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      Voices: Junior doctors should see 22% pay rise deal as a compromise, say readers

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      Support trulyindependent journalismFind out moreCloseOur mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.Louise ThomasEditorJunior doctor strikes could end following the offer of a 22% pay increase – and our community have been having their say on the proposals.When we asked, many Independent readers expressed dissatisfaction with how the Tories previously managed the NHS, criticising the former government for underfunding, mistreating doctors, and pushing for privatisation. While some noted that British doctors often emigrate, others also pointed out that NHS doctors’ salaries are low compared to other countries, suggesting a 22% pay rise is actually modest. Overall, most saw the pay deal as a reasonable compromise and a positive step toward improving the quality of the NHS.Here’s what you had to say:‘The Tories set out to destroy the NHS’Given the state the Tories have left the country in, I would say that this is as good as the country can afford for this year. Further negotiations can take place in the future to try and restore the NHS to an acceptable standard. The doctors have been shabbily treated by the Tories and need to be compensated in a proper manner.The Tories set out to destroy the NHS and all community services, the new government needs to have the time to try and restore them. We owe the health care staff.How much do people think doctors of all kinds would be paid if the NHS did not exist? Do people really think that they would be paid less? How much would insurance premiums cost if the NHS did not exist? The NHS is cheap in comparison to other systems and some people are too cheap to fund it properly.That the Tories were not prepared to resolve this dispute, just goes to show the depths that they were prepared to sink to in order to destroy the NHS and prolong the waiting times for people needing treatment.WinstonSmith2‘Mismanaged public pennies’If you give to one group then you will have to settle with the rest. There is always enough money for everyone, unfortunately, politics makes sure that public pennies are mismanaged!Chris‘Medicine on the cheap’What Joe Public does not seem to know is that more than 5,000 British doctors emigrate every year and are “replaced” by cheap Third World “doctors” of dubious qualifications and training.Doctor’s incomes in every other civilised country are far higher than here. For too long, silly politicians have sought to have medicine “on the cheap”. No wonder the NHS is so dreadful with massive waiting lists for almost everything. Mind you that is not helped by legal immigration of 1.2 million every year.BillEastman111‘Lousy’People who save lives are worth far, far more than a lousy 20% pay rise.BeansNToast‘I hope Streeting is listening’Of course it’s not enough, but we hope the junior doctors understand the predicament the Tories have put us in and accept it. Hopefully over time what they have lost can be made up. At least Labour have come to a sensible agreement. I understand that the Tories were running the NHS and all public services into the ground, preparing the fed-up public for the wholesale sale of everything, to their friends. Just as they did with water, transport and energy, and we can see where that has brought us. The NHS privatisation has already begun in earnest under the Tories, our GP and dental services are now owned by US multinationals. Imaging services (xray, mri) in major London hospitals are now outsourced. All this needs to be brought back in-house. I hope Wes Streeting is listening.punda‘Lumbers the taxpayer’A junior doctor after five years of service has an average salary of sixty thousand pounds, has just had a twelve thousand pound pay rise, and not only that but this also lumbers the taxpayer with a huge pension to pay for.Salt and Vinegar‘Gone on too long’This has gone on for too long… the previous government had no interest in resolving it. They cared nothing for the NHS. They were a bunch of deceitful disingenuous miscreants and they should hang their heads in shameHappilyRetiredWoman‘A reasonable compromise’The public doesn’t know that a “junior” doctor could be a doctor in training who is not a consultant and this means that a junior doctor could even be 40 or more years old. So this is a misleading term. Now for the amount of time and effort the doctors have invested and the amount of work they do their salary is one of the lowest. So 20% is not a lot but it sounds a reasonable compromise.So the public believes that £4-5k per month for someone who has spent 15 years to become a safe and high-quality doctor is a lot. Don’t worry NHS has started replacing GPs with cheap labour called associate physicians. They can treat people after two years of training only. Perhaps not as good as proper doctors but at least they are cheap. And sooner or later, when health care becomes private, the public will miss the old good NHS with the good doctors. And remember next time your appendix may be removed by a non-doctor that you asked for it because he/she is cheapTiredAllTheTime‘Settling the dispute is essential’Sounds like the sort of compromise that the last government could have agreed if they hadn’t been determined to undermine the NHS to make way for their private health friends. Settling the dispute is an essential first step to getting the health service on the road to recovery.Carolan‘Get our priorities right’That’s really not the priority to me. These people are well-paid. We have millions of children under the poverty level. Let’s get our priorities right.NoblahSome of the comments have been edited for this article. You can read the full discussion in the comments section of the original article.All you have to do is sign up, submit your question and register your details – then you can then take part in the discussion. You can also sign up by clicking ‘log in’ on the top right-hand corner of the screen.Make sure you adhere to our community guidelines, which can be found here. For a full guide on how to comment click here. More

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      Voices: Is a 20% pay rise enough to halt junior doctor strikes? Join The Independent Debate

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      Support trulyindependent journalismFind out moreCloseOur mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.Louise ThomasEditorJunior doctor strikes may soon end following a government proposal offering a 20% pay increase. Health Secretary Wes Streeting and the British Medical Association (BMA) have negotiated a deal to be voted on by junior doctors.This deal includes an overall pay rise of 20%, valued at £1 billion, with a backdated 4.05% increase for 2023-24 on top of an existing 8.8-10.3% rise. For 2024-25, junior doctors would receive an additional 6% pay rise plus a consolidated £1,000 payment.Over the past 18 months, strikes have led to the cancellation of more than 1.4 million NHS appointments and operations, costing the health service an estimated £3 billion. Junior doctors in England have staged industrial action 11 times in the last 20 months, with the most recent strike from June 27 to July 2 affecting 61,989 appointments, procedures, and operations, according to NHS England.Is the deal struck by Streeting and the BMA enough to end the junior doctor strikes? Or do you think industrial action should continue?Share your thoughts by adding them in the comments — we’ll highlight the most insightful ones as they come in.All you have to do is sign up and register your details — then you can take part in the discussion. You can also sign up by clicking ‘log in’ on the top right-hand corner of the screen.Make sure you adhere to our community guidelines, which can be found here. For a full guide on how to comment click here.Join the conversation with other Independent readers below. More

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      Unlike Joe Biden, Kamala Harris will be a genuine champion for abortion rights | Moira Donegan

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      When he was still the nominee, Joe Biden’s preferred euphemism for abortion was “Roe”. He would talk about “upholding” Roe v Wade even after June 2022, when the US supreme court struck it down. Reproductive rights advocates bristled at this, pointing out how many people had been denied abortions under Roe, and how flimsy the decision’s protection of reproductive rights had been on personal-autonomy or sex-equality grounds.Frankly, it was hard to get the president to talk about abortion at all. He seemed to avoid even the word “abortion”. When he did talk about the procedure – and the bans on it that Republicans have unleashed across the country – he preferred to focus on women who had been denied emergency abortions for wanted pregnancies in the midst of tragic health complications.Abortion, in his hands, became an issue in which sad, troubled and helpless women could be aided by the mercy of heroic men like himself – or like that of the imagined doctor he referenced in his disastrous June debate with Donald Trump, a man, Biden said, who would determine whether an abortion seeker “needed help or not”. Abortion, in his telling, was an unpleasant but necessary evil that men mediated for women. It was decidedly not a matter of adult women’s rights, dignity or right of autonomy over their own bodies and lives.Kamala Harris, Biden’s successor at the top of the Democratic ticket following his withdrawal last Sunday, has taken a different approach. The Biden administration had largely delegated abortion rights messaging to the vice-president, out of deference both for Biden’s obvious personal discomfort with the issue and his growing inability to campaign effectively at all. (The anti-choice group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America named Harris as Biden’s “abortion czar”, a name that perhaps sounds a little cooler than they intended.) She made a multistate tour focusing on the issue earlier this year, which included what is believed to be the first public visit to an abortion clinic by a president or vice-president: a stop at a Planned Parenthood in St Paul, Minnesota, where Harris appeared with the clinic’s medical director, and commended the clinic’s staff for their “true leadership”.“It is only right and fair that people have access to the healthcare they need,” she said.The result was a divergence of abortion messaging within the White House, with Harris making a much more robust case for abortion, and for reproductive justice more broadly, in much more affirmative and unapologetic terms. The preferred catchphrase that she repeated when speaking about the issue was not Biden’s tepid and euphemistic “restore Roe”. Instead, Harris has made apparent reference to Dr George Tiller, an abortion doctor who was murdered by anti-choice extremists in 2009, who summarized his own approach to abortion in two words: “Trust women.”Before Biden dropped out of the race, November’s presidential election was set to be little more than a referendum on his age. But now that he has stepped aside, Harris has an opportunity to make a much stronger case for a Democratic policy vision. And reproductive rights, an issue that has motivated women voters in large numbers even in deep-conservative states since the Dobbs decision, appears to be at the center of her agenda.The move is good politics. Abortion rights are extraordinarily popular, and have only become more so in the years since Dobbs, mobilizing voters who would stay home or vote for Republicans when other issues are more salient. A new poll from the Associated Press finds that six in 10 Americans support abortion for any reason; other polls show even higher levels of support for abortion, especially early in pregnancy.It’s not just that abortion, in the abstract, is popular: abortion bans, in particular, are profoundly unpopular. The reality of post-Dobbs bans has dramatically moved public opinion on the issue: since May 2019, the percent of Americans who say that abortion should be legal under all circumstances has increased by 10 points, to 35%. The percent who say it should be illegal under all circumstances – the position advocated by the Republican party platform, which supports recognition of fetuses and embryos as persons under the 14th amendment – has fallen dramatically during that same period, to just 12%.These shifts in public opinion have had a marked impact at the ballot box. Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the November 2022 midterms is credited to outrage against the Dobbs decision that June. But a desire to protect or restore abortion rights has driven large turnout even in heavily Republican states: Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio have all voted overwhelmingly in favor of abortion rights since Dobbs. Harris has seized on this shift in a way that Biden has not been able to, speaking passionately – and credibly – about abortion as a matter of not only health, but also dignity.Harris has also cannily and repeatedly drawn connections between Trump’s last term, in which three anti-choice zealots were appointed to the US supreme court, and the suffering that abortion bans have caused in Republican-controlled states. She refers to the state laws prohibiting the procedure as “Trump abortion bans”. This focus could bear fruit in November: alongside Harris’s presidential bid, a total of five states – Nevada, Colorado, South Dakota, Maryland and Florida – will have abortion-rights measures on the ballot.The Republican ticket, meanwhile, has leaned further and further into an ideology of misogyny and gender reaction. Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, is a passionate and lurid misogynist; he recently referred to Harris and other Democratic women as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”, and that childless women “have no direct stake” in America’s future. He has also suggested that citizens without children should have their votes diluted.Childless women seem to be a particularly irksome demographic for the Trump camp’s army of prurient creeps: both the media personality Laura Loomer and the lawyer and thinktank gadfly Will Chamberlain quickly joined Vance in attacking Harris for not having biological children. It’s a fitting line of attack; after all, the very reason why Republicans are pursuing abortion bans in the first place is because they have an extremely narrow view of what women should be, one they want to enforce with the law.Abortion-rights advocates will certainly seek to push Harris for even more commitments for reproductive freedom and justice. But Harris, at least, is willing to argue that women can be things other than mothers. Like maybe the president.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Arkansas official rejected valid abortion ballot signatures, lawsuit claims

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      Organizers behind a ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights into the Arkansas state constitution sued a senior state official on Tuesday, accusing him of illegally rejecting the signatures they submitted in support of putting the measure on the November ballot.The group, Arkansans for Limited Government, submitted more than 101,000 signatures backing its ballot measure on 5 July, according to its lawsuit. Five days later, the Arkansas secretary of state John Thurston rejected their signatures because, he said, they failed to turn in the required paperwork, including a statement that identified any paid canvassers used by the group.In its lawsuit, Arkansans for Limited Government fired back, claiming that the group had fully complied with Arkansas law and submitted canvassers’ names. They also argued that even if they had not complied with the law, they should be given the chance to correct the paperwork.“Our compliance with the law is clear and well-documented,” Lauren Cowles, executive director of Arkansans for Limited Government, said in a statement. “The secretary of state’s refusal to count valid signatures is an affront to democracy and an attempt to undermine the will of the people.”Arkansas currently bans all abortions except in medical emergencies. Arkansans for Limited Government’s ballot measure would permit people to get abortions up until 18 weeks of pregnancy, as well as in cases of rape or incest.“We are reviewing the lawsuit and would have no further comment at this time,” Chris Powell, press secretary for the Arkansas secretary of state, said in an email.In order to go before voters in November, the ballot measure must be certified by 22 August. Arkansans for Limited Government’s lawsuit asks the Arkansas supreme court to force Thurston to start counting and verifying signatures so that the measure can meet that deadline.In the two years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, voters in states like Michigan, Ohio and Kansas have all passed ballot measures to protect abortion rights. A number of states, including Nevada, Arizona and Florida are slated to put abortion-related ballot measures before voters this November. Democrats are hoping that these measures will boost turnout among their base, while anti-abortion activists and their Republican allies have tried to squash similar measures in states like Missouri and South Dakota. More

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      in UK Politics

      Wes Streeting vows to begin negotiations with junior doctors next week in first act as health secretary

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      Support trulyindependent journalismFind out moreCloseOur mission is to deliver unbiased, fact-based reporting that holds power to account and exposes the truth.Whether $5 or $50, every contribution counts.Support us to deliver journalism without an agenda.Louise ThomasEditorNew health secretary Wes Streeting has announced talks next week with junior doctors to negotiate an end to strikes as his first act in office.Following a landslide Labour win in the general election, Wes Streeting was appointed the Department for Health and Social Care’s new health secretary, as was expected. He takes over the office as the NHS faces ongoing junior doctors strikes and an NHS waiting list of 7.57 million. In his first statement as health secretary on Friday he said: “I have just spoken over the phone with the British Medical Association junior doctors committee, and I can announce that talks to end their industrial action will begin next week.“We promised during the campaign that we would begin negotiations as a matter of urgency, and that is what we are doing.”Mr Streeting has previously been clear he could not cave to junior doctors’ requests for a 35 per cent pay rise, but promised to open negotiations with the BMA when in office.His statement added: “When we said during the election campaign, that the NHS was going through the biggest crisis in its history, we meant it.Wes Streeting, left, has been handed one of the most challenging ministerial roles in the cabinet More

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      in US Politics

      Arizona proposal to protect abortion rights in state constitution advances

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      A proposal to enshrine abortion rights into the state constitution of Arizona, a key battleground state in the upcoming US elections, has inched closer to becoming an official ballot measure.On Wednesday, Arizona for Abortion Access, the coalition behind the measure, announced that it had turned in more than 800,000 signatures – more than double the needed amount to get the measure on the ballot come November.That’s more signatures than have ever been submitted for a citizen-led ballot measure in Arizona, according to Chris Love, a spokesperson for Arizona for Abortion Access.“It represents one in five Arizona voters,” Love said. “It’s an amazing feat for us. I think it’s a demonstration of the strength of our campaign and the excitement of Arizona voters to really settle the issue of abortion rights on the ballot in November.”Arizona currently bans most abortions past 15 weeks of pregnancy, but the state came close to outlawing almost all abortions earlier this spring. In April, the Arizona supreme court ruled to uphold a law that paved the way for a 1864 near-total abortion ban – passed before Arizona even became a state – to take effect. That controversial decision kicked off a weeks-long battle in the Arizona state legislature, where Republicans hold a one-seat majority in both the state house and senate, as Democratic lawmakers tried to pass a repeal of the 1864 ban. They ultimately succeeded after a handful of Republican legislators broke ranks and voted for the repeal.“Our message has always been the same: pregnant patients deserve the freedom to make their individual and personal health care decisions, and especially decisions about abortions, with their families and their health care providers,” Love said. “The back and forth that just happened with respect to the 1864 ban is a clear demonstration of why we need politicians out of the calculus.”If voters pass the ballot measure, which is officially titled the Arizona Abortion Access Act, it would eliminate the state’s 15-week ban and instead protect the right to an abortion until fetal viability, a benchmark that typically occurs around 24 weeks of pregnancy. It would also allow abortions to take place after fetal viability if a health care professional believes the procedure is necessary to protect a pregnant person’s life or physical or mental health.Roughly a dozen states, including Arizona and fellow swing state Nevada, are expected to hold ballot measures over abortion rights in the November elections. Activists in Nebraska and Arkansas are also set to turn in signatures supporting abortion rights ballot measures this week.Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade two years ago, several states – including traditional Republican strongholds like Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio – have successfully passed ballot measures to preserve or strengthen abortion rights. Democrats are now hoping that enthusiasm for abortion rights will boost voter turnout and translate to support for their own candidates, particularly as Joe Biden continues to trail Donald Trump in the polls and has faced calls to step down in the wake of a devastating debate performance last week.Arizona county election officials now have until 22 August to officially verify the signatures. Part of the reason for turning in so many signatures, Love said, was to counter any efforts to legally challenge the signatures’ legitimacy. More

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      in US Politics

      The abortion ruling hides conservative justices’ partisan agenda | Moira Donegan

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      The supreme court is a messy institution. It’s six conservative justices are mired in infighting over both the pace of their shared ideological project of remaking American law and life according to rightwing preferences, and over their preferred methodological course for doing so. Their squabbling is not helped by the fact that two of them, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, keep embarrassing the court with gauche public scandals, which draw attention to the court’s legitimacy crises like a vulgar flag waving above One First Street. For their part, the liberals are exhausted, impotent, and at times apparently publicly despairing. Their dissents have sometimes taken on tones of exasperation and peeved sarcasm, as if they’re turning to the country and asking: “Can you believe this?” Their most senior member, Sonia Sotomayor, recently told an interviewer that over the past several terms, since the court’s conservative supermajority was sealed under the Trump administration, she has sometimes gone into her chambers after the announcement of major decisions and wept. She says she anticipates having to do so again: in one recent dissent, she warned ominously about the future of gay marriage rights.The court’s partisans like to point out that it controls neither the military nor the federal budget; the court’s legitimacy, they say, comes merely from the fact that people believe it to be legitimate. But increasingly, many of them don’t. The court’s approval rating remains at record lows, and the justices’ conduct over the past several years has punctured the mystique of scholarly seriousness that the institution once pretended to. They don’t seem like wise legal scholars, carefully and dispassionately deliberating the merits of competing interests and claims. Instead, they seem more like a bunch of bumbling partisan hacks – perhaps just more cynical and less clever than the average Republican operatives stuffed into suits throughout DC.The court did not appear particularly competent, for instance, when on Wednesday, a draft opinion in Moyle v United States, was briefly uploaded to the court’s web page. The case concerns Idaho, which has one of the most extreme and sadistic anti-choice legal regimes in the nation, and asks whether states’ attempts to ban abortions even in cases of medical emergencies can be preempted by Emtala, a federal law regulating emergency rooms. After it was uploaded, the opinion was quickly taken down; in a statement, a supreme court spokesperson said that the opinion had been uploaded briefly by mistake. By then, Bloomberg news had already obtained the full text of the draft, and it was published soon thereafter.This makes the third time in recent memory that an opinion in a high-profile supreme court case was leaked before its official release. The first was when Justice Alito reportedly told a conservative movement activist friend of his upcoming decision in 2014’s Burwell v Hobby Lobby, a case that struck down the Affordable Care Act’s contraception coverage mandate for religious employers; the second was when the draft of Alito’s majority opinion in Dobbs was leaked to Politico almost two full months before it was ultimately issued by the court. All three of these leaks have been in cases pertaining to women’s reproductive rights.But if the court is bumbling in their functioning, embarrassing in their public personas, and obviously fractious in their internal relations, then the leaked order in Moyle also shows that the conservative majority can be quite calculating in their political strategy. In the draft decision, issued per curium (that is, unsigned), the court dismisses the case as improvidently granted, and sends it back down to the lower courts. They include the restoration of a lower court order that had allowed emergency abortions to continue in Idaho hospitals while the case proceeds. For now, that means that women experiencing failing pregnancies in Idaho will still be able to get the care they need to preserve their health, their fertility and their lives; hopefully, emergency room doctors there will feel safe enough to actually perform the procedures, and patients will no longer have to be air lifted out of state to receive the routine care that will stabilize them. That’s what’s most important for the American public: that for the time being, lives will not be needlessly lost in service to the anti-choice agenda.But to the court’s conservative majority, what seems to be most important is pushing the abortion issue – and an inevitable ruling that eventually will allow states to ban emergency abortions – past the November election. The decision in Moyle was transparently a compromise between the court’s three liberals, who wanted to preserve women’s lives, and the three more pragmatic conservatives – John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett – who wanted to preserve Donald Trump’s electoral chances. These conservatives know that a ruling saying that states can allow women to bleed out, suffer septic infections, have seizures from eclampsia, lose the function of their uterus, and ultimately die – out of deference to preserving what by then are already doomed, futile pregnancies – would hurt Republican candidates in this November’s elections. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to issue such a murderous ruling; it means that they want to do so at a more politically convenient moment.So three of the court’s conservatives are acting like Republican political strategists, working to conceal their own legal agenda in order to minimize harm to their preferred party in an election year. That would be bad enough. But not all of the court’s conservatives can exercise even this degree of cynical, self-interested restraint. Although the order was issued per curium, Alito dissented, arguing that the state ban on emergency abortions should be enforceable under federal law; he was joined by Thomas and Neil Gorsuch. Some of his reasoning was echoed by Barrett, whose concurrence, studded with handwringing concerns as to whether Emtala sufficiently protected the conscience rights of anti-abortion doctors and whether it could preempt a state criminal law, read like a road map for anti-choice lawyers seeking to re-argue the issue at a later, more politically amenable time. (Another sign of the court’s dysfunction – how often opinions are now accompanied by a flurry of dissents and concurrences, with each of the justices seemingly very eager to publicly distinguish their own thinking from that of their colleagues.)Together, their writings made it clear that though the court’s conservatives are split – sometimes fiercely and peevishly so – over how fast to proceed, they agree over their ultimate goal: one day, probably sooner than we think, this case will come back, and the supreme court will allow states to ban emergency abortions. What follows will be blood on their hands. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘A healthcare crisis’: Harris takes aim at Trump on anniversary of Roe’s fall

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      Joe Biden and Kamala Harris marked the second anniversary of the US supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade with forceful campaign statements that laid the blame squarely on Donald Trump for ending the national right to abortion.In a video released on Monday, Biden pledged to restore the right to an abortion and “protect American freedom” if he is re-elected.The video, along with a campaign event headlined by the vice-president, came two years to the day since the court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization reversed nearly half a century of guaranteed federal abortion rights, and reflect the centrality of abortion in Biden’s presidential campaign.In College Park, Maryland, Harris took the stage to chants of “four more years”. In her remarks, Harris laid out what she said were the stakes for abortion access if Trump is re-elected.“Understand as much harm as he has already caused, a second Trump term would be even worse,” she said. “His friends in the United States Congress are trying to pass a national ban that would outlaw abortion in every single state – in states like New York and California, and even right here in Maryland.”Nodding to her background as a prosecutor, Harris called Trump’s attack on women’s reproductive rights “premeditated” and said he has “not denied, much less shown remorse, for his actions”.“In the case of the stealing of reproductive freedom from the women of America, Donald Trump is guilty,” she said.Harris called Republicans who have passed state-level bans Trump’s “accomplices” and warned that he would go even further by curtailing access to contraception and IVF.Pointing to the statistic that one in three American women live in a state with abortion restrictions, she said: “Today our daughters know fewer rights than their grandmothers. This is a healthcare crisis, and we all know who to blame: Donald Trump.”Kate Cox, the Texas woman who was denied an abortion under the state’s near-total ban last year despite a fatal fetal anomaly, introduced Harris in Maryland.“My state chose to drive me out of my home, my community, away from my children and my doctors, rather than to let me access care,” she said. “I will never again miss an opportunity to vote. I will cast my ballot in every election like my life depends on it.”Cox ultimately left Texas to receive care. Growing emotional from the stage on Monday, she shared that she is pregnant again, expecting a child in January. The crowd erupted in applause. “I hope that by then, when we welcome our baby into the world, we will have a world led by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” she said.“You are a hero of this movement,” Harris told Cox.In Biden’s video, the president, too, placed the responsibility for reversing abortion rights on Trump, quoting him boasting about the decision and taking credit for putting three conservative justices on the court.“Here’s what Donald Trump says about your freedom: ‘After 50 years of failure, with nobody coming even close, I was able to kill Roe v Wade,’” Biden says, quoting a Trump statement last year.“Two years ago, the supreme court justices that Trump handpicked helped overturn Roe v Wade,” Biden continues. “Decades of progress shattered just because the last guy got four years in the White House.”“We’re up against extremism. Send me back to the White House and I’ll fight like hell to restore Roe v Wade and protect American freedom.”The offensive comes amid polling evidence that with consistently weak approval ratings for Biden, concerns over reproductive rights represent Democrats’ best hope of retaining the White House in November.Since Roe v Wade was overthrown in 2022, ballot measures in several states – including ones that tend to vote Republican – have upheld or enshrined abortion rights locally, signalling that the issue has popular resonance particularly among female voters.On Friday, a group of Montana abortion rights supporters became the latest to announce that they had secured enough signatures to hold a November ballot measure asking voters to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. Although that measure has not yet been confirmed by state officials, voters in roughly a dozen states are expected to weigh in directly on abortion rights this year, including in battleground states such as Nevada and Arizona.Democrats are hoping that these measures will boost turnout in their favor.Several groups – including the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Reproductive Rights and Reproductive Freedom for All – announced on Monday a $100m Abortion Access Now campaign across several states.Since Roe fell, Biden has frequently promised to “codify” Roe’s protections into law. Although his administration has issued executive orders aimed at boosting access to reproductive healthcare, including contraception, as well as defended abortion access in two supreme court cases this year, Biden cannot re-establish a federal right to abortion without congressional support. Congress has repeatedly failed to pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, a bill that blocks states from totally banning abortion before fetal viability, or the point at which a fetus can survive outside the womb.In a call with reporters on Monday, White House officials declined to reveal any plans for future abortion-related executive actions. Jennifer Klein, assistant to the president and director of the Gender Policy Council, also acknowledged that, if the supreme court rules against the Biden administration in a highly anticipated case over emergency abortions, “our options on emergency medical care are likely to be limited”.Trump has sought to backpedal on his stance in recent months, telling congressional Republicans in a meeting on Capitol Hill this month that the matter should be left to the states and warning them against pursuing a national ban. More