Abortion News Roundup: 2025 Retrospective
CW: This article will address harm and death caused by anti-abortion laws. We invite you to practice care as you read.
2025 was a difficult and often traumatic year for those seeking an abortion.
As birth workers, we do the important work of staying engaged in politics and legislation that may impact ourselves and our clients, but media cycles can make it difficult to keep up with the rapidly shifting environment for reproductive rights.
As an act of care for our community throughout the year, we provided updates through our Current Events in Repro Justice series on Instagram to make learning about the news a little less overwhelming.
Today, we’re doing a 2025 abortion news roundup, not to contribute to the overwhelm, but because we believe that we deserve a moment to pause and reflect.
As birth workers or aspiring birth workers, we bear witness to so much - grief, trauma, relief, joy, nuance - and we hold our communities through it.
We hope that this article helps you take a moment to acknowledge the often-unseen work that you do to show up for your community. While not comprehensive, below is a recap of just a few events from this year.
The Recap:
In the 2024 November election, New Yorkers voted to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, which went into effect on January 1, 2025. In addition to establishing constitutional protections against discrimination, this law also protects access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion, IVF, and birth control.
The government passed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” act, which has already and will continue to strip Medicaid access from individuals as well as health centers and hospitals providing access to abortions. The passage of this bill was a devastating blow to Americans and will have ramifications for years to come. At the end of 2025 though, a federal judge blocked Trump’s ability to implement part of the bill that defunded Planned Parenthood in 22 states because they performed abortions. While this is only a small victory, we are hopeful that this preliminary injunction will help restore funding to these clinics to ensure access to not only abortions but also reproductive healthcare in general in these areas.
In December 2025, a U.S. appeals court upheld the right of Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs) to tell patients about “abortion pill reversal,” an unproven “treatment” that CPCs say would reverse the effects of abortion pills to prevent the abortion from happening. While this is a blow for those seeking and providing abortions, particularly because CPCs outnumber abortion clinics 3:1, this decision reinforces the very important work that we are doing as doulas and childbirth educators. We appreciate websites like abortionfinder.org, which vets clinics to ensure those seeking abortions are accessing actual abortion clinics.
A Georgia abortion law, which only allows abortions up until 6 weeks of pregnancy, killed Adriana Smith. Adriana Smith was a daughter, nurse, and mother. She was 9-weeks pregnant when she was rushed to the ER, found to have multiple blood clots, and declared brain-dead. However, due to Georgia’s LIFE Act, doctors chose to keep her on life support until her fetus was viable outside of the womb. After her son was delivered by C-section in June, she was finally removed off of life support, 4 months after her death. Her family held a funeral for her in June 2025 and has called for Adriana’s Law, which advocates for bodily autonomy–that individuals and families retain the rights to make medical decisions, even under restrictive fetal personhood laws.
As SisterSong states, “Black women must be trusted” when it comes to healthcare decisions. Adriana deserved a safe, healthy pregnancy. She deserved medical providers who were free of deadly legal restrictions and so-called legal “grey areas.” As we move forward as birth workers, may we remember Adriana and honor her legacy in our advocacy, support of our clients, and pursuit of justice.
Despite a directive stating not to detain pregnant individuals, ICE continues to kidnap pregnant people, deprive them of medical care and adequate food, and cause immense trauma and physical harm to them and their families. While these practices are not new to 2025, the dramatic increase ICE’s presence in our communities warrants additional attention as birth workers to knowing our clients’ rights and being creative and strategic as we help them navigate these difficult systems.
The Center for Reproductive Rights’ advocacy helped expand shield laws that protect providers in Colorado, Vermont, Maine, and New York when providing abortion to patients coming to them from other states. We can support advocacy work like this as we move into 2026 and beyond on the state and federal level.
Get Involved
Abortion doulas’ primary role is to support clients in feeling more capable as they make healthcare decisions and deal with the medical industrial complex.
In our prerecorded 6-session Abortion Doula CE Course, you can learn more about how to navigate the constantly shifting landscape of abortion care. We discuss everything you need to know about abortion itself, including different procedures and post-abortion care. You will learn about how to teach clients self-advocacy skills and build your toolbox of strategies to provide support and comfort measures to clients, whether in-person or virtually.
Our CE course also prepares you by offering information on creating sustainable business practices and working on self- and community care. While news and events like those above can make us (rightfully) feel hopeless or isolated, we are not in this work alone. With this course, you’ll have access to a community of abortion doulas and birth worker BADTies who care.
You can learn more about the course and enroll here. And whether you’re ready to join today to level up your abortion doula care or not, we are so grateful that you care. May we all feel held and supported and receive so much care as we continue forward in 2026, together.