Abortion

Subterms

    More stories

    • 175 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Texas questions rights of fetus in prison guard lawsuit despite arguing opposite on abortion

      by

      In defending themselves against a lawsuit, Texas officials have argued that an “unborn child” may not have rights under the US constitution, putting them in tension with arguments made by the state’s attorney’s general’s office as well as Republican lawmakers to support restrictions to abortion.A guard at the state prison in the community of Abilene filed the lawsuit in question after she asserted that her superiors barred her from going to the hospital while she experienced intense labor pains and what she suspected were contractions while seven months pregnant and on duty.The guard – who is named Salia Issa – was finally able to leave to go to the hospital two and a half hours after the pain started. She was rushed into emergency surgery after doctors were unable to find a fetal heartbeat, and she ultimately delivered the baby in a stillbirth. The lawsuit claims that if Issa had been able to get to the hospital sooner, the baby would have survived.Issa and her husband sued the Texas department of criminal justice and three supervisors, arguing the state caused the death of their child. They seek restitution in medical and funeral costs and for pain and suffering.The prison agency and the Texas attorney general’s office have argued in defense of the lawsuit that the agency should not be held responsible for the stillbirth and that it is not clear the fetus had rights as a person. Both entities advance those positions despite consistent arguments made in lockstep by the attorney general’s office and Texas legislators that “unborn children” should be recognized as people starting at fertilization.“Just because several statutes define an individual to include an unborn child does not mean that the 14th amendment does the same,” the Texas attorney general’s office wrote in a legal filing in response to the lawsuit, referring to the constitutional right to equal protections afforded to US citizens. The filing also notes that the stillbirth occurred before the US supreme court in June 2022 eliminated the Roe v Wade precedent which had established nationwide rights to abortion protection.The US magistrate judge Susan Hightower last week allowed the lawsuit to proceed in part, without addressing the arguments over the rights of the fetus.The overturning of Roe v Wade allowed several states to enact laws which prohibited the termination of many – if not most – pregnancies. Many states, however, have been met with lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the bans which remain unresolved. More

    • 150 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Republican senator will ‘burn the military down’ over abortion policy, says Democrat

      by

      The Alabama Republican senator Tommy Tuberville is “prepared to burn the military down” with his block on promotions in protest of Pentagon policy on abortion, the Connecticut Democratic senator Chris Murphy said.“I think everybody’s been hoping that Senator Tuberville would back down,” Murphy told reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday.“And I think we have to come to the conclusion that that is not happening and that he is prepared to burn the military down.“Maybe Republicans were hopeful that leading up to the August break he would relent. He didn’t, and we now have to adjust our strategy.”Last year, the conservative-dominated US supreme court removed the federal right to abortion. Since February, Tuberville has been protesting Pentagon policy that allows service members to travel for abortion care if their state does not provide it.His method is to place a hold on all promotions to senior ranks that are subject to Senate confirmation, usually a pro forma process carried out with unanimous consent.Senior military leadership is increasingly severely affected, the US Marine Corps and US Army without permanent leaders and the joint chiefs of staff facing a similar predicament when the current chair, Gen Mark Milley, steps down next month.Nikki Haley, the former governor of South Carolina now running for the Republican presidential nomination, also said Tuberville should back down.“We do not have a chief of staff of the army for a first time in 200 years,” Haley told the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt. “More than 300 vacancies. It’s a mess.”Haley said Hewitt should call Tuberville “and ask him to stop screwing up the military, because we’re on the brink of a conflict with China and we cannot have this”.Joe Biden has called for Tuberville to step down. So have hundreds of military spouses. Tuberville has refused. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, has said he does not support Tuberville’s protest but has not moved to stop it. Senate rules give individuals the ability to hold up proceedings. Furthermore, Tuberville retains support among his own party, in both chambers of Congress.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOn Tuesday, Murphy said Republicans should support a temporary change to Senate rules, in order to process promotions that are now held up.“I just think we have to start thinking creatively about breaking this logjam,” he said. “There is no world in which we can use floor time for these nominations. It’s logistically impossible.”Murphy also said Tuberville, a former football coach and now a prominent Trump supporter, “is not going to back down” because “he thinks he’s become a celebrity folk hero in the fringe right.“He’s having the time of his life. If you want the military to function, you’re going to have to find a creative way to get around this guy.” More

    • 213 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans in Ohio are about to vote … to curtail the power of voting | Moira Donegan

      by

      Technically, August special elections are supposed to be illegal in Ohio. Late last year, a Republican-backed bill passed the state house prohibiting most special elections in August, reasoning that timing an election in the dog days of late summer depressed turnout, and cost too much money. But those same Republicans changed their tune in May, when it became clear that abortion rights supporters in Ohio would be able to put a ballot measure to voters securing abortion rights in the state in the November 2023 election. Ohio has a six-week ban on the books, but it is currently blocked by a court, and abortion remains legal up to 22 weeks of pregnancy. The measure, if passed, would help keep it that way, amending the Ohio state constitution to grant individuals a right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions”.Ballot measures have been extremely successful tools of the pro-choice movement since the supreme court abolished the federal abortion right last year in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health: pro-choice ballot initiatives passed by surprisingly large margins even in Ohio’s heavily Republican neighbor state, Kentucky, as well as the similarly deep-red Kansas. Since Dobbs, every single time abortion rights have been put to the voters, they have prevailed. And so suddenly, the Ohio GOP felt that it was important that a vote be held in August: a vote, that is, to curtail the power of voting.Ohio voters head to the polls on Tuesday to vote on Issue 1, the Republicans’ response to the November constitutional amendment. The sole question posed to voters in the August special election is a direct attempt to stop the legalization of abortion through democratic means: if passed, Issue 1 would make it more difficult for a ballot initiative to be brought to Ohio voters, and more difficult to pass one that was. The rule change would require advocates to collect signatures in all Ohio counties before a proposal could be placed on the ballot – a procedure that would give disproportionate power to rural, conservative parts of the state – and raise the threshold for passage from 50% to 60%. Currently, the pro-choice ballot initiative slated to go before Ohio voters in November polls at about 58% approval.And so the fight over abortion rights and Issue 1 in Ohio has become a proxy for the broader fight many Republicans are waging across the states: when voters don’t like the party’s proposed policies – and overwhelmingly, voters do not like abortion bans – then instead of changing their platforms or setting out to persuade the electorate to change their minds, Republicans simply change the rules, so that the voters’ wishes don’t get in the way of their preferred policy outcomes. Don’t want to vote for the Republican party line? Then state Republicans will make sure that your vote doesn’t matter.The Issue 1 special election is just the latest in a string of efforts by state Republican parties to curtail access to ballot measures. In Missouri, a court ruled that a ballot initiative seeking to legalize abortion could be presented on the 2024 ballot, even though the Republican attorney general there, Andrew Bailey, had tried to stonewall the effort by falsely claiming that the vote would cost the state a gargantuan amount of money. But state Republicans there had already pushed another measure through the state house, requiring ballot initiatives to receive at least 57% of the vote to pass. Like in Ohio, Missouri was unable to keep the abortion rights measure off the ballot. But just as Ohio Republicans are doing, the Missouri GOP tried to rig the process, explicitly to lessen the pro-choice side’s chances. The measure failed in the Missouri state senate, but Republicans there have vowed to try again. Republicans in at least nine other states – Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Maine, Mississippi, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Utah – have also tried to make it harder for ballot initiatives to pass, at least when those initiatives support abortion rights.Abortion is not the only issue where Republicans have sought to curtail access to direct democracy in order to protect their policy goals. In South Dakota, an effort last year to raise the ballot initiative passage threshold to 60% was aimed mostly at stopping Medicaid expansion in the state. (It failed.)But abortion has long been the issue around which America’s anti-democratic forces are most determined and inventive. In Texas, for instance, Republican politicians have responded to local prosecutors in large, Democratic-leaning cities like Houston who say they will not prosecute abortion cases by passing a bill allowing those prosecutors to be removed for “misconduct”. Similar bills aiming to curtail the authority of elected district attorneys over whether or not to enforce criminal abortion bans have also been brought forward by Republicans in Georgia, Indiana and South Carolina. Like the limits on ballot initiatives, the limits on the discretion of local DA’s also aim to end the ability of public opinion to influence policy outcome. If you don’t want to vote for the Republican policy, the Republicans will make sure your vote doesn’t matter; and if you vote in an official who will pursue a different policy, the Republicans will make sure that official loses the authority to do her job.Maybe it’s appropriate that Republicans have made the anti-abortion crusade the focus of so much of their anti-democracy efforts. Abortion bans, after all, are substantively anti-democratic. They are unpopular, yes, imposed by the unelected supreme court. But more importantly they are an insult to citizenship, depriving half of Americans the ability to live their lives with freedom, dignity, bodily integrity and self-determination – preconditions to any meaningful, equal status as citizens. It makes sense that Republicans would embark on sneaky, procedural efforts to undermine abortion in pursuit of this same project. They don’t want to allow women to live as full, equal citizens. But really, they don’t especially want that for anyone else, either. In justifying his decision to overturn Roe v Wade, Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority opinion, wrote that if women didn’t like what he was doing to them, they could just vote. “Women are not without political power,” he wrote. At least, the Republican ones aren’t. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Elections

      Today’s Top News: DeSantis Acknowledges Trump’s 2020 Loss, and More

      by

      The New York Times Audio app is home to journalism and storytelling, and provides news, depth and serendipity. If you haven’t already, download it here — available to Times news subscribers on iOS — and sign up for our weekly newsletter.The Headlines brings you the biggest stories of the day from the Times journalists who are covering them, all in about 10 minutes. Hosted by Annie Correal, the new morning show features three top stories from reporters across the newsroom and around the world, so you always have a sense of what’s happening, even if you only have a few minutes to spare.Along with other Republican presidential candidates, Ron DeSantis has been testing new lines of attack against Donald Trump.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesOn Today’s Episode:DeSantis Bluntly Acknowledges Trump’s 2020 Defeat, with Nicholas NehamasWhat’s at Stake in Ohio’s Referendum on Amending the State ConstitutionThe Taliban Won but These Afghans Fought On, with Christina GoldbaumEli Cohen More

    • 125 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      Anti-Abortion Republicans Don’t Want You to Notice Ohio’s Issue 1

      by

      There’s an extraordinarily important referendum in Ohio next week that the anti-abortion movement hopes most citizens don’t notice. It’s a vote that demonstrates why reproductive rights and the preservation of democracy, two issues that have catalyzed recent Democratic victories, are intertwined. That’s almost certainly why it’s being held in the torpid month of August, a time when a great many people would rather think about almost anything other than politics.Issue 1, which Ohio Republican legislators put on the ballot, would make future ballot measures to change the state Constitution harder to pass in two key ways. If it’s approved, citizens who hope to put amendments to the voters would first have to collect signatures in each of the state’s 88 counties, up from 44 now. And to pass, constitutional ballot initiatives would need to win 60 percent of the vote, rather than a simple majority.The measure’s import may not be immediately clear to voters, but it’s meant to thwart a November ballot initiative that will decide whether reproductive rights should be constitutionally protected in Ohio, where a sweeping abortion ban is tied up in court. Publicly, Ohio’s Republican secretary of state, Frank LaRose, has denied that abortion is the motivation behind Issue 1. But at a private event in May, he told a group of supporters, “It’s 100 percent about keeping a radical pro-abortion amendment out of our Constitution.”The outcome of next Tuesday’s vote will resonate nationally, because the strategies of both Ohio abortion-rights supporters and opponents are being replicated elsewhere. Throughout the country, reproductive-rights advocates, faced with legislatures that have insulated themselves from the popular will, are turning to referendums to restore some of what was lost when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. And throughout the country, abortion opponents understand that to keep abortion illegal, they need to change the rules.Most voters, as we’ve seen repeatedly, want abortion to be legal. Last August, a Kansas measure declaring that abortion isn’t protected by the state’s Constitution was defeated by an overwhelming 18 percentage points. In the midterms, there were abortion-related initiatives on the ballots in five states, including Kentucky and Montana, and the pro-choice side won all of them. Encouraged by these victories, activists are planning ballot measures to restore reproductive rights in states including Arizona, Florida, Missouri and, of course, Ohio.Ohio has been trending right for years, but gerrymandering ensures that the State Legislature is far more extreme than the population. As The Statehouse News Bureau, a news organization devoted to Ohio politics, has reported, “Ohio’s voter preference over the past 10 years splits about 54 percent Republican and 46 percent Democratic.” Yet under Ohio’s highly gerrymandered maps, Republicans control 67 of 99 State House seats and 26 of 33 State Senate seats. The Ohio Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled these maps unconstitutional, but before the last election, federal judges appointed by Donald Trump ordered the state to use them.“This August election is sort of a final vote that gives the people any chance to say, at some point we still exert power here,” said David Pepper, former head of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of “Laboratories of Autocracy,” a book about undemocratic right-wing statehouses.Ohio, you might remember, is the state that forced a 10-year-old rape victim to flee to Indiana for an abortion. Its prohibition on abortion once fetal cardiac activity is detectable — usually at around six weeks of pregnancy — has no exceptions for rape or incest. The Republican governor, Mike DeWine, told The Statehouse News Bureau that even though he signed the law, he thinks it goes farther than voters want, and he urged lawmakers to amend it, though he didn’t specify how. But with Republicans in gerrymandered districts more worried about primary challenges from the right than about general election challenges from the center, they have little incentive to respond to public sentiment. Instead, some anti-abortion lawmakers want even stricter anti-abortion laws, and one, Representative Jean Schmidt, has said she’d consider a ban on birth control.The November ballot initiative to make abortion a constitutional right is a chance for Ohio voters to circumvent their unrepresentative representatives. With this August initiative, the Republicans are working to head off the voters by essentially asking them to disenfranchise themselves. Because most people are unlikely to give up their rights quite so easily, Republicans scheduled the vote at a time when few are paying attention. Just last December, Ohio Republicans voted to effectively eliminate August special elections because of their expense and low turnout. But for this election, they reversed themselves.It is not just Democrats who oppose Issue 1; the former Ohio governors John Kasich and Bob Taft, both of whom are Republicans, do as well. “This is a fundamental change in Ohio’s voting rights,” Taft said during a League of Women Voters forum in June, adding, “I just think it’s a major mistake to approve or disapprove such a change at the lowest-turnout election that we have.”The task for opponents of Issue 1 isn’t to convince voters, but to alert them. “It’s just a math question: Can you reach enough people on a short timeline?” said Yasmin Radjy, executive director of the progressive group Swing Left, which is running a get out the vote drive in Ohio. Polling has been mixed: A July USA Today/Suffolk University poll found that 57 percent of voters oppose the measure, but one from Ohio Northern University shows a tossup, with a little more than 42 percent supporting Issue 1, 41 percent opposing it, and the rest neutral or undecided. (Interestingly, the Ohio Northern poll also shows that almost 54 percent of voters support a constitutional amendment to protect reproductive rights, suggesting that some voters aren’t connecting Issue 1 to abortion.) As The Columbus Dispatch points out, there hasn’t been an August vote on a ballot initiative in Ohio in almost a century, making the outcome unpredictable.Issue 1’s backers are doing their best to confuse Ohioans with ads suggesting, bizarrely, that the initiative is about defending parents’ rights against those who, as one spot said, “put trans ideology in classrooms and encourage sex changes for kids.” This is such dishonest agitprop that it’s challenging to even parse the logic behind it, but essentially, Issue 1 proponents are pretending that language in the November referendum saying that “individuals” have the right to make their own “reproductive decisions” implies that children have the right to transition without parental consent.If the right prevails on Issue 1 — and probably even if it doesn’t — you can expect to see the blueprint repeated in other places. Already, Republicans in states including Florida, Missouri and North Dakota, recognizing the danger that direct democracy poses to their own abortion bans, are trying to make the ballot initiative process much more onerous.In May, Dean Plocher, the Republican speaker of the Missouri House, angry that a bill creating new obstacles to citizen-led ballot initiatives had stalled in the State Senate, warned that, in the law’s absence, there would be a referendum to “allow choice,” which would “absolutely” pass. If that were to happen, he said, the Senate “should be held accountable for allowing abortion to return to Missouri.” It’s not clear whom exactly he thought the Senate should be accountable to. He certainly didn’t mean the voters.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 113 Shares129 Views

      in Elections

      How Trump Could Wreck Things for Republicans in 2024

      by

      Things just got a whole lot more interesting in New Hampshire politics. Just below the presidential churn, the governor’s race in the politically quirky Granite State has some superjuicy drama percolating — the kind that offers a vivid reminder of just how much trouble Donald Trump stands to cause for his party in 2024.Gov. Chris Sununu, currently enjoying his fourth two-year term, recently announced that he would not run for re-election next year. This instantly gave Democrats their best shot at flipping a governorship from red to blue in 2024, and the race is now rated as a tossup. Quick as a bunny, Republican contenders began hopping into the field, and both parties started gearing up for a brawl.Of the candidates so far, the best known is the former senator Kelly Ayotte. Like Mr. Sununu, Ms. Ayotte is from the more moderate, pragmatic, bipartisan end of the Republican spectrum — as you might expect in this staunchly independent, politically purple state. Elected to the Senate in 2010, she was considered a serious up-and-comer in the party until, with a little help from Mr. Trump’s lousy coattails, she narrowly lost her 2016 re-election race against the Democrat Maggie Hassan.It’s hard to know precisely how much of a drag Mr. Trump, who also lost New Hampshire that year, exerted on Ms. Ayotte. But the senator’s wild waffling over Mr. Trump’s fitness for office surely didn’t help: Did she see as him a role model? “Absolutely.” Oops, make that no! Would she endorse his candidacy? Um, not really. Did she personally support him? Yes. Wait, no!The voters of New Hampshire were unimpressed.Seven years later, Ms. Ayotte is looking to make a comeback. Unfortunately for her, so is Mr. Trump, who may be popular in deep red states but will be a source of agita for Ms. Ayotte and other Republicans in swing states who might have to share the ticket with him. Republicans are hopeful about picking up Senate, House and governors’ seats in 2024, but they have barely started to contend with how the once-and-aspiring president could complicate things for down-ballot candidates.Nowhere is this clearer than in New Hampshire, a key presidential battleground. The state’s Trump-infected political landscape looks even more treacherous in 2024 than it did in 2016. Not just because of the former president’s latest campaign, which is shaping up to be even nastier and more divisive than his first two, but also because of Mr. Sununu’s high-profile crusade to tank that campaign.One of the nation’s most popular governors and one of his party’s most prominent Trump critics, Mr. Sununu has grown increasingly adamant that his party must move beyond the 45th president, and he has publicly pledged to work against Mr. Trump’s nomination. If Mr. Trump is the nominee in 2024, “Republicans will lose again. Just as we did in 2018, 2020 and 2022. This is indisputable, and I am not willing to let it happen without a fight,” Mr. Sununu wrote in The Washington Post last month.This move may burnish Mr. Sununu’s independent rep nationwide. (He is seen as a future presidential player.) But it only complicates life for many down-ballot Republicans in the state. Especially ones, like Ms. Ayotte, who have a somewhat … troubled history with the fealty-obsessed Mr. Trump.For the G.O.P., the New Hampshire governor’s office is one of the shrinking number of outposts where a pragmatic, old-school breed of Republican leader has been able to thrive in the midst of the party’s MAGAfication. Republicans felt confident Mr. Sununu had the juice to win, no matter who topped the ticket next year. Any other Republican is a shakier bet for winning the independent and crossover votes needed to win statewide in New Hampshire. The governor’s departure is being talked about as yet another step in the party’s ideological constriction.Although broadly popular, Mr. Sununu is not beloved in New Hampshire’s conservative circles. His anti-Trump mission will do nothing to improve this. “I think Sununu is trying to dance the same tightrope I am and a lot of us are: being very forceful about the fact that we need a new nominee and yet trying not to take too big of a dump on the former president,” said Jason Osborne, the Republican leader of the state House and one of Ms. Ayotte’s early endorsers.Fancy footwork aside, the Trumpnunu rift is going to make it harder for the governor’s aspiring successors to avoid getting sucked into the Trump vortex — the dangers of which Ms. Ayotte knows too well. She is already trying to get out ahead of the issue, asserting that she will support whoever winds up the party’s standard-bearer.“I do wonder whether she’s going to hold to that line of, ‘Hey, that’s between Sununu and Trump,’” said Dante Scala, a professor of political science at the University of New Hampshire. “She may be able to do that for some time.”But as campaign season heats up, look for Ayotte et al. to be increasingly pressed to clarify their views on the whole mess. (Trust me: Intraparty feuding is catnip for political journalists.) Staying out of the muck will very likely require elaborate tap dancing on a tightrope while juggling hot potatoes.The situation will be even thornier for whomever Mr. Sununu decides to endorse — which, at this point, is expected to be Ms. Ayotte. Sure, a popular governor’s nod in the race to succeed him will serve as a vote of confidence in the eyes of many. But it could also “fire up the conservative base even more” to undermine his pick, said Mike Dennehy, a G.O.P. strategist in the state. The territory is “more complicated than in 2016,” he asserted. And some think it would be best for the governor to delay endorsing until much later in the game.All of this, mind you, is piled on top of Ms. Ayotte’s specific challenges as a candidate. (Pro-life in a pro-choice state post-Dobbs? Oof.) And the basic political disposition of New Hampshire. “In general, it has become a slightly uphill battle to beat Democrats,” observed Mr. Scala.Stay tuned. As with so much in Mr. Trump’s Republican Party, this promises to be quite the show.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      How Nikki Haley Responded to a Question About Illegal Abortions

      by

      The former South Carolina governor — who is trying to break out in a packed 2024 Republican presidential primary — gave a nuanced response on one of the thorniest issues facing Republicans.At town halls and political events in New Hampshire, where she has made far more campaign stops than her rivals, Nikki Haley has mostly sidestepped any discussion of abortion, a fraught issue for the Republican Party.As the G.O.P. activist base tries to pull state lawmakers further to the right in curbing access to abortion, moderates worry that the hard-line stance has already handed electoral wins to Democrats and could have dire consequences in 2024. Ms. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and United Nations ambassador, has tried to pull off a difficult balancing act on the issue, and her attempts haven’t always resonated — partly because, her critics say, she has avoided discussing details.On Tuesday, with more than 100 people gathered in a drizzle for a town hall at a picturesque vineyard in Hollis, Christina Zlotnick, 55, an undeclared voter from Amherst, posed a hard question. Ms. Haley provided little by way of concrete policy proposals, but this time she drew an enthusiastic response.A Question for Nikki Haley“You said on TV that women who get abortions should not be put in jail and should not be subject to the death penalty. But how exactly should women who get illegal abortions — women like me — how do you specifically think we should be punished?”The SubtextSince the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican-dominated state legislatures have rushed to institute new laws outlawing or imposing stringent restrictions on abortion, even as the issue has fueled Democratic victories across the nation, with Americans supporting at least some access to the procedure at record levels. Most abortions are now banned in 14 states. Some state laws stipulate narrow but vague exceptions, and carry years of prison time. Last week, a teenager in Nebraska who used abortion pills to end her pregnancy, and who pleaded guilty to illegally concealing human remains, was sentenced to 90 days in jail. At the time, abortion was banned in Nebraska after 20 weeks.In the past, anti-abortion activists have largely maintained that they don’t support punishing women who seek out the procedure illegally. But more recently, some state lawmakers have proposed legislation with criminal consequences for patients as well as those who may help them.Haley’s Answer“In order for us to have a federal law, we’re going to have to have consensus. What does that consensus look like? Can’t we all agree that we don’t want late-term abortion? Can’t we all agree that we want to encourage more adoptions and good-quality adoption so that children feel more love, not less? Can’t we all agree that doctors and nurses who don’t believe in abortion shouldn’t have to perform them? Can’t we all agree that contraception should be accessible? And can’t we all agree that a woman who gets an abortion should not be subject to the death penalty or get arrested? That’s where I think we start — we start, and we do it with a level of respect. No more demonizing this issue. We’re going to humanize this issue. I had a roommate who was raped in college. I wouldn’t wish on anyone what she went through, wondering if she was OK. Everybody has a story. Let’s be respectful of everybody’s story, and let’s figure out what we can do together instead of sitting there and tearing each other apart.”The SubtextMs. Haley began her reply by flatly stating that she did not believe women needed to be punished, adding that she was “unapologetically pro-life,” but did not “judge anyone for being pro-choice.” She went on to explain her support for the Supreme Court decision that thrust the issue back to the states but said she did see a role for the federal government in setting abortion policy, as long as there was congressional consensus between Republicans and Democrats.Her answer mostly echoed her previous remarks on abortion, but delivered with passion, it seemed to pack a more powerful punch in front of a smaller, friendlier audience. Attendees nodded along or expressed whoops and hollers in agreement, breaking into applause as she ended.Many Republican and independent women at her events this week have said they see Ms. Haley as a strong leader and messenger on abortion, as the only Republican woman in the presidential race, and believe she might be able to blunt attacks from Democrats on the issue. Ms. Haley’s positions on the topic tend to be more moderate than the rest of the field, and it is among the issues she has used to set up her bid as a test of the Republican Party’s attitudes about female leaders, without leaning too far into her gender.After the event, Ms. Zlotnick, who once had to take a drug to end an unviable pregnancy — a procedure that is not illegal — said she phrased her question as a hypothetical because if she found herself in different circumstances, she would consider having an illegal abortion. She said she was a strong believer in reproductive rights but had been satisfied with Ms. Haley’s response. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans target abortion pill access as government shutdown threat looms

      by

      A Republican-backed spending bill threatens to end national access to mail-order abortion pills and cut billions from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) that provides low-income families with food benefits.The legislation is part of a spate of appropriations bills that lawmakers will debate this month, and which Congress must reach a decision on by the end of September in order to pass a budget for the 2024 fiscal year and avoid a federal shutdown. It was already approved by a House appropriations subcommittee in May, while being condemned by Democrats and causing internal rifts among Republicans. Republicans have added several provisions to the bill that would have wide-ranging effects on reproductive rights, health policy and benefits.The food and agriculture spending bill is the latest front in the rightwing campaign against reproductive rights. In the year since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, Republicans have passed bills in more than a dozen states that ban or severely restrict abortion access. Ending access to mail-order pills that induce abortions would complicate and limit efforts from abortion rights groups and physicians to provide care for people in states with abortion bans.Specifically, the bill would reverse a 2021 Food and Drug Administration policy that allowed people to get the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone – which can be used up to 10 weeks after conception – through the mail rather than via in-person visits to providers. The FDA had temporarily lifted restrictions on the drug during the Covid-19 pandemic, before later making those changes permanent. But the drug, which is widely used for abortion and can also be used for managing miscarriages, has been the center of legal challenges and rightwing attempts to prevent its use ever since.House Republicans’ messaging on the bill claims that their provision “reins in wasteful Washington spending” and “protects the lives of unborn children”. The bill would also decrease the Snap benefit program – formerly known as food stamps – by $32bn compared with 2023 levels, as well as prevent the health and human services department from putting limits on the maximum amount of nicotine in cigarettes.The approaching fight over spending bills has echoes of the standoff over debt ceiling negotiations earlier this year, when Democrats accused Republicans of holding the government hostage in an attempt to exact sweeping cuts to federal programs. Hardline Republicans similarly pushed to shift their party towards far-right policies during those negotiations as well.Democrats are eager to prevent a government shutdown such as the one in 2018 during the Trump administration that left about 800,000 government workers without pay and lasted longer than any previous closure in US history. But some have called for establishing red lines around what compromises they are willing to make, with a number of House Democrats such as the Massachusetts representative Jim McGovern pushing back against attempts to cut Snap funding and other conservative provisions in recent legislation. House Democrats previously tried to add two amendments to the food and agriculture spending bill that would have eliminated the anti-abortion provision, but both failed.Several Republicans have also spoken out against the food and agriculture bill, including the New York representative Marc Molinaro, who told Politico he will vote against the legislation if it comes to the floor. Molinaro, along with another New York Republican lawmaker, previously denounced a conservative Texas judge’s ruling that threatened to remove FDA approval of mifepristone.Molinaro’s opposition to the bill highlights a rift within the Republican party over just how far to push an anti-abortion agenda that has proven nationally unpopular and contributed to electoral losses in many states.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbortion policy has divided the GOP as hard-right Republicans, as well as powerful Christian conservative activist groups, have demanded far-reaching bans on abortion access. Others, such as the South Carolina Republican Nancy Mace, have warned that Republicans need to “read the room” on abortion or face defeat in elections.The Republican speaker of the House, Kevin McCarthy, has meanwhile been left scrambling to manage the different factions of his party as votes on must-pass appropriations bills loom. In addition to limiting abortion access and benefits, far-right Republicans have sought to use spending bills to greatly reduce military aid to Ukraine in its fight against the Russian invasion.An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll from earlier this year saw that support for abortion access was at an all-time high, and included a finding that about one-third of Republicans also broadly back the right to abortion access. More