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      US lawmakers call on EPA to ban pesticide linked to Parkinson’s disease

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      More than 50 US lawmakers are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to join dozens of other countries in banning a widely used weedkiller linked to Parkinson’s disease and other health dangers.In a 31 October letter to the agency, seven US senators said that paraquat, a weedkiller commonly applied on US farms, was a “highly toxic pesticide whose continued use cannot be justified given its harms to farmworkers and rural communities”. The call for a ban from the senators came after 47 members of the US House of Representatives sent a similar letter to the EPA calling for a ban earlier in October.The lawmakers cite scientific links between paraquat use and development of Parkinson’s and other “life threatening diseases” as well as “grave impacts on the environment”. “Health risks include a higher risk of Parkinson’s disease, with some studies finding a 64% increase in the likelihood of developing Parkinson’s, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, thyroid cancer, and other thyroid issues,” they wrote.The New Jersey senator Cory Booker, organizer of the Senate letter, said the risks of paraquat exposure were “well documented” and that it was “irresponsible” for the EPA to continue to allow its use. “I hope the EPA will follow the science and ban paraquat,” Booker said.The EPA has long maintained that there is no “clear link” between paraquat exposure and Parkinson’s disease, though the agency does have a number of restrictions on use of the chemical due to its acute toxicity. The agency issued a draft report earlier this year affirming its position.Still, the agency said at that time that it would be reviewing more scientific studies and would issue a final report by 17 January 2025.When asked about the congressional call for a ban, an EPA spokesperson said only that the agency “will respond to the letter appropriately”.Several California lawmakers pushed for a ban in the most recent state legislative session, also citing the risks of Parkinson’s. A compromise measure signed by the governor last month requires an expedited regulatory review of paraquat.The push to ban paraquat in the US was “long overdue”, said Ray Dorsey, a professor of neurology at the University of Rochester who studies the causes of Parkinson’s disease.“For 60 years, paraquat has been helping fuel the rise of Parkinson’s disease,” Dorsey said. “The evidence from human, laboratory and apparently even the company’s own research is overwhelming. When paraquat is banned, more lives will be spared the consequences of Parkinson’s.”Chinese-owned Syngenta, the longtime maker and marketer of paraquat products did not respond to a request for comment about the congressional letters. The company has denied there is any valid connection between Parkinson’s and paraquat. In response to previous reporting, it asserted that no “peer-reviewed scientific publication has established a causal connection between paraquat and Parkinson’s disease”.Internal Syngenta documents revealed by the Guardian show the company was aware many years ago of scientific evidence that paraquat could affect the brain in ways that cause Parkinson’s, and that it secretly sought to influence scientific research to counter the evidence of harm.Syngenta was allegedly aided in suppressing the risks of paraquat by a “reputation management” firm called v-Fluence, the Guardian reported in September.Thousands of US paraquat users who suffer from Parkinson’s are currently suing Syngenta, alleging the company should have warned them of the risk of developing the incurable brain disease, but instead worked to hide the evidence of risk.This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group More

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      in UK Politics

      Unemployed to be given weight-loss jab to help them back into work

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      Your support helps us to tell the storyThis election is still a dead heat, according to most polls. In a fight with such wafer-thin margins, we need reporters on the ground talking to the people Trump and Harris are courting. Your support allows us to keep sending journalists to the story.The Independent is trusted by 27 million Americans from across the entire political spectrum every month. Unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock you out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. But quality journalism must still be paid for.Help us keep bring these critical stories to light. Your support makes all the difference.CloseRead moreCloseUnemployed people will be given weight-loss jabs to assist them back into work in a trial. The UK’s life sciences sector will receive £279 million from drugs giant Eli Lilly, to invest in developing new medicines and ways to deliver treatment. Amanda Pritchard, Chief Executive of the NHS praised weight-loss drugs as “game-changers” in supporting people to reduce their risk of life-threatening conditions. The plans with Lily, announced at the UK’s International Investment Summit, will include the first trial of the jab’s effect on unemployment, productivity and NHS reliance.Obesity is the second-biggest preventable cause of cancer and a major contributor to ill-health that prevents people from participating fully in work, the government said. “The long-term benefits of these drugs could be monumental in our approach to tackling obesity. For many people, these jabs will be life-changing, help them get back to work and ease the demands on our NHS,” health secretary Wes Streeting wrote in The Telegraph. The latest Health Survey for England found that rates of obesity have not fallen since 2019. In 2022, some 29 per cent of adults in England were obese while 64 per cent were deemed to be overweight or living with obesity.It currently costs the NHS more than £11billion a year – more than smoking. Excess weight is linked to deadly conditions such as diabetes, heart attack and stroke. “Backing the UK life sciences sector to understand obesity further, alongside introducing measures to prevent obesity in the first place such as restrictions on junk food advertising, will help ease pressure on the NHS,” the government said. Ms Pritchard praised weight-loss drugs as ‘game-changers’ in supporting people to reduce their risk of life-threatening conditions More

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      Harris calls for end to Senate filibuster to restore US abortion rights

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      Kamala Harris has called for an end to the Senate filibuster to make good on her pledge to restore the right to abortion through legislation.The US vice-president, herself a former senator, told a radio station in Wisconsin that eliminating the filibuster – which sets a 60-vote threshold in the 100-seat upper chamber of the US Congress – would be necessary to codify the rights that were enshrined in Roe v Wade, the 1973 supreme court ruling that upheld the right to legal abortion throughout the US until it was overturned by a ruling two years ago.“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe and get us to the point where 51 votes would be what we need to actually put back in law the protections for reproductive freedom, and for the ability of every person and every woman to make decisions about their own body – and not have their government tell them what to do,” Harris told WPR, an affiliate of National Public Radio, on a campaign trip to Wisconsin, a key midwestern swing state where she has a wafer-thin lead over Donald Trump, according to recent polls.Her remarks accentuated her determination to put abortion rights at the heart of her campaign message amid polling evidence that it is a priority for many women voters.However, it cost her the support of the outgoing West Virginia senator, Joe Manchin – a former Democrat who left the party this year to become an independent – who said he would not endorse her candidacy because of her pledge.“Shame on her,” Manchin, who is retiring from the Senate at the end of the year, told CNN. “She knows the filibuster is the holy grail of democracy. It’s the only thing that keeps us talking and working together. If she gets rid of that, then this would be the House on steroids.”Trump has been on the defensive on abortion because the 2022 supreme court ruling was achieved with the votes of three conservative justices he appointed to the bench when he was president. Harris has claimed that Trump would sign a nationwide ban if he re-captured the White House, although he insists he would leave it to individual states.Harris’s use of a radio interview to underline her commitment follows criticism that she was deliberately avoiding high-profile interviews – a charge Harris has sought to counter by making herself available to selected media in battleground states.Trump told a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday that he would be women’s “protectors” and that they would not “be thinking about abortion” if he won a second term.Harris’s filibuster remarks echoed a similar comment by Joe Biden immediately after Roe v Wade was struck down, when he said an exception to the time-honoured Senate rule had to be made to guarantee abortion rights.“I believe we have to codify Roe v Wade in the law,” he said. “And the way to do that is to make sure the Congress votes to do that. And if the filibuster gets in the way, it’s like voting rights – it should be (that) we provide an exception to this … requiring an exception to the filibuster for this action to deal with the supreme court decision.”Harris has previously advocated overriding the filibuster to pass additional voting rights laws and Green New Deal legislation.In 2020, Barack Obama described the filibuster as a “Jim Crow relic” from America’s racially segregated past and argued that it should be eliminated if used to block voting reform.The filibuster describes the use of prolonged debate to delay or prevent a vote on a bill. It can be invoked by any senator objecting to a bill and has been used with increasing regularity in recent decades.It can only be overridden by triggering “cloture”, which requires a three-fifths majority vote – or 60 of the 100 senators. If cloture passes, it enables a vote on the original measure the filibuster was designed to block.The longest filibuster in Senate history was achieved by Strom Thurmond, the pro-segregationist South Carolina senator, when he spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes in an effort to block civil rights legislation in 1957.Thurmond’s speech – described by his biographer as a “urological mystery” – was reportedly achieved with help of prior steam baths to dehydrate his body and preclude the need for regular bathroom breaks. He was also reported by a staffer to have had himself fitted with a catheter to relieve himself while he spoke. More

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      in US Politics

      Thanks to Donald Trump, Apple’s new AirPods will make America hear again | John Naughton

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      Like many professional scribblers, I sometimes have to write not in a hushed study or library, but in noisy environments. So years ago I bought a set of Apple AirPods Pro, neat little gadgets that have a limited degree of noise-cancelling ability. They’re not as effective as the clunky (and pricey) headphones that seasoned transcontinental airline passengers need, but they’re much lighter and less obtrusive. And they have a button that enables you to switch off the noise cancellation and hear what’s going on around you.I remember wondering once if a version of them could also function as hearing aids, given the right software. But then dismissed the thought: after all, hearing aids are expensive, specialised devices that are often prescribed by audiologists – and also signal to the world at large that you are hard of hearing.But guess what? On 12 September, I open my laptop, click on the Verge website and find the headline: “Apple gets FDA authorisation to turn the AirPods Pro into hearing aids.” The new generation of the headphones will be able to serve as clinical-grade hearing aids later this autumn. More importantly, they can be bought over the counter (OTC in the lingo of the healthcare industry) and they will sell for $249 in the US (and £229 in the UK). Compare that with the prices of hearing aids sold by, say, Specsavers, which start at £495 and go all the way to £2,995 for the Phonak Infinio Sphere 90.Now of course price comparisons can be misleading. Vendors of conventional hearing aids will stress that customers get the undivided attention of an audiologist etc. And for customers with severe hearing difficulties, that’s fine. But for people with “mild to moderate hearing impairment”, even the US FDA (Food and Drug Administration) has concluded that the customisation software provided by Apple will be adequate.It works like this. You take an on-demand hearing test on your iPhone’s health app, which causes the earbuds to ping each ear with different frequencies at varying volumes. You tap the phone screen if you hear the sound. After a few minutes, the app will generate an audiogram that graphs your hearing deficits and this audiogram can then be used to program the AirPods Pro as hearing aids. Alternatively, you can upload an existing audiogram if you’ve had one generated by an audiologist.Neat, eh? And also a nice example of engineering ingenuity. But, as with most things, the technology is only part of the story. The healthcare industry in the US is tightly controlled by the FDA, which insisted for years that any device that goes into a human ear needs a prescription. As Matt Stoller, an antitrust expert and campaigner, points out, since 1993, campaigners have been calling for the FDA to loosen its stance on these devices and the calls got louder over the years. In 2015, the president’s council of advisers on science and technology issued a report seeking to make these devices more widely available. The next year, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine issued a similar report.But eventually, in 2017, Congress passed the Over-the-Counter Hearing Aid Act, proposed by senators Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Grassley and requiring the FDA to allow hearing aids without a prescription – and Donald Trump signed it! The act imposed a deadline of 2020 on the FDA, but the agency continually prevaricated until 2022, after the Biden administration compelled it to act with an executive order. Only then did the dam that had been building up since 1993 break.The moral of this story, in Stoller’s words, is simple: “How we deploy technology is not a function of engineering and science as much as it is how those interplay with law, in this case a law that fostered a hearing aid cartel and then a different law that broke it apart. So it’s not outlandish to say that Joe Biden designed Apple’s new hearing aid AirPods, with an assist from Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Grassley and Donald Trump. It’s just what happened.”This is perhaps a bit hyperbolic, but it captures an essential truth that Silicon Valley would prefer to ignore: technology does not exist in a vacuum, and the ways it is deployed and developed are shaped by social and political forces. Social media companies escape liability because of a 26-word clause in a 1996 law, for example. And millions of people in the US suffering from hearing impairment could have had hearing aids at affordable prices at least a decade ago. The problem was not that the technology didn’t exist, but that it wasn’t in the interest of the healthcare-regulatory establishment to make it available.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhat I’ve been readingBad pressJeff Jarvis, the veteran journalist and City University of New York emeritus professor, has an insightful analysis on his blog titled What’s become of The Times & Co? about why US mainstream media has gone wrong.Top MarxThe Enduring Influence of Marx’s Masterpiece is a marvellous introduction by Wendy Brown to a new translation of Das Kapital.Head case A lovely essay by Erik J Larson is The Left Brain Delusion, which argues that we’re too governed by one side of our grey matter. More

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      in UK Politics

      Darzi NHS report: Key points from landmark review of the health service

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      Your support helps us to tell the storyFind out moreCloseAs your White House correspondent, I ask the tough questions and seek the answers that matter.Your support enables me to be in the room, pressing for transparency and accountability. Without your contributions, we wouldn’t have the resources to challenge those in power.Your donation makes it possible for us to keep doing this important work, keeping you informed every step of the way to the November electionAndrew FeinbergWhite House CorrespondentA landmark report into the NHS has described the health service as “in serious trouble” as Labour vows to act on its findings. The review by Lord Darzi says honesty is needed if healthcare in the UK is to be improved, highlighting many issues.The rapid review, completed in nine weeks, diagnoses the problems in the NHS in England and sets out themes for the government to incorporate into a 10-year plan for reforming the health service.The study argues the NHS is facing rising demand for care as people live longer in ill health, coupled with low productivity in hospitals and poor staff morale.Prime minister Keir Starmer and health secretary Wes Streeting More

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      in UK Politics

      Tory austerity and shake-ups have left NHS in ‘critical condition’, major review finds

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      Your support helps us to tell the storyFind out moreCloseAs your White House correspondent, I ask the tough questions and seek the answers that matter.Your support enables me to be in the room, pressing for transparency and accountability. Without your contributions, we wouldn’t have the resources to challenge those in power.Your donation makes it possible for us to keep doing this important work, keeping you informed every step of the way to the November electionAndrew FeinbergWhite House CorrespondentA decade of Tory austerity has left the NHS in “critical condition” with some of the worst cancer survival rates in the Western world, according to a damning independent report.A rapid review of the health service, completed in nine weeks, has found that many of its staff are “disengaged” and that there are “distressingly high levels of sickness absence”.The author of the report, Ara Darzi, a surgeon and an independent peer, blamed choices made by the last government for the damage to the health service, and said it would take more than five years to fix.Sir Keir Starmer is expected to respond to the findings on Thursday by blaming the Tories while also making clear that the NHS must “reform or die”.He will say: “People have every right to be angry. It’s not just because the NHS is so personal to all of us – it’s because some of these failings are life and death.”In his report, Lord Darzi described a “disastrous” 2012 shake-up by Conservative health secretary Andrew Lansley as “a calamity without international precedent”.“In the last 15 years,” he continued, “the NHS was hit by three shocks – austerity and starvation of investment, confusion caused by top-down reorganisation, and then the pandemic, which came with resilience at an all-time low. Two out of three of those shocks were choices made in Westminster.”Lord Darzi said Britain “cannot afford not to have the NHS, so it is imperative that we turn the situation around”, adding that the health service “is in critical condition, but its vital signs are strong”.Other key findings from the report include the following: Comparisons of cancer survival rates reveal that Britain is “substantially” worse than its European neighbours as well as the USA, Australia and Canada The NHS has made “no progress whatsoever” on improving early cancer diagnosis for nearly 10 yearsThe programme to build 40 new hospitals would not have been needed if investment in healthcare had matched that of other nations since 2001In almost all NHS services, access to care has declined and long waits for care have become normalisedChildren are being let down by services and are waiting too long for mental health treatment and physical healthcare Despite there being enough dentists in Britain, not enough want to do NHS workToo much cash has been allocated to hospitals instead of community care servicesPatients are struggling to see their GP despite doctors seeing more patients than everSir Keir is expected to point the finger of blame at the Tories, saying that the situation is “unforgivable”.Prime minister Keir Starmer will pledge to reform the NHS More

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      in US Politics

      Republicans want to steal reproductive freedom. Black women will suffer most | Monica Raye Simpson

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      As the 2024 elections continue to heat up, there are increasing concerns about the rise of fascism around the world and in the United States. Regardless of the word or label used, Black people, living with the legacy of slavery and multiple forms of reproductive oppression including rape and forced pregnancies, sterilizations and the killing of our children and loved ones by vigilantes and police, have a lot of experience with authoritarian regimes that oppress and dehumanize.There is a strategic agenda from the far right – laid out in clear language in Project 2025 to keep power in the hands of a chosen few and prevent the United States from becoming a truly representative, multiracial democracy that embraces and supports all people including those with the capacity for pregnancy.According to US census projections, people of color are on par to be the majority by the middle of the century. With this imminent reality, the focus on controlling our fertility and denying us bodily autonomy is the age-old strategy of authoritarian, democracy-denying regimes. And to have a conservative-leaning supreme court that has proved that it will roll back some of the most critical protections further supports their agenda.One of those critical protections was the right to abortion recognized and protected in Roe v Wade. The Dobbs decision overturned Roe – and not only denied women the right to abortion, but also laid the groundwork for dismantling all reproductive rights and aspects of pregnancy-related healthcare.For decades, we have seen a focus on reversing Roe v Wade with numerous states implementing barriers to access through proposing Trap (targeted regulation of abortion providers) laws, expanding funding to crisis pregnancy centers and promoting declarations of personhood for the unborn from the moment of fertilization, all while gerrymandering states to stack our state legislatures with conservative leaders. We are also fighting abortion bans and increased criminalization for those seeking abortions and for pregnant women who are targeted for creating imagined risks of harm to personified eggs, embryos and fetuses.And it is not just about ending a pregnancy. Before the Dobbs decision, the US already had an appalling and shameful rate of maternal mortality that is from four to 12 times higher for Black women. As OB-GYNs flee states that have banned abortions and women are forced to wait out ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages and stillbirths and continue pregnancies with non-viable or already dead fetuses – because doctors have been terrorized into inaction – that rate will no doubt go up. As if that wasn’t enough, research consistently finds that US Black maternal mortality is fueled by racism that goes unaddressed and reinforced by our opposition.While devastating, we can at least note that the Dobbs decision shook the nation and brought the longstanding fight for abortion to the mainstream. While so many wondered how we got here, Black women and people of color had warned about the danger of single-issue litigation and organizing strategies within the historically predominantly white-led reproductive health and rights movements for decades.Thirty years ago, Black women came up with the term reproductive justice and started a human-rights-based movement that not only fought for the right to prevent or end pregnancies but to expand the fight to have the children that we want, to parent them in safe and sustainable communities. This new intersectional movement centered the leadership and lived experiences and bodily autonomy of those historically pushed to the margins.Fascism thrives when the masses are conditioned to think, organize and create policies that are not intersectional thus creating fertile ground for authoritarianism. I believe the kryptonite to fascism is the work being done by those who laid the foundation for the reproductive justice movement – Black women.Black women have found every way possible to resist while also remaining innovative. We consistently vote for our values to save our democracy. From the Black women who were the backbone of the civil rights and Black liberation movements to the Black women who redefined feminism at the Combahee River, to the Black women who created new movements like reproductive justice, Black Lives Matter and Me Too – it is clear we have decades of receipts that show our commitment to dismantling white supremacist, patriarchal authoritarian regimes.With this election we are faced with a serious question: “What world do we want for ourselves and the generations to come?” Do we want to live in a world where we do not have the human right to make our own decisions around our bodies, our families and our futures? Or do we want to live in a world where our lives are dictated by insidious policies?Our future is in the hands of those who are ready to fight for our freedom. This is the time to not only vote but also organize. This is the time to sit at the table and build with people we don’t know and deepen our relationships with our current allies. This is the time to study and learn from the historical victories over fascism. Because fascism always loses when it comes against the collective power of those determined to achieve our human rights.

      Monica Raye Simpson is the executive director of SisterSong, the southern-based national Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective. Monica is a proud Black queer feminist & cultural strategist who is committed to organizing for LGBTQ+ liberation, civil and human rights, and sexual and reproductive justice by any means necessary. She was also named a New Civil Rights Leader by Essence Magazine and as one of TIME 100’s most influential people of 2023. More

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      in US Politics

      Donald Trump is backing free IVF? You can practically smell the desperation | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Would you like to do your bit to curb population decline in the west? Fancy a home full of babies with very high IQs and extremely blond hair? Well, let me introduce you to the Donald J Trump Insemination Institute. On a sprawling ranch in New Mexico, women can be impregnated, free of charge, with Trump’s sperm, ensuring that future generations, on Earth and Mars, are blessed with a steady supply of very stable geniuses.Sorry if I turned your stomach there, but I’m afraid I’m only half-joking. It was actually Jeffrey Epstein – who used to party with Trump – who was besotted with the idea of a ranch where 20 women at a time would be impregnated, in order to seed the human race with his DNA. Elon Musk, who is obsessed with babies and Trump, may harbour similar fantasies. Earlier this year the New York Times reported that Musk has “volunteered his sperm” to help seed a colony on Mars. (Musk has denied these claims.)While Trump hasn’t announced plans for a baby ranch of his own yet, he is suddenly a big fan of artificial insemination. Last week the former president announced that he would support free in vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatments if elected again. “We wanna produce babies in this country, right?” Trump said during a town hall campaign event in Wisconsin. He didn’t provide many details about how this would work other than saying that either the government or insurance companies would pay for everything.Another fuzzy detail? How government-sponsored IVF would coexist with the Republican party’s 2024 platform, which supports states’ rights to pass foetal personhood laws. It is impossible to support widespread access to IVF while also supporting the idea of foetal personhood, which holds that an embryo is a person and destroying one is homicide. I am fairly sure that Trump has no idea how IVF actually works, so here is a little explainer: you typically fertilise multiple eggs because you have no idea how many of them will develop into viable embryos. You could fertilise 20 eggs and end up with no viable embryos or end up with 20. The only way to control how many embryos you create is to harvest a single egg at a time, which is hugely expensive, inefficient and emotionally exhausting. In short: Trump seems to be running on a platform where IVF would be free but also effectively illegal.While it may be half-baked, Trump’s free IVF policy makes it clear that he is desperate to woo female voters. Women have registered and voted at higher rates than men in every US presidential election since 1980 and now – for obvious reasons – they are leaning heavily towards Kamala Harris. I’m not sure a last-minute IVF policy is going to cancel out the fact that abortion rights are a key issue in this election and Trump has boasted about being the guy who overturned Roe v Wade. Nor will it cancel out the fact that Trump is a legally defined sexual predator who can’t stop himself from saying every misogynistic thought that creeps into his little head. During a recent rally in Pennsylvania, for example, Trump praised his male supporters for “allowing” their wives to attend his campaign rallies without them.While Trump is clearly trying to appeal to women with his IVF policy, you also have to wonder whether his buddy Musk – one of the most influential voices in the US’s growing pro-natalist movement – has a hand in this. If the billionaire did get a position in a Trump administration (a possibility that has been repeatedly floated) one imagines Musk would encourage the US to emulate Hungary’s pro-natalist policies, which stem from a racist desire to encourage births and repopulate the country with the “right” (AKA white) kind of children. “We want Hungarian children,” Viktor Orbán said in 2019. “Migration for us is surrender.”Free IVF may sound like a progressive policy on the surface but, for many on the right, it is linked to a belief that women are nothing more than baby-making machines designed to pass on the legacy of men. A future Donald J Trump Insemination Institute may not be as far-fetched as it sounds. Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnistDo you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here. More