This is what reshaping reproductive healthcare looks like when it happens quietly.

Nearly $9 million in Title X family-planning funding is being directed to organizations associated with “restorative reproductive medicine”—an approach increasingly promoted by anti-abortion advocates as an alternative to mainstream reproductive healthcare.

According to Autonomy News, FACTS About Fertility was awarded $4 million to develop a national infertility training center. Its cofounder, Marguerite Duane, is a prominent advocate of restorative reproductive medicine and has ties to anti-abortion organizations.

Another $3 million will go to Reproductive Health Mission to establish a national family-planning training center. Its CEO, Nicholas Kongoasa, is also listed as medical director of Pregnancy Aid Clinic, an anti-abortion pregnancy-center organization, and has publicly discouraged hormonal contraception.

This matters because Title X was created to provide evidence-based family-planning and reproductive healthcare—particularly for women with limited access to care.

Federal reproductive-health policy isn’t only being changed through abortion bans.

It can also be changed by deciding who gets the money, who trains the providers, and what kind of reproductive healthcare women are ultimately offered.

Women deserve comprehensive, evidence-based healthcare—including contraception, fertility care, pregnancy care and abortion care—not ideology dressed up as medicine.

Follow the funding. It tells you where reproductive healthcare policy is headed.

Her Safe Harbor
24/7. Just a phone call away.
302-660-1273 | HerSafeHarbor.com

Abortion Is Always on the Ballot

Even when the word never appears.

There is a dangerous mistake we make every election year.

We look at the ballot and ask:

Is abortion on it?

If there isn't a constitutional amendment, referendum, or ballot initiative with the word abortion printed across it, we assume the answer is no.

But abortion is always on the ballot.

Because we are not simply electing people.

We are electing power.

We are choosing the legislators who will write the next abortion law.

The governor who will sign it—or veto it.

The attorney general who will decide whether to challenge abortion providers, defend a restriction, pursue an out-of-state clinician, or take a fight all the way to the Supreme Court.

The members of Congress who can write federal abortion legislation and determine the direction of federal policy.

And we are helping determine who will have the power to shape the courts that will interpret all of it.

That isn't theoretical anymore.

We are watching states attempt to extend their abortion bans beyond their own borders. Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana recently asked the U.S. Supreme Court to challenge shield laws protecting abortion providers in California, Massachusetts, and New York.

Those lawsuits didn't materialize from nowhere.

Elections built the governments bringing them.

The Vote Before the Vote

We tend to pay attention when abortion finally appears explicitly before voters.

And this November, it will.

Voters in Idaho, Nevada, Virginia, and Missouri will directly consider measures capable of changing abortion rights or protections in their states.

Those votes matter enormously.

But there were hundreds of votes before them that mattered too.

Someone was elected to the legislature.

Someone introduced the bill.

Someone controlled the committee.

Someone decided whether it received a vote.

Someone signed it.

Someone challenged it.

Someone defended it.

Someone appointed judges.

Someone confirmed them.

And eventually, years later, a woman discovers what all those elections meant when she is pregnant and needs care.

That is when politics stops being abstract.

Roe Should Have Taught Us This

Roe v. Wade did not disappear on the day Donald Trump was elected.

It disappeared years later.

Between those two events came judicial nominations, Senate confirmations, litigation, elections, state trigger laws, advocacy campaigns and an enormous political infrastructure built patiently over decades.

Then one morning, Americans woke up and a constitutional protection that had existed for nearly half a century was gone.

That should have taught us something:

The election that changes your rights may happen years before you realize your rights were on the ballot.

Political power compounds.

One election determines who writes the law.

Another determines who enforces it.

Another determines who appoints the judge.

Another determines who confirms that judge.

Then the case arrives.

And suddenly everyone pays attention.

By then, much of the machinery is already in place.

Look Down the Ballot

This is why presidential elections cannot be the beginning and end of our political attention.

In 2026, more than 6,100 state legislative seats and 36 governorships are being contested. State control is particularly consequential because abortion policy after Dobbs is being fought intensely in state legislatures, governors' offices, attorneys general's offices and state courts.

Those races may not dominate cable news.

Some candidates may barely appear in your social media feed.

Learn their names anyway.

Learn who is running for your state legislature.

Learn who wants to be your governor.

Learn who wants to be your attorney general.

Pay attention to judicial elections and retention votes where they exist.

Look at what candidates have actually done—not merely what carefully tested campaign language they use now.

Because the politician campaigning on taxes today may be voting on abortion next year.

Your Rights Don't Only Appear on the Ballot When Someone Prints Them There

This is the part we cannot afford to forget.

A ballot initiative asks you what the law should be.

An election often decides who gets to write the next one.

That may be even more consequential.

The anti-abortion movement understands this extraordinarily well.

It has spent decades building political power at every level—statehouses, governors' mansions, attorneys general's offices, Congress, federal agencies and courts.

Those victories accumulate.

So must ours.

We cannot become politically engaged only when abortion is printed in bold letters on the ballot.

We cannot wait until another ban is introduced.

We cannot wait until another clinic closes.

We cannot wait until another attorney general announces another prosecution.

We cannot wait until another case reaches the Supreme Court.

And we certainly cannot wait until another frightened woman calls us because the politicians elected years earlier have suddenly become very real in her life.

November Is About More Than November

At Her Safe Harbor, we hear what public policy sounds like when it reaches an actual woman.

It sounds like fear.

Can I get in trouble?

Can anyone find out?

Is it still legal?

Can you help me?

Behind those questions are laws.

Behind those laws are politicians.

And behind those politicians are elections.

That is the chain.

So when you look at your ballot this November, don't ask only:

“Is abortion on my ballot?”

Ask:

“Could this person ever have power over a woman's pregnancy?”

Could they write the law?

Sign it?

Enforce it?

Challenge it?

Defend it?

Shape the court that decides whether it survives?

If the answer is yes, then abortion is on your ballot.

It always was.

Vote accordingly.

And don't stop at the top of the ticket.

Read the entire ballot.

Learn the candidates.

Learn what power each office actually holds.

Talk to your friends.

Talk to your daughters.

Talk to your sons.

Talk to women who think this election has nothing to do with abortion because they don't see the word printed anywhere.

Tell them:

You don't have to see the word “abortion” on your ballot for your vote to determine what happens to a woman who needs one.

By the time the word finally appears, the people who will decide its meaning may already have been elected.

Her Safe Harbor

Pregnant and need someone you can talk to privately?

You call. A real person answers.

24/7. Just a phone call away.
302-660-1273 | HerSafeHarbor.com

If you believe every woman deserves access to evidence-based reproductive healthcare, please consider sharing this article or supporting our work. Every donation helps us continue providing care, education, and support to women across the country.

Here we go again: abortion advocacy dressed up in a lab coat.
A “new peer-reviewed study” is being promoted as evidence that the FDA lacked justification for removing mifepristone’s in-person dispensing requirement.
Here’s the context missing from the headline:
The authors are affiliated with the anti-abortion Charlotte Lozier Institute, and Issues in Law & Medicine has published scholarship advancing anti-abortion positions.
More importantly, the paper does not uncover a new safety problem with mifepristone. It does not demonstrate that telehealth prescribing is unsafe. It argues that the FDA should have kept a restriction in place.
That’s a critique of FDA policy—not a newly discovered medical danger.
“Peer-reviewed” doesn’t erase ideology, conflicts, or context.
If remote dispensing is harming women, show the data.
Otherwise, stop presenting another argument for restricting abortion access as a new scientific discovery.

Now states with abortion bans are asking the Supreme Court to help their laws reach across state lines.

Remember the promise?

Overturning Roe v. Wade wasn’t about banning abortion nationwide, we were told.
It was about “returning abortion to the states.”

In fact, when Roe fell, Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall celebrated by declaring: “The issue of abortion now returns to the States.” (Alabama Attorney General’s Office)

Well, apparently that principle has limits.

Because Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas have now gone directly to the U.S. Supreme Court asking it to strike down abortion shield laws in New York, Massachusetts, and California. Those laws protect providers who prescribe and mail abortion medication to women living in states with abortion bans. (AP News)

Read that again.

The states that demanded the power to make their own abortion laws now object to other states making theirs.

So let’s stop pretending this is simply about “states’ rights.”

This is about reach.

How far can an abortion ban reach?
Across a state border?
Into another state’s medical practice?
Into a doctor’s office hundreds of miles away?
Into the mail?
Into the home of a pregnant woman?

That is the fight now before us.

And they’re not just going after the laws.

At the same time, the states filed another lawsuit in federal court targeting 30 individuals and organizations involved in providing medication abortion.
They are seeking injunctions, damages, civil penalties, statutory damages, attorneys’ fees and other relief. (Alabama Attorney General’s Office)

Think about the message that sends.

Help a pregnant woman in a state with an abortion ban, and another state may try to drag you into court.

This is how abortion bans become something bigger than abortion bans.

They become systems of enforcement.

And inevitably, that enforcement requires information.

Who is pregnant?
Who helped her?
Who prescribed the medication?
Who mailed it?
Who communicated with her?
Where are the records?

That should concern every woman in America.

This is why privacy matters.

At Her Safe Harbor, we have been saying this repeatedly:
Be careful where you put information about your pregnancy.

Every search, form, account, message and database creates another potential record of something extraordinarily private.

We built Her Safe Harbor differently for a reason.

We answer the phone.

A pregnant woman can speak with a real healthcare professional without first typing the intimate details of her pregnancy into another online platform.

Because in this environment, privacy isn’t a slogan.
It’s protection.

They said leave abortion to the states.

Now states with abortion bans are asking the Supreme Court to intervene in laws enacted by states that protect abortion access.

The constitutional questions will be fought by lawyers.
But pregnant women will live with the consequences.

Because beneath all the talk about federalism, sovereignty and the Full Faith and Credit Clause is a much simpler question:

How far should the power of one state extend into a woman’s pregnancy?

Her Safe Harbor’s starting point is different.

We trust women.

And as long as one pregnant woman is sitting somewhere frightened and wondering whether anyone will simply listen to her—
Her Safe Harbor will answer the phone.

Her Safe Harbor
24/7. Just a phone call away.
302-660-1273 | HerSafeHarbor.com

If you believe every woman deserves access to evidence-based reproductive healthcare, please consider sharing this article or supporting our work. Every donation helps us continue providing care, education, and support to women across the country.

An anti-abortion legal strategy just opened a potentially significant new front: using wrongful-death law to build fetal personhood into abortion litigation.
In New Mexico, the estate of a fetus aborted at approximately 26 weeks received a $200,000 settlement in a case alleging, among other things, that the patient could not provide valid informed consent because she was under the influence of methamphetamine. A court order appointing a representative for the estate described the fetus as a “person” under New Mexico’s Wrongful Death Act.
The attorney behind the case, Mike Seibel of AbortionInjury.com, is openly describing the outcome as a way to strengthen fetal-personhood claims and encourage similar litigation against abortion providers.
That distinction matters: a settlement involving disputed informed consent is not the same thing as a court declaring abortion itself wrongful or illegal.
But the strategy is clear. Anti-abortion attorneys are looking for new ways to use civil litigation to establish fetal legal rights—and then carry those arguments into the broader fight over abortion access.
This is how legal boundaries can shift: one case, one definition, one precedent argument at a time.