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      The fight for abortion rights: what to know going into 2024

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      More than a year after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, the dust from the landmark decision’s collapse has yet to settle.It has been a dramatic year of fallout, with abortion rights supporters and foes now waging a state-by-state skirmish for abortion rights. They are sparring in state legislatures, courtrooms, voting booths and hospitals, with each side racking up victories and losses.With a presidential election and another major supreme court case on the horizon, the coming year promises to be at least as eventful. Here’s what you need to know about the fight over abortion in 2023 – and what it means for 2024.Abortion rights supporters keep winning at the ballot boxIn 2022, Republicans underperformed in the midterms and abortion rights activists won a string of ballot measures to preserve abortion rights, even in conservative states. This year, activists extended their winning streak – and they hope to replicate their successes in 2024.In November, Ohio became the first reliably red state since Roe fell to vote in favor of proactively enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution, while Virginia Democrats successfully fended off Republicans’ attempt to retake the state legislature by campaigning on a 15-week abortion ban.For activists and Democrats, these victories were proof that abortion is an election-winning issue – and, potentially, an issue that can draw in voters from across both sides of the ideological spectrum. Activists are already at work on 2024 abortion-related ballot measures in roughly a dozen states, including swing states like Arizona and Nevada.Abortions are on the riseAfter abortion clinics across the south and midwest were forced to shutter, patients overwhelmed the country’s remaining clinics. In the first year after Roe’s demise, the average number of US abortions performed each month rose rather than fell. Clinics and their advocates are now struggling to keep up. “What actually is happening is a complete disruption,” one expert told the Guardian.There is also a gaping hole in the data, which was released in October by the Society of Family Planning: it does not include abortions performed at home, a practice known as “self-managed abortion”. Medical experts widely agree that it is safe to self-manage an abortion using pills early on in pregnancy, and a number of services shipping abortion pills have increased in visibility since Roe’s overturning. But while evidence suggests that self-managed abortion is on the rise, the lack of concrete data about the practice reflects a growing problem in the post-Roe United States: as abortion moves further into the shadows of US life, we will know less about it.Legal battles over abortion bans are ongoingAbortion bans continued to cascade across the country in 2023, with near-total bans taking effect in Indiana, North Dakota and South Carolina. South Carolina and Nebraska, meanwhile, enacted laws to ban abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy. In total, 24 states or territories have now banned abortion before viability, or roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy, which would have been illegal under Roe.Litigation over abortion restrictions is still unfurling in many of these states, and court cases have frozen bans in states like Wyoming and Iowa. Wisconsin abortion providers, meanwhile, found themselves in a unique position this year: after a judge ruled that an 1849 law that had been interpreted to ban abortions instead only banned feticide and did not apply to what she called “consensual abortions”, providers resumed performing the procedure – even though the ban is still technically on the books.Lawsuits may force other hardcore anti-abortion states to soften their bans in 2024 to clarify exceptions when abortions are permitted in medical emergencies. While Tennessee and Texas carved out narrow exceptions in their abortion laws, abortion rights supporters have still filed lawsuits in those two states, as well as in Idaho, that challenge the language. One Texan mother of two filed a lawsuit seeking an emergency abortion while she was still pregnant. (She ultimately fled the state for the procedure.)Theoretically, people in medical emergencies should be able to access the procedure even in states with bans – but doctors say that, in reality, these bans are so vaguely worded that they block doctors from helping sick patients. This summer, one of these lawsuits led women to testify in a Texas court about their experiences of being denied abortions. It was the first time since Roe fell, if not the first time since Roe itself was decided, that women did so.Abortion pills are in perilThe most common method of abortion, abortion pills, is at the mercy of deeply conservative courts in 2024.In April, a conservative judge in Texas ruled to suspend the FDA’s approval of a key abortion pill, mifepristone, in response to a lawsuit brought by a coalition of rightwing groups determined to make the pill the next target in their post-Roe campaign against abortion. A federal appeals court soon scaled back that decision, ruling to keep the pill, mifepristone, available but impose significant restrictions on its use. The supreme court then stepped in and decreed that the FDA’s rules around mifepristone should stay the same while litigation plays out.The Biden administration and a manufacturer of mifepristone in September have asked the supreme court to formally hear arguments in the case. In December, the justices agreed.Although the justices indicated that they will only rule on the restrictions imposed by the appeals court, rather than on the overall legality of mifepristone, the case could still have enormous consequences. Rolling back the FDA’s rules could allow future lawsuits against other politicized medications, like gender-affirming care, HIV drugs or vaccines. Plus, the supreme court will probably rule by summer 2024 – just months before the presidential election.Mifepristone is used in more than half the abortions in the country. If access to the drug is curtailed, many abortion clinics have said they will pivot to using doses of a different drug, misoprostol, to perform abortions, but misoprostol-only abortions are less effective and associated with more complications.Doctors are fleeing states with abortion bansWith abortion bans endangering their patients and threatening to send doctors to prison, doctors are fleeing states where the procedure is banned. After Idaho banned abortion, at least 13 reproductive health physicians left the state and at least two rural labor and delivery wards have closed. Doctors in Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida have also told reporters that they are leaving states with abortion bans or planning to do so.OB-GYNs are already in short supply in the United States. About half of US counties do not have a practicing OB-GYN, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The US maternal mortality rates are also worsening, particularly for Black and Native people, at a time when the United States already has the worst maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries.Doctors are now even afraid to get trained in states with abortion bans. Applications to OB-GYN residencies in states with near-total bans fell by more than 10% the year after Roe’s demise, according to data from Association of American Medical Colleges. Applications to US OB-GYN residencies overall dropped by about 5% – indicating that fewer doctors are planning to become OB-GYNs at all. More

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      ‘A generational struggle’: abortion rights pioneer offers insights to the post-Roe US

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      The battle to bring back the federal right to abortion in the US hinges on much more than just the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and winning will require proponents to be as organized and steadfast as their opponents, at least as one of the reproductive freedom movement’s most veteran voices sees it.Invoking scenes that played out all across the country after the supreme court’s Dobbs decision eliminated nationwide abortion rights, Merle Hoffman recently said: “It looks like thousands of people marching in the streets all over the country … [But] you can’t just do one action.“The pressure has to go, and go, and go.”Hoffman, 77, positioned herself at the forefront of the American reproductive freedom movement decades ago, when she helped open one of the US’s first abortion centers in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens in New York City two years before the supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision established the national right to the procedure.Hoffman recently spoke to the Guardian about how Democratic control of the White House and one of the congressional chambers has offered little resistance to Republican command of the judiciary, which allowed the supreme court’s conservative majority to overturn Roe.She believes that gaining back the ground lost since Dobbs was handed down in the summer of 2022 requires more than just voting for pro-abortion candidates.“That’s one aspect, yes,” Hoffman said.But, given that the federal levers of power are divided among the two political parties, and the procedural blocks that one branch of government can leverage on another, “don’t assume – please don’t assume – that as soon as these people get into office, they’re going to put Roe v Wade right back,” Hoffman said.“They can’t.”Hoffman highlighted how little federal-level Democrats had done to protect abortion access with Joe Biden in the White House and a slim majority in the Senate since Roe v Wade was overturned.Biden has been unwilling to pursue an expansion of the nine-seat supreme court to add liberals to the bench and better balance its 6-3 conservative majority. Meanwhile, with control of the House and Senate split by thin margins, Congress has not been able to enact national protections for reproductive rights through legislation, creating a confusing checkerboard where abortion is nearly completely banned in 14 states.Hoffman had a hand in founding Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights shortly before Roe fell, with the aim of galvanizing popular opposition to abortion restrictions.She said the thousands who participated in mass street protests in cities across the US – including Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago – then and since have had the correct approach. And she complimented the energy younger advocates brought in organizing those events and similar, unrelated ones when unrest over Roe’s fall was at its highest.But Hoffman said such demonstrations have all but vanished in terms of size and intensity as other major events, including the Israel-Gaza war that erupted in October, have taken up the progressive left’s attention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHoffman acknowledged that some believe street protests and walkouts in schools and workplaces have a limited effect within the current structure of power in the US. But she said she steadfastly believed enough actions like that, sustained over an adequate amount of time, would convince those in power to side with the majority of Americans who favor abortion rights over opposing special interests.She said reproductive rights supporters could also do more to advocate for the movement by contributing time or money to efforts aimed at improving healthcare for women who do want to have children.Meanwhile, Hoffman said, women who have had abortions but have chosen to remain silent because of the social stigma could help break that stigma by speaking up about their experiences and decisions.She likened it to LGBTQ+ people “coming out” about their sexualities, and how supportive that can be to members of their communities who feel shame and guilt in silence.“There’s an abortion closet,” Hoffman said. “The first thing you can do is come out.”Hoffman said it was perhaps most important to realize that truly taking back what was lost to Dobbs would take decades. That’s how long it took opponents of reproductive rights – as well as like-minded judges and lawmakers – to plot the seeds for the historic decision to end the right to abortion in the US.“This is a generational struggle,” said Hoffman, echoing the central point in her recent book Choices: A Post-Roe Abortion Rights Manifesto. “This is going to pass from me to the next generation to the next generation.“The opposition is extremely, extremely … relentless. They’re persistent, they’re creative – and they won’t stop until there is no abortion in this country.” More

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      The Supreme Court’s Big Trump Test Is Here

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      A generation after the Supreme Court stepped into a disputed presidential election, America is experiencing a creeping sense of déjà vu. Twenty-three years ago, a bare majority of the justices halted a recount in Florida, effectively handing the presidency to George W. Bush.The specter of Bush v. Gore, the case that stands as a marker of how not to resolve searing political disputes, looms large as the Supreme Court is being called upon to address controversies with profound implications for the fortunes of the Republican front-runner in 2024.The justices are feeling the heat nearly a year in advance of an election rather than in the fraught weeks following the vote. The questions today are more complex — there are at least three separate matters, not one — and all revolve around the Capitol insurrection that transpired across the street from the Supreme Court Building in 2021.On Friday, the court turned down Special Counsel Jack Smith’s request for fast-track review of Donald Trump’s claim that former presidents have “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution for their conduct while in office. But that critical question will almost certainly return to the Supreme Court soon: The D.C. federal appeals court is hearing the case on Jan. 9 and will probably rule shortly thereafter.The court has agreed to hear a case asking whether Jan. 6 rioters can be charged with obstructing an official proceeding, another key part of Mr. Smith’s Jan. 6 case against Mr. Trump. And most dramatically, the former president will surely ask the justices to reverse a ruling of the Colorado Supreme Court that, if affirmed, could pave the way for an untold number of states to erase his name from the ballot.For a tribunal that is supposed to sit far away from, not astride, politics, that’s a lot for the Supreme Court to handle. And this is happening at a rough moment for the court. In August 2000, on the eve of Bush v. Gore, 62 percent of Americans approved of how the Supreme Court was conducting itself. Now, recent polling shows that nearly that portion (58 percent) disapproves of the institution, a figure that scrapes historic lows for the court.Yet the multiplicity of cases affords the justices an opportunity to avoid pinning themselves in still further if they keep an eye on how potential decisions will — collectively — shape the political landscape. The point is not that getting the underlying legal questions “right” is irrelevant. But when the stakes are this high and the legal questions are novel, the justices have a duty to hand down decisions that resonate across the political spectrum — or at least that avoid inciting violence in the streets. That’s not subverting the rule of law; it’s preserving it.Extraordinary times call for a court that embraces the art of judicial statecraft.The trap the court finds itself in is largely a function of its own behavior, both on and off the bench. The 6-to-3 conservative supermajority has radically expanded gun rights, circumscribed the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to protect the environment, all but eviscerated race-based affirmative action, punched holes through the wall separating church from state and — most notoriously — eliminated the constitutional right to abortion. The past year has also seen increasing public scrutiny of the justices’ apparent ethical lapses, sunlight that pushed the justices to adopt their first code of ethics.A universe in which the court somehow splits the difference — for example, keeping Mr. Trump on the ballot while refusing to endorse (if not affirmatively repudiating) his conduct and spurning his kinglike claim to total immunity — could go a long way toward reducing the temperature of the coming election cycle. Such an outcome could also help restore at least some of the court’s credibility.We understand that trying too hard to project an image of nonpartisanship carries risks. Recent reporting on the twists and turns of how the conservative majority engineered the end of Roe v. Wade shows how curating rulings can make justices look too clever by half — if not outright deceptive. Delaying the grant of review in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, in which some of the conservative justices apparently knew they had the votes to overrule Roe, created a false impression that the court was struggling over the matter — when the reality was anything but. Indeed, the Dobbs experience and its aftermath might have led some justices to sour on the idea of judicial statecraft — especially if their internal deliberations end up getting leaked to the press. No jurist wants to be seen as a cunning manipulator of public opinion.And yet, some of the court’s most important rulings across its history have represented just the kind of high constitutional politics that we believe are called for now. The court’s recognition of its power to strike down acts of Congress in Marbury v. Madison came in a context in which the direct effect of the ruling was to restrain the court while slapping the Jefferson administration on the wrist.Its concerted effort to produce unanimous opinions in some of the landmark civil rights cases of the 1950s and 1960s reflected a view that speaking in one voice was more important than the legal nuances of what was said. (This, perhaps, is why no justice publicly dissented from Friday’s decision not to fast-track the immunity question.)The court’s landmark rejection of President Richard Nixon’s executive privilege claim in the Watergate tapes case, which helped to directly precipitate Nixon’s resignation, came in a unanimous opinion written by Nixon’s handpicked chief justice.This is also the best way to understand Chief Justice John Roberts’s much-maligned 2012 vote in the first serious challenge to the Affordable Care Act — upholding the individual mandate as a tax while rejecting it as a valid regulation of interstate commerce.What those (and other) rulings have in common was the sense, across the Supreme Court, that the country would be better off with a court that took appropriate measure of how its rulings would be received beyond the details of the legal analysis the justices provided.The court failed that test in Bush v. Gore — handing down a ruling widely perceived as Republican-appointed justices installing a Republican president via a strained (and oddly cabined) reading of the Equal Protection Clause and helping to precipitate the downturn in public opinion that figures so prominently in these cases.As the Jan. 6 cases put the justices right in the middle of the 2024 election, the question is whether they’ll understand the imperative of not letting history repeat.Ultimately, these contemporary disputes may not provide a perfect opportunity for the Supreme Court to right that wrong. But if one thing’s for certain, it’s that neither the court nor the country can afford another election-altering ruling that takes such obvious partisan sides.Steven V. Mazie (@stevenmazie) is the author of “American Justice 2015: The Dramatic Tenth Term of the Roberts Court” and is the Supreme Court correspondent for The Economist. Stephen I. Vladeck (@steve_vladeck), a professor at the University of Texas School of Law, writes the One First weekly Supreme Court newsletter and is the author of “The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

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      Democrats won Virginia on abortion. Can it also win them the White House?

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      Days before Josh Cole won his toss-up race, the Democratic candidate for Virginia’s house of delegates predicted that his party would perform well on election day, largely because the issue of abortion had motivated many voters to turn out at the polls.“There are people who are absolutely passionate about reproductive freedom and making sure that an abortion ban doesn’t come to Virginia,” Cole said.Four days later, Cole was proven right, defeating the Republican candidate Lee Peters to represent house district 65 in Richmond, the capital of Virginia. Cole’s victory reflected Virginia Democrats’ broader success on election day, as the party flipped control of the house of delegates and maintained their majority in the state senate.Democrats’ wins in Virginia may now offer some helpful lessons for the party heading into a crucial presidential election. A year and a half after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, abortion continues to weigh heavily on voters’ minds, helping to lift Democrats’ prospects at the polls. Even as Biden remains unpopular and voters express pessimism about the state of the economy, Republicans have struggled to translate that dissatisfaction into electoral success.House district 65 in particular represents a fascinating example of how Republicans failed to win the support of swing voters who helped elect Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia governor, two years earlier. The district, which was newly redrawn following the 2020 census, lies roughly halfway between Washington and Richmond and encompasses the small city of Fredericksburg, as well as parts of Stafford and Spotsylvania counties.The battleground district supported Biden by 11.7 points in 2020, according to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Just one year later, the district went for Youngkin by 2.8 points. Both parties had targeted the seat, with Youngkin himself appearing alongside Peters at a get out the vote rally in Fredericksburg the day before polls closed.Republicans had hoped Peters’ biography as a sheriff’s captain and a former marine would help him defeat Cole, a local pastor and former delegate who narrowly lost his re-election race in 2021. But Cole ultimately won the seat by 6 points.“This was in no way a predetermined result. It’s not a solid blue district at all. It was a winnable one [for Republicans],” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. “And probably among the house of delegates districts, it best represents what went wrong for the Republicans when it should have been a better year for them in the legislative races.”Democrats credit their success in the district and elsewhere to one issue: abortion. Democrats consistently reminded voters of Virginia’s status as the last remaining state in the US south without severe restrictions on the procedure, warning that Republicans would enact an abortion ban if they took full control of the legislature.Those warnings appeared to resonate with Virginians; according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted in October, 60% of voters in the state said abortion was a “very important” factor in their election decisions. More than half of Virginia voters, 51%, said they trusted Democrats more when it came to handling abortion policies, while 34% said the same of Republicans.In this year’s race, Cole kept relentless attention on the issue, citing his support for abortion rights in nearly all of his ads and mailers while attacking Peters over his “anti-choice extremism”.“It was very interesting because it seemed as if people were showing up on one issue,” Cole said after election day. “Of course, we did talk about kitchen-table issues when we’re on the doors and different things like that, but our message was simple. We need to trust women and we need to protect a woman’s right to choose and we need to make sure that the government doesn’t interfere with that.”Virginia Republicans were clearly aware that their stance on abortion could become a liability in the legislative races, particularly after the party’s disappointing performance in the 2022 midterms. To address voters’ potential concerns over abortion, Youngkin chose to deploy a new and untested messaging tactic. He proposed a “reasonable 15-week limit” on the procedure, rejecting the label of an abortion “ban” and instead accusing Democrats of being out of step with voters on the issue.“Most people believe that abortion at the moment of birth is wrong, far beyond any reasonable limit. Not Virginia Democrats,” the narrator said in one Republican ad. “They fought to make late-term abortions the rule, not the exception.”Republicans also attempted to downplay the significance of abortion in the legislative races, insisting Virginia voters were more focused on other issues. Peters himself made this argument at a September debate, saying, “Everybody is not concerned or worried about women’s rights, even though there are many, many women who are. Some people worry about public safety. Some people worry about their schools.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut in the end, Virginia Republicans’ efforts to redefine and minimize the abortion debate were unsuccessful. Democrats maintained a majority of 21-19 in the Virginia senate while flipping control of the house of delegates with a majority of 51-49.“They tested some new messages around this issue – with the intention of getting to the same result, which was an abortion ban. And voters just outright rejected them,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “Republicans are still scratching their head on how to talk about an issue that voters don’t want.”Even fellow Republicans have acknowledged that abortion has become a persistent problem for the party’s electoral prospects. Bill Bolling, a Republican and the former lieutenant governor of Virginia, attributed the party’s losses to three factors: abortion, Donald Trump and a lack of a clear policy vision.“It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to quickly analyze why Republicans did not perform better at the polls,” Bolling wrote last month. “Democrats successfully argued that Republicans wanted to ‘ban abortion’ in Virginia. While this argument was certainly not truthful, it was effective, especially with suburban women who have grown increasingly Democratic in their voting patterns in recent years.”In Cole’s view, his message to voters spread beyond abortion access to encompass other rights, allowing his campaign to embrace a central theme of safeguarding fundamental freedoms.“This election was about protecting rights, whether it’s the right to education, women’s rights, the right to live safely in the streets, or whatever have you. This race was about rights,” Cole said. “[Voters] understood that we definitely have to have people fighting for us on every level, who are looking out for us and our rights.”That theme was similarly present in the messaging of other Democratic candidates in Virginia, Williams said. She suggested that their success could offer a framework for candidates running next year, when Democrats will be fighting to hold the White House and the Senate and flip control of the House of Representatives.“The way that that [message] shows up in an individual community or state may look different. One community may gravitate much more towards having good safe schools and a planet to live on,” Williams said. “But that arc is still true – that fundamental freedoms matter and voters want to see their freedoms protected and not rolled back.”For Republicans, the results in Virginia present the latest in a series of warning signs about how the party is suffering because of its stance on abortion. Youngkin’s failure to take control of the legislature may signal that Republicans must find a way to shift the conversation away from abortion, although that strategy risks angering their rightwing base.“It seems to me that Republicans have just constantly squandered whatever advantage that they have by focusing on divisive social issues where the voters are not aligning with their position,” Rozell said. “So they need to find a way out of that trap that they’ve made for themselves. Otherwise, they’re going to keep losing winnable districts.” More

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      Kamala Harris Will Tour the U.S. in Support of Abortion Rights

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      The vice president has been the administration’s most forceful voice for abortion rights in the year and a half since Roe v. Wade fell.Vice President Kamala Harris will tour the country next year to host events in support of abortion rights, a galvanizing issue for Democrats and one that has become a focus for the vice president in the months since Roe v. Wade was overturned last summer.Ms. Harris, who for the past year and a half has embraced her role as a leader on the issue even as the White House remains hamstrung by what it can do to protect abortion rights, said that her tour would continue to push back on some of the proposals floated by Republican candidates, including national bans and threats to criminalize abortion providers.“Extremists across our country continue to wage a full-on attack against hard-won, hard-fought freedoms as they push their radical policies,” Ms. Harris said in a statement. “I will continue to fight for our fundamental freedoms while bringing together those throughout America who agree that every woman should have the right to make decisions about her own body — not the government.”For the tour’s first stop, Ms. Harris will travel to Wisconsin to mark the 51st anniversary of Roe on Jan. 22, according to her office. Wisconsin is crucial to President Biden’s re-election prospects — he won the state by about 20,600 votes in 2020 — and it was a target of former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to spread falsehoods about illegal voting.Abortion rights supporters packed the rotunda in the Wisconsin State Capitol in January ahead of an election that gave liberals the majority on the State Supreme Court.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesJanet Protasiewicz, a liberal Milwaukee County judge, was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court by an 11-point margin.Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York TimesDemocrats also hope that a series of victories for abortion-rights activists in Wisconsin could signal a wider trend in next year’s general election. In April, voters elected a liberal candidate to the state’s Supreme Court by an 11-point margin. And in September, Planned Parenthood began providing abortions again after a judge ruled that an 1849 state restriction against them — which had been invalidated by Roe until it fell — was not enforceable.The White House has few options beyond using the bully pulpit to spur support for reproductive rights from state to state. But Ms. Harris has used it repeatedly over the past year, starting in January, when she marked the 50th anniversary of Roe in Florida.“Let us not be tired or discouraged,” Ms. Harris said at the time. “Because we are on the right side of history.”Since then, she has made abortion rights a major part of her portfolio as she continues to define her role as vice president. Ms. Harris’s office pointed out on Tuesday that she had also traveled to college campuses across the country to reach young voters. During those interactions, Ms. Harris often fields questions on reproductive rights. More

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      Would the US survive a second Trump presidency? – podcast

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      Last week, Donald Trump was asked whether he would use power as retribution if he were to win a second term in the White House. The former US president responded that he would in fact abuse his power – but only on his first day in office. He followed up by saying: “After that, I’m not a dictator.”
      So what would a Trump presidency 2.0 look like? Would a second term be as catastrophic as the critics believe? And what would be the impact of a Trump sequel not only on the US but on the world?
      This week, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic, whose latest issue is dedicated entirely to a single topic: If Trump wins

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know More

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      An ‘abortion abolitionist’ became an Oklahoma senator. The fringe is celebrating its big victory

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      When Dusty Deevers won his race to become an Oklahoma state senator on Tuesday night, he wasted no time in making sure his new constituents knew what he stood for.“Here in Oklahoma, it’s time to abolish abortion, abolish pornography, abolish the state income tax and give power and equal representation back to the people!” the Republican posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.Deevers’ use of the term “abolish abortion” is no mere rhetorical flourish. On his campaign website, Deevers has identified himself as an “abortion abolitionist” – an adherent of a hardline, fringe segment of the anti-abortion movement that, in Oklahoma and elsewhere, is growing in the wake of the fall of Roe v Wade.Opposition to abortion is rooted in the belief that fetuses are people, worthy of rights and protections. But the mainstream “pro-life” movement posits that abortion patients should not be punished, since they are seen as the bamboozled victims of nefarious doctors and the “abortion industry”. Typically, abortion bans target abortion providers, not patients.Abortion “abolitionists,” on the other hand, hold what they believe to be a more ideologically consistent stance: if a fetus is a person, then abortion is tantamount to murder. And patients should be punished accordingly.Roe’s overturning has made a broader range of anti-abortion ideas look acceptable, as well as cast a spotlight on the contradictions and limits in current anti-abortion law, said Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis School of Law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. In turn, that’s emboldened the abolitionists.“It’s not an easy question about how you can be consistent and exempt women from punishment,” Ziegler said. The abolitionists, she says, are essentially saying: “‘We’re the pragmatists, because if a lot of abortions are self-managed, or involve medical practitioners from out of state or even out of the US altogether, how do you propose meaningfully enforcing [bans] if you’re not going to punish women or other pregnant folks?“They’ve also been hated because people who are not opposed to abortion didn’t know that they existed,” Ziegler added. “And people who are opposed to abortion are not happy that people discovered that they existed.”Over the last several years, “abortion abolitionists” and their ideology have quietly amassed popularity in churches, state legislatures and online. Several abolitionist organizations filed an amicus brief in the decision that overturned Roe. Abolitionists Rising – which features a video of Deevers on its website – has almost 200,000 subscribers on YouTube, with at least one video with more than half a million views. (Deevers did not immediately reply to an interview request.) The YouTube account of Apologia Studios, which is run by prominent abortion “abolitionist” and pastor Jeff Durbin, has more than 500,000 subscribers.In 2023, legislators in at least nine states introduced bills that would advance the abortion abolition cause, such as by erasing provisions in laws that explicitly protect pregnant people from being prosecuted for having abortions. At least two of those bills explicitly cite the 14th amendment, which was originally passed to ensure that formerly enslaved people had equal rights, to extend rights and protections to fetuses.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe anti-abortion movement has a long history of drawing comparisons between their cause and that of pre-civil war abolitionists trying to end US slavery, as well as civil rights crusaders. For decades, they have tried to use the 14th amendment to establish fetuses’ right to personhood, a push that is seeing renewed interest post-Roe.However, anti-abortion “abolitionists” often draw a line between their work and that of the mainstream pro-life movement. Not only do they frequently disdain the pro-life label, but while the pro-life movement has increasingly sought to portray its mission as secular, anti-abortion “abolitionists” are staunchly and openly Christian.“I think that the abolitionist movement is a litmus test for how much the anti-abortion movement needs to win or wants to win in democratic politics versus other means,” Ziegler said. “If you need to win with voters, abolitionists are not going to get anywhere, ever.”There is little support for severe punishments for people who get illegal abortions. Although 47% of US adults believe that women who have illegal abortions should face some form of penalty, just 14% think they should serve jail time, according to a 2022 poll by the Pew Research Center. “Abolitionists” don’t necessarily believe that people should face the death penalty for abortions. “I do believe that the unjustified taking of human life, if provable, ultimately, justly, ought to be capital punishment,” Durbin told the New York Times last year. “However, I don’t trust our system today to deal that out.”None of the “abolitionist”-style bills ultimately advanced very far in state legislatures this year. Still, they can be something of a PR nightmare for Republicans and the mainstream pro-life movement. After a host of news articles about South Carolina’s Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which would allow people who have abortions to face the death penalty, 10 Republican state legislators asked to remove their names as sponsors of the bill.That bill died in committee.While these bills technically focus on abortion seekers, in reality they would probably also be used to penalize people of color or poor people who have unintended pregnancy losses, according to Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director of If/When/How, a legal advocacy group for reproductive justice.“We know who the targets of these laws would be, because they’re the people who are already criminalized for pregnancy outcomes. So we would see an escalation of that status quo,” Diaz-Tello said. “Things that for people of wealth and privilege would be considered a tragedy end up being charged as a crime against people of color, in particular Black women, and people who are in poverty.”Deevers won his seat in the Oklahoma state legislature after its former occupant resigned for another job. On his campaign website, Deevers says that he supports Oklahoma’s version of the Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which was introduced in 2023. That bill eliminates language that would block Oklahoma prosecutors from targeting pregnant people for “causing the death of the unborn child”. Its sponsor, whose 2020 election was supported by the abolitionist group Free the States, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.“This bill would abolish abortion by making preborn children equal under law and closing the loopholes which allow for self-managed abortion,” Deevers’ campaign website reads, adding, “I am 100% against abortion and for its abolition.” More

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      Democrats Seize on Texas Case in Push for Abortion Rights

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      Democratic candidates jumped on the story of a woman who left Texas for an abortion as a cautionary tale for voters, and Republicans were largely silent.The case of a Texas woman who sought a court-approved abortion but wound up leaving the state for the procedure is reigniting political arguments that have roiled elections for more than two years, placing Democrats on the offensive and illustrating Republicans’ continued lack of a unified policy response or clear strategy on how to talk about the issue.The Texas woman, Kate Cox, a Dallas-area mother of two, has emerged as the living embodiment of what Democrats say remains one of their strongest arguments heading into the 2024 election: that Republicans will ban all abortion. Ms. Cox was more than 20 weeks pregnant with a fetus that had a fatal genetic abnormality known as trisomy 18, and lawyers and doctors argued that carrying the pregnancy to term put her health and her future fertility at risk.Her lawsuit was one of the first attempts by an individual woman to challenge the enforcement of abortion bans put in place by Republican states after Roe v. Wade was overturned a year and a half ago. Hours before the Texas Supreme Court ruled against granting Ms. Cox a medical exemption to the state’s abortion bans, she had decided to travel to receive the procedure in a state where it remained legal.From top officials on President Biden’s campaign to candidates in battleground states, Democrats jumped on Ms. Cox’s plight as a cautionary tale for voters next year, highlighting her situation as they have done with the wrenching, deeply personal stories of other women and girls since Roe was overturned.Representative Colin Allred, the Texas Democrat running to unseat Senator Ted Cruz, cast the ruling as emblematic of the kind of abortion bans Republicans would enact across the country.“This is not an unintended consequence of these extreme policies — this is exactly what folks like Ted Cruz wanted and a pretty predictable outcome of their policies,” Mr. Allred said. “Unfortunately, Kate’s story is not going to be the last one we hear like this.”Representative Colin Allred, the Texas Democrat running to unseat Senator Ted Cruz, cast the ruling against Ms. Cox as emblematic of the kind of abortion bans Republicans would enact across the country.Mariam Zuhaib/Associated PressThe Biden campaign offered an even simpler message about the case: Blame Trump. Campaign aides connected the case directly to Mr. Trump’s legacy as president, pointing out that he appointed three of the Supreme Court justices who cast decisive votes in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling that overturned Roe in 2022.“This is happening right here in the United States of America, and it’s happening because of Donald Trump,” Julie Chávez Rodríguez, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, said on a call with reporters. “As the chaos and cruelty created by Trump’s work overturning Roe v. Wade continues to worsen all across the country, stories like Kate Cox’s in Texas have become all too common.”The party’s quick embrace of Ms. Cox underscores how Democrats plan to place abortion rights at the center of their political campaigns next year, part of an effort to replicate their playbook from the 2022 midterms and transform the 2024 elections into another referendum on abortion rights.Their attacks were largely met with silence from Republicans.At a town-hall meeting CNN hosted in Des Moines on Tuesday night, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor running for the Republican presidential nomination, avoided giving a direct answer to a question about whether women in Ms. Cox’s position should be forced to carry their babies to term. Mr. DeSantis noted that a six-week abortion ban he signed in Florida this year contained exceptions for a fatal fetal abnormality or to save the life of the woman.“These things get a lot of press attention, I understand. But that’s a very small percentage that those exceptions cover,” he added. “There’s a lot of other situations where we have an opportunity to realize really good human potential, and we’ve worked to protect as many lives as we could in Florida.”Republican strategists working for the party’s Senate campaign committee and for other candidates have urged their politicians to state their support for “reasonable limits” on late-term abortions with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother, part of an effort to craft a more popular response on the issue. While majorities of Americans support abortion rights, they also back restrictions later in pregnancy, particularly as women move into the second trimester.Yet, as Ms. Cox’s situation shows, the messy medical realities of pregnancy can challenge those poll-tested stances. Ms. Cox was denied exactly the kind of medical exception that many Republicans now support. In Congress, Republicans have been trying to enact a federal ban on abortions after 20 weeks — a marker Ms. Cox had passed in her pregnancy — for about decade.“It used to be a good idea politically to talk about later abortion,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor and historian of abortion at the University of California, Davis. “The claims just don’t land the same way when abortion bans are actually being enforced and when it is the patients themselves who are speaking.”Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a Republican presidential candidate, deflected when asked whether she would support rulings similar to the one from the Texas Supreme Court that block an individual woman’s decisions on the matter. Ms. Haley has positioned herself as seeking “consensus” on the issue, arguing that she is both “unapologetically pro-life” and that decisions about whether to undergo the procedure are deeply personal.Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina and a Republican presidential candidate, deflected when asked whether she would support rulings similar to the one from the Texas Supreme Court that block an individual woman’s decisions on the matter.Jordan Gale for The New York Times“You have to show compassion and humanize the situation,” Ms. Haley said, speaking after at a packed town-hall meeting in a ski area in Manchester, N.H. “We don’t want any women to sit there and deal with a rare situation and have to deliver a baby in that sort of circumstance any more than we want women getting an abortion at 37, 38, 39 weeks.”That kind of response is unlikely to satisfy the socially conservative flank of the party’s base. Tensions between anti-abortion activists and establishment Republicans, who are more willing to compromise on the issue for political gain, flared as the party debated Ms. Cox’s case.“The prolife movement has gone from compassion for the child to cruelty to the mother (and child),” Ann Coulter, the conservative commentator, posted on social media. “Trisomy 18 is not a condition that is compatible with life.”Rick Santorum, the socially conservative Republican former senator from Pennsylvania, shot back with a photo of his daughter Bella. “Meet my incompatible w life daughter,” he wrote. “Every kid deserves a shot at life, not be brutally dismembered for not being perfect.”Ardent anti-abortion advocates such as Mr. Santorum argue that just as the law would not permit the killing of a terminally ill adult, it should forbid the abortion of a fetus with a fatal diagnosis — like the one carried by Ms. Cox.“There are two patients involved, and targeting one of them for brutal abortion will never be the compassionate answer,” said Katie Daniel, the state policy director for SBA Pro-Life America, an anti-abortion political organization. “Texas law protects mothers who need lifesaving care in a medical emergency, which a doctor can provide without deliberately taking a patient’s life and without involving the court.”The argument that abortion is akin to murder, a foundational belief of the anti-abortion movement, is more difficult to make when it is no longer hypothetical. As conservative states have begun enforcing bans that all but completely forbid abortion, pregnant women have emerged as some of Democrats’ strongest messengers.In Ohio, the account of a girl who was raped at age 9 and had to travel to Indiana to end her pregnancy at age 10 became a national controversy after Republicans publicly questioned the veracity of the story. And in Kentucky, Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, spent nearly $2 million on startling ads for his re-election campaign that featured Hadley Duvall, a young woman who said she was raped by her stepfather as a girl.Eric Hyers, Mr. Beshear’s campaign manager, said those ads had the biggest impact among older men living in more rural and conservative parts of the state.“A lot of folks there had just never had to think about this in the terms that Hadley was describing,” Mr. Hyers said. “This is the road map for how Democrats should talk about this in tough states like Kentucky and specifically on how extreme these laws and bans are.”Across the country, activists have been pushing to introduce ballot measures that would enshrine abortion rights in state constitutions. Many Democrats believe those referendums could help energize their voters, increasing turnout in Arizona, Florida and other crucial states. In Florida, abortion-rights supporters said they were close to capturing the necessary number of signatures to put an amendment to the state constitution on the ballot.Some Democrats say such measures aren’t enough, particularly for women in conservative states such as Texas, where legislation had already banned abortion nearly completely even before the Supreme Court overturned Roe.“It is absolutely unacceptable that women have to ask permission to get lifesaving health care,” said Ashley All, who helped run a campaign for an abortion-rights ballot measure in Kansas and urges Democrats to push legislation codifying abortion rights in federal law. “The fact that we aren’t making some sort of effort nationally to fix that problem is frustrating.”Nicholas Nehamas More