BY CHARLOTTE ALTER
NATION
Dr. Jennifer Lincoln has amassed nearly 3 million followers on Tik-Tok through her frank videos about sex, abortion, and reproductive care. Now the Oregon-based ob-gyn is taking on a new role as executive director of Mayday Health, a health-educatione nonprofit designed to help patients in states that have banned abortion figure out how to get abortions anyway.
Lincoln and Mayday are on the front lines of the next battle over abortion rights: the information war. Mayday launched on the day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with the goal of spreading the word about abortion pills—two medications prescribed by a doctor that, when taken within 48 hours of one another during the first trimester, can safely terminate a pregnancy. For patients living in states where abortion is banned, Mayday lays out the step-by-step process for obtaining the pills through the mail and provides medical information about safety and reliability. “The most valuable message anybody can spread is telling the folks who live in those states how they can still make decisions about their own bodies,” says Sam Koppelman, a co-founder of Mayday.
A wave of new restrictions have curtailed sources of reliable information about reproductive health. Doctors across the country are caught in legal limbo about how to advise patients. In some states where abortion is banned, even school administrators and library workers are discouraged from talking about abortion.
More than 50% of abortions in the U.S. in 2020 were medication abortions, and requests for abortion pills have surged since Roe was overt
