Anti-Abortion Groups Thought the Media Would 'Lose Their Minds' If 'Roe' Fell

If you’re going to engage in nefarious activities such as condoning conversion therapy and working to ban gender-affirming care and abortion, you might want to make sure you store the files where you make all your little plans securely.

The American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds)—a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group, among other dubious honors—did not follow this basic advice. They left a Google Drive unsecured and accessible on an old version of their website. So people… accessed it. And then one of those people shared a file from the drive with us at Rewire News Group.

The file is a recording of a Zoom meeting that took place in March of 2022. To situate you in time, that’s after the oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, but about two months before Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in the case was leaked to Politico. In the meeting, Sue Swayze Liebel, director of state affairs for the very powerful anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony List, gives the members of ACPeds’ “Pro-Life Council” an overview of the case and its likely outcomes.

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Liebel is pretty confident that Roe is going to be overturned. To be fair, nearly all close observers were. But Liebel is a key player in the anti-abortion movement. She worked very hard for a very long time to chip away at abortion rights and create the perfect opportunity for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe. So you think she’d be excited to be on the brink of that. And there is some excitement in the meeting.

But mostly, Liebel is preparing the ACPeds members for battle.

“When Roe gets overturned, the media is going to go insane, they’re going to lose their minds,” Liebel says. “You remember the Kavanaugh hearings, when there was so much violence and rudeness?” she adds a few minutes later. “I mean, it’s gonna look like that, yeah. The arguing is going to be just very intense.”

She goes on to share and talk through a document that amounts to a crisis communications plan. Interesting, isn’t it, that the anti-abortion movement prepared for its biggest-ever win as if preparing for a disaster?

Here’s another choice quote:

“And this is going to be really tricky for the conservative community … by default, we don’t want to increase social services, we don’t want welfare spending, well of course not. However, we want to end abortion. And when we end abortion we’re going to have a lot more women needing services,” Liebel says.

“Now, not all those women are poor,” she continues. “That is a fallacy. Many of those women are just college girls that don’t want to be pregnant.”

There’s also a heck of a lot of discussion in the meeting about medication abortion, mirroring almost exactly the arguments that anti-abortion groups—including ACPeds—are making in the lawsuit seeking to remove the medication abortion drug mifepristone from the market. That lawsuit wasn’t filed until about eight months after the meeting, so we can see that the wheels had long been in motion there.

And all of that is just the tip of the iceberg. I didn’t even tell you about the Trump administration contractor-turned-insurrectionist who was there!

Speaking of anti-abortion strategies, did you know that “crisis pregnancy centers,” aka anti-abortion centers or fake clinics, appear in STI testing directories from the CDC? That’s right. The agency tasked with protecting public health in the United States is sending people who want to get tested for STIs to anti-abortion, anti-gay, anti-trans, religiously affiliated crisis pregnancy centers.

I first learned about this last year while organizing an ACCESS event alongside Reproductive Transparency Now, CPC Map, We Testify, and SisterLove. (And if you missed that [amazing!!] event, lucky you, you can still listen to it in podcast form.)

Not a lot surprises me, but this one really did—especially once I learned that advocates and researchers have been trying to get the agency to remove CPCs from its directories for years, to no avail. I had been wanting to report on this for over a year and I finally got to do that.

Finally, as I mentioned in my last newsletter, last month the FDA held hearings on whether or not to allow a birth control pill to be sold over the counter for the first time in the U.S. In a historic move, joint FDA advisory committees voted unanimously in favor of OTC birth control.

But, in my opinion, a lot of the headlines on this were a little too optimistic. To those of us who watched every minute of the two-day proceeding (yes I did), it was pretty clear that the FDA is very hesitant here! Personally, I’m pretty concerned that they’re going to do what they did with Plan B back in the early 2000s and approve it for OTC use in adults only, rather than for all ages. This would be a HUGE bummer considering that the people who most need and would most benefit from OTC birth control are teens. You can learn more about that in my explainer, and catch up on the live tweeting I did here, here, and here.

And stay tuned—more big stories coming very soon!