The Gilead Gazette: Trump’s Anti-Abortion FDA Pick, the Pentagon’s Rape Rule, Texas Hides Abortion Ban Deaths

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, where every week the war on women gets fresh letterhead and somehow the same six guys keep signing it. Today Donald Trump hands the FDA to a woman who calls abortion corrosive, the Pentagon explains that being raped is incidental to your service, Texas publishes a maternal death report with the deadly years torn out, and a list of criminal immigration agents triples in a single afternoon. Let’s get into it.Trump’ “ROCKSTAR” FDA ChiefDonald Trump nominated Heidi Overton to run the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday and announced it on Truth Social by calling her a “ROCKSTAR,” then added that Secretary Kennedy says she is “ALWAYS RIGHT.” Two capitalized endorsements, zero mention of qualifications, which tracks, because she has never worked a day in federal regulation. What she has done is write. At the America First Policy Institute she co-authored a brief calling abortion “corrosive to children, women, and society broadly.” She called the fall of Roe “a huge victory for life.” And she refers to medication abortion as “teleabortion,” a word she appears to have invented so she’d have something new to be against.The agency she’d run is sitting on a safety review of mifepristone, the pill used in most abortion care in this country and in miscarriage management, on the market for twenty-six years. Her predecessor Marty Makary quit in May, and Senator Josh Hawley’s complaint was that Makary “slow walked” that review. So the job opened up because a man wasn’t anti-abortion fast enough, and it’s being handed to a woman who thinks the drug is a plague. Anti-abortion groups have already publicly asked her to yank it off the market. They didn’t wait for the hearing. Live Action put out a statement of encouragement, which is what you send a candidate, not a regulator.She also stood next to the president last week while he cut the childhood shot schedule from eighteen to eleven. Rockstar.Rape is Incidental to Military ServiceThe Pentagon logged 8,195 reports of sexual assault in fiscal 2024, and not one of those service members can sue the government over it, because a Supreme Court decision from 1950 holds that being raped is incidental to your military service. That is not my paraphrase. That is the standard. Incident to service. Filed alongside the bad knee and the ringing in your ears.I spent a year in a combat zone. I signed up for a lot. I knew what I was signing up for. Nobody handed me a form that said you may be assaulted by the guy in the next bunk and the United States government will classify it as an occupational hazard.The doctrine is called Feres, and it is so indefensible that Justice Clarence Thomas, a man who has never once been mistaken for a feminist, wrote a dissent pointing out that if two people get hit by a bus in the Pentagon parking lot, only the civilian gets to sue. The soldier eats it. In 2021 the Court declined to hear the case of a West Point cadet who said the academy failed to protect her from being raped by a classmate. Attorney Christine Dunn, who represents survivors, said it plainly. “The idea that being raped is ‘incident’ to your military service is so absurd.” Researchers at Brown estimate the real assault numbers run two to four times what gets reported, and about a third of women who do report are discharged inside a year. Report it and you’re out. Don’t report it and you’re stuck. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and John Kennedy filed a fix in June. It has been sitting on a shelf ever since, which for Congress counts as urgency.Texas Hides Abortion Ban Maternal DeathsPorsha Ngumezi died in a Houston hospital after being denied care during a miscarriage, and Texas has decided there’s nothing there worth looking at. On September 1 the state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee publishes its report, and it will not review a single death from 2022 or 2023, the first two years the total ban was in effect. The committee’s explanation is that it wanted more contemporary data. Her husband told the Texas Observer the decision retriggered his grief, which is the phrase you reach for when the state invents a fresh way to hurt you with the same event.And it gets tidier. The statute that created the committee bars it from reviewing abortion-related deaths at all, a rule some members didn’t find out about until recently. In 2023 the legislature eliminated the community advocate seat held by Nakeenya Wilson, who had nearly died giving birth, so the one person in the room who’d lived it was shown the door. Then the health department filled a “rural community” slot with Ingrid Skop, a national anti-abortion activist whose position is that bans don’t raise maternal deaths and might lower them. Skop practices in San Antonio. Population one and a half million. Rural.So the committee is barred from reviewing the deaths, skipping the years, and staffed with an expert who already knows there’s nothing to find. Somewhere a Texas official is calling this rigorous.Increase in ICE & CBP Sex OffensesThe Ohio Immigrant Alliance updated its list of ICE and Border Patrol agents charged or convicted of sexual and violent crimes on Tuesday, and the count jumped from 59 to 152. Director Lynn Tramonte says about 90 percent of the cases involve sexual abuse or gender-based violence, just over half involve children, and in nearly 45 percent of them the agent used the badge to do it. The badge was the tool.They started counting after learning a Cincinnati ICE supervisor had a documented history of violence against the woman he lived with, including 23 separate police visits to the house. Twenty-three. He kept the job. A year before that, a federal jury convicted a Cincinnati deportation officer of extorting sex from women he had power over.Homeland Security’s response to The 19th was that its Office of Professional Responsibility “diligently applies the proper personnel vetting regulations.” Meanwhile a former ICE training attorney testified under oath that the program is “deficient, defective and broken,” and that 240 hours got cut from a 584-hour curriculum. The vetting is diligent, the training is broken, the hiring is the fastest it has ever been, and the list is up 93 names.Speed RoundFlorida Republicans fired Congressman Cory Mills on Tuesday, the fourth congressman this year to lose his seat over misconduct against women, and Donald Trump had renewed his endorsement four months after a judge granted Mills’s ex-girlfriend a protective order and called him untruthful. Congressman Max Miller is still on the ballot in Ohio. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posted a video of herself freezing her eggs, so commentator Matt Walsh sat down and calculated whether her hypothetical pregnancy would count as geriatric, and a senior White House official told Axios that was “not helpful.” And the Charlotte Lozier Institute ran a webinar pitching Interpol as the way to stop the abortion pill, using an operation built for counterfeit medicine, which mifepristone is not.Stay angry. Stay loud. Under Her Eye.Sources:Make sure to follow Abortion, Every Day https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6039089-trump-heidi-overton-fda-nominee/https://19thnews.org/2026/08/military-sexual-trauma-survivors-bill/https://thewarhorse.org/military-sexual-trauma-surviviors-bill/https://www.texasobserver.org/maternal-mortality-committee-roe-deaths-lawmakers-politics/https://19thnews.org/2026/08/ice-border-patrol-agents-violence-data-women/https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/08/21/ohio-immigrant-group-adds-to-its-list-of-criminally-charged-federal-agents/https://19thnews.org/2026/08/cory-mills-florida-primary-election/https://19thnews.org/2026/08/anti-abortion-mifepristone-international-shipments/ Get full access to The Rogue Voice aka Linsay Rousseau at linsayrousseau.substack.com/subscribe