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      Supreme Court Case Throws Abortion Into 2022 Election Picture

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      Supporters and opponents of abortion rights say a major ruling just before the midterm elections could upend political calculations for the two parties.WASHINGTON — Within hours of the Supreme Court accepting a case that could lead it to overturn or scale back a landmark abortion rights ruling, Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat facing re-election next year, issued a dire warning to supporters: The fate of Roe v Wade is on the line.“We cannot move backwards,” Mr. Bennet said in a campaign statement. “Colorado was a leader in legalizing abortion — six years before Roe v Wade. I will always fight for reproductive justice and to ensure everyone has safe and legal access to the health care they need.”His declaration was among the first in a quickly intensifying clash over abortion, long a defining issue to many voters but one likely to gain additional prominence as the court weighs the possibility of rolling back the constitutional protections it provided to abortion rights in Roe 48 years ago.Motivated in part by a belief that the Supreme Court will give them new latitude to restrict access, Republican-dominated states continue to adopt strict new legislation, with Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas signing into law on Wednesday a prohibition on abortions after as early as six weeks. The law, sure to face legal challenges, is one of more than 60 new state-level restrictions enacted this year, with many more pending.With the Supreme Court ruling likely to come next year — less than six months before midterm elections that will determine control of Congress and the future of President Biden’s agenda — the court’s expanded conservative majority has injected new volatility into an already turbulent political atmosphere, leaving both parties to game out the potential consequences.Republicans had already shown that they intended to take aim at Democrats over social issues, and abortion will only amplify the culture wars.Nearly all agree that the latest fight over Roe, which has been building for years, is certain to have significant political repercussions. Conservative voters are traditionally more energized than liberals about the abortion debate, and for many of them it has been the single issue spurring voter turnout.But Democrats, likely to be on the defensive given their current hold on the White House and Congress, say a ruling broadly restricting abortion rights by a court whose ideological makeup has been altered by three Trump-era appointees could backfire on Republicans and galvanize women.“Outlawing Roe would create a backlash that would have critical unintended consequences for those who would like to repeal it,” said Senator Jeanne Shaheen, Democrat of New Hampshire and a leading voice in Congress for abortion rights. “The women of the country would be very upset, particularly young women, that there would be such a deliberate effort to limit women’s access to reproductive choices.”Those on the right, already anticipating a favorable ruling given the conservative tilt of the 6-3 court, say they expect liberals to seize on the issue to try to “scare” voters. But they believe they can make a case for “reasonable” abortion limits.“This is clearly going to invigorate people on both sides of the debate, but this is a winning issue for pro-life candidates,” said Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for Susan B. Anthony List, a conservative nonprofit.She said she did not expect conservative voting enthusiasm to ebb if the right triumphed at the Supreme Court, an outcome that would bring to fruition years of emphasis on electing anti-abortion lawmakers at the federal and state levels and working aggressively to confirm conservative judges.“What happened on Monday is evidence that elections have consequences,” Ms. Quigley said, referring to the Supreme Court’s decision to take a case about a Mississippi law that seeks to ban most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy — about two months earlier than Roe and subsequent decisions allow.Anti-abortion activists in the Texas State Capitol in Austin in March.  Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday signed into law one of the country’s most restrictive abortion measures.Jay Janner/Austin American-Statesman, via Associated PressThe Supreme Court action may have political ramifications before next year. The case is likely to be argued weeks before Virginia voters head to the polls in November to elect a new governor in a race often seen as a midterm bellwether. Terry McAuliffe, a former governor and most likely the Democratic nominee, is eager for another political battle over abortion rights, rattling off his record protecting clinics in the state and vetoing legislation that would impose restrictions.“This is going to be a huge motivator,” he said in an interview. “In 2013, I promised women I would be a brick wall to protect their rights. And I will be a brick wall again.”Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, downplayed the potential effect of the court ruling, though he said that as an abortion opponent he welcomed the court taking up the case. But Mr. Scott said he believed voters would be more persuaded by what he described as the Biden administration’s failings on issues such as immigration, the economy, taxes, inflation and more.While the lines have always been starkly drawn on abortion into the pro and anti camps, public opinion has proved more nuanced, with a clear majority backing Roe but majorities also favoring some limits. How the Supreme Court comes down on the fine points of abortion law could determine how the issue plays in the elections.“Considering the decision will likely be made five months ahead of the election, and depending on the decision itself, it’s too early to measure its ultimate impact on the midterms,” said Nathan Gonzales, the editor of the nonpartisan Inside Elections. Mr. Gonazales said it could conceivably energize Republicans but also pay benefits for Democrats — a view shared by others.President Donald J. Trump helped inspire record turnout last year from Democratic voters, who were eager to reject his administration. With Mr. Trump no longer on the ballot, many Democrats say the Supreme Court case could provide crucial midterm motivation, particularly for suburban women in swing districts who were instrumental in Democratic wins last year.Katie Paris, the founder of Red, Wine and Blue, a group focused on organizing suburban female voters for Democrats across the country, said the Supreme Court news immediately touched off alarm on the Facebook groups and other social media channels run by her organization.“When the news came out that this was going to be taken up, it was like, ‘Everybody get ready. This is real,’” she said. “We know what this court could do, and if they do it, the backlash will be severe.”Tresa Undem, a pollster who specializes in surveys on gender issues, said that abortion rights would continue to be an effective cause for Democrats because voters link it to larger concerns about power and control that motivated female voters during the Trump administration.“Democrats and independents have felt a loss of control and power from people at the top,” said Ms. Undem, who has conducted polling for several abortion rights organizations. “Now you have six individuals who are going to make these decisions about your body in this personal area that will affect the rest of your life.”Mr. Bennet said he could not predict the political implications of the court taking on abortion, but he wanted to alert his supporters that something of consequence was at hand.“There are a lot of people who have worked for a long time to overturn Roe v. Wade, and that is what is at stake,” he said. “I think people needed to hear that in the wake of the Supreme Court taking this case from Mississippi.” More

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      Arizona passes sweeping anti-abortion bill banning procedure for genetic issues

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      Arizona’s governor has signed a sweeping anti-abortion bill that bans the procedure if the woman is seeking it solely because a fetus has a genetic abnormality such as Down’s syndrome.Doctors who perform an abortion solely because the child has a survivable genetic issue can face felony charges. The proposal also contains a raft of other provisions sought by abortion opponents.The measure passed the Republican-controlled legislature on party-line votes over unanimous opposition from minority Democrats. Doug Ducey, a Republican, is an abortion opponent who has never vetoed a piece of anti-abortion legislation.The abortion bill as originally written made it a felony for a doctor to perform the procedure because the fetus has a genetic abnormality such as Down’s syndrome, and contained a slew of other provisions, including one that confers all civil rights to unborn children. Democrats call that “personhood” provision a backdoor way to allow criminal charges against a woman who has an abortion.In addition to the ban on abortions for genetic abnormalities and the “personhood” provision, the bill bans mail delivery of abortion-inducing medication, allows the father or maternal grandparents of a fetus aborted because of a genetic issue to sue, and bans the spending of any state money toward organizations that provide abortion care.The measure also requires fetal remains to be buried or cremated, and it forbids state universities from providing abortion care.The measure was a top priority for the social conservative group Center for Arizona Policy. Its president, Cathi Herrod, routinely backs anti-abortion bills in the legislature. National anti-abortion groups hailed its passage.Minutes after the governor acted, Herrod sent out a news release with the subject line “Life Wins!”Pro-choice groups had rallied at the Capitol on Monday, urging Ducey to veto the measure and presenting him with petitions signed by opponents of the bill.Democrats lamented the governor’s action, including representative Diego Espinoza of Tolleson.“Governor Ducey’s decision to sign SB1457 is not pro-life. It is anti-families, anti-woman, and anti-doctor,” Espinoza tweeted. “I’m disappointed to see Arizona moving in this direction, ignoring the needs and desires of doctors, women, and families for an extreme political agenda.”Republican-controlled legislatures in Arizona and several other states – emboldened by the possibility that a more conservative US supreme court could overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 decision that found women have a constitutional right to seek an abortion – have embraced proposals this year that could completely ban abortion. An Arizona proposal doing that, however, has not advanced. More

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      Your Monday Briefing

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }Aleksei NavalnyNavalny’s Life in OppositionKremlin AnxietyCourt DecisionWhat Will Yulia Navalnaya Do?Putin’s ‘Palace’AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyYour Monday BriefingThe Schengen Area closes up.Feb. 21, 2021, 10:13 p.m. ETGood morning.We’re covering travel restrictions within the E.U., the worst day of violence in Myanmar since the coup and the coming U.S. milestone of 500,000 deaths from Covid-19.[embedded content]A police officer addressing a driver at a checkpoint at the German-Czech border near Bad Gottleuba, Germany. Credit…Filip Singer/EPA, via ShutterstockA fresh blow to Europe’s open bordersAs new variants of the coronavirus are spreading rapidly, European countries such as Germany and Belgium have introduced new border restrictions, flying in the face of the free movement that has long been seen as a fundamental pillar of the European Union.The European Commission, the E.U. executive, has tried to pull countries back from limiting free movement since March, on the grounds that it had disrupted the bloc’s single market. The result has been an ever-shifting patchwork of border rules that has sown chaos and not always successfully limited the virus’s spread.But many countries cannot seem to resist taking back control of their borders. A suggestion by the commission that new restrictions be reversed induced a swift pushback from Germany, even as the new rules triggered supply chain disruptions and long lines of commuters from Austria and the Czech Republic.Background: Countries within the Schengen Area have the explicit right to reintroduce checks at their borders, but they need to clear a few legal hurdles to do so, and they are not meant to retain them over the long term.Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.In other developments:As the American death toll nears 500,000, more Americans have now died of Covid-19 than on the battlefields of World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined. No other country has counted as many deaths in the pandemic.To secure the release of an Israeli civilian held in Syria, Israel secretly — and contentiously — agreed to finance a supply of Russian-made Covid-19 vaccines for Damascus.Australia began vaccinating its population against the coronavirus on Sunday, with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and 19 others getting their shots. The first to be vaccinated was an 84-year-old woman who lives in a nursing home.Dozens of protesters were injured in Mandalay, Myanmar, on Saturday.Credit…Aso/Associated PressMyanmar security forces open fire on protestersWitnesses said two people were killed and dozens wounded when security forces on Saturday opened fire on protesters in the city of Mandalay, Myanmar. It was the bloodiest day of protests so far against the military’s Feb. 1 coup.The shootings occurred as the authorities were trying to force workers back to their jobs at a local shipyard. The work stoppage there in protest of the ouster of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, Myanmar’s civilian leader, has paralyzed river transport on the Irrawaddy, the country’s most important commercial waterway, according to Radio Free Asia.Details: The authorities used water cannons, rubber bullets, tear gas, slingshots and live ammunition to break up the crowd. At least 40 people were wounded, according to medics.Mansour Abbas, center, an Islamist leader hoping to join the next Israeli government, campaigning in Daburiyya, an Arab village in northern Israel.Credit…Dan Balilty for The New York TimesIn the Israeli election, an opportunity for ArabsAccelerated by Israel’s election campaign, two trends are converging: On the one hand, Arab politicians and voters increasingly believe that to improve the lives of Arabs in Israel, they need to seek power within the system instead of exerting pressure from the outside.Separately, mainstream Israeli parties are realizing they need to attract Arab voters to win a very close election — and some are willing to work with Arab parties as potential coalition partners.Both trends are born more of political pragmatism than dogma. But while the moment has the potential to give Arab voters real power, it could backfire and split the Arab vote, ultimately lowering the numbers of Arab lawmakers in the next Parliament.Context: Arab politicians and voters have not shed all their discomfort with Zionism and Israeli policies in the occupied territories. But there is a growing realization that problems the Arab community in Israel faces — gang violence, poverty and discrimination in access to housing and land — will not be solved without Arab politicians shaping policy at the highest level.If you have 7 minutes, this is worth itLibraries to honor women lost to violenceCredit…Kiana Hayeri for The New York TimesNajiba Hussaini, who died in a Taliban suicide bombing in Kabul in 2017, was a determined, highly accomplished scholar, who landed a prestigious job in Afghanistan’s Ministry of Mines and Petroleum.Today, her memory lives on at the Najiba Hussaini Memorial Library, in the Afghan city of Nili, as a symbol of the progress made toward gender equality and access to education in Afghanistan. As of 2018, as many as 3.5 million girls were enrolled in school in the nation and one-third of its teachers were women.But amid negotiations between the Afghan government and the Taliban, many worry that a peace deal could mean that the progress Afghan women have made over the past two decades will be lost.Here’s what else is happeningAleksei Navalny: A Russian court has cleared the way for the possible transfer of the opposition leader to a penal colony, the latest step by the authorities to silence the country’s most vocal critic of President Vladimir Putin.Libya weapons: Erik Prince, the former head of the security firm Blackwater Worldwide and a supporter of former President Donald Trump, violated a United Nations arms embargo on Libya by sending weapons to a militia commander who was trying to overthrow the government in Tripoli, according to U.N. investigators. He has denied any wrongdoing.Venezuela: Millions of women in the troubled South American country are no longer able to find or afford birth control. The situation has pushed many into unplanned pregnancies or illegal abortions at a time when they can barely feed the children they have.ISIS: Frenchwomen who joined the Islamic State and are now held in squalid detention camps in Syria have gone on a hunger strike to protest France’s refusal to bring them back.Credit…Alana Holmberg for The New York TimesSnapshot: Above, Novak Djokovic won his third straight Australian Open title. His victory over the fourth-ranked Daniil Medvedev gave him his 18th career Grand Slam title. Naomi Osaka beat Jennifer Brady for her fourth Grand Slam title.Cephalopod sensing: An octopus’s arms can sense and respond to light — even when the octopus cannot see it with the eyes on its head, according to a study published this month in The Journal of Experimental Biology.Bollywood: Increasingly, new Hindi productions are showing mothers, and women over all, as full and complex human beings — not melodramatic side characters, but outspoken, independent leads who are in charge of their own fates.What we’re reading: The U.S. may experience a wonderful summer this year — even if the pandemic is not yet behind us, writes the health journalist James Hamblin in this long read from The Atlantic.Now, a break from the newsCredit…Con Poulos for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Jerrie-Joy Redman-Lloyd.Cook: This shrimp étouffée draws inspiration from Cajun and Creole cuisines.Listen: Radio drama, especially from its golden age in the 1930s through the ’50s, is now freely available, thanks to the internet. Here are six shows to enjoy.Do: Many mothers have felt obliged to put themselves last during the pandemic. But making time for self-care may give you what you need to keep on going.Restore your sense of self. At Home has our full collection of ideas on what to read, cook, watch, and do while staying safe at home. And now for the Back Story on …Taking stock of 500,000 deathsA graphic on Sunday’s front page of The New York Times depicts the totality of Covid’s devastation in the United States. From afar, the graphic looks like a blur of gray, but up close it shows something much darker: close to 500,000 individual dots, each representing a single life lost to the coronavirus.Credit…The New York TimesThis is not the first time The Times’s designers have used the front page to represent the scale of the pandemic’s toll. When Covid-19 deaths in the United States reached 100,000 last May, the page was filled with names of those lost — nearly a thousand of them, just 1 percent of the country’s deaths then.And as that number approached 200,000, the lead photograph on the page showed the yard of an artist in Texas who had filled his lawn with a small flag for every life lost to the virus in his state.But this is the first time the front page has depicted all the U.S. fatalities. “I think part of this technique, which is good, is that it overwhelms you — because it should,” said Lazaro Gamio, a graphics editor at The Times.That’s it for this briefing. See you on Tuesday.— NatashaThank youTo Theodore Kim and Jahaan Singh for the break from the news. You can reach the team at briefing@nytimes.com.P.S.• We’re listening to “The Daily.” Our latest episode is on children and Covid.• Here’s our Mini Crossword, and a clue: What light travels in (five letters). You can find all our puzzles here.• Claire Cain Miller, a reporter who worked on our series on working mothers, “The Primal Scream,” spoke to NPR about the toll of the pandemic on women.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Republicans employ new ‘extremely aggressive’ tactics to ban abortion

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      At a church-style rally in Arizona, the state Republican lawmaker Walter Blackman described his “perfect” legislative proposal: to prosecute women who have abortions for homicide alongside the doctors who provide them.Such a bill would be patently unconstitutional in the US – but for anti-abortion rights activists like Blackman that’s the point.“We are not going to amend this bill,” Blackman said in January. “This is a perfect bill. I just want to tell you that now.” Nine of Blackman’s colleagues signed on to the bill.The bill was just one of nine more Arizona bills designed to ban, restrict or undermine abortion rights – ranging from funding religious crisis pregnancy clinics which oppose abortion to banning abortion at six weeks, before most women know they are pregnant.“It’s nothing less than appalling,” said Dr Julia Kwatra, an obstetrician and gynecologist who has practiced in Scottsdale for 20 years. “This is just representing a full frontal assault on women’s healthcare in Arizona this legislative session.”But this slew of legislation is just one state’s effort to redefine reproductive rights in a year of Republican party schism. In other states across the US – from Florida to North Dakota – legislation from Republican lawmakers seeking to undermine abortion rights is on the move. For anti-abortion activists, the goal has long been to challenge the supreme court decision that gave pregnant people the right to abortion 48 years ago: the landmark Roe versus Wade.Each spring, especially in the last decade, Republicans have introduced restrictive abortion laws tailored to challenge that supreme court precedent by creating test cases. In 1973, Roe versus Wade provided women with a right to abortion up to the point the fetus can survive outside the womb, generally understood to be 24 weeks.Abortion restrictions investigate the outer limits of that right, by creating laws that provoke reproductive rights advocates to sue, and for courts to consider their legitimacy.“The more ambitious a restriction the court upholds, that will greenlight even more restrictions in the states,” said Mary Ziegler, a Florida State University law professor whose recent book, Abortion in America: A Legal History, tracked the history of the nation’s most important abortion cases.“What we’ve been seeing is not what anti-abortion lawmakers want, but it’s been tailored to what they think the supreme court wants,” said Ziegler.This effort is not meant to reflect the will of the majority of Americans, 77% of whom believe the supreme court should uphold Roe v Wade. The effort is meant to please a motivated, religious voter base, who have helped power Republican victories since the Reagan era. Trump played for the same “social conservatives” when vowing to appoint supreme court justices who would overturn Roe.But since Trump rose to power, exactly how to do that has become a vexing question for the Republican party. Grassroots extremists came to power alongside Donald Trump, making common cause with some evangelical Christians, and demanding immediate gratification in bills like Blackman’s.Bills that ban abortion, demand doctors perform the impossible and “reimplant” ectopic pregnancies, punish women and doctors under murder statutes and whose authors believe the fundamental legal principle of precedent should not apply to their cases have all shown up in state legislatures in the last couple years.Bans in recent sessions have been “extremely aggressive”, said Hillary Schneller, a senior staff attorney for the Center for Reproductive Rights, and who is now fighting a Mississippi law that could ban abortion at 15 weeks. The state has appealed to the supreme court.Recent bans have been, “saying the quiet part out loud – that they’re not just restriction abortion, they want to end access to abortion entirely”, said Schneller.Until recently, most slates of new bills avoided this type of exposure. Establishment anti-abortion groups, like the National Right to Life Committee, preferred calculated legal strategies designed to elicit maximum supreme court interest and minimum voter outrage.This year, since Trump lost re-election and the Republican party has split into warring factions, the spectrum of anti-abortion legislation has come to reflect that intra-party feud – a war between extremists and established anti-abortion strategists. In states like Mississippi, lawmakers have passed both kinds of legislation.More extreme members of the anti-abortion movement are “making bids to control strategy for their movement”, said Ziegler. Extremists have shown, “They have legislators in a way we would assume only people like the National Right to Life Committee would have,” she said.In Arizona, the architect of most of the state’s abortion restrictions over the last decade opposes Blackman’s bill. Cathi Herrod, president of the Center for Arizona Policy, told a local television station, “In the pro-life community, we love both the woman and her unborn child. Both are victims.”These bans don’t come out of nowhere. They are the result of a sustained campaign from anti-abortion politiciansArizona is in the process of turning from red to purple – recently sending two Democratic senators to Washington DC and helping flip the presidential election for Joe Biden. Kwatra said she views the huge number of new restrictions as a “last gasp” from the state Republican party.“It’s literally all men on deck” and “assault from every direction”, said Kwatra, adding that as more than 14,000 Arizonans have died of Covid-19, “our legislature is focused on taking voting rights away and healthcare rights away from women”.One bill being championed in both Arizona and South Carolina is a “fetal heartbeat bill” that would ban abortion before most women know they are pregnant, without exemptions for rape or incest. As of 2019, nine other states had done the same.Actually a misnomer, “fetal heartbeat bills” use the detection of “cardiac activity” in an embryo (the stage of development before a fetus) as early as six weeks. At that stage, embryos have a pulse, but not a fully developed heart to power a circulatory system. This kind of restriction would outlaw the vast majority of abortions.The author of that bill is Janet Porter, an evangelical Christian based in Ohio. Alongside her anti-abortion advocacy, she is fiercely anti-gay, and promotes the baseless idea that the election was stolen from Trump.In one interview in late January, she said Biden’s inauguration had the mood of a funeral. “Maybe that’s what it feels like to steal an election, and you know you’re not there rightfully so,” Porter said.Her interviewer concurred: “I do believe God wanted Donald Trump to be re-elected, I think it was God’s will, yet sometimes in this fallen world the devil wins.”Meanwhile, establishment groups like NRLC have pushed to ban specific procedures, such as dilation and evacuation, and to restrict abortion to earlier and earlier in pregnancy – such as in 15 weeks in Mississippi.By banning specific procedures, which are not well understood by lawmakers or the public, anti-abortion advocates may see fewer objections to their efforts while still significantly eroding rights. A Kentucky version of the dilation and evacuation ban could come before the supreme court this session (just 4% of abortions overall).Problematically, abortion rights advocates view extreme bills – such as Blackman’s – as providing political cover for potentially more damaging establishment bills.“These bans don’t come out of nowhere. They are the result of a very sustained campaign from anti-abortion politicians,” said Schneller.In 2021, with a new Democratic presidential administration, not all efforts are focused exclusively on defending reproductive rights. The Biden administration rolled back several funding restrictions for reproductive health counseling domestically and abroad.The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists has sued the US Food and Drug Administration to end in-person dispensing requirements for medication abortions during the pandemic, which the professional association has said are not medically justified.In Oregon, a bill would require the state to examine whether specific healthcare mergers reduce access to reproductive rights. In Arizona, advocates are fighting to allow birth control to be dispensed without a prescription.“We know how to decrease the abortion rate, while at the same time improving women’s healthcare,” said Kwatra. “We need to take care of women in all their complicated ways … which is really not hard to do.” More

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      Biden move to refund UN population agency is 'ray of hope for millions'

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      The decision by US president Joe Biden to refund the UN population fund, UNFPA, offers “a ray of hope for millions of people around the world”, said the agency’s executive director.
      Dr Natalia Kanem said the announcement on Thursday would have an “enormous” impact on the agency’s work, particularly as the world continues to grapple with the coronavirus pandemic.
      In 2017, the Trump administration halted funding to the UNFPA, claiming it supported coercive abortion and involuntary sterilisation – claims strongly denied by the agency.
      The US was one of the agency’s largest funders. In 2016, it provided $69m (£50m) to support its work in more than 150 countries.
      “Ending funding to UNFPA has become a political football, far removed from the tragic reality it leads to on the ground. Women’s bodies are not political bargaining chips, and their right to plan their pregnancies, give birth safely and live free from violence should be something we can all agree on,” said Kanem.
      She added that the pandemic had hit particularly hard the vulnerable communities in which the UNFPA works. “US support will be instrumental in helping us build back better and fairer.”
      US secretary of state Antony Blinken said his department would appropriate $32.5m to support the UNFPA this year.
      “UNFPA’s work is essential to the health and wellbeing of women around the world and directly supports the safety and prosperity of communities around the globe, especially in the context of the global Covid-19 pandemic,” he said.
      Blinken also confirmed that the US would withdraw its support for the “Geneva Consensus Declaration” – an anti-abortion policy introduced last year by the then secretary of state Mike Pompeo, and signed by more than 30 countries, including Brazil, Hungary and Uganda.
      “The United States is re-engaging multilaterally to protect and promote the human rights of all women and girls, consistent with the longstanding global consensus on gender equality and sexual and reproductive health and reproductive rights,” said Blinken. More

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      What is Ivanka Trump's legacy? Enabling her father's odious actions | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Ivanka Trump has wound up her time in the White House in the most fitting way possible: with a scandal about a $3,000-a-month toilet. Members of the Secret Service, it was recently reported, were banned from using any of the bathrooms in Jared Kushner and Ivanka’s Washington DC mansion and, instead, had to rent an apartment to relieve themselves in (although Jared and Ivanka have denied this). Talk about flushing taxpayers’ money down the drain.One imagines Ivanka did not plan to spend her final days in DC dealing with the fallout from a violent insurrection and battling embarrassing leaks about her loos. When she appointed herself special adviser to the president, Ivanka was a handbag and shoe saleswoman bursting with ambition. She was going to empower women everywhere! Little girls around the world would read about Saint Ivanka for decades to come. She would be a role mogul: her branded bags would fly off the shelves.Four years later, Ivanka’s clothing line has shut down and her personal brand has been damaged enough for a university to cancel her as a speaker. It seems she is persona non grata in New York and her dad has been banned from parts of the internet for inciting violence. By rights, Ivanka should be sobbing into her sheets wondering how everything has gone so wrong.But Ivanka is a Trump: narcissism and self-delusion are in her DNA. As DC braces for pre-inauguration chaos Ivanka has been blithely tweeting her “achievements” and retweeting praise in an attempt to convince us she has left an important legacy.According to her Twitter feed, one thing Americans should all be thanking Ivanka for is paid family leave, which has been one of her marquee issues. And, to be fair, if Ivanka is to be praised for anything, it’s for pushing Donald Trump to pass a bill giving federal employees 12 weeks of paid parental time off. Would that have happened without Ivanka? I don’t know. But she facilitated it. Does it make up for the many odious things Ivanka also facilitated? No.Another of Ivanka’s big projects was the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity (W-GDP) initiative, which aims to reach 50 million women in the developing world by 2025 and … well, I’m not sure exactly what’s supposed to happen then. The initiative is so buzzword-laden that it’s somewhat hard to understand. You get the impression Ivanka launched it via vague instructions to “empower women in powerful ways via strategic pillars of empowerment”.Ivanka has been very keen to turn the Women’s Global Development and Prosperity initiative into part of her political legacy … But she got greedy and insisted on using her version of the billAnyway, all that empowering has paid off, according to a report W-GDP released last week: almost 12.6 million women worldwide have been equipped with the skills they need for economic advancement, thanks to Ivanka. Let’s be charitable and say W-GDP has done some good. The problem is, that good is massively outweighed by the Trump administration’s worldwide war on abortion: the administration imposed an harmful expansion of “the global gag rule”, which bans US federal funding international NGOs that provide abortion services or advocacy. Trump also did his best to try to destroy the budget for foreign aid.Still, Ivanka has been very keen to turn the W-GDP into part of her political legacy. Last year, she was behind the bipartisan launch of a bill formally authorising the programme so that it would live on after her dad left office. That could well have happened: Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator, initially lent Ivanka her support. But Ivanka got greedy and insisted on using her version of the bill. Shaheen abandoned her support, explaining that Ivanka’s version of the legislation focused too narrowly on women’s economic advancement, minimising issues such as education, healthcare and gender-based violence. Not so much “let them eat cake”, as “let them start cake-making businesses”. Last month, the bill was dropped and now the future of Ivanka’s biggest project is unclear.I don’t want to be unfair to her. She may not have empowered women the way she promised she would, but she did empower herself. Ivanka and Kushner have made a fortune while “serving” in the White House. And you know what they say about charity: it begins at home. More

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      Trump administration in 'staggering' isolation at UN on health issues

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      The outgoing Trump administration’s final days at the United Nations have resulted in a deepening of US isolation on social and health issues, with only a handful of allies including Russia, Belarus and Syria.
      In one vote this week, the US was entirely alone in backing its own amendment to a seemingly uncontroversial resolution about efforts to treat medical complications from childbirth. It called for the removal of references to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the UN Population Fund.
      No other nation agreed, with 153 voting against the amendment and 11 abstaining.
      A UN diplomat said the spectacle of a western ally and a superpower so totally isolated was “staggering”.
      “It’s amazing that they decided they want to put their isolation on record, on full display, like that,” the diplomat said.
      Debates at the UN general assembly this week have been on social and humanitarian affairs and human rights issues, on which the US mission stepped up its largely unsuccessful campaign to remove mention of reproductive health from UN documents. The Trump administration sees the phrase as synonymous with abortion.
      The US backed eight amendments to resolutions on issues such as violence against women and girls, trafficking of women and girls, female genital mutilation, and early, child and forced marriages.
      Apart from the move to delete a reference to the WHO, which Donald Trump has blamed for the coronavirus pandemic, the proposed amendment involved removing references to providing reproductive health services to female victims of violence and oppression.
      Each time the amendments were decisively voted down in the general assembly, with the US drawing only a very small group of between four and 14 supporters. Its only consistent allies were Russia, Belarus, Syria, Qatar and the Pacific island states of Nauru and Palau.
      In one resolution about providing healthcare to women and girls during the pandemic, the US wanted to change the phrase “designating protection and healthcare services as essential services for all women and girls, especially those who are most vulnerable to violence and stigma”. The US mission demanded the deletion of the words “services as essential services”.
      “We’ve seen the US approach harden on these issues over the past four years, but I think this year was uniquely challenging as they clearly decided they were going to put their foot down on sexual reproductive health services language, across every single kind of relevant human rights resolution,” a UN diplomat said.
      After failing to change the wording of resolutions in negotiations before a vote was taken, the US took the added step of tabling amendments from the floor of the assembly, even though they were doomed to fail.
      “It is kind of an aggressive move normally used by Russia, but this year US decided to do it too,” the diplomat said.
      The US permanent representative, Kelly Craft, said the US objected to wording in the UN resolutions designed to “promote the global abortion industry”.
      “The US could not be clearer,” Craft said in a tweet. “There is no international right to abortion. Abortion is not healthcare. Abortion is not safe in any circumstance.”
      Explaining a vote on a French-Dutch resolution on sexual violence that mentioned reproductive health, the US delegate Jennifer Barber said: “It is particularly hypocritical that a resolution on violence against women promotes access to something that results in the loss of millions of baby girls every year.”
      Craft and Barber are from Kentucky and were backed for their position by the powerful Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, despite having minimal or no international experience. Barber is a specialist in Kentucky tax law. More