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Tag: Abortion

  • Roe Anniversary Is a Painful Reminder of What the Right Took Away

    Roe Anniversary Is a Painful Reminder of What the Right Took Away

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    Today marks the 51st anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade decision. But it’s a hollow anniversary, as the constitutional right to an abortion is gone, eliminated by a Supreme Court that’s became home to a conservative supermajority thanks to Donald Trump, a guy who was once “very pro-choice” but is now lionized by the religious right. And as Trump cruises to the GOP nomination, he’s taking credit for the “miracle” of getting Roe “terminated.”

    Despite such a devastating decision, Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett texted me about how the loss of Roe has become a rallying cry for the women of Texas: “While women have been underestimated throughout history, when we fight, we win!” She said that “brave Texas women fought to give us the Roe decision before, and brave Texas women such as Kate Cox and Dr. Austin Dennard,” who were prevented from having emergency abortions despite deadly fetal diagnoses, “are fighting to get our freedoms back that the Supreme Court unjustifiably ripped away from us.”

    Even after achieving their presumed goal—to strip a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion, and then take medical decisions out of the hands of doctors and effectively put them into the hands of right-wing politicians—antiabortion crusaders aren’t satisfied or satiated. On Friday, thousands of activists converged in Washington, DC, for the second March for Life rally since Roe’s demise. “Some march participants said they had thought that the ruling would result in a change of heart in the country around abortion and that they were disappointed,” according to The Washington Post. “Others are hoping for a federal abortion ban. Still others want the focus to be on limiting abortion pills.” 

    It seems that the people who claimed abortion was a states’ rights issue are now desperate for a federal abortion ban, which would effectively take the right completely away from the states. (Abortion is already banned in 14 states post-Roe.) Yet GOP calls for a nationwide ban come as Americans are supporting abortion access at near-record levels, with an October poll finding about 55% in favor of access to the procedure for any reason.

    Meanwhile, abortion bans and restrictions have become a harbinger of doom for this Trumpified Republican Party. Voters in deep red Kansas rejected an antiabortion measure in August 2022, and the midterms months later demonstrated that abortion rights can galvanize voters. This past November, Democrat Andy Beshear handily won reelection in deep red Kentucky while leaning into abortion rights, as voters in GOP-friendly Ohio enshrined the right to abortion in the state’s constitution. Over in purple Virginia, Governor Glenn Youngkin failed to flip the statehouse, dashing his hopes of enacting a more focus-grouped 15-week abortion ban.

    Abortion bans are so unpopular that Republicans have decided they need to change the messaging around them. National Republican Congressional Committee chair Richard Hudson told Punchbowl News, “[Candidates] need to articulate their position to the voters, because the voters think the Republican position is like, ‘We’ll throw you in jail if you get an abortion.’” He continued: “Republicans don’t have a policy problem. We have a branding problem.” Perhaps Hudson should tell that to the Texas woman who nearly died of sepsis due to the state’s draconian abortion ban.

    Or perhaps Hudson can explain the branding problem to Jaci Statton, a 20-something Oklahoma woman who had a cancerous, nonviable molar pregnancy and said she was told to sit in the parking lot and wait for dangerous complications. “‘We cannot touch you unless you are crashing in front of us or your blood pressure goes so high that you are fixing to have a heart attack,’” she recalled of what she was told by hospital staff.

    Republicans who think abortion bans simply have a branding problem appear incapable of seeing how these severe restrictions endanger women and represent a profound sea change in allowing Republican politicians to dictate medical policy, whether they have the faintest knowledge of how the human body works or not.

    Meanwhile, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are marking this week’s anniversary by highlighting GOP attacks on abortion rights and announcing new steps to support abortion access As White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre emailed me, “Women are being turned away from emergency rooms, doctors can be charged with felonies, and many of the state bans in place have no exceptions for rape or incest. When the Supreme Court—enabled by justices nominated by Donald Trump—took the outrageous step of forcing politicians into the most personal decisions women make, President Biden said, ‘I don’t think the Court or, for that matter, the Republicans who for decades have pushed their extreme agenda, have a clue about the power of American women.’ The American people are making themselves heard loud and clear, with record support for reproductive rights across the country. President Biden and Vice President Harris are fighting to restore our freedoms every day, and no nationwide abortion ban will ever be allowed while President Biden holds a veto pen.”

    Banning abortion in 14 states didn’t reduce abortions; it just made it more dangerous to be pregnant. Republicans have kept losing since Roe because they don’t care about the health of pregnant women, apparently thinking they know better than doctors. But on this 51st anniversary of Roe, it’s important to remember the fundamental reason Republicans keep losing: People don’t like having an existing, and hard-fought, right taken away from them. No one wants to go backward.

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    Molly Jong-Fast

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  • Abortion fight puts Vice President Harris at center of 2024 election campaign

    Abortion fight puts Vice President Harris at center of 2024 election campaign

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    WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris is taking center stage in the Democrats’ renewed push for abortion rights during this year’s election and she will mark the 51st anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling on Monday in Wisconsin.

    It will be the first in a series of events hosted by Harris, and it comes one day before she joins President Joe Biden at another campaign event focused on abortion in Virginia. First lady Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff are also expected to be there.

    In her speech in Wisconsin, Harris plans to hammer former President Donald Trump for saying he is “proud” to have helped overturn Roe v. Wade, which he enabled by nominating three conservative justices to the U.S. Supreme Court during his term.

    “Proud that women across our nation are suffering?” Harris will say, according to excerpts released by her office. “Proud that women have been robbed of a fundamental freedom? That doctors could be thrown in prison for caring for patients? That young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers?”

    Back in Washington, Biden on Monday will convene a meeting of his reproductive health care access task force to discuss threats to emergency care and new steps for implementing executive orders on the subject.

    The Democratic president said in a statement that “tens of millions of women now live in states with extreme and dangerous abortion bans,” and “because of Republican elected officials, women’s health and lives are at risk.”

    The administration plans to announce new steps to strengthen access to contraception and help file complaints under a law that’s intended to ensure emergency health care access. The law is the subject of another legal battle that will be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, which will consider whether it requires providing abortions in situations where a woman’s health is at risk.

    “President Biden and Vice President Harris stand with the vast majority of Americans who believe that the right to choose should be fundamental, and that healthcare decisions should be made by a woman with the help of her doctor — not politicians,” White House gender policy adviser Jen Klein said in previewing the effort. “We’ve shown and will continue to show that commitment by decisively taking action to protect access to reproductive health care.”

    Although the loss of Roe v. Wade was a historic defeat for Democrats, the party successfully harnessed anger over the decision during the 2022 midterm elections, and they hope to do the same thing this year as Biden runs for a second term.

    The White House has repeatedly turned to Harris, the first woman to serve as vice president, to make its case.

    “One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree that the government should not be telling her what to do with her body,” she said in a recent appearance on ABC’s “The View.” “If she chooses she will talk with her priest, her pastor, her rabbi, her imam. But it should not be the government telling her what to do.”

    Harris also suggested that too many people took Roe v. Wade for granted before it was overturned.

    “We kind of believed that it was always going to be there,” she said. “And look what happened.”

    Harris’ outspokenness on abortion contrasts with Biden’s more reticent approach. Although he is a longtime supporter of abortion rights, he mentions less often and sometimes avoids using the word abortion even when he discusses the issue.

    “I think the real star from a messaging standpoint is the vice president,” said Mini Timmaraju, head of Reproductive Freedom for All, the activist organization formerly known as the National Abortion Rights Action League. “Look, Joe Biden picked Kamala Harris. Joe Biden has asked Kamala Harris to lead on this issue. This is going to set us up for a great contrast with the other side.”

    After Harris’ appearance on “The View,” she received a notable assessment from Kayleigh McEnany, a former Trump spokeswoman who co-hosts a show on Fox News.

    “She brought up abortion again and again and again,” McEnany said. No matter the topic, “she pivoted right back to abortion because she knows what is true, which is the GOP has lost every single abortion ballot initiative post-Roe.”

    McEnany described herself as pro-life, but said “what Kamala is doing, right or wrong, is very powerful among young women.”

    While Harris and Democrats have embraced abortion as a campaign issue, Republicans are shying away or calling for a truce.

    Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor who is running for the Republican presidential nomination, recently made a plea to “find consensus” on the divisive issue.

    “As much as I’m pro-life, I don’t judge anyone for being pro-choice, and I don’t want them to judge me for being pro-life,” she said during a primary debate in November.

    Trump has taken credit for helping to overturn Roe v. Wade, but he has balked at laws like Florida’s ban on abortions after six weeks, which was signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, another Republican candidate.

    “You have to win elections,” Trump said during a recent Fox News town hall.

    Harris’ team is still working out the schedule for the rest of her events focused on abortion. Each stop is likely to feature a speech and a more intimate conversation with healthcare providers or women who have been affected by restrictions.

    Wisconsin, Harris’ first stop, is a key battleground state with an ongoing legal battle over abortion. When Roe v. Wade was overturned, Republicans argued that an 1849 law that was still on the books would effectively ban the procedure except in situations where a mother’s life was at risk.

    “These extremists want to roll back the clock to a time before women were treated as full citizens,” Harris plans to say in her speech on Monday.

    Clinics across the state stopped offering abortions until a court ruled the law did not apply to abortions. Republicans have appealed the decision, and the case will likely be decided by the state supreme court.

    Abortion has reshaped Harris’ tenure as vice president after earlier struggles when dealing with intractable issues like migration from Central America.

    Jamal Simmons, a former communications director for Harris, said abortion “focused her attention and her office in a way that nothing had before.”

    “Focusing on abortion rights tapped into the vice president’s legal background, her political values and her substantive knowledge in a way that I saw no other issue do while I was there,” he said.

    Vice presidents are rarely decisive figures in reelection campaigns. However, Harris has faced additional scrutiny because of Biden’s age — he would be 82 at the start of a second term — and her status as the first woman, Black person and person of South Asian descent to serve in her position.

    The battle over abortion will also bolster her visibility.

    “The president and the vice president appeal to different parts of the party,” Simmons said. “They’re stronger as a team.”

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  • Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: Biden Needs To Be More ‘Blunt’ About Abortion

    Gov. Gretchen Whitmer: Biden Needs To Be More ‘Blunt’ About Abortion

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  • Democrats Believe Abortion Will Motivate Voters In 2024. Will It Be Enough?

    Democrats Believe Abortion Will Motivate Voters In 2024. Will It Be Enough?

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — When Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump said recently that he was “proud” to have a hand in overturning the abortion protections enshrined in Roe v. Wade, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake took it as a political gift, thinking to herself, “Oh my God, we just won the election.”

    It may not be that simple, but as the 2024 race heats up, President Joe Biden’s campaign is betting big on abortion rights as a major driver for Democrats in the election. Republicans are still trying to figure out how to talk about the issue, if at all, and avoid a political backlash.

    “A vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is a vote to restore Roe, and a vote for Donald Trump is a vote to ban abortion across the country,” said Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager. “These are the stakes in 2024 and we’re going to continue to make sure that every single voter knows it.”

    Since Roe was overturned in 2022, voters have pushed back by approving a number of statewide ballot initiatives to preserve or expand the right to abortion. Support for abortion rights drove women to the polls during the 2022 midterm elections, delivering Democrats unexpected success. For many people, the issue took on higher meaning, part of an overarching concern about the future of democracy, according to AP VoteCast, a nationwide survey of more than 94,000 voters in the midterm elections.

    Democrats are working to broaden how they talk to voters about the Supreme Court’s decision, delivered by a conservative majority that included three justices nominated by Trump, and what it means for people’s access to health care and their personal freedoms.

    An abortion rights demonstrator holds a sign during a rally, May 14, 2022, in Chattanooga, Tenn. On Monday, Jan. 8, 2024, more women joined a Tennessee lawsuit challenging the state’s broad abortion ban that went into effect shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.

    Ben Margot via Associated Press

    The Biden campaign is launching a nationwide political push this coming week centered on Monday’s 51st anniversary of the 1973 decision that codified abortion rights. Vice President Kamala Harris, the administration’s chief messenger on this, will hold the first event in Wisconsin on Monday.

    On Tuesday, Biden, Harris, first lady Jill Biden and second gentleman Doug Emhoff will travel to Virginia for another campaign stop focused on abortion. It will be their first joint appearance of the 2024 reelection campaign, a marker of how much importance the campaign places on the issue. More events featuring top Democrats in battleground states are also in the works.

    The campaign on Sunday released a new television advertising campaign that is scheduled to run all week, including during “The Bachelor” season premiere and the NFL conference championships. The spot features Austin Dennard, an OB-GYN in Texas who had to leave her state to get an abortion when she learned that the fetus had anencephaly, a fatal condition that could damage her health as well.

    “In Texas, you are forced to carry that pregnancy, and that is because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v. Wade,” said the woman.

    Focusing on abortion will not be a silver bullet for Democrats. The economy, foreign policy, immigration and inflation are major issues, too, as is concern about Biden’s age as he tries to overcome low poll numbers. Many voters are simply turned off by the prospect of a likely 2024 Trump-Biden rematch.

    Still, Democrats believe abortion will be a key motivator for base voters and help expand their coalition. Biden aides and allies point to recent elections that have overwhelmingly shown that, when voters can choose, they have chosen to safeguard abortion rights.

    The issue isn’t vanishing from the headlines anytime soon, either. The Supreme Court will decide whether to restrict access to medication prescribed for abortion and to treat other reproductive issues. And there is an ongoing stream of stories about the impact of abortion bans, such as the mother who had to sue, then flee, her home state of Texas to end her doomed pregnancy.

    Democrats spent decades trying to calibrate their message on abortion, always defending the right to choose while also making overtures to voters who are conflicted about the issue. President Bill Clinton’s mantra was that abortion should be “safe, legal and rare.”

    But the loss of federal abortion protections has been a catalyst for a broader and bolder message about abortion and reproductive rights after the historic setback from the decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to overturn Roe.

    Supporters of Issue 1, the Right to Reproductive Freedom amendment, attend a rally in Columbus, Ohio, Oct. 8, 2023. The Biden campaign is betting big on abortion rights as a major driver in the 2024 presidential election. But the economy, foreign policy, immigration and inflation are also major issues for voters, as Biden tries to boost his low poll numbers.
    Supporters of Issue 1, the Right to Reproductive Freedom amendment, attend a rally in Columbus, Ohio, Oct. 8, 2023. The Biden campaign is betting big on abortion rights as a major driver in the 2024 presidential election. But the economy, foreign policy, immigration and inflation are also major issues for voters, as Biden tries to boost his low poll numbers.

    Joe Maiorana via Associated Press

    “We know that if we talk about this issue as a fundamental freedom, we are able to resonate across demographics — older voters, younger voters, people of color, folks in rural areas,” said Mini Timmaraju, head of Reproductive Freedom for All, formerly the National Abortion Rights Action League.

    Biden aides said the strategy is to let the president be who he is — an 81-year-old Catholic man who generally avoids using the word abortion and prefers to talk instead about the issue in the context of personal freedom.

    The White House often frames the fight over abortion as part of a larger battle that involves book bans, voting rights and other issues. Harris is the messenger for more aggressive talk about abortion specifically and how the ripple effects of the decision are affecting maternal health.

    Timmaraju said those “different messages resonate with different parts of the electorate.”

    Since the high court overturned the nationwide right to abortion, roughly 25 million women now live in states with some type of ban in effect. The impacts are increasingly felt by women who never intended to end their pregnancies, yet have had emergency medical care denied or delayed because of the new restrictions.

    According to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll, among Democrats, nearly nine in 10 say abortion should generally be legal. Four in 10 say it should be legal in all cases, and nearly half say it should be legal in most cases. About nine in 10 Democrats say their state should allow a pregnant person to obtain a legal abortion at six weeks into the pregnancy, compared with about three-quarters of U.S. adults overall.

    As for Republicans, the topic was largely absent in the lead-up to this year’s Iowa caucuses, a remarkable change in a state that has long backed religious conservatives vowing to restrict the procedure. Part of the change is because Republicans achieved a generational goal with the overturning of Roe. But it also underscores a pervasive fear among Republican candidates and voters alike that vocalizing their desire to further restrict abortion rights in 2024 might be politically dangerous.

    “I am calling the time period we are in now ‘the new fight for life,’” said Benjamin Watson, a former NFL player who is now an anti-abortion advocate. “Roe is done, but we still live in a culture that knows not how to care for life. Roe is done, but the factors that drive women to seek abortions are ever apparent and ever increasing. Roe is done, but abortion is still legal and thriving in too much of America.”

    Overall, opinions on abortion remain complex, with most people believing abortion should be allowed in some circumstances and not in others. About two-thirds of U.S. adults say abortion should generally be legal, but only about one-quarter say it should always be legal and only about 1 in 10 say it should always be illegal.

    Trump has waffled on the topic. During a recent Fox News town hall, he expressed support for limited exceptions and criticized state laws that ban abortion after as little as six weeks.

    “We’re living in a time when there has to be a little bit of a concession one way or the other,” Trump said.

    But he also has promoted his own role in undoing the nationwide right to abortion, a milestone goal for his conservative and evangelical supporters.

    “For 54 years they were trying to get Roe v. Wade terminated, and I did it and I’m proud to have done it,” he said.

    The Biden administration is nearing the limits of what it can do to preserve access to abortion absent congressional legislation. In the immediate aftermath of the Dobbs decision on June 24, 2022, the administration quickly tried to flex its regulatory muscle to fight back against Republican efforts to severely restrict abortion. Many efforts have been challenged in court.

    Biden had invited states with robust abortion access to apply for Medicaid waivers that would help pay for women to travel for the care. But so far, only California has applied to unlock federal money for the effort. The legal battles around abortion pills, emergency health care and state laws have stymied some of the agency’s efforts.

    The nation’s top health official, Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra, is beginning a three-day tour along the East Coast to talk with doctors and medical students about access to abortion and birth control.

    “This is the beginning of an effort to reach out to all Americans,” Becerra said, and “say to the American people how important it is that we stand up at a crucial time.”

    Associated Press writers Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston and Amanda Seitz and Linley Sanders contributed to this report.

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  • What It's Like to Be Denied an Abortion in Your State – POPSUGAR Australia

    What It's Like to Be Denied an Abortion in Your State – POPSUGAR Australia

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    Getty / Michael B. Thomas

    When Nancy Davis was denied an abortion for a nonviable fetus in her home state of Louisiana in 2022, she took her story to media outlets in an attempt to draw attention to what she sees as a fundamental injustice that disproportionately affects Black women like her. Davis, the mother of an 18-year-old, a 14-year-old, and a 2-year-old, is now an outspoken advocate for reproductive justice. She formed the Nancy Davis Foundation to help other women in similar situations. As part of that work, she has organized the upcoming Voices For Change March on Baton Rouge, which falls on Jan. 21, a day before the anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

    Davis told us about the trauma of being denied critical healthcare, what it was like to travel out of state to obtain her abortion, and why she continues to use her voice for others. Read it all, in her own words, below.

    Last year, my fiancé and I faced an extremely challenging and distressing situation. To make a painful story short, I was denied an abortion for a nonviable fetus. Our fetus was diagnosed with acrania, which refers to the absence of the skull. The doctor pretty much told me that if I continued to carry the pregnancy, she would die within minutes, if not be stillborn. Initially he told me that procedure could be done, but later, whenever I tried to schedule the appointment, we were told we were denied due to the fetus still having a heartbeat and Louisiana’s abortion bans. Louisiana had exceptions in place, but the hospital director didn’t want to risk it – I guess due to them being scared and confused, they pretty much told us the closest place to get an abortion would be Florida. And they wished us well.

    “[I]t was like my heart was ripped out of my body.”

    I just could not believe it. It was already hard enough dealing with the fact that my baby wasn’t going to make it. This was a wanted pregnancy; this was a planned pregnancy. So it was like my heart was ripped out of my body, literally. And even in the ultrasound room – I’m not crazy, but anyone could see on the ultrasound picture that something was awfully wrong. You could only see half of the head. So to digest that as well as being denied healthcare and having to go to a whole different place where I wasn’t comfortable – leaving my family, leaving my children – it was so traumatic. I was emotional the entire time. I felt like we were being left to fend for ourselves in a very hostile environment.

    We scheduled appointments in Florida and North Carolina, because those were the two places closest to Louisiana. We were thinking about driving there. But once everything settled with me, I went to the news station. I just felt like it was wrong and my voice needed to heard. And I knew if I was going through it, other people were going through it, whether it was at that very moment or in the future. I just had to speak up and speak out for myself. And my story went viral. I received so much support.

    Related: 50 States, 50 Abortions

    So I contacted Planned Parenthood of Greater New York, and they contacted The Brigid Alliance. And they literally took care of everything. I didn’t have to worry about having to book our flights, book hotels. They gave us a childcare stipend, a meal stipend. They literally took care of us. I’d been utilizing Planned Parenthood services in Baton Rouge since I became sexually active, you know, 17 or 18. There were times when I didn’t have insurance, and they would still give me the care that I needed and deserved – cervical exams, STD testing, birth control. So when this situation came about and I was researching and I saw Planned Parenthood of New York, I felt comfortable going to them.

    I didn’t have the resources to get the care. If I hadn’t gone public with it and reached out to Planned Parenthood – that was my whole reasoning to going to the news station. I didn’t have the resources. It was like a cry for help, as well as putting these type of situations on notice. That’s why I also feel a sense of obligation to speak out to help as many others as I possibly can. I started the Nancy Davis Foundation for people who are in similar situations. We assist individuals who have experienced trauma as a result of a developmental defect in pregnancy, and we provide support for medical pregnancy terminations.

    “I didn’t want to carry my baby to bury my baby.”

    My whole saying has been: I didn’t want to carry my baby to bury my baby. That’s something I feel like I was being forced to do, and it was just something that under no circumstances was I going to do. But these laws are controlling our lives, and it’s putting our lives in danger. And not only is it hurting us, but it’s hurting our loved ones too. Like my 14-year-old daughter, we still have conversations and she breaks down and cries about it to this day. My mom still breaks down too and cries to this day about it. It is definitely hurting others.

    So we all need to speak up and speak out. Women need to do what’s best for them. Just because you live in a state with an abortion ban does not mean you have to put yourself through trauma.

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  • Anti-abortion activists brace for challenges ahead as they gather for March for Life

    Anti-abortion activists brace for challenges ahead as they gather for March for Life

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    A year ago, anti-abortion activists from across the U.S. gathered for their annual March for Life with reason to celebrate: It was their first march since the Supreme Court, seven months earlier, had overturned the nationwide right to abortion.

    At this year’s march, on Friday, the mood will be very different — reflecting formidable challenges that lie ahead in this election year.

    “We have undeniable evidence of victory — lives being saved,” said John Seago, president of Texas Right to Life. “But there is also a realization of the significant hurdles that our movement has right now in the public conversation.”

    Participants at the march in Washington will salute the 14 states enforcing bans on abortion throughout pregnancy. They will proclaim that thousands of babies have been born who otherwise might have been aborted, even as studies show the total number of abortions provided in the U.S. rose slightly in the year after that enforcement began.

    Moreover, anti-abortion leaders know that their side has a seven-state losing streak in votes on abortion-related ballot measures. Even in red states such as Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky, the outcomes favored keeping abortion access legal.

    In this year’s election, several more states are expected to have abortion-rights ballot measures, and Democratic candidates in many tight races are likely to highlight their support for abortion access.

    “We have been around for more than 50 years, and I don’t know of any year that was easy,” said Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee.

    “But it definitely got harder after Dobbs,” she added. “We have a lot of work ahead of us.”

    Tobias was referring to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling in June 2022, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion nationwide.

    The key consequence of Dobbs was to return decision-making on abortion policy to individual states. Some Democratic-governed states — such as California, New York and New Jersey — have strengthened protections for abortion access. Roughly 20 states with Republican-controlled legislatures have either banned abortion or sought to impose new restrictions.

    After Dobbs, “I didn’t want anyone to get the false sense that we were at the end of our work,” said Brent Leatherwood, an abortion opponent who heads the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy wing.

    “We’ve gone from a focal point at the federal level to 50 different focal points,” he said. “It may be another 50 years before we truly establish a culture of life, where preborn lives are saved and mothers are supported.”

    Even the current claims of lives being saved due to the Dobbs decision are subject to question. While abortions have decreased to nearly zero in states with total bans, they have increased elsewhere – notably in states such as Illinois, Florida and New Mexico, which are near those with more restrictions.

    Anti-abortion leaders are keenly aware that their opponents in the abortion debate depict the wave of state bans as an infringement on women’s rights and a potential danger to their health.

    Thus the theme of this year’s March for Life strives to convey support for women facing unexpected pregnancies: “Pro Life: With Every Woman, For Every Child.”

    “ Pregnancy care centers and maternity homes are the very backbone of our movement,” March for Life president Jeanne Mancini wrote in a recent opinion piece.

    She and her allies have encouraged states to offer support programs for new mothers in need — helping them find housing, jobs and health insurance.

    Among the scheduled speakers at the march is Jean Marie Davis, executive director of Branches Pregnancy Resource Center in Brattleboro, Vermont. Davis says a similar center in New Hampshire helped her break free several years ago after she became pregnant while ensnared in a sex-trafficking operation.

    Other scheduled speakers include House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and U.S. Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., a co-chair of the Congressional Pro-Life Caucus.

    Mancini said last year’s march drew tens of thousands of people; she’s hoping this year’s march will be bigger.

    The participants, she said, will be in a “persevering mood.”

    J.J. Straight, part of an American Civil Liberties Union team working to protect and broaden abortion access, says her side also feels determined, especially in light of the recent ballot-measure results.

    “We’ve seen a tremendous pushback to the anti-abortion agenda,” she said. “There’s a huge coalition of folks, regardless of their party and other demographics, who absolutely draw the line at this kind interference in their health care.”

    Among the reasons for uncertainty for all parties in the debate is the inconsistent way that federal and state courts have adjudicated abortion-related cases. There have been numerous legal challenges to the various state laws banning or restricting abortion, some failing and others succeeding at least temporarily.

    There’s a pending lawsuit in Texas filed by women who say the state’s abortion ban forced them to continue pregnancies despite serious risk to their health.

    In an even higher profile Texas case, Kate Cox, a mother of two, sought an abortion after learning the baby she was carrying had a fatal genetic condition. Her request for an exemption from Texas’ ban — one of the country’s strictest — was denied by the state Supreme Court, and Cox left Texas to seek an abortion elsewhere.

    For abortion-rights activists, Cox’s case was a powerful illustration of how abortion bans could be dangerous for women with pregnancy complications.

    “Never in our history have we had such overwhelming reaction to any case,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. “We got phone calls, emails, snail-mail. Over and over, people talked about her with awe, her courage in going public.”

    Seago, the Texas Right to Life president, defended Texas’ abortion ban. He said the Cox case and the pending lawsuit simply underscored the need for Texas health authorities to clarify what doctors are and aren’t allowed to do in dealing with problem pregnancies.

    Carol Tobias acknowledged there can be difficult pregnancies.

    “But I don’t think hard circumstances should be used to establish state laws,” she said. In such cases, she added, “the doctors have two patients. They need to take care of both of them to best of their ability.”

    All the new bans make an exception to allow abortion if deemed necessary to save the life of the mother. There are divides within the anti-abortion movement over additional exceptions — for example, in cases of rape and incest, or when severe fetal abnormalities are diagnosed.

    Other divisions have surfaced over who should be criminalized by the new laws.

    Among leading anti-abortion activists, there’s a general consensus that women should not be prosecuted for seeking or obtaining an abortion. But there is support for criminal penalties against doctors and others who help people get an abortion; some states, including Texas and Idaho, seek to deter people from traveling out of state to get abortions or obtaining abortion pills by mail.

    Dr. Jamila Perritt, an abortion-rights supporter who is president of Physicians for Reproductive Health, worries that abortion opponents in states with bans will criminalize people who seek abortions outside the formal medical system.

    “The impact of their campaign has been devastating — and it will get worse,” she said. “I’m worried about many more people being arrested and prosecuted.”

    One of the biggest unknowns, heading toward to Election Day on Nov. 5, is how power in Washington will be divided between the two major parties.

    Abortion-rights supporters fear a Republican sweep of Congress and the White House might trigger a bid to impose a federal abortion ban. Conversely, some abortion opponents — including Chris Smith — fear a Democratic sweep might lead to a law overriding the state abortion bans that are now in effect.

    Such legislation — as modeled in the unsuccessful Women’s Health Protection Act of 2021-22 — would be “an existential threat,” Smith said.

    Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., has introduced a bill proposing to ban most abortions nationwide after 15 weeks of gestation. SBA Pro-Life America, a prominent anti-abortion group, supports the bill, according to its state policy director, Katie Glenn Daniel. But the measure has vehement critics on both sides of the abortion divide.

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  • Why 'viability' is dividing the abortion rights movement

    Why 'viability' is dividing the abortion rights movement

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    JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. — Reproductive rights activists in Missouri agree they want to get a ballot measure before voters this fall to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans in the country and ensure access. The sticking point is how far they should go.

    The groups have been at odds over whether to include a provision that would allow the state to regulate abortions after the fetus is viable, a concession supporters of the language say will be needed to persuade voters in the conservative state.

    It’s a divide that’s not limited to Missouri.

    Advocates say the disagreements there and in other states where activists are planning abortion-rights measures this year have resurfaced long-brewing ruptures among reproductive rights advocates. The divisions are most acute in Republican-leaning or closely divided states, where some worry that failing to include limits related to viability will sink the measures.

    The conflict has been especially sharp in Missouri, where dueling strategies have complicated efforts to push ahead with a ballot measure seeking to reinstate the right to abortion.

    “The movement is grappling with its value system,” said Bonyen Lee-Gilmore, the Kansas City-based vice president of communications for the National Institute for Reproductive Health, which opposes viability clauses.

    Viability is used by health care providers to describe whether a pregnancy is expected to continue developing normally or whether a fetus might survive outside the uterus. It’s generally considered to be around 23 or 24 weeks into pregnancy but has shifted downward with medical advances. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists opposes viability language in legislation or regulations.

    Some say it creates an arbitrary dividing line and stigmatizes abortions later in pregnancy, which are exceedingly rare and usually the result of serious complications, such as fetal anomalies, that put the life of the woman or fetus at risk.

    The Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision established a constitutional right to abortion but also created a framework that allowed states to regulate abortions at certain points during pregnancy. Since the current court overturned it in 2022, “Roe is the floor, not the ceiling” has become a rallying cry for activists who vowed to rebuild access, especially for marginalized communities, according to Pamela Merritt, executive director of Medical Students for Choice, a group that opposes viability clauses.

    Yet measures proposed for this year’s ballot in Missouri, Florida and Arizona have been replicating Roe’s viability framework, as did an Ohio constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to abortion that passed last year.

    Shortly after that election, a Black Ohio woman who miscarried in her bathroom was charged with abuse of a corpse. The amendment’s viability clause was cited as justification for allowing the case to move forward, though a grand jury ultimately dismissed the case.

    The charges are part of a larger effort by anti-abortion forces in Ohio to use the viability clause to limit the reach of the amendment, said Merritt. Many of these efforts will wind up in Ohio’s largely conservative court system, she added.

    “When you hand them the scalpel, you can’t turn around and be surprised when they start cutting,” Merritt said.

    In South Dakota, the local Planned Parenthood affiliate has pulled out of ballot measure efforts for a proposal that allows lawmakers to restrict abortion after the first trimester. In a statement, the group said the proposal fails to protect abortion rights.

    In Oklahoma, viability has been central to conversations about a potential ballot measure to repeal the state’s abortion ban, said Rebecca Tong, co-executive director of Trust Women, which provides abortion care. Tong said viability is “not something we want written into the Constitution in Oklahoma.”

    But Lauren Brenzel, campaign director for Floridians Protecting Freedom, said viability has not been a major focus in conversations around ballot measure language in a state that currently bans the procedure after six weeks of pregnancy. The campaign recently reached the necessary number of verified signatures to qualify an abortion-rights measure for this year’s ballot that includes a viability clause.

    “Viability is the framework that Florida had used until the legislators started passing abortion bans,” Brenzel said. “What we know is that voters understand this, and we see it as clear and concise language that matches with what the standard was in Florida for a long time.”

    Viability language in Florida’s proposed measure has already opened the door to a legal challenge from the state’s Republican attorney general, who has asked the state Supreme Court to keep the measure off the ballot because of vagueness over the meaning of the term.

    A few states, including California and Vermont, have enshrined abortion rights in their constitutions without viability limits. Proposed amendments in Maryland and New York also don’t mention viability.

    Missouri has found itself in the center of the national debate over the issue as abortion-rights groups have split over which of 11 versions of a measure to support for the ballot. The petitions have been tied up in court for months after being challenged by Republican Secretary of State Jay Ashcroft.

    Complicating the effort is another initiative petition — one proposed by a Republican, strategist Jamie Corley. It would allow abortions up to 12 weeks into pregnancy and include exceptions for rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother until viability.

    Corley said those restrictions are what’s feasible to pass in Missouri, where Republicans banned abortions except in medical emergencies.

    “Pro-life, anti-abortion voters, a lot of them are still OK with legal but limited access,” Corley said.

    Some reproductive rights groups advocating for versions of a more permissive ballot measure with a viability clause raised concerns that anti-abortion forces would attack proposals without one by saying it was an attempt to legalize abortion “up until birth” or “abortion on demand,” terms considered misleading by medical experts.

    Sarah Standiford, national campaigns director of Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said reproductive rights groups must balance their desire for the most expansive access with proposals that can withstand legal challenges and qualify for the ballot.

    She acknowledged that such an approach “may ultimately advance a policy that is far short of the ideal.”

    Other activists say they’re increasingly frustrated by compromises they see as based on fear and repeating past mistakes in Roe v. Wade that prevented abortion access for the most vulnerable, including people with higher-risk pregnancies, those with lower incomes, people of color and people living in rural communities.

    “It is a restriction under the guise of reproductive freedom,” said Jennifer Villavicencio, senior director of public affairs and advocacy at the Society of Family Planning.

    In Missouri, it’s yet to be seen how and if activists divided over viability will come together. To many, there’s a sense of urgency to restore at least some rights.

    “Real lives are on the line, and that has to be part of these political considerations,” said Mallory Schwarz, executive director of Abortion Action Missouri. “We have to consider both what is politically possible and also look at why that is possible in that moment.”

    ___

    Fernando reported from Chicago.

    ___

    The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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  • Republicans push back on Biden plan to axe federal funds for anti-abortion counseling centers

    Republicans push back on Biden plan to axe federal funds for anti-abortion counseling centers

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    WASHINGTON — In a new twist to the fight over abortion access, congressional Republicans are trying to block a Biden administration spending rule that they say will cut off millions of dollars to anti-abortion counseling centers.

    The rule would prohibit states from sending federal funds earmarked for needy Americans to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers,” which counsel against abortions. At stake are millions of dollars in federal funds that currently flow to the organizations through the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program, a block grant program created in 1996 to give cash assistance to poor children and prevent out-of-wedlock pregnancies.

    “Programs that only or primarily provide pregnancy counseling to women only after they become pregnant likely do not meet the … standard,” the Health and Human Services agency said in its rule proposal released late last year.

    More than 7,000 comments have been submitted on the proposed rule, which includes a series of restrictions on how states would be able to spend TANF monies.

    The proposal limiting funds for anti-abortion counseling centers is the Biden administration’s latest attempt to introduce federal policies that expand abortion access. Conservative states, meanwhile, have severely restricted the care since the U.S. Supreme Court stripped women of their federal right to an abortion in 2022.

    Congressional Republicans this week introduced legislation that would block the Health and Human Services Agency from restricting the funds from the centers. The bill has no chance of becoming law this year.

    “Pregnancy centers are an important and vital alternative for expectant mothers,” Republican Rep. Darin LaHood of Illinois said Thursday during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing to mark up the legislation.

    The anti-abortion counseling centers have become an increasingly popular way for conservatives to sermonize against abortions, with an Associated Press investigation last year finding that states have been sending more and more money to the programs over the last decade. More than a dozen states have given the centers roughly $500 million in taxpayer dollars since 2010. Last year, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor cut funding for all centers from the state budget.

    The centers’ mission is controversial not only because workers often advise pregnant patients against seeking an abortion, but, critics say, the organizations can provide some misleading information about abortion and contraception, like suggesting that abortion can cause breast cancer. Most centers are religiously affiliated and not licensed healthcare facilities. They typically offer pregnancy tests and some offer limited medical services such as ultrasounds.

    The Human Coalition, an anti-abortion organization that has locations in Georgia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Texas, estimates it would lose millions of dollars in funds, said Chelsey Youman, the group’s national director of public policy. Plans to expand to Louisiana and Indiana could be put on hold if the rule goes through, she added.

    Youman argues that her organization helps connect women to social services, like Medicaid, while persuading them to continue with their pregnancy.

    “The work we do is truly compassionate and loving care for women who are facing sometimes the most difficult moment of their life,” Youman said.

    HHS is suggesting several tweaks that would change how states can use the $16.5 billion in block grants intended for the nation’s neediest families. The proposal comes on the heels of a high-profile corruption scandal in Mississippi, where $77 million in TANF funds were squandered over several years.

    The restrictions would limit how much of the money ends up benefitting middle- and high-income earners, with the agency saying that the percentage of impoverished families who get cash assistance has dropped from nearly 70% in 1996 to just over 21% in 2020. The plan would restrict how states use the money for college scholarships and child care, for example.

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  • Louisiana Gov.-elect Jeff Landry has been inaugurated, returning the state's highest office to GOP

    Louisiana Gov.-elect Jeff Landry has been inaugurated, returning the state's highest office to GOP

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    BATON ROUGE, La. — Louisiana Gov.-elect Jeff Landry, a Republican endorsed by former President Donald Trump and known for his conservative positions on issues like abortion, was inaugurated Sunday evening — marking a political shift of leadership in a state that has had a Democratic governor for the last eight years.

    During his 30-minute speech, Landry called for unity and expressed his love for the Bayou State while also laying out some of his priorities, including an aggressive response to addressing “uncivilized and outrageous” violent crime and safeguarding schools from “the toxicity of unsuitable subject matter.”

    Landry will officially assume office as Louisiana‘s 57th governor on Monday at noon. His inauguration was originally scheduled to take place Monday but was pushed up to Sunday evening due to weather concerns.

    “It is fitting and appropriate that we stand today before this Capitol, the sun having set on the past and where a new Louisiana day dawns,” Landry said during his address.

    Landry took the oath of office on the steps of Louisiana’s Capitol, where hundreds of people watched. Once assuming office tomorrow afternoon, Republicans will occupy all statewide elected positions in Louisiana. Additionally, the GOP has a two-third supermajority in both the state House and Senate.

    Among those in attendance at the inauguration were House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, Donald Trump Jr., current Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards and former Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal.

    The walkways were lined with American flags and thin blue line American flags, a symbol that has become associated with Blue Lives Matter — a term which has been used by some police supporters in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. Landry, who has a law enforcement background, noted the rows of flags in his speech and said, “We know too well the sacrifice you give every day and the risk you endure to protect us from those who will not follow the laws of society.”

    Among Landry’s top priorities once in the governor’s mansion is addressing crime in urban areas. Louisiana has the nation’s second-highest murder rate per capita.

    Landry has vowed to call a special legislative session in his first few months in office to address the issue. He has pushed a tough-on-crime rhetoric, calling for more “transparency” in the justice system and continuing to support capital punishment.

    “I pledge to do all I possibly can to make our state safer and to bring an end to the misguided and deadly tolerance for crime and criminals that plague us,” Landry said Sunday.

    Landry, who has served as the state’s attorney general for eight years, won the gubernatorial election in October, beating a crowded field of candidates and avoiding a runoff. The win was a major victory for the GOP, reclaiming the governor’s mansion. Edwards was unable to seek reelection due to term limits.

    Landry, 53, has raised the profile of attorney general since taking office in 2016, championing conservative policy positions. He has been in the spotlight over his involvement and staunch support of Louisiana laws that have drawn much debate, including banning gender-affirming medical care for young transgender people, the state’s near-total abortion ban and a law restricting children’ access to “sexually explicit material” in libraries, which opponents fear will target LGBTQ+ books.

    “Our people seek government that reflects their values,” Landry said Sunday. “They demand that our children be afforded an education that reflects those wholesome principles, and not an indoctrination behind their mother’s back.”

    The governor-elect has been in national fights over President Joe Biden’s policies limiting oil and gas production and COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

    Prior to serving as attorney general, Landry spent two years on Capitol Hill, beginning in 2011, where he represented Louisiana’s 3rd U.S. Congressional District. Before that, he served 11 years in the Louisiana Army National Guard, was a local police officer, sheriff’s deputy and attorney.

    Along with addressing crime, Landry has also vowed to call a special redistricting session once in office.

    Louisiana lawmakers have until the end of January to draw and pass new congressional boundaries to replace a current map that a federal judge said violates the Voting Rights Act by diluting the power of the state’s Black voters.

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  • PolitiFact – TikTok video falsely links removal of Florida voters and abortion amendment

    PolitiFact – TikTok video falsely links removal of Florida voters and abortion amendment

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    Abortion rights supporters in Florida are hopeful that a question will land on the November ballot that will let voters ensure abortion rights. But if you believe a TikTok video, election officials have conspired to prevent passage by kicking Democrats off voter rolls.

    The TikTok user said Florida voter roll data showed that “almost a million people, mostly Democrats, have been kicked off the voter roll.”

    The speaker, who did not answer our message, said in the video that a half-million Democrats were “purged” from the voter roll “because they know Florida women are about to put abortion rights (in) on the Constitution in 2024.” 

    A TikTok user tagged us in the comments to verify whether this is true, so we investigated. (We have a separate partnership with TikTok to analyze videos flagged as potential misinformation.)

    Our review shows county officials have removed about 1 million people from voting lists, and about half were Democrats. 

    Why? It’s part of their annual work to comply with state law. We found no evidence that voters were removed to thwart a potential question on the November ballot to protect abortion rights. 

    The abortion question will appear on the ballot if organizers collect the required nearly 900,000 signatures by Feb. 1, which appears to have been met, and the Florida Supreme Court approves the ballot language. A University of North Florida poll in November showed strong support.

    Florida routinely updates voter rolls before federal elections

    The TikTok video shows voter registration data posted by Brian Beute, a candidate for Seminole County elections supervisor. Beute cited state data showing that near the end of 2023, Florida had 13.5 million active registered voters, down from 14.5 million in 2022. That included a decline of about 153,000 Republicans and 467,000 Democrats, while the rest were largely unaffiliated with a party. The decline happened despite state population growth.

    But that’s not the complete voter registration list, because it does not include inactive voters.

    “Inactive voters are still registered voters,” said Mark Ard, Florida Division of Elections spokesperson. “Inactive voters can’t be removed until after two general election cycles of inactivity because of federal and state law.”

    Inactivity means not voting or having any contact with the elections office.

    “Basically they need to fog a mirror for us — call us to request a ballot, show up at a polling place to vote,” said Broward County Elections Supervisor Joe Scott. 

    New election laws changed voter removal processes

    The decline of 1 million active voters was more than in recent years.

    “It is unusual to have this many voters be removed from the voter rolls in one year,” said Mark Earley, Leon County elections supervisor. “But it is due to election law changes over the last three legislative cycles.”

    Florida, like all states, focused on updating voter rolls in odd-numbered years because of federal law that prohibits most removals within 90 days of a federal election. With primaries and a general election, there are few windows for this to happen.

    In 2022, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed S.B. 524, which required county election supervisors to update the voter rolls annually. In 2023, DeSantis signed S.B. 7050, another elections bill that changed how election officials remove voters who have died, been convicted of felonies or moved. 

    The recent law shortened the process for providing voters with notice of removal.

    Before that law passed, if voters did not answer a final notice within 30 days to confirm they remained at the address and the notice didn’t bounce back, those voters stayed on the active list. Earley said that resulted in a backlog of voters who had moved out of the county or state but remained active registered voters, with no easy way to correct it.

    Under the new law, voters who don’t respond are moved to the inactive list. Then, if the voters have no contact with the elections office over two federal election cycles, those voters are removed.

    It did not surprise officials that the active-voter list declined by far more Democrats than Republicans. Democrats tend to be younger and more mobile and are therefore more likely to be removed from the voter rolls, said Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political science professor. 

    However, the number of active voters will likely rise as Floridians register or update their status before November. 

    Our ruling

    A TikTok user said, “Almost a million people, mostly Democrats, have been kicked off the voter roll here in Florida” because of a question about abortion that could appear on the 2024 ballot.

    There is an element of truth, because almost 1 million people were removed from the active-voter list, and about half were Democrats. However, the post misleads about the reason. 

    County election officials must follow state law to remove voters from the active list, and voters on the inactive list are teed up for removal years later. A question could be placed on the November ballot to protect abortion rights, but there is no evidence that this influenced election officials who were updating voter rolls.

    We rate this statement Mostly False. 

    RELATED: All of our fact-checks about elections

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  • Florida Is One Step Closer To Getting A Pro-Choice Amendment On The 2024 Ballot

    Florida Is One Step Closer To Getting A Pro-Choice Amendment On The 2024 Ballot

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    Abortion rights advocates in Florida have officially collected enough signatures to put a pro-choice amendment on the ballot in November.

    The state’s Division of Elections reported that the petition to put abortion on the ballot has received 911,029 verified signatures, as of Friday morning. The state requires 891,523 signatures for an amendment — a big hurdle in Florida, which has seen some of the most high-profile abortion battles since the Supreme Court repealed federal protections in 2022.

    The amendment seeks to guarantee access to abortion care up to fetal viability, which is usually around 24 weeks. Although hitting the threshold is a big milestone, the state Supreme Court ― known to lean conservative ― still has to sign off on the wording of the proposed ballot initiative.

    “No law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider,” the amendment states. As of now, the amendment clarifies that it would not change the state’s current law that requires parental consent for a minor to obtain an abortion.

    Abortion rights advocates celebrated the win on Friday, knowing it’s a critical step in a highly contentious abortion battle that’s been ongoing in the state.

    “The fact that we only launched our campaign eight months ago and we’ve already reached our petition goal speaks to the unprecedented support and momentum there is to get politicians out of our private lives and health care decisions,” Lauren Brenzel, campaign director of Floridians Protecting Freedom, said in a statement. Floridians Protecting Freedom is a coalition of statewide organizations, including Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union and Women’s Voices of Southwest Florida, that’s sponsoring the amendment.

    “Most initiative campaigns never make it this far,” Brenzel added. “The ones that do usually spend far more or take much longer to qualify, which is why we’re so confident that voters will approve our amendment once they’re given a chance to vote.”

    The Florida Supreme Court has scheduled a Feb. 7 hearing on the ballot proposal. Florida Attorney General Ashley Moody and other anti-choice advocates are fighting the initiative, claiming that the amendment is misleading – a tactic used by Republicans in several other states that have since passed pro-choice ballot initiatives.

    Florida currently has a 15-week abortion ban in effect, which was championed by Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), an extreme abortion opponent. DeSantis, who is also in the running to be the Republican presidential candidate, signed a six-week abortion ban into law last year, but it will not go into effect until the state Supreme Court rules on a challenge to the current 15-week restriction.

    The idea of a ballot initiative has been in the works since the end of 2022, after Roe v. Wade fell and DeSantis swiftly passed a 15-week abortion ban. Pro-choice amendments have won out in every state where abortion was on the ballot since 2022, including in red and purple states like Kentucky and Ohio.

    “Signatures came from everyone and everywhere, proving once again this is not a Republican or Democratic issue — it’s about freedom, healthcare, and safety,” state Senate Minority Leader Lauren Book tweeted on Friday. “No woman and no doctor should fear imprisonment over abortion care. No woman or mother should face death because she can’t get proper care. That’s what this fight is about, and that’s why we will win.”

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  • U.S. Women Are Stocking Up on Abortion Pills

    U.S. Women Are Stocking Up on Abortion Pills

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    Thousands of women stocked up on abortion pills just in case they needed them, new research shows, with demand peaking in the past couple years at times when it looked like the medications might become harder to get.

    Medication abortion accounts for more than half of all abortions in the U.S., and typically involves two drugs: mifepristone and misoprostol. A research letter published Tuesday in JAMA Internal Medicine looked at requests for these pills from people who weren’t pregnant and sought them through Aid Access, a European online telemedicine service that prescribes them for future and immediate use.

    Aid Access received about 48,400 requests from across the U.S. for so-called “advance provision” from September 2021 through April 2023. Requests were highest right after news leaked in May 2022 that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe v. Wade — but before the formal announcement that June, researchers found.

    Nationally, the average number of daily requests shot up nearly tenfold, from about 25 in the eight months before the leak to 247 after the leak. In states where an abortion ban was inevitable, the average weekly request rate rose nearly ninefold.

    “People are looking at looming threats to reproductive health access, looming threats to their reproductive rights, and potentially thinking to themselves: How can I prepare for this? Or how can I get around this or get out ahead of this?” said Dr. Abigail Aiken, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and one of the letter’s authors.

    Daily requests dropped to 89 nationally after the Supreme Court decision, the research shows, then rose to 172 in April 2023 when there were conflicting legal rulings about the federal approval of mifepristone. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on limits on the drug this year.

    Co-author Dr. Rebecca Gomperts of Amsterdam, director of Aid Access, attributed this spike to greater public awareness during times of uncertainty.

    Researchers found inequities in who is getting pills in advance. Compared with people requesting pills to manage current abortions, a greater proportion were at least 30 years old, white, had no children and lived in urban areas and regions with less poverty.

    Advance provision isn’t yet reaching people who face the greatest barriers to abortion care, said Dr. Daniel Grossman, an OB-GYN at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the research.

    “It’s not surprising that some people would want to have these pills on hand in case they need them, instead of having to travel to another state or try to obtain them through telehealth once pregnant,” he added in an email, also saying more research is needed into the inequities.

    Recently, Aiken said, some other organizations have started offering pills in advance.

    “It’s a very new idea for a lot of folks because it’s not standard practice within the U.S. health care setting,” she said. “It will actually be news to a lot of people that it’s even something that is offered.”

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  • Sinn Féin walks immigration tightrope toward power in Ireland

    Sinn Féin walks immigration tightrope toward power in Ireland

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    DUBLIN – For Sinn Féin chief Mary Lou McDonald to become Ireland’s next prime minister, she will have to negotiate a delicate path over the newly hot-button topic of immigration.

    Tensions about Ireland’s overwhelmed refugee system have shot to the top of the political agenda following race riots in Dublin — and now pose challenges for all parties ahead of elections later this year.

    While centrists in Ireland’s coalition government face their own backroom tensions over immigration policy, it is the main opposition party, Sinn Féin, which is considered most at risk of splitting its base and shedding support to right-wing rivals.

    Such a development would undercut Sinn Féin right on the cusp of an historic breakthrough in the Republic of Ireland, where it appears poised to gain power for the first time following decades of expansion from its longtime stronghold in neighboring Northern Ireland. The Irish republicans, with popular anti-establishment messages and strong working-class roots, have held a commanding lead in every opinion poll since 2020 — an advantage that could slip away as public unease over immigration spikes.

    Unusually for a nationalist party in Europe, Sinn Féin principally fishes for votes on the crowded left of the Irish political divide, not the relatively empty right – where, according to polling, many of its traditional supporters are flowing as they seek a tougher line on asylum seekers.

    Since November 23 — when an Algerian man stabbed three schoolchildren and a teacher in central Dublin, igniting rioting and vandalism by hundreds of protesters chanting bigoted slogans — Sinn Féin has seen its popularity fall below 30 percent in national polls for the first time in two years. Much of the lost support has drifted to rural independent politicians and right-wing fringe parties, among them Sinn Féin defectors now free to express immigration-critical views.

    Rank and file Sinn Féin politicians have been warned internally not to post anything on social media at odds with McDonald’s immigration stance, which focuses on the impact on services — reflecting a hyper-twitchy environment in which commentators are primed to pounce on any perceived hardening in her position.

    McDonald wants her party to stay focused on housing, specifically its core pre-election promise to build tens of thousands of public housing units beyond the government’s own expanding commitments.

    She sees anti-immigrant sentiment as tied to the soul-crushing struggle to secure an affordable home in a country where property prices and rents are among the highest in Europe. This market dysfunction reflects a Europe-leading population boom amid tight supply.

    ‘I share that anger’

    The pace of social change has been staggering, particularly on the relatively impoverished north side of Dublin. Barely a generation ago, Ireland had only 3.5 million people and almost no immigrants in a country where its own people were its biggest export. By contrast, a fifth of today’s nearly 5.3 million residents were born outside Ireland.

    The population boom has been fueled by nearly a decade of strong multinational-driven economic growth and, more recently, a disproportionate intake of 100,000 Ukrainian war refugees and more than 26,000 other asylum seekers, hundreds of whom are now sleeping in tents in parks and side streets. Starting later this month, the government is poised to cut benefits to new Ukrainian arrivals in a bid to reduce them coming via other EU states, where benefits are lower.

    “If you are a person who can’t get a home, or your son or daughter can’t get housed, and then you reckon that lots more people are coming to the country, naturally enough, you’re going to say: ‘Well, how am I going to be housed?’” McDonald told the Business Post, the latest in a series of interviews in which she portrays anti-immigrant sentiment as both understandable and unfair.

    Followers of Hare Krishna, many of whom fled Ukraine during the war, listen to a lecture after prayer near Enniskillen, western Northern Ireland | Paul Faith/AFP via Getty Images

    “All of that anger about housing, I share that anger,” she said. “But that’s on the government, not on new people coming into the state.”

    It’s an argument that, behind the scenes, McDonald and senior party lieutenants are having with their own supporters, whose anti-immigrant sentiment has been vividly captured by pollsters if not permitted on official Sinn Féin platforms.

    According to the most detailed recent survey isolating the views of each party’s grassroots, Sinn Féin voters came out as the most anti-immigrant.

    While majorities of voters for other parties identified continued immigration as positive, Sinn Féin’s took the opposite tack. More than 70 percent said too many immigrants were arriving, with a majority associating this with “an increase in crime” and Ireland “losing its personality.” Only 38 percent viewed immigration as “beneficial for the economy.”

    Tapping into those sentiments are a disparate array of right wing upstarts. Among them is Aontú (Unity), a party founded by ex-Sinn Féin lawmaker Peadar Tóibín, and the Rural Independents, a loose grouping of lawmakers including another Sinn Féin defector, Carol Nolan. Two other Rural Independents from Cork and Limerick have just founded a new party, Independent Ireland, which they bill as offering “a comfortable alternative” to Sinn Féin.

    Independents could potentially hold the balance of power following the next general election, which must come by March 2025 but is widely expected in late 2024.

    Sinn Féin vice president Michelle O’Neill, left, watches on during the Sinn Féin Ard Fheis | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

    First, however, these and other rising voices on the far right will get the chance to build grassroots organizations in local council elections, which take place in June alongside European Parliament elections. Likely candidates include anti-immigrant activists who have led protests outside vacant properties earmarked for housing asylum seekers, some of which have subsequently been torched.

    Police have failed to bring charges in relation to any of these arson attacks, which began in 2018 and escalated in size and frequency in the past year.

    McDonald – a Dubliner who succeeded Gerry Adams as Sinn Féin leader in 2018 – has started to experience heckling from far right activists as she attends meetings with local groups in her central Dublin constituency. These critics vow to field candidates for June’s council elections, potentially gaining a toehold in democratic institutions for the first time.

    Some are members of the Brexiteer-aping Irish Freedom Party, which predicts shelters “will continue to burn” unless government policy on immigration is reversed. Others back the far-right National Party, although its divided leadership is mired in dispute over the ownership of €400,000 in gold bars seized by police from the party’s HQ.

    The irony of Irish people demonizing immigrants is not lost on government ministers tasked with salvaging Ireland’s tourist-focused image of céad míle fáilte – “a hundred thousand welcomes.”

    When Nolan introduced a Rural Independents anti-immigration motion in parliament last month, Green Party Minister for Integration Roderic O’Gorman recalled how Ireland had “closed the doors” to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and should never act that way again – particularly given millions of Irish had emigrated since the 18th century in search of a better life.

    Sinn Féin principally fishes for votes on the crowded left of the Irish political divide, not the relatively empty right | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images

    Referring to the motion’s claim that placing “unvetted single males” in rural towns and villages presented “grave potential consequences for residents,” O’Gorman said the opposition should vet their own family trees.

    “Can any of us put our hand on our heart and say there is not a male member of our family who has not gone abroad seeking work?” he said. “There are ‘unvetted’ male migrants in every one of our families. We are lucky as a country that other countries let them come in and contribute to the system.”

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    Shawn Pogatchnik

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  • Kellyanne Conway Thinks Republicans Can Win Back Women in 2024 by Saying, “We Took Away Your Abortion Rights, but We’re Letting You Keep Contraception”

    Kellyanne Conway Thinks Republicans Can Win Back Women in 2024 by Saying, “We Took Away Your Abortion Rights, but We’re Letting You Keep Contraception”

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    Something you’ve probably heard by now is that the Republican Party’s decision to decimate reproductive rights—and celebrate the overturning of Roe v. Wade like it was the greatest thing to ever happen to America—has not gone over great with voters. The 2022 midterm elections, which were supposed to be a red tsunami for the GOP, were anything but: Democrats picked up a seat in the Senate and Republicans just barely took back the House, with voters in critical states citing abortion as the most important issue of the day. A year later, the right to an abortion was enshrined in Ohio’s state constitution; Kentucky voters reelected pro-choice governor Andy Beshear; and Democrats took control of Virginia’s state legislature, preventing the GOP governor from limiting abortion moving forward, which he’d planned to do. The results were unambiguous: The American people want abortion rights.

    Now, with the 2024 election less than a year away, what are Republicans running for higher office to do? According to GOP strategist and Donald Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway, the answer is simple: make their campaign slogan something like, “Yeah, we took away your reproductive rights, but, hey, we’re letting you keep contraception, and that’s something!”

    Politico reports that Conway plans to tell Republican lawmakers that the key to big wins this year is to focus less on the gutting of abortion access, and more on vocally supporting access to birth control, the logic apparently being that people will be grateful for what they can get (and too dumb to notice what they’re not getting). “You’ve got a fair number of Democrats saying that they want an alternative to [Joe] Biden and [Kamala] Harris, or they may sit it out,” Conway told Politico. “He’s especially bleeding young voters, who you would think would be animated and interested to hear about [contraception], and who are in the prime of their years and choosing to conceive or not to conceive.” Using an extremely strange analogy, Independent Women’s Voice CEO Heather Higgins told the outlet, “Republicans are like your uncle, who really loves you and loves the women in his family, but he’s bad about showing it. It’s just not in their natural vocabulary. And we’re trying to help them learn how to make this be more part of their vocabulary and tell them that they need to talk about these things that their constituents all support, and be more visible and vocal.”

    Both Conway and Higgins cited polling showing that more than eight in 10 independents and more than eight in 10 pro-life respondents agreed that, “Given the current political debate about abortion, it is more important than ever that women have access to the most modern and effective contraception method of their choice regardless of where they live, how much it costs, and where they receive health care services.” Of course, most Americans support abortion being legal to some degree, but neither Conway nor Higgins are telling GOP politicians to craft their policies and messaging around that. The two also don’t appear to be talking much about the fact that in 2022, just eight House GOP members voted in favor of the Right to Contraception Act, which would suggest that Republican lawmakers don’t actually support access to contraception, despite what they’ll be told to tell voters.

    Speaking to The Daily Beast, Republican senator Lisa Murkowski, one of the few people in her party who actually supports access to contraception and abortion, said she was skeptical the plan would work.

    “Does this help? Does a focus on contraception make Republicans well with women on the issue of abortion?” Murkowski asked. “I think that remains to be seen,” she said. For her part, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spokesperson Nebeyatt Betre told the outlet it absolutely won’t work, saying that no amount of “fancy marketing will change this fundamental truth: House Republicans have consistently pushed legislation to crack down on both abortion and contraception access in their assault on women’s reproductive freedoms.”

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    Bess Levin

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  • This Reproductive Justice Advocate Says “We Should Be Fighting For More” in 2024 – POPSUGAR Australia

    This Reproductive Justice Advocate Says “We Should Be Fighting For More” in 2024 – POPSUGAR Australia

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    As we wrap up 2023, the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in June 2022 to overturn Roe v. Wade is coming into clearer focus. Just this month, a decision by the Texas Supreme Court denying a woman a court-approved abortion set an important legal precedent around medical exceptions. And, looking ahead to 2024, the fate of abortion will be on the ballot in a dozen states.

    Communities of color have always been disproportionately affected by restricted abortion access. That’s why organizations like In Our Own Voice have sprung up – to address the inequality that has existed for so long and to seek reproductive justice for all.

    We spoke with Regina Davis Moss, president and CEO of In Our Own Voice, about what voters should keep in mind heading into 2024, what’s at stake for the Black community in particular when it comes to restricted abortion access, and more. Read it all, in her own words, below.

    It’s really important to understand that for Black women in particular, Roe is just the floor. It has never been enough. It’s always only centered the fact that we should have legal protection of abortion, which is absolutely the case, we should. However, we have always been challenged as Black women, girls, nonbinary people in terms of having the access. At times, we’ve also been challenged when we wanted to get pregnant in the first place; we’ve been sterilized without our consent.

    That is one thing that I always want to lift up – that while it does feel like a new era for a lot of people, for Black pregnant people, we’ve always been subjected to reproductive oppression. Now everyone knows what it’s like to be potentially surveilled and criminalized for trying to exercise your bodily autonomy.

    “Abortion is a matter of survival.”

    But the impact of the last couple of years is clear. It’s everything from providers being confused about what they can and can’t do; increased risk of intimate partner violence; life-threatening pregnancy complications; surveillance with at-home abortions. It’s really important to note that despite all of this, what I hear overwhelmingly is that abortion is a matter of survival. And whether we have political protection or not, people will still seek abortions. That’s ultimately going to drive people toward places where abortions are being provided by people who are not trained, and people are going to die.

    Disproportionately, women who are seeking abortions are already financially insecure. You have to overlay this with where we see the most restrictive abortion bans and where there are voter restrictions – in the South, you have the largest Black populations, and it’s where you see the most voter disenfranchisement as well as abortions bans and the highest maternal mortality rates. There’s absolutely no coincidence there. The goal is to keep people disempowered. When we’re not empowered and financially insecure, that pushes people into deeper poverty.

    “The goal is not just reproductive justice; it’s human rights.”

    What we’re trying to do at In Our Own Voice is to get people to vote with the reproductive justice lens. Because reproductive justice is a larger framework that’s basically asking people to go beyond abortion politics and intentionally welcomes in people from other movements, whether that’s economic justice, environmental justice, workers’ rights. The goal is not just reproductive justice; it’s human rights.

    We really focus on getting people to vote with the reproductive justice frame, because that’s really about advocating for human rights, advocating for voting rights, holding elected officials accountable, electing people who represent those values because they’re going to govern in the way that’s reflective of what you want. It’s also not just about national elections; it’s about state, local elections – it’s every year, year-round.

    Roe as we know it is gone. So we should lean into that and look at it as an opportunity to fight for more. Yes, we need to make sure legal protections are there, but we can fight for more and the things that we always wanted. Like, Medicaid does not cover abortion. Well, who’s disproportionately on Medicaid? So this is an opportunity to get at the access.

    Black women were saying Roe wasn’t enough because when you had things like the Hyde Amendment and you couldn’t even access abortion, what did that matter? We want things like comprehensive sex education, contraceptive equity. All of those things we have the opportunity to address in 2024. My argument will always be that we should be fighting for more.

    – As told to Lena Felton

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    Regina davis moss

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  • Kamala Harris to embark on reproductive freedoms tour as Biden campaign makes abortion a central issue

    Kamala Harris to embark on reproductive freedoms tour as Biden campaign makes abortion a central issue

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    Vice President Kamala Harris announced on Tuesday that she would be embarking on a national tour next year to advocate for women’s reproductive freedoms.

    “Extremists across our country continue to wage a full-on attack against hard-won, hard-fought freedoms as they push their radical policies – from banning abortion in all 50 states and criminalizing doctors, to forcing women to travel out of state in order to get the care they need,” Harris said in a statement.

    The first stop of the tour will take place in Wisconsin on Jan. 22, the anniversary of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. The tour’s remaining stops have not yet been announced. 

    Harris will “host events that highlight the harm caused by these abortion bans while sharing stories of those who have been impacted,” the press release said.

    The tour announcement comes one week after Biden-Harris campaign officials indicated in a call with reporters that they would make abortion a central issue of President Joe Biden’s re-election bid. They specifically expressed plans to elevate personal stories like that of Kate Cox, who had to travel out of Texas to undergo an abortion procedure after her fetus was diagnosed with a deadly disorder that could have also impacted her fertility. 

    Vice President Harris Delivers Remarks On Dobbs V. Jackson Women's Health Ruling Anniversary
    Vice President Kamala Harris speaks on the anniversary of the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in Charlotte, North Carolina, on June 24, 2023.

    Erik S. Lesser/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images


    Biden-Harris campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said on the call that cases like Cox’s are “extremely powerful because it shows, you know, the realities of white women and, you know, health care providers are facing in this moment. You know, with Roe being, you know, overturned, it’s just, we have a patchwork of state laws that are impacting the lives of women every single day.”

    Biden-Harris campaign officials also said they would attempt to tie restrictive abortion laws to former president Donald Trump’s legacy, but they emphasized that all the candidates vying for the Republican presidential nomination “want to rip away Americans’ freedoms.”

    “I mean, every single Republican running in this race is as extreme as the next when it comes to abortion. You’ve got DeSantis and Haley who signed abortion bans, and we’re talking about signing anything that comes across their desk,” said Michael Tyler, communications director for the Biden-Harris campaign. “And so that stands again in stark contrast to the President & Vice President who are promising to restore Roe.”

    Mr. Biden signed an executive order last year to address abortion access, and Harris has helmed the issue following the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. The Biden-Harris campaign’s push to make abortion a central feature appears to signify its intent to nationalize an issue that has been handed back to state legislators.

    Shawna Mizelle

    Shawna Mizelle is a 2024 campaign reporter for CBS News.

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  • North Dakota judge to decide whether to temporarily block part of abortion law that limits doctors

    North Dakota judge to decide whether to temporarily block part of abortion law that limits doctors

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    BISMARCK, N.D. — A North Dakota judge said Wednesday he will decide soon whether to temporarily block a part of the state’s revised abortion laws so doctors can perform the procedure to save a patient’s life or health.

    The request for a preliminary injunction asks state District Court Judge Bruce Romanick to bar the state from enforcing the law against physicians who use their “good-faith medical judgment” to perform an abortion because of pregnancy complications that could pose “a risk of infection, hemorrhage, high blood pressure, or which otherwise makes continuing a pregnancy unsafe.”

    North Dakota outlaws all abortions, except in cases where women could face death or a “serious health risk.” People who perform abortions could be charged with a felony under the law, but patients would not.

    Physicians, to mitigate risk of prosecution, “feel like they must delay offering abortions to their patients until the patients’ health has declined to the point where other physicians could not plausibly disagree that it was necessary to provide an abortion,” Center for Reproductive Rights attorney Meetra Mehdizadeh said.

    “Patients and physicians have experienced significant harm,” she said. “For patients, the denial of their constitutional rights and forced additional health risks; and for physicians, the harm of having the threat of criminal prosecution hanging over their head every time they treat a patient with a medical complication.”

    The state’s revised abortion laws also provide an exception for pregnancies caused by rape and incest, but only in the first six weeks, before many women know they are pregnant. It also allows for treatment of ectopic and molar pregnancies, which are nonviable situations.

    Special Assistant Attorney General Dan Gaustad cited the plaintiffs’ “seven-month delay” in seeking a preliminary injunction, and he disputed the “good-faith medical judgment” language. He told the judge the plaintiffs are asking him “to modify and rewrite the statute under the guise of a preliminary injunction.” The law uses ”reasonable medical judgment.”

    The Red River Women’s Clinic sued the state last year after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the court’s landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling establishing a nationwide right to abortion. The lawsuit targeted the state’s since-repealed trigger ban — a ban designed to go into effect immediately if the court overturned Roe v. Wade — as unconstitutional. The clinic moved from Fargo to neighboring Moorhead, Minnesota, where abortion is legal.

    The judge granted a preliminary injunction blocking the ban from taking effect last year, which the state Supreme Court upheld in March.

    Chief Justice Jon Jensen wrote in the court’s March decision that “it is clear the citizens of North Dakota have a right to enjoy and defend life and a right to pursue and obtain safety, which necessarily includes a pregnant woman has a fundamental right to obtain an abortion to preserve her life or her health.”

    Soon afterward, North Dakota’s Republican-controlled Legislature passed a bill revising the state’s abortion laws, which Gov. Doug Burgum signed into effect in April.

    In June, the clinic filed an amended complaint, joined by several doctors in obstetrics, gynecology and maternal-fetal medicine. A jury trial is scheduled for August 2024.

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  • The Pitch for a Unity Ticket in 2024 Keeps Getting Weaker

    The Pitch for a Unity Ticket in 2024 Keeps Getting Weaker

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    As questions endure about the electability and the competency of the two leading candidates for president, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, No Labels—a group that has pitched itself as a bipartisan band intent upon propping up a third-party candidacy with a “unity ticket” in 2024—seems to be adopting—if quietly—the latest Republican position du jour on abortion. The group’s position, tacitly endorsing a 15-week ban, has furthered the criticisms that they are a Republican stalking horse pitching unity but actually resolved to prove a spoiler to a Biden ticket.

    Since its inception, No Labels’ stance has been that Americans are sick of bitter partisanship and should have more options. In 2010, according to Slate, the group’s website posited that social issues like gay marriage and abortion “keep Americans from working together” and that it wanted “to help call a cease-fire in the culture wars by focusing on common ground goals rather than absolutist positions on the left or right.”

    But, today, No Labels doesn’t seem to be ignoring those so-called wedge issues at all. David Brooks listed some of them in a column for The New York Times last year, including “no guns for anyone under 21 and universal background checks” and “moderate abortion policies with abortion legal until about 15 weeks.”

    In July, the group published a policy booklet describing their approach to addressing the country’s most contentious issues. The phrasing is purposefully fuzzy. At first, they note that most abortions happen before 15 weeks, helping the argument that many Republican members have propped up as a “consensus” position on abortion. Then, they remark that Americans will not find a compromise on this issue until there’s a leader in office who navigates the issue with empathy and respect: “Abortion is too important and complicated an issue to say it’s common sense to pass a law—nationally or in the states—that draws a clear line at a certain stage of pregnancy.” 

    Republicans, including Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, former vice president Mike Pence, head of the Republican National Committee Ronna McDaniel, and failed presidential hopeful Tim Scott, among others, have taken up the 15-week stance. However, some antiabortion advocates have said that particular rhetoric has not helped the cause. “Talking about 15 weeks was incorrect,” Olivia Gans Turner, president of the Virginia Society for Human Life, an antiabortion group, said, according to a Politico report. “It became about the weeks, not about the ability of the unborn child to feel pain.”

    “It’s kind of no shock that No Labels is pushing an antiabortion agenda considering they are being run by a lot of Republicans with a vested interest in pushing an antiabortion agenda,” Alexandra De Luca, the vice president of strategic communications at American Bridge 21st Century, a progressive and Democratic research group, told Vanity Fair. Indeed, the group’s leadership includes Republicans Larry Hogan and Pat McCory, plus former Democrat turned independent Joe Lieberman. Notably, the politicians No Labels has propped up include Jon Huntsman and Joe Manchin. When Huntsman served as the Republican governor of Utah, he signed multiple pieces of antiabortion legislation. Manchin, meanwhile, has had a mixed record on abortion. He was the sole Democrat to vote alongside the entire Senate Republican caucus against the Women’s Health Protection Act, which would have enshrined the right to abortion nationwide as well as providing other reproductive rights protections. However, Manchin did say he would vote on a narrower codification of *Roe—*a position seemingly at odds with No Labels’ “compromise” ban, emphasizing the clumsiness of the group’s goals.

    Democratic wins in Ohio and, ostensibly, Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania this November have proved that abortion access is a motivating issue for voters. Reproductive rights advocates are also quick to argue that a 15-week ban is medically arbitrary, and it would just serve as a starting point for Republicans intent on banning abortion outright. No Labels has argued that a third-party ticket could siphon off enough votes from both parties to be a viable alternative. But polling only partially bears this premise out. Instead, a No Labels candidate would likely hurt Biden and help clear Trump’s path to the White House.

    While the White House has remained largely mum on No Labels’ mission, behind closed doors, it appears the effort is causing much angst within some Democratic circles. “What we hear universally from Democrats is deep concern about this,” said Matt Bennett, the executive vice president of public affairs at Third Way, a moderate Democratic think tank that has come out in opposition of a third-party candidacy.

    Bennett added in the July interview with Vanity Fair, “We have not encountered a single Democrat who doesn’t think this is bad, other than, you know, Senator Manchin himself, basically,”—a reference to the moderate West Virginia senator who earlier this year headlined a No Labels event and whose recent decision not to seek reelection amplified existing speculation that he might run third party for president. Even Representative Dean Phillips, a vocal advocate of widening the Democratic presidential primary field before he announced his own bid, told VF this summer that anyone running third party—such as Cornel West and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—“Those people are absolutely helping Trump.”

    Former Michigan congressman Fred Upton, a Republican working with No Labels, seemingly said the quiet part out loud earlier this month. “I’d like to think that we’d have a Republican presidential candidate and a Democratic vice presidential candidate.”

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    Abigail Tracy

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  • Some state abortion bans stir confusion, and it's uncertain if lawmakers will clarify them

    Some state abortion bans stir confusion, and it's uncertain if lawmakers will clarify them

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    Ever since the nation’s highest court ended abortion rights more than a year ago, vaguely worded bans enacted in some Republican-controlled states have caused bewilderment over how exceptions should be applied.

    Supporters have touted these exemptions, tucked inside statutes restricting abortion, as sufficient enough to protect the life of the woman. Yet repeatedly, when applied in heart-wrenching situations, the results are much murkier.

    “We have black and white laws on something that is almost always multiple shades of gray,” said Kaitlyn Kash, one of 20 Texas women denied abortion who are suing the state seeking clarification of the laws — one of a handful of similar lawsuits playing out across the country.

    State lawmakers there and elsewhere face growing pressure to answer these questions by amending laws in legislative sessions that start in most states next month. But it’s not certain how — or whether — they will.

    Before the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision in June 2022, nearly every state allowed abortion at least until a fetus would be viable outside the womb — around 24 weeks’ gestational age, or about 22 weeks after conception.

    Yet the new ruling cleared the way for states to impose tighter restrictions or bans; several had such laws already on the books in anticipation of the decision.

    Currently, 14 states are enforcing bans on abortion throughout pregnancy. Two more have such bans on hold due to court rulings. And another two have bans that take effect when cardiac activity can be detected, about six weeks into pregnancy — often before women know they’re pregnant.

    Each state ban has a provision that allows abortion under at least some circumstances to save the life of the mother. At least 11 — including three with the strictest bans — allow abortion because of fatal fetal anomalies, and some do when the pregnancy was the result of rape or incest.

    But a provision included in a law enacted by Congress in 1986 and signed by Republican President Ronald Reagan said abortion must be available when a pregnant woman’s life is at risk during a medical emergency.

    But a lack of clarity over how to apply that rule and other exceptions in state laws has escalated the trauma and heartache some women experience while facing serious medical issues but unable to access abortion in their home states.

    The case of Katie Cox, a Texas woman who sued for immediate access to abortion amid a fraught pregnancy and was denied by the state’s top court, received broad attention this month.

    Meanwhile, Jaci Statton filed a complaint in Oklahoma claiming the state violated the federal rule. She said in court documents that because her own life wasn’t found to be in immediate peril when doctors deemed her pregnancy nonviable, she was told to wait in a hospital parking lot until her conditioned worsened enough to qualify for life-saving care.

    In Tennessee, Nicole Blackmon told reporters that a 15-week ultrasound showed that several of her baby’s major organs were growing outside its stomach and it would likely not survive. Even so, her medical team told her she didn’t have the option to have an abortion. She eventually delivered a stillborn baby because she could not afford to travel out of state for an abortion.

    The vagueness surrounding the Volunteer State’s abortion ban has prompted Republican state Sen. Richard Briggs’ push to tweak the law during the upcoming 2024 legislative session. However, it’s unclear how far the measure will advance inside the GOP-controlled statehouse where many members are running for reelection.

    Republicans carved out an extremely narrow exception earlier this year, but Briggs, who is a doctor, said the statute still fails to properly help women and doctors. He wants the law to include a list diagnoses when abortion could be appropriate and protect women with pregnancy complications who may end up infertile if they don’t receive an abortion.

    Other states took steps in 2023 to address the confusion, but advocates say they didn’t fully accomplish the task.

    In Texas, lawmakers this year added a provision that offers doctors some legal protection when they end pregnancies in cases of premature rupture of membranes, commonly referred to as water breaking, or ectopic pregnancies. which can lead to dangerous internal bleeding.

    Across the country, advocates on both sides anticipate more legislatures will consider adding or clarifying abortion ban exceptions and definitions in 2024, though few, if any, such measures have been filed so far.

    “What is and is not an abortion, what is an abortion emergency?” said Denise Burke, senior counsel with Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal advocacy group that his behind many anti-abortion lawsuits. “That may need some clarification in some areas.”

    Meanwhile, in state where Democrats are in control, lawmakers are expected to push to loosen abortion restrictions and expand access.

    This year, Maine became the seventh state to have no specific limit on when during pregnancy an abortion can be obtained.

    Greer Donley, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, who is an expert on abortion law, said there could be a push for more changes like that: “Many people are questioning whether a line should exist at all right now.”

    The line is stark in Texas, where changes are unlikely in 2024 because lawmakers aren’t scheduled to meet.

    In Texas, Kash and 19 other women who were denied abortions, plus two physicians, have a lawsuit before the state’s Supreme Court seeking to clarify when abortions should be allowed.

    Kash, who already had one child, was overjoyed at the thought of telling family and friends that she was expecting. But after a routine ultrasound 13 weeks into pregnancy, she learned that the baby had severe skeletal dysplasia – a condition affecting bone and cartilage growth. Her baby was unlikely to survive birth or likely to suffocate soon after being born.

    “Is this where we talk about termination?” Kash asked her doctor.

    “He told me to get a second opinion out of state,” she recalled.

    Her health wasn’t immediately at risk of failing, so she didn’t qualify for any of the narrow exceptions to allow her doctor to provide her abortion services. Instead, she went to another state to terminate her pregnancy legally.

    In the arguments on the case last month, a lawyer for the patients told the justices about the confusion.

    “While there is technically a medical exception to the ban,” Molly Duane, a Center for Reproductive Rights lawyer said, “no one knows what it means and the state won’t tell us.”

    Beth Klusmann, an assistant state attorney general, said that the law does include guidance: Doctors must use “reasonable medical judgment” when deciding whether a pregnant woman’s life is at risk.

    She added that “there are always going to be harder calls at the edge” of the lines of any abortion ban.

    Marc Hearron, a lawyer at the Center for Reproductive Rights who is leading the Texas case, said he does not have a lot of confidence in lawmakers across the U.S. to do it right generally.

    “Legislatures do not have a track record of listening to doctors,” he said. “We’re certainly not waiting on legislatures to do the right thing.”

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  • Overturning Roe Has Been a Horror Show

    Overturning Roe Has Been a Horror Show

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    The moment Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, I knew Roe’s days were numbered. Sometime in 2019, a conservative friend texted me that Donald Trump was saving Amy Coney Barrett for when RBG dies. Sure enough, Trump tapped Coney Barrett shortly after trailblazing justice’s death, with Mitch McConnell steamrolling the nomination through the Senate just ahead of the 2020 election. By the following September, the conservative majority Supreme Court refused—by way of the “shadow docket”—to block Texas law SB8, which banned nearly all abortions, and with that, functionally overturned Roe, before officially doing so nine months later.

    With nearly 50 years of precedent wiped away, and an existing constitutional right to an abortion eliminated, I worried about all the cruel and chaotic scenarios that could play out, such as doctors being afraid to treat miscarriages. One of the reasons Roe was decided so broadly in 1973 was because doctors found themselves hamstrung by existing legislation, more worried about losing their medical licenses than their patients.

    Unfortunately, that’s what played out after the 2022 Dobbs decision striking down Roe v Wade, with The New York Times reporting weeks later how “the uncertain climate has led some doctors and hospitals to worry about being accused of facilitating an abortion, a fear that has also caused some pharmacists to deny or delay filling prescriptions for medication to complete miscarriages, providers and patients say.” A Texas hospital refused to provide a procedure known as dilation and curettage, or D&C, for a woman who appeared to be in the middle of a “miscarriage in process.” and instead sent her home to bleed in her bathtub over two days. More recently, an Oklahoma woman was told to wait until she was “bleeding out” before coming back for treatment for her partial molar pregnancy.

    For millions of women, it’s more dangerous to be pregnant in post-Roe America, and there have been countless stories of doctors refusing to treat women who are miscarrying in Ohio, Wisconsin, Missouri, and Texas, which was recently back in the news under particularly awful circumstances. The plight of Kate Cox, a Dallas-area mother of two, again highlighted the seemingly intentional vagueness of abortion-ban exceptions. Cox would appear to be an ideal candidate for an exception given that her 20-week-old fetus was diagnosed with trisomy 18, a defect which has roughly a 95% fetal death rate. She also already had two C-sections, and having more such surgeries could endanger the mother’s life.

    With three overlapping abortion bans in Texas, according to NPR, the procedure “is illegal in the state from the moment pregnancy begins” and doctors can only legally “provide abortions in the state only if a patient is ‘in danger of death or a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.’” While “doctors, hospitals and lawyers have asked for clarity on what ‘serious risk’ of a major bodily function entails,” notes NPR, “the Texas attorney general’s office has held that the language is clear.” Republican attorney general Ken Paxton, the villain of this story (and others), reminded doctors that a lower court ruling saying Cox could have an exception to the draconian law “will not insulate hospitals, doctors, or anyone else, from civil and criminal liability for violating Texas’ abortion laws.”

    Some may argue that the vagueness in the law is inadvertent, but my guess is that it’s intentional, a way to prevent doctors from treating these women and making sure exceptions are never implemented. Greer Donley, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh whose research includes the workability of medical exceptions to abortion regulations, wrote in the Times that “the [Texas] law does have a narrow exception allowing abortions in some medical emergencies, but it is written in such a vague and confusing way that it is difficult for even experts on this topic, like myself, to parse.”

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    Molly Jong-Fast

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