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      ‘I can’t stay silent’: Roe reversal powers new generation to sign up and vote

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      ‘I can’t stay silent’: Roe reversal powers new generation to sign up and vote Huge bloc of women expected to turn out in November midterms to protect abortion rights – could it alter the election outcome?Sonya Koenig is scared. A 19-year-old student from Kalamazoo, Michigan, Koenig often stays up until 2am thinking. Sometimes she paces up and down the hall, or speaks to her roommate about nightmare scenarios in which she ends up pregnant and in need of an abortion.“Being in college, I hear stories all the time of women getting drugged at parties, or just walking down the street, and something unfortunate can happen,” says Koenig, a freshman at Michigan State University. “A guy can walk away, but [these abortion bans] mean the woman has to choose: ‘Do I want to give this baby up … or raise this child with no help from anybody?’ That’s a really hard decision.”In August, a week after her 19th birthday, Koenig signed up to vote. She is one of many women registering in droves since the supreme court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion on 24 June.“My brain is constantly on fire. I can’t relax. I just want this election to be over with,” says Koenig, who plans to vote to protect abortion rights in a Michigan ballot as well as voting Democrat come November.People such as Koenig threaten to be a hugely pivotal voting bloc as the midterms loom, with organizers focusing on women and young people in voter registration drives all over the country. The first hints of that bloc’s voting power came in early August, when women in Kansas came out overwhelmingly to protect abortion rights. That election saw huge turnout, with women representing 70% of newly registered voters. They ultimately protected abortion rights in a state where Donald Trump had a 15% lead in the 2020 presidential election that he lost to Joe Biden.That trend seems to be continuing in other states – a threat to Republican lawmakers, who in recent weeks have quietly removed abortion-related election pledges from their websites and softened their anti-abortion messaging.For instance, the Republican gubernatorial candidate for Minnesota, Scott Jensen, had previously said he would ban abortion outright. But more recently, Jensen released a video saying he supports abortion in the cases of rape, incest, and threat to life of the pregnant person.That pivot might not be enough to hide the party’s hardline agenda: this week, Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina proposed a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, despite months of Republican rhetoric about putting the question back to the states. Perhaps women are unconvinced. Target Smart analyzed new voter registration from 45 states following the supreme court decision that reversed federal abortion rights – the group said female registration shot up 12%.In Wisconsin, a battleground state that voted for Biden by a margin of just 30,000 votes in 2020, women are out-registering men by 16%. New registrants also skew hugely Democratic: 52% of newly registered voters in Wisconsin, compared to just 17% of new registrations by Republicans.“In my 28 years of analyzing elections, I had never seen anything like what’s happened in the past two months in American politics,” Tom Bonier, chief executive of Target Smart, wrote in the New York Times. “Women are registering to vote in numbers I never witnessed before. I’ve run out of superlatives to describe how different this moment is.”This week, the Michigan supreme court agreed to put the question of abortion rights directly to voters in November, after 730,000 Michiganders signed a petition requesting a vote. Initially, Republicans on the state’s board of canvassers tried to block the call for a referendum, complaining about spacing errors.“I tend to do the bigger elections … I’m disabled, and standing in line for a long time is not the best for me,” says Diamond Doré, 30, from Detroit. “But seeing [the supreme court] decision, I was like, I have to vote. I’m Black and queer, and I know this means a lot of Black women are gonna die. I couldn’t stay silent.”A grassroots activist, Doré phone canvasses, and says she has seen anti-abortion voters suddenly wanting to protect abortion. “When this happened, a lot of people sat back and said, ‘Oh, dang, this is for real. It’s not just about me, this is about tons of other women and pregnant persons around America,’” says Doré.News of a 10-year-old girl from Ohio traveling 200 miles to Indiana to get abortion care after being raped was one thing Doré has seen sway voters. Add to that list people being forced to carry unsuccessful pregnancies to full term, at risk to their own lives, and the threat of criminalization.“A lot of Black people feel like we are going back to what our ancestors went through,” says Doré.William Wojciechowsk, 35, who hails from what he calls “Trump country, Michigan” (St Clair), says abortion bans across the country mean he will be voting Democrat in November for the first time.“All the way up until the last primary election, I voted very conservatively. But I’m a transgender male, and abortions can affect me directly because I haven’t had a hysterectomy.”Asked if he felt abandoned by his party, Wojciechowsk responded: “They’re too extreme. They’re out of their minds. These bans are putting women and trans men back into the dark ages.”Bonier says the gender gap in voter registration seems more pronounced in some states than others.“There’s a general sense that even though Dobbs fell, that [some of the electorate still feels] abortion is protected. In states like Oregon, where they’ve been trying to protect abortion in their state constitution, you don’t really see gender gaps [in those registering to vote] since the decision,” says Bonier. But in Republican-dominated states such as Alaska, Idaho, Kansas and Louisiana, and competitive midwestern swing states – such as Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan – the gap is clearer, he says.“[In those] races, governors and senators have certainly focused pretty extensively on [abortion]. And so I think voters generally have a sense of the stakes.”Those stakes include control of Congress at a pivotal moment for American democracy – control that until recently looked like it could pass into Republican hands. The party in power has historically tended to struggle in the midterms.“Just a few months ago, if you were to watch any of the cable news shows or read any of the political columnists, there seemed to be a universal agreement that Republicans were on their way to an inevitable wave election, where they were going to take back the Senate and take back the House. Now that doesn’t seem so sure,” Bonier says.Now, surprise races are being won for candidates putting abortion at the centre of their campaigns. Republicans lost Alaska’s special House election at the end of August – a surprise victory for Mary Peltola, who was running against Alaska’s former governor, Sarah Palin, and against Nicholas Begich, a Republican who comes from a lineage of Alaskan Democrats.Younger people, in particular, are playing a key role in the surge in women voting. Usually, voter turnout is particularly low for young people in midterms and primaries. But in Kansas, voters under the age of 30 comprised over 14% of ballots cast, surpassing their vote share for each of the past three general elections in Kansas.Katharine from Minnesota, who just turned 18 and did not give her surname for privacy, will vote for the first time in November. She remembers the moment she heard about the Dobbs decision: she was sitting in history class.“Somehow, in my mind, I still thought it wouldn’t happen, that once [the draft opinion] was leaked, maybe the public would somehow sway the decision,” she says.She had written many school assignments about the importance of judicial precedent – and here she was seeing it all torn down.“That’s when I knew I had to vote,” she says. “To see a lot of things I’ve grown up viewing as basic rights being taken away was very jolting.“I am ready to put these politicians in their place. We’re tired of the older guys in office telling us what to do with our bodies.”Bonier cautions that young people usually surge in voter registration closer to midterms, and that first-time voters make up a tiny proportion of those who are registering to vote.But, he says, past election cycles indicate that when a group shows a greater level of intensity at a particular point – registering to vote for the first time in increased numbers – those numbers translate to a higher level of turnout overall for that group. In Michigan, Koenig recalls feeling stirred when she heard Ruth Bader Ginsberg, one of her idols, talk about abortion as a human right, rather than simply an issue of gender.“Forcing a woman to have a child, it affects everything,” Koenig says. “It’s not just an issue of abortion. It’s a racial issue. It’s a women’s rights issue. And I feel like a lot of these politicians are so concerned with their power, they don’t think about how we going to support babies that are going to be born.“If something terrible happens to me, I want to have a choice in the matter.”TopicsAbortionUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Republicans on the Defensive on Abortion and Other Social Issues

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      Republican missteps have helped to spotlight the party’s divisions on abortion and same-sex marriage, two issues on which their base is out of step with the general public.WASHINGTON — Republicans have perfected the art of keeping the heat on Democrats on the searing social issues of the day, but this election year, it seems to be Republicans who are getting scorched.During a midterm cycle that seemed tailor-made for significant Republican gains in the House and Senate, Democrats have managed to grab the advantage on abortion rights and same-sex marriage, steering the conversation away from topics that are thornier for them, such as inflation and crime.They have had substantial help from Republican miscues, confounding Democrats who typically expect more craftiness from across the aisle.“They can’t seem to get out of their own way,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, one of the Democratic incumbents on the ballot in November.One reason for their struggles is that a large swath of the Republican base has fallen out of step with broader public opinion on these issues. Most Americans favor same-sex marriage rights and at least some abortion rights, but many Republican voters continue to oppose same-sex marriage and want strict abortion limits if not an outright ban. The disconnect makes navigating those topics treacherous for Republicans, who are faced with the choice of turning off their core supporters or alienating the independents whose support they need to prevail in November.The trouble shows.On Thursday, Democrats announced they would postpone until after the election a vote to protect same-sex marriages because its backers had failed to secure enough Republican support to overcome a G.O.P. filibuster.It was an intriguing decision by Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, who is not usually inclined to pass up an opportunity to inflict political pain on the opposition. But he acquiesced to a request from bipartisan backers of the legislation for more time — and a less charged environment.Senator Chuck Schumer, the New York Democrat and majority leader, decided to postpone a vote on legislation to protect same-sex marriages at the request of its bipartisan backers.Al Drago for The New York TimesWhile it spared Republicans what was looking like a difficult moment, damage had already been done.The threatened filibuster made it clear that some Republicans weren’t comfortable voting in favor of same-sex marriage before the midterm election, and others didn’t want to go on record against it at an inopportune time. Either way, Republicans looked shaky on an issue that most Americans consider to be long resolved.The Republican posture in the Senate was sufficient to prompt hundreds of prominent Republicans, including Senate candidates in Pennsylvania and Colorado, to sign a letter calling for passage of the same-sex marriage legislation to “reaffirm that marriage for gay and lesbian couples is settled law.”The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries over, both parties are shifting their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Midterm Data: Could the 2020 polling miss repeat itself? Will this election cycle really be different? Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, looks at the data in his new newsletter.Republicans’ Abortion Struggles: Senator Lindsey Graham’s proposed nationwide 15-week abortion ban was intended to unite the G.O.P. before the November elections. But it has only exposed the party’s divisions.Democrats’ Dilemma: The party’s candidates have been trying to signal their independence from the White House, while not distancing themselves from President Biden’s base or agenda.On abortion, Republicans knew that the Supreme Court ruling striking down Roe v. Wade would complicate their push to reclaim Congress, and they sought to quickly rid themselves of the problem. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, said a G.O.P.-controlled Congress could pursue a nationwide abortion ban, but Republicans soft-pedaled that idea and instead chose to emphasize that the ruling returned the question of abortion rights to each state, where they said it belonged. Case closed.Enter Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who surprised his colleagues on Tuesday by rolling out his plan, backed by anti-abortion groups, to enact a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks, which would impose federal restrictions on blue and purple states that have not joined the post-Roe race to enact strict new limits on the procedure.Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, introduced a bill that would implement a national ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. “When the dust settles, this will all make sense,” he said.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesTo cringes from many of his Republican colleagues, Mr. Graham declared that the coming election was essentially a referendum on abortion — and that if his party won control of Congress, it would, in fact, consider a ban..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.Despite their determination to shift the issue away from the Capitol, Senate Republicans — and their midterm candidates — suddenly found themselves forced to answer whether they backed such a prohibition, potentially driving off suburban women who will be crucial to the election outcome. Again, some Republican lawmakers and candidates sought to distance themselves from the proposal.Privately, many of Mr. Graham’s colleagues wanted to throttle him. Others were more diplomatic.“I didn’t know anything about it,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. “I don’t know what his motivation was.”Democrats could not believe their good fortune. On the day new inflation numbers were driving down the stock market, Mr. Graham had turned the conversation back to a topic that has so far proved advantageous for Democrats in the aftermath of the court ruling, which Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said had already shocked much of the nation.“Republicans, having succeeded in putting in a conservative majority to overturn Roe v. Wade, are proposing to go even farther,” Mr. Coons said of the Graham legislation.Mr. Graham insists he will be proved right in the end.“I think that my position is reasonable and logical and over time, I feel good about it winning the day,” he said. “When the dust settles, this will all make sense.”Until then, Democrats are gleefully running ads portraying Republicans as reactionaries.Republicans were also in danger of running afoul of public opinion on another volatile social issue — immigration — after Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida sent air charters of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, the island retreat in the blue state of Massachusetts. The stunt was aimed at highlighting the uneven impact of federal border policies, and had many Republicans celebrating having steered the campaign conversation to the dysfunctional immigration system.But it also risked spurring a backlash. While polls show that most Republicans draw a hard line on immigration, they also find that the majority of Americans regard immigration as a positive and are particularly sympathetic to refugees, suggesting that the G.O.P. stunt — which stranded vulnerable people in a place unprepared for their arrival — could also prompt outrage among voters who regard it as cruel.Republicans concede they could do without the turmoil surrounding the abortion rights and same-sex marriage battles, but contend that the focus on those issues is mainly a Washington preoccupation.“Could we do without the distractions?” asked Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota. “Perhaps. But I think the voters are still focused on the main things.”“At the end of the day, I think it is still the economy, stupid,” he added, quoting the famous line from Bill Clinton’s successful 1992 presidential campaign. “Everybody is still paying too much for groceries and other things, and that’s what the election is going to be about.”Republicans are also trying to regain the upper hand on abortion, portraying Democrats as extremists who don’t support any restrictions at all, a position that is also at odds with those of many Americans.“The Democrat position used to be Roe v. Wade,” said Mr. Cornyn. “Now it is abortion without limitations up to the time of delivery. It is just shocking to me. Most people’s views on this are more nuanced. They may be pro-choice but would say there is a limit.”Democrats have not explicitly proposed such a sweeping policy, but they have put forward legislation that would protect abortion access nationwide by prohibiting a long list of abortion restrictions, including some enacted after Roe was decided in 1973. It failed in May when Senate Republicans, joined by one Democrat, blocked it.Mr. Cornyn joined the Republican chorus in saying that the economy, border security and rising crime would remain the decisive topics in the election, even as he conceded that Democrats had been successful in stoking voter enthusiasm on the social issues.“Inflation is not going away, the Fed is going to raise interest rates more,” Mr. Cornyn said. “People are still going to be grumpy.”Democrats, more accustomed to being on the losing end of the culture clash, say Republicans are misreading where the public stands on such issues and will pay a price for it.“Republicans are just way out of the American mainstream,” said Mr. Blumenthal. “On a woman’s right to make a personal decision, individual women may make very different decisions. But the vast majority think they ought to be trusted to make those decisions — not some government official.” More

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      California governor’s ad campaign offers help to women in anti-abortion states

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      California governor’s ad campaign offers help to women in anti-abortion statesBillboards will be displayed in states including Texas, Mississippi and Ohio but have some questioning Gavin Newsom’s ambitions “Need an abortion? California is ready to help.”That’s one of the billboard advertisements that California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, is paying to display across seven of America’s most aggressively anti-abortion states, including Texas, Mississippi, Ohio, South Carolina and South Dakota.The advertising blitz in states outside California is being funded by Newsom’s re-election campaign for governor – Newsom is expected to easily win re-election in November in his deep blue state. But the move is renewing questions about the Democratic politician’s national ambitions.Democrats call Indiana’s near-total abortion ban a ‘death sentence’ Read moreA recent poll found that the majority of California voters do not think Joe Biden should run for re-election in 2024, and that Newsom was one of the leading contenders to replace him.The California governor has repeatedly denied having any interest in running for president, while simultaneously paying for high-profile ad campaigns in states outside the one in which he is running for office. In July, he launched a television ad campaign in Florida, where the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, is considered a leading replacement for Trump in the 2024 Republican presidential race, focused on the state’s attacks against LBGTQ+ people, book bans and abortion restrictions.This week, Newsom also asked the US attorney general to investigate the governors of Texas and Florida for transporting migrants across the country to wealthy Democratic enclaves such as Washington DC, and Martha’s Vineyard, in what has widely been criticised as a political stunt.What @GovRonDeSantis and @GregAbbott_TX are doing isn’t clever, it’s cruel.I’m formally requesting the DOJ begin an immediate investigation into these inhumane efforts to use kids as political pawns. pic.twitter.com/x2sBa06nSw— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 15, 2022
      The messaging in many of Newsom’s new abortion ads is sharply critical of Republicans’ successful efforts to ban abortion, with phrases like, “Texas does not own your body. You do,” and an image of a woman with her hands cuffed behind her back.The 18 billboards point viewers to a new California state-funded website, abortion.ca.gov, which offers guidance on how people outside California can access abortion care in the state, an effort that Planned Parenthood’s California affiliate praised as a good model for increasing abortion access.“Here is my message to any woman seeking abortion care in these anti-freedom states: come to California,” Newsom said in a statement announcing the campaign, saying that abortion bans “are literally killing women”.On his personal Twitter account, Newsom launched the ad campaign by tagging seven anti-abortion Republican governors in tweets showing images of the billboards.“The people of Mississippi deserve to know they have access to the care you are refusing to provide. This will be launching in your state today,” he told the Mississippi governor, Tate Reeves.@tatereeves the people of Mississippi deserve to know they have access to the care you are refusing to provide. This will be launching in your state today. pic.twitter.com/8qg7psYT2j— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) September 15, 2022
      The Newsom campaign noted that it expects the Mississippi billboards could face a legal challenge in the state. A spokesperson for Reeves told the Washington Post that it was “interesting to see Governor Newsom’s 2024 primary campaign extend to Mississippi” and that they thought most residents “will not be interested in what he’s selling”.Newsom himself told the Washington Post that he had launched the abortion ad campaign “because the people that support my candidacy support this. And when many heard about this, they wanted to support additional efforts like it, to be fully transparent with you.”Polls show that Newsom is expected to cruise to victory over his little-known Republican opponent in the California governor’s race this November, after triumphing over an expensive attempt to recall him as governor in 2021.TopicsCaliforniaAbortionGavin NewsomUS politicsnewsReuse this content More

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      Democrats Buoyed by Abortion and Trump, Times/Siena Poll Finds

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      Even as they struggle to persuade voters that they should be trusted on the economy, Democrats remain unexpectedly competitive in the battle for Congress as the sprint to November’s midterm election begins, a New York Times/Siena College poll has found.The surprising Democratic strength has been bolstered by falling gas prices and President Biden’s success at breaking through legislative gridlock in Washington to pass his agenda. That shift in political momentum has helped boost, in just two months, the president’s approval rating by nine percentage points and doubled the share of Americans who believe the country is on the right track.But Democrats are also benefiting from factors over which they had little control: the public outcry in response to the Supreme Court’s overturning of federal abortion rights and the return of former President Donald J. Trump to an attention-commanding presence on the national stage.Changes in Voter Sentiment More

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      Republicans won’t stop until abortion is banned across America | Moira Donegan

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      Republicans won’t stop until abortion is banned across America. And it could beMoira DoneganIt is time for liberal Americans, and all American women, to face this reality: there will soon be no safe states Republicans want to ban abortion nationwide, and they have the nerve to claim that this is a compromise. This week, Senator Lindsay Graham, of South Carolina, introduced a bill to ban all abortions everywhere in the United States at 15 weeks. Abortion is already banned before 15 weeks in 15 states.It is banned outright in Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin. Indiana’s ban on abortion went into effect just this Wednesday. It is banned at six weeks – in practice a total ban – in Georgia and Ohio. West Virginia passed an abortion ban, too. It won’t be the last.The Republican national 15-week ban that Graham has introduced will do nothing to help the women in these states, who will not have their rights restored. It’s not a floor for abortion legality: it is a ceiling. The goal is to ban abortion in blue states. Currently, 58% of American women of childbearing age live in states that are “hostile or extremely hostile” to abortion rights, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Republicans want to raise that to 100%.One way that we know that the Republicans will ban abortion nationally as soon as they get the chance is because they keep saying that they want to. This is the sixth time Graham has introduced a national abortion ban bill. The previous five were, by his standards, less extreme: they all banned abortion at 20 weeks. That Graham has pushed his ban back earlier in pregnancy is a sign of the rapidly lowering standards for American women.We’re now told that 15 weeks is a compromise. But 15 weeks is not a compromise. It is the very beginning of the second trimester – before fetal abnormalities and other health risks are detected, before many women in red states, burdened by poverty and travel and the medically needless burdens imposed by their states, can get an abortion at all. And there is no stage of pregnancy where a woman deserves the indignity of a ban. There is no point at which she becomes unworthy of controlling her own life and health; there is no point at which a legislator knows more about what’s best for her than she does. Any ban is unacceptable; a national ban, like the kind that the Republicans are now pursuing, is abhorrent.This was always their plan. The anti-choice movement, and their servants in the Republican party, have long understood the overturning of Roe v Wade – the long-desired goal that they achieved this summer, on 24 June, when the US supreme court issued its decision in Dobbs v Jackson – as just the opening salvo in their assault on women’s rights.Their real goal is a national ban on abortion, beginning with the kind of legislation introduced this week by Graham. They have made no secret of this: anti-choice groups announced their plan for a national ban even before the Dobbs decision was officially released. They don’t have the votes for it now, but they could get the votes in the future. And when they do, a combination of factors, including pressure from fundraisers and their base and what seems to be a genuine hatred for abortion and the freedom that it provides to women, combine to make a political certainty: the next time Republicans hold both houses of US Congress and the White House, they will ban abortion nationwide.It is time for liberal Americans, and all American women, to face this reality: there will soon be no safe states, no place in America where abortion is legal. In the future, we will come to see this horrible era – the time after Roe fell, but before abortion was banned nationally – as an interregnum, when the suffering and loss enforced on women by abortion bans was only confined to red states.As horrible as this state of affairs is, one day we will look back on it fondly. As women bleed for days, and little girls are pushed out of school, and thousands of dreams are abandoned to forced birth – even these, eventually, might come to seem like the good old days.Because though the Republicans will certainly ban abortion nationally at their first opportunity, they may not even need to wait for an electoral victory to do so. A group calling itself Catholics for Life has already asked the supreme court to declare fetuses and embryos to be persons under the 14th amendment, a move that would grant them constitutional rights. From there, “it’s a short step to saying that laws allowing abortion are unconstitutional because they deny equal protection to those persons that are unborn human beings,” the Berkeley Law School dean, Erwin Chemerinsky, told Ms magazine. “I believe that there may be a majority on the Court to take that position.” The unelected, lifetime-appointed judges on the court could extend their assertion in Dobbs that it’s legal to ban abortion, and instead say that it’s actually illegal to allow it. To get that outcome, the Republicans don’t need to win even one more vote.These are the stakes of every election now, for the rest of our lives. A national abortion ban will be on the ballot every time Americans vote for congressmen and senators; it will be on the ballot every time they vote for president. In previous years, while Roe was still in place, voting for a governor or state legislatures could affect practical abortion access within a state quite substantially. Red states were able to cut funding, impose labyrinthine requirements, up the cost for patients and impose uniquely onerous burdens on providers. But Roe preserved a bare-bones floor for abortion rights: no state could ban abortion before viability.Now, any state – or the United States at the federal level – can ban abortion as early as they want. There is no bottom, and Republicans are determined to keep pushing further and further back, dragging the rights and dignity of American women further and further down into the dirt. This is the possibility that we have to resist every time we vote. It’s also the possibility that Democrats accept – every day that they do not expand the court.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
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      Near-total abortion ban with narrow exceptions takes effect in Indiana

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      Near-total abortion ban with narrow exceptions takes effect in IndianaLaw effectively wipes out abortion access for 1.5m people in the state, which was a safe haven for those seeking the procedure A sweeping abortion ban went into effect in Indiana on Thursday, containing only extremely narrow exceptions for medical emergencies, rape and incest and making it the latest state to largely outlaw the procedure in the US.The ban is being challenged in court by the ACLU and several abortion care providers, with hearings set to start on 19 September.Indiana lawmakers passed the legislation during a special legislative session in early August, with a six-week pause before it came into effect. Then, Indiana was the first in the nation to bring in a new law banning abortion after Roe fell. Before that, anti-abortion activists had relied on so-called “trigger laws”, written pre-Roe, to ban the procedure once the supreme court decision came down.But earlier this week West Virginia followed and also passed a sweeping ban.“We will always have more work to do because we need to make it unimaginable to end an unborn baby’s life,” the Republican state senator Liz Brown said when she backed the bill six weeks ago.The law effectively wipes out abortion access for 1.5 million Indianans of reproductive age, and will have far-reaching consequences as Indiana had become a safe haven for those seeking abortion in other nearby states.Now, residents in places like Ohio, Wisconsin and Kentucky, which have total or near-total abortion bans in place, will have to travel hundreds of miles to neighboring Illinois for the procedure. Meanwhile, other midwestern states, like Michigan, will put abortion rights directly to the public in a ballot in November.The Indiana law – known as SB 1 – is an all-encompassing abortion ban with some extreme restrictions. It limits abortions to cases where there is serious risk to the health or life of the pregnant person, and in the case of a lethal fetal anomaly up to 20 weeks post-fertilization.Similar abortion restrictions in other states have already put the lives of pregnant people at risk, which is of huge concern in a state like Indiana, which has some of the worst maternal and infant mortality rates in the US.The Indiana law allows abortions in the case of rape or incest – but only up to 10 weeks of pregnancy. Indiana threw rape and incest exceptions into the spotlight on an international stage early this year, after a 10-year-old girl travelled to the state from Ohio after being raped. Dr Caitlin Bernard, the girl’s OB-GYN, spoke out about the case after the 10-year-old was denied an abortion in her home state due to a trigger law in Ohio that does not include exceptions for rape.The ban puts a limit on where abortions can be performed, specifically banning abortion clinics from performing the procedure. Instead, abortions must be performed in hospitals or surgical centers owned by hospitals. That has left hospitals scurrying to set up special units and work out their options – previously hospitals performed only a tiny fraction of abortions happening in state.TopicsIndianaAbortionUS politicsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Want to see political change? Look to the margins | Rebecca Solnit

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      Want to see political change? Look to the marginsRebecca SolnitChange begins in the shadows, not the limelight. Once you see that you see how powerful we can be These days I think of myself as a tortoise at the mayfly party. By that, I mean I try to see the long trajectory of change behind current events, because it takes time to see change, and understanding change is essential to understanding politics and culture, let alone trying to participate in them. The short view generates incomprehension and ineffectuality.Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they’re connected to. If you follow them either in real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works. And yet these trajectories and genealogies are often left out of the news, the conversation and apparently the conception of how something came to pass.Change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change, and the short-term view breeds defeatism and despair. Not long ago, people would announce to me that feminism had failed, apparently unable to recognize the extraordinary changes in the legal and cultural status of women over the past half century, or assuming that dismantling millennia of patriarchy was a simple task that should be all wrapped up in a few decades. We have just begun.Forgetting is everywhere. Take the Biden administration’s August announcement of a broad package of student loan relief. If you didn’t follow the history, you could believe that it was a gift from above rather than an achievement long fought for from below. If you did follow it, you would have remembered how student debt emerged as a focus in 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising. By raising up the voices of those crushed by debt and decrying the system that crushed them, it changed the national conversation.Nevertheless as soon as Occupy began, pundits were asserting it was a failure, and when the Zuccotti Park presence in Lower Manhattan was violently broken up by police in November 2011, they declared that it was over. But even when the rock’s on the bottom of the pool, the ripples are still spreading.Occupy’s impact had just begun. It inspired other occupations far beyond New York City, some of them outside the United States. Across the country, police-accountability groups, solidarity organizing with foreclosure victims and the unhoused, and many other progressive projects emerged. Some of them lasted.‘A truce with the trees’: Rebecca Solnit on the wonders of a 300-year old violinRead moreOne of them was the Debt Collective, founded in 2012. It has successfully taken on all forms of debt – housing, medical and educational – and began to organize to abolish debt directly, campaign for debt abolition and legal changes, and draw public attention to the devastating cruelty of the system.In 2015, the Debt Collective announced that a student debt strike it organized initiated “an ongoing campaign that has helped win changes to federal law and over $2bn in student debt abolition to date”. Activists made student debt a public issue and then part of the Biden campaign’s platform and that ultimately led to last month’s debt-relief measures.The year the Debt Collective started its campaign, the supreme court recognized marriage equality as a constitutional right. The mayfly version would have seen that right as likewise handed down from above by the US supreme court, rather than built from below. But the court merely gave legal force to long-term campaigns that encouraged and built on broader shifts in acceptance and support of queer rights and inclusion. To see those shifts, you also have to remember what things were like beforehand.Early in this country’s history, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that the war of independence from the British throne was not the revolution; “the revolution was in the minds of the people and this was effected from 1760 to 1775 … before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” It’s an assertion that the crucial change came through culture, through beliefs and values, that the most important territory to take is in the imagination.Once you create a new idea of what is possible and acceptable, the seeds are planted; once it becomes what the majority believes, you’ve created the conditions in which winning happens. It may be the least tangible, but most important, part of a campaign. Ideas are powerful and dangerous, as their enemies know, and everyone else often forgets.One of the joys of being a tortoise is watching the slow journey of ideas from the margins to the center, seeing what is invisible, then deemed impossible, become widely accepted. The other day the Salt Lake City Tribune editors called for draining Lake Powell, the now failing reservoir created 60 years ago by Glen Canyon Dam, to make its beautiful canyonlands into a new national park. That was considered an outrageous idea 20 years ago. The city of Oakland just announced plans to return five acres of open space to its original Ohlone owners, an act modest in scale but huge as a sign of how Native American land rights have gained recognition. Barack Obama himself tweeted in support of the student debt relief he did not support as president.If people are shortsighted about the past, so they are about the future – a lot of complaining about the incompleteness of the student loan reform and cancellation was met with the Debt Collective’s vow that they were far from done.That nearly all change is incremental and even a comprehensive victory usually has intermediary steps preceding it is one of the things that disappears in the short view. Imperfect and frustrating though those steps may be, they can still lead us to our destination. We can’t reach the summit without climbing the mountain.Perhaps some of this is built into the news system, which tends to report on events as sudden ruptures rather than the consequence of long-term forces. More of it may come from the attachment to the idea of revolution, of everything changing overnight, though it’s no longer sensible, if it ever was, to believe regime change can change everything – and the long revolutions around gender, nature, race and the rest in our time have been incremental and largely cultural in means even as they produce concrete ends as changed laws, policies and finance.Perhaps the problem is embedded in the very word news, as in new. In the sense that everything has a history, nothing is entirely new. (Even mayflies can live for a year or two as underwater larvae before they emerge into the air for their few days of winged life.) I have been a witness and sometimes a participant to change and I’ve seen so many versions of people fail to see change, believe change is impossible, walk away prematurely, dismiss those who are trying because of this lack of perspective.So far as I can tell, the mayfly view is of a perpetual present in which the order of things is largely immutable. Martin Luther King Jr memorably said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”You can argue about how it bends – we’ve certainly seen it bend other ways of late – and how to bend it. But you have to stick around for that long view to see it bend at all. Conservatives have been recognized for their long-term strategy, building power from the ground up, taking over local government, winning state races to take over state legislatures to control redistricting to gerrymander their way to minority power in the federal government, bending democracy into something worse. Happily, they’re not the only ones with tenacity.The examples are everywhere. In 2020, after 31 years of organizing, the coalition of ranchers, Native Nevadans and other rural people who came together as Great Basin Water Network finally defeated Las Vegas’s attempt to extract the water from one of the driest places on the continent. The plan would have taken 58bn gallons of water annually from eastern Nevada, devastating wildlife and rural communities. As Eric Siegel’s report in High Country News put summarized it, “the Vegas Pipeline, had it succeeded, threatened to make a dust bowl of 305 springs, 112 miles of streams, 8,000 acres of wetlands and 191,000 acres of shrubland habitat, almost all of it on public lands.”Siegel quoted the Ely Shoshone tribal elder Delaine Spilsbury, who declared: “Never give up the ship. Never. That’s the kind of feeling that I think most of us had. Just do the best we can and let’s make something happen, even if it does take forever.”It didn’t take forever but it took decades. For much of that time it would have been easy to look at the struggle and conclude that it was doomed or losing because it hadn’t won. You could say the same of many other campaigns, including the student-led movement to get Harvard University to divest from fossil fuels, which took 10 years to reach victory in 2021. As my friend Astra Taylor of the Debt Collective remarked to me when I congratulated her, “We’re all losers until we win.”Another of my friends, Joe Lamb, is a poet and arborist who sports a T-shirt that says: “70 is young for a tree.” In a recent essay about the epic tree-planting program that was part of the New Deal’s effort to stop the erosion that produced the Dust Bowl, he wrote, “We need to remember that we can learn from and repeat the successes of our past.” It was a gorgeous revision of the old “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”There are past victories you want to repeat, or build on, or learn from. Which is why understanding how they unfold is so essential, recognizing that an oak was once an acorn and then a spindly sapling, remembering this law was once a radical idea and then a campaign. That means seeing the world like a tortoise, not a mayfly.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
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