“What I’m about to say is not a statement by the Susan B. Anthony List, but it is, of course, a personal position of my own. I used to think that Planned Parenthood was my enemy. And now, I’m starting to realize that the modern medical profession is actually who I also fight every day,” said Sue Swayze Liebel, director of state affairs for Susan B. Anthony List.

Liebel made this comment in a meeting last year with the “pro-life council” of the American College of Pediatricians (ACPeds), a physicians group that opposes abortion and gender-affirming care, endorses conversion therapy, and is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit seeking to remove medication abortion drug mifepristone from the market. The Southern Poverty Law Center designates ACPeds a hate group.

Rewire News Group reviewed a recording of the Zoom meeting, which took place on March 24, 2022. The recording, which was initially shared with RNG by an anonymous source, was one of many files on an unsecured Google Drive belonging to ACPeds, some of the contents of which have previously been reported by Wired and Texas Observer. ACPeds has characterized the exposure of these files as a “malicious cyberattack,” but the drive and its contents were publicly accessible.

The recorded meeting provides a window into how anti-abortion groups prepared for the fallout from the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization nearly a year ago, showing that they knew their movement’s biggest-ever win would also create a humanitarian crisis. It also suggests that the seeds of the movement’s post-Dobbs strategy—in particular, attacks on access to mifepristone—had already been planted.

Sowing a myth

Another common theme throughout the meeting, effectively summarized in Liebel’s comment, is the idea that the U.S. medical establishment is aggressively pro-abortion, and that doctors with personal objections are forced to participate in abortion care anyway—a central claim in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, the mifepristone case, which was filed about eight months after the meeting. (The evidence to counter these claims is vast, but to name a few points: almost every U.S. state allows physicians to refuse to participate in abortion care; the organizations that accredit medical schools and residencies do require abortion training, but their enforcement of these requirements is notoriously weak; and 95 percent of abortions in the United States happen in clinics, where doctors choose to work.)

Other speakers in the meeting included Dr. Robin Pierucci, a neonatologist who was then the chair of the “pro-life council” and, along with the Life Legal Defense Foundation, filed two separate amicus briefs in Dobbs; Dr. Jill Simons, who was at the time an interim co-executive director of ACPeds and is now the organization’s executive director; Dr. Felipe Vizcarrondo, president of the Miami Guild of the Catholic Medical Association; Dr. Anne Nealen, a pediatrician in Washington state, and Arina Grossu, an anti-abortion operative who served as a communications consultant in the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services. Grossu was also interviewed during the congressional investigation into the January 6, 2021 Capitol attack because of the role Jericho March, a group she co-founded, played in the events of that day. The meeting was recorded in “speaker view,” so only participants who speak are visible.

Preparing for a PR disaster

In the meeting, Liebel briefs ACPeds members on Dobbs and how to prepare for its potential outcomes, including media strategy.

“The question before the Court is whether or not a state can restrict abortion prior to viability … we don’t think they would have taken it [the case] if the answer was going to be no,” Liebel says.

At the time, close observers across the political spectrum likely would have agreed with this statement. Though the meeting occurred two months before Politico published a leaked draft of Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Dobbs, it was clear based on the justices’ questions during oral arguments in December 2021 that a majority of the Supreme Court was ready to overturn Roe v. Wade—or at least gut it beyond recognition.

“In the beginning of this, I thought, yeah, sure, right, they’re gonna give us 15 weeks, and here we go,” Liebel says. However, she goes on to say that she had changed her mind, because “the pro-life community will keep pushing that across the line, and we’ll try to go to 14, and to 13, and to 12 [weeks],” she said. “We’re gonna keep being bad boys and girls … and just flood the courts. And so I think they [the justices] know that, and they’re not going to settle by doing that.”

For decades, reproductive rights and justice advocates warned that the eventual and inevitable fall of Roe would create a humanitarian catastrophe in the United States. The recorded meeting reveals that, while anti-abortion groups never would have described it in the same way, they were aware a crisis was on the horizon. However, they weren’t concerned about the pregnant people who would suffer—they were concerned about the hit their image might take.

“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.”

To prepare ACPeds members for that “violence,” Liebel shares her screen to present an SBA List document entitled “Dobbs Supreme Court Case Messaging Guide,” previously surfaced by the Center for Media and Democracy. The document amounts to a crisis communications manual, urging anti-abortion groups to focus on “four key messages” in response to “tough questions.”

Examples of such tough questions include, “If Roe is overturned and abortion is criminalized, how would you enforce it? Who should be punished under the law? The doctor? The mother? Both?” and “If Roe is overturned and pro-life states ban abortion, the impact is going to be hardest on poor women, especially poor women of color who cannot afford to travel out of state to get an abortion. Why are you advocating for laws that will hurt poor people of color?”

“It’ll be a circus”

Did the media lose its collective mind after the fall of Roe? There certainly has been frequent coverage of the devastating and potentially deadly results of banning abortion. But anti-abortion groups and leaders aren’t getting any less airtime than they did before. Compared to the way most major news outlets treat, for example, false claims about vaccines or election fraud, anti-abortion groups are still getting a pass when it comes to making false and misleading claims in the press.

With states left to decide how to legislate abortion rights with no guardrails from the Supreme Court, “it’ll be a circus of state, by state, by state. It’ll also be a circus of exceptions, by exceptions, by exceptions,” Liebel warns. In the pre-Roe era, she claims, it was common for women who became pregnant as a result of rape to be “taken care of.” Most state legislators are in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, and “may still remember that norm,” she says, framing abortion bans with exceptions for rape as somehow outdated.

“It makes them feel good about themselves … to include exceptions for ‘life of the mother,’” she adds.

Liebel also acknowledges that abortion bans will result in more people carrying pregnancies to term, painting stronger social services as a necessary evil that conservatives will have to accept in a post-Roe world.

“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.”

Liebel doesn’t explicitly advocate for more government spending to help pregnant people and their children. Instead, she repeatedly urges ACPeds members to get involved with local “crisis pregnancy centers” (CPCs), also called anti-abortion centers, and other Catholic charities.

Simons wonders aloud about whether ACPeds could create a directory of CPCs and other services on its website “that shows that we do care beyond not having the abortion. Especially being pediatricians … How do we care for the child, and the young mother who may be a child herself?”

“I think one of the things that would be interesting—it’s always better when we personally know the center—is [to] challenge our own members to go to these centers to see, could you recommend it? As well as could you vouch for it, could you be volunteering there? We need to vet and kind of, basically put our money where our mouth is,” Pierucci says, in an interesting admission that not all CPCs operate in a way that physicians would consider to be above board.

Grossu echoed that, suggesting that individual ACPeds members could “adopt a pregnancy center and beef up the medical services there,” because lack of legitimate medical services is one of the “biggest criticisms” of CPCs.

Turning to medication abortion

When the conversation turns to medication abortion—or, as the participants of the meeting say, “chemical abortion”—the talking points are strikingly similar to those being deployed in the current legal battle over mifepristone.

“Over half of the abortions in America are chemical abortions. So what’s happening is all those women are going into the ERs and finishing the abortion there, essentially expelling the baby. So that’s how they’re pushing it on the medical community as well,” Grossu says.

This claim is blatantly untrue: The most common reason that people seek care in emergency departments after having a medication abortion is because they traveled to access care and can’t return to the same clinic for a follow-up. Serious complications occur less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the time. However, Grossu’s statement might as well be a summary of one of the key arguments in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA.

When it comes to medication abortion, Liebel says, “there’s a lot of money on the table”—another key claim that could be lifted straight from AHM v. FDA. She also emphasizes how important it is for anti-abortion doctors to speak out, a strategy the anti-abortion movement has clearly embraced.

“Our movement doesn’t always have the doctors,” she says.