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reproductive healthcare
National Abortion Providers, Thank You!
On this National Abortion Provider Appreciation Day, during Women’s History Month, we reflect on what it truly means to lead change by honoring providers who stand courageous in clinics across the country.
Mar 10, 2026
Each March, as the world turns its gaze toward Women’s History Month, we are reminded of the countless women whose courage, intellect, resilience, and leadership have reshaped our world. For 2026, the national theme—“Leading the Change: Women Shaping a Sustainable Future”—honors the women who are reimagining and rebuilding systems to ensure long-term sustainability: environmental, economic, educational, and societal. It recognizes women’s leadership in creating a future rooted in equity, justice, and opportunity for all.
Within that narrative sits a group of women and gender-expansive people whose work rarely appears in history books but whose impact resonates through lives across the nation: abortion providers.
On March 10, National Abortion Provider Appreciation Day, we are called to honor these fearless caregivers who sit at the frontlines of reproductive healthcare. They embody the very essence of this year’s Women’s History Month theme of leading change and shaping a future where bodily autonomy, dignity, and compassionate care are not just ideals but realities.
Abortion providers deliver essential medical care in the face of extraordinary adversity. They confront threats, protests, harassment, legal warfare, and violence—all aimed at trying to silence them, intimidate them, or push them out of the work they know is crucial. They endure anti-clinic demonstrations, surveillance by extremists, and political rhetoric designed to vilify not just a medical procedure but the fundamental humanity of the people they serve. Despite this, they show up day after day with resolve and open hearts.
Just as the suffragists, civil rights leaders, and healthcare pioneers of earlier eras were architects of change, today’s abortion providers are reshaping what justice looks like in the 21st century.
Their courage is deeply personal. It is the exam room conversation where a provider listens without judgment. It is the moment they guide a patient through a complex decision with clarity and care. It is the steady hand on a shoulder trembling with fear and hope. This is leadership: not in some distant boardroom, but in shared humanity. This is sustainability: building systems of care that endure in the face of relentless attack.
At the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project (WRRAP), we fund patients and eliminate financial barriers. But it is abortion providers who make care happen. They are the ones with the medical training, the compassion, the resilience, and sometimes the very bodies standing between patients and an unsafe, uncertain future.
Our work at WRRAP could not exist without these providers at the forefront. They are our partners in every sense bridging policy and possibility, funding and freedom, fear and resilience. We provide financial support so a patient doesn’t have to choose between rent and care, but it is the provider who opens their door, who holds space for people, who offers healing and hope in a world that so often refuses it.
To the providers who dedicate their lives to this work: We see you, we thank you, and we honor you. You are shaping a sustainable future, one where people have autonomy over their bodies and futures; one where care is delivered with compassion, dignity, and respect; one where equity is more than a slogan but a lived practice.
The work of abortion providers is history making. Just as the suffragists, civil rights leaders, and healthcare pioneers of earlier eras were architects of change, today’s abortion providers are reshaping what justice looks like in the 21st century. They are environmental stewards of well-being, economic innovators in equitable care delivery, educators in dignity and consent, and societal leaders in advancing reproductive freedom for all.
Being a provider today means doing the work under threats that others can scarcely imagine. It means navigating legal labyrinths designed to block care, enduring hostile legislative sessions, and facing protests that seek to make the act of healing itself controversial. And yet, providers persist, not because it is easy, but because it is necessary.
On this National Abortion Provider Appreciation Day, during Women’s History Month, we reflect on what it truly means to lead change by honoring providers who stand courageous in clinics across the country, whose safety has been threatened because they chose care over fear, whose compassion has saved futures with every patient they serve.
To every abortion provider today: Thank you for leading. Thank you for caring. Thank you for building a future rooted in justice, compassion, and dignity.
We are grateful beyond words, and we stand with you. This is our collective power.
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The VA is Ripping Away Abortion Care for Veterans... Again
This isn’t just a rollback. It’s a deliberate erasure of rights that we fought for in the wake of deeply personal and collective loss.
Jan 25, 2026
In 2022, my wife and I lost our first child. We named them June. They were deeply wanted and fiercely loved. In one fateful appointment, our entire worlds changed. We learned that June had a severe fetal bladder abnormality and was unable to produce amniotic fluid. Without it, their lungs would never develop. They would not survive.
We made the impossible decision to end the pregnancy—an act of compassion, love, and medical necessity.
At the time, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) had a total ban on abortion care and counseling.
No exceptions for rape. No exceptions for incest. Not even to save a veteran’s life.
Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.
After our loss, the only way I felt I could keep breathing was to turn that grief into meaning. I shared our story with lawmakers to help reverse this dangerous policy so that veterans and their families could turn to the VA—no matter the circumstance or where they lived. That fall, the VA finally took steps to reverse the ban, signaling a long-overdue shift toward care, autonomy, and dignity.
But that progress was short-lived.
The VA just finalized a new abortion ban policy that, once again, excludes exceptions for rape or incest and offers only vague assurances that it will intervene if our lives are at risk. They initially implemented this enormous change in secret without telling veterans or their families.
In effect, it returns the VA to what was once the most extreme abortion ban in the country—an outright prohibition on care and counseling that applies to every VA facility nationwide, regardless of state law.
This isn’t just a rollback. It’s a deliberate erasure of rights that we fought for in the wake of deeply personal and collective loss.
And it is not happening in isolation. The same administration driving this ban is also working diligently to eliminate gender-affirming care, defund programs for minority and underrepresented veterans, and strip inclusive language and data collection from federal policy. The message is unmistakable: Some veterans count. Others don’t.
Veterans are not a monolith. We are a diverse community—LGBTQIA+, people of color, disabled, parents, caregivers, survivors, and yes, women too. Our community exists at every intersection of identity and experience, and our families serve alongside us. Our care cannot be conditional. Our humanity is not negotiable.
Policy is never just about one issue. It is intersectional—because our lives are intersectional.
Reproductive care cannot be separated from gender-affirming care, from disability access and mental health, from racial justice, or maternal health. Our needs don’t exist in silos, and neither do we. When one right is taken away, the loss reverberates across all the others.
I’ve seen what’s possible when we refuse to stay silent—how lived experience can reshape policy and expand care that has never existed before. And I know exactly what is at stake when care is denied. Pregnancy can change on a dime.
June’s life, though brief, transformed mine. Through their memory, I found purpose. I found a voice. And in their honor, I will continue working to ensure that no veteran or family ever has to face what we faced alone.
We should be building systems rooted in care, equity, and truth. We should be honoring the fullness of who veterans are, how we serve, and how we build our families. Instead, our fundamental rights are being stripped away—one policy memo at a time—and once again, we are being asked to fight for the right to make personal decisions about our health, our futures, and our families.
I will not allow June’s legacy to become another casualty of politics. Their life will be a call to care.
This moment demands more than endurance. It demands action.
The policies we pass—within the VA and beyond—shape the futures of veterans and the people who love us. Had my wife not been able to access critical care in her time of need—had we not been given the chance to make the most compassionate choice amid impossible circumstances—we might never have known the joy of raising our child today, a joy born from grief and shaped by love.
Veterans and our families deserve futures built on compassion, justice, and love—not fear.
Because in the end, we are all only human.
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When it Comes to Women’s Health, The Trump Admin’s Hypocrisy is on Full Display
President Donald Trump and his cronies are peddling lies about abortion care while touting their farce advancements for women’s health.
Nov 22, 2025
Earlier this month, Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made an announcement regarding the removal of broad “black box” warnings from Hormone Replacement Therapy products for menopause.
As an OB-GYN PA with more than a decade of experience in reproductive care, I know what decisions women and patients are grappling with when it comes to their health and maternal care. I also know first hand the devastating consequences of denying patients critical care when they need it the most and stripping access to care that’s been proven to be safe and effective after decades of research.
President Donald Trump and his cronies are peddling lies about abortion care while being hypocrites when touting their farce advancements for women’s health. Right now, Trump and his anti-abortion administration are pulling every string possible to ban abortion and that includes banning abortion medication.
Ironically, Commissioner Makary said in a statement that “women and their physicians should make decisions based on data, not fear,” and anti-abortion extremist Kennedy Jr. said that the administration is “returning to evidence-based medicine and giving women control over their health again.”
Contrary to their assertion of trusting research and doctors, right now, the Trump administration is working to roll back access to mifepristone and reproductive care, with Makary and Kennedy Jr. at the helm.
At the press event for this announcement, while responding to a question from a reporter, Makary said that the administration is “sticking with our philosophy that the government is not your doctor.”
So, which is it? Does this administration trust women and patients to consult their physicians for what’s best on making personal medical decisions, or is that only convenient messaging when it’s pushing forward their extreme agenda?
The healthcare crisis in America is a dire one, and yet, the Trump administration continues to play political games and feign ignorance as to how their efforts to ban abortion nationwide will have a catastrophic impact on women and patients across the country.
It has been 25 years since the FDA approved mifepristone, a safe, effective medication that has reshaped abortion care in the US.
Contrary to their assertion of trusting research and doctors, right now, the Trump administration is working to roll back access to mifepristone and reproductive care, with Makary and Kennedy Jr. at the helm.
At the urging of anti-abortion politicians and junk science, the FDA has agreed to revisit its approval of mifepristone, because extremists condemned the FDA approving a generic abortion pill just last month.
We must continue to call out this hypocrisy, because Republicans know that imposing Project 2025’s abortion agenda risks significant political backlash, particularly in battleground states where abortion is either legal or popular. More than 6 in 10 Americans support keeping medication abortion available. Even many Trump voters oppose new restrictions.
Let’s be clear—this administration’s attacks on mifepristone are a national abortion test.
Project 2025, spearheaded by Trump, Kennedy Jr., and Makary, would dismantle access to one of the safest, most widely used medications in the country. Medication abortion accounted for nearly two-thirds of all US abortions in 2023.
Will women and families retain the ability to make private medical decisions—or will patients have their rights ripped away and be forced to jump through unimaginable hoops just to receive care?
If Republicans were actually committed to prioritizing women’s health in their agenda, they would invest in healthcare so expecting mothers across the country have access to the most comprehensive care available, including abortion care.
If Republicans were actually committed to protecting women and advancing medical research, they wouldn’t pull funding from clinics and hospitals dedicated to providing care for women and patients nationwide, especially in rural communities where resources are already sparse.
I’m not buying this feigned effort toward showing allyship toward women, when everything that this administration has done since January has been an assault on women’s health and the care we undoubtedly need. Physicians and providers like me spend years in schooling and training so we can provide the best care to our communities, and yet this administration undermines those years of dedication and expertise to appease an extreme anti-abortion minority.
If Trump, Makary, and Kennedy Jr. want to walk the walk in advancing women’s healthcare, they should start with looking at themselves and acknowledging the harm that they are doing across the country to the detriment of the American people.
Lives are at stake, and we are waiting for them to mean what they say.
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