From sweeping attacks on abortion pills and ‘equal protection’ bills to bizarro claims about abortion in the water, last year’s assaults on reproductive rights seemed to be all over the place. Still, there was a method to their madness—and we saw much of it coming.
Since Abortion, Every Day’s predictions for 2025 proved to be unfortunately prescient, we’re doing it again: you’ll find predictions from both of us below, with a few wishlist items for good measure.
A theme runs through both of our lists: 2026 will be a big year for conservatives showing us who they are. It will be a year without nuance, pretense, or shame.
You’ll also notice that we don’t mention attacks on abortion pills; that’s not a mistake or omission. AED is dedicating an entire piece to all the different ways conservatives are targeting medication abortion. Keep an eye on your inbox this week.
In the meantime, read on—you can use the headers below to skip around—and tell us in the comments what you’re watching for this year.
Jessica’s predictions: Attacks on Pro-Choice Speech, Mainstreaming Junk Science, Going All in on Young WomenKylie’s predictions: Glorifying Teen Pregnancy, Women & Coercion Claims, Even More CPC Funding, Rise of the Pink Pill Pipeline Our 2026 Wishlist: A national reckoning on pregnancy-related criminalization, and an end to ‘both sides’ media
I’m expecting some seriously ramped up attacks on free speech in 2026, with anti-abortion lawmakers and activists tapping into every tool and tactic they have to stop us from sharing information and resources with each other. Why? Because conservatives know that the free flow of information online—and the relentless work of community organizers—enables women to get abortions in spite of state bans. And they are pissed.
The good news is that we know what to expect: legislation to ban pro-choice websites and online speech, social media censorship dressed up as ‘child safety’, lawsuits targeting abortion funds, and attacks on advertisements that have anything to do with abortion. The bad news is that while the strategies will be familiar, they’re also going to be more brazen.
We’re going to see more suits, more bills, and less tiptoeing. And the people most in danger will be the local activists who ensure their communities know how to access care. Because even if they’re not legally successful in the long-term, conservatives know that they can kneecap small groups with time- and money-draining litigation.
One through-line to watch closely: anti-abortion leaders will claim they’re not censoring free speech, but protecting women. Republicans in both Florida and Missouri are already suing Planned Parenthood for “false advertising,” alleging that the group lies about the safety of abortion pills. South Dakota Republicans are using the same excuse in their suit against Mayday Health, arguing that the group’s ads are deceptive because medication abortion is dangerous. (All of these cases cite the junk science EPPC study on mifepristone.)
Which leads into my second prediction…
The Trump administration has already launched an unprecedented war on science, medicine, and expertise. Now, with conspiracy theorists running key health agencies, we’re going to watch the junk science ‘studies’ we tracked in 2025 be uncritically mainstreamed—with other, just as shitty research following closely behind.
After all, if the anti-abortion movement can convince the EPA that Americans might be drinking abortions, and if they can get a thoroughly debunked mifepristone study all the way to the Supreme Court—they’ve been emboldened to throw whatever they want at the wall.
Now that we know legislators will shamelessly weaponize fake research to restrict abortion (and that media outlets will fall for it), we’d be smart to look ahead to where else conservatives will deploy the same tactic.
The issues I’m most worried about? Birth control and maternal mortality data. Both have been in the anti-abortion movement’s crosshairs for years, and with RFK Jr. leading the HHS—and MAHA culture reigning supreme—anti-abortion groups have never been better positioned to act. That could mean calls for new ‘research’ on hormonal contraception, pushes to restrict birth control for minors, or efforts to discredit (or dismantle) maternal mortality data altogether.
Even the definition of abortion itself is up for debate: I think we’ll see more made-up medical language in 2026, with more legislative efforts to redefine ‘abortion’ as never medically necessary.
For years, the anti-abortion movement has been laying the groundwork to appear scientifically credible—publishing ‘studies’, founding sham research institutes, and co-opting legitimate language to push ideological bunk. 2026 is the year they hope it will all pay off.
While Democrats are shifting their focus to winning over young male voters, conservatives are going to use 2026 to shore up their power with young women. I agree with Kylie’s prediction (below) that we’re going to see more of the pink pill pipeline—from misinformation about birth control to tradwife nonsense. But I’m also watching for two other moves in 2026:
Let’s be real: old white men have always been the public face of the anti-abortion movement—from the guys running the organizations to the maniacs screaming outside clinics. And while conservatives have added a few female figureheads—like Marjorie Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and Kristan Hawkins of Students for Life—they’re largely older leaders.
They desperately need younger women to counter the image of the anti-abortion movement as aging, out-of-touch, and dying out. So expect a trial run of fresh pundits and personalities in 2026: Erika Kirk types, Fox News-ready, loudly and proudly anti-abortion.
Given that young women are the most pro-choice demographic in the country, they’re going to have their work cut out for them. That’s why I’m also expecting a sneaky push to indoctrinate young women and girls in public schools—namely with teen tradwife classes.
I wish I was kidding—or that my feminist paranoia was getting the better of me. But with Project 2025 in full effect, sex education on the chopping block, ‘Baby Olivia’ bills spreading across the country, and the White House pumping out pro-natalist propaganda, it’s just a matter of time.
We even have a sense of what this push might look like: last year, AED discovered that a West Virginia legislator had pressured a school superintendent to create classes that “encourage” high school girls to “start families and have babies.” (He even suggested that girls should be taught to forgo college for motherhood.)
So watch your kids’ curricula, and keep an eye out for any revamped lesson plans or brand-new classes. And remember that this might not be part of a health or sex ed class: ‘Baby Olivia’ videos, for example, are being slipped into science classes. The tradwife push might not even come in a class at all—it could show up in assemblies, guest speakers, or school book clubs.
It’s a prediction I hate to make, truly—but it’s one we can nip in the bud if we catch it early.
Just to expand on Jessica’s prediction about conservatives going all in on young women: My first prediction is that right-wing bro-natalists—many of whom occupy highly influential roles in the White House—are prepared to lean all the way in on normalizing and glorifying teen pregnancy, implicitly pressuring children to start having kids themselves ASAP.
Already, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr. is fear-mongering about how most teens have a lower sperm count than 68-year-old men, and Congressional Republicans have tried to defund the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. Meanwhile, abortion bans are forcing child rape victims to give birth or travel across state lines for care, and anti-abortion states are passing sweeping bills to push anti-abortion propaganda in sex ed and teach high school students about parenting. That’s to say nothing of the fact that the GOP is standing ten toes down with Trump and dismissing his close relationship with the late, notorious child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein!
It’s all connected.
One of AED’s predictions for 2025 was that we’d see an increase in aggrieved men bringing lawsuits over their partners’ or exes’ abortions—and that’s exactly what happened. But let’s face it, even anti-abortion activists would probably admit that the men they identified to bring those cases forward weren’t exactly Prince Charming. In some cases, the men even had records of abuse.
That’s why conservative attorneys have started experimenting with a new tactic: Recruiting women. Anti-abortion attorney/activist Jonathan Mitchell, in particular, has been suing abortion providers on behalf of women who say their partners coerced them into taking abortion medication—claiming that the providers enabled that abuse.
We’ve covered several such cases over the last few months—like Rosalie Markezich in Louisiana, a joint plaintiff with the state in a suit to ban telemedicine abortion access.
We fully expect these cases to continue, and likely increase, in 2026. It’s the next logical step in the anti-abortion movement’s nauseating campaign to broadly equate medication abortion with ‘coercion’ and ‘abuse.’ And while reproductive coercion is a very real issue, abortion bans are only exacerbating it.
Since Dobbs, 100 brick-and-mortar independent abortion clinics have closed their doors. Republicans’ “Big, Beautiful Bill” defunded abortion providers across the country. No matter, conservatives say—we can all just get reproductive care from crisis pregnancy centers that tell us birth control causes cancer and, often enough, do not provide any real health care.
CPCs are raking in more state funding than ever post-Dobbs, and come 2026, we anticipate Republicans will fully lean into propping up their beloved surveillance centers as sufficient, one-to-one replacements for Planned Parenthood clinics. Why else would they publish a junk study claiming CPCs charitably offered $450 million in services to patients at the end of 2025?
They’re already greasing the wheel.
After Trump won reelection, we heard quite a bit about the “manosphere,” but little about the burgeoning “womanosphere”—the pipeline through which young women are also being radicalized in online spaces, lured by seemingly apolitical content like celebrity gossip, dating, and “natural” birth control. These spaces have especially zeroed in on birth control, pushing stigma and disinformation at the same time that Republicans are increasingly attacking it via policy.
The conservative, hyper-feminine Evie magazine, funded by Peter Thiel, has continued to grow its online following, all while maligning birth control as unsafe and implicitly—and explicitly—arguing that feminism ruined women’s lives. I think in 2026, online birth disinfo will continue to proliferate, GOP attacks on birth control will escalate, and we’ll likely see increasingly aligned messaging and collaboration between the two.
Kylie wants…a national reckoning on pregnancy-related criminalization.
For years now, AED has been reporting on truly devastating cases of pregnancy-related criminalization: women and girls, reeling from the medical trauma of pregnancy loss, handcuffed and jailed for how they disposed of miscarriage remains. This kind of criminalization has continued to surge across the country: Pregnancy Justice tracked over 400 cases since Dobbs alone.
We are sorely in need of a national reckoning on the scourge and terror of pregnancy-related criminalization. Maybe I’m being too optimistic here—or maybe not, considering a Wisconsin Democrat recently introduced a bill to end pregnancy criminalization—but here’s hoping our political leaders finally treat this crisis with the urgency it deserves, make it impossible to ignore, and codify real change into law.
Jessica wants…an end to both-sides media.
It’s a tall order, I know. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past three-plus years of doing this work, it’s that headlines matter—more than I’d care to admit. And as much as social video has taken over how Americans get their news, those videos are often built on—you guessed it!—headlines.
We desperately need to end the lie that ‘both sides’ of the abortion debate are equally credible or equally representative. We need journalists and editors who understand the nuances of abortion rights—the players, policies, language, and stakes. And we need a media ecosystem that stops treating women’s lives as a political talking point or something up for debate.
In 2026, I want to see more dollars flowing to local public radio stations, which are often the only outlets getting these stories right. And I’d love to see newsrooms hiring abortion-rights reporters whose sole beat is this issue—allowing writers to develop a real expertise, rather than relying on political and health generalists who might miss the complexity and history of some of these stories.