Articles & essays
They Called the Freezer a Nursery
In LePage v. Center for Reproductive Medicine (Feb 2024), the Alabama Supreme Court held that frozen embryos are children under the state's Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. Within days, three of Alabama's largest IVF providers halted treatment — the ruling protected no embryo and shut down the medicine that creates them.
When the Hospital Has to Choose Between You and Prison
Idaho's Defense of Life Act permits abortion only to prevent the mother's death, while federal EMTALA requires hospitals to stabilize any emergency, forcing physicians to wait until a pregnant patient is dying before acting. In Moyle v. United States (2024) the Supreme Court dismissed the case as improvidently granted, resolving nothing; St. Luke's airlifted six pregnant patients out of state in early 2024 alone.
The Zombie Statute They're Bringing Back
The Comstock Act of 1873, an unrepealed federal law criminalizing the mailing of material deemed obscene, including abortion drugs, is being positioned as the administrative mechanism to ban abortion pills nationwide without Congress or the courts. Project 2025 urges the DOJ to enforce it against mailed mifepristone; a December 2022 OLC memo currently limits it, and its rescission is the trigger.
Your Pregnancy Is Subpoenaed
The 2024 HIPAA rule that shielded reproductive-care records from out-of-state subpoenas was quietly vacated nationwide in Purl v. HHS, restoring a default framework in which any patient's prenatal, miscarriage, or pharmacy records can be pulled by a hostile prosecutor. The federal privacy floor is gone; the records infrastructure for criminalization is now exposed.
The Fugitive Slave Act, Now With Mifepristone
In 2025 Louisiana criminally indicted Dr. Margaret Carpenter, a New York physician, for a telehealth prescription that was legal where she practiced — the first cross-state criminal prosecution of an abortion provider since Dobbs. New York refused extradition; the case is the template built to gut every shield law in the country.
The Bounty State
Texas HB 7 (2025) takes the SB 8 civil-bounty design — private lawsuits in place of state enforcement, to dodge constitutional review — and extends it across state lines. Any citizen can sue anyone who supplies abortion medication to a Texan for a minimum of $100,000, with no cap and no standing requirement.
You Cannot Solve What You Are Not Allowed To Name
In 2024 Black women died of pregnancy-related causes at 3.15× the white rate. In 2025, Executive Order 14151 and the HHS communications pause triggered the largest scrub of federal health data in modern history — shutting down PRAMS mid-survey and gutting the CDC reproductive- and minority-health offices that count those deaths.
Either You Marry Your Brother, Or You Don't Vote — H.R. 22 (the SAVE Act)
H.R. 22, the SAVE Act — passed by the U.S. House and pending in the Senate — requires documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote. Because a birth certificate rarely matches a married-name ID, the requirement lands on roughly 69 million married women, throttling turnout without banning a single voter.
About Know Your Rights
Know Your Rights is the actionable arm of In Her Name. While other sections analyze policy, this one tells you what to do about it. State-by-state guides, legal precedents, patient rights in emergency care, insurance appeals, and the protections that exist — along with the ones that have been stripped. Knowledge is the first form of resistance.
Part of the In Her Name journal at Labora Collective.
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