(BRENTWOOD, Calif.) — Three people are dead and two others seriously injured after an Amtrak train collided with a car in Brentwood, California, on Sunday, the East Contra Costa Fire Department told ABC News San Francisco station KGO.
The two people who were wounded, including a child, suffered serious injuries and were both sent to John Muir Medical Center, according to officials.
It’s unclear how many people were on the train.
Fire department officials said they have been called out to that train crossing up to twice a year because there isn’t a traffic guard at that location.
(TACOMA, Wash.) — At least eight people were injured early Sunday when gunfire broke out at a dance party being held in an industrial area of Tacoma, Washington, police said.
The shooting occurred at 12:45 a.m. at a private venue in South Tacoma, where police said the rave attracted a large crowd.
A barrage of gunfire erupted during an argument that broke out in an alley behind the venue, located in an area filled with mostly car dealerships and auto repair shops, according to police.
Police immediately closed streets around the crime scene as officers and paramedics responded and began treating the wounded.
There were no immediate reports of fatalities and no arrests were immediately announced.
The victims appear to have all suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were hospitalized in stable condition, the Tacoma Police Department said in a statement.
Officers responded to the scene after multiple 911 callers reported shots being fired at the rave.
“Officers arrived to find a chaotic scene with a large crowd and multiple shooting victims,” according to the police statement.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(NEW YORK) — Jeffery Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell has been put on suicide watch days before her sentencing on five criminal counts, including sex trafficking, according to her lawyer.
She is awaiting sentencing, ahead of Tuesday morning’s hearing, at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn.
“Yesterday, without having conducted a psychological evaluation and without justification, the MDC placed Ms. Maxwell on suicide watch,” her lawyer, Bobbi Sternheim, wrote to a federal court in New York on Saturday. “She is not permitted to possess and review legal documents and is not permitted paper or pen. This has prevented her from preparing for sentencing.”
Nearly three years ago, her accomplice, Jeffery Epstein was found dead by suicide at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. The federal government announced last year that MCC would close due to its poor conditions.
Maxwell’s lawyers told the court she is not suicidal and has been deemed so by outside psychologists.
“Ms. Maxwell was abruptly removed from general population and returned to solitary confinement, this time without any clothing, toothpaste, soap, legal papers, etc,” her lawyer’s letter said on Saturday. “She was provided a ‘suicide smock’ and is given a few sheets of toilet paper on request. This morning, a psychologist evaluated Ms. Maxwell and determined she is not suicidal.”
Her lawyers said she is unable to prepare for sentencing and “is prohibited from reviewing legal materials prior to sentencing, becomes sleep-deprived, and is denied sufficient time to meet with and confer with counsel.” They said if this doesn’t change by Monday, they will formally request to have sentencing date delayed.
“I met with Ms. Maxwell today (after a 97-minute delay following my arrival at the facility),” her lawyer said. “She is not suicidal.”
The Department of Justice responded to Maxwell’s legal team Sunday afternoon, saying she was put on suicide watch after she allegedly emailed the Bureau of Prisons Inspector General’s Office claiming she feared for her safety. However, it said Maxwell does have a hard copy of all her legal documents and “is able to confer with defense counsel.”
“Here, the Warden and Chief Psychologist assessed that the defendant is at heightened risk of self-harm, particularly given her upcoming sentencing and sex offender status. As a result, they are not comfortable placing the defendant in the SHU (Special Housing Unit), but they also need to remove the defendant from general population to investigate the threat she reported to the IG,” United States attorney Damian Williams wrote to the court Sunday.
Following Maxwell’s email, and her alleged refusal to answer questions from the prison’s psychology staff, she was removed from the general population and placed on a suicide watch, according to the US Attorneys Office.
“Although the defendant has claimed to psychology staff that she is not suicidal, she has refused to answer psychology staff’s questions regarding the threat she reported to the IG. While she claimed to the IG to be in fear for her safety, she refused to tell psychology staff what that fear is,” Williams wrote.
“Given the defendant’s inconsistent accounts to the IG and to psychology staff, the Chief Psychologist assesses the defendant to be at additional risk of self-harm, as it appears she may be attempting to be transferred to a single cell where she can engage in self-harm. The defendant will remain on suicide watch until the MDC assesses that she is no longer at heightened risk of self-harm,” Williams wrote.
Prosecutors said despite her legal team’s claim, there’s no reason to delay Maxwell’s sentencing on Tuesday.
The Bureau of Prisons said it doesn’t comment on individual inmates.
“The BOP is committed to ensuring the safety and security of all inmates in our population, our staff, and the public. Humane treatment of the men and women in our custody is a top priority,” a Bureau of Prisons spokesperson told ABC News.
ABC News has previously reported that while she was awaiting trial, Maxwell was given paper clothes as a precaution.
(NEW YORK) — The Supreme Court’s landmark decision overturning Roe v. Wade has set the stage for a major test of public and private pregnancy support programs that abortion rights opponents have touted for decades.
“This is not the moment to celebrate. I’m not celebrating,” said Archbishop William Lori, the top American Catholic leading the church’s campaign for alternatives to abortion. “This is a moment for steadiness, for staying the course, for increased compassion, for increased services.”
Maternity homes and crisis pregnancy resource centers – offering everything from housing support to free diapers — are expecting a surge of demand in states enacting strict new bans on abortion. The Catholic Church is one of the leading backers of a national pregnancy aid network.
“Our major focus is woman and child. Not only do we provide services, we are robust advocates for the poor, needy and vulnerable,” Lori said.
Critics say the church is dangerously ill-equipped and unprepared. In the 13 states with trigger laws enacted to ban abortions after Roe was overturned, more than 103,000 were performed in 2020 alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“I don’t think they have reckoned with what the ramifications are going to be in a post-Roe world,” Jamie Manson, president for Catholics for Choice, told ABC News. “The amount of care and social work and life skill training that these women need is massive.”
Since SB8 banned nearly all abortions in Texas beginning in September 2021, 84,000 women have signed up with a state-funded program “Alternatives to Abortion” aimed at supporting women who continue unwanted pregnancies, according to the Texas Health and Human Services.
Texas Catholic aid programs are also seeing an impact.
“We have a wait list now. We’re already trying to gear up and make sure that we can meet the current need in addition to any increase that we might see,” said Kasey Whitley, who oversees the Gabriel Project in Ft. Worth, a church-funded ministry for women in crisis pregnancies.
The diocese helped 175 women last year. Kexsy Villeda, a single mom who found out she was unexpectedly pregnant the day she got divorced, said the program provided her with emotional support and financial stability.
“I looked at my son, and I couldn’t. No,” she said of briefly contemplating abortion five months into her pregnancy.
Kathleen Wilson, director of Mary’s Shelter in Fredericksburg, Va., a Catholic-funded organization helping women with unintended or unwanted pregnancies, told ABC News she’s expanding capacity this summer because of a steady stream of women in need.
The Catholic Church is the nation’s largest single religious institution with 18,000 local parishes. Its leaders have long promised women in crisis pregnancies unconditional emotional and financial aid well into motherhood, if they carry their child to term.
“The church is not just about bans. In fact, that’s not our major focus,” Lori said. A spokesman for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops could not provide a dollar figure for how much the Church spends on pregnancy support each year nationwide.
Catholic abortion rights advocates say allowing a woman to terminate her pregnancy should be a matter of conscience and social justice. And, many argue, efforts to dissuade women from abortion involve misleading claims about long-term support.
“Forced motherhood is never a good thing. And to deny someone what is for them, essential care, is wrong. I think it’s a sin,” Manson said.
The American Public Health Association, in a brief to the Supreme Court last year, said that abortion bans will lead to “elevated risks of maternal mortality….infant mortality…[and] traumas …[that can] trigger inter-generational harm.”
“Look at the big picture. Since Roe v. Wade, it’s been 63 million abortions. That’s a lot. A lot of loss of life,” Lori said when asked about the analysis. “The answer is to provide the best medical care we can.”
Critics of the Church and other faith-based initiatives opposing abortion say they prioritize bans over lobbying for expansion of social programs that support life, like a higher minimum wage, nutrition assistance, and paid family leave.
The 14 states that have had the most restrictive abortion laws, including Texas, invest the least in policies and programs for women and children, according to a 2020 analysis by the nonpartisan Commonwealth Fund, a social policy think tank.
“I don’t think we should underestimate the generosity either of the charities or services we provide, or of God’s people,” Lori said. “The church in Texas is stepping up to the plate. They’ve kind of, again, given us a preview and I think a very helpful preview of what’s to come.”
(LOUISVILLE, Ky.) — A Kentucky pediatrician was charged in a plot she allegedly conceived to kill her ex-husband and gain sole custody of her children, according to court documents unsealed by the Justice Department.
According to the criminal complaint, Dr. Stephanie Russell, 52, asked an undercover agent posing as a hitman for “Christmas flowers” to be delivered to her ex-husband before Christmas last year, FBI investigators say. The FBI alleges that Christmas flowers is a moniker for carrying out a hit against her ex-husband.
Investigators say Russell allegedly sent text messages to the agent arranging for the murder as well as payment for the plot.
Russell is charged with the use of interstate commerce facilities in the commission of murder-for-hire. She appeared in federal court in Louisville, Kentucky, last week and pleaded not guilty. Her trial is set for August. An attorney representing Russell did not return ABC News’ request for comment.
FBI investigators say they were first tipped off about Russell in 2019, when a nanny for the family said in a sworn affidavit provided by the attorney of Russell’s husband that Russell had asked the nanny if she knew “some really bad people,” according to the complaint. The nanny said she thought she was joking at first, according to investigators.
Investigators say they did not find enough evidence to charge Russell at that time.
Russell had previously accused her husband, Rick Crabtree, of abusing their children. An investigation by the Louisville Metro Police Department did not find evidence of the abuse and Crabtree was awarded custody of their children while Russell had supervised visits two days a week.
Crabtree did not immediately respond to a request for comment from ABC News.
Nearly three years later, a Louisville private investigator came to the FBI with what he believed was a murder-for-hire plot involving the same pediatrician, court documents say.
A confidential witness, who was employed at Russell’s practice, then told the FBI that between July 2021 and March 2022, Russell approached two nurses at her practices on separate occasions and asked each of them for help in killing Crabtree, investigators allege.
Text messages, investigators allege, prove that Russell wanted to carry out a hit against to her ex-husband.
In the messages, Russell and a second witness agreed to a payment of $4,000 to deliver “Christmas flowers,” the complaint shows. Russell agreed to pay the person another $1,000 if the plan was carried out before Christmas, investigators say.
The witness initially told Russell that the hitman they knew had died and was no longer able to carry out the hit, but months later, according to the FBI, she was still looking for someone to kill her ex-husband.
In May of 2022, Russell informed the witness she was still looking for “flowers,” the court documents say. The witness then gave her the number of an FBI undercover agent, who said they could facilitate the “delivery of flowers” to her ex-husband.
Russell allegedly asked the undercover agent to make it appear as if Crabtree committed suicide, investigators say. She gave the agent information on how to unlock the biometric lock code on her ex-husband’s phone so that the agent could text a fake suicide note after his death, according to the complaint.
The doctor also expressed concern that she would look “guilty” because she had expressed distain for her ex-husband publicly before, according to the complaint.
Russell left $3,500 outside of her office as “payment” for the undercover agent, investigators say.
Russell is in custody pending her trial. If convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison, the DOJ says.
(PROVIDENCE, R.I.) — Jennifer Rourke, a candidate for Rhode Island State Senate, claimed on Twitter that she was attacked at an abortion rally in Providence by her opponent in the race, police officer Jeann Lugo. The rally took place hours after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that provided federal protection of abortion rights, now instead leaving it to states to pass their own laws.
Providence police said they are criminally investigating an off-duty officer after “a female subject was assaulted” at a protest outside the Rhode Island State House Friday night. Lugo was identified by police as the subject of the investigation, according to ABC affiliate WLNE.
“The officer has served on the department for three years and was placed on administrative leave with pay this morning, pending a criminal investigation and administrative review,” Rhode Island police said in a statement.
In an interview with the Providence Journal, Lugo did not deny punching his opponent, but also claimed Rourke became physical with him. The Journal said Rourke denied that accusation.
“I’m not going to deny,” Lugo told The Journal of the punching allegation. “It was very chaotic, so I can’t really tell you right now. Everything happened very fast.”
ABC News’ Aaron Katersky contributed to this report.
(WASHINGTON) — President Joe Biden remains unmoved on the issue of court expansion, the White House said, despite his criticism of the Supreme Court rulings handed down this week on gun rights and abortion.
“That is something that the president does not agree with,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One on Saturday when asked about such a reform. “That is not something that he wants to do.”
Democrats and activists are floating the idea after the high court expanded gun rights and did away with 50 years of precedent to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Sen. Ed Markey of Massachusetts and others expressly called for expanding the court in the wake of the decision on abortion access.
New York City Mayor Eric Adams said court expansion is “critical.”
“We need to balance out this court before they do more harm than what they’ve done thus far,” Adams said at a press conference on Friday, where he said he wouldn’t have become the city’s leader if his former partner didn’t get an abortion when they were in their teens.
Biden has never expressed great interest in expanding the high court, even when many of his opponents in the 2020 Democratic primary for president were supportive of the reform.
After he was elected, Biden appointed a 36-member bipartisan commission to study potential changes to the Supreme Court — including the addition of more seats, as well as term limits and a code of ethics for justices.
The commission unanimously adopted a report late last year, in which they warned that excessive change to the institution could cause democracy to regress in the future.
The panel found “considerable” support for 18-year term limits for justices, but the issue of expanding the court beyond nine seats was met with “profound disagreement.”
“There was a commission that was put together about how to potentially move forward with the court, reform the court,” Jean-Pierre said Saturday. “I don’t have anything more to share from any final decision that the president has made.”
Biden has issued forceful condemnations of both Supreme Court decisions.
He described being “deeply disappointed” in the June 23 ruling striking down a century-old New York law limiting concealed handguns in public, stating it “contradicts common sense and the Constitution, and should deeply trouble us all.”
The Roe repeal, he said, was a “sad day” for the Supreme Court and the nation.
“Make no mistake: This decision is the culmination of a deliberate effort over decades to upset the balance of our law,” he said Friday in remarks delivered from the Cross Hall of the White House. “It’s a realization of an extreme ideology and a tragic error by the Supreme Court, in my view.”
In response, Biden said he was instructing federal agencies to protect nationwide access to federally approved medication like contraception, and employed the Department of Justice to ensure women can travel out-of-state for abortion services where the procedure is legal.
The president continued his criticism on Saturday, telling reporters that the Supreme Court “has made some terrible decisions.”
(CHICAGO) — One person is dead and two were inujured after a shooting at a WeatherTech warehouse in the Chicago suburb of Bolingbrook early Saturday morning, ABC Chicago station, WLS reported.
Officers were dispatched to 1 Weathertech Way at 6:25 a.m. Saturday in response to reports of a subject shot, Bolingbrook police said in an online statement.
The suspect was located and taken into custody Saturday at approximately 9:25 a.m., police said.
According to police, in addition to the one victim dead, another is in critical condition and one has been released from the hospital.
The incident is still under investigation, authorities said.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(CHEYENNE, Wyo.) — For Wyoming, a Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade means an automatic ban on abortion as the state is one of 13 that have enacted “trigger bans” on abortions. But even as Roe stood, the state sat in a so-called “abortion desert” where access to pregnancy termination was few and far between.
In a ruling Friday, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that protected the constitutional right to abortion nationally. Now, it will be up to the state legislatures to decide on abortion rights.
In Wyoming, even anticipating this possibility, advocates for abortion rights fought to gain access to abortion care for patients in the state — and questioned how a historically libertarian state became so restrictive.
Wyoming law tightens
In March, Gov. Mark Gordon signed a bill passed by both the Wyoming House and Senate. The bill, HB0092, would ban abortion in all circumstances except rape, incest or if the mother is in serious risk of death or injury, if the protections of Roe are overturned. It would also prohibit the use of government funding towards an abortion.
Following a Supreme Court ruling, the law could become active in about a month.
The governor’s office told ABC News that Gordon will adhere to the process outlined in the bill and has no additional comment regarding his choice to sign the legislation.
On Friday, Gordon tweeted a statement in support of the Supreme Court’s ruling, calling it “a decisive win for those who have fought for the rights of the unborn for the past 50 years.”
Republican state Rep. Patrick Sweeney, who voted against the trigger law, said in a press call Friday that it was difficult for the House to get the rape and incest clause included in the Senate’s bill, and he worries that clause could be removed in the legislation’s next session.
Sharon Breitweiser, executive director of Pro-Choice Wyoming, told ABC News before the Supreme Court’s decision that this ban could become reality “sooner than we had ever thought possible.”
She said in prior legislative cycles, the organization was always able to find “compassionate, realistic” elected officials who would be able to hold such anti-abortion laws from reaching the governor’s desk.
Republican Sen. John Barrasso of Wyoming tweeted Friday in support of the court’s decision to overturn Roe.
“The Supreme Court today ruled to return power back to states to legislate in a way that reflects the will of their voters. With today’s decision, the U.S. will no longer have the same anti-life laws as countries like communist China & North Korea,” he wrote.
Brent Blue, who provided abortions in Wyoming for decades, said the new state ban is hypocritical to Wyoming political tradition.
“It’s sexist, it’s racist and it’s anti-Wyoming,” said Blue, who spoke with ABC News before the Supreme Court’s decision. “It’s the government interfering with the lives of individuals, when the Republican party in the state has dedicated itself for decades to getting the government out of the lives of individuals.”
Blue said that the new legislation has no accountability because there is no medical or financial assistance offered to children who are born to parents without resources, saying “the hypocrisy is overwhelming.”
“To try to limit access is really promoting poverty and is really racist… it’s going to affect poor women and women of color, and the true irony and crime involved is that the same people voting for this are voting against Medicaid expansion for parents who have no resources,” Blue added.
The push to open a second clinic
Currently, Wyoming has one health care center that offers abortions, the Women’s Health & Family Care in Jackson, which has the phrase “management of unplanned pregnancy,” on their website’s gynecology page. The center’s pregnancy termination services are limited to medication abortions, which can be administered only up to 10 weeks’ gestation.
However, Wellspring Health Access, a national abortion rights organization, is in the midst of building a full-service abortion clinic in Casper.
Wellspring Health Access has been working to establish the clinic for almost two years, its founder and president Julie Burkhart told ABC News. But just as the clinic was reaching its opening date, an arson attack on May 25 pushed back the clinic’s opening by several weeks.
Even before the arson attack, the clinic has become home to regular protests by anti-abortion rights groups, according to Burkhart.
Now, with the Supreme Court decision, Wellspring may never be able to provide abortions in their Wyoming clinic. Burkhart said in a Friday statement the ruling will impact those “who already face the greatest barriers to access” including “people living in rural communities, the Native population and people with low incomes.”
Burkhart told ABC News before the decision that Wyoming residents sought out the organization to establish a clinic in their state. The clinic was strategically placed in central Wyoming to reach not only Wyoming patients, but also those who live in restrictive nearby states such as Nebraska, South Dakota and Montana.
Before the May ban was introduced, Wyoming law had moderate restrictions on abortions, allowing abortions to occur until the fetus was viable, around 24 weeks, following the framework of Roe.
Therefore, Burkhart said it had made sense for Wellspring to go to Wyoming when they started planning the Casper clinic in 2020, since it was a historically libertarian state where laws lacked major restrictions on abortion.
Burkhart said the Wellspring team has found much support in Casper from both vendors and community members, despite the recent arson attack.
“My absolute assessment is that there are some folks who we know who have been elected to the state Legislature over the past couple of cycles who do not speak for the broader majority of Wyomingites and they have their axe to grind,” Burkhart told ABC News. “They have their agenda, and unfortunately, it’s not what people in the state feel is needed or necessary.”
While most Americans nationally support abortion rights, a 2014 Pew Research poll found abortion beliefs to be right down the middle in the state, with 48% of Wyoming adults feeling abortion should be legal in most cases, and 49% believing it should be illegal in most cases.
Before the Friday ruling, Burkhart said Wellspring was already working on a legal strategy that she is hopeful will protect their ability to provide full reproductive care. She said Friday it is an “immediate” priority for the organization to determine the best legal steps going forward.
“The Wyoming constitution has strong protections for Wyomingites’ bodily autonomy. We will fight tooth and nail to protect this fundamental right for the people of Wyoming, including in the courts. We call on Wyoming lawmakers to honor the Wyoming constitution and take action to protect abortion access for the people of this state,” Burkhart said in a statement Friday.
Going out of state for care to end a pregnancy
The average distance a person in Wyoming must drive to obtain an abortion before 14 weeks was 132 miles, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights organization. That distance may expand as bans emerge, pushing people to leave their state to obtain abortion care.
Riata Little Walker, a lifelong Wyoming resident in Casper, said she had to travel to Denver, Colorado, to receive care when her pregnancy took a turn for the worse in January 2020.
Walker and her husband were ready to have their first child when doctors found a complex combination of heart defects in the fetus. At 22 weeks, Walker said she decided to be induced into labor to terminate the pregnancy.
“We were given our options, but there was no talk of leaving the hospital,” Walker told ABC News. “There was a chance our daughter could have survived birth, but she was incurable and she would have suffered greatly.”
Ultimately, Walker said she decided to undergo “termination for medical reasons,” or TFMR. In the second and third trimester, abortions can be performed by inducing labor, which includes labor and delivery.
Dr. Jeffrey Marcus, a board-certified obstetrician-gynecologist with North Atlanta Women’s Specialists in Georgia, told U.S. News TFMR is “when a pregnancy is ended due to a structural, genetic or chromosomal abnormality of the baby or when continuing the pregnancy would risk the health of mother.” Marcus said because it was technically abortion, an overturning of Roe would mean TFMR would not be a guaranteed option for women who receive such diagnoses.
“A lot of people don’t want to look at TFMR as abortion, but it is,” Walker said.
After the induced labor, Walker’s daughter survived for 10 minutes, during which the family said goodbye, took pictures and had her baptized. The care and compassion Walker felt from the medical professionals in Denver impacted her, she said.
“We were able to choose the best option for us and have the time that we needed to take care of our daughter,” Walker said. “Most people have to go to an abortion clinic and walk through protesters.”
Walker said she and her husband were fortunate because they had the resources to get top-level care in Denver, including her mother driving them there. The one-night stay for the procedure cost $19,000, she said.
Walker said she comes from a conservative, Catholic family of Wyoming ranchers, but added that even her great-grandparents believed abortion should be “a private decision.”
“Wyoming has had a terrible shift,” she said of the state’s politics, adding it “used to be ‘live and let live.'”
The possibility of a ban in Wyoming has Walker concerned for the futures of women in the state.
“I was pro-life with exceptions for rape, incest or if the mother had to make a decision [for her health],” Walker said, before the Supreme Court’s ruling. “But then I realized that actually meant I was pro-choice. It’s too gray to say one situation is OK and one isn’t, not everyone is going to agree, but they should have a choice.”
(NEW YORK) — Before the Supreme Court released its ruling Friday upending abortion rights in the U.S., Elisa Wells was thinking of virtual mailboxes.
For people who move or travel a lot, a virtual mailbox is a way to check their mail online. If an item is critical, they forward it to their current location.
For Wells, founder of the online abortion site Plan C, which tells women how to find the abortion pill, it’s a potential workaround to state laws restricting access.
Using dried garbanzo beans and old pill bottles, Wells tested whether a virtual mailbox set up in a state like California or New York — which allow abortion pills to be prescribed through a telehealth appointment — could make its way to a woman in a state like Texas or Oklahoma that restrict access.
The answer was yes.
“We want all the information we provide on our website to be as helpful as possible,” Wells told ABC’s “20/20.”
“We know that people looking for abortion care, especially in restricted states are in a really stressful situation. And we don’t want them to have to guess about what to do and which services to use,” she added.
As 26 states are expected to eventually ban or severely restrict abortion in the wake of Dobbs v. Jackson, a grassroots resistance movement is on the rise that looks notably different than it did in the 1960s.
Unlike before the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling on abortion, about half of the U.S. will already offer abortion access, and several online-based state funds are providing patients with flights, child care, gas cards and access to food delivery services like Grubhub and DoorDash if they need to travel far. The National Abortion Federation is expanding a nationwide hotline — established in 1978 — to connect abortion seekers to those funds.
“It is just really important that people understand that there is an infrastructure in place right now to help people move across the country and to help provide support,” said Melissa Fowler, chief program officer at NAF.
It’s possible anti-abortion rights states will try to brand such efforts as illegal, paving the way for more court challenges.
The other major difference is federal approval 22 years ago of the drug mifepristone. Used in combination with another drug, misoprostol – commonly prescribed for stomach ulcers — the Food and Drug Administration says the pills can be used to induce an abortion so long as a woman is within 10 weeks of pregnancy.
The FDA also says those drugs can be prescribed through a telehealth appointment and mailed to the person’s home, although anti-abortion states have restricted access. A group called Just the Pill and Abortion Delivered said Friday that it’s now launching new mobile clinics in Colorado — one that will offer surgical abortion for patients over 11 weeks, and another equipped entirely for telehealth appointments for medication abortion.
Another group, called Unite for Reproductive and Gender Equality, is training local activists on how to “self-manage” an abortion, including when and how to take mifepristone and misoprostol. Several anti-abortion rights lawmakers and activists say this could potentially violate state laws that prohibit “aiding and abetting” abortion.
Kimberly Inez McGuire, head of URGE, said she believes their work will be protected as free speech.
“Before Roe (v Wade), we did not have safe and effective abortion pills like we do now. We didn’t have the internet. And so it really is a different circumstance,” she said.
This grassroots movement also is looking overseas. Among the options the website Plan C points people towards is Aid Access, an international organization that prescribes the abortion pill to women in the U.S. even if their state law prohibits it.
Dr. Rebecca Gomperts, founder of the organization, told ABC that she will personally conduct a telehealth appointment online with American patients and prescribe the pills to them for 95 euros; the pills are then filled from a pharmacy in India and mailed to the U.S. address. Gomperts said she believes state laws only apply to residents of that state, whereas she works out of Amsterdam and Austria.
The FDA though warns getting medications overseas from sites not regulated by the U.S. could be dangerous. Under federal rules, the abortion pill can only be prescribed by certified clinicians and provided from FDA-inspected manufacturers.
Another drawback: The medication can take as long as three weeks to arrive – posing a risk that patients may take the medication too late in their pregnancy.
Gomperts said she is confident in the quality of the product and will continue to offer the service. She predicted other doctors in the U.S. and around the world will follow suit as states ban abortion.
“What will happen (in the U.S.) is what happens everywhere in the world and that is that there will be huge underground markets,” she told ABC’s “Nightline.”
