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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

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      US supreme court agrees to consider abortion pill access

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      The US supreme court on Wednesday agreed to hear oral arguments in a case that could determine the future of a pill used in most abortions in the US, in the first major abortion rights case to land at the country’s highest court since the justices overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the national right to the procedure in 2022.A decision in the case will probably arrive in summer 2024, just months before the presidential election. The outcome of the case could affect not just access to the pill, which has been repeatedly deemed safe and effective, but the Federal Drug Administration’s authority to regulate all manner of medications.The drug at the heart of the case is mifepristone, one of the two drugs typically used in medication abortions, which make up the majority of US abortions. Last year, an association of anti-abortion organizations and doctors, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the FDA had overstepped its authority when it approved mifepristone in 2000.In April, a Texas federal judge appointed by former president Donald Trump issued a preliminary ruling to suspend the FDA’s approval of mifepristone and pull the medication off the market. The US court of appeals for the fifth circuit – one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the US – ruled in August that, while it was too late to suspend the FDA’s approval, the agency should significantly restrict access to mifepristone. The Biden administration and Danco Laboratories, which manufactures mifepristone, then asked the supreme court to weigh in on the case.The supreme court paused lower-court rulings while the case plays out, so mifepristone remains widely available in states that permit abortion. If the court allows the fifth circuit ruling to stand, it would roll back recent FDA efforts that refined the drug’s dosage and expanded access by allowing it to be prescribed later on in pregnancy and through telehealth.On Wednesday, the supreme court agreed to hear the consolidated petitions from the Biden administration and Danco Laboratories, which asked the justices to focus on the legal attempts to roll back those later FDA efforts. Those petitions also asked the justices to consider whether the challengers have the legal right, or standing, to bring the case in the first place.“You can’t just bring random lawsuits in court. You actually have to have been harmed by something,” said Greer Donley, an associate law professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. “That’s really what standing analysis is all about, to try to figure out if if the people who bring the lawsuit actually have a stake in the case.” Numerous legal experts have questioned whether the challengers in this case have properly demonstrated that they have been harmed by mifepristone’s continued legality.The supreme court also denied a petition from the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine that asked the justices to explicitly consider the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone. That move suggests that the supreme court is unlikely to pull mifepristone off the market entirely.In Donley’s view, the outcome of this case will probably signal whether the supreme court, which is controlled 6-3 by conservatives, wants to be involved in the post-Roe war over abortion rights. If the justices decide to focus on the standing issues in the case, they could sidestep having to rule on the substance of the case entirely.“I could see the more moderates on the supreme court thinking: ‘we don’t want to touch this,’” Donley said. “It might make the supreme court look like less of an activist court if it were to dismiss this case on the basis of really legitimate standing problems.”Any ruling by the court would affect all 50 states, including those that have protected abortion rights. (In recent months, officials in states such as Washington and California have announced that they have begun to stockpile mifepristone.)A ruling could also imperil the FDA’s regulatory power writ large and pose an existential threat to pharmaceutical companies. If courts can rewrite the FDA’s approval of abortion pills, any kind of drug – including, for example, drugs used to protect against HIV or to provide gender-affirming care – could end up in conservative jurists’ crosshairs.The ruling from the federal appeals court, Danco Laboratories warned in its briefs to the supreme court, “destabilizes the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries by questioning when scientific studies – accepted by FDA – are sufficient”. More than 100 studies, conducted across 26 countries, have concluded that mifepristone is safe, a New York Times review found.If deprived of access to mifepristone, several abortion clinics have said that they would keep providing medication abortions using only misoprostol, the other drug typically used in medication abortions. Although misoprostol-only abortions are still overwhelmingly safe, they can have more side-effects and are slightly less effective than the two-drug protocol.Ultimately, regardless of how the supreme court rules, its decision will not curtail the thriving underground networks that routinely supply mifepristone to women looking to end their pregnancies, including in the 16 states with near-total abortion bans. In fact, a move to ban mifepristone is likely to cause a sharp rise in demand for the drug through those networks.In the wake of Roe’s fall, a vast web of abortion rights supporters and opportunistic merchants have sprung up to ship abortion pills to Americans. Inducing your own abortion is not illegal in most US states, even in states that have banned in-clinic abortions, and medical experts widely agree that it can be safe to use pills to “self-manage” an abortion early in pregnancy. More

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      ‘Couples Therapy,’ but for Politics

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      Growing political polarization is a problem that keeps me up at night. Not because I think it’s bad to have strong opinions, but because of what social scientists call affective polarization: polarization beyond political disagreement, when “ordinary Americans increasingly dislike and distrust those from the other party.” At its worst, affective polarization can lead to hate and dehumanization.When my colleague Thomas Edsall wrote about affective polarization earlier this year, he quoted Sean Westwood, an associate professor of government at Dartmouth, who said that part of what’s behind today’s intense partisan divide is that “Politicians, instead of focusing on the large list of issues where there is broad agreement in the American public, endlessly re-litigate social divides like gay rights and abortion to mobilize a base they fear will stay home if they focus on the mundane details of pragmatic governance.”I see this play out when I hear activists suggest that you can’t talk to them about climate change if you don’t agree with their stance on the Israel-Hamas war, or when I see politicians tying approval of military appointments to abortion access. The attitude seems to be: You have to agree with me about everything or you’re my enemy and we can’t work together on anything. It leads to a whole lot of nothing.Because I cover family policy, the lack of movement on areas of “pragmatic governance” where there is “broad agreement” drives me bonkers. A prime example is federal paid leave, which is popular among voters across the spectrum, yet remains in legislative purgatory, and has for decades. Though there’s a bipartisan working group in Congress on the issue, we’re still a long way from any change, leaving us out of step with most wealthy nations and creating a lot of stress and economic hardship for people just trying to make ends meet while also caring for children or sick family members.But there’s a group of people of all ideological backgrounds — social conservatives, progressive activists, budget wonks and lots of people in between — that’s been convening over the past year, and that gives me a bit of hope for family policy’s future. It also offers a road map for people who disagree vehemently on issues to have productive conversations and find points of connection. If nothing else, the group’s participants agree that too many American families are struggling, that families should be more of a political priority and that something needs to be done to help them.The convocation has the somewhat jargony name Convergence Collaborative on Supports for Working Families, and its members let me sit in on one of their guided discussions with the understanding that I would follow the Chatham House Rule — I can report on what was said during the session but not reveal “the identity nor the affiliation” of any speaker.The group consists of around 30 people and it has met monthly since April. It is directed by Abby McCloskey, who runs a research and consulting firm and was a policy adviser for Jeb Bush’s and Rick Perry’s 2016 presidential campaigns and Howard Schultz’s exploratory 2020 presidential run. The collaborative is funded by the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. With permission, after the meeting I reached out to some of the individuals involved to see if they’d be comfortable talking in general terms about their experiences in the group.During the initial meetings, the members came up with set of family policy principles they could mostly agree on. The discussion I observed involved them delivering feedback on a draft of a report outlining those principles. At first, I feared this was going to be an absolutely mind-numbing way to spend three hours of my life and that I would have to gently pinch myself to stay awake while listening to a discussion of the budgetary implications of the earned-income tax credit.Instead, the conversation was spicy while still being respectful, and full of fundamental disagreements that did not seem completely papered over simply for the sake of congeniality. McCloskey described it to me more than once as feeling like “couples therapy,” and it did.For example, a few people objected to wording in the report about center-based child care that they felt put a thumb on the scale against stay-at-home parents. Others disagreed with that objection, and there was an impassioned back-and-forth about it. Ultimately, the moderator stepped in, restated everyone’s point of view in a neutral way and advised that everyone needn’t agree on every detail to move forward.I give a lot of credit to that moderator, the aptly named David Fairman, who is a senior mediator at the Consensus Building Institute, for the structure and tone of the discussion. When we spoke on the phone afterward, he explained that C.B.I. is one of “roughly a dozen” similar organizations that help conduct mediation on public issues. His job is to help find common ground among people with different backgrounds and belief systems.There are three main things Fairman does to facilitate these discussions. The first is to build relationships among participants, so that “they discover that there’s more to them than the battle of tweets that they’ve had or the countering publications or testimony and the identities that they carry with their businesses, with their advocacy groups or whoever.” That kind of humanizing is done partly through guided conversations in breakout groups, and some of it is done more organically through events like in-person cocktail hours.The second is by getting people to “listen openly” during discussions, which means calming down their “rebuttal minds, the hamster wheel that is almost always turning as we listen to someone with whom we disagree, coming up with the counterarguments,” Fairman explained. Instead, he urges people to ask “clarifying questions, not rhetorical questions, not debating questions.” And he gave this example: “What do you mean by saying that ‘you really feel strongly that the child tax credit should remain universal’? Is it that the most important thing about it is that it’s for everyone? Or is it that you are worried that the political support for it will not be there if it is not universal, or is it something else? I just want to know.”The third, and I would argue the most difficult component, is trying to get beyond people’s stated positions to their underlying interests, values and principles, to create space “to explore new ways of thinking about the options,” Fairman said. He referred to a disagreement over how generous a child care tax credit or other allowance could be. The group was at an impasse. While they couldn’t agree on the appropriate size of the credit, a new idea emerged: that more flexibility for parents to choose how to spend the credit “over the life cycle of their child would be a win, even if it doesn’t address the question of the absolute amount of funding.”I also interviewed several members of the group about their experiences. My takeaway was that overall, people were happy to be in conversation with one another, to meet basically agreeable people with totally different ways of framing the problems at hand and to think hard about their own biases. “I think the level of candor was surprising,” said Patrick Brown, a fellow at the right-leaning Ethics and Public Policy Center. “I think everybody committed to coming in with a willingness to critique their own side where necessary and to say frankly where their red lines were.”But the process was certainly not a cure-all. Many said that they wished they had even more time to work through the document they were creating. Some felt that some fundamental concerns — particularly with regard to race and immigration — weren’t aired thoroughly enough before moving on to the particulars of policymaking. More than one person expressed frustration that systemic racism was not more explicitly addressed and that barriers to accessing currently available benefits weren’t fully interrogated.While all the participants thought they would have a document at the end of the process that they would be willing to put their names to, some wondered if it would wind up being so watered down that it wouldn’t have “truly moved the needle,” as Lina Guzman, the chief strategy officer at Child Trends, put it, to get more people fired up about these issues.Even if they come up with something that isn’t earth-shattering, every person I spoke to felt that the process was worthwhile because of the relationships they built. “I think that having created the space to do this is valuable in and of itself, even if what we come out with falls short of what some people might have hoped,” said Katharine Stevens, the founder and chief executive of the Center on Child and Family Policy.We don’t know what unexpected alliances and priorities might arise in national politics in the coming years. But because these professionals have spent a lot of hours together talking about their deepest values, giving and getting clarity about their beliefs, they may find unexpected sources of support for specific ideas that aren’t yet mainstream.I came out of observing the discussion mostly wishing that we could all have mediators like Fairman at our holiday tables. We can’t simply wish away the profound disagreements many of us have. But I’ll certainly be trying to ask more clarifying questions of people I don’t agree with. Quieting my rebuttal mind, as a professional opinion haver, will be a rough one, but I’m going to do my best, and I’m going to try to maintain as much good faith as I can muster. We’ll need it in 2024. More

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      What Is the Real Meaning of ‘Pro-Life’?

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      More from our inbox:The Texas Abortion RulingThe Campus Clash of Free Speech and AntisemitismThe Undemocratic Electoral CollegeTrump and NATO Illustration by Alicia Tatone; Photographs by Yiming Chen, SDI Productions, Joshua Roberts/Getty ImagesTo the Editor:Re “Republicans Are Finding Out That ‘Pro-Life’ Has Too Many Meanings,” by Liz Mair (Opinion guest essay, Dec. 6):Ms. Mair, a G.O.P. campaign strategist, writes about all the desperate ways Republican politicians are trying to explain their stance on abortion now that their decades-long fight to make it illegal has taken a step forward.It seems her clients are scrambling, surprised to find that “rank-and-file G.O.P. voters are not as pro-life as we might have thought.”The medical community is not surprised. You see, there are no party affiliation requirements for unplanned or medically doomed pregnancies. Doctors have seen staunch Republicans obtain safe and legal abortions for decades. I’m sure that every single white male Republican legislator who signs “heartbeat” laws, piously claims he is pro-life and rails against Planned Parenthood knows a woman who has had an abortion. And he may have caused one himself.Instead of spinning the message on their terrible policies, her advice to her G.O.P. clients should be to stop blocking funding for reliable contraception, stop interfering with medical decisions between women and their doctors and start writing laws that support women who can’t afford another pregnancy because of poverty, a lack of postpartum job security or abusive partners.You know, “pro-life” stuff.Cheryl BaileySt. Paul, Minn.The writer is a retired gynecologic oncologist.To the Editor:In recommending that Republicans finesse the abortion issue, Liz Mair doesn’t mention one point. Pro-choice advocates are not anti-life, but we disagree with those who call themselves pro-life in two fundamental ways. We do not believe that humans can claim to know what God — who certainly allows miscarriages — wants, and we do not believe that humans claiming to have this knowledge have a right to impose their religious beliefs on others.Republicans may continue to succeed politically by demagoguing the abortion issue, but most Americans, religious or not, do not believe that the law should forbid women from obtaining a safe abortion.Jamie BaldwinRedding, Conn.To the Editor:Liz Mair is absolutely correct that “pro-life” has many meanings, but she mistakenly focuses only on abortion.Being “pro-life” also means things like good pre- and post-natal care for all mothers; good health care for everyone, including babies born to the poorest among us; accessible and affordable child care and preschool for all; gun safety laws to ensure that bullets are no longer the biggest cause of accidental death among U.S. children, and, not least, more commitment to combating climate change.Republicans need to consider these matters when they (or if they) decide to come up with a better, more marketable definition of “pro-life.”Nadine GodwinNew YorkThe Texas Abortion Ruling Kate Cox, via Associated PressTo the Editor:Re “Texas Supreme Court Rules Against Woman Who Sought Abortion” (news article, Dec. 12):I hope the women of Texas go on strike and march to the state capital. Women, especially mothers, all over the country will stand with them.Eve Rumpf-SternbergSeattleTo the Editor:Is there no end to these people’s cruelty?Linda GrunbaumNew YorkThe Campus Clash of Free Speech and Antisemitism Adam Glanzman for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Censorship Can’t Help University Presidents,” by David French (column, Dec. 11):Mr. French argues that what American campuses need is more viewpoint diversity and true freedom of speech — not the current hypocrisy of some speech being favored and other speech censored.But what Mr. French does not mention at all is the need for morality and truth to be part of the curriculum. President John F. Kennedy, a Harvard alumnus, said “the goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.”The university presidents’ failure before Congress to unambiguously repudiate calls for “the genocide of Jews” reflected how far these schools have strayed from that purpose. Allowing more speech on campus without a moral compass will yield only more noise and little else.Nathan J. DiamentWashingtonThe writer is the executive director for public policy of the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America.The Undemocratic Electoral College Christopher Lee for The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “‘The Exploding Cigar of American Politics,’” by Gail Collins (column, Nov. 30):Ms. Collins’s excellent column about the Electoral College should have commented more on the U.S. Senate, which is even more unrepresentative and undemocratic.Two out of three of our elected national arms of government are unrepresentative. (The third “arm,” the House, is roughly representative, but tainted by gerrymandering, “dark” money and increasing voter suppression.)The Electoral College has overturned the national popular vote five times in America’s nearly 250-year history, but twice already in this still young century. It’s likely to happen again, probably soon (’24?).One reason the founding fathers decided not to have direct elections to the presidency was a fear of a mostly uneducated and ill-informed electorate voting in either a fraudster or a populist demagogue as president. Some would say we got two for the price of one in 2016.We should abolish the Electoral College and directly vote for the president (as we do for the Senate and the House). Failing that, embrace the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, by which states agree to award their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote.I dread the day when many more Americans despair of the ballot box and instead choose far more dangerous ways of expressing their will — i.e., more Capitol insurrections, but successful ones.The founding fathers must be spinning in their graves at our inability to modernize our now dangerously outdated Constitution.Michael NorthmoreStaten IslandTrump and NATOFormer President Donald J. Trump has made it clear that he primarily sees NATO as a drain on American resources.Doug Mills/The New York TimesTo the Editor:Re “Trump’s Stance Toward NATO Alarms Europe” (front page, Dec. 10):I’m 73 years old and frightened. So many things I have taken for granted my entire life are threatened. My dad fought overseas in World War II. He, and I, always assumed that the things he fought for would remain protected.I never contemplated that the coalitions we established with our allies after the war would be threatened. I came to believe that the isolationism thriving before the war had been essentially put to rest.But now Donald Trump and his disciples have awakened the blind nationalism that raises the specter of totalitarianism. That menace should strike terror in all who treasure our democracy.And we can’t allow a feeling of helplessness or a belief that such things could never happen here prevent us from protecting what we can no longer take for granted.Stephen F. GladstoneShaker Heights, Ohio More