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      Schumer announces Senate abortion rights vote: ‘America will be watching’ – as it happened

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      US politics liveUS politicsSchumer announces Senate abortion rights vote: ‘America will be watching’ – as it happened
      Measure has next to no chance of passing in divided chamber
      Biden names Karine Jean-Pierre new White House press secretary
      Supreme court justice Alito bails on senior judges’ conference
      ‘Do something’: Democrats struggle to rise to abortion challenge
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       Updated 1h agoRichard LuscombeThu 5 May 2022 16.14 EDTFirst published on Thu 5 May 2022 09.26 EDT Show key events onlyLive feedShow key events onlyFrom More

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      After victory in the US, now the far right is coming for abortion laws in Europe | Sian Norris

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      After victory in the US, now the far right is coming for abortion laws in EuropeSian NorrisThe attack on Roe v Wade has roots in well-funded organisations whose tentacles have spread across the Atlantic For those of us who have been watching the assault against abortion in the US for years, this week’s leaked supreme court draft opinion – which could pave the way for an overturning of Roe v Wade – came as no surprise.Roe v Wade protects the right to an abortion in the US up to the point a foetus can survive outside the womb, and the religious and far-right have been gunning for it since it was introduced in 1973. Evangelical ideologues, far-right actors and radical-right billionaires have organised to undermine women’s right to safe, legal abortions through a combination of violence against clinics and doctors, dark money and political influence.‘Unnecessary suffering and death’: doctors fear for patients’ lives in a post-Roe worldRead moreSo, how did the US get here?After years of legal assaults that restricted abortion access and targeted clinics in Republican states; years of disinformation spread by “crisis pregnancy centres”, where women are persuaded to not have abortions; and years of burdensome demands on women to endure ultrasounds, gain parental consent and put up with counselling in order to have a termination, Trump’s election opened the door for abortion rights to end in the US.Ultimately, it required courts, not politicians, to end abortion. That’s where the Federalist Society comes in. Headed by Leonard Leo, the legal organisation supported anti-abortion lawmakers across the US into positions of influence where they could draft laws to ban abortion after 15 weeks … 12 weeks … six weeks … and completely. The end goal was for anti-abortion states to try to implement one of these laws, where it would be challenged again and again until it reached the supreme court.To do that, the anti-abortion movement needed supreme court justices who would enact its agenda. They got their way with the help of the leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, who blocked President Obama from nominating a supreme court judge, leaving the field open for Trump to promote the anti-abortion Neil Gorsuch. After that came two more Trump-appointed justices: Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.That was the judicial assault on abortion rights. But that assault could only happen with the help of money … and lots of it. Luckily for the anti-abortion movement, there are plenty of wealthy foundations keen to fund the cause. They include the DeVos, Prince, and the Templeton Foundation, which have helped to support organisations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Heritage Foundation and Focus on the Family.Backed by billionaire funding, organisations such as the ADF took the fight against abortion rights to the courts – helping to secure a ban on buffer zones and so-called “partial birth abortion”, and supporting the notorious Hobby Lobby case, which stated that employers should not have to cover birth control on employees’ healthcare plans if it was against the owner’s religious beliefs.These organisations and their billionaire backers have transatlantic reach. Take the DeVos and Koch Foundation-supported Heritage Foundation, which has welcomed a range of Conservative MPs to discuss free speech – including Oliver Dowden, Priti Patel and Liam Fox. It was announced on the day of the supreme court leak that Lord David Frost would soon be addressing the organisation.Then there’s the ADF, which spent $23.3m in Europe between 2008 and 2019, when its European arm’s youth conference played host to the Conservative MP Fiona Bruce.ADF International intervened in Belfast’s notorious “gay cake” case and is allied with organisations that lobbied to further restrict abortion in Poland. The US anti-abortion legal organisation, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a second religious freedom organisation that takes on legal cases to challenge abortion and LGBTQ+ rights, has also operated in Europe. Set up by the Republican Pat Robertson, who famously accused feminism of turning women into lesbians, ACLJ’s chief counsel is a former Trump defence attorney, Jay Sekulow. ACLJ spent $15.7m in Europe from 2008-2019.So far you can see how big money, the judiciary and religious freedom movements have come together in the US and Europe. But there’s another active force that has pushed us towards the end of Roe: the far right.Across the far-right infosphere, men discuss the need to ban abortion in order to reverse what they term the “great replacement” – a conspiracy theory that posits white people are being “replaced” by migration from the global south, and that, in the US in particular, this replacement is aided by feminists repressing the white birthrate via abortion.Conspiracy theories such as the “great replacement” sound extreme. But when it comes to the US abortion row, such views are mainstream. Take this quote from the former Republican congressman Steve King, who represented Iowa between 2003-2021. He claimed “the US subtracts from its population a million of our babies in the form of abortion. We add to our population approximately 1.8 million of ‘somebody else’s babies’ who are raised in another culture before they get to us.” Far-right theories circulate globally – that’s why people outside the US shouldn’t just act in solidarity with American women at this time, but prepare to stand up against the possible erosion of their own hard-won rights.
      Sian Norris is the chief social and European affairs reporter at Byline Times. She is writing a book about the far-right attack on productive rights called Bodies Under Siege
      Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a letter of up to 300 words to be considered for publication, email it to us at guardian.letters@theguardian.comTopicsRoe v WadeOpinionAbortionUS supreme courtWomenHealthUS politicsLaw (US)commentReuse this content More

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      Trump justices accused of going back on their word on Roe – but did they?

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      Trump justices accused of going back on their word on Roe – but did they? Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett face accusations of having misled politicians and the public but experts say people may have read into their statements what they wished to hear Chief Justice John Roberts has condemned the leak of a draft supreme court opinion overturning Roe v Wade as a “betrayal”. But for the majority of Americans who support the right to abortion access, the true betrayal was committed by the five justices who have initially voted to overturn the landmark case.That is especially true of the three conservative supreme court justices who were nominated by Donald Trump: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. During their Senate confirmation hearings, each of those three justices was asked about Roe and Planned Parenthood v Casey, the 1992 case that upheld the right to abortion access and could now be overturned as well.US supreme court justices on abortion – what they’ve said and how they’ve votedRead moreThe comments that the three justices made during those hearings are now coming under renewed scrutiny, as they face accusations of having misled politicians and the public about their willingness to overturn Roe.Republican Senator Susan Collins, who supported Gorsuch and Kavanaugh and repeatedly reassured the public that they would not vote to overturn Roe, has expressed alarm over the draft opinion and a sense that the justices told her something they later reversed.“If this leaked draft opinion is the final decision and this reporting is accurate, it would be completely inconsistent with what Justice Gorsuch and Justice Kavanaugh said in their hearings and in our meetings in my office,” Collins said, while noting that the draft opinion is not final.Republican Senator Lisa Murkowksi, who also supports abortion rights and voted in favor of Gorsuch’s and Barrett’s nominations, said the draft opinion “rocks my confidence in the court right now”.Murkowski told reporters on Tuesday: “If the decision is going the way that the draft that has been revealed is actually the case, it was not the direction that I believed that the court would take based on statements that have been made about Roe being settled and being precedent.”During his 2017 confirmation hearings, Gorsuch said: “Casey is settled law in the sense that it is a decision of the US supreme court.” When Kavanaugh appeared before the Senate judiciary committee in 2018, he similarly described Roe as “important precedent of the supreme court that has been reaffirmed many times”, and he defined Casy as “precedent on precedent” because it upheld Roe.But legal excerpts say Gorsuch and Kavanaugh’s comments about Roe and Casey did not clearly indicate how they might vote in a case like Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, raising the prospect that some people may have read into their statements only what they wished to hear.“When people are nominated to the supreme court and they testify in Senate confirmation hearings, they are very careful about their language,” said Professor Katherine Franke of Columbia Law School. “Something like ‘settled law’ actually has no concrete legal meaning. What it means is that that’s a decision from the supreme court, and I acknowledge that it exists. But it doesn’t carry any kind of significance beyond that.”During her Senate confirmation hearings, Barrett was arguably even more careful than Gorsuch and Kavanaugh in her language about Roe. She refused to identify Roe as a “superprecedent”, meaning a widely accepted case that is unlikely to be overturned by the court. Instead she promised that, if confirmed, she would abide by “stare decisis”, the legal principle of deciding cases based off precedent.However, Barrett’s writings before joining the supreme court gave a clear indication of her thoughts on Roe. In one 1998 paper, Barrett and her co-author defined abortion as “always immoral” in the view of the Catholic church. She also signed off on a 2006 advertisement that described Roe as “barbaric”.“I’m sure that both Senators Collins and Murkowski asked pointed questions of all of these nominees, trying to get them to clearly say that they would not overrule Roe v Wade,” Franke said. “Murkowski and Collins maybe heard what they wanted to hear in order to feel better about voting to confirm these nominees, when the rest of the world knew quite clearly that they were ideologically and legally opposed to abortion.”For that reason, many progressives expressed little sympathy for Collins and Murkowski as they reacted with bafflement to the draft opinion.“Murkowski voted for Amy Coney Barrett when Trump himself proclaimed that he was appointing justices specifically to overturn Roe,” progressive congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said Tuesday. “She and Collins betrayed the nation’s reproductive rights when they were singularly capable of stopping the slide. They don’t get to play victim now.”Murkowski voted for Amy Coney Barrett when Trump himself proclaimed that he was appointing justices specifically to overturn Roe.She and Collins betrayed the nation’s reproductive rights when they were singularly capable of stopping the slide. They don’t get to play victim now https://t.co/6i7b3g08lN— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) May 3, 2022
      Rather than showing remorse, progressives are demanding that Collins and Murkowski take action to protect abortion rights.Both Collins and Murkowski have said they support codifying Roe into law, but that proposal does not have the 60 votes necessary to overcome a Senate filibuster. Progressives are now calling on Collins and Murkowski to support a filibuster carveout to enshrine the protections of Roe into law.“To salvage their legacy, Collins and Murkowski must join with Democratic senators to do whatever is necessary to protect Roe in federal law,” said Stephanie Taylor, co-founder of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. “No meaningful action will happen without a filibuster carveout now.”But Collins and Murkowski have so far given no indication that they would support such a carveout. Unless they do, the court stands ready to overturn nearly 50 years of precedent and erase the national right to abortion access, even though a clear majority of the country would oppose that decision. A CNN poll released earlier this year found that 69% of Americans are against overturning Roe, while just 30% support a reversal.If the court follows through with the draft decision, 26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion. Those bans could force people to travel far from home to reach states where abortion is legal, seek medication illicitly or attempt to terminate a pregnancy through dangerous means. Many pregnant people will also be forced to carry unwanted pregnancies to term.And Collins and Murkowski may have nothing to offer Americans but regret.The Guardian’s Jessica Glenza contributed to this reportTopicsUS supreme courtAbortionLaw (US)US politicsDonald TrumpfeaturesReuse this content More

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      ‘Do something, Democrats’: party struggles to rise to abortion challenge

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      ‘Do something, Democrats’: party struggles to rise to abortion challenge Despite controlling the White House and Congress, Democrats seem powerless to fight the assault on Roe v Wade but hope it will energise midterm votersVisibly shaking with fury and brandishing megaphones and posters, thousands of women defending reproductive rights in America thronged below the marbled columns of the US supreme court to protest against what appears to be the imminent demise of the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling recognizing abortion as a constitutional right.“Do something, Democrats,” the crowd chanted at one point.Tell us: how has Roe v Wade made a difference to your life?Read moreIn the hours that followed, Democrats, who currently control the House, the Senate and the White House, echoed their outrage and vowed a response.The urgency follows a leak late on Monday evening of a draft opinion from the court that a majority of the nine judges on the bench – all conservative-leaning appointees of Republican presidents – support not just more restrictions on abortion services but the overturning of the landmark Roe ruling that guarantees the right to abortion when final opinions are issued in June.“I am furious – furious that Republicans could be this cruel, that the supreme court could be this heartless, that in legislatures across the country, extreme Republicans are ready for their trigger bans to go into effect,” Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington and a longtime advocate of women’s reproductive rights, said.Speaking from the steps of the US Capitol, she was referring to states that have legislative bans on abortion prepared and waiting to be “triggered” into effect as soon as Roe is overturned. “It is craven and we won’t stand for it,” she said. “I’m not going to sit quietly and neither should any of you.”Yet, infuriatingly for the pro-choice voters who helped elect Joe Biden and a Democratic Congress, the party finds itself largely powerless at present, without a legislative path forward to protect abortion rights in the likely event the court reverses its decision in Roe.Biden said it would be a “radical decision” by the court and called on Congress to act to enshrine the rights afforded by Roe into federal law via legislation.And Vice-President Kamala Harris, speaking to attendees at a gala hosted by Emily’s List, which works to elect Democrats who support abortion rights, railed that a ruling overturning Roe would be a “direct assault on freedom” in America.Barring swift legislative action, nearly half of US states are likely to ban abortion or severely restrict access to the procedure.But the reality of Democrats’ thin congressional majorities is that they don’t have enough support in the evenly divided US Senate to codify abortion protections, nor do they have the votes to eliminate the so-called filibuster rule, thus allowing legislation to pass with a simple majority.Biden has resisted pressure from progressives to use his bully pulpit to call for eliminating the filibuster, following recent demands to do so to pass voting rights legislation. And on Tuesday, he said he was “not prepared” to do so to protect reproductive rights.Nevertheless, the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, vowed to forge ahead with a vote on current legislation that is stalled in Congress but, if it could be passed would enshrine a woman’s right to end her pregnancy.But the measure, a version of which passed the Democratic-controlled House last year, was already rejected once this year, when it fell far short of the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster. It didn’t even win the support of all 50 Democrats, so even if the filibuster were scrapped the bill, called the Women’s Health Protection Act, would not have passed in the Senate.Senator Joe Manchin, an anti-abortion Democrat from West Virginia, voted with Republicans to block consideration of the bill. The bill also failed to attract the support of two pro-choice Senate Republicans, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who have introduced separate legislation that they say would codify Roe.Yet Schumer argued that it was important to put every senator on the record.“A vote on this legislation is no longer an abstract exercise. This is as urgent and real as it gets,” he said. The leaked draft decision, written by the conservative justice Samuel Alito, would shift the question of whether abortion should be legal to the individual states.The effect would dramatically alter the US landscape almost overnight, with restrictions and bans going into effect across much of the south and midwest while abortion would remain legal in many north-eastern and western states.Emboldened by the supreme court’s conservative super-majority, Republican legislatures have enacted a flurry of new abortion laws as conservative activists begin to lay the groundwork for a nationwide ban.On Tuesday, as the country reeled from the revelation that the supreme court was likely to dismantle Roe, Oklahoma’s Republican governor signed into law a bill that would ban abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, a copycat version of a Texas law enacted last year.Meanwhile, liberal states have moved to safeguard abortion protections. Last week, Connecticut lawmakers approved a bill that would protect abortion providers in the state. And states like California and New York have vowed to be a “sanctuary” for people seeking reproductive care from places where the procedure is banned.With few options, Democrats have implored Americans shocked and angered by the seemingly impending loss of abortion rights to vote in the midterm elections. Majorities of Americans say they want abortion to remain legal in some or most cases. Few say they want the court to overturn Roe.But Democrats face steep headwinds in November, weighed down by Biden’s low approval ratings, rising inflation and a sour national mood.The Republican reaction to the news that the nation’s highest court was prepared to strike down Roe was relatively subdued. In the Senate, lawmakers were far more focused on the source of the leaked document than the decision, which is the culmination of a decades-long drive by the conservative movement to overturn Roe.The response suggested that there may be some concern that Republicans are worried about provoking a political backlash among more moderate and independent voters who broadly support a constitutional right to abortion.“There’s an answer,” the Illinois senator Dick Durbin, the majority whip, said at a press conference. “The answer is in November.”But many Democrats and activists believe November is too late for millions of women in states where abortion will banned almost immediately. They want the party – from the president on down – to throw every ounce of their political capital at finding a legislative solution.“People elected Democrats precisely so we could lead in perilous moments like these- to codify Roe, hold corruption accountable, & have a President who uses his legal authority to break through Congressional gridlock on items from student debt to climate,” Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive Democrat from New York, wrote on Twitter. “It’s high time we do it.”TopicsDemocratsAbortionUS politicsJoe BidenUS SenateUS CongressfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Four Opinion Writers on Roe, J.D. Vance and Trump

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      During a seismic week in American politics, one clear winner has emerged: former President Donald Trump. The three Supreme Court justices he nominated appear poised to deliver a long-sought victory to the right by overturning Roe v. Wade, after a draft of the anticipated Dobbs decision was leaked Monday evening. The next day, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author J.D. Vance won his race in the Republican Senate primary in Ohio after Mr. Trump’s endorsement resuscitated his sluggish campaign. What do the events of this week mean for both parties as they look ahead to the midterm elections? The Times Opinion writers Jane Coaston, Michelle Cottle and Ross Douthat discuss what this moment means for the U.S. political landscape with the Times Opinion podcast host Lulu Garcia-Navarro.Four Opinion Writers Ask After Vance Win and Roe Leak: ‘Is This Trump’s World Now?’The following conversation has been edited for clarity.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Before we get to the Ohio race, I think we really need to understand this leaked opinion and how it sets the stage for red states and red races.I think what’s been stunning to me is how surprised everyone is that this Supreme Court — with five conservative members who seem to have been expressly picked to deliver the end of Roe — seems ready to effectively end abortion access for millions of women.Obviously the leaked opinion by Justice Samuel Alito, published by Politico, is not a final draft. No official court ruling has come out. But it seems to me that far from ending the debate over abortion, this might supercharge it. What do you think? Do you think it’s going to be the galvanizing issue liberals hope it will be?Ross Douthat: First, I just want to stress that this is a leak of a draft opinion. Including on abortion, Supreme Court decisions have changed between the initial draft and the final ruling.However, I agree that it was always quite likely that you would get this kind of ruling from a conservative Supreme Court, and its effects are going to be the return of real abortion politics for the first time in decades. That will have some kind of supercharging effect just inevitably. Because if Roe falls, you immediately have laws on the books in various states that restrict abortion or make it illegal that will create debates within those states.But I think the reality is because we haven’t had these kinds of debates in so long, they are — even by the standards of our unpredictable politics — really hard to predict. I personally have been surprised, in a way, at how stable Texas politics has been since the Supreme Court allowed Texas effectively to restrict abortion after six weeks.My general assumption has been that there would be a substantial backlash and a big political opportunity for Democrats. But the evidence from state politics so far doesn’t prove that that’s real. To some extent, we’re just going to have to see what happens without having any recent analogies to tell us what’s likely to take place.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I want to play this tape of Senator Elizabeth Warren, speaking about the possible end of Roe at a rally here in Washington:I am angry because we have reached the combination of what Republicans have been fighting for, angling for, for decades now. And we are going to fight back.Speaking of opportunities for Democrats, as Ross has pointed out and as Senator Elizabeth Warren there says, this has been decades in the making. But fight back how? Options seem limited right now.Michelle Cottle: It looks like this is going to wind up being an issue that gets fought in the states for a while. There is legislation floating around Capitol Hill, but what the Democrats have passed in the House of Representatives is not going anywhere. Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have a pared-down codification of Roe, but that’s unlikely to go anywhere right now. It’s one of these things that I think at the federal level is just going to flummox people.Democrats are hoping that this will give them a boost in the midterms come November, but I don’t expect it to have a huge impact this time around. I think it could, though, going forward.The place where you might see it in November would be in the primaries, where Representative Henry Cuellar, who is a pro-life Democrat on the Texas border, is in a fight with a pro-choice challenger. Could this tilt that race just enough for Cuellar to lose and have a different Democrat going into the generals? I don’t know, but I don’t expect it to have a huge impact on the midterms in November.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: We know from our history in this country and what we see in other places where there isn’t abortion access, that women who don’t have abortion access will resort to illegal abortions, putting their lives at risk.It strikes me that all of this is happening while we have a Democratic president, a Democratic Senate and a Democratic House. Is there going to be a feeling that Democrats haven’t only fumbled, they’ve also roundly been beaten, and it could lead to a decline in support from their base? It could have the opposite effect of galvanizing them.Jane Coaston: It’s a complicated issue. A Gallup poll from 2021 found that the poorest Americans, who are most likely to suffer from a lack of access to abortion, are also more likely to believe that abortion is morally wrong.It’s worth remembering that this has been the carrot waved in front of social conservatives for 50 years. And now you’re hearing from a lot of conservatives that actually nothing will change. A conservative writer, Erick Erickson, said yesterday that this isn’t a big deal because nothing will change. They didn’t call them “Students for a 12-week abortion ban.” They didn’t call it “March for a 15-Week Abortion Ban.”This is going to be complicated for a lot of people, especially because they will see that there’ll be a clear difference between states like Connecticut and Colorado that have already provided abortion protections and Republican states that attempt to have an abortion ban, whether it will be a Texas-like system in which you are asking people to essentially inform on others, or just a straight-up ban.Voters have very conflicted views on abortion, but generally, they support people having some access to abortion.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I’m going to pick up on something you said. It is true that something like 80 percent of Americans think there should be some access to abortion. What that access should look like is unclear. But if Roe is overturned, that means that states will have the right to legislate on abortion access.Red states already have “trigger” laws in place that will immediately curtail abortion access for their residents if that happens. Some states are going to be doing one thing and other states are going to be doing a different thing. What does that mean for the unity of this country, where some citizens will have some rights and others won’t?Ross Douthat: I’m sorry to keep pleading agnosticism, but I don’t think we know. If you go back to the period before Roe was decided, in the late ’60s and early ’70s, this was basically the system that we were heading toward.There had been some liberalization of abortion laws in a number of states. There was a nascent pro-life movement that had pushed back against that and had halted and reversed that trend in other states. At that point, if you were looking at the landscape, you would have said, Well, this is sort of the federalist solution, right? This is the way the American system is set up to negotiate some deeply polarizing social issues.Now, that was also a landscape in which abortion had not been nationalized by the Supreme Court and had not then become a key driver of polarization between the parties. Back in the 1970s, you had lots of pro-choice Republicans and you had lots of pro-life Democrats, including Joseph Robinette Biden, now the pro-choice president of the United States.You had a landscape where you could imagine abortion policy being federalized, in the sense of being different from state to state, and also the two political parties not dividing over it.The fact that now the parties have divided over it so completely makes me suspect that the federalist strategy will be somewhat unstable and you will have constant pressure to have a national abortion policy from both sides, which will then implicate debates over the filibuster and everything else.The flip side of that is that lots of national Republican politicians have never been enthusiastic about talking about abortion, let alone legislating on it. A lot will depend on what happens in some of the bigger red states like Florida and Texas. Does the pro-life movement consider that an at least temporary victory?Or is that politically unstable? Is there a big backlash? Democrats have assumed that Texas is supposed to trend blue for a long time. So in theory an overreaching abortion ban in Texas could provoke the kind of backlash that Democrats have been looking for.Jane Coaston: It’s worth noting here that we don’t know what this will look like. We’ve seen that Senate Republicans passed around a memo on potential talking points and some of them include things like saying, We don’t want to put doctors in jail. We would never take away anyone’s contraception or health care. But you are hearing from other Republicans who are saying, for example, We do want to go after Griswold.Ross Douthat: Wait a minute. Which Republicans — outside of some traditionalist Catholic blog or something — are saying that they want to pass a law banning contraception?Jane Coaston: Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee. She brought up Griswold as being constitutionally unsound.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Griswold v. Connecticut, of course, is the case where the Supreme Court ruled that marital privacy protects couples against state restrictions on contraception.Jane Coaston: My point is that when you have something that you’ve been fighting over for 50 years, there are lots of tangential pieces that people have been arguing about. For instance, telemedicine and access to abortion-causing medications. And there are Catholics who argue that some forms of birth control are themselves abortion-causing medications.Michelle Cottle: We have no idea how this is going to play out, even with just the abortion restrictions. You were asking about rights and different rights for people in different states. I mean, the reality is there are some states where it’s virtually impossible already to get an abortion — where there’s one abortion clinic for the entire state. If you’re talking about surgical abortions, that has already become a matter of where you live.An interesting thing that we’re going to watch play out here — and it’s going to get really sticky, really fast — are medication abortions. Are you going to have a black market? How are states going to determine who’s getting what? When there are certain rules in place that allow for medication abortions, which now are upward of 50 percent of abortions. That’s one thing. But if you have states that have just outlawed them, it starts to get really complicated. Who are you going after? How are you going to enforce this? What happens if somebody crosses state lines to get these meds?We have no idea what the future landscape will look like, much less one step down the road with abortifacients or anything like that.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: What we have seen in other countries that restrict abortion is that women have illegal abortions and get their health put at risk. It’s not that the numbers of abortions necessarily go down. It’s that they may not be as safe.When you’ve had 50 years of abortion access, as you’ve had in the United States, if you take away those rights, as will happen to women in many red states, that is going to have serious repercussions. I don’t think that this will be the end of it. And I think it’s naïve to think that it will.Ross Douthat: I have to argue with you very briefly. There is a frequent pro-choice argument along the lines of: “Abortion restrictions don’t reduce abortion rates. They just lead to more illegal abortions.”We have a lot of evidence from the developed world — from the United States and Western Europe — that that is not true: that rich nations or states that have restrictions on abortions have fewer abortions. The abortion rate is higher in Scandinavia, which has more liberal abortion laws, than it is in Germany, which has more restrictive abortion laws in general.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Rich people will be able to get abortions, sure. But the disadvantaged will not.Ross Douthat: That’s not what I’m saying. I’m including the poor people within those rich countries.Jane Coaston: That’s a point worth making, as is the point that abortion rates in the United States have actually been going down. They reached a high, I believe, in the early 1980s.Ross Douthat: Yes.Jane Coaston: Each year we keep hitting record lows in the number of abortions.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Because we have sex education and contraception.Ross Douthat: That’s not what’s driving it.Jane Coaston: Also, fewer people are having sex in general — yay! [LAUGHS]Ross Douthat: That’s more of what’s driving it. The reason that the pro-life side supports restrictions on abortion is that there is a lot of evidence that restrictions reduce abortion rates. This is where I completely agree that the question of who is getting prosecuted, what is done with state power, makes a really big difference.But right now, you have states in the U.S. and countries around the world, including places like Chile, that have had restrictive abortion laws that have very low maternal mortality rates and very good records on women’s health. It is possible to restrict abortion without having the massive maternal mortality nightmare that gets brought up. It just requires public spending and sensible policymaking.Michelle Cottle: Which has no bearing on this society.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Indeed. If the pandemic showed us anything.Ross Douthat: Well, this is the United States of America.Jane Coaston: There have been conversations among social conservatives about a post-Roe environment. All of them seem to recognize that it would require spending choices that Republicans have historically not wanted to make. Expanding access to WIC, for example.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: WIC, the federal nutrition program that supports women, infants and children.Jane Coaston: Yeah. Expanding access to maternal care, because again, maternal mortality risks, especially around African American women, are very bad in the United States.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: As much as I’ve enjoyed this debate, we have something else to argue about, which is Trump and the Ohio race on Tuesday. Here is the victorious J.D. Vance after he won the Republican primary:Thanks to the president for everything, for endorsing me. And I got to say, a lot of the fake news media out there, and there are some good ones in the back there, there’s some bad ones, too, let’s be honest, but they wanted to write a story that this campaign would be the death of Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda. Ladies and gentlemen, it ain’t the death of the “America First” agenda.I think this story connects to our first conversation because we were talking about abortion, one of the original culture war issues. And here we have, with Vance victorious, someone who’s embodying Trump and his “America First” agenda.Michelle, you were just outside Cincinnati with J.D. Vance on the campaign trail, and with Donald Trump Jr. What stood out to you the most about the campaigning you saw?Michelle Cottle: The Vance clip you played basically captures the whole thing. The minute he got the nod from Trump, this race didn’t have anything to do with J.D. Vance or any of the other candidates. It became a referendum on Trump and Trump’s king-making ability.I watched Don Jr. appear at these events, and it was all about how Vance was the only Trump-endorsed candidate in this race. It was all about Trump, which is a testament to how far J.D. Vance has bent over to smooch Donald Trump’s backside, which is what a lot of the party has done — in fact, what most of the party has done. But it is still galling to watch.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Jane, you are from Ohio.Jane Coaston: Cincinnati, stand up!Lulu Garcia-Navarro: What does what Michelle is saying tell you about not only your home state but the direction of the G.O.P.?Jane Coaston: I talked to J.D. Vance back in 2016 when he published “Hillbilly Elegy,” and he told me that white working-class voters were frustrated and hungry for political leadership and that a lot of “political elites” hadn’t picked that up. He has since taken on the mantle of being a jerk. He has taken on talking about cat ladies and arguing about Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, because you have to sound like Trump in order for Trump to see you as being part of him.There is an idea that this is a part of Ohio, north of Cincinnati, where, in Vance’s view, things used to be better and now they are bad. And that it is the responsibility of someone — Vance or somebody else — to fix it, to make things better. And there is an idea that this was the fault of globalization or NAFTA or big business or something like that. And that the people who were like Vance used to be better. And now they aren’t better, but it’s not their fault.There are people who wax rhapsodic about working-class jobs, many of whom have never actually worked. You hear this when people talk about manufacturing jobs. My grandpa worked in a copper mill. It sucked and he died at 48. There’s this idea, this halcyon concept of an Ohio that once was. A Cincinnati that used to be.Michelle Cottle: This is what the Trump appeal was in general, the idea that these people had been left behind. This is why he played well in Pennsylvania. That is not an unusual concept. The problem with Trumpism is they’ve taken this kind of populist impulse and turned it into: “It’s the immigrants’ fault. It’s the Black people’s fault.” They’re blaming it on somebody else.Jane Coaston: It’s “the other.”Michelle Cottle: Yeah, they’re blaming it on China, too. It’s “the other.”Jane Coaston: It’s me, essentially. I did it. [LAUGHS]Michelle Cottle: At these rallies you don’t hear about abortion. You hear about how immigrants have turned central Ohio into the child trafficking capital of the world. It’s completely shamelessly, xenophobic.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Ross, you have made no mystery of your distaste for Trump’s style and its impact on the tenor of the G.O.P. What do you make of Vance’s win and what it signals about the post-Trump presidency era of the Republican Party?Ross Douthat: I should say, just as a preface, that I know J.D. Vance and so I’m trying to offer detached analysis. But the listeners should know that I do in fact know him.Jane’s narrative is broadly right: There’s a basic continuity in populous worldview between the Vance who was extremely critical of Trump, in ways that I still agree with, and the Vance who won his endorsement.But there is a difference, too. “Hillbilly Elegy” is more about an internal pathology in white working-class America than it is about the elite policy mistakes that hollowed out American industry. So there’s been some shift in emphasis, but the basic narrative of elite betrayal of the American heartland — I don’t think that’s something that Vance has flip-flopped on.Even when he was damning Trump in the past, the argument was always, Trump is tapping into real and legitimate grievances, but he is essentially the political opioid of these communities that have been hit so hard by fentanyl.That’s the background. Then Vance ran a campaign in which — unlike Josh Mandel, his big rival — he spent less time personally appealing for Trump’s support and more time in the MAGA-extended universe of Steve Bannon’s show, Tucker Carlson’s show, various podcasts and so on that are all extremely right-wing and extremely Trumpy.Politico had a really good piece about how the Trump endorsement came about. Not surprisingly, Trump didn’t respond well to Mandel and others begging for his endorsement, and he seems to have decided to endorse Vance because he watched the debates and thought that Vance looked the best on TV, which, as we know, is the most important thing for anything connected to Trump. That, and he saw Vance play golf and liked his swing. The entire future history of American politics may turn on whether Trump likes a Senate candidate’s golf swing.Jane Coaston: Ohio’s political winds have shifted significantly. I do think it will be interesting to see how Vance attempts to get at a broader audience, if he even attempts to. That is going to be a bigger audience, and one accustomed to Ohio Republicans like Rob Portman or Steve Chabot, who are definitely more Ohioan. We’re Midwesterners! We tamp down our feelings with lasagna. But that’s not what Vance does. His kind of online anger and online ire — I am curious to see how that plays out when he’s having to make an appeal to, well, not my parents, but people like my parents.Michelle Cottle: That’s one of the problems we’re looking at with America in a foul mood, though, right? Whether you think it’s because of the pandemic or inflation or whatever, Americans are sour, and when you are sour, you are spoiling for a fight and you are looking for someone to come and tell you: “You are right to be angry. This is not your fault. You have been taken advantage of, and I’m going to fix it for you.” Those are the headwinds that the Democrats are looking at.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: I’m going to wrap this up by asking for predictions, which I know everyone loves to do. This is mine: If politicians like J.D. Vance are elected into office in the fall, on the G.O.P. side, we’re going to have more of the strong culture-war G.O.P. presidential nominees in 2024, probably Trump or Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who are drawn to these divisive issues. The Democrats have had trouble countering those narratives.What do you see coming down the line, in terms of our political landscape and what it might portend?Michelle Cottle: Historical trends made it hard for the Democrats not to lose ground in this midterm. They have not had a break with the pandemic or inflation or anything like that. I think they’re going to have a rough midterm, and then going into 2024, if for some reason Trump does not run, I think DeSantis immediately moves to the head of line and we’re looking at somebody like that from the Republican side. There’s no real indication that the Republicans want to move away from Trumpism in the near future.Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Ross? Trump is king?Ross Douthat: There’s no indication at all. For Republican voters in Ohio, the fundamental choice was between Josh Mandel, who was basically the Trump attitude but with the pre-Trump mix of economic policies — that’s why Mandel was endorsed by the Club for Growth and they poured all this money into defeating Vance — or Vance, who was channeling the Trump attitude, but with policies on trade and immigration and foreign policy that were much more like the shift that Trump brought.Michelle Cottle: They could have gone with Matt Dolan, who was running and who came in a tight third behind Mandel.Ross Douthat: Right. But that suggests that it’s not just the Trump attitude. There is a constituency for Trump’s issues in the G.O.P. that remains very powerful.Fundamentally, the Democrats’ problems are about inflation and the post-Covid recovery turning into an inflationary spiral that has real wages going down, even as people are making more money on paper. That’s the biggest problem.With the culture war stuff, those battles are a cycle of overreach and backlash. What we’re living through right now, especially with the critical race theory debates and gender in schools debates, is a backlash against the sweeping leftward movement that we saw late in the Trump era, where there was a transformation of elite institutions, particularly in the summer of 2020, along more dramatically progressive lines. The backlash to that was always going to have a certain amount of political running room.The question is — whether it’s abortion or transgender issues or anything else — where does that backlash end up overreaching in its turn? Or do Republicans have room to have a backlash and still win because Democrats haven’t found a good way to get back to the center themselves?Lulu Garcia-Navarro: Jane, I’m going to leave the last word to you.Jane Coaston: I’m so interested in how Republicans are using this moment to respond to cultural trends with politics. At a certain point you just can’t make everything you don’t like illegal. If you do, people will respond poorly because legally, that’s questionable. That’s morally questionable, too.A politics that’s “I just don’t want anyone to do something I don’t like” is going to make people mad.I’m not sure what’s going to happen in the midterms, but these trends of overreach speak to an idea. If Republicans have control of the Supreme Court or the House and Senate, will they still be thinking: “Why are people not more like us? Why are people not doing what we want?” And liberals can see that Democrats right now have perceived control and are saying: “Why can’t we do anything? We have nothing!” Both sides screaming at each other, “You have everything and we have nothing.”That’s a really bad state for our politics to be in, because it means that no one takes any responsibility for anything. That’s what makes me worried.Lulu Garcia-Navarro is a Times Opinion podcast host. Jane Coaston is the host of “The Argument” podcast. Michelle Cottle is a member of the editorial board. Ross Douthat is a Times columnist.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.Times Opinion audio produced by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, Alison Bruzek and Phoebe Lett. Fact-checking by Kate Sinclair, Adrian Rivera and Alex Ellerbeck. Original music by Carole Sabouraud. Mixing by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Special thanks to James Ryerson, Jenny Casas, Vishakha Darbha and Patrick Healy. More

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      Biden warns LGBTQ+ children could be next target of Republican ‘Maga crowd’

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      Biden warns LGBTQ+ children could be next target of Republican ‘Maga crowd’President warns of new attacks by Trump-dominated political party after supreme court ruling draft leak on abortion Joe Biden has warned of new attacks on civil rights as the supreme court prepares to strike down the right to abortion, telling reporters at the White House that LGBTQ+ children could be the next targets of a Trump-dominated Republican party he called “this Maga crowd” and “the most extreme political organisation … in recent American history”.Contraception could come under fire next if Roe v Wade is overturnedRead more“What happens,” the president asked, if “a state changes the law saying that children who are LGBTQ can’t be in classrooms with other children? Is that legit under the way the decision is written?”Biden’s remarks, at the end of a brief session on deficit reduction, referred to a leaked draft of a ruling by Justice Samuel Alito. One of six conservatives on the supreme court, Alito was writing on a Mississippi case which aims to overturn both Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling which guaranteed the right to abortion, and Casey v Planned Parenthood from 1992, which buttressed it.The Mississippi case is expected to be resolved in June. The leak of the draft ruling to Politico, which reported that four other conservatives on the nine-justice court supported it, caused a storm of controversy and anger.In a statement and remarks on Tuesday, Biden condemned Alito’s reasoning and intentions and called for legislation to codify Roe into law.But the president has faced criticism within his own party for seeming reluctant to contemplate reform such legislation would require, namely abolishing the Senate filibuster, the rule that requires 60 votes for most bills to pass.A lifelong Catholic who nonetheless supports a woman’s right to choose, Biden has been eclipsed as a strong voice against the attack on abortion rights by high-profile Democratic women including the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, who spoke angrily outside the court on Tuesday, and the vice-president, Kamala Harris.Harris’s struggles as vice-president have been widely reported but on Tuesday night, speaking to the Emily’s List advocacy group in Washington, she seemed to hit her stride.The former prosecutor and California senator said: “Those Republican leaders who are trying to weaponise the use of the law against women. Well, we say, ‘How dare they?’“How dare they tell a woman what she can do and cannot do with her own body? How dare they? How dare they try to stop her from determining her own future? How dare they try to deny women their rights and their freedoms?’”She asked: “Which party wants to expand our rights? And which party wants to restrict them? It has never been more clear. Which party wants to lead us forward? And which party wants to push us back? You know, some Republican leaders, they want to take us back to a time before Roe v Wade.”At the White House on Wednesday, Biden took brief questions. He was asked about sanctions on Russia over the invasion of Ukraine and about “the next step on abortion once this case gets settled”.“As I said when this hit, as I was getting on the plane to go down to Alabama, this is about a lot more than abortion,” he said. “I hadn’t read the whole opinion at that time.”The 79-year-old president then gave a lengthy, somewhat rambling answer about “the debate with Robert Bork”. Bork was nominated to the supreme court by Ronald Reagan in 1987. Biden was then chair of the Senate judiciary committee. The nomination failed.US supreme court justices on abortion – what they’ve said and how they’ve votedRead moreAt the White House, Biden said Bork “believed the only reason you had any inherent rights was because the government gave them to you”, a stance with which Biden said he disagreed.Biden also said Bork had opposed Griswold v Connecticut, the 1965 case which established the right to contraception – a right many on the left fear may be left open to rightwing attack once Roe, another case concerning privacy, has been overturned.In her speech the previous night, Harris said: “At its core, Roe recognises the fundamental right to privacy. Think about that for a minute. When the right to privacy is attacked, anyone in our country may face a future where the government can interfere in their personal decisions. Not just women. Anyone.”The vice-president also said: “Let us fight for our country and for the principles upon which it was founded, and let us fight with everything we have got.”TopicsLGBT rightsJoe BidenBiden administrationUS politicsAbortionUS supreme courtnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden condemns efforts of extremist ‘Maga crowd’ to overturn Roe v Wade abortion protections – as it happened

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      US politics liveUS politicsBiden condemns efforts of extremist ‘Maga crowd’ to overturn Roe v Wade abortion protections – as it happened
      Biden: ‘This Maga crowd is really the most extreme political organization that exists in American history’
      How soon could states outlaw abortions if Roe v Wade is overturned?
      Protesters swarm outside US supreme court
      Contraception could come under fire next
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      What the justices have said and how they’ve voted on abortion
       Updated 1h agoRichard LuscombeWed 4 May 2022 16.09 EDTFirst published on Wed 4 May 2022 09.34 EDT Show key events onlyLive feedShow key events onlyFrom More

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      Advising women on abortions in 1960s New York | Letter

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      Advising women on abortions in 1960s New YorkJenny Wright recalls her time helping women from around the US who wanted abortions that were possible, though illegal I worked for the Abortion Law Reform Association in New York in 1968-69 (US shaken to its core by supreme court draft that would overturn Roe v Wade, 3 May). At that time, abortion was possible – but not legal – up to 12 weeks. My job was to scrutinise the hundreds of letters that poured in after an article in Life magazine that gave advice on obtaining an abortion in New York.I replied to all of them to weed out the women who were more than 12 weeks pregnant and advised them to go the UK. I remember that the majority of the letters were from other states. They were mostly from women who had more children than they could manage. Many were Roman Catholic and their husbands refused to let them use contraception. Very few were teenagers, though the common perception at the time was that only promiscuous young women wanted to use the services.My immediate superiors were arrested for committing a federal offence because we facilitated crossing state lines to commit a crime. I ceased working for them at that time, as I was British and a “registered alien”, and I would have been deported.Jenny WrightDublin, IrelandTopicsAbortionRoe v WadeWomenUS politicsGenderlettersReuse this content More