Abortion

Subterms

    More stories

    • 238 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Biden has reminded us yet again that he’s a weak and lukewarm ally of abortion rights | Moira Donegan

      by

      A closed-door fundraiser for the very wealthy is a place where a lot of politicians really shine. Among their fellow elites, surrounded by people like them who like them – and are giving them money – Democrats and Republicans alike often become their truest selves. They drop the flesh-pressing affectations, the focused-group soundbites, the stiff smiles. They become something they’re usually not: honest.Honest is what Biden was at a similar fundraiser in tony Chevy Chase, Maryland, this past Tuesday, when he told a crowd of his wealthy supporters that he was personally ambivalent about abortion rights. “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion,” the president said. Nevertheless, he claimed that the compromise Roe v Wade decision on abortion “got it right”.Biden’s reassertion of his own discomfort with abortion came just three days after the first anniversary of the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision, which eliminated the abortion right. In the year since women lost the constitutional right that the president says he is not “big on”, the bans that snapped into effect have had life-changing – life-ruining – effects for thousands.Women have been forced to carry for months babies that cannot live outside the womb, which they have had to watch die after agonizing moments or hours of life. Women and girls have been forced to flee their home states to get abortions after being impregnated through rape. Women have lost their organs to abortion bans, needing emergency hysterectomies to save their lives after incomplete miscarriages or cesarean scar pregnancies. Others have been drafted into exercises in morbid futility, forced to carry fetuses that lack major organs, such as heads, in a new reality that has been likened to torture. Other women have been forced to become sicker and sicker – suffering, risking their lives, and incurring permanent damage to their bodies in order to be made ill enough that abortion might become legally permissible.Many more women have been stripped of control over their lives – denied healthcare, denied the ability to plan their families, denied the freedom to choose the course of their own lives, for the sake of retrograde, bigoted and punitive conceptions of gender and sexuality held by others. And all American women, along with many trans people, have been degraded and humiliated by abortion bans, relegated to a lesser class of adult citizenship, informed that they are not permitted to control their own fates.The abortion data project WeCount suggests that there were 25,640 fewer legal abortions in America in the year following Dobbs. That number does not account for the number of women – the unlucky ones – who received care only after their pregnancies sickened them to the brink of death. And it doesn’t account for the women – the lucky ones, as these things go – who were able to flee their home states and subject themselves to the indignity and burden of traveling for care. So the number is conservative. But still, it represents a staggering injustice: 25,640 violations of human rights; 25,640 people who deserved better.Throughout the past year, members of the Biden administration, and President Biden in particular, have been largely absent from this unfolding catastrophe. They have not taken on an expansive view of executive authority in attempts to restore abortion rights; they have not pressed allies in Congress to advance pro-choice legislation; they have not been willing to challenge, even tentatively, an anti-choice federal judiciary that is wildly expanding its interpretations of its own power.They are not even willing to do the one thing that the president has the unquestioned authority to do: use the bully pulpit to express solidarity with American women, to grieve for their lost health, futures and dignity, and to rally Americans to the increasingly popular pro-choice cause. Joe Biden has abdicated leadership on abortion, the loss of which is causing untold suffering, and which will define life prospects for a generation of women. Because he finds it distasteful. Because he’s not “big on” it.Lest this seem like an ungenerous reading of a well-intended gaffe, it should be noted that an unwillingness to advocate for abortion rights has been a recurring theme of his career. Abortion is a test that Joe Biden has failed every single time that history has called him to it. His paeans to his Catholic faith as cover for his unwillingness to champion abortion also ring false: most American Catholics support abortion rights. And as Jamie Manson, the president of Catholics for Choice, pointed out, the church also fiercely opposes marriage equality, which the president has long championed. It is not Catholicism that makes Joe Biden unwilling to issue a full-throated support of abortion rights. It is sexism.Until it became a political liability for him in the 2020 midterm cycle, Biden was among one of the last leading Democrats to support the Hyde Amendment, a 1976 provision that forbade federal funding for abortions, and which, because of its ban on Medicaid coverage of the procedure, made Roe’s protection of the abortion right largely moot for poor women almost as soon as it was achieved. Biden’s assertion that “Roe got it right,” is both disingenuous to this long-held position, which curtailed Roe’s protections, and also a sign of how indifferent and uninterested he has been in the insights of pro-choice activists, who have long argued that Roe was insufficient in its protections for abortion, inadequate in its argument for the right on privacy, rather than liberty and equality, grounds, and too diminished by subsequent attacks on abortion access that were pursued by rabidly anti-choice Republicans and allowed by cowardly “pro-choice” Democrats who never had the courage of their campaign promises.But an indifference to abortion rights activists from Biden is no surprise: after the Dobbs decision, while his administration fumbled and tried to change the subject from their own incompetence and lack of preparation, it was not those who had conspired and schemed for decades against Roe who the Biden administration blamed, and it was not those who had snatched women’s rights away that they demonized. It was pro-choice activists.“Joe Biden’s goal in responding to Dobbs is not to satisfy some activists who have consistently been out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic party,” his then-communications director, Kate Bedingfield, sneered.Mission accomplished: pro-choice activists are not satisfied with Joe Biden. But abortion is a salient issue, one that is only growing more popular, and more electorally persuasive, every day. In light of the post-Dobbs political reality, Joe Biden’s unwillingness to give unqualified support to abortion rights is not just morally cowardly; it’s also politically irresponsible. Republicans are running from the issue, and the Biden campaign is declining to attack them on it. Voters are rallying around abortion rights, and the Biden campaign is declining to lead them.The time for apologetic, defensive, partial non-defenses of abortion rights is over, and America’s newly mobilized pro-choice majority knows it. It’s not the activists who are out of step with the mainstream of the Democratic party. It’s Joe Biden.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Elections

      Democrats to Use $20 Million Equal Rights Push to Aid 2024 N.Y. House Bids

      by

      Numerous left-leaning groups are behind a statewide effort to focus attention on a 2024 equal-rights referendum, hoping to increase voter turnout.New York Democrats’ substandard performance in the midterm elections last year helped their party lose control of the House of Representatives, threatened its national agenda, and angered national Democrats.In an effort to avoid repeating the same mistake, New York Democrats on Thursday will announce support for a statewide effort to pass a women’s rights amendment that they hope will also supercharge turnout in 2024, when President Biden and House members will be up for re-election.Their strategy: Get Democrats to the polls by focusing attention on a 2024 statewide referendum, the New York Equal Rights Amendment, that will explicitly bar New York from using its power and resources to penalize those who have abortions.The campaign, backed by Gov. Kathy Hochul and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, among others, plans to raise at least $20 million to spend on television ads, direct mail and organizing in support of the initiative. The effort is designed to complement the House Democrats’ main super PAC’s $45 million bid to win six New York swing districts next year, including four that just flipped Republican. The campaign is launching a year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion and ushering in near-total abortion bans in 14 states. It is in step with a national Democratic strategy highlighting the abortion record of the Republican Party — a game plan that Gov. Hochul embraced last year with mixed results, beating her Republican opponent, Lee Zeldin, by only six points..In an interview on Monday, Ms. Hochul argued that the threat to women’s reproductive rights represents “a highly mobilizing force” that is a proven electoral strategy in New York, her own history notwithstanding. She pointed to the victory last year of Representative Pat Ryan, a Hudson Valley Democrat, over Marc Molinaro, a Republican who favored giving states the discretion to govern the legality of abortion.The New York Equal Rights Amendment campaign is being supported by numerous left-leaning groups, including Planned Parenthood, the New York Immigration Coalition, the New York Civil Liberties Union, NAACP New York and Make the Road New York.Ms. Hochul added that the campaign chose to bring the amendment to a statewide vote in 2024, rather than this year as the state is legally entitled, to create space for its message to penetrate. The timing, during a presidential election year, should maximize the campaign’s efforts“Having a ballot initiative in our state is going to drive voter turnout overall, which will definitely help Democrats,” said Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York. “The biggest reason we lost House seats was because of voter turnout.”Mr. Jeffries, the House minority leader, took a slightly different tack. “This has nothing to do with voter turnout and everything to do with ensuring that a woman’s freedom to make her own reproductive health care decisions is protected in New York State,” he said.The New York Equal Rights Amendment is backed by the state’s Democratic leaders, including the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, right, and the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries.Doug Mills/The New York TimesIn 2019, New York passed the Reproductive Health Act, which protected abortion rights in New York State. Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor at the time, regarded the law as necessary in case a more conservative Supreme Court might overturn Roe v. Wade.That act and others render the ballot amendment “largely gratuitous and symbolic,” said Dennis Poust, the executive director of the New York State Catholic Conference.“The reality is, abortion is already widely available and accessible in New York,” Mr. Poust said. He urged New York to put “at least as much effort into helping to empower women who might seek to keep their baby if only they had the necessary resources and support.”But Ms. Hochul argues that the Reproductive Health Act is no longer enough.“Laws can be repealed,” she said. “There’s a much higher threshold to change the Constitution.”Voter sentiments about abortion have begun to shift nationally, in step with a drumbeat of stories about pregnant women being denied medical care and facing near-death experiences. Polls have found that pro-choice Democratic voters are more motivated to vote on the issue, and Republicans less so. Democratic leaders have taken notice.“Let’s be honest,” said Letitia James, the state attorney general. “As I travel, reproductive rights is an issue which comes up over and over again.”Electoral strategy aside, the campaign’s supporters also back the initiative on the merits. Other states have passed their own versions of an equal rights amendment, but many generally ban sex discrimination alone, the organizers said. New York’s ballot initiative would go further.Not only would it prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, but also on the basis of “pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, reproductive health care and autonomy.” It would ban government discrimination based on age, ethnicity, national origin, disability, sexual orientation and gender identity.Sasha Neha Ahuja, the former national director for strategic partnerships at Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who is spearheading the new campaign, said the amendment would mean that “for the first time, discrimination of folks on the basis of their reproductive health decisions will be categorized as explicitly sex discrimination.” More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Elections

      DeSantis’s Pitch to New Hampshire Focuses Heavily on Florida

      by

      Focusing heavily on Florida at his first town-hall event in the Granite State, Ron DeSantis drew a reception that was sometimes warm, sometimes more skeptical — especially on the issue of abortion.At his first town-hall event in New Hampshire, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida talked on Tuesday about illegal immigration in Texas, crime in Chicago, disorder on the streets of San Francisco and the wonders of nearly every aspect of Florida — a state he mentioned about 80 times.Roughly an hour into the event, Mr. DeSantis finally got around to saying “New Hampshire.”His relentless focus on Florida was at times well received in a state that will play a key role in deciding who leads the Republican Party in the 2024 election against President Biden. Mr. DeSantis’s comments seemed to especially resonate when he connected his actions at home to issues of importance to New Hampshire residents, like the flood of fentanyl and other deadly drugs into their communities.Still, his self-confident lecture about his record as Florida’s governor left the distinct impression that he believes Republican voters need what he is offering them more than he is interested in what he could learn from their questions.“Every year I’ve been governor, we’ve decreased the assumptions in our pension fund,” he boasted, digging deep into the Florida policy weeds. “In other words, you know, whatever it was when I came in was rosier. And we always reduced down to ensure that no matter what happens, our pension system is going to be funded. I think we’re like eighth-best in the country with that.”Even his jokes were Florida-centric, sometimes to the point of obscurity to the crowd of roughly 250 people who packed a carpeted banquet hall in Hollis, a few miles from the Massachusetts border. The audience reaction was muted when he joked about property prices rising in Naples, Fla., to make a point about Chicago residents fleeing south to his state.After facing criticism in recent weeks for not answering questions from voters at his rallies, Mr. DeSantis has held recent town hall-style events in South Carolina, Texas and now New Hampshire. David Degner for The New York TimesThe main ideological skepticism in the audience concerned Mr. DeSantis’s hard-line stance against abortion — a position that is popular in heavily evangelical states like Iowa but less so in more secular New Hampshire.Like several other Republican women in attendance, Jayne Beaton, 65, of Amherst, N.H., said she came with questions about the candidate’s position on abortion, and the six-week ban he signed in Florida.“I predict it’s going to be an issue for him,” she said. “With everything else” in his platform, she added, “I’m onboard and excited, but I’m less sure about abortion, and the six-week ban.”After taking criticism in recent weeks for not answering questions from voters at his rallies, Mr. DeSantis has held town hall-style events in South Carolina, Texas and now New Hampshire since Thursday. Although he has rarely faced tough questions, he has seemed relatively comfortable in these unscripted moments, asking voters their names, thanking military veterans for their service and occasionally cracking jokes.Such casual interactions are especially important in New Hampshire — the first-in-the-nation primary state whose residents are accustomed to vetting presidential candidates over and over in intimate settings.“It is a little different here than it is in any other state,” Jason Osborne, the Republican majority leader of the New Hampshire House, who has endorsed the Florida governor for president, said in a phone interview before the event on Tuesday. “We’re so small, we’re the first, so the most candidates are going to touch the state than any others.”Mr. DeSantis, who has a reputation for being somewhat socially awkward, is working hard to overcome a deficit of roughly 30 percentage points in the Granite State against former President Donald J. Trump, the Republican front-runner. He spent more time answering questions from voters in Hollis than he has at any event since announcing his candidacy in May.The audience, which included many out-of-staters who traveled hours to see Mr. DeSantis, seemed to appreciate that he had showed up. Several told him they admired his handling of the coronavirus pandemic in Florida. In a veterans-heavy state, he was also thanked for his military service and received applause when he said he was the only veteran running in the Republican field.Mr. DeSantis ducked only one question. A teenage boy invited him to condemn Mr. Trump’s efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power on Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. DeSantis declined to do so. All he would say was that he did not “enjoy seeing, you know, what happened” that day, but that he had nothing to do with it and Republicans needed to look forward, not backward, because if they dwelled on the past they would lose elections.When he was finally asked about Florida’s six-week abortion ban, Mr. DeSantis seemed comfortable answering the question and, unlike Mr. Trump, he made no effort to contort himself to appeal to more moderate voters. He said he believed that in America, “life is worth protecting,” and it was important to provide services to support low-income and single mothers.Doreen Monahan, 65, of Spofford, N.H. — who asked Mr. DeSantis the question about abortion, and the burden placed on taxpayers when women who cannot get abortions bear unwanted children — said later that she had been reassured by his answer, including his mentions of beefed-up postnatal care and adoption programs.“It’s nice that they have some options,” she said. “I have friends who waited years to adopt.”She said she had reached out to Mr. DeSantis’s campaign to ask about exceptions to the six-week ban, and felt more comfortable after hearing details.Mr. DeSantis pitched two main arguments against Mr. Trump, without naming him. The first was that change could not come to Washington if Republicans kept losing elections. The second was his theme of “no excuses” — a shot at Mr. Trump’s failure to deliver on core promises such as completing a wall along the southern border.An older man told Mr. DeSantis that he had voted twice to “drain the swamp,” but that it never happened. He wanted to know what Mr. DeSantis would do differently from Mr. Trump.Mr. DeSantis opened his response by recalling how exciting it was in 2016 to hear the rally chants of “drain the swamp.” But then he took two unsubtle shots at the former president.Mr. DeSantis said that “the swamp” in Washington was worse now than ever and that to “break the swamp,” a president must be disciplined and focused, and have the “humility” to understand he cannot do it on his own. The audience cheered when he promised to fire the Trump-appointed F.B.I. director, Christopher A. Wray, and turn the Justice Department “inside out.”Mr. DeSantis made a campaign stop on Monday in Eagle Pass, a Texas city on the border.Christopher Lee for The New York TimesMr. DeSantis seemed at his most animated toward the end of the rally when a woman asked him about Covid vaccines. In response, the governor denounced the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, calling their efforts to promote vaccines a “total disaster.” He also attacked big pharmaceutical companies, and highlighted a study by Florida’s health department that purported to show elevated health risks for young men who took mRNA vaccines but that was widely criticized by scientists.“These Covid restrictions and mandates were not about your health,” Mr. DeSantis said. “It was about them controlling your behavior.”The DeSantis campaign has leaned heavily into criticizing how Mr. Trump handled the pandemic, seeing widespread anger among Republicans over vaccines, masking, school closures and social-distancing measures as an opportunity to peel voters away from the former president.The crowd responded approvingly to Mr. DeSantis’s eight-minute tirade against what he called “the medical swamp.”Mark Pearson, a Republican state representative in New Hampshire who has endorsed Mr. DeSantis, said in an interview this month that he had seen the governor grow more confident as a retail politician.In May, Mr. Pearson said, he told Mr. DeSantis that he needed to engage directly with New Hampshire voters.“I told him, ‘Here’s what I suggest you do: You walk the rope line, you drop into the diners, you go to the small venues,’” he recounted. “‘But it better be real, Ron, because we can smell a phony from a mile away, because we’ve been doing this for a hundred years.’” More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      After Roe’s overturn, Republicans target trans rights using extremist rhetoric

      by

      Americans are “frustrated and anxious”, lamented former vice-president Mike Pence. The country is “in a precarious position” assessed North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, Mark Robinson. And Glenn Jacobs, a former professional wrestling star and current mayor of Knox county, Tennessee, declared that “these are hard times”.What could be the cause of such hardship? To the Republican presidential candidates who spoke in Washington DC on Friday at a major gathering of the religious right, the culprit was American society’s acceptance of transgender people and the broader LGBTQ+ community.The language and imagery is extreme and full of conspiracy theories.“We are facing the greatest challenge this country has ever seen, certainly in my lifetime,” the Missouri senator Josh Hawley said to the crowd of hundreds gathered for the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s annual Road to Majority Policy Conference.He described the challenge as “a new Marxism that is rising in this country”, one that tells Americans, among other things: “That there’s no such thing as male and female, that there are not two genders. There’s 2,000 genders and it tells our children that the way God made them is wrong.“These new Marxists want to give America a new religion. They want to impose on us the religion of woke. It is the religion of transgenderism, critical race theory and open borders multiculturalism, and they are shoving it down our throats,” Hawley said.Held in the hotel where Ronald Reagan survived an assassination attempt, the audience of hundreds seated in its ballroom heard from several major Republican presidential candidates, including, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, Senator Tim Scott, and the ex-Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson.Their appearances came at an inflection point for cultural conservatives. A year ago, they had seen their long-held dream of overturning Roe v Wade become reality when the supreme court struck down the precedent after 49 years, allowing states to ban abortion. But in the realm of LGBTQ+ rights, the movement recently appeared to be on the back foot, with congressional Republicans in 2022 helping to pass a law that protected same-sex marriage nationwide, building on the supreme court’s establishment of the right in 2015.In response, groups opposed to rights for the gay, lesbian and transgender communities have orchestrated a well-funded backlash to the expansion of rights – one that is being fostered by extremists, has seen the erosion of gay rights in many states across the US and includes a growing threat of violence.“God hates pride. He hates pride in January, February, March, April, May and in the month of June,” conservative preacher John Amanchukwu proclaimed early in the event, in a reference to the LGBTQ+ Pride month that drew laughs and cheers from the crowd in Washington.The fallout has hit the trans community in America particularly hard. This year so far, the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) says that 15 bans on gender-affirming care for transgender youth have been passed into law, as have seven bills allowing or requiring the misgendering of transgender students, along with a handful of other measures targeting drag performances or school curriculum. All told, more anti-gay bills have been introduced in statehouses in 2023 than in the past five years, according to HRC.“The purpose of these laws is to facilitate a rise in political extremism by alienating and isolating LGBTQ+ Americans, and the impact of these laws is alarming,” said Kelley Robinson, president of HRC, in a recent statement, calling it a “state of emergency”.“In every county you represent, in every county your colleagues represent, you will find parents and children, teachers and nurses, community leaders and small business owners who are afraid that the rise in legislative assaults and political extremism has put a target on their backs.”Earlier this month, the pollster Gallup reported a drop in public support for same-sex relations, driven mostly by Republicans. The issue’s approval now stands at 64%, compared with 71% last year, with only 41% of Republicans approving – a decline of 15 percentage points from last year.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionLast week, rights groups Glaad and the Anti-Defamation League found that at least 356 incidences of hate directed at LGBTQ+ Americans occurred between June 2022 and the past April, including a mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs that left five people dead.At the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s conference, speaker after speaker made clear their resolve to continue the campaign against trans Americans.“We will end the gender ideology that is running rampant in our schools, and we will ban chemical and surgical gender transition treatment for kids under the age of 18,” said Pence.As governor of Florida, DeSantis has overseen a campaign against what he calls “woke ideology”, including a bill he signed earlier this year that bans gender-affirming care for minors, restricts its access for adults and allows the state to temporarily remove trans children from their parents.Polls show DeSantis in a distant second place to Donald Trump, who has maintained his lead in the Republican primary field by offering voters a familiar mix of conspiracies, charisma and promises to continue the policies he pursued during his first term as president.DeSantis stayed away from attacking the Republican frontrunner in his speech, instead promising the Faith & Freedom Coalition audience that as president, he would implement his policies in Florida across the United States.“We will fight the woke in the schools, we will fight the woke in the corporations, we will fight the woke in the halls of government. We will never ever surrender to the woke mob. We are going to leave woke ideology in the dustbin of history where it belongs,” DeSantis said. More

    • 150 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘We can’t rest or relent’: Pence reiterates support of staunch abortion restrictions

      by

      Despite their unpopularity with the American public, former Republican vice-president and 2024 White House hopeful Mike Pence doubled down Sunday on his hard-line support of staunch abortion restrictions, saying: “We just can’t rest or relent until we restore the sanctity of life.”Pence – in an interview on Fox News Sunday – made clear that he viewed bringing the elimination of abortion “to the center of American law” as both essential and “a winning issue” for the Republican party trying to wrest back control of the Oval Office.“I’m pro-life, and I don’t apologize for it,” Pence boasted to host Shannon Bream, even though polling shows most Americans favor keeping the termination of pregnancies legal in most cases.The Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling that the US supreme court handed down one year ago Saturday in effect left it up to states to decide whether abortion should be legal within their boundaries. Many states have taken steps to severely limit access to abortion, setting off a seismic shift in how doctors are training to provide reproductive care to how far patients in need of attention must travel.Pence on Sunday hailed the Dobbs decision as “a historic victory” which sent the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling establishing federal abortion rights “to the ash heap of history”. But he also suggested it didn’t go far enough and reiterated a call he had publicly made days earlier for his fellow Republicans to rally behind setting “a minimum standard” and implementing a nationwide ban on abortions beyond 15 weeks.The former US congressman, Indiana governor, and vice-president to Donald Trump argued that failing to do so would leave the nation more closely aligned with “western countries in Europe” on the topic of abortion than with North Korea, China and Iran. “I fully support that,” said Pence, a professed evangelical.Pence’s beliefs on abortion put him at stark odds with Trump, who has signaled that he regards a national abortion ban as a vote-loser which he is unlikely to support.Many of the other declared candidates for the Republican nomination to challenge Democratic presidential incumbent Joe Biden’s re-election campaign have been less frank about their positions on abortion.Notably, Florida governor Ron DeSantis – the closest challenger to the frontrunner Trump – signed a six-week ban in his state, which pundits predict could be a problem for him in a general showdown with Biden.Biden’s administration has taken steps to widen access to abortion, and promises to defend such procedures helped Democrats keep a majority in the Senate as well as lose fewer House seats than projected during last year’s midterms.Pence on Sunday also evaded answering whether he would consider pardoning Trump if he won the 2024 presidency and his ex-boss was convicted of criminal charges pending against him.“I don’t know why the other people running for president in the Republican primary assume that the president will be found guilty,” Pence said when asked if he would pardon Trump.Trump is facing federal charges that he improperly stored government secrets at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he and Pence were defeated by the Biden-Kamala Harris ticket in 2020.Separately, he is also facing state charges in New York over hush money payments made to adult film star Stormy Daniels after a sexual encounter that she has described having with Trump. Presidential pardons would not apply to state charges.The ex-president has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.Trump’s presidency ended with his supporters attacking the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 and demanding – among other things – Pence’s execution by hanging. At the time of the attack, the pro-mob Trump incorrectly maintained that Pence could have used his ceremonial role at a joint session of Congress certifying the results of the 2020 election to single-handedly undermine Biden’s victory. More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in Elections

      Trump Highlights Abortion Supreme Court Decision at Faith and Freedom Conference

      by

      Former President Donald J. Trump told an evangelical gathering that no president had done more for Christians than he did.One year after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, former President Donald J. Trump reminded a gathering of evangelical activists in the nation’s capital how he had shaped the court’s conservative supermajority that ended nearly 50 years of constitutional protections for abortion.Appearing at a Faith & Freedom Coalition gala in Washington on Saturday night, he cited his appointment of three of the six justices who voted to strike down the law as a capstone of his presidency. And he cast himself as an unflinching crusader for the Christian right in a meandering speech that lasted nearly 90 minutes.“No president has ever fought for Christians as hard as I have,” he said, adding, “I got it done, and nobody thought it was even a possibility.”It was the eighth appearance by Mr. Trump in front of the group, whose support he is seeking to consolidate in a crowded G.OP. competition for the 2024 nomination, though he is the front-runner in the field. He said that Republican voters were skeptical of claims by some of his rivals that they were stronger opponents of abortion, and suggested that the skepticism had arisen on the campaign trail.“A woman stood up and said, ‘This guy ended Roe v. Wade. How the hell can you go against him?’” Mr. Trump said.A few thousand activists gave Mr. Trump an ovation when he mentioned the ruling, which he said gave conservatives leverage in the ongoing battle over abortion rights. Several hundred more filled an overflow room.“You have power for the first time,” he said.Former Vice President Mike Pence called for the 2024 Republican field to back a 15-week federal abortion ban — an abortion policy more extreme than what Mr. Trump has supported.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesVirtually all of Mr. Trump’s rivals in the crowded G.O.P. field appeared during the group’s three-day Road to Majority conference at the Washington Hilton. The lineup included Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s chief rival, and former Vice President Mike Pence, Mr. Trump’s onetime running mate.At a rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial earlier on Saturday commemorating the court’s ruling, Mr. Pence urged anti-abortion activists to continue fighting to place further restrictions on the procedure at the state level.“Save the babies, and we will save America,” he said, adding, “As the old book says, that many more are with us than are with them.”In a speech at the gathering a day earlier, Mr. Pence called on the entire 2024 Republican presidential field to pledge support for a national abortion ban at 15 weeks — a ban more extreme than what Mr. Trump has backed so far.David Porter, 64, a Republican from Newport News, Va., who wore a “Walk With Jesus” hat to the rally, commended Mr. Trump for his imprint on the judiciary.“He’s my guy right now,” he said.Several times in his speech on Saturday night, Mr. Trump sought to align himself with the faith community and said that it was under attack, much like he was.“Together, we’re warriors in a righteous crusade to stop the arsonists, the atheists, globalists and the Marxists,” he said.Each indictment, he added, was a “great badge of courage.”“I’m being indicted for you,” he said.Mr. Trump’s alliance with the Christian right is a study in political opportunism, one that has yielded prodigious dividends for both.In 2016, evangelical voters helped propel Mr. Trump to successive Republican primary victories in South Carolina and other key states, giving him a pathway to the nomination and ultimately the presidency.The influential electoral bloc demonstrated its willingness to look beyond the impieties of the twice-divorced Mr. Trump, whose extramarital affairs had long been tabloid fodder and who came with a history of supporting abortion rights in the 1990s. Evangelical voters bought into Mr. Trump’s populist narrative, as well as his pledges to carry out a hard-line reset of the nation’s immigration and trade policies and to appoint “pro-life” justices.The group collected its returns during Mr. Trump’s presidency when he cemented a supermajority on the Supreme Court.Mr. Trump has heralded his remake of the nation’s highest court as he once again seeks the support of evangelical voters, this time beset by a cascade of indictments, including one in a hush-money case involving a porn star.But even as Mr. Trump has highlighted his role in the right’s fight to end abortion rights, he has repeatedly sidestepped questions about whether he would sign a federal abortion ban if Republicans managed to steer one through the divided Congress.Mr. Porter, the anti-abortion activist from Virginia, said Mr. Trump’s evasiveness was concerning.Mr. Trump has suggested that a six-week abortion ban signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida was “too harsh,” causing some of his rivals to see an opening on the right of Mr. Trump on the issue.Pete Marovich for The New York Times“Either you stand for what you believe in or you don’t,” he said.Mr. DeSantis, who spoke on Friday at the evangelical conclave, has sought to stake out the right flank against Mr. Trump on abortion policy. He criticized the former president for suggesting that a six-week abortion ban that Mr. DeSantis signed in Florida was “too harsh.”Susan Migliore, an anti-abortion activist from Falls Church, Va., who said she was religious but not evangelical, said at the Lincoln Memorial rally that she was grateful for Mr. Trump’s court picks, but had not decided which candidate she will support in 2024. More

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      GOP-run states are eyeing abortion beyond their borders. Blue states are fighting back

      by

      The Planned Parenthood clinic in Spokane, Washington, is just a 30-minute drive from the Idaho border, and since May, when Idaho’s “abortion trafficking” law went into effect, it’s been sitting on a timebomb.Like many blue-state abortion clinics, the Spokane health center has been inundated with patients from out of state since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade a year ago in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, allowing abortion to be banned outright or severely restricted in many states. In Spokane, they have received patients from as far away as Texas and Florida. But the new law in Idaho, which criminalizes anyone who helps a minor travel out of state for an abortion without the permission of their parents, threatens this already unsustainable reality. It is the first effort to criminalize travel for the purposes of abortion, and to make the state’s ban on abortion within its borders into something more like a ban on its citizens accessing abortion anywhere.The Idaho law marks a major escalation in the post-Dobbs battle over abortion: an attempt by an anti-choice state to extend its abortion ban beyond its borders. And it puts a target on those who travel along the interstate highway to the Spokane Planned Parenthood. If the trafficking law is ultimately enforced – if an aunt or a sister drives a teenage girl across the Idaho border to have an abortion, and gets caught – the prosecution and civil suits that follow will more likely than not center around a procedure that takes place at the Spokane center. “Nobody wants to be the guinea pig case,” says Sarah Dixit, the public affairs manager for Planned Parenthood of Greater Washington and North Idaho. “Nobody wants to be the example of what it looks like when a state tries to enforce one of these laws.”If Idaho gets its way, the Spokane clinic won’t have a choice.But Washington is one of a growing list of Democratic-controlled states that are pushing back through abortion “shield” laws that aim to extend protections to doctors providing abortions to out-of-state patients and to the patients themselves. Ten states have passed different versions of such laws and more are likely to come.In April, the state passed a set of bills that add new legal protections for medical providers, restrict the reach of out-of-state subpoenas, prohibit the use of state resources for out-of-state anti-abortion legal actions, protect patient data from use in out-of-state legal actions, and expands access to abortion care. The bills provide some much-needed peace of mind to a reproductive health field that’s reeling from anxiety and uncertainty about what’s legal, what’s actionable, and what an emboldened and inventive anti-choice movement might do next. They also advance an untested legal theory about what obligations states have – and don’t have – to honor and assist with the enforcement of other states’ laws.The five bills, collectively referred to as Washington’s “shield law”, were signed by Governor Jay Inslee in Seattle on 27 April. But they were nearly a year in the making. The state senator Yasmin Trudeau, a Democrat representing Tacoma was one of the law’s architects. A millennial, Trudeau is acerbic and funny, and surprisingly candid for a politician. She remembers being at a state senate event with her mother when the Dobbs draft opinion was leaked on 3 May 2022. Like many women, they were both intimately invested in the abortion right: Trudeau was born when her mother, denied an abortion, was just 14. “She was forced to marry and forced to mother,” Trudeau told me. At the time of the leak, Trudeau herself was pregnant, and all too familiar with the burden and gravity of pregnancy. “Carrying a baby,” she said, “is not like carrying a purse.” She began looking into what could be done to secure the rights of women and medical providers in Washington.Trudeau was connected to other Washington legislators looking to expand and secure abortion access in their state. Among them was Drew Hansen, a lawyer and Washington house member from Bainbridge Island who did much of the legwork in shaping the bills. Like Trudeau, he set to work as soon as he learned that Dobbs was coming. “As soon as the draft decision leaked, we started mapping out what other states would have to do to prosecute or enforce civil liability,” Hansen told me. He talked to law enforcement about what interstate prosecutions look like and require; he talked to north-west reproductive rights activists, law professors and a panel of OBGYNs. “I spent all last summer and fall incorporating their feedback, going through drafts [of the bills],” he said. The idea was to get a complete picture of all the ways that another state’s laws could impede access in Washington, and get as close as they could to eliminating them.Washington, like other states that have passed abortion shield laws – including California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota and New York – is looking to provide some clarity in a confusing new era. Even in pro-choice states, the end of Roe v Wade has changed the abortion landscape, and providers are now staring down a vast, complex and ever-changing regime of new criminal penalties and civil liabilities imposed by anti-choice states.The possibilities unravel in an endless stream of questions, which Hansen and Trudeau alike say they have received from anxious, uncertain medical practitioners. Could an abortion provider based in Spokane be subpoenaed to comply with the Idaho travel ban, made to describe the care they provided or incriminate someone who brought a patient to their doors? Could that same provider be sued under Idaho’s law that allows people who can claim a blood relation to an aborted fetus to file civil suits against those who facilitated an abortion? Or could she be targeted by an “aiding and abetting” clause that seeks to sweep up anyone even tangentially related to an abortion into a net of legal liability?Many of these questions are still unanswered, looming ominously in the muck of legal chaos that Dobbs has unleashed. The Washington shield law aims to provide at least some answers: an assurance that the state will argue that no one following Washington’s laws, and acting within Washington’s borders, will be legally punished by another state while Washington stands idly by.There are limits, however, to what a shield law can accomplish. There is only so much protection the laws can extend to the patients and their companions who travel for abortion care – and then have to travel back. Prosecutions and lawsuits are possible for returning patients and companions, because just as Washington’s shield law prevents Idaho’s anti-choice attacks from reaching over the border, Idaho also has no need to respect Washington’s own legal regime. There’s nothing in the shield law that can protect women from being prosecuted or sued once they travel back into Idaho after a legal abortion in Washington.There’s also nothing that prevents Idaho from arresting a Washington abortion doctor if she crosses into their territory for, say, a ski trip. A doctor who practices in both Washington and Idaho may find her license suspended in the latter state over abortion procedures she provided legally in the former. Washington’s law, in particular, is not as aggressive and proactive as those of some other pro-choice states. Some, like Massachusetts, have worked to provide more protection for telemedicine providers in their state, advancing the novel new claim that medical care is subject to the laws of the state where the provider is – not where the patient is located. This means that abortion providers in Boston, under state law, can prescribe abortion medication to a patient living in, say, Florida. Not so in Washington: under the shield law there, a Walla Walla provider who prescribes pills to her Sioux Falls patient online would not be protected.Some of this, of course, is on purpose. Both Trudeau and Hansen are eager to point out the limits of the law, casting Washington’s abortion shield regime as alternately comprehensive and constitutionally modest. Idaho, they both told me, is free to do whatever it wants – in Idaho. It’s just not free to do it in Washington. “The idea is not to interrupt what other states are doing,” Trudeau said. “We’re not the state that’s trying to come down on other states. We’re the ones trying to outline what the obligations are.”If Trudeau sounds defensive, it might be because those obligations are not entirely clear. Abortion shield laws like Washington’s have to be crafted in ways that avoid running afoul of the full faith and credit clause of the US constitution, which states: “Full faith and credit shall be given in each state to the public acts, records, and judicial proceedings of every other state.” Courts have traditionally interpreted this to allow for some degree of flexibility and discretion by states as to how they cooperate with other states, but a zealous and aggressive anti-abortion legal movement is likely to press the issue.This is what is most confounding about shield laws like Washington’s, and what is likely to be subject to considerable fighting in federal courts: the question they raise about what the states owe to one another, and how to mitigate those obligations when they conflict with the passionately held desires – and personal freedoms – of their citizens. In an interconnected country – where commerce, social life and healthcare are all dense with inextricable interstate connections – it remains uncertain if states like Washington will really be able to legally harden their own borders, and meaningfully protect themselves from the reach of other states’ anti-abortion laws.It raises questions, too, about just how long this country can remain so deeply and profoundly divided against itself. If legal judgements and criminal investigations no longer command inter-state cooperation, then what does it mean for the states to be in union with each other? If something is considered a fundamental right of citizenship in one state, and a crime 30 minutes away in another, then what entitlement does one state have to protect conduct that its neighbors want to prosecute? And what entitlement do other states have to stop their people leaving to a place where they might commit what the law understands as murder?Shield laws are likely to be the subject of lawsuits between pro- and anti-choice states sooner rather than later. In a federal judiciary that has been profoundly reshaped by a conservative legal movement propelled by anti-abortion animus, it would appear likely that many federal courts will invoke the obligations of interstate cooperation, or expansive estimations of anti-choice states’ interests in preventing their citizens from obtaining abortions. But as far as Hansen and Trudeau are concerned, the abortion shield law is nothing less than an assertion of Washington state’s sovereignty, and its right to democratic self-government.“The people of our state have spoken on this issue,” says Trudeau, and both election results and popular polling suggest that the strength of pro-choice sentiment in Washington is not ambiguous. “It’s a judgment of democratically elected officials in Washington state to decide what conduct is criminal and what is not,” Hansen says.As for the coming constitutional challenges, he thinks he’s done his homework. “I ran it by civil procedure scholars, by constitutional law scholars. No one could identify any federal constitutional barrier or federal statutory barrier,” Hansen told me. “No one could tell me why we couldn’t do it.” More

    • 200 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘A year of trauma and terror’: Democrats issue calls to action as US marks Roe reversal

      by

      As the US on Saturday marked one year since the country’s supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, abortion rights supporters and politicians issued a call to action – and prepared for reproductive health to be a flashpoint of the 2024 presidential election.The supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health reversed the landmark 1973 decision that had enshrined a federal right to abortion. In the wake of its overturning, more than one dozen states have green-lighted abortion bans, and many others have passed laws dramatically restricting access to the procedure.“States have imposed extreme and dangerous abortion bans that put the health and lives of women in jeopardy, force women to travel hundreds of miles for care, and threaten to criminalize doctors for providing the health care that their patients need and that they are trained to provide,” Joe Biden said in a statement.The president added: “Yet state bans are just the beginning. Congressional Republicans want to ban abortion nationwide, but go beyond that, by taking FDA-approved medication for terminating a pregnancy off the market and [to] make it harder to obtain contraception. Their agenda is extreme, dangerous, and out-of-step with the vast majority of Americans.“My administration will continue to protect access to reproductive health care and call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe v Wade in federal law once and for all.”During a powerful speech in North Carolina on Saturday, Vice-President Kamala Harris called for the restoration of abortion rights across the US, saying, “Extremist Republicans in Congress have proposed to ban abortion nationwide. But I have news for them. We’re not having that. We’re not standing for that. We won’t let that happen. And by the way, the majority of Americans are with us.“The majority of Americans, I do believe, agree that one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do with her body. The United States Congress must put back in place what the supreme court took away.”On Twitter, Texas’s Democratic Congress member Jasmine Crockett described the period post-Dobbs as “a year of trauma & terror for women across the country, especially in states like Texas where Roe was our last line of defense”.“My district is 40% Black and majority women. It’s the people I represent that are hurt by life-saving medical care the most,” she wrote. “North Texas has the highest rate of hospitalization due to pregnancy complications in the entire state.“For all their talk about protecting babies, let me ask you this: What happens to the already born children of a mother who dies from pregnancy complications because she can’t get the treatment she needs during an ectopic pregnancy? Who’s protecting them?”The US House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, decried “rightwing extremists on the supreme court” for “shamefully” reversing the decades-long precedent.“Maga Republicans in Congress want to impose a nationwide ban on abortion care,” the New York Democrat warned, referring to the Donald Trump presidency’s Make American Great Again slogan. “House Dems are working hard to stop these extremists and restore reproductive freedom.”As many issued calls to action, some took steps to protect abortion rights. Arizona’s Democratic governor Katie Hobbs on Friday signed an executive order to better protect abortion rights across the south-western state.The executive order makes central all abortion-related prosecutions under Arizona’s attorney general so that local prosecutors don’t limit access to abortions. Hobbs’s executive order also directs state agencies not to aid in any investigations relating to providing, assisting, seeking or obtaining reproductive health care that would be legal in Arizona.Hobbs’s order also calls on Arizona to refuse extradition requests from other states that want to prosecute persons seeking or providing legal abortion services in Arizona.Amid Democrats’ calls for the restoration of abortion rights, a group of influential reproductive rights organizations – including Planned Parenthood – endorsed Biden and Harris in the 2024 presidential election.A statement from Alexis McGill Johnson, head of the Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said: “Abortion is healthcare. … We need leaders who are committed to protecting our freedoms, not taking them away.”While the upcoming presidential election is unlikely to be a landslide for either party – victories and losses in recent elections have been decided with thin margins – most American voters disagree with Roe’s reversal.In an NBC News poll published Friday, 61% of voters said they disagreed with the court’s decision in Dobbs. Sixty-seven percent of women disapproved of the ruling.Despite the fact that Roe’s reversal appears to have little popular support, anti-abortion leaders are describing the decision as a first step.“We are at the starting line,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America. “We have just begun. We have just begun a journey to start saving lives.”Protests opposing the Dobbs decision are expected across the US throughout the weekend. More