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      If you have a miscarriage in Republican America, your health is now at risk | Moira Donegan

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      If you have a miscarriage in Republican America, your health is now at riskMoira DoneganThe supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe has created a vast new public health crisis, as abortion bans complicate once-standard care for pregnant women The worst-case scenarios arrived with alarming speed. In the weeks since the US supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health, the case that overturned Roe v Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, American women have faced a radical reordering of their lives. A right essential to their dignity and self-determination has been stripped away after nearly 50 years – and with it, the gains women have made in professional, political and social life are newly and gravely endangered. But in addition to this moral and civic crisis, the supreme court’s decision has also created a vast and acute new public health crisis, as abortion bans complicate once-standard care for pregnant women – and place the health of even those who are not pregnant into new and arbitrary danger.From natural birth to caesarean: women must be given unbiased information | Kara ThompsonRead moreTopicsUS politicsOpinionAbortionWomen’s healthHealthHealth policyRepublicanscommentReuse this content More

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      Stacey Abrams Aims to Put Abortion at Center of Georgia Governor Race

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      ATLANTA — Stacey Abrams, the Democratic nominee for governor of Georgia, is racing to turn abortion rights supporters’ frustrations and fears into electoral gains for her party after a court ruling reinstated the state’s six-week ban on the procedure.Immediately after the ruling from a federal appeals court, which put into effect a 2019 law prohibiting most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, Ms. Abrams’s campaign released an advertisement on Thursday morning calling the law — and Gov. Brian Kemp’s support for it — “extreme” and hinting that the governor could move to ban exceptions for rape or incest.And in an impassioned news conference late Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Abrams, flanked by more than two dozen state Democratic leaders, underlined the stakes for women in Georgia, with a specific message for those still unsure whether they would cast their vote for her in November.“Georgia is part of a nation that faces economic vicissitudes — things go up, things go down,” she said. “But this law is permanent.”She added that she would ask the state’s scores of moderate Republican and independent voters, who may be disillusioned with Democratic leadership in Washington, to “balance whether your immediate concerns about money outweigh your concerns about your constitutional protected rights.”Read More on Abortion Issues in AmericaMedication Abortion on Campus: Some students want colleges to provide the abortion pill. But even in states that protect abortion rights, schools are proceeding with caution.In Ohio: The case of a 10-year-old rape victim who was forced to travel out of state to terminate her pregnancy has become the focus of a heated debate over what new abortion bans mean for the lives of the youngest patients and their bodies.Medical Exceptions: Of the 13 states with trigger abortion bans, all make exceptions for abortions to save the life of the mother. But what defines a medical emergency?Hurdles to Miscarriage Care: Since the reversal of Roe, some patients have had trouble obtaining miscarriage treatments, which are identical to those for abortions.Ms. Abrams’s comments represented something of a bet: that for Democrats, it is better to focus on subjects on which the party’s positions poll better, like abortion, than on economic issues, on which voters tend to favor Republicans. Polls have consistently shown that inflation and other economic issues are voters’ top concerns ahead of the November midterm elections.Ms. Abrams’s remarks also signaled a shift in her campaign message. While she has previously called for expanded abortion access in Georgia and criticized state Republicans, she is now making direct appeals to on-the-fence voters on the issue and portraying her opponent, Mr. Kemp, as the architect of one of the nation’s most restrictive abortion laws.Ms. Abrams has sought to make abortion access one of the clearest dividing issues between her and Mr. Kemp. Days after a draft ruling revealing the Supreme Court’s intention to overturn Roe v. Wade leaked, her campaign redirected its fund-raising efforts to organizations that provide abortion care.Several candidates on the state Democratic ticket have also pledged to use all levers of their power to oppose the law if elected, including the Democratic nominee for attorney general, Jen Jordan, who vowed not to prosecute abortion-related cases while in office.Mr. Kemp, who has generally led Ms. Abrams in limited polling of the race, has not widely discussed abortion. In the weeks after the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade, his campaign focused instead on Ms. Abrams’s support for efforts to overhaul policing, aiming to tie her to the movement to defund the police, which she does not support.When asked for comment on Ms. Abrams’s remarks on Wednesday, Mr. Kemp’s campaign pointed to an official statement from his office, in which he said the federal court ruling “affirms our promise to protect life at all stages.”Ms. Abrams’s campaign views the next few weeks as pivotal in its effort to tell more voters about Georgia’s newly reinstated abortion law and its implications.In a memo released Thursday, Lauren Groh-Wargo, Ms. Abrams’s campaign manager, shared internal polling showing that over half of voters in Georgia opposed additional abortion restrictions, along with more than 60 percent of independent voters.“While Abrams will protect women and abortion rights as the next governor, Kemp will continue his crusade against women — including victims of rape and incest and those whose health is at risk,” Ms. Groh-Wargo wrote. More

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      Where the Midterms Could Affect Abortion Most

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      Now that the United States Supreme Court has returned the power to regulate abortion to the states, every election has implications for access. The 2022 midterms will bring the issue’s first big electoral test since the court overturned Roe v. Wade. Five states have put abortion rights directly on the ballot with measures to amend […] More

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      Democratic members of Congress arrested during pro-choice protest

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      Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and House colleagues arrested during pro-choice protest The legislators were engaged in peaceful civil disobedience against the loss of abortion rights in front of the supreme court Several prominent Democratic members of Congress were arrested on Wednesday during a protest in support of abortion rights in front of the supreme court, in the aftermath of the historic overturning of Roe v Wade last month.The politicians gathered in front of the US Capitol before marching to the court building, chanting “our bodies, our choice” and “we won’t go back”.The group, which included the prominent progressives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush, proceeded to stand along a crosswalk, or pedestrian crossing area, in front of the court, which is surrounded by a large black fence claimed to be unclimbable and erected to keep protesters away.Happening rn: MOCs & EDs of orgs across the country are risking arrest at the Capitol. #BansOffOurBodies @CPDAction pic.twitter.com/Cl9ldc9iBf— Maegan LLerena 🦋 (@maeganllerena) July 19, 2022
      The group sat down in the middle of the street as an act of peaceful civil disobedience, as a group of police officers gathered around them, broadcasting a pre-recorded message announcing imminent arrest for blocking the street.The officers then began to arrest the lawmakers, cuffing them and leading them to an area taped off away from the street.Multiple members of Congress, including @AOC, being arrested by Capitol Police for blocking traffic outside the Supreme Court in abortion rights demonstration: pic.twitter.com/fysQN1oBAw— Andrew Solender (@AndrewSolender) July 19, 2022
      A livestream of the protest was posted online by CPD Action, the protest-centered arm of the Center for Popular Democracy, a social justice organization, which coordinated the direct action.CPD Action said 18 members of Congress were arrested. Seventeen were women. Andy Levin of Michigan was the sole congressman among them.In a statement, Carolyn Maloney, a Democrat from New York who was also arrested, said: “I have the privilege of representing a state where reproductive rights are respected and protected – the least I can do is put my body on the line for the 33 million women at risk of losing their rights.”Jackie Speier, a representative from California who was also arrested, said on Twitter: “Proud to march with my Democratic colleagues and get arrested for women’s rights, abortion rights, the rights for people to control their own bodies and the future and our democracy.”Reps. Jackie Speier and Carolyn Maloney getting arrested pic.twitter.com/c1AP7ILHDu— Nancy Vu (@NancyVu99) July 19, 2022
      It has been less than a month since the supreme court overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade ruling, which protected the right to an abortion under the constitution. Abortion is now banned or under threat of being banned in 60% of states.Backlash against the supreme court, which is now dominated by six conservative justices, including three appointed by Donald Trump, intensified in May when a draft of the decision to overturn Roe was leaked. Soon after, the court installed the 7ft security fence.Immediately after the release of the official decision, massive protests swept the US from New York to Los Angeles, including in large cities of Republican-led states such as Missouri and Texas.Joe Biden has announced and the House has since passed bills offering federal protections – but these are largely symbolic as long as the Senate is all but certain to reject such legislation, and as the individual states now have the right to dictate abortion regulation.Analilia Mejia, co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy Action, said the protest “sent a powerful message to Republican lawmakers and [the supreme court]: we will not back down.“Our rights, our freedoms, and our reproductive autonomy matters. Abortion is healthcare and a human right – and you don’t represent the vast majority of Americans who believe we, not the government, should dictate our own health decisions.”Polling shows consistent majorities in favor of abortion being legal in at least some cases.Mejia said: “We will not stop fighting for the world our communities deserve – one that honors our right to decide our futures.”TopicsAbortionProtestReproductive rightsUS politicsDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      Joe Biden scraps plan to nominate anti-abortion lawyer to Kentucky judgeship

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      Joe Biden scraps plan to nominate anti-abortion lawyer to Kentucky judgeshipSenator Rand Paul announced Friday he would not consent to Chad Meredith’s nomination, vetoing the president’s effort After weeks of criticism from fellow Democrats and abortion advocacy groups, Joe Biden has deserted plans to nominate an anti-abortion lawyer to be a federal judge in Kentucky.The White House said on Friday that Republican Kentucky senator Rand Paul would not be consenting to the nomination of Chad Meredith, effectively vetoing Biden’s move to put him on the bench.Biden planned to nominate anti-abortion lawyer to federal judgeship, emails showRead more“In considering potential district court nominees, the White House learned that Senator Rand Paul will not return a blue slip on Chad Meredith,” said White House spokesperson Andrew Bates on Friday, referring to the “blue slip” tradition that allows senators to veto judicial nominations from their home states. “Therefore, the White House will not nominate Mr Meredith.”Had Biden nominated Meredith, the attorney’s promotion to the court would have been unusual in the lineup of Biden’s judicial picks. The president has made it a point to nominate people from underrepresented backgrounds, public defenders and those with experience in civil rights law to the court instead of the usual slate of corporate lawyers and prosecutors.Meredith served as chief deputy general counsel to former Republican Kentucky governor Matt Bevin, who was in office from 2015 to 2019. In this role, Meredith helped the state defend a 2017 law that required doctors to perform ultrasounds and show images of the fetus to patients before performing an abortion. The law was ultimately upheld by a federal appeals court.Working under Bevin, Meredith also helped put together the former governor’s slate of controversial pardons, which included people convicted of murder and rape, according to the Louisville Courier-Journal.After Bevin left office, Meredith began working for a private law firm in Cincinnati, Ohio.News of his nomination was first reported by the Courier-Journal on 29 June. Democrats started hounding the White House for an explanation behind its intention to nominate the anti-abortion lawyer on the heels of the 24 June US supreme court decision overturning the nationwide right to terminate pregnancies embedded in Roe v Wade.In a group statement, a coalition of national abortion advocacy groups denounced news of the potential nomination.“We are in this moment because anti-abortion judges were intentionally nominated at every level to take away our fundamental right to abortion – and given his record, we know Chad Meredith would be no exception,” the statement read.When White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre was questioned about the potential nomination, she said, “We make it a point here to not comment on any vacancy, whether it is on the executive branch or the judicial branch, especially those where the nomination has not been made yet.”While the White House has been quiet behind its reasoning for considering Meredith, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell said that Biden was close to taking up his judicial pick “as a personal friendship gesture”, the Kentucky senator told the New York Times. McConnell said that no specific deal between himself and Biden was made, and it simply represented the “collegiality” that exists between them.Paul, who ultimately shut the nomination down, has not commented on his veto of Meredith’s nomination. McConnell suggested to the Times that Paul may believe it is his turn to pick a judicial nominee, though he has not made such an agreement on judicial nominees with Paul.TopicsKentuckyUS politicsJoe BidenAbortionDemocratsRand PaulUS justice systemnewsReuse this content More

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      2022 Midterms Poll: Roundup of Key Insights

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      A summary of the findings includes deep dissatisfaction among voters and potential fertile ground for new candidates in 2024.Which side has the most energy heading into November? More polls will come as the midterm elections near, but for now we’ve wrapped up our first New York Times/Siena survey, and here are some notable takeaways:Voters are not happy. Just 13 percent of registered voters said America was heading in the right direction. Only 10 percent said the economy was excellent or good. And a majority of voters said the nation was too politically divided to solve its challenges. As a point of comparison, each of these figures shows a more pessimistic electorate than in October 2020, when the pandemic was still raging and Donald J. Trump was president.Joe Biden is in trouble. His approval rating in our poll was in the low 30s. That’s lower than we ever found for Mr. Trump.Democrats would rather see someone else get the party’s nomination in 2024. Mr. Biden’s age was as much of an issue among voters as his overall job performance. Of course, he probably would have trailed “someone else” ahead of the last presidential primary as well, but he still won the nomination because his opposition was weak or fractured. Still, it’s a sign that Mr. Biden is much weaker than the typical president seeking re-election. It could augur a contested primary.Democrats’ Reasons for a Different CandidateWhat’s the most important reason you would prefer someone other than Joe Biden to be the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential nominee?

      Asked of 191 respondents who said they planned to vote in the 2024 Democratic primary and who preferred a candidate other than Joe Biden in a New York Times/Siena College poll from July 5-7, 2022.By The New York TimesTrump isn’t doing great, either. Like Mr. Biden, Mr. Trump has become less popular over the last two years. The number of Republicans who hold an unfavorable view of him has doubled since our final polling in 2020. He’s now under 50 percent in a hypothetical 2024 Republican primary matchup.Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is already at 25 percent in an early test of the Republican primary. Mr. Trump may still be the front-runner, but the polls increasingly look more like the early surveys from the Democratic primary in 2008 — when Hillary Clinton found herself in an extremely close race and ultimately lost to Barack Obama — than the polls ahead of the Democratic primary in 2016, when she won a protracted battle against Bernie Sanders.Many voters do not want to see a 2020 rematch. Mr. Biden still led Mr. Trump in a hypothetical 2024 matchup, 44 percent to 41 percent. What was surprising: Ten percent of respondents volunteered that they would not vote at all or would vote for someone else if those were the two candidates, even though the interviewer didn’t offer those choices as an option.The midterm race starts out close, with voters nearly evenly divided on the generic congressional ballot (voters are asked whether they prefer Democrats or Republicans to be in control of Congress). That’s a little surprising, given expectations of a Republican landslide this year. More

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      Beto O’Rourke broke a Texas fund-raising record with a $27.6 million haul, his campaign said.

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      Beto O’Rourke set a new Texas fund-raising record for state office with a $27.6 million haul over four months in the governor’s race, his campaign announced on Friday, saying that it had outpaced Gov. Greg Abbott, the Republican incumbent, in the tightening contest.But the campaign of Mr. Abbott, who still holds a cash-on-hand advantage over Mr. O’Rourke, reported that he had raised nearly $25 million during the same period ending in June.Mr. O’Rourke’s campaign received over a half-million donations at the same time that he was staunchly critical of gun control laws in Texas after a mass shooting in May at an elementary school in Uvalde, and after the state imposed restrictions on abortions last month.Both issues have boosted the national profile of Mr. O’Rourke, a Democrat and former congressman who ran unsuccessfully for the Senate in 2018 and later for president.Mr. O’Rourke received widespread attention in May when he interrupted a news conference held by Mr. Abbott in Uvalde after an 18-year-old gunman armed with an AR-15-style rifle killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school. Mr. O’Rourke, who supports banning assault weapons, accused Mr. Abbott of “doing nothing” to prevent gun violence before Mr. Abbott’s allies told Mr. O’Rourke to “shut up” and said that he was an “embarrassment.”Two recent polls — one conducted by the University of Houston and one by the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas in Austin — had Mr. O’Rourke within five and within six percentage points of Mr. Abbott.“We’re receiving support from people in every part of Texas,” Mr. O’Rourke said in a statement and pointed to “keeping our kids safe” and “protecting a woman’s freedom to make her own decisions about her own body, health care and future” as significant concerns.Gardner Pate, who is Mr. Abbott’s campaign chairman, said in a statement that Mr. Abbott’s re-election effort was well positioned, with nearly $46 million in cash on hand as of the end of June and having raised nearly $68 million since last June.“Our campaign has also pre-purchased more than $20 million in advertising for the fall, and begun funding an extensive block-walking program to get voters to the polls this November,” Mr. Pate said.Mr. O’Rourke’s campaign did not disclose how much cash on hand it had through June, but a February filing showed that he had nearly $6.8 million.Official campaign finance reports for Mr. O’Rourke and Mr. Abbott, due on Friday to the Texas Ethics Commission, have not yet been posted. It was not immediately clear who held the previous Texas fund-raising record for state office. More