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    A State Court Ruling on I.V.F. Echoes Far Beyond Alabama

    Frozen embryos in test tubes must be considered children, judges ruled. The White House called it a predictable consequence of the overturn of Roe v. Wade.An Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling that frozen embryos in test tubes should be considered children has sent shock waves through the world of reproductive medicine, casting doubt over fertility care for would-be parents in the state and raising complex legal questions with implications extending far beyond Alabama.On Tuesday, Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said the ruling would cause “exactly the type of chaos that we expected when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and paved the way for politicians to dictate some of the most personal decisions families can make.”Speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One as President Biden traveled to California, Ms. Jean-Pierre reiterated the Biden administration’s call for Congress to codify the protections of Roe v. Wade into federal law.“As a reminder, this is the same state whose attorney general threatened to prosecute people who help women travel out of state to seek the care they need,” she said, referring to Alabama, which began enforcing a total abortion ban in June 2022.The judges issued the ruling on Friday in appeals cases brought by couples whose embryos were destroyed in 2020, when a hospital patient removed frozen embryos from tanks of liquid nitrogen in Mobile and dropped them on the floor.Referencing antiabortion language in the state constitution, the judges’ majority opinion said that an 1872 statute allowing parents to sue over the wrongful death of a minor child applies to unborn children, with no exception for “extrauterine children.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump privately backs 16-week abortion ban with exceptions, report says

    Donald Trump likes the idea of a national ban on abortion past 16 weeks of pregnancy with exceptions for rape, incest and to save the life of the mother, the New York Times reported on Friday morning.Trump has veered away from taking a firm stance on abortion during his presidential campaign. He has taken credit for the US supreme court’s 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, since he appointed three of the justices who took part in that decision, but he has also suggested that Republicans who take extreme stances on abortion lose elections.“Know what I like about 16?” Trump told one individual, according to the Times, which based its report on two people with knowledge of Trump’s thoughts. “It’s even. It’s four months.”Trump is waiting until after the conclusion of the Republican primary to publicly discuss his position, the Times reported.Since Roe’s demise, voters have repeatedly rejected attempts to curtail abortion rights and supported state-level ballot measures to protect the right to the procedure. Outrage over Roe is also widely credited with defeating the promised “red wave” in the 2022 midterms and leaving Republicans with fewer victories than anticipated.Last year, Virginia Republicans campaigned in a state election on a pledge to ban abortion past 15 weeks, as a kind of “compromise” position. Their efforts to retake control of the state legislature failed.However, the anti-abortion movement, with its coterie of high-powered activists, has made it clear that they would like to see the procedure totally outlawed. Although most Americans consider themselves “pro-choice”, polling shows they are far less supportive of abortions past the first trimester.After publication of the Times article, the Trump campaign sent out a statement dismissing it as “fake news”.“As President Trump has stated, he would sit down with both sides and negotiate a deal that everyone will be happy with,” said Karoline Leavitt, the campaign’s national press secretary. Leavitt then celebrated Trump’s role in overturning Roe and falsely accused Democrats, among other things, of supporting abortion “after birth”, which is infanticide and already illegal in the United States.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe vast majority of abortions take place in the first trimester of pregnancy. However, someone may have an abortion later on in pregnancy due to a medical emergency.More than a dozen states have enacted near-total abortion bans, several of which do not have exceptions for rape or incest. And doctors have repeatedly said that carve-outs for abortions in cases of medical emergencies have proven so vague as to be unworkable; dozens of women have now come forward to say that they were denied medically necessary abortions.“Now, after being the one responsible for taking away women’s freedom, after being the one to put women’s lives in danger, after being the one who has unleashed all this cruelty and chaos all across America, Trump is running scared,” Joe Biden said in a statement on Friday afternoon. “He’s afraid that the women of America are going to hold him responsible for taking away their rights and endangering their rights at the ballot box in November. That’s exactly what’s going to happen.” More

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    Anti-abortion centers raked in $1.4bn in year Roe fell, including federal money

    Anti-abortion facilities raked in at least $1.4bn in revenue in the 2022 fiscal year, the year Roe v Wade fell – a staggering haul that includes at least $344m in government money, according to a memo analyzing the centers’ tax documents that was compiled by a pro-abortion rights group and shared exclusively with the Guardian.These facilities, frequently known as anti-abortion pregnancy centers or crisis pregnancy centers, aim to convince people to keep their pregnancies. But in the aftermath of Roe’s demise, the anti-abortion movement has framed anti-abortion pregnancy centers as a key source of aid for desperate women who have lost the legal right to end their pregnancies and been left with little choice but to give birth.Accordingly, abortion opponents say, the centers need an influx of government cash.“Those are the centers that states rely on to assist expecting moms and dads,” Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, told anti-abortion protesters at the March for Life in January. The Louisiana Republican praised the centers for providing “the important material support that expecting and first-time mothers get from these centers”.Earlier this year, under Johnson’s leadership, the House passed a bill that would block the Department of Health and Human Services from restricting funding for anti-abortion pregnancy centers. State governments are also in the midst of sending vast sums of taxpayer dollars to programs that support anti-abortion pregnancy centers. Since the demolition of Roe, at least 16 states have agreed to send more than $250m towards “alternative to abortion” programs in 2023 through 2025. Those programs funnel money towards anti-abortion pregnancy centers, maternity homes and assorted other initiatives meant to dissuade people from abortions.Still, abortion rights supporters say, much of the anti-abortion pregnancy center industry remains shrouded in mystery – including their finances.“Stewards of both taxpayer and charitable funds should insist on a real impact analysis of the industry, whether investments that are being made are achieving their desired outcomes and are cost-effective,” said Jenifer McKenna, the crisis pregnancy center program director at Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch, the group behind the analysis of tax documents. “Taxpayers deserve performance standards and hard metrics for use of their dollars on these centers.”The analysis by Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch examined 990 tax documents, which most US tax-exempt organizations must file annually, from 1,719 anti-abortion pregnancy centers in fiscal year 2019 and from 1,469 in fiscal year 2022. The analysis confirms that the anti-abortion pregnancy center industry is growing: while the centers’ revenue in 2022 exceeds $1.4bn, it was closer to $1.03bn in 2019, even though more centers were included in the earlier analysis.Centers reported receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from private funders between 2018 and 2022. While only a relatively small fraction of the centers reported receiving grants from state and federal governments in both 2022 and 2019, that number is on the rise, according to the Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch analysis memo. In 2022, the centers said they received $344m in such grants, but they received less than $97m in 2019.Just 21 centers identified the federal grants that they received in 2022, the analysis found. Those grants included the Fema-funded Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which is primarily meant for organizations that alleviate hunger and homelessness, and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a program for low-income families.This accounting does not represent the full financial picture of the anti-abortion pregnancy center industry. More than 2,500 anti-abortion pregnancy centers are believed to dot the United States – a number that far outstrips the number of abortion clinics in the country.‘What did they do with all that money?’Much of the modern, publicly available information on anti-abortion pregnancy centers comes from one of their biggest cheerleaders: the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which assembles reports on the industry and operates as an arm of Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, one of the top anti-abortion organizations in the United States.In 2019, the Charlotte Lozier Institute said that 2,700 anti-abortion pregnancy centers provided consulting services to 967,251 new clients on-site. In 2022, the Institute said 2,750 centers provided consulting services for 974,965 new clients – an increase of 0.08%.Even though the US supreme court overturned Roe at the halfway point of 2022, it did not appear to result in a crush of new clients – despite anti-abortion advocates’ argument that the pregnancy centers need an infusion of funding to handle post-Roe clients.“The new client numbers alone don’t fully tell the story,” a bevy of Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars – Moira Gaul, Jeanneane Maxon and Michael J New – said in an email to the Guardian, adding that anti-abortion centers and groups have seen an increase in violence following the fall of Roe. (The abortion clinics that remain post-Roe have also faced rising violence. That has not stoppered the demand for their services, as rates of abortions have risen since Roe’s demise.)Anti-abortion pregnancy centers are seeing a dramatic rise in calls for certain kinds of help. Data from the Charlotte Lozier Institute reports show that centers handed out 64% more diapers, 52% more baby clothing and 43% more wipes in 2022, compared to 2019. Demand for new car seats and strollers also increased by about a third.All of these items would presumably go to new parents. The fall of Roe led to an estimated 32,000 more births, particularly among young women and women of color, a 2023 analysis found.The total dollar value of these goods and services was about $358m, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute report. Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch found that the roughly 1,500 centers included in the group’s 2022 analysis reported expenses of more than $1.2bn on their 990 tax documents.“They took in – according to the 990s – $1.4bn, and they spent $1.2bn on expenditures,” McKenna said. “What did they do with all that money? There’s so many questions begged by their own reporting.”The Charlotte Lozier scholars said there were other expenses not listed in the report, such as maternity clothing, property-related payments, fundraising, marketing and staff salaries. Data from their report indicates that, between 2019 and 2022, the number of volunteers who work at the centers fell while the number of paid staffers rose. (Volunteers still make up the overwhelming bulk of the workforce.)“Most non-profits prefer to use staff when possible. Centers are attracting more professionals that desire to help women,” the scholars said. “Many centers are now in a place where they can pay them so they are less reliant on volunteers.”The institute’s report on anti-abortion pregnancy centers in 2022 is a very different document to the reports that it released to cover the centers in 2019 and 2017. The earlier reports span dozens of pages; the 2022 report is only four. A longer report is now in the works, the Charlotte Lozier scholars said, which will include information about government funding of centers.A lack of regulationAlthough anti-abortion pregnancy centers may appear to be local mom-and-pop organizations, in reality many are affiliated with national organizations like NIFLA, Care Net and Heartbeat International. These centers thrive in a kind of regulatory dead zone, providing medical services like ultrasounds. But many are not licensed as medical facilities, leaving them unencumbered by the rules or oversight imposed on typical medical providers.“They are changing their names a lot and changing their names in ways like including ‘clinic’ or ‘medical’ or ‘healthcare’ into their names and dropping things like ‘Care Net’ and other types of wording that might instantly identify them as a CPC,” said Andrea Swartzendruber, an associate professor at the University of Georgia College of Public Health who tracks anti-abortion pregnancy centers.These centers, she said, are “changing their names in ways that make them seem more like medical clinics”.The Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars said “calls for governmental regulation are nothing new” post-Roe and that “such efforts have been ongoing for decades”.“They have been found to be politically motivated and have been largely unsuccessful,” the scholars said. “Abortion facilities are in need of far greater government regulation.”Anti-abortion pregnancy centers’ taxes can also be deeply intricate. The analysis by Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch found that the centers used a variety of tax codes to describe themselves, frequently describing themselves as organizations that provide “family services” or “reproductive healthcare”. They were sometimes listed as organizations that work to outlaw abortions, or as explicitly Christian, religious organizations.The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a charity watchdog group, has previously found that many centers share tax identification numbers with much larger organizations that do multiple kinds of charity work, such as non-profits run by Catholic dioceses. By sharing numbers, these organizations are effectively collapsed into one legal and tax entity, the committee said.The Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars told the Guardian that “this is not our understanding at all”. NIFLA, Care Net and Heartbeat International do not share tax identification numbers with affiliated centers, they said.Just because these particular groups do not share tax identification numbers does not preclude centers from sharing them with other organizations. For example, Care Net is affiliated with a string of Florida pregnancy centers – which, rather than sharing Care Net’s tax ID, are instead listed on tax documents for a wide-ranging charity run by a local Catholic diocese.Anti-abortion pregnancy centers tend to be faith-based. Given the industry’s religious bent, courts have proven reluctant to restrict centers in order to avoid treading on their free speech rights.In 2018, the US supreme court ruled to toss a California law that would have forced centers to disclose whether they were a licensed medical provider. Then, last year, a federal judge in Colorado paused a law that would have banned “abortion reversal”, an unproven drug protocol that aims to halt abortions and is often offered by anti-abortion pregnancy centers. (The first randomized, controlled clinical study to try to study the “reversal” protocol’s effectiveness suddenly stopped in 2019, after three of its participants went to the hospital hemorrhaging blood.)“More regulation could lead to better reporting, which would also then help with reducing all of these risks,” said Teneille Brown, a University of Utah College of Law professor who studies anti-abortion pregnancy centers. “Then the consumers could get some sense of like, ‘Oh, this clinic has had a bunch of violations,’ and if there were regulation, they could actually even shut them down.” More

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    Don’t Underestimate the Mobilizing Force of Abortion

    Poland recently ousted its right-wing, nationalist Law and Justice Party. In 2020, a party-appointed tribunal severely restricted the country’s abortion rights, sparking nationwide protests and an opposition movement. After a trip to Poland, the Times Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg came to recognize that similar dynamics could prevail in the United States in 2024. In this audio essay, she argues that Joe Biden’s campaign should take note of what a “powerful mobilizing force the backlash to abortion bans can be.”(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available by Monday, and can be found in the audio player above.)Illustration by Akshita Chandra/The New York Times; Photograph by Getty ImagesThe 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, X (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram.This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Engineering by Isaac Jones and Sonia Herrero. Original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. More

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    Inside the youth anti-abortion movement in the US: ‘Victory is on its way’ – video

    Since the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, 16 states have enacted stringent bans on nearly all abortions. But that is not enough for a new generation of organised and passionate activists intent on pushing even stricter laws across the country. Carter Sherman spends time with students and organisers at the annual March for Life in Washington DC and meets the influential woman spearheading the national movement More

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    Abortion rights are Biden’s most powerful re-election issue. He should act like it | Moira Donegan

    For years, the beltway set had a standard line of advice for Democratic candidates: stick to the economy. The idea was that white, male, blue-collar voters – those magical creatures, somewhere out there in the windswept lands of the upper midwest, who always qualify in the pundit imagination as “real Americans” – would be turned off by so-called culture-war issues.These guys, we were told, didn’t want to hear about civil rights or social equality: they wanted to hear about economic growth. According to this advice, Democrats could be pro-choice, pro-racial justice, or pro-LGBTQ+ rights, but not openly, avowedly so. They had to play their progressive social positions in a minor key.It’s not clear that this advice ever really paid off for Democratic candidates. At any rate, you don’t hear it much any more. That’s because, for the past two years, Democratic electoral victories up and down the ballot have been driven disproportionately by one of those culture-war issues that candidates were typically told to avoid: abortion.American women’s anger over the US supreme court’s Dobbs ruling is the single most potent political force in America right now, and if Joe Biden wins re-election – a distinct if imperiled possibility – it will be because his campaign succeeded in making the election a referendum on Republicans’ abortion bans. There is no one issue with greater importance; there are few issues that have ever motivated voters so dramatically.You would think that this would be a gift to the Biden campaign. On paper, Republicans are almost solely responsible for the overturning of Roe and the draconian, morbid and dangerous abortion bans that have followed.Donald Trump continually brags about appointing three of the six justices who ruled to eliminate the abortion right; Republican politicians nationwide, not content with being able to ban abortion, have sought to eliminate life and health exemptions, to further restrict gestational age limits, and to impose criminal and civil penalties for things like advocating for abortion rights or transporting a patient across state lines. These are hateful, bigoted, invasive and lawless moves, ones that degrade women’s citizenship and are hated by the public. And they’re Republican moves.But the new prominence of abortion in electoral politics presents something of a conundrum for the Biden campaign: because while Republicans are vehemently anti-choice, Biden himself is not a particularly convincing abortion rights advocate.He is, at best, unenthused about the issue. Biden speaks of abortion in stilted, euphemistic terms, talking about “restoring the protections of Roe” or “a woman’s right to choose” more than “abortion”. (He did not use the word in public remarks until he was forced to after facing pressure from activists.) On the stump, he frequently ad libs, straying from prepared remarks to make his dislike of abortion clear. In one set of remarks last year, he unhelpfully offered that he was “not big on abortion”.In remarks this past week, he characterized his own position using anti-choice buzzwords, saying he was opposed to “abortion on demand”. Most of the campaigning on the issue has been passed off to Kamala Harris, admittedly a more comfortable messenger for a women’s rights platform. But outsourcing such a prominent issue to the vice-president is itself fraught with symbolic dangers: the campaign risks signaling that they consider abortion to be a second-tier issue by assigning it to their second-tier principal. And Harris is limited in what she can say by the somewhat narrow extent of the president’s comfort.And so Biden has taken on the task of marketing himself as a champion of abortion rights with all the relish of a third-grader told to eat his broccoli: he has been informed that doing so is good for him, but he really, really doesn’t want to. This week, as the Biden administration launched a series of policy and public relations efforts meant to frame the stakes of the elections for voters invested in reproductive freedom, things got off to something of a rocky start.Last Monday, on what would have been Roe’s 51st anniversary, Biden held a task force meeting in which he said that his administration would defend laws legalizing things like the FDA approval of mifepristone, which is being challenged by anti-choice lawyers in court. He said he would create a team to educate the public about when emergency abortions are legal in hospitals – a growing need in an era when more and more pregnant women are facing disastrous health risks because of abortion bans that prohibit the procedure from being used to spare them from catastrophic harm. He said he would encourage access to birth control.It was a tepid announcement, one where Biden seemed self-satisfied for doing the bare minimum. It was a policy agenda, too, that leaves all the agenda-setting power in the anti-choice movement’s hands: what the Biden campaign is offering American women – the ones who are angry and distraught, the ones that have suffered a blow to their dignity and an endangering of their safety – is that his administration might be willing to make minimal efforts to stop the people who are working maximally hard to make it worse.At a rally in Wisconsin the next day, Harris seemed more interested in describing the post-Dobbs landscape as one of a “healthcare crisis” – emphasizing, as Biden has, the stories of women denied life – and health-preserving abortions in moments of medical emergency. And it is true that the post-Dobbs world is one where it has become dramatically more dangerous to be pregnant, one where a capricious law, or a doctor’s fear of one, could cost you your life, your health or your fertility in the event that something goes wrong. And it is true, too, as Harris told the crowd, that a Republican victory would almost certainly result in a national ban on abortion – something a Republican president could effect in practice even without a filibuster-proof majority in Congress.But the campaign’s focus on these aspects of the Dobbs catastrophe – the women suffering complications from wanted pregnancies, the potential that things could get worse – does too little to grapple with the harm that’s happening right now, to women who simply do not want to be pregnant, and who deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity of citizens, not talked down to like children who cannot be trusted to act as custodians of their own bodily functions.Biden was not wrong when he said that women who were forced to become sicker and sicker during miscarriages before they were allowed to obtain abortions were subjected to an indignity. But so, too, are those who the law treats as de facto incompetent or suspicious: those who want and deserve their abortions, in Biden’s contemptuous phrasing, “on demand”.If anything, Biden is talking like he believes that abortion remains a delicate issue, as if it is something he thinks he will lose by being too strong on. But that advice, which maybe never quite worked, was from another time. It is not advice for this moment. Biden needs to change his strategy on abortion, to bring it more in line with both the sentiments of voters and the demands of our era. It is time for him to grow up, and eat his vegetables.
    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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    Biden hopes abortion will keep him in the White House. But has he done enough to protect rights?

    Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has made a big bet that outrage over abortion will keep the president in the White House come November.Over the last several days, the Biden administration has unleashed a blitz of ads and events to spotlight the devastation wrought by the overturning of Roe v Wade. Biden met with a reproductive health task force, while his vice-president, Kamala Harris – who he has entrusted to lead this effort – embarked on a national tour to talk about abortion. They even devoted their first joint campaign stop of 2024 to the issue. From the podium, Biden promised to sign any bill that would codify Roe’s protections into law and to fight back efforts by Congress to diminish abortion access.“Donald Trump and Maga Republicans, including the speaker of the House, are hellbent on going even further,” Biden said, a reference to the hard-right Republican speaker, Mike Johnson. “As long as I have power of the presidency, if Congress were to pass a national abortion ban, I would veto it.”Congress is unlikely to ban or protect abortion anytime soon. Not only is Congress largely frozen – it passed just 27 bills last year – but both political parties seem wary of tackling national legislation around a third-rail topic like abortion.Now that Roe is gone, the question of if and how to regulate abortion access is largely up to state governments to answer. But the executive branch of the US government still maintains several powers to protect abortion access – and undermine it.What has Biden done to protect abortion access?The Biden administration’s ability to enforce remaining federal laws that touch on abortion is perhaps its greatest weapon in the fight over the procedure. Shortly after Roe’s demise, the Biden administration announced that it believed a 1986 federal law that protects people’s access to emergency care at hospitals also applies to emergency abortions. The administration later sued Idaho, arguing that the state’s near-total abortion ban flew in the face of that law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala).That case has now made its way to the US supreme court. The supreme court justices are also set to hear arguments in a case involving the availability of a major abortion pill – a case in which the Biden administration is, once again, arguing in favor of abortion access.“Being a check on the supreme court is pretty significant,” said Mary Ziegler, a University of California Davis school of law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. The US supreme court is dominated 6-3 by conservatives. “If the supreme court says that you can or should enforce rules against abortion providers, I don’t think a Biden administration is going to do that.”Since Roe fell, anti-abortion activists have also begun to argue that the federal government could enforce a de facto national abortion ban through the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials.However, the Biden administration has issued guidance declaring that they do not believe the Comstock Act can or should be used to enforce a national abortion ban. According to the Biden administration, as long as someone does not intend to break the law when they mail abortion-related materials, they are not violating the Comstock Act.What more could Biden be doing?The answer depends on who you ask. Abortion rights advocates have long been dissatisfied with Biden’s approach to the procedure; Biden has supported Roe’s protections but also said that, as a Catholic, he is personally not “big on abortion”. During his campaign and the first several months of his presidency, he seemed wary of even saying the word “abortion”, leading reproductive justice advocates to launch a website devoted to answering the question “Did Biden Say Abortion Yet?” (He has now said it multiple times.)The Biden administration has pursued several cases under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, or Face Act, a federal law that penalizes people for threatening, obstructing, or injuring someone who is trying to access a reproductive health clinic, or for vandalizing a clinic. But abortion providers have long complained that the law is not being enforced enough.Abortion rights supporters have also proposed a litany of other, experimental ways to protect abortion access, such as by leasing federal land to abortion providers or advocating for the repeal of the Comstock Act. Biden could also loosen regulations around abortion pills, although Ziegler cautioned that such actions run the risk of politicizing the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to a dangerous degree. Abortion rights advocates have also said that the Biden administration could take steps to lessen the impact of the Helms Amendment, a decades-old law that has been used to block the use of federal funding to pay for abortions. Advocates have accused Biden of inappropriately over-enforcing the Helms Amendment, to the point that the US Agency for International Development in 2021 cancelled a conference session on the provision of safe telemedicine abortion.However, in Ziegler’s view, the threat of the supreme court tamps down on Biden’s ability to innovate. Rather than pursuing novel, national ways to protect abortion access and run the risk of litigation, the administration may want to stay out of federal court entirely.“I think Biden has been really cautious,” Ziegler said. “But I do also think that had he not been as cautious, it could have ended up the same or worse anyway, just because the supreme court is so conservative.”What could Donald Trump do to further restrict abortion?If Trump wins the presidency in November 2024, he may reverse course on many of the Biden administration’s decisions around how and if to enforce federal abortion law. He could try to implement the Comstock Act to ban abortion in some form, including in states that haven’t passed bans. He could also decrease Face Act prosecutions, or tighten regulations on mifepristone.Unlike Biden, he likely wouldn’t worry about politicizing the FDA, Ziegler said. “There’s a lot of asymmetry that hurts Democrats, but also Democrats do value some of these institutional separations that Republicans don’t.”Trump’s first four years in the White House also offer a blueprint for how he may further dismantle access to both abortion and contraception if he returns to power.Since the 1980s, whenever a Republican becomes president, he has implemented what is known as “the Mexico City policy” or the “global gag rule”, as abortion rights supporters call it. This policy typically blocks foreign NGOs that receive US family planning funding from providing abortion-related services or even advocating for increased access to the procedure. (Historically, whenever a Democrat replaces a Republican as president, he has rescinded the Mexico City policy.)Trump, however, turbocharged the Mexico City policy during his presidency. Rather than stripping funding only from family planning assistance, in 2017 his administration expanded it to apply to all US global health assistance. Rather than impacting $600m worth of funding, by 2018 it impacted $12bn, according to estimates by the Guttmacher Institute, which supports abortion rights.As president, Trump also implemented a “domestic gag rule”, which blocked members of Title X, the nation’s largest family planning program, from even referring people for abortions. Rather than comply with this rule, a quarter of Title X-funded health centers simply left the program. Six states were left with zero Title X providers, who offer low-cost access to family planning services like birth control.If Trump wins in 2024, he will likely reinstate this rule, said Robin Summers, vice-president and senior counsel for the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association. And that’s just the beginning of Summers thinks he might do.“I think it only gets worse,” Summers said.Trump could, Summers suggested, legally label certain forms of hormonal birth control – such as IUDS – as abortifacients, suggesting that they cause abortions. (Medical experts widely believe that they do not.) The US supreme court has previously supported a similar move. In a 2014 decision, issued when the court’s makeup was far less conservative, the justices ruled that a corporation did not have to cover certain forms of birth control for employees because the corporation’s religious owners believed them to be abortifacients.“The bottom line here is that advocates sounded the alarm for years that Roe was at significant risk of being overturned. And we were dismissed by many as catastrophizing the whole thing,” Summers said. “And look where we are.” More

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    US elected officials avoiding topics of abortion and gun control over fear of threats

    Tens of thousands of state legislators and elected local officials are avoiding hot-button policy issues such as abortion and gun control because they are fearful of the backlash of intimidating abuse, a new report has found.A major survey by the Brennan Center for Justice released on Thursday warned that the spate of extremist intimidation that has been seen nationally in the US, epitomized by the attack on the Capitol building on 6 January 2021, is also sweeping local and state politics. In the fallout, elected individuals are limiting their interactions with constituents and narrowing the contentious topics they are prepared to take on.Some are even contemplating quitting public life altogether. Such chilling of public discourse poses a threat to the functioning of representative democracy at every level of government, the Brennan Center, a non-partisan authority on law and policy, concludes.The center conducted a survey of 350 state legislators and more than 1,350 local officeholders working in towns, municipalities and county government. It found that more than 40% of state lawmakers had experienced threats or attacks in the past three years, while almost one in five local officials faced the same abuse over 18 months.View image in fullscreenAlmost one in 10 state legislators reported that they had been intimidated by a person wielding a weapon. Many others faced death threats, including one state lawmaker who said they had received a message that provided granular detail down to the date, time and precise location where an attack would take place.The abuse is often directly related to the policy positions that elected individuals have adopted over contentious issues such as gun control and abortion. That in turn is having a withering impact on the democratic process, the Brennan Center warns.Some 39% of locally elected officials and more than one in five state lawmakers said they were less willing to advocate for contentious policies for fear of abuse. When those figures are extrapolated for all public servants in state and local government, many tens of thousands of officials are affected.At a time when the US is experiencing record numbers of mass shootings, gun regulations were repeatedly mentioned as an area in which lawmakers were holding back for fear of attack. Kelly Cassidy, a Democratic representative in the Illinois legislature, told the researchers that she decided not to lead bills that would introduce safety controls on firearms because “my kids were too little, the threats were too common and too on point”.View image in fullscreenPublic service is being distorted in other ways. Many officials said they are now less likely to participate in public events, post on social media, visit public spaces when off-duty or bring their family members with them, or make media appearances.A similar pattern has been seen on the national stage, with politicians becoming increasingly wary of confronting controversial subjects. Liz Cheney, the former leading Republican in the US House of Representatives who was herself forced out of her Wyoming seat in retaliation for her criticisms of Donald Trump, has alleged that some of her party colleagues voted not to impeach Trump over his role in the Capital insurrection because they were afraid for their lives.Concern for the safety of elected individuals has become a top priority for the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, as the country enters the 2024 presidential election year. On 5 January he convened a meeting at the justice department to discuss increasing protection for all public servants, from law enforcement personnel, members of Congress and judges, to election workers.View image in fullscreenGarland said the country was seeing “a deeply disturbing spike in threats against those who serve the public”. The abuse threatened “the fabric of our democracy”.Kristine Reeves, a Democratic lawmaker from Washington state, told the Guardian that as the first Black woman elected to the state house in 2016 she now has to think carefully before addressing hard political topics. She recently introduced a bill that would disqualify anyone convicted of acts of insurrection from running for state office under the 14th amendment of the US constitution.The blowback has been extreme, she said. “White men have come online and told me that I need to be hanged. They have called my office and suggested that me and my family need to watch out because we’ve got what’s coming to us. It’s one thing to take those risks on for yourself; it’s completely another to do so knowing that you’re putting your family in harm’s way.”Reeves belongs to a demographic group that is bearing the brunt of the incipient political violence sweeping the US. The Brennan survey shows that women – and women of colour in particular – are disproportionately likely to endure severe abuse, often of a sexual nature and frequently with the threats extending to their families including children.Reeves and her election campaigns team have been forced to limit contact with the public. They have curtailed the canvassing of citizens during elections – a bedrock of US democracy – with door knocking increasingly replaced by phone banking, mail outs and virtual events.When canvassers do go out, Reeves encourages them to travel in pairs and to avoid knocking on doors alone. “It sounds crazy to say this out loud as a woman of colour, but if we have a Black man going out, we encourage him to go with a white counterpart, just to ensure that there’s a de-escalation opportunity.”Canvassers are also handed pepper spray in case of attacks. Reeves herself was abused on a doorstep recently when she was called the N-word.As the election year unfolds, the volatile language and imagery used by Trump at his rallies and in fundraising communications is raising concern about what might lie ahead. Trump has taken to calling convicted rioters from the January 6 insurrection “hostages”.In a recent fundraising email the Trump campaign offered supporters free “Make America great again” knives, with “razor-sharp, 3.5[in]” flick blades. The knives are recommended for “military personnel”, “tactical enthusiasts”, and “law enforcement” and are described as a “symbol of patriotic pride” that are perfect for “self-defense”. More