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For Immediate Release
June, 24 2024, 09:30am EDT
Contact:
Email: media@reproductivefreedomforall.org
Leading Reproductive Health, Rights, and Justice Organizations Launch ‘Abortion Access Now’ Campaign and $100 Million Investment
arking the two-year anniversary of the Dobbs decision, leading reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations have launched the ‘Abortion Access Now’ campaign, pledging a $100 million investment to advance abortion rights and access across the United States. The funding will help build a long-term federal strategy to codify the right to abortion, including lobbying efforts, grassroots organizing, public education, and comprehensive communication strategies to mobilize support and enact change. This groundbreaking initiative aims to ensure that everyone has the right to access reproductive health care, free from stigma and barriers.
The ‘Abortion Access Now’ campaign is a collaborative effort led by:
- American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
- Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR)
- In Our Own Voice: National Black Women’s Reproductive Justice Agenda
- National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice (Latina Institute)
- National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum (NAPAWF)
- National Women’s Law Center (NWLC)
- Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA)
- Reproductive Freedom for All
- Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity (URGE)
The campaign issued the following statement:
“We envision a future where abortion, and all sexual and reproductive health care, is not only legal but also accessible, affordable, and free from stigma or fear. This campaign is committed to building and leading a broad, inclusive vision for abortion access, ensuring everyone can make fundamental decisions about their health and bodies with dignity and support. Together, we will secure the freedom to control our own bodies and care for ourselves, our families, and our communities.”
For decades, abortion access has been hindered by restrictive laws, social stigma, and disparities – many that disproportionately affect Black, Latinx, AAPI, LGBTQIA+, Indigenous communities, rural communities, immigrant communities, young people, and those with low incomes. The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has opened the floodgates to politicians enacting extreme abortion bans and enforcing outdated and harmful laws.
Anti-abortion lawmakers have already banned or severely restricted abortion in 21 states with devastating consequences, and they won’t stop until they can force a nationwide ban on abortion and push care out of reach entirely, even in states that have protected abortion access. These bans have denied millions of people across the country the power to make personal medical decisions during pregnancy, forcing many to carry pregnancies against their will.
Abortion bans make pregnancy less safe by putting reproductive health care further out of reach. In states where legislatures have banned abortion, clinics are closing, OBGYNs are leaving, and people are left with drastically fewer options to manage or end a pregnancy. People are struggling to get lifesaving medical care for miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies, and other pregnancy complications.
The campaign will work to expand abortion access and coverage over the next decade, ensuring a federal right to abortion, making it legal again, and securing access to abortion care in every state.
For over 50 years, Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America) has fought to protect and advance reproductive freedom at the federal and state levels—including access to abortion care, birth control, pregnancy and post-partum care, and paid family leave—for everybody. Reproductive Freedom for All is powered by its more than 4 million members from every state and congressional district in the country, representing the 8 in 10 Americans who support legal abortion.
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Experts Warn That MAHA Bait-and-Switch by RFK Jr. and Trump 'Means Big Money for Big Wellness'
"They sell consumers their own version of the grift."
Feb 05, 2026
Government watchdog Public Citizen on Thursday issued a report outlining the major conflicts of interest held by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his allies in the Make America Healthy Again, or MAHA, movement.
In particular, the report focuses on Kennedy and three key allies: Wellness influencer Dr. Casey Means, who is President Donald Trump's nominee to be US surgeon general; her brother Calley Means, a senior adviser to Kennedy at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS); and the siblings' business partner Dr. Mark Hyman.
Public Citizen centers its report on these individuals' ties to the wellness industry, which "encompasses nutritional supplements and fitness products, and increasingly overlaps with non-science-based health beliefs."
Taken as a whole, the report says, "MAHA's influence in US healthcare means big money for Big Wellness."
Among other things, the report noted that Casey Means owns a metabolic testing company that "may have already benefited from Secretary Kennedy’s promotion of wearable health tracking devices."
The report states that Dr. Means "has also potentially violated [Federal Trade Commission] rules on influencer marketing by failing to adequately disclose sponsorship relationships in dozens of web and social media posts" that promote assorted wellness products.
"Public Citizen’s review of Dr. Means’ website, newsletter, and social media feeds found that for the almost two dozen companies from which Dr. Means reported receiving affiliate fees, Dr. Means disclosed her financial relationship inconsistently and ambiguously," the report says. "In total, she failed to disclose her financial relationship 79 out of 140 (56%) times she promoted affiliated products."
Calley Means, meanwhile, comes under scrutiny for his company TrueMed, which Public Citizen said "relies on a legally dubious business model." The report also criticizes Means for regularly promoting "dangerous and false health information," including attacks on fluoridated water and Covid-19 vaccines, and the promotion of drinking raw milk.
And Mark Hyman, states the report, "oversees a wellness empire that stands to benefit significantly from HHS policies under Kennedy."
Eileen O’Grady, a researcher in Public Citizen’s Congress Watch division, acknowledged the appeal of many MAHA influencers' sales pitch, stating that "they accurately identify that much of the US healthcare system is beholden to corporate interests like Big Pharma and the insurance industry."
However, O'Grady said that what the Means siblings and Hyman are peddling isn't much different than what they criticize in the US healthcare system.
"They sell consumers their own version of the grift," she explained. "Excessive testing, unproven and underregulated health supplements, and assurances that only their products hold the key to better health. While MAHA influencers reap the benefits of lucrative sponsorship contracts and, in some cases, political appointments, regular Americans are once again being cheated."
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Private Jet of Billionaire Trump Donor Used to Deport Palestinians From US to Occupied West Bank
“They dropped us off like animals on the side of the road,” said 24-year-old Maher Awad, who’d lived in the United States for nearly a decade and was taken from his girlfriend and newborn son in Michigan.
Feb 05, 2026
A private jet owned by a top donor for President Donald Trump was used to secretly deport Palestinians out of the United States to the occupied West Bank, where they have been separated from their families, according to an investigation published Thursday by the Guardian and the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972.
On January 22, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that a private jet containing eight Palestinian men touched down at the Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv before dumping them off at a checkpoint near an Israeli settlement, where they were released into the occupied territory.
Security sources familiar with the case described it as "highly unusual," as chartering a private jet to Israel costs about $300,000—vastly more than the commercial jet travel that the US government typically uses for deportations.
But the Guardian and +972 have learned that the jet, which carried another set of Palestinian deportees to be dropped in the West Bank on Monday, is owned by Trump's longtime business partner, the Florida real estate tycoon Gil Dezer.
Dezer and his father, the Israeli-American Michael Dezer, have collaborated with Trump on six different residential towers in Miami and have donated at least $1.3 million to Trump's presidential campaign, according to campaign filings.
The jet was found to have been chartered by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) through the Florida-based company Journey Aviation. Before it dropped Palestinians off in Israel, the group Human Rights First determined that it had been used for at least four other "removal flights" to Kenya, Liberia, Guinea, and Eswatini.
US officials did not answer questions about how much money they paid to charter the flights, but aviation industry sources told the outlets that chartering the two flights to Israel would probably cost between $400,000 and $500,000.
Maher Awad, a 24-year-old Palestinian man who was deported, said the men were carried on Dever's plane with their arms and ankles shackled after being taken out of a notoriously squalid ICE detention hub in Phoenix, Arizona.
When they arrived at the checkpoint, he said, “they dropped us off like animals on the side of the road.” All he had to show Israeli authorities was his Michigan driver’s license.
The men went to a house near the checkpoint, owned by a university professor named Mohammad Kanaan.
Kanaan said the men stayed at his home for about two hours. During that time, he learned that many of them had been in ICE detention for so long that some of them were considered missing.
“Their families were so happy to hear their voices,” he said. “One mother started screaming and crying over the phone.”
According to the outlets, the flights were "part of a secretive and politically sensitive US government operation to deport Palestinians arrested by ICE to the Israeli-occupied West Bank."
The Trump administration has aggressively targeted Palestinians for deportation, stripping legal status from hundreds of people who have protested or otherwise expressed solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel's two-year genocide in Gaza.
972+ reported that several of the deported men have held green cards in the United States. Many had wives, children, and other family members living there.
Awad, who had lived in the US for nearly a decade, was taken away from his girlfriend and his newborn son in Michigan. “I grew up in America,” he said. “America was heaven for me."
“I was feeling safe and secure in the United States until ICE arrested me," he said.
The secret deportation program has shocked many immigration attorneys, who described it as highly unusual and potentially illegal for the US to deport Palestinians to the West Bank, where they face systemic persecution and violence from Israel's occupation.
In recent weeks, state-sanctioned Israeli settler violence has exploded. In the three days following the first deportation flight, the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) reported that "at least 10 serious Israeli settler attacks were recorded" in the West Bank, resulting in "extensive property damage, arson attacks, injuries, and forcible displacement of Palestinian families."
“Aside from the many irregularities with the deportation of eight Palestinians on a private jet and no due process, this transfer also violates the principle of nonrefoulement, which prohibits the forcible return of individuals to a country where there are substantial grounds for believing that the person would be at risk of irreparable harm upon return, including persecution, torture, ill treatment, or other serious human rights violations,” Gissou Nia, director of the Strategic Litigation Project at the Atlantic Council, told +972.
"The United States is bound by international treaties that explicitly prohibit this, including the Convention Against Torture,” she continued. “Therefore, the US violated this principle in sending Palestinian asylum seekers and Palestinians with other statuses back on a flight to Israel, where they face persecution."
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'I Am Speechless': Historians Sickened as Trump Set to Remove Mention of Racism from Medgar Evers Monument
"The murder of Medgar Evers was an act of racial terror," said human rights activist Martin Luther King III.
Feb 05, 2026
Historians and other critics expressed disgust on Thursday after news broke that the Trump administration was removing references to racism from the monument dedicated to civil rights icon Medgar Evers.
According to a report from Mississippi Today, the National Park Service has removed visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument in Jackson, Mississippi.
Two Park Service employees tell Mississippi Today that the brochures are expected to undergo significant revisions, including removing references labeling Evers' killer, Byron De La Beckwith, as a racist.
In fact, Beckwith was a member of both the White Citizens Council and the Ku Klux Klan, and remained a committed white supremacist up to his death in prison in 2001.
Mississippi Today noted that the removal of the brochures at the Evers monument aren't a one-off event, and the publication cited an earlier report from the Washington Post detailing how the Trump administration "has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits related to slavery at multiple national parks, including an 1863 photo that Christian abolitionists used to prove the horrors of slavery."
US Civil War historian Kevin Levin reacted with shock to the Trump administration's latest effort to whitewash American history.
"I am speechless," he wrote in a social media post referencing the changes to the Evers monument.
Historian Todd Arrington, site manager of the James A. Garfield National Historic Site, noted the suspicious timing of the change in the monument brochures.
"Today is the 32nd anniversary of Byron De La Beckwith’s February 5, 1994 conviction for murdering Medgar Evers in 1963," he wrote. "I’m sure it’s just a coincidence that this news broke today. That racist POS—who bragged about killing Evers at Klan meetings and rallies—died in prison in 2001."
Human rights activist Martin Luther King III, son of civil rights icon Martin Luther King, Jr., slammed the Trump administration for trying to distort history.
"The murder of Medgar Evers was an act of racial terror," wrote King. "That fact is not partisan. It is historical. Calling it anything else is not 'restoring truth.' It is erasing it."
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