Abortion Funds Are a Lifeline. And a Target.

The right's attacks on grassroots groups have already begun.

- By Irin Carmon

At 7:40 a.m. on a Saturday morning earlier this year, Neesha Davé answered a knock at her door. A process server handed her a stack of papers. The documents called her the leader of an organization that helps women in Texas abort their unborn children.” Davé is the deputy director of Lilith Fund, an abortion fund in Texas. It stood accused of having “knowingly and intentionally aided or abetted at least one post-heartbeat abortion in violation of the Texas Heartbeat Act, or SB8, which allows anyone to sue anyone else who facilitates an abortion after around six weeks of pregnancy and which the Supreme Court allowed to go into effect last fall. A local woman named Sadie Weldon was demanding she sit for a deposition and provide the names of anyone else involved in those abortions, as well as “sources of financial support.” Said Davé, “They want to go on a fishing expedition.”

She had never heard of Weldon, but one attorney listed at the end was all too familiar: Jonathan Mitchell, SB8's author and the former state solicitor general. Later, when the America First Legal Foundation, also listed as counsel on the demand, issued a press release with Dave's name on it, she realized it was headed by none other than former high-level Trump official Stephen Miller. A third organization involved, the Chicago-based Thomas More Society, began tweeting that donors to abortion funds could face criminal prosecution, even though SB8 has only a civil remedy.