Planned Parenthood Action Fund, the country’s largest abortion rights organization, officially backed the Democrat Graham Platner for Senate in Maine on Monday, selecting him over Senator Susan Collins, one of only two Republican senators who support abortion rights.
A Maine affiliate of the organization had praised Ms. Collins’s “long history of supporting Planned Parenthood and access to essential health care” as recently as May 2025, cheering her opposition to efforts by congressional Republicans to slash federal funding for the organization.
But at an event in Portland on Monday, Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and chief executive of the national organization, suggested that Ms. Collins had failed to make the “hard decisions” when it came to advocating for abortion rights.
“Senator Collins is a fair-weather feminist at best,” said Ms. McGill Johnson, flanked by women holding signs with Mr. Platner’s name printed in the group’s signature shade of hot pink. “She is conveniently pro-reproductive freedom when it suits her.”
The race has created a conundrum for some Democrats in the state, who have voiced concerns about reports of Mr. Platner’s conduct toward women, but who also remain furious with Ms. Collins for her vote to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018. Four years later, Mr. Kavanaugh was among the conservative majority that voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion for nearly half a century.
Angela Kuefler, a Democratic strategist who has conducted extensive polling on abortion rights in recent elections, said the Platner campaign might be trying to use the issue to not only undercut Ms. Collins’s image as a moderate but also bolster its support among female voters, who make up a majority of the Maine electorate.
“The question is, Is it impactful enough to get some of these older women who may be put off by Platner’s shenanigans?” said Ms. Kuefler, who is not involved with the campaign. “Is it enough to get them to hold their nose and vote for Graham? I don’t know. But they’re also the group that is most upset with Collins’s vote.”
Standing before a backdrop of female supporters on Monday, Mr. Platner pledged to fight for abortion rights, accusing Ms. Collins and “establishment Democrats” of failing to codify abortion into federal law — a measure the Democratic Party has long lacked the votes to pass.
His attacks largely centered on Ms. Collins’s support for Mr. Kavanaugh. The Supreme Court’s vote on Roe has led to bans and restrictions on abortion across more than two dozen states. This month, Ms. Collins told a reporter at The Portland Press Herald that she did not “regret” her support.
“She may not regret her vote for Brett Kavanaugh, but there are a lot of Maine voters who regret their vote for her,” Mr. Platner said.
In an interview with Fox News taped earlier on Monday, Ms. Collins cast herself as a supporter of abortion rights, saying she disagreed with the decision to eliminate federal abortion rights. But she said Roe v. Wade would have been overturned even if Mr. Kavanaugh had not been confirmed.
She noted that liberal justices whose confirmations she had also supported — Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan — voted against overturning Roe v. Wade.
Five justices supported overturning Roe. A sixth, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., voted with the majority but said he would have taken “a more measured course,” stopping short of overruling Roe outright.
Either path taken by the conservative majority would have functionally undone Roe, which allowed abortion until fetal viability of about 24 weeks.
“Unfortunately, every election year we see the leaders of Planned Parenthood become more and more partisan,” Shawn Roderick, a spokesman for Ms. Collins’s campaign, said in a statement. “The leadership cares more about party politics than they do about the issues.”
During the Democratic primary, Mr. Platner did not focus heavily on abortion rights, centering his campaign on a populist economic message of fighting wealth inequality, taxing billionaires and empowering the working class.
In his remarks on Monday, Mr. Platner praised Planned Parenthood as a model of universal health care, saying that his wife and female friends and even he himself had received services at its clinics.
“I got S.T.I. checks at the Portland Planned Parenthood,” he told the crowd. “It’s not an embarrassing thing. It’s a smart thing to do, especially when you are younger.”
In 2020, when Ms. Collins last ran for re-election, Democrats also highlighted Ms. Collins’s support for Mr. Kavanaugh. But strategists for Mr. Platner say the subsequent overturning of Roe v. Wade has increased the salience of the issue as a line of attack.
Since the decision, more than a dozen states have enacted laws banning abortion in nearly all circumstances. Maine did not follow that path, instead passing legislation to expand access to the procedure to all stages of pregnancy.
“There is a massive, massive difference in her being on the ballot at a time that Roe is no longer the law of the land because of a vote she took,” Morris Katz, a top adviser for Mr. Platner, said in an interview on MS NOW. “There is a fundamental issue here of trust.”
Other abortion rights organizations haven’t been as quick to throw their support behind Mr. Platner. This week, Reproductive Freedom for All announced plans to spend $23.5 million in the midterms, focused heavily in Arizona, California, Georgia, Michigan and Nevada — not Maine.
