Reproductive rights advocates in southern states are embroiled in a fight against severe restrictions on abortion access and a flurry of state-level GOP efforts to create more of them. They say President Donald Trump's second term threatens to make those obstacles worse — and they're calling on the rest of the country to back them up.
In a handful of states across the country, many of which are in the south, abortion is almost completely illegal with few exceptions, the most common being when necessary to protect the pregnant person's health. In other southern states, abortion access is extremely limited with restrictions imposed before most people know they are pregnant. Republican state lawmakers in Arkansas, South Carolina, West Virginia and others have introduced legislation this session seeking to further curtail residents' reproductive rights, including bills criminalizing education on abortion options, striking down exceptions to existing abortion bans and requiring anti-abortion views in sex education.
But as state GOP lawmakers level these proposals — fueled, in part, by the Trump administration's uncertain yet hostile approach to national abortion rights — grassroots activists have supercharged their fight against this latest push, stepping up work to ensure their communities have the access to healthcare and comprehensive education they feel they deserve.
"We will not stop trying. We will not give up. We will continue our efforts," said Brittaney Stockton, the policy and growth strategist for the Arkansas Abortion Support Network. "This go around, somehow — even though it feels harder; it feels way worse than it was last time — I am finding hope in the community, within the communities who are constantly fighting everything that they throw at us. We believe that hope is an action, and we're not going to stop."
Arkansas law bans abortion at all stages of pregnancy except when necessary to "save the life of a pregnant woman in a medical emergency." The state also makes performing or attempting to perform an abortion punishable by a fine of up to $100,000 or a maximum of ten years in prison.
Powered by donations from community members, the Arkansas Abortion Support Network challenges that restrictive policy by helping Arkansas travel out of state to access abortion care, disseminating information about safe ways to obtain an abortion and providing products like Plan B and Opill to help people who want to prevent pregnancies. The group also partners with other grassroots organizations to mobilize around restrictive bills in the Arkansas Legislature and shares educational materials about their potential harms on social media.
In that way, the organization fights back "by just existing," argued AASN executive director Karen Musick. "The fact we're here, the fact we continue to help people every day — that's how we are helping."
The AASN has most recently been monitoring the progression of the Baby Olivia Act through the state legislature. That bill would require public schools to fold a "human fetal growth and development discussion" into their health classes starting in sixth grade and show students a video created by anti-abortion group Live Action depicting "the process of fertilization and every stage of human development inside the uterus."
The video, Stockton argued, fails to include a sex education component and instead offers "misleading" context in an effort to teach pubescent children that a fetus is a human life. Its passage would also place the responsibility of a pregnancy on children in a state with abstinence- and shame-based sex education, the nation's highest population-adjusted rate of reported child sexual abuse cases and third highest rate of registered sex offenders, she said.
"It's problematic because you're further shaming kids that might end up in a situation where they were assaulted and become pregnant and they don't even understand how they got from point A to point B," Stockton told Salon.
Stockton said that being a mother of three girls made her want to voice opposition before the Senate in a committee hearing on Feb. 26. In her remarks, she argued that truly protecting the state's children would be equipping them with the tools they need to recognize and resist predatory behavior through a comprehensive sex education program.
"Those children that you speak of that become pregnant, they did not choose to become pregnant as children," Stockton testified, raising her gaze from her prepared remarks to the lawmakers before her. "They do not deserve that, and we need to teach them how to remain safe."
The bill, which has passed in other states, failed in committee for the second time in the state Senate on Feb. 28. But Stockton and Musick said the organization expects the lead sponsor, Republican state Rep. Mary Bentley, to reintroduce the bill for a third and final time before the legislative session ends. Still, Musick said, they're confident they can defeat the legislation again.
"Republicans have a super majority again in the state of Arkansas. The fact that opposition was there to disrupt that felt powerful, and it felt powerful to a lot of people," Musick said. "We think it's a huge victory that we're able to talk about it enough and get people there to talk about these bills."
In South Carolina, abortion rights advocates are also working to stave off a spate of bills progressing in their state legislature aimed at further restricting access to abortion and criminalizing providers, educators and patients over the care.
The Women's Rights Empowerment Network is monitoring three such bills, including HB 3457, which seeks to upend the state's current six-week ban by prohibiting all abortions in the state except in medical emergencies and striking exceptions for rape, incest and fetal anomaly. Also on the group's radar is that proposal's related bill in the state Senate, SB 323, which would also prohibit medication abortions and criminalize the act of providing information on how to obtain an abortion by phone, web or another mode of communication to a pregnant person. Another bill, HB 3537, seeks to classify abortion as a homicide and open abortion patients up to murder charges.
"All of these bills are cruel and do nothing to protect the people of South Carolina, [and] only to seek to control their bodies and their extremely personal decisions about their lives and well-being," argued Amalia Luxardo, WREN's CEO. SB 323 is especially alarming, she said, because it would criminalize her organization and others' work to educate people on their options for reproductive care.
To fight back against these proposals, Luxardo said that WREN creates materials informing South Carolinians on the legislation their lawmakers are proposing and provides call and email templates they can use to directly voice their opposition. The organization also lobbies at the statehouse weekly, sharing stories with elected officials about how their policies affect constituents' everyday lives. Ahead of a Tuesday hearing for HB 3457, the group mobilized more than 750 people to email or call legislators with opposition to the bill and confirmed some 40 volunteers to testify before the legislature.
"We are fighting like hell in South Carolina for reproductive rights," Luxardo said. "Our people deserve access to essential healthcare and the ability to make their own decisions about their lives and their futures. We refuse to be silent, and we will continue to defend abortion access in the state."
That determination, she added, has become even more pronounced in the wake of Trump reassuming the presidency.
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While Trump repeatedly said during the 2024 election cycle that restricting abortion access at the federal level would not be a priority, activists are skeptical that he will keep his word now that he's in office. Trump's campaign-trail ambivalence on the issue followed his long-held anti-abortion stance, characterized by his first-term efforts to defund Planned Parenthood, flirting with a national ban and later taking credit for the Supreme Court's 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.
His first-week blast of executive orders didn't include the national abortion ban that advocates feared they might see, but the president has still made efforts to restrict access or bolster anti-abortion sentiment since returning to the Oval Office in January. One executive order aimed to end "forced use of Federal taxpayer dollars to fund or promote elective abortion" domestically, while another anti-trans action he signed included language implicating fetal personhood. The president also pardoned nearly two dozen anti-abortion activists on his fourth day in office.
Margaret Chapman Pomponio, executive director of the reproductive health and justice organization WV Free, told Salon that Trump's presidency and "authoritarian approach to governing" has also placed activists and residents of West Virginia, another state with a near-total abortion ban, on high alert.
"All are scared, angry, embarrassed — just like so many across the country," she told Salon. "We may be considered a deep-red state, but that didn’t fully happen until 2014. A little over 10 years ago. So there are still lots of pockets of progressivism, and plenty of people ready to fight the rollback of our rights."
In West Virginia, abortion is prohibited through all stages of pregnancy except in the case of a medical emergency, an ectopic pregnancy or a fetus that's not medically viable. More exceptions exist for survivors of rape and incest, who can obtain abortion care up to eight weeks into their pregnancies but only if they first report to law enforcement. For minors who have survived sexual assault or incest and reported to authorities or got medical treatment, they have until 14 weeks to obtain an abortion.
Pomponio said WV Free's team is currently organizing to combat more than a dozen bills in the state legislature seeking to further restrict the state's ban. One such bill, HB 2712, would strike the state's exemptions for survivors of rape and incest, including exemptions for minors.
The group has also ramped up abortion trainings to teach West Virginians they can safely manage abortion at home with pills, shared information on abortion funds that offer practical and financial support to those seeking assistance, partnered with nurses to offer education on its birth control program and connected people with reproductive health, rights, and justice resources at public presentations across the state. Last summer, the organization led a public education campaign on their options should they have an unintended pregnancy complete with a billboard.
While Pomponio said the campaign was widely successful — more than doubling traffic to WV Free's website with easily accessible resources — lawmakers responded this session by introducing a bill prohibiting billboards that "display messages about the availability of abortion in bordering states" or name healthcare providers that perform them.
"Since Dobbs and the subsequent abortion ban, WV FREE became laser focused on the needs of our communities in the new landscape. And frankly, the political situation and health care deserts have only gotten worse," Pomponio said. "We know we cannot go about business as usual because we are in extraordinary times."
Though West Virginia overwhelmingly elected Trump with 70% of the vote in the 2024 presidential contest, its political landscape — and attitude toward abortion — is much more complex than it seems, she said. The state was, until 2018, one of just 17 in the country to allocate state funding for abortion care under Medicaid and was, in 2005, one of the first to enact a law ensuring health insurance plans cover contraceptives. Residents of the state are also divided on the state's abortion policy, with 45% of respondents to a September 2024 poll saying they support the ban compared to 44% who oppose it.
State lawmakers' push to further restrict abortion access in the state doesn't holistically represent the will of West Virginians, Pomponio said, also pointing to the "Trump effect" among West Virginian voters, which shows their overwhelming support for the president's policies doesn't align with the issues that most concern them: education, child care, communities with clean drinking water, good paying jobs.
Because of that, she said, she urges the rest of the country to keep faith in red states like West Virginia.
"We are worth investment and compassion and respect," she said. "If given the resources, we could be the learning lesson for other tough places — when we show people how we reconnect with the ideals of fairness, shared prosperity, and healthy and safe communities for our families."
Musick echoed that sentiment. She added that she wished the rest of the country understood that Arkansans are and feel like the Americans that they are, deserving of the same healthcare that residents of blue states receive.
"They deserve access to all the best," she said, offering a warning to the rest of the nation. "We are all citizens of the United States — when they start taking away the rights of some, understand they're coming for the rights of all."
Still, Musick said, hope is currently guiding her organization in its fight to protect and expand abortion access in Arkansas — and elsewhere. In fact, she said, it's become AASN's new mantra.
"We're trying to lean into 'Hope is an action,' because that's been the piece that so many of our supporters have been missing," she said. "We feel hope when we're surrounded by each other, so we're working very hard to make the community feel strong because that's where we're going to find hope."
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