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    Nigel Farage is cosying up to the US anti-abortion group that challenged Roe v Wade. Women in Britain should know that | Zoe Williams

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    Nigel Farage’s obsession with free speech has become the mood music of his own party, the Conservatives and the BBC, so it shouldn’t have been shocking or troubling to learn that he’d testified in the US Congress on 3 September on the subject of this elemental liberty, and how profoundly at risk it is in the UK.His position we could recite in our sleep – it hasn’t deviated, and remains nonsense on stilts. Free speech is only at risk in the UK insofar as 80-year-olds can now be arrested for opposing genocide with homemade placards, and that’s quite a big “only”. But in Nigel’s upside-down world he is remorselessly censored, and a leftist cabal is still calling the shots – and will only get stronger. The troubling element wasn’t what he said, but who orchestrated his appearance.The Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is a conservative Christian lobby group whose allies include JD Vance and speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, who used to work as an ADF lawyer. While their focus, brokering Farage’s appearance in Congress (the formal invitation came from the House judiciary committee) is on free speech, the legal challenges they bring, both in the US and internationally, tend to use the issue instrumentally as a way to gain allies in their battle against reproductive rights.ADF UK has given legal support to people who’ve been prosecuted for protesting outside abortion clinics, breaching the UK’s “buffer zones”, and to the midwife who was suspended from her job for making anti-abortion statements on social media. It also uses the existence of legislation against this harassment as proof of a free-speech crisis in the country. The two issues are thus conjoined in a ratchet, where any victory in one becomes grist for the other.The buffer-zones debate works particularly well, appealing as it does to a progressive sense of fair-mindedness – come on, liberal, if you want to be allowed to call out a genocide, who are you to stop a Christian calling out a pregnant woman for murdering a baby? It’s an argument whose bad faith you can smell a mile off, but it’s enough to sow confusion and turn the wokerati against itself.When Farage was head of the Brexit party, it had no stance on abortion. The New York Times could find no record of his having done so, anyway, and knowing him as we all do, you can’t imagine it: it doesn’t chime at all with the smoking, pint-loving, British pound sterling and sovereignty guy, to be digging around in women’s business. Yet as if by magic, suddenly last November, he wanted to talk about rolling back the abortion time limit “given that we can now save babies at 22 weeks” (the time limit is 24). By May this year, the current limit was “absolutely ludicrous” , according to Nigel. Although he did say to New York Times reporters that it was “bollocks” to say he had found a new interest in the topic of reproductive rights.ADF lawyers have told journalists explicitly that their goal, long term, is to see abortion rights curtailed in the UK – to which one’s every synapse screams, “in your dreams, you hubristic fantasists”. But we’ve seen how fast the current Labour leadership and the Conservatives scramble to meet Reform UK halfway.We have already seen how influenced by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 the Conservatives are: from seeing renewable energy as a way to future-proof the economy to now seeing it as a woke conspiracy we can’t afford. Five years ago, it would have been considered tawdry to be interested in the physiology of whoever was in the toilet cubicle next to you, and now it is a matter for the UK supreme court. Attitudes to migration were becoming steadily more positive from 2015. However, in 2023, they flipped negative, and have since galvanised a hardcore of protesters whose aggression has since torched asylum hotels and left foreign-born carers scared to get out of their cars.Which politicians do you trust to stand up to what is basically authoritarian empire-building? Because the time to start supporting them is now, not five to midnight.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

    Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist More

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      Where do babies come from? Robert F Kennedy Jr doesn’t seem to know | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr is the father of six children. He’s also the US health secretary. Two facts that might lead a reasonable person to assume he possesses a basic understanding of how foetuses develop.In a shocking development, however, it seems that Kennedy – an anti-vaxxer who says his brain was partly eaten by a parasitic worm – may not know what he’s talking about. During a cabinet meeting last Thursday, Kennedy reasserted unproven claims that taking the common painkiller acetaminophen, also known as Tylenol or paracetamol, while pregnant causes autism. Doubters of this theory, he said, were motivated by Trump derangement syndrome. To underscore his point, he referenced a TikTok video he’d seen of a pregnant woman “gobbling Tylenol with her baby in her placenta”.Foetuses, of course, develop in the uterus, not the placenta. It’s possible, if we are being generous, that Kennedy misspoke. Then again, he would hardly be the first US politician to make it clear he knows nothing about the female bodies he is so keen to legislate, would he?In 2019, for example, 25 Republicans – all white men – voted for a near-total ban on abortion in Alabama. During the debate, Clyde Chambliss, one of the bill’s sponsors in the Senate, noted that while he didn’t have medical training, “from what I’ve read, what I’ve been told, there’s some period of time before you can know that a woman is pregnant … It takes some time for all those chromosomes and all that.” Chambliss went on to say the generous bill allowed a woman to end her pregnancy “up until the point she is known to be pregnant”. Yeah, I don’t know what he means either.Then there’s the Ohio Republican John Becker, who once co-sponsored a bill prohibiting insurers from covering abortion services, except for a procedure “intended to reimplant” an ectopic pregnancy in a woman’s uterus. This is medically impossible. After this was pointed out, Becker said he’d never actually researched the issue.And there’s the Idaho lawmaker who once asked if a woman could swallow a small camera so doctors could conduct a remote gynaecological exam. No, he was told by a doctor, because swallowed pills don’t end up in your vagina. “Fascinating,” he replied.I could go on; I’m afraid there are endless examples. But I’ll end with the late Todd Akin, a conservative Missouri Republican, who said in 2012 that “legitimate rape” rarely results in pregnancy because “the female body has ways to try and shut that whole thing down”. Yep, that same crafty female body that grows babies in its placenta. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

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      Anti-abortion groups furious as FDA approves generic abortion pill

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      In a move that has left anti-abortion advocates reeling, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) quietly approved a request to manufacture a new abortion pill earlier this week.Thanks to the approval, a company called Evita Solutions will be able to manufacture its generic version of mifepristone, one of two drugs typically used in most US medication abortions. A generic version of mifepristone, which was first approved as a brand-name drug in 2000, is already available on the market.Yet the approval stunned and infuriated foes of abortion, who have spent the three years since the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade pressuring the federal government to curb access to mifepristone. Robert F Kennedy Jr, the health secretary, announced last month his department would review the safety of mifepristone.“FDA had promised to do a top-to-bottom safety review of the chemical abortion drug, but instead they’ve just greenlighted new versions of it for distribution,” Josh Hawley, a Republican senator from Missouri and fierce abortion opponent, posted on X. “I have lost confidence in the leadership at FDA.”Kristan Hawkins, president of the powerful anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, called the approval “a true failure”.“This is a stain on the Trump presidency,” she added in a statement.To bolster their attack on mifepristone, anti-abortion activists recently seized on an April paper by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a rightwing thinktank, claiming almost 11% of women experience sepsis or other serious complications within 45 days of taking mifepristone. In his letter announcing the review of mifepristone, Kennedy cited the center’s paper.But that paper was not peer-reviewed nor published in a medical journal, and experts have uncovered multiple flaws in it. For example, it counts ectopic pregnancies – wherein an embryo implants somewhere outside of the uterine lining – as a serious complication. Mifepristone does not cause or worsen ectopic pregnancies.Meanwhile, more than 100 studies, conducted across more than three decades and dozens of countries, have concluded that mifepristone is a safe and effective tool to end a pregnancy.Abortion rights supporters celebrated the news of the FDA’s approval, proclaiming it a victory for evidence-backed medicine.“By expanding generic options, the agency is reinforcing mifepristone’s impeccable safety record,” Kiki Freedman, co-founder and CEO of the telemedicine abortion provider Hey Jane, said in a statement.“At a time when politically motivated attacks threaten to undermine science and restrict care, it’s critical to underscore that the science couldn’t be clearer.”The health department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, a spokesperson for the department told the New York Times in a statement that “the FDA has very limited discretion in deciding whether to approve a generic drug”.“By law, the secretary of Health and Human Services must approve an application if it demonstrates that the generic drug is identical to the brand-name drug,” the spokesperson said. More

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      DoJ sues pro-Palestinian activists under law often used to protect abortion clinics

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      The Trump administration has filed a first-of-its-kind civil rights lawsuit against pro-Palestinian groups and activists, accusing the advocates of violating a law that has traditionally been used to protect reproductive health clinics from anti-abortion harassment and violence.The lawsuit, filed on Monday by the justice department’s civil rights division, alleges that two advocacy groups and six people broke the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (Face) Act when they protested against an event at a West Orange, New Jersey, synagogue in November 2024. The event at the Ohr Torah synagogue promoted the sale of property in Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, which are widely considered illegal under international law. Similar events have sparked protests in the years since the outbreak of the war in Gaza, but this event escalated into violence.One man, a pro-Israel counterprotester, pepper-sprayed a pro-Palestinian demonstrator, while another counterprotester bashed the same demonstrator in the head with a flashlight, according to a local news outlet. Local New Jersey prosecutors ultimately filed charges against the two counterprotestors on multiple counts, including aggravated assault. (The pair have denied the accusations against them.)The lawsuit filed by the Trump administration portrays the pro-Palestinian advocates as the aggressors. It alleges that some of the advocates physically assaulted at least one pro-Israel protester, effectively used vuvuzelas “as weapons” – arguing that the horns are “reasonably known to lead to permanent noise-induced hearing loss” – and ultimately disrupted both a memorial service and a lecture on the Torah.“These violent protesters meant their actions for evil, but we will use this case to bring forth good: the protection of all Americans’ religious liberty,” Harmeet K Dhillon, an assistant attorney general in the justice department’s civil rights division, said in a press conference on Monday.The Trump administration is asking a court to fine the pro-Palestinian demonstrators more than $30,000 for their first violation of the Face Act, and roughly $50,000 for each subsequent violation.One of the groups named in the lawsuit, American Muslims for Palestine-New Jersey, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The national branch of another group, the Party for Socialism and Liberation-New Jersey, also did not immediately respond. The other defendants could not be immediately reached for comment.The Face Act penalizes people who go beyond peaceful protest to threaten, obstruct or injure someone who is trying to access a reproductive health clinic or “place of religious worship”, but the federal government has never used the act to protect houses of worship, Dhillon confirmed during the press conference. Instead, it has historically been used to guard abortion clinics, since former president Bill Clinton signed the 1994 bill into law amid unprecedented violence against abortion providers and clinics. The Face Act is so unpopular among anti-abortion advocates that Republicans have repeatedly called for its repeal.For Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California’s Davis School of Law, the new case is especially striking because the Trump administration announced earlier this year that it would dramatically curtail its use of the Face Act to protect abortion clinics. Donald Trump has also pardoned several anti-abortion protesters who had been convicted under the Face Act.“It probably feels like a slap in the face to people who support reproductive rights,” said Ziegler, who studies the legal history of reproduction. “The administration has said it’s open season when it comes to the Face Act and reproductive health clinics – but is being pretty aggressive in enforcing it when it comes to places of worship.”Ziegler also sees this use of the Face Act as a means of bigfooting local prosecutors in blue states – and, potentially, cracking down on protests writ large.“If you’re the Trump administration and you want to shut down pro-Palestinian protests altogether, reaching for the Face Act makes sense,” Ziegler said. “The reason the Face Act was put into place is because people were worried that clinic blockades were dangerous and were leading to violence – and, more importantly, because other criminal laws weren’t getting the job done. So the Trump administration is looking to a federal law with steeper penalties probably for a similar reason.” More

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      The abortion pill is safe. But why should Trump let facts get in the way of his agenda? | Moira Donegan

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr’s health department is conducting a new review of mifepristone, the drug used in the majority of American abortions, claiming that a new study from a conservative thinktank has raised concerns about its safety.Mifepristone, which was approved by the FDA 25 years ago this month, has repeatedly been proven safe and effective for use terminating pregnancies in both multiple medical trials and in widespread patient use over the past quarter of a century. The report cited by Kennedy, meanwhile, comes from the Ethics and Public Policy Center – a group that applies “the Jewish and Christian traditions” to modern law and pushes back “against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives” – and was not peer reviewed. The study has been heavily criticized by medical experts for its methodology and lack of transparency regarding how it obtained and analyzed its data. The report appears to have dramatically inflated the rate of serious adverse health outcomes in patients who took mifepristone – in part by seemingly conflating the bleeding that occurs in the normal course of a medication abortion with hemorrhaging, and in part by relying on unclear terminology. The Ethics and Public Policy Center report classified “serious adverse events” as occurring in almost 11% of mifepristone patients. More reliable studies, subject to data transparency, peer review, and a more rigorously honest set of definitions, have found that such adverse health events happen in fewer than 0.5% of users. In a meta-analysis of more than 100 studies, the vast majority found that more than 99% of people who use mifepristone have no serious complications.Mifepristone is safe. But why let the facts get in the way of the Trump administration’s political agenda? The review of mifepristone marks the second time in less than a week that the Trump administration has marshalled false medical claims and junk science in an effort to constrain the freedoms of pregnant women and curtail their access to relief. On Monday, in a bizarre, rambling and frequently nonsensical press conference, the president appeared alongside Kennedy Jr to claim, falsely, that Tylenol use during pregnancy can cause autism in the resulting children, and to instruct pregnant women to avoid the painkiller and instead “tough it out”.The Trump administration has long been under pressure from the anti-abortion movement – which, not satisfied by the end of Roe v Wade (in a decision delivered to them by Trump’s appointees, hand-selected for the purpose), has continually pushed the administration to further limit access to abortion. Donald Trump has seemed unwilling to directly attack abortion, appearing to think that the issue is a political loser for him. But his administration has already curtailed access nationwide. His massive domestic spending bill included a provision barring most abortion providers from receiving Medicaid reimbursements for any services they provide – abortion related or not – for a year, a move that makes it dramatically more expensive for clinics to offer abortion services. As a result, clinics are already shutting their doors in Democratically-controlled states like California. In Wisconsin, where the battle for abortion legalization led to a fantastically expensive state supreme court race and massive voter mobilization, the state Planned Parenthood affiliate made the decision to stop providing abortions in order to retain access to the Medicaid funding they need to stay open – even though that enormous political effort succeeded in re-legalizing abortion in the state.But that’s not enough for the anti-choice right. Three Republican-controlled states – Missouri, Idaho and Kansas – are suing the FDA, seeking to reverse changes to mifepristone regulations that allowed the drug to be prescribed via telemedicine and sent through the mail, and to restore other restrictions on the drug. Texas, Florida and Louisiana are seeking to join and expand that lawsuit to further restrict mifepristone. The new regulations, which have been endorsed by leading health experts, have made mifepristone dramatically more accessible in the years since the Dobbs decision, as women living in states that ban abortion seek out ways to have the medication prescribed and mailed to them by physicians abroad or in Democratically controlled states.Kennedy’s move against mifepristone could restrict access even further. Compared with surgery, the pill is a more accessible, safer and less resource-intensive way for clinics to provide abortions. It does not require a surgical room or very much of a provider’s time; patients can take the pills and have their abortions in the comfort and privacy of their own homes. Getting rid of the abortion pill, or making it harder to access, would put even more strain on abortion providers who are already having a difficult time keeping their heads above water.Even more tragically, the move could be devastating for women’s health and lives. In the pre-Roe era, when abortion was illegal and mifepristone had not yet been invented, many women in need of abortions sought out surgical procedures on the black market. But surgery is much riskier than taking a pill, and many of these women experienced injuries and infections that killed or permanently maimed them. There is exactly one reason why the US has not yet seen a return to those bad old days of unsafe surgical abortions and mass female death: that reason is mifepristone. The drug saves women’s dreams and dignity by allowing them to control their own reproduction; it saves their lives by allowing them to avoid a dangerous surgery in an illegal market. Even in liberal states, abortion has become much harder to access than it was before Dobbs; that alone is an injury to women’s citizenship and status. With mifepristone under threat, it looks like the Trump administration is threatening their lives, too.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump’s absurd Tylenol claims heighten the suffering of pregnant women in the US | Moira Donegan

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr continued his futile search for a single pharmaceutical cause of autism on Monday, when the Trump administration claimed that distorted recent studies and misstated scientific evidence to allege a link between women’s Tylenol use during pregnancy and the development of autism in children. Kennedy has long spoken with disturbing disgust about autistic people, claiming at one press conference that autistic children “destroy families” and “will never pay taxes. They’ll never hold a job. They’ll never play baseball. They’ll never write a poem. They’ll never go out on a date.” He had previously pledged to find the cause of autism by this month.As part of his apparent quest to eliminate this vast and varied group of people – who do, in fact, pay taxes, hold jobs, play baseball, write poems, go on dates, and function as beloved and caring members of functional families – Kennedy has already sought to restrict access to common vaccines. In June, he fired every member of the advisory committee on immunization practices, an influential group of vaccine experts whose recommendations had long shaped policy for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In place of the experts, he reconstituted the panel with a number of vaccine critics and cranks, whose incompetence has led to chaotic meetings and bizarrely changing vaccine recommendations. Donald Trump has recently joined his health secretary in casting aspersions on childhood vaccines – safe and effective treatments that have saved countless lives and are among the more wonderful miracles of human innovation. “It’s too much liquid,” the president said of the early childhood immunizations on Monday. “Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number. The size of this thing, when you look at it.”Trump’s remarks came at what was supposed to be the debut for Kennedy’s new tactic: discouraging pregnant women from taking a common over-the-counter medication to ease pain or reduce fevers. At a rambling and shambolic press conference issued from the White House, Trump was unambivalent in his unproven assertions of the drug’s dangers. “Taking Tylenol is, uh, not good,” Trump said, flanked by Kennedy and Dr Mehmet Oz. “I’ll say it. It’s not good.” The president also offered his opinion that the weight-loss drug Ozempic doesn’t work, offering that his friends who take the drug are still fat. Kennedy, his face an uncanny color, stood awkwardly behind Trump, wearing a suit jacket that was visibly too small and with his head hanging slightly to the side; he looked a bit like a bored child at a prep school assembly. “Don’t. Take. Tylenol,” Trump continued, addressing pregnant women. “And don’t give it to the baby after the baby is born.”There is no evidence suggesting that Tylenol causes autism. A small number of studies have shown a correlation – not a cause – between acetaminophen use and incidents of neurological development disorders in early childhood. But these studies, aside from being inconclusive in their results, are also flawed in their methodologies: because pregnant women cannot be easily or ethically sorted into control groups, it is impossible for researchers to isolate Tylenol as a causal factor in the ensuing health of their children. There is as much evidence to suggest that those women whose children later developed autism got it from the Tylenol they took as there is to suggest that they got it because of a gust of wind, or because their mothers wore the color green. Fevers, however – which Tylenol is used to treat – pose proven risks to a fetus, and have been linked to cleft lip and palate, spina bifida, and congenital heart defects. “The conditions that people use acetaminophen to treat during pregnancy are far more dangerous than any theoretical risks and can create severe morbidity and mortality for the pregnant person and the fetus,” Dr Steven Fleischman, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said in a statement.Pregnant women do not lack for judgmental, frightening and dubiously factual instructions about their health. Everywhere, they are told that they risk the health of their fetus by partaking in a series of banal everyday activities – be it jogging or having coffee or eating a certain cheese – that they are told will lead, by obscure mechanisms that are never quite explained, to impossible and devastating health outcomes for their children-to-be. The admonishments are multiple and often contradictory, but they all tend to agree on one thing: that it is always good for women to deprive themselves of joy and relief – and to suffer more – for the sake of their fetuses.Health misinformation has thrived on the ignorance in which most women are kept about their bodies, particularly during pregnancy, and it feeds on the cruel combination of neglect and lack of interest with which many women have been treated by the medical system and the maximally judgmental and punitive treatment that they receive from others while pregnant. Frightened women, scared both for the health of their pregnancies and for the ways they will be blamed if something goes awry, seek out a way to secure a good outcome, and are met by charlatans, grifters and quacks who are happy to tell them lies in exchange for their attention and money. It is this very dynamic, fed like a sourdough starter in the damp and fecund social media environment of the pandemic, that Kennedy used to revive his own career after decades of scandal and disgrace.Now, this cynical exploitation of pregnant women’s fears, deployed to them at a time when they are most vulnerable, is coming from no less a place of authority than the White House itself.At the press conference, Trump advised pregnant women to simply endure their suffering. “A mother will have to tough it out,” he told them. Readers will forgive me if I posit that perhaps pregnant women in the US are already suffering enough. Six justices of the supreme court, three of them appointed by Trump himself, ruled in 2022 that they no longer have the federally protected right to terminate their pregnancies. The laws that have gone into effect since have cost several pregnant women their lives, as laws prohibit the medical interventions that could easily save them and allow them to die painful, premature and needless deaths. Other women have had their corpses desecrated for the sake of Trump’s anti-choice agenda, as hospitals and lawmakers use them as incubators against their will. Others are being forced to wait for care while they bleed and develop sepsis, risking their organs and their lives. The Trump administration has cut off Medicaid funding to some of the largest providers of sexual and reproductive healthcare, meaning many of the clinics that pregnant women rely on will now have to close. With doctors who provide gynecological and obstetric care fleeing states with strict abortion bans, many pregnant women in the US do not have access to competent medical care at all. As a result, more babies are being born sick, and more of them are dying. Women from states such as Florida report being forced to carry fetuses that have no chance of surviving, and then being forced to watch those infants suffer and die in the moments after birth. As Kennedy continues with his search for the causes of autism, his eugenic project will inevitably extract more and more coercion and violence on the bodies of pregnant women. Today’s fearmongering about Tylenol is only the beginning.It can seem darkly comedic at times how laughably incompetent Trump and his administration are. Kennedy’s ill-fitting suit; the president’s ramblings about his fat friends; the brazen indifference to truth in the absurd claim that Tylenol, perhaps the paradigmatic over-the-counter drug, is somehow this lurking danger. Trump’s idiocy and vulgarity give the lie to the pomp and dignity of his office; his now near-total capture of American political life mocks the promise of democracy. But pregnant women are not a punchline. Their hopes for their families, their fears for their bodies, their health, their comfort and their dignity – all of these are things Trump is willing to sacrifice at the altar of his own ego. Tylenol isn’t dangerous, but he is.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’

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      Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences.If it was current and controversial in US politics, chances are that Kirk was talking about it. On his podcasts, and on the podcasts of friends and adversaries, and especially on college campuses, where he would go to debate students, Kirk spent much of his adult life defending and articulating a worldview aligned with Trump and the Maga movement. Accountable to no one but his audience, he did not shy away in his rhetoric from bigotry, intolerance, exclusion and stereotyping.Here’s Kirk, in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative media.On race
      If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

      If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022

      Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

      If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
      On debate
      We record all of it so that we put [it] on the internet so people can see these ideas collide. When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.
      – Kirk discussing his work in an undated clip that circulated on X after his killing.

      Prove me wrong.
      – Kirk’s challenge to students to publicly debate him during the tour of colleges he was on when he was assassinated.
      On gender, feminism and reproductive rights
      Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
      – Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

      The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.
      – Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024

      We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024
      On gun violence
      I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.
      – Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023
      On immigration
      America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025

      The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

      The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024
      On Islam
      America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April 2025

      We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025
      On religion
      There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022 More

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      Texas bill allowing residents to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers reaches governor

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      A measure that would allow Texas residents to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers advanced to the desk of the governor, Greg Abbott, on Wednesday, setting up the state to be the first to try to crack down on the most common abortion method.Supporters say it’s a key tool to enforce the state’s abortion ban, protecting women and fetuses.Opponents see it not only as another way to rein in abortion but as an effort to intimidate abortion providers outside Texas who are complying with the laws in their states – and to encourage a form of vigilantism.If the measure becomes law, it’s nearly certain to spark legal challenges from abortion rights supporters.Under the measure, Texas residents could sue those who manufacture, transport or provide abortion-inducing drugs to anyone in Texas for up to $100,000. Women who receive the pills for their own use would not be liable.Under the bill, providers could be ordered to pay $100,000. But only the pregnant woman, the man who impregnated her or other close relatives could collect the entire amount. Anyone else who sued could receive only $10,000, with the remaining $90,000 going to charity.Lawmakers also added language to address worries that women would be turned in for seeking to end pregnancies by men who raped them or abusive partners. For instance, a man who impregnated a woman through sexual assault would not be eligible.The measure has provisions that bar making public the identity or medical details about a woman who receives the pills.It wasn’t until those provisions were added, along with the limit of a $10,000 payment for people who aren’t themselves injured by the abortion, that several major Texas anti-abortion groups backed the bill.The idea of using citizens rather than government officials to enforce abortion bans is not new in Texas. It was at the heart of a 2021 law that curtailed abortion there months before the US supreme court cleared the way for other state bans to take effect.In the earlier law, citizens could collect $10,000 for bringing a successful lawsuit against a provider or anyone who helps someone obtain an abortion. But that measure didn’t explicitly seek to go after out-of-state providers.Pills are a tricky topic for abortion opponents. They were the most common abortion method in the US even before the 2022 supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade and allowed states to enforce abortion bans.They’ve become even more widely used since then. Their availability is a key reason that the number of abortions has risen nationally, even though Texas and 11 other states are enforcing bans on abortion in all stages of pregnancy.The pills have continued to flow partly because at least eight Democratic-led states have enacted laws that seek to protect medical providers from legal consequences when they use telehealth to prescribe the pills to women who are in states where abortion is illegal.Anna Rupani, executive director of Fund Texas Choice, said the measure is intended to threaten those out-of-state providers and women in Texas.“This is about the chilling effect,” she said. “This is yet another abortion ban that is allowing the state to control people’s health care lives and reproductive decisions.”Earlier this year, a Texas judge ordered a New York doctor to pay more than $100,000 in penalties for providing abortion pills to a Dallas-area woman.The same provider, Dr Maggie Carpenter, faces criminal charges from a Louisiana prosecutor for similar allegations.New York officials are invoking their state’s shield laws to block extradition of Carpenter and to refuse to file the civil judgment.If higher courts side with Louisiana or Texas officials, it could damage the shield laws.Meanwhile, the attorneys general of Texas and Florida are seeking to join Idaho, Kansas and Missouri in an effort to get courts to roll back US Food and Drug Administration approvals for mifepristone, one of the drugs usually used in combination for medication abortions, contending that there are safety concerns. They say it needs tighter controls because of those concerns.If the states are successful, it’s possible the drug could be distributed only in person and not by telehealth.Major medical organizations including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say the drug is safe. More

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      Texas threatens to sue organizations and doctor for increasing abortion pill access

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      The heated US war over abortion pills warmed up another degree on Wednesday, as the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sent cease-and-desist letters to two organizations and an individual that he accused of mailing abortion pills to Texans or facilitating their shipment. Paxton threatened to sue if they do not stop their alleged activities.“These abortion drug organizations and radical activists are not above the law, and I have ordered the immediate end of this unlawful conduct,” Paxton said in a news release announcing the letters.The state of Texas bans virtually all abortions.Paxton sent the letters to Plan C, a website that provides information about how to obtain abortion pills; Her Safe Harbor, an organization that provides abortions through telemedicine; and Rémy Coeytaux, a doctor who has been accused of mailing abortion pills to a Texan.Debra Lynch, a nurse practitioner who works with Her Safe Harbor, said that Paxton’s letter would not stop the organization from sending abortion pills to people. If anything, Lynch suggested, it would spur the group on.“None of our providers are primarily concerned with our own wellbeing or our own legal status,” Lynch said. “All the horrors that women are facing because of these ridiculous bans and restrictions outweigh anything that could possibly happen to us as providers, in terms of a fine or a lawsuit or even jail time, if it were to come to that.”Lynch said that in the hours after news of Paxton’s letter broke, Her Safe Harbor received more than 150 requests from Texans who were afraid about abortion access and want to obtain pills that they may use in the future. Normally, Her Safe Harbor has around four to five providers taking calls from patients. Now, they plan to have at least 10 working “until this wave of fear subsides”.Neither Plan C nor Coeytaux immediately replied to the Guardian’s request for comment.In the three years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and unleashed a wave of state-level abortion bans, abortions have surged in the United States. This rise is due in large part to the availability of abortion pills and the emergence of “shield laws”, which have been enacted by a handful of blue states and aim to protect abortion providers who mail pills across state lines from out-of-state prosecution.By the end of 2024, clinicians working through shield laws were facilitating an average of 12,330 abortions per month, according to data from #WeCount, a research project by the Society of Family Planning.Enraged by this development, anti-abortion advocates have in recent months stepped up their campaign to crush abortion pill providers. In his cease-and-desist letters, Paxton – a Republican who is running to become a US senator – repeatedly cited the Comstock Act of 1873, an anti-vice law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials. Although legal experts have long regarded the Comstock Act as a dead letter, several anti-abortion activists now believe that the fall of Roe has left the federal government free to fully enforce the act.Alongside 15 other state attorneys general, Paxton earlier this summer signed onto a letter imploring Congress to pass a law that would pre-empt states’ shield laws. He has also sued a New York-based doctor whom he accused of mailing abortion pills into Texas. Then, after a New York county court official said that the state’s shield law prohibited New York from enforcing a fine against the doctor, Paxton sued the official.Paxton’s cease-and-desist letters also follow similar letters sent by the Arkansas attorney general, Republican Tim Griffin. In July, Griffin sent a cease-and-desist letter to Possibility Labs, the parent company of Plan C, and to Mayday Medicines, the parent company of Mayday Health. Like Plan C, Mayday Health offers information about abortion pills, but does not directly sell them.Other anti-abortion activists are going after abortion providers through other legal avenues. A Texas man who said that Coeytaux supplied abortion pills to aid his female partner’s abortion has also sued Coeytaux in a federal wrongful death lawsuit. The man is being represented in court by Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion attorney who masterminded a six-week abortion ban that took effect in Texas in 2021.Last week, Mitchell filed another federal wrongful death lawsuit against a different abortion provider. More