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      Wyoming becomes first US state to outlaw use of abortion pills

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      Wyoming has become the first US state to outlaw the use or prescription of medication abortion pills after the governor, Mark Gordon, signed into law a bill that was passed by the state’s Republican-controlled legislature earlier this month.The crux of the two-page Wyoming bill is a provision making it illegal to “prescribe, dispense, distribute, sell or use any drug for the purpose of procuring or performing an abortion”.So-called “morning-after” pills, prescription contraceptive medication used after sex but before a pregnancy can be confirmed, are exempted from the ban.The measure also includes an exemption for any treatment necessary to protect a woman “from an imminent peril that substantially endangers her life or health”, as well as any treatment of a “natural miscarriage according to currently accepted medical guidelines”.Violation of the ban is to be treated as a criminal misdemeanor, punishable by up to six months in jail and a fine of up to $9,000.The measure stipulates that a woman “upon whom a chemical abortion is performed or attempted shall not be criminally prosecuted”.In a statement, Wyoming ACLU advocacy director Antonio Serrano criticised the governor’s decision to sign the law.“A person’s health, not politics, should guide important medical decisions – including the decision to have an abortion,” Serrano said.The governor said he was also allowing enactment, without his signature, of a separate bill passed by state lawmakers to prohibit conventional abortion procedures except when necessary to protect the health and life of the mother, or in case of rape or incest. Exception is also permitted to end a pregnancy if doctors determine there to be a lethal abnormality of the foetus.Wyoming’s new law comes as a rightwing push to crack down on medication abortions gathers momentum, with a federal judge in Texas currently considering a nationwide ban on the abortion pill mifepristone in response to a lawsuit by anti-abortion groups.A two pill combination of mifepristone and another drug is the most common form of abortion in the US.Medication abortions were the preferred method for ending pregnancy in the US even before the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, the ruling that protected the right to abortion for nearly five decades.Since that decision last June, abortion restrictions have been up to states and the landscape has shifted quickly. Thirteen states are now enforcing bans on abortion at any point in pregnancy, and one more, Georgia, bans it once cardiac activity can be detected, or at about six weeks’ gestation.Courts have put on hold enforcement of abortion bans or deep restrictions in Arizona, Indiana, Montana, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah and Wyoming. Idaho courts have forced the state to allow abortions during medical emergencies.Reuters and Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      in US Politics

      The Democrats botched the Ohio disaster response – and handed Trump a victory | Michael Massing

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      The Democrats botched the Ohio disaster response – and handed Trump a victoryMichael MassingThe failure of Pete Buttigieg, the US secretary of transportion, to appear for nearly three weeks recalls the incompetence of Fema during Hurricane Katrina“Where’s Pete Buttigieg?” someone shouted at a February 15 town hall meeting in East Palestine, Ohio. “I don’t know,” Mayor Trent Conaway replied.Twelve days earlier, a Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals had derailed near the town. Three days later, the company announced it was going to carry out a controlled burn of vinyl chloride that would send dangerous gasses into the air, forcing many of East Palestine’s 4,700 residents to evacuate. They returned after receiving assurances that the air and water were safe, but a strong chemical odor clung to the town, and many continued to complain of headaches, nausea, and burning throats. And so several hundred residents had crowded into a local school to demand answers. Conaway said that two weeks had passed before anyone at the White House had contacted him, and the US secretary of transportation still hadn’t materialized.In Washington, Republicans made hay. “Secretary Buttigieg laughing about Chinese spy balloons, while ignoring the Ohio train derailment, shows you how out of touch Democrats are,” Ohio congressman Jim Jordan tweeted. Senator Marco Rubio called Buttigieg “an incompetent who is focused solely on his fantasies about his political future & needs to be fired”.On Fox, Tucker Carlson mocked Buttigieg for commemorating “Transit Equity Day” while remaining silent about the majority-white, struggling East Palestine. If the disaster had happened in a rich Washington DC neighborhood like Georgetown, he said, the National Guard would have been called in, and the story would have led every news channel. “But it happened to the poor benighted town of East Palestine, Ohio, whose people are forgotten and in the view of people who lead this country, forgettable.”But it wasn’t just the right who complained. Democratic congresswoman Ilhan Omar of Minnesota tweeted that “East Palestine railroad derailment will have a significant negative impact on the health and wellbeing of the residents for decades … We need Congressional inquiry and direct action from @PeteButtigieg to address this tragedy.” In a rare show of partisanship, Senator Ted Cruz said he “fully agreed” with her.On 22 February, Donald Trump visited East Palestine. He distributed thousands of bottles of Trump-branded water, walked through the town with his son Donald Trump Jr and Ohio senator JD Vance, and visited a local McDonald’s to buy food for first responders. “You are not forgotten,” Trump said in a speech not far from the accident site. “In too many cases, your goodness and perseverance were met with indifference and betrayal.”The next day, Buttigieg finally showed. Surveying the site of the derailment in a hard hat and safety vest, he acknowledged that he could have spoken out “sooner” about the accident. “I was taking pains to respect the role that I have, the role that I don’t have – but that should not have stopped me from weighing in about how I felt about what was happening.” He tweeted a photo of himself at the site along with the message that he was “amazed by the resilience and decency of the people of East Palestine”.The Department of Transportation did not have the lead role in the accident response – that fell to the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Transportation Safety Board – but the failure of the nation’s top transportation official to appear at the disaster site for nearly three weeks inevitably recalled the incompetence and disengagement of Fema director Michael Brown during Hurricane Katrina. (President George W Bush famously claimed Brown was doing “a heck of a job”.) It also allowed Trump to present himself as the champion of blue-collar America.How could so poised and polished a figure as Buttigieg so badly miscalculate? A glowing Washington Post profile in August 2021 described him as a skilled communicator and “nimble public speaker” who “rarely makes verbal miscues”.President Joe Biden had made Buttigieg the lead spokesman for his massive infrastructure program, offering him an opportunity to meet with local officials around the country as he promoted roads, ports, bridges and tunnels. During the presidential campaign, the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor had assumed the mantle of outsider, but, the Post observed, he had “quickly morphed into a quintessential Washington insider” – omnipresent on television, a fixture at dinners, a tireless networker seeking to advance both the president’s agenda and his own political prospects.Buttigieg’s East Palestine no-show can help answer the question, What’s the matter with Ohio? Formerly considered a “battleground state”, it has in recent years become unshakably red. Columbiana county, where East Palestine is located, is a microcosm. In 2008, John McCain barely took the county with 52% of the vote. Donald Trump won 68% in 2016 and 71.5% in 2020 – a reflection of the perception that the Democrats had abandoned small-town America.In January, Biden went to Covington, Kentucky, to publicize the awarding of $1.6bn in federal funds to reconstruct a bridge over the Ohio River to Cincinnati, a key regional artery. He was joined by Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell, Kentucky governor Andy Beshear, and Ohio governor Mike DeWine. The Democrats hope that such investments and ceremonies over the long term can help repair the damage done to the Democrats’ standing in the midwest by their longstanding embrace of free trade, globalization and the outsourcing of jobs to China and Mexico.In the short term, however, Buttigieg’s no-show in East Palestine reinforces the perception that the Democrats really don’t care. It didn’t help that on February 20, as East Palestine was still dealing with the fallout from the derailment, Biden made his surprise visit to Kyiv. “The biggest slap in the face,” Mayor Conaway called it on Fox News, adding, “that tells you right now he doesn’t care about us. He can send every agency he wants to, but I found out this morning that he was in Ukraine giving millions of dollars away to people over there and not to us, and I’m furious.”All the investment in bridges, roads, and factories will not translate into political gains if the party continues to be missing in action.Heck of a job.
      Michael Massing is the author most recently of Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionDonald TrumpPete ButtigiegOhioPollutionHealthcommentReuse this content More

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      in US Politics

      John Fetterman can help lift the stigma around mental illness and depression | Akin Olla

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      John Fetterman can help lift the stigma around mental illness and depressionAkin OllaThe US senator checked into a hospital for clinical depression – and has provoked a conversation about mental healthMy senator, John Fetterman, has checked into a hospital for clinical depression.This is an action that an increasing number of Americans will likely take in their lifetimes, given the rising rates of depression. Still, Fox News has already pounced: Tucker Carlson argued that Fetterman is “unfit to serve in the United States Senate”, while Laura Ingraham went as far as to imply that Fetterman’s wife has worked to hide his condition and that the act was “craven or a cruel political calculation by a stage wife and political nihilist”.Fetterman isn’t exactly the only person in the United States suffering from some form of depression. According to a Boston University study, “[d]epression among adults in the United States tripled in the early 2020 months of the global coronavirus pandemic – jumping from 8.5% before the pandemic to a staggering 27.8%”, and it only got worse from there. According to the same study, rates of depression continued “climbing to 32.8% and affecting 1 in every 3 American adults”.Stroke victims, which Fetterman is, are particularly susceptible to depression. According to a study in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, “depression occurs in roughly one-third of stroke survivors.” In terms of major depression, which involves at least two weeks of depressive symptoms like problems with sleep and sense of self-worth, the National Institute of Mental Health reported that roughly 8.4% of all Americans had at least one depressive episode in 2020, with higher rates among “adult females (10.5%) compared to males (6.2%)”.This disparity is why it’s important for women in positions of influence like Olympian Simone Biles and former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Arden to speak out about their own mental health struggles. Similarly, it’s important for men in positions of power like Fetterman, especially given the reluctance of men in particular in seeking treatment. Trying to push Fetterman out of politics belittles millions of Americans and signals to roughly one-tenth of the country that they are not worthy of being elected to office.Fetterman, like many Americans who have experienced clinical depression, can still accomplish much of what he sets out to do. Shooting him down now would be similar to what was done to Thomas Eagleton, the original running mate of democrat George McGovern’s 1972 run for the presidency. Eagleton was essentially shamed out of the position after it was revealed that he’d suffered from depression in the past and received electroshock treatment for it. Despite the slights against him and his resignation from the candidacy, he’d won the heart of his constituents and served another two terms as senator.Every day, millions of depressed Americans go to work, the country wouldn’t function without them. While Fetterman may need to step down or decline to run in the future as Arden did, he should actually be given a chance to govern.Fetterman seeking treatment should not trigger calls of incompetency. Instead, it should trigger empathy and questions of how we can ensure that others can seek the help that they need.In the words of Senator Tina Smith of Minnesota, who spoke openly about her depression in 2019: “De-stigmatizing and de-mystifying mental illness is just the beginning. Everyone can be a friend to those in need by urging them to take advantage of the resources available to them. But the one hundred of us here in the Senate have a responsibility to make sure those resources are available to everyone.”
      Akin Olla is a contributing opinion writer at the Guardian US
      TopicsDepressionOpinionMental healthUS politicsHealthUS CongressPennsylvaniacommentReuse this content More

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      in UK Politics

      NHS: A&E and cancer unit nurses set to join fresh strikes

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      Sign up for our free Health Check email to receive exclusive analysis on the week in health Get our free Health Check email Nurses in England are preparing to escalate their dispute with the government by involving staff from NHS A&E departments, intensive care and cancer wards in a series of 48-hour strikes. The Royal […] More

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      in UK Politics

      Nurses to stage two more strikes in February as ministers fail to negotiate on pay demands

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      Sign up for our free Health Check email to receive exclusive analysis on the week in health Get our free Health Check email Nurses have announced that they will escalate their already unprecedented strikes next month, accusing Rishi Sunak’s government of failing to start negotiations on pay for the current financial year. As nurses prepare […] More

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      in World Politics

      US Emergency Departments Are Overstretched and Doctors Burned Out

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