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Abortion Pills Aren't Uncomfortable; Censorship Is
Here's my message to The Times-Picayune and every other institution that finds truth "uncomfortable": Get comfortable with discomfort. Because abortion pills aren't going anywhere.
May 22, 2025
So here's what happened.
We—Mayday Health, an abortion education nonprofit—tried to buy a newspaper ad in The Times-Picayune of New Orleans. The ad featured just a few words: "Abortion pills are more popular than ever. Thanks, Amy" with a photo of Amy Coney Barrett, who was born in New Orleans.
The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, Louisiana said… no. They refused to publish.
They sent us a rejection letter assuring us that they "support First Amendment free speech," of course. They just find our particular speech too "uncomfortable."
Uncomfortable.
Let me tell you about uncomfortable.
Uncomfortable is 900,000 Louisiana women of childbearing age waking up in a state that treats their uteruses like crime scenes. Uncomfortable is pregnant Kaitlyn Joshua bleeding through her jeans in a Louisiana hospital parking lot because doctors were too scared of criminal repercussions. Uncomfortable is driving five hours across state lines for healthcare that used to be 10 minutes away. Uncomfortable is a group of Louisiana Republicans investigating a New York-based doctor for legally shipping pills to patients in the state—prosecutors hunting doctors for simply providing care.
In trying to end abortion access, Barrett accidentally revealed just how determined Americans are to control their own bodies. (Thanks for nothing, Amy.)
Louisiana already had one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation before this medieval abortion ban. Black and Native American women die here at rates that would make developing countries blush. And now? Doctors turn away women with pregnancy complications because providing necessary care might land them in a state prison.
So yes, Amy Coney Barrett voted to overturn Roe v. Wade. Yes, clinics shuttered overnight from coast to coast. But here's what nobody saw coming: When you eliminate physical access to abortion care, people don't simply accept defeat. They fight for their reproductive freedom. Today, more Americans are ending pregnancies with pills delivered to their mailboxes than ever before—not because it's ideal, but because it's necessary. The data is unequivocal; Abortion rates have actually risen since Roe fell in 2022, though countless people still face dangerous barriers to care. In trying to end abortion access, Barrett accidentally revealed just how determined Americans are to control their own bodies. (Thanks for nothing, Amy.)
But The Times-Picayune finds our ad uncomfortable. The Times-Picayune chose comfort over truth. They chose to protect their readers from reality, rather than prepare them for it.
Here are the facts The Times-Picayune doesn't want you to read: Abortion pills work. They're Food and Drug Administration-approved. They're safe. And—here's the kicker—they're available by mail in all 50 states, including Louisiana. Right now, as you read this, about 8,000 women per month in abortion-banned states are getting these pills delivered to their doorsteps.
I run Mayday Health. We're the people who put up billboards and buy ads and generally make powerful people squirm by stating the obvious. Like the time we put up three billboards in Jackson, Mississippi that read "Pregnant? You still have a choice." When Mississippi's attorney general tried to intimidate us with subpoenas, we didn't blink. We bought 20 more billboards and ran a state-wide TV ad. We turned their threats into a marketing campaign about abortion pills.
When Spotify rejected our audio ads about abortion pills, claiming we violated their policies, we posted a Tweet thread called the "Spotify Rapist Playlist," a list of convicted felons whose music is still available to stream. A week later, Spotify admitted their "ad reviewer made an error." (Spotify ultimately rejected our ads, and we ended up going on Pandora).
We've danced this dance before. The powerful get nervous when they think they have something to lose.
Here's what kills me: The same people who spread complete bullshit about abortion—that it causes breast cancer, that fetuses feel pain at six weeks, that women regularly use it as birth control—these people get full-page spreads. But a few words of truth about FDA-approved pills? Too spicy for the newspaper of record in the Big Easy.
Amy Coney Barrett and her robed colleagues said they were giving the power back to the states, back to the people. Noble, right? Except how are people supposed to make informed decisions when newspapers won't even print basic medical facts?
The truth is simple: Abortion bans don't stop abortions. They stop safe abortions. Women have been ending pregnancies since before we figured out how to make fire, and they're not stopping anytime soon. The only question is whether they'll have accurate information to aid them in the process.
We're not backing down. Mayday Health will keep taking out ads, conducting undercover investigations into fake crisis centers, flying airplane banners over MLB games, driving digital billboard trucks to fake crisis pregnancy centers, building pop-up abortion stores in Texas, and spreading information to rape crisis pregnancy centers. Because while The Times-Picayune worries about its comfort level, Louisiana women are out here living in the real world—a world where information isn't just power, it's survival.
So here's my message to The Times-Picayune and every other institution that finds truth "uncomfortable:" Get comfortable with discomfort. Because we're not going anywhere, and neither are abortion pills.
How's that for uncomfortable?
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Attacks on ‘Political’ Graduation Speakers Are Craven Attacks on Intellectual Freedom
All students, faculty, and staff—and indeed all who care about public education—are threatened by the “The New Campus McCarthyism,” which continues to spread across the country and throughout the society at large.
May 20, 2025
Last week New York University announced that it was withholding the diploma of a graduating senior named Logan Rozos, and commencing disciplinary proceedings against him. His academic “crime?” As a featured graduation speaker, Rozos described the Israeli attacks on Gaza as “genocide” and expressed moral outrage that the attacks were supported by U.S. tax dollars and university investments.
These sentiments, of course, are not universally shared. They, predictably, provoked and offended those present who do not like it when Israel is criticized in this way. More importantly, their expression violates what is quickly becoming an 11th Commandment of Academic Life in the United States: Thou Shall Not Criticize Israel.
And so NYU official spokesperson John Beckman, a true inspiration to his increasingly craven profession, immediately vaulted into action to denounce the student and the speech:
NYU strongly denounces the choice by a student at the Gallatin School’s graduation today—one of over 20 school graduation ceremonies across our campus—to misuse his role as student speaker to express his personal and one-sided political views. He lied about the speech he was going to deliver and violated the commitment he made to comply with our rules. The university is withholding his diploma while we pursue disciplinary actions. NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks and that this moment was stolen by someone who abused a privilege that was conferred upon him.
Apparently, those who “lead” NYU believe that graduation speakers—typically selected because of their academic distinction or other exemplary accomplishments—should not express themselves honestly or say anything controversial, should clear their remarks with university censors in advance, and then say only things that will make everyone happy. To challenge an audience on a campus is thus forbidden. Most importantly, invited speakers must never violate the new 11th Commandment.
If this strikes you as anti-intellectual, censorious, and absurdly patronizing, consider the perhaps even more outrageous controversy surrounding Harvard’s 2024 Commencement Address, given by Maria Ressa, the winner of the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize for her courageous defense of press freedom, and civil liberties, in her native Philippines and in the world at large.
While this controversy unfolded at Harvard last year, it was brought to national attention only weeks ago, with the April 29 publication of Harvard’s Report of the Presidential Task Force on Combating Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, which cited Ressa’s speech as an example of the “bias” that the report is charged with countering.
According to the report’s Executive Summary, “Ressa chose not to deliver prepared remarks that were meant to urge pro-Israel and pro-Palestine students to reconcile. Instead, she substituted new remarks praising the student protestors and delivered off-the cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.” The authors then ask: “Why did a renowned humanitarian ad-lib seemingly antisemitic remarks against her Jewish critics at a highly scripted Harvard graduation ceremony?”
Every university that bends the knee to such efforts thereby undermines its own credibility as an institution of free intellectual inquiry, higher learning, and moral seriousness.
When I read these words, on page 12 of the 311-page report, I was shocked and in disbelief. For I have long admired Ressa, have followed her closely, and consider her 2022 book, How to Stand Up to a Dictator: The Fight for Our Future, to be one of the very best books I’ve read in recent years. The report’s question struck a chord. Maria Ressa is an antisemite? How can this be?
The first thing I did was search for her commencement speech to see for myself what offensive things she said. I quickly found both a transcript and a video, read the first and watched the second, and remained confused about the “seemingly antisemitic remarks.” The speech seemed fine to me; and as I watched it, I wished my own university were willing and able to invite such a fine person to give a commencement address.
Only then did I turn to the more elaborate explanation of the problem, on pages 116-17 of the report. Apparently Ressa had shared her prepared remarks in advance (with whom? does Harvard exercise prior restraint on its speakers?), but then deviated from these remarks in her speech, in two ways that troubled the report’s authors and thus merited commentary.
First, while in her prepared remarks she very generally alluded to the many different ways that she has been attacked on social media, in her speech she said this: “Because I accepted your invitation to be here today, I was attacked online and called antisemitic by power and money because they want power and money. While the other side was already attacking me because I had been on stage with Hillary Clinton. Hard to win, right?”
These, apparently, were the “off the cuff comments that appeared to echo traditional conspiracy theories about Jews, money, and power.”
What????
In the offending brief paragraph, Ressa clearly references attacks from both “sides” of the pro-Israel and pro-Palestine controversy. She says that those labeling her an antisemite—a scurrilous charge without a shred of evidence, I might add—have “power and money.” She does not say her attackers are Jews. She says they are rich and powerful. Because they are rich and powerful. The coverage of the event by the Texas Jewish Post—hardly an antisemitic publication—is instructive. After noting that billionaire “Bill Ackman [had] led a revolt of large donors,” the reporter offered this background:
Right-wing media and lawmakers had sought to paint Ressa as antisemitic prior to commencement, pointing to a Filipino-language editorial published in November in her media outlet, Rappler, calling for a cease-fire in Gaza, and to her signing of an open letter calling on Israel to protect journalists in Gaza. The Washington Free Beacon, a conservative site, claimed that the Rappler piece compared Israel to Hitler. That claim was amplified on the social network X by New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik, who has gained attention for her combative questioning of university leaders, including Gay, at congressional hearings on campus antisemitism. “Harvard chose an antisemitic commencement speaker,” Stefanik wrote earlier this month, sharing a link to the Free Beacon article. “The university has failed to stand up for Jewish students at every turn, revealing the depths of its moral delinquency.”
Was it antisemitic for Ressa to say that “money and power” had denounced her? Hardly. Indeed, the report itself elsewhere comments on the efforts of at least three extremely wealthy donors—Ackman, Len Blavatnik, and Ken Griffin—to use promised donations to influence Harvard in the midst of its crisis, though it does not mention that Ackman himself had called Ressa “antisemitic” in a May 3 X post, three weeks before Ressa’s commencement address. Perhaps this is why the report claims that her “offending” words “appeared to echo” antisemitic tropes, and not that they did in fact echo them? For it is hard to see how alluding to a man who is rich, powerful, and censorious as rich, powerful, and censorious echoes antisemitic tropes.
Ressa’s second “offense”: She apparently omitted a brief section of her prepared remarks challenging keffiyah-wearing pro-Palestinian protesters (the report doesn’t say whether her prepared remarks also included a comment challenging pro-Israeli protesters, but it seems likely that it did and this too was omitted), and instead delivered add-libbed praise of “student speakers who had addressed the topic of Palestine.”
Here, again, are the offending words, worth quoting at length:
I loved the speeches of the students today. They were incredible. Because these times will hopefully teach you the same lesson I learned. You don’t know who you are until you’re tested, until you fight for what you believe in. Because that defines who you are.
But you’re Harvard. You better get your facts right, because now you are being tested. The chilling effect means that many are choosing to stay silent because there are consequences to speaking out.
I’m shocked at the fear and anger, the paranoia splitting open the major fracture lines of society, the inability to listen. What happened to us in the Philippines, it’s here.
The campus protests are testing everyone in America. Protests are healthy. They shouldn’t be violent. Protests give voice, they shouldn’t be silenced.
These words are evidence of “antisemitism and anti-Israeli bias”?
The report proceeds to devote an entire paragraph to the fact that Harvard Chabad Rabbi Hirschy Zarchi was offended by Ressa’s speech, “quietly requested clarification” of her on the stage, and then walked off stage when she did not respond (apparently, the clarification requested involved her retaking the microphone and revising the speech she had just finished giving to Zarchi’s specifications; are such requests for “clarification” by clergy a regular practice at Harvard commencements? It is one I have never experienced at the many commencements I’ve attended.)
The report’s account of commencement says nothing about the fact that Chabad Rabbi Zarchi was embroiled in controversy back on November 7, 2023, for giving a speech in which he seemed to call both Hamas terrorists and Hamas supporters not a “human” but “an animal... below an animal.” The precise intended reference and meaning of his words notwithstanding—the subject of much semantic discussion, they seem pretty nasty to me—in this speech and elsewhere he made very clear that Harvard’s Palestine Solidarity Committee was “antisemitic” and should be decertified by the university, with its protests banned from campus. (Note: Zarchi’s comment and his anti-PSC advocacy was noted earlier in the report, on p. 110; but its obvious connection to his defensive reaction to Ressa’s speech is never drawn.) That many Jewish leaders on campus disagree strongly with Zarchi—who has collaborated extensively with Bill Ackman’s crusade against Harvard, and who met with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in July of 2024—was also unmentioned in this narrative.
Perhaps most important, the report says nothing about the fact that the overall frame of Ressa’s entire speech was the responsibility of all students to be their “best selves” and to work together, with compassion and understanding, to make the world a better place. To reduce that speech to the identity-obsessed concerns of its critics is to engage in exactly the kind of small-mindedness that the report elsewhere decries.
Obviously, the report is about much more than this one commencement episode, and should not be judged by its treatment this one episode. But what it says about Ressa’s Commencement Address is so strikingly tendentious and misleading, that you have to wonder how this account ever made its way into a report claiming to be so very academic and serious, and what this means for the other narratives recounted in the report.
Maria Ressa is a world-renowned journalist and human rights activist. While she has suffered persecution in her own country, and while she surely is hated and even targeted by authoritarians the world over, she is not likely to be materially harmed by the denunciations of Harvard’s Chabad rabbi or the displeasure of Harvard’s top donors and administrators.
But NYU’s Logan Rozos, and many others like him, experience severe repercussions for saying similar things. U.S. Representative Jared Moskowitz—a Democrat who has joined with Elise Stefanik and other Trumpists to attack so-called “antisemitism” on American campuses—was quite candid about Rozos: “He lied to the university... [and] everyone listening. There is no genocide going on in Israel... But at the end of the day, that’s up to the university whether they give him his diploma or not. You know, in fact, they can give him his diploma, it’s not going to matter. Good luck getting a job. That was a stupid, selfish thing, ruined the ceremony for a lot of families.”
The Trump administration’s efforts to deport Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and many others who have spoken out for Palestinians and against Israel represent an even more serious form of intimidation and punishment for those who dare to violate the 11th Commandment. And make no mistake, while courts have recently ordered the release of many of these individuals pending resolution of their court cases, their cases are still being litigated, and the administration continues to pursue such deportations through every legal means available even as it pushes the boundaries of legality. In the first instance, it is foreign students and noncitizens more generally who are threatened by such efforts.
But in a broader sense, all students, faculty, and staff—and indeed all who care about public education—are threatened by the “The New Campus McCarthyism,” which continues to spread across the country and throughout the society at large.
This intellectual virus is not circulating randomly. As The New York Times recently reported, The Heritage Foundation has been busy at work planning and then putting into effect its “Project Esther,” designed, as the Times puts it, “to destroy pro-Palestinian activism in the United States.” While “Esther” is largely, though not exclusively, the work of right-wing evangelical Christian Zionists, it dovetails neatly with the post-October 7 efforts of the Anti-Defamation League to castigate all pro-Palestinian activism as “antisemitic” and to pressure campus leaders to crack down on such activity. Most importantly, these efforts have the full-throated backing of the Trump administration and its supporters in red states, like my own state of Indiana, all across the country.
Every university that bends the knee to such efforts thereby undermines its own credibility as an institution of free intellectual inquiry, higher learning, and moral seriousness, and contributes to the steady weakening of the freedom of expression and association that is at the heart of any decent, liberal democracy.
Such conduct is not academic leadership. It is craven submission to ideological small-mindedness and political pressure.
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In 'Call to Duty' for 'Civic Courage,' Free Speech Champions Challenge Trump Assault on Key Rights
"In little more than 100 days, President Trump and the agencies under his control have threatened First Amendment rights through a breathtaking array of actions."
May 19, 2025
In an open letter on Monday, seven leading free speech organizations in the United States warned that the capitulation of universities and other institutions to President Donald Trump's demands for suppressed speech affect not just those organizations, their employees, and their students—but the state of U.S. democracy itself.
The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University spearheaded the letter that was signed by the ACLU, the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, PEN America, and Reporters Without Borders USA.
"If First Amendment freedoms are compromised, our democracy will be compromised, too," wrote the groups. "Democracy and free speech are inextricably linked. If we are to govern ourselves, we must be able to inquire, speak, write, associate, and protest without fear of governmental retaliation."
It followed several recent victories for some international students who have been arrested for expressing opposition to the United States' support for Israel. Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk was marked for deportation and sent thousands of miles away from her home in Massachusetts to a detention facility in Louisiana for writing an op-ed calling on her school to divest from companies benefiting from Israel's assault on Gaza—and was released earlier this month, with a judge saying her detention was a clear assault on the First Amendment.
"If our democracy is to survive, the freedoms of speech and the press need a vigorous, determined defense. Leaders of this country's most powerful, well-resourced, and prestigious institutions must play a larger part in this effort."
Georgetown University scholar Badar Khan Suri was released from immigration detention in Texas last week; he was apparently targeted by the Trump administration for his support for Palestinian rights and because his father-in-law, Ahmed Yousef, was a former adviser to a Hamas leader. Yousef has publicly condemned Hamas' October 2023 attacks.
Columbia graduate Mohsen Mahdawi wore a keffiyeh over his robe at commencement on Monday in solidarity with Palestinians—and received a standing ovation—less than a month after he was freed from detention. He had also been marked for deportation for organizing pro-Palestinian protests.
But another Columbia graduate, Mahmoud Khalil, remains in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center in Louisiana more than two months after being accosted at his campus apartment along with his pregnant wife and hustled into an unmarked car by immigration agents for his role in last year's pro-Palestinian protests.
The open letter on Monday did not mention Columbia University by name, but condemned universities and organizations that have capitulated to the White House.
Columbia trustees allegedly collaborated with ICE to detain Khalil, and when threatened with the revocation of $400 million in federal grants and contract, agreed to take a number of steps the Trump administration claimed were aimed at "fighting antisemitism." The school agreed to impose a ban on masks, appointed an administrator to oversee Middle Eastern and Palestinian studies, and hire "special officers" with the authority to swiftly remove people from campus.
"The logic that leads even powerful institutions to compromise or submit in these circumstances is of course easy to understand," reads the open letter. "But when one institution 'bends the knee,' its peers face increased pressure to do the same. Each surrender makes the assertion of First Amendment rights more costly and more perilous. We fear that if major institutions continue to submit rather than stand on their rights, the freedoms of speech and the press will be seriously and perhaps irrecoverably weakened."
Along with its attacks on higher education, the Trump administration has targeted major law firms—terminating their federal contracts and limiting their employees from entering federal buildings—in retaliation for their representation of his political opponents.
Some law firms have filed legal challenges against the president—and won—but others, including Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, have negotiated with the administration, offering pro bono legal services and promising to end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives.
"These actions call for a forceful, uncompromising response. Some institutions have countered in exactly this way, to their credit," wrote the free speech groups on Monday. "It has been disheartening, however, to see so many others capitulating to the administration's unconstitutional demands rather than asserting their rights."
The letter also condemned the Trump administration's decision to bar legal scholars from providing information to the International Criminal Court, which has issued a warrant for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; its rule banningThe Associated Press from White House press briefings for its refusal to call the Gulf of Mexico by Trump's chosen name, the "Gulf of America"; and the Federal Communications Commission's threat to revoke the licenses of TV and radio networks if the president disagrees with their news coverage.
"In little more than 100 days, President Trump and the agencies under his control have threatened First Amendment rights through a breathtaking array of actions," reads the letter. "If our democracy is to survive, the freedoms of speech and the press need a vigorous, determined defense. Leaders of this country's most powerful, well-resourced, and prestigious institutions must play a larger part in this effort."
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, warned that "First Amendment freedoms will wither if institutional leaders don't assert and defend them."
"This letter is meant to be a call to duty," he said, "and to civic courage.”
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