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On Saturday night, while families across South Carolina settled in for the weekend, the Palmetto State Abortion Fund (PSAF) went bar hopping. Their event, billed as “Abortions After Dark,” invited supporters to drink their way through The Vista in Columbia to support murdering more babies in South Carolina.
PSAF is very open about its goals, and its merchandise is even more grotesque.
Its regular merch includes slogans like “Slut for justice,” “This shirt helped fund an abortion,” and “It’s my patriotic duty to assist abortion seekers.” For Halloween, the fund launched a special line. Highlights include stickers and even a pillow reading “Hex the patriarchy, Vex the GOP” and “Abortion is Magical.”
What appears to be its most popular line is “Mifepristone and Misoprostol ‘24,” a campaign-style slogan for the two-drug abortion pill regimen. That regimen is now the dominant method of abortion in South Carolina. More than 80 percent of the abortions the state recorded last year were done with pills. The abortion industry’s own researchers estimate that most South Carolina abortions now arrive by mail from out-of-state prescribers and are taken at home, no matter what term their pregnancy is in.
Who is the Palmetto State Abortion Fund?
The Palmetto State Abortion Fund (PSAF) was founded in December 2021 and received its IRS tax exemption as a 501(c)(3) in February 2022, according to ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. It runs out of a mailbox at 701 Gervais Street in Columbia, with no physical office. The Post and Courier reported that the group operates remotely through phones and an app.
Co-founder Ashlyn Preaux told the Post and Courier the founders came together after watching Texas restrict abortion. Another co-founder, Deidre Griffin, told WFAE in 2022 that her personal attitude toward proposed legal limits on abortion aid was “I don’t care what you say.”
Their funding has been staggering. PSAF’s own tax filings show revenue climbing every year:
| Year | Revenue | Expenses | Net Assets (year end) |
| 2022 | $106,052 | $85,167 | $20,885 |
| 2023 | $166,888 | $141,727 | $46,046 |
| 2024 | $338,909 | $201,032 | $184,483 |
| 2025 | $601,369 | $658,208 | $127,644 |
That is a nearly sixfold increase in three years. In 2025 alone, the fund reported $564,713 in “Abortion Funding Practical Support” to roughly 1,800 recipients on Schedule I of its 990. The fund itself noted that the 1,800 figure was an estimate, calculated at about $300 per recipient.
The fund has also outgrown its own borders. What began as an effort to serve “all South Carolinians” now advertises support for women in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, and the Post and Courier reported that in 2024 PSAF funded 1,022 abortions across seven states.
How They Get Around SC Abortion Laws
South Carolina’s Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act was passed to protect unborn children once a heartbeat can be detected. PSAF treats that law as a scheduling problem, which makes sense since there is no punishment for mothers for breaking abortion laws in South Carolina. Nothing in state law reaches the people who drive her, house her, or pay for her trip to a state where the procedure is legal. That gap is exactly where PSAF operates. The banner at the top of its website reads:
“Abortion is legal up to 6 weeks gestation in South Carolina. If you are past the 6 week mark we can still help you access abortion care outside of SC.”
This is the business model for PSAF. Board members told the Post and Courier that most of the women they help travel out of state, usually to North Carolina or Virginia. The fund’s 2025 year-end appeal on Donorbox asked donors for gas money, lodging, and airfare for women “forced to travel out of state,” pricing a full procedure at $500.
Looking at the finances, the heartbeat law appears to be one of the best things that ever happened to PSAF’s fundraising. Revenue nearly tripled in the two years after the law took effect in 2023 and PSAF built a travel agency.
The Undercover Sting: PSAF Exposed
In December 2025, the pro-life group Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust released undercover footage showing a PSAF volunteer driving a girl she believed was 15 years old from the Myrtle Beach Mall to Planned Parenthood in Charleston, a two-hour trip, without her parents’ knowledge. Live Action News reported the details on December 4, 2025.
According to the report, the undercover journalist told the driver she was 15 and that her parents thought she was at a friend’s house for homeschool. The video includes a Planned Parenthood counselor asking whether the person who drove her knew her age, and suggesting she might be seen in North Carolina. The driver told the “teen” PSAF would cover $194 for the abortion at a future appointment. On the way home, a Survivors staffer posing as the girl’s father confronted the driver at a gas station. The alleged PSAF driver’s answer, per the footage, was that she was “just giving her a ride.”
Live Action News noted that it could not independently verify the driver was volunteering for PSAF that day, but confirmed that a woman by the same name has been publicly associated with the fund, and that a phone number in the text messages matched one on PSAF’s website.
PSAF’s History Prior to the Footage
The Myrtle Beach sting was not Survivors’ first look at PSAF. A cumulative evidence summary compiled by the group’s South Carolina investigator describes three separate tests of the fund over more than a year.
In the first, the investigator says she entered a South Carolina zip code on PSAF’s website and was prompted to request free, mail-order abortion pills, with the site pointing her to Las Libres, a Mexico-based network. She says she followed the instructions, used an encrypted email account as directed, submitted a fake name, and received unbranded mifepristone and misoprostol at her home six days later with instructions to “triple-bag” the fetal remains when disposing. According to her summary, the accompanying materials described the pills as available up to 18 weeks of pregnancy, three times South Carolina’s legal limit, and placed no age restriction on who could receive them.
After a September 2024 protest at Coastal Carolina University, where PSAF’s College Outreach Director Ina Seethaler teaches, the investigator says PSAF swapped Las Libres for a similar mail-order pill provider (Aid Pills) and added disclaimers. She repeated the test. This time, she writes, PSAF told her by email that it would pay for a minor’s in-clinic abortion at up to 12 weeks of pregnancy at its “partner clinics,” which she lists as Planned Parenthood South Atlantic locations in Wilmington, Charleston, and Columbia. Twelve weeks is double South Carolina’s heartbeat limit. The summary also says the pill provider’s instructions advised women not to tell their doctors they had taken the pills if complications arose, and not to involve family.
The third test is the concerning. Posing as a 16-year-old, the investigator says she texted PSAF’s intake line on October 3, 4, and 5, 2025, and that Intake Director Wayne Borders and co-founder Ashlyn Preaux arranged to pick her up from home without her parents’ knowledge, drive her across the state line to a North Carolina Planned Parenthood, and cover the costs. That exchange came one month before the Myrtle Beach drive.
Abortion trafficking is when an adult secretly moves a minor to get an abortion without her parents’ knowledge. Several state have moved to outlaw abortion trafficking, but South Carolina has not. With no consequences for abortion trafficking or the woman who obtains the illegal abortion, how is South Carolina supposed to effectively prevent the murder of the unborn?
The Pill Pipeline
The South Carolina Department of Public Health’s (SCDPH) 2025 Abortion Report, released this summer, counts 2,534 abortions performed in the state in 2025, down from 3,025 in 2024. Of those, 2,073 were medication abortions, about 82 percent of the total. Nearly 98 percent occurred at six weeks or earlier. Three facilities, Greenville Women’s Clinic and Planned Parenthood’s Columbia and Charleston locations, accounted for nearly all of them.
Those are the pills dispensed inside South Carolina’s licensed facilities. We cannot imagine what the real number looks like because SCDPH only counts what happens in this state. South Carolina law bans prescribing abortion drugs through telehealth, yet out-of-state doctors in so-called shield-law states mail the pills anyway. The pro-abortion research project #WeCount, run by the Society of Family Planning, estimated that in 2025 shield-state telehealth providers accounted for roughly 70 percent of all abortions in South Carolina, as reported by Ms. Magazine.
The state’s official count shows abortions falling but the abortion industry’s own researchers say the majority are now arriving in South Carolina mailboxes from New York, Massachusetts, and other shield states, beyond the reach of DPH reporting and South Carolina law.
Follow the Money From Out of State
While PSAF may present itself as a homegrown South Carolina effort, the money they receive tells a very different story.
When the Post and Courier profiled the fund, interviewing co-founder Ashlyn Preaux and other board members, it reported that PSAF’s donations come from across the country, especially Chicago, California, New York, and Atlanta. Interestingly, not one South Carolina city made the list.
The Third Wave Fund, a national grantmaker for abortion and “gender justice” groups, lists PSAF as a 2023 grantee of its Mobilize Power Fund, supporting a “rural community outreach program” in South Carolina. This information was removed from the Third Wave Fund’s website after June of this year.
Live Action News, citing IRS grant data, identified past foundation donors to PSAF included the Anderson-Rogers Foundation, the Lucey Charitable Foundation, the Commonwealth Fund, and the AMJ Foundation. The fund also announced in a Facebook post last year that a single committed donor was covering $48,000 a year to fund its first paid staff position.
PSAF partners with clinics outside South Carolina and, by the Post and Courier’s count, paid for abortions in seven states in 2024. A PSAF board member wrote in Rewire News Group that when one fund cannot cover a full procedure, it typically asks another fund to pledge the rest, meaning South Carolina cases are routinely co-financed by abortion funds elsewhere. And it plugs into the national infrastructure, as PSAF is listed on the national abortion-fund directory ineedana.com as serving four states.
The Executive Director From Pittsburgh
PSAF is run by co-founder and Executive Director Ashlyn Preaux. In 2022, she ran as the Democratic nominee for South Carolina House District 61, which covers parts of Myrtle Beach and Conway. According to the Ballotpedia profile from that campaign, she was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We confirmed this through her Facebook profile, which also lists Pittsburgh as her hometown.
She lost that race to Republican Carla Schuessler, who took nearly 70 percent of the vote. In her campaign survey, Preaux pledged she “would never vote for any legislation that would restrict abortion.” Her endorsements came largely from national progressive groups, including Run for Something, the Working Families Party, Vote Mama PAC, and the Progressive Turnout Project.
According to her LinkedIn, she co-founded PSAF in 2021 with one of her friends and is a campaign and political consultant. Preaux lists Mal Hyam for Congress in 2018 and 2024, Bernie Sanders for President from 2019 to 2020, Russell Ott for Senate in 2024, and Belinda for Senate in 2024.
Since January 2025, Preaux has also worked for Planned Parenthood South Atlantic as a community organizer. That is the same organization whose Wilmington, Charleston, and Columbia clinics PSAF reportedly calls its “partner clinics.” It is also the same year PSAF’s 990 shows it paying her $28,687, her first reported compensation from the fund.
PSAF raises money through the pro-abortion grassroots by posting appeals for anonymous patients who need their abortions paid for. Some of those patients are minors. On September 29, 2025, the fund posted on X that it had “a minor patient who needs additional help and is currently in clinic waiting to be seen,” with a $3,400 gap, and asked the public to cover it. In another appeal, the executive director described a patient as young as 13. Whose parents signed off on those? The fund did not say.
The current board, per the 2025 Form 990, is Carey Shofner (President), Marcurius Byrd (Secretary), Ina Seethaler (College Outreach Director), Jessica Casagrande, Wayne Borders, Talisa Effinger, and Deidre Griffin. Seethaler is also a Women’s and Gender Studies faculty coordinator at Coastal Carolina University, according to her Linkedin.
Friends and Foes in the Statehouse
The fund named State Rep. Seth Rose, a well-known Columbia Democrat, its 2026 Legislator of the Year.
The fund has also used its platform to single out pro-life legislators and activists by name. Senator Richard Cash is one of their favorites. Take a look at this post, where they call him a “dick” for fighting for the unborn:
Who Let This Happen?
Every one of the 2,534 abortions DPH counted last year was a child with a beating heart or the promise of one. Thousands more arrived by mail. PSAF raised more than $600,000 to fund them, and on Saturday night it raised a glass to those deaths.
It didn’t have to be this way. Last year, we covered S.323, a true anti-abortion bill with real penalties. Republicans on the Senate Medical Affairs Subcommittee voted for an amendment to gut those penalties. Then the bill died because too many Republicans voted against it or refused to vote at all.
The first principle in the SC GOP platform is “The Right to Life” but nearly all the candidates it elects won’t defend it. No wonder PSAF thrives in a state with a Republican supermajority.
Psalm 139 tells us God knit each of us together in our mother’s womb and saw our unformed bodies. Will South Carolina’s Republicans ever start acting like they believe it?
