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healthcare
How Innovators Are Emotionally Supporting Abortion Seekers in a Post-Roe World
With laws constantly changing and often unclear, being able to reach abortion seekers on an emotional level is a critical touchpoint in the new digital landscape of access.
Jul 10, 2025
In the three years since the Dobbs decision resulted in abortion bans in 42 states across the U.S, the ecosystem of abortion access in America has shifted and stretched to meet the ever-changing moment. The Supreme Court’s ruling in Planned Parenthood vs. Medina has paved the way for even more states to further target abortion providers by enabling states to withhold state funding to clinics that provide sexual health services from sexually transmitted infection tests to cervical cancer screenings simply because they also offer abortion care.
With laws constantly changing and often unclear in the eyes on abortion seekers, being able to reach abortion seekers on an emotional level is a critical touchpoint in the new digital landscape of access. Innovators have stepped up to meet the demand for emotional support, helping individuals feel heard and get informed throughout the abortion process as laws change and stigma abounds. They’re pairing abortion seekers with counselors, peers, and educators as the digital entry point to care, meeting and supporting the actual and immediate needs, whether they are anxious, confused about where to find care, or feeling stigmatized.
With policies currently in Congress that might lead to the closure of even more reproductive healthcare clinics, including services from cancer screenings to STI testing, the need to keep patients informed of how to get the care they want has never been more dire.
We might discuss the emotional journey of an abortion seeker around getting them from confusion and disorientation to understanding and relief, regardless of their choices.
At the same time, Crisis Pregnancy Centers, or fake clinics that pose as counseling centers for pregnant people, persist in their anti-abortion messaging and are funded nationwide at five times the rate of abortion clinics and funds. Through the language of free testing and counseling, they encourage patients to enter illegitimate medical clinics, by talking about abortion decision-making despite the fact that they do not provide it, or any other form of medical care.
Their latest move has been to go digital, expanding their already vast and well-funded footprint into a mobile chat experience that utilizes the language of values-based decision-making and regret avoidance to deter those seeking real support amid a complicated landscape.Their goal is clear: be the first to reach abortion seekers confused by the complex legal landscape when they go online looking for information. They then delay, deter, and redirect them away from real medical care.
The punchline is that their latest innovation is a rip-off. Planned Parenthood’s Chat and Text program has paired website visitors with sex educators for the past 15 years, and the M+A hotline has operated a phone line staffed by doctors and volunteers since 2019. And post-Dobbs, the internet abounds with even more determined activist-innovators. There are comprehensive resource websites for those seeking medication abortion by mail, awareness campaigns, brave providers shielded by their state’s laws, health centers with stronger telehealth capabilities, and abortion doulas and hotlines stitching pieces together with the patient’s needs in mind.
Knowing that most users’ journeys start with a Google search on their mobile devices, it’s important to ensure that emotional support tools are easily accessible in a variety channels like web chat, text, Signal, or WhatsApp, and through completely low-tech options, and ensuring immediate connection to a person who can help no matter how someone prefers to communicate. These crucial organizations engage users compassionately and non-judgmentally. Powered by counselors, volunteers, and care providers, they are digital communities formed to listen, validate, and educate, without pathologizing the user’s emotional state. Engaging emotionally also helps users talk through social and legal stigma, misinformation, and education needs no matter where they live.
Reprocare is a peer phone and textline that offers comprehensive support at every phase of the process including informed landscape navigation for people who need detailed hand-holding and practical support, and the care team sends care packages directly to users who are alone and who express a need for resources and a human touch. Reprocare’s sister company, Autonomie, also builds technology that quickly matches users with abortion funds that help them access care.
Aya Contigo calls their bilingual chat tool “an abortion doula in your pocket,” and it first launched in the U.S. in Spanish, primarily using WhatsApp to reach vulnerable Latino communities. Designed in Venezuela with feminist organizations and 1,000 co-creators, it brings lessons from the Latin American feminist movement to our country, including the tradition of “acompañantes” or accompaniment as a framework. Using bilingual educators on WhatsApp chat and the asynchronous resources on their downloadable app, Aya Contigo ensures patients are never alone, that they have check-ins and follow-ups and are treated gently and compassionately for the days and weeks following their medication abortion.
Exhale Pro Voice is a post-abortion counseling program that offers a non-judgemental support text line for after-abortion support. Exhale also promotes its services for partners, parents, and friends of those who have had an abortion, in order to meet their unique emotional needs and also learn to be a support system for the person in their lives. Exhale is also a crucial resource for counselors, providers, and reproductive health workers seeking a confidential space outside of their work to sustain their well-being, especially important after three years of confusion and challenging, uphill work.
All-Options goes a step further, with a reproductive justice framework that understands that access to abortion has always been inequitable, be it because of location, resources, family, or tradition. Through their talk line, users are given emotional support to understand their access abortion care, and can also speak with a spiritual counselor, access adoption resources, pregnancy resources and infant care support, and a diaper program in their Indianapolis community.
Meeting the emotional impact of bans means considering a reframing of what we could term “the journey map” of an abortion seeker. The Turnaway Study highlights the mental health impact on those denied abortions over a period of 10 years. It elevates an important point: The most common emotion after an abortion is a sense of relief. Framed this way, we might discuss the emotional journey of an abortion seeker around getting them from confusion and disorientation to understanding and relief, regardless of their choices.
Today, researchers are only beginning to track the mental health impact of the Dobbs decision, and recent studies highlight depression and anxiety among women of reproductive age in general. Nearly 25% of women 18-25 years old have had a major depressive episode in the past year, and women of reproductive age in states where abortion is banned report increased anxiety. Further behaviors among young adults post-Dobbs, like increased permanent contraception like tubal ligation and vasectomy in banned states, are proof of the social pressures and sense of personal insecurity, and a lack of bodily autonomy created by bans.
Emotional support is key not just to providing immediate care, but to transforming the abortion access landscape. The coalition building of organizations that prioritize emotional and cultural competency can provide innovative, scalable solutions to a complex societal problem. While funders understand emotional support as a component of the wider access landscape, they don’t always see it as a fulcrum for change and outsize impact. Investing in innovators who have built this direct accompaniment ecosystem, powered by real, caring humans, is vital to maintaining access for critical abortion and reproductive healthcare.
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10 Ways the GOP’s Big Ugly Bill Could Hurt You
Instead of inflicting policy violence on the most vulnerable, Congress should harness America’s abundant wealth to create a moral economy that works for all of us.
Jul 09, 2025
The GOP’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” passed by the narrowest of margins in Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump, represents the largest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich since chattel slavery.
The slashing of vital services will cause a surge of economic insecurity and preventable deaths while massive hikes in military and deportation funding will serve to perpetuate endless wars and the senseless destruction of immigrant families and their communities.
1. Death by Denial of Healthcare
Cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, combined with new administrative hurdles to accessing benefits, could result in an estimated 51,000 preventable deaths per year. Overall, the new law and other policy changes from the Trump administration will likely strip health insurance from about 17 million people. Research shows that the rigid, red tape-laden work requirements in the bill are unlikely to actually increase employment. Most Medicaid enrollees already work, and even those who do work can end up without healthcare if red tape trips up their ability to prove it. Those who do not work are often caring for family members or attending school or have a disability. Formerly incarcerated people also face particularly high barriers to employment.
2. Hospital Apocalypse
The budget reduces the allowable Medicaid provider taxes that many states use to fund this vital program. The threat is particularly severe for rural hospitals because they rely more heavily on Medicaid revenue than urban facilities. More than 700 rural hospitals are already at risk of closure, and at least 338 rural hospitals, including hospitals in nearly every state, are at increased risk due to changes in this budget. To buy off critics, Republicans included a rural health fund that is expected to cover less than a third of projected rural Medicaid losses.
3. Taking Food From the Mouths of Hungry People
New work requirements for Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits will take food assistance from millions of people, including children and veterans. As with Medicaid, new work requirements for SNAP would have little effect on employment but would cause more children to go hungry.
4. Squeezing States on SNAP
This vital food program has always been fully federally funded, but the newly passed budget will require states to take on a significant share of the costs. This unprecedented burden shift will likely lead many states to cut enrollees or even terminate food aid programs for the first time since their inception, causing even more people to go hungry.
5. Barring Lawfully Present Immigrants From Aid
Hundreds of thousands of lawfully present immigrants, including children, who’ve fled persecution and violence in their home countries in search of safety in the United States (refugees, asylum-seekers, some victims of sex or labor trafficking, some victims of domestic violence, and people with temporary protected status) will lose access to Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicare, ACA tax credits, and SNAP benefits. And 2.6 million U.S. citizen children who live with only an undocumented adult are expected to lose their Child Tax Credit.
6. Terrorizing Immigrant Families
The GOP budget provides roughly another $170 billion to arrest, detain, and deport immigrants, and for a border wall and militarization in the next few years. That includes $45 billion for building new immigration detention centers, including family detention facilities—a 265% increase on an annual basis that would primarily benefit private companies contracted to build and run detention facilities. It includes an additional $29.9 billion for deportation operations and $46.6 billion for border wall construction.
7. Takes From the Poor to Give to the Rich
New tax policies would overwhelmingly benefit the wealthiest households. Cuts to healthcare, student loans, and other vital services would wipe out the minor tax benefits for working families. A Yale analysis of the bill’s combined tax and spending policies finds that the poorest 20% of households would suffer a net income loss of $700 per year on average while the top 1% would receive a $30,000 increase.
Other tax changes benefit the wealthiest while leaving the poorest without help. Despite modest increases in the maximum Child Tax Credit, the budget will still deny benefits to an estimated 17 million children whose parents earn too little to receive the full credit. For the wealthy, changes to the estate tax mean that wealthy heirs will enjoy a one-time tax savings of $6.4 million while 99.8% of American families would not get a single penny from this tax cut.
8. Leaving Corporations to Enjoy Their Spoils
The budget keeps the corporate tax rate at 21%, a drastic reduction from the 35% pre-2018 rate—despite the fact that ordinary workers have not benefited from this rate reduction. The budget also includes more than $1 billion in new tax breaks and subsidies for the fossil fuel industry—on top of existing subsidies for the industry that accelerate climate change while costing taxpayers an estimated $17 billion per year.
9. Rewarding Polluters While Raising Energy Costs
The budget allows oil and gas companies to avoid paying fees for polluting methane leaks that are a major cause of climate change, while cuts to clean energy subsidies could mean that household energy bills could spike by $415 a year over the next decade.
10. Funding War and Enriching War Profiteers
President Trump is requesting a record-high $1.011 trillion for the Pentagon and war for FY 2026. Because regular appropriations bills require a 60-vote Senate majority, the GOP included a $150 billion boost for the Pentagon through the reconciliation bill, which requires only a straight majority. They included $25 billion to begin building the “Golden Dome,” a missile defense system that is economically and physically impossible and would only drain more money from social programs to enrich wealthy Pentagon contractors, including Elon Musk; as well as $14 billion for new artificial-intelligence-driven weapons that will further enrich tech companies while making wars more deadly.
A Moral Budget Versus Policy Violence
Instead of inflicting policy violence on the most vulnerable, Congress should harness America’s abundant wealth to create a moral economy that works for all of us. By fairly taxing the wealthy and big corporations, reducing our bloated military budget, and demilitarizing immigration policy, we could free up more than enough public funds to ensure we can all survive and thrive. As our country approaches its 250th anniversary, we have no excuse for not investing our national resources in ways that reflect our constitutional values: to establish justice, domestic tranquility, real security, and the general welfare for all.
This analysis was produced by the Institute for Policy Studies for Repairers of the Breach.
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Ad Campaign Targets Vulnerable Republican Who Broke Promise Not to Cut Medicaid
Northeastern Pennsylvania Congressman Rob Bresnahan is one of many Republicans in swing states who are taking heat after ripping away Medicaid coverage from their constituents.
Jul 08, 2025
A new ad campaign is targeting a vulnerable first-term Republican congressman in a Northeastern Pennsylvania swing district after he broke his promise not to vote for Medicaid cuts.
Rep. Rob Bresnahan Jr. (R-Pa.) joined the rest of his party last week to vote for the Republican budget megabill, which cut over $1 trillion from the safety net program over the next decade.
As editorial board of The Times-Tribune in Scranton wrote, Bresnahan's vote went against his "repeated promises" to protect safety net programs, including a pledge he made in February that "if a bill is put in front of me that guts the benefits my neighbors rely on, I will not vote for it."
Bresnahan did ultimately vote for the bill, which may now result in nearly a half-million of his "neighbors" in the state of Pennsylvania losing coverage, according to a study published last week by the Joint Congressional Economic Committee. More than 200,000 people in Bresnahan's district—over a quarter—are Medicaid recipients.
In a new ad released Monday by the progressive group Unrig Our Economy, one of those neighbors comes back to haunt him.
"I sat in a meeting with Congressman Bresnahan," says a Scranton woman named Krysten. "We discussed some issues that I deal with myself."
The ad notes that Krysten had an ankle injury that required "six surgeries," "rehabilitation," an "ankle brace," and "medication."
"I had explained how important Medicaid is with him sitting straight across from me," Krysten says. "He stated to me that he would not make cuts to Medicaid."
"Afterwards, when the votes were done," she continues, "when I found out how he voted, I was very upset to hear that Congressman Bresnahan voted for the largest cut to Medicaid in history to give tax breaks to billionaires. This doesn't make sense at all."
Bresnahan won his seat by just 1.6 points in 2024, knocking out Democratic incumbent Rep. Matt Cartwright. The Cook Political Report lists Bresnahan as one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents in the country in the 2026 midterms.
"Congressman Bresnahan looked his own constituents in the eyes and promised to protect Medicaid, then turned around and voted to gut it so billionaires could get another tax break," said Kobie Christian, a spokesperson for Unrig Our Economy. "People like Krysten deserve healthcare and honesty, not cruel cuts and empty promises. Congressman Bresnahan should start fighting for his constituents, not the ultrarich."
Other Democratic-aligned groups are joining in the full-court press, hoping Bresnahan's betrayal of Medicaid recipients would be enough to sink his reelection chances.
In a post on X Tuesday, the House Majority PAC, which seeks to win the House majority back for Democrats, called out Bresnahan for selling his stock in the Centene Corporation, the largest Medicaid provider in the U.S., on May 15, just one week before the first version of the Republican bill passed the House. The value of the stock would tank throughout the month of June as cuts to Medicaid became increasingly inevitable.
"This congressman literally dumped stock in a Medicaid provider company right before this bill came to the floor," said Rep. Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.). "Don't be fooled—these guys know exactly what they're doing."
Bresnahan is one of many Republicans who may be in danger after voting to strip Medicaid from their constituents.
According to Newsweek, 64 GOP lawmakers represent districts where the Medicaid enrollment rate is higher than the national average. In addition to Bresnahan, four others—Nick Begich (R-Alaska), Juan Ciscomani (R-Ariz.), Ken Calvert (R-Calif.), and Jeff Hurd (R-Colo.) won their districts by five points or less and are particularly vulnerable.
The GOP bill is historically unpopular, with polls from Quinnipiac University, The Washington Post, Pew Research, and Fox News all showing roughly 2-to-1 opposition. Meanwhile, just 10% of Americans say they support cuts to Medicaid spending compared to nearly half who say the government should spend more money on the program, according to Quinnipiac.
According to reporting from Politico Sunday, Republicans are now in panic mode about how this vote could affect their chances.
"What we know from past elections is that messing with people's healthcare coverage is very problematic for politicians," said Republican pollster Whit Ayres. "It has, in the past, yielded some very, very negative views about the people who supported it."
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