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    Senate Republicans block bill to ensure IVF access for second time

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    Senate Republicans voted on Tuesday afternoon to block a bill that would have ensured access to in vitro fertilization nationwide.Every Republican, except Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, voted against the measure. Though a majority of 51 voted in favor, the bill needed 60 votes to pass. Democrats had brought the measure back to the floor after Republicans previously blocked it from advancing in June.Democrats have been pushing the issue this year after Alabama’s supreme court ruled that frozen embryos could be considered children under state law, leading several clinics in the state to suspend IVF treatment.Republicans, including Donald Trump, have scrambled to counter what could be a deeply unpopular stance against IVF.“Senate Republicans put politics first and families last again today by blocking the Right to IVF Act for the second time since June,” said Emilia Rowland, national press secretary for the Democratic National Committee.The vote marked Democrats’ latest election-year attempt to force Republicans into a defensive stance on women’s health issues.The bill had little chance of passing, but Democrats are hoping to use the do-over vote to put pressure on Republican congressional candidates and lay out a contrast between Kamala Harris and Trump in the presidential race, especially as the former president has called himself a “leader on IVF”.Rowland warned that Donald Trump would jeopardize access to fertility treatments if he wins in November.“Voters know the difference between words and actions,” she said. “And between now and November, they will turn out against Republicans from the top to bottom of the ballot.”The push started earlier this year after the Alabama supreme court ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law. Several clinics in the state suspended IVF treatments until the Republican-led legislature rushed to enact a law to provide legal protections for the clinics.Democrats quickly capitalized, holding a vote in June on the congressional bill from the Illinois senator Tammy Duckworth and warning that the US supreme court could go after the procedure next after it overturned the right to an abortion in 2022. The legislation would also increase access to the procedure and lower costs.The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said on the floor on Tuesday morning that the vote was a “second chance” for Republicans.“Americans are watching, families back home are watching, and couples who want to become parents are watching, too,” Schumer said.Meanwhile, Republicans have scrambled to counter Democrats on the issue, with many making clear that they support IVF treatments. Trump last month announced plans, without additional details, to require health insurance companies or the federal government to pay for the fertility treatment.In his debate with Harris earlier this month, Trump said he was a “leader” on the issue and talked about the “very negative” decision by the Alabama court that was later reversed by the legislature.But the issue has threatened to become a vulnerability for Republicans as some state laws passed by their party grant legal personhood not only to fetuses but to any embryos that are destroyed in the IVF process. Before its convention this summer, the Republican party adopted a policy platform that supports states establishing fetal personhood through the constitution’s 14th amendment, which grants equal protection under the law to all US citizens. The platform also encourages supporting IVF but does not explain how the party plans to do so.Democrats say that if Trump wants to improve access to the procedure, then Republicans should vote for their legislation.Duckworth, a military veteran who has used the fertility treatment to have her two children, has led the Senate effort on the legislation. “How dare you,” she said in comments directed toward her Republican colleagues after the first vote blocking the bill.Republicans have tried to push alternatives on the issue, including legislation that would discourage states from enacting explicit bans on the treatment, but those bills have been blocked by Democrats who say they are not enough.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Democrats unite to center reproductive rights as Republicans flail on abortion

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      As Kamala Harris and Donald Trump prepare to meet on the debate stage in Philadelphia, the battle over abortion rights has vaulted to the center of the 2024 presidential election campaign, the first since the supreme court’s decision overturning Roe v Wade.At the party’s convention last month, Democrats spotlighted the harrowing stories of women placed in medical peril as a result of post-Roe abortion bans in their states. Last week, the Harris campaign launched a 50-stop “reproductive freedom” bus tour across several battleground states, kicking off in Trump’s “back yard”, miles from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago residence in south Florida.And this weekend, days before the first – and perhaps only – primetime presidential debate, where the issue is likely to be raised, the Harris campaign debuted three new TV ads reminding voters that Trump has repeatedly taking credit for his role in ending the 50-year-old constitutional right to an abortion. The message is blunt: because of Trump, one in three women of reproductive age now live in states where abortion is banned or significantly restricted. And it could get worse, they warn, if Trump is given a second term.“Donald Trump is a fundamental threat to reproductive freedom – and you don’t have to take our word for it – Trump said it himself,” Lauren Hitt, a spokesperson for the Harris-Walz campaign, said in a statement. “Vice-President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting to restore reproductive freedom in all 50 states because they trust women to make the right decisions for their families.”In the bitterly contested race for the White House, abortion remains a glaring vulnerability for the Republican nominee.“You know it’s an important issue because Trump is trying to change his position,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster.As a candidate, Trump has held conflicting positions on abortion, alternately boasting that he appointed three of the nine supreme court justices whose votes were decisive in overturning Roe, while complaining that Republican extremism on the issue has cost his party at the ballot box.​He recently appeared to endorse a ballot measure to expand abortion rights in his adopted home state of Florida, only to announce one day later – after sparking backlash among prominent conservative groups – that he would vote against it. He has also previously hinted at support for a 15-week federal ban only to insist that the issue should be left to the states. His campaign has said Trump would not sign a national abortion ban as president.While the economy remains the top election issue for voters this November, a New York Times/Siena College poll released in August showed that a growing share of battleground state voters, particularly women, say abortion will be central to their decision. Among women younger than 45, abortion has eclipsed the economy as their single most important issue.In the final months of the campaign, Democrats are aiming to harness the unabated anger over the loss of federal abortion protections, especially among women and young people, and unifying around a platform that seeks to protect what remains of abortion access and the availability of reproductive healthcare, including contraception and fertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).In polling and focus groups, Lake said abortion rights remains an especially salient issue for women and the issue was helping to fuel a widening gender gap between Harris and Trump. Harris’s vocal support for abortion rights has not only energized young voters, a core Democratic constituency, but is also helping to persuade independent women and, as Lake put it, “older women who remember when abortion was illegal, and don’t think the idea of jailing doctors, investigating miscarriages, [and] eliminating birth control and IVF is a good idea”.View image in fullscreenIn recent weeks, Trump, who has long worried that Republican-led efforts to outlaw abortion and restrict access to reproductive care could imperil his White House bid, has sought recast his approach to the issue. During a town hall even in battleground Wisconsin, he endorsed a plan to make the government or insurance companies cover the cost of IVF – a type of fertility assistance that can cost tens of thousands of dollars and that some in the anti-abortion movement want to see limited.“We wanna produce babies in this country, right?” Trump said.Democrats assailed the proposal as insincere, pointing to the Republican’s record and the positions of his running mate, JD Vance.Trump has had “more positions on reproductive rights than he has had wives”, Ana Navarro, a TV personality and anti-Trump Republican, said last week, at the Florida launch of the Harris campaign’s bus tour.Democrats have leveraged the abortion issue to secure key victories in the 2022 midterms, when mobilization efforts around abortion rights drove strong turnout and enthusiasm, helping the party keep control of the Senate and limiting Republican gains in the House. In Michigan, Democrats secured a governing trifecta as voters in the state overwhelmingly turned out to back a ballot initiative enshrining abortion rights in the state’s constitution.“Bringing the message to the people, talking with women and healthcare providers and our families, that’s how we had such a historic outcome in our ’22 election here in Michigan,” the state’s governor, Gretchen Whitmer, a co-chair of Harris’s campaign, said in an MSNBC interview this week. “But it’s important, even for Michiganders and New Yorkers and Floridians, to know what’s at stake if we have a second Trump presidency.”Some Republicans have argued that the potency of abortion rights would wane in a noisy presidential election. But Lake believes the opposite could be true.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAbortion rights are a priority for young voters who are more likely to turn out in a presidential election year. Constitutional amendments seeking to guarantee abortion rights are on the ballot in 10 states this fall, including battleground states like Arizona and Nevada as well as Florida, once a presidential bellwether that has trended Republican in recent cycles.“We are the belly of the beast here in the state of Florida,” said Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party. “We are the state that has drastically moved on abortion from two years ago having full access to now being one of the most extreme abortion bans in the country.”Florida Democrats are hopeful the ballot initiative will help boost the former representative Debbie Mucarsel-Powell’s underdog campaign against the Republican incumbent senator Rick Scott. Elsewhere in the battle for control of the Senate, vulnerable Democratic incumbents Jon Tester of Montana and Jacky Rosen of Nevada will appear on the ballot alongside measures to protect abortion rights.Fried, who joined the Harris campaign kick-off in Palm Beach county last week, said the referendum had helped draw attention to the state – and was mobilizing voters of all political stripes.“If they can take away access to reproductive healthcare, what else is next?” she said. “What other types of rights have we moved the needle on that would be going backwards if Trump is re-elected?”The state’s referendum would overturn the state’s unpopular six-week ban, guaranteeing the right to abortion “before viability”, usually around 24 weeks of pregnancy. A poll released in mid-August found that 56% of Sunshine state voters support the proposed amendment, just shy of the 60% threshold needed to become law. Yet it drew more support than Trump, who led Harris 51% to 47% in the state, according to the survey.Abortion remains Harris’s strongest issue. She holds a 15-percentage-point advantage over Trump in a national poll of likely voters by The New York Times and Siena College. Yet there were also signs that Trump’s mixed signals have muddied the waters on the issue. According to the survey, released Sunday, nearly half of independent voters say they did not think the former president would sign into law a national abortion ban.Still, the Republican nominee must contend with his base, particularly evangelicals and other conservative Christians, who expect Trump to further restrict access to abortion as president.Kristan Hawkins, president of the prominent anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, recently told the Guardian that young conservatives were “shocked and saddened to see someone who they thought was pro-life, or who had always reaffirmed pro-life values, walking back on that”.Tuesday’s presidential debate in Philadelphia offers one of the highest-profile opportunities for Harris to draw a sharp contrast with Trump on abortion. Reproductive rights supporters anticipate Harris will challenge the former president over his attempts to shift positions on the issue.“I hope that Vice-President Harris makes it crystal clear for the tens of millions of people who are watching that leaving it to the states is not a moderate position – that it is extreme,” said Rob Davidson, a Michigan-based emergency physician and executive director of the Committee to Protect Health Care, a left-leaning coalition of physicians and medical professionals that recently endorsed Harris.Davidson said voters will also want to hear Harris articulate her vision for expanding access to reproductive healthcare.“We know what Trump did,” he said. “What are we going to do going forward?” More

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      JD Vance endorsed anti-IVF report that contradicts Trump’s new stance

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      A rightwing thinktank report proposing sweeping restrictions to abortions and fertility treatments was endorsed by JD Vance years before he became a fervent backer of Donald Trump and – eventually – his vice-presidential running mate known for his derisive views on childless women.In 2017, months into Trump’s presidency, Vance wrote the foreword to the Index of Culture and Opportunity, a collection of essays by conservative authors for the Heritage Foundation that included ideas for encouraging women to have children earlier and promoting a resurgence of “traditional” family structure.The essays lauded the increase in state laws restricting abortion rights and included arguments that the practice should become “unthinkable” in the US, a hardline posture the Democrats now say is the agenda of Trump and Vance, who they accuse of harbouring the intent to impose a national ban following a 2022 supreme court ruling overturning Roe V Wade and annulling the federal right to abort a pregnancy.The report also includes an essay lamenting the spread of in vitro fertilisation (IVF) and other fertility treatments, with the author attributing them as reasons for women delaying having children and prioritising higher education rather than starting families.IVF has emerged as an issue in November’s presidential race after Trump said last week that he favoured it being covered by government funding or private health insurance companies – a stance seeming at odds with many Republicans, including Vance, who was one of 47 GOP senators to vote against a bill in June intended to expand access to the treatment.The report’s contents provide fresh insights into the philosophy informing some of Vance’s inflammatory later public statements, which have included saying that America is run by “childless cat ladies” and that he is disturbed by the idea of teachers who do not have children.He has also suggested that people without children are likely to become “more sociopathic”.The 2017 report was released a year after the publication of Vance’s bestselling memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, and also after he had made a series of statements denouncing Trump, whom the US senator called “cultural heroin” and speculated could become “America’s Hitler”. He also described himself as “a never Trump guy”.However, its foreword contains hints that Vance’s thoughts on the then president were already evolving.“We all seem to be waking up to the fact that things are not quite what they used to be,” he wrote. “When president Trump has spoken of the country as trapped in a losing game of international trade or decried the carnage on so many American streets, he has earned criticism for painting an overly pessimistic view of his own country. Yet that pessimism struck a chord with many Americans.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“The question for those concerned about the future of the country is not whether negativity is justified, but why negativity inspired so many at the polls.”Vance’s views ultimately went full circle, and Trump endorsed his successful election campaign for the US Senate in Ohio in 2022.The foreword to the 2017 report also seems to be one of Vance’s first known links to the Heritage Foundation, a thinktank responsible for producing Project 2025, a controversial and radical blueprint for remaking US government and society in a conservative image. Trump has disowned the 922-page document. But the campaign of Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, has depicted it as an assault on basic freedoms and typical of what lies in store under a second Trump presidency. More

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      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

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      Anti-abortion groups warn Trump’s row back on position risks losing votes

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      Over the last two weeks, Donald Trump has publicly backed away from multiple anti-abortion positions – a move that Democrats see as hypocritical and that, anti-abortion activists warn, risks alienating voters who have long stood by him.On Thursday, Trump said that, if elected, he would make the government or insurance companies cover in vitro fertilization – a type of fertility assistancethat some in the anti-abortion movement want to see curtailed. Trump also seemed to indicate that he planned to vote in favor of a ballot measure to restore abortion access in Florida, which currently bans abortion past six weeks of pregnancy. “I am going to be voting that we need more than six weeks,” Trump told NBC News in an interview.Trump’s campaign quickly rushed to walk back his remarks on the ballot measure, telling NPR that Trump simply meant that six weeks is too early in pregnancy to ban abortion. “President Trump has not yet said how he will vote on the ballot initiative in Florida,” his press secretary said.Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, in a decision backed by three justices that Trump appointed, Trump has alternately bragged about toppling Roe and complained that outrage over its fall will cost Republicans elections. But Trump’s comments on Thursday mark his latest attempt to apparently clarify and soften his stance on the controversial procedure. Last week, Trump also suggested that he would not use a 19th-century anti-vice law to ban abortion nationwide, while his running mate, JD Vance, said Trump would not sign a national ban.“I don’t think it tells us necessarily what Trump is or isn’t going to do, because he’s still been leaving himself wiggle room on a lot of critical questions,” said Mary Ziegler, a professor at the University of California, Davis, School of Law who studies the legal history of reproduction. But, she continued: “What had been a strategy of ‘be ambiguous and then hopefully be everything to everyone’ has tilted more in the direction of Trump trying to assure voters that he doesn’t agree with the anti-abortion movement.”Trump’s new strategy comes as Kamala Harris, a far more effective champion of abortion rights than Joe Biden, has taken over as the Democratic nominee for president, and as polls show the two candidates are neck and neck. But this strategy may leave anti-abortion voters feeling less energized to vote for him, warned Kristan Hawkins, president of the prominent anti-abortion group Students for Life of America.“The pro-life movement didn’t always have a firm place in the Republican party. For many years, we were at the little kids’ table,” Hawkins said. “The young people that we work with, they don’t remember that. And so they’re absolutely shocked and saddened to see someone who they thought was pro-life, or who had always reaffirmed pro-life values, walking back on that.”Although the anti-abortion movement was a critical component of Trump’s success in the 2016 presidential election, Republicans have tried to back away from it in the years since Roe’s demise as abortion rights supporters have repeatedly won ballot measures even in red states. Sixty per cent of American adults believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 70% say access to IVF is a “good thing”.Tresa Undem, who has polled people on abortion for more than 20 years, does not think that Trump’s comments will necessarily win him the support of uncertain or independent voters who support abortion rights. Instead, he may be trying to reassure the segment of his base that also supports access to the procedure.“A third of his voters are pro-choice,” Undem said. “In a recent survey we did, 16% of 2020 Trump voters say abortion rights are a top five issue. So when you have an election that is probably going to be determined based on 1% of people, 16% of Trump voters saying their abortion rights is top in their mind – that’s a problem for him.”Democrats have cast Trump’s new strategy, particularly his comments on IVF, as a sham. In a Friday press call organized by the Harris campaign, the Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren, a Democrat, repeatedly pointed out that Vance had voted against a Senate bill to create federal protections for IVF.“Trump that thinks women are stupid and that we can be gaslighted,” Warren said. “He seems to believe he can do one thing when he talks to his extremist base and then turn around and smile at the overwhelming majority of Americans who want to see access to abortion and IVF protected.”On Friday, the DNC is rolling out billboards in Pennsylvania, a critical battleground state, that slam Trump over IVF, according to a strategy shared exclusively with the Guardian. “Trump overturned Roe, threatening the future of IVF,” one billboard reads. Another says: “Donald Trump’s Project 2025 Undermines Reproductive Care and Threatens IVF.”Project 2025, a playbook of conservative policies drawn up by the influential Heritage Foundation, contains a long list of anti-abortion proposals. Trump has tried to distance himself from it over the last several weeks.At least one prominent anti-abortion activist, Lila Rose, has publicly declared she currently does not plan to vote for Trump, given his recent turn away from anti-abortion positions. But Hawkins is still committed to getting people to vote for Trump – not because of Trump himself, but because she fears how a Harris presidency would strengthen abortion access.“I don’t like it. It’s not where I think we should be as a nation, but I think that we’ve had to do this at times within the pro-life movement,” she said. “Folks are asked: if you can’t vote for a candidate, vote against the worst one.”What Hawkins is less sure of is whether Trump’s comments will affect Students for Life’s get-out-the-vote program for the 2024 election. “I think it remains to be seen whether or not we’re also talking about Donald Trump at the doors,” she said. More

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      The coach v the couch: key takeaways from the first Harris-Walz rally

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      Kamala Harris introduced her running mate, Minnesota governor Tim Walz, to supporters at a packed, energetic rally at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.The event, which kicks off a week-long tour through the most politically competitive US states, marks a new chapter for the Harris campaign after securing enough delegates to be the Democratic nominee.Here’s what you need to know:Harris sought to define Walz foremost as a teacher, veteran and football coachHarris called Walz the “kind of teacher and mentor that every child in America dreams of having”. She told a story about him agreeing to lead his school’s gay-straight alliance, knowing “the signal it would send to have a football coach get involved”.Harris also spoke of his skills as a marksman and his views on the second amendment. And finally, she talked at length about Walz’s time in the army national guard and his service to the country.Walz focused on a unifying, future-focused messageWalz, who like Harris is known for his smile, started his speech by saying: “Thank you for the trust you put in me, but more so, thank you for bringing back the joy.” He then spoke about growing up in the “heartland”, respecting neighbors, and his family of educators, attempting to differentiate the ticket from Donald Trump and JD Vance’s focus on mass deportation and crime.“If Donald Trump and JD Vance are irritated that Kamala Harris smiles and laughs, they’re really going to be irritated by Tim Walz,” Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of Minnesota’s house of representatives, told the Guardian.’Mind your own damn business’: Walz attacked the Trump-Vance ticket with a focus on reproductive rights and other freedomsWalz talked about his daughter Hope, who often appears in videos and photographs with her father, being born through IVF, and Republican attacks on contraception and abortion. Abortion opponents have been increasingly pushing for broader measures that would give rights and protections to embryos and fetuses, which could have big implications for fertility treatments.He also spoke about gun control, a tenet of the Harris campaign, saying he supported the second amendment but that children should have the freedom to go to school without the concern of school shootings.Walz made a direct hit at Project 2025, the conservative manifesto created by Trump allies and advisers. “Don’t believe him when he plays dumb,” he said of the former president. “He knows exactly what Project 2025 will to do restrict our freedoms.”He encapsulated his idea in another sticky colloquialism to counter Republicans hoping to intervene in medical practices and schools: “Mind your own damn business.”Josh Shapiro, who had been a vice-presidential contender, still made his markThe Pennsylvania governor who was also in the final running to be Harris’s running mate, spoke before Harris and Walz. His pitch-perfect and fiery speech helped set the tone for the rally, and he threw his support behind the newly announced ticket.Shapiro and Walz’s speeches also made the distinction between the two politicians clear. Shapiro has been described as Obama-like in his polished and forceful delivery. Meanwhile, Walz, whose speech spanned dad jokes and pointed attacks on his opponents, seasoned his remarks with midwestern dialect, adding a “damn well” here and a “come on” there. “Say it with me! We are not going back,” he said, starting a chant from the audience. “We’ve got 91 days. My god, that’s easy,” he said. “We’ll sleep when we’re dead.”The couch joke was madeWalz said his GOP rival, Trump’s running mate JD Vance, and Trump “are creepy and yes, they’re weird as hell”. He added that he “can’t wait to debate the guy”, speaking of Vance. Then, to sustained cheers and laughter, he made a reference to the baseless, but much-shared claim, that Vance admitted to having sex with a couch in his memoir. “That is if he’s willing to get off the couch and show up”.Stumping earlier today in Pennsylvania, Vance said: “I absolutely want to debate Tim Walz,” but not until after the Democratic convention, he said, because of the sudden change in the Democratic ticket. More

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      Senate Republicans block bill that establishes right to IVF across the US

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      Senate Republicans have defeated a bill that would have established a federal right to in vitro fertilization, a piece of legislation that Democrats forced to the floor on Thursday as part of an election-year effort to contrast their approach to reproductive rights with that of the party across the aisle.The bill, the Right to IVF act, would have overwritten any state efforts to restrict the right to IVF as well as seeking to make the treatment more affordable and accessible, including for US military service members and veterans.The legislation was introduced by Senators Patty Murray of Washington state, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, and the bill was not expected to pass, given that most legislation needs at least 60 votes to advance in the Senate.Instead, Democrats hoped to get Republicans on the record opposing an infertility treatment that is widely popular among Americans. They deployed a similar strategy last week, when Democrats held a vote on a bill that would have guaranteed a nationwide right to contraception – which, like IVF, is very popular. That bill, the Right to Contraception act, also failed.“Last week, every senator was put on the record as to whether they will defend the right to contraception. And despite Republicans’ words about supporting birth control, their actions – voting against the Right to Contraception act – spoke louder,” Murray said in a speech from the Senate floor on Thursday. “Today, we are putting Republicans on the record on another issue families across the country are deeply concerned about: the right to IVF.”The Louisiana senator Bill Cassidy, a Republican, denounced the bill, which he said was motivated by “political purposes”.“This is not serious legislation,” Cassidy said. “It was not brought through the committee process. It is a political process.”Because IVF typically involves creating embryos that may not be implanted in a woman’s uterus or may go unused after genetic testing, some anti-abortion campaigners have long opposed IVF. However, the US abortion wars have rarely focused on IVF.Then, in February, the Alabama state supreme court ruled that frozen embryos created through IVF are legally “extrauterine children” – a decision that endorsed the tenets of so-called fetal personhood, promoted by a US movement that seeks to endow embryos and fetuses with full legal rights and protections. The ruling led many IVF providers in Alabama to temporarily pause their operations, which created chaos and triggered backlash across the country.Still, anti-abortion activists have continued to gain ground in their battle on IVF. On Wednesday, the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant group in the US, voted at its annual meeting to condemn IVF. With its nearly 13 million members and enormous political influence, the Southern Baptist Convention’s rejection of IVF signaled a turning point in the debate over IVF. Although evangelical Protestants have largely supported IVF, the vote suggests that the anti-abortion movement is successfully making the case that opposition to abortion necessitates opposition to IVF.“This is not the end of our fight for family building for all. We will continue until everyone in this country has access to the family building options they need and the availability of IVF is guaranteed in all 50 states,” Barbara Collura, president and CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association, said in a statement Thursday, after the failed Senate vote. “Introducing this bill was already a big win for advocates of increasing access to fertility treatments. Our work led to this comprehensive legislation, and we are not giving up.” More

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      Alabama Democrat Marilyn Lands says voters ready for ‘change’ after surprise win – as it happened

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      In an interview with Huntsville, Alabama broadcaster WHNT, the Democrat Marilyn Lands predicted better days ahead for the beleaguered party:Lands yesterday was elected to Alabama’s state house in a special election to fill a vacant seat previously held by the GOP, in a rare instance of Democrats making inroads in one of the most thoroughly Republican states in the country.Democrats are cheering Marilyn Lands, who managed to seize a state house seat from Republicans in deep-red Alabama, fuelled by her promises to protect IVF access and repeal the state’s abortion ban. To be clear: the party does not have the numbers to make either of those promises happen in a state thoroughly dominated by the GOP, but it’s nonetheless the latest instance of Joe Biden’s allies using concerns about reproductive rights to win elections in hostile territory. Meanwhile, in Texas, a federal appeals court maintained the block on a Republican-backed law that would allow state police to arrest suspected illegal border crossers. The legislation will probably remain on hold until either appeals judges or the US supreme court rules on its merits.Here’s what else happened:
      Israel wants to reschedule a meeting with US officials that it called off after Washington allowed a UN security council resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza to pass.
      Disney ended its feud with allies of Republican governor Ron DeSantis, which erupted after the entertainment giant criticized the state’s so-called “don’t say gay” law.
      Kansas Republicans moved to force abortion providers to ask patients the reason why they are seeking the procedure, and probably have the votes to get around an expected veto by the Democratic governor, Laura Kelly.
      Donald Trump is under a new gag order in his hush-money case. But it does not apply to the presiding judge Juan Merchan, so the former president attacked him on his social media network this morning.
      Jeffrey Clark, a former justice department official indicted alongside Trump in Georgia for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election, pleaded the fifth at a hearing that could lead to him losing his law license in Washington DC.
      Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis says a settlement reached between Disney and his allies over who controls Walt Disney World’s governing district “vindicated” his administration’s policies:Here’s more on the end of the long-running squabble:Jeffrey Clark, the former justice department official who was indicted in Georgia alongside Donald Trump for allegedly trying to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory in the state, repeatedly declined to answer questions today at a hearing that could see him lose his law license in Washington DC, Politico reports.Clark repeatedly invoked the fifth amendment’s protecting against self incrimination in response to questions from DC Bar panel investigators, who rested their case after today’s hearing.Here’s more on that, from Politico:
      Clark’s decision to invoke his constitutional right against self-incrimination underscores the criminal jeopardy he faces in other ongoing legal proceedings. In Atlanta, he’s charged alongside Trump in an alleged racketeering conspiracy to corrupt the 2020 election, and in Washington DC, federal prosecutors identified him – but have not charged him – as one of Trump’s alleged co-conspirators in a scheme to seize power.
      “I will invoke the Fifth,” Clark said in response to a question about when he first met Trump. Clark also said the question was covered by attorney-client, law enforcement and executive privileges. “A veritable phalanx of privileges,” Clark added wryly as the exercise wore on.
      The Fifth Amendment to the Constitution protects Americans from being forced to provide testimony that may incriminate themselves in legal proceedings. For Clark, that’s particularly important as he faces a potential criminal trial in Georgia. His attorneys worried that forcing Clark to take the stand simply to invoke his Fifth Amendment right would drive headlines or embarrass Clark, but the DC Bar panel presiding over the hearing permitted investigators to pose several dozen questions to Clark.
      Clark himself grew combative as the questioning wore on, accusing the lead investigator, Hamilton Fox, of seeking to humiliate him on the stand by forcing him to repeatedly invoke the Fifth Amendment. His bristling prompted Merrill Hirsh, the chair of the panel presiding over the hearing, to admonish Clark not to argue with Fox or risk potentially waiving the privileges he invoked.
      Democrats nationwide are taking heart from Marilyn Lands’s victory in Alabama, seeing it as a validation of their strategy to make concerns over reproductive care access a centerpiece of their pitch to voters.But Lands’s election does not change the fundamental balance of power in Alabama, where the Republican party firmly controls the levers of power. All elected officials are members of the GOP, which has supermajorities in the state house and senate.Republican lawmakers in Alabama have lately spent their time passing laws restricting diversity and inclusion programs from being established at public schools and state agencies, and barring trans people from using public bathrooms that align with their gender identity at colleges and universities.They also moved quickly to pass legislation allowing in vitro fertilization care to continue after the state supreme court issued a ruling that forced fertility clinics to cancel appointments. Democrats supported that effort:Marilyn Lands’s victory yesterday in the special election for Alabama’s state house is probably the most exciting thing to happen for Democrats in the state since Doug Jones won a Senate seat in 2018.His victory came after multiple women alleged sexual assault or other inappropriate behavior by the Republican candidate, Roy Moore. In an interview last night with CNN, Jones, who was ousted from the Senate by the Republican Tommy Tuberville in the 2020 elections, described Lands’s win as “a huge deal”:In an interview with Huntsville, Alabama broadcaster WHNT, the Democrat Marilyn Lands predicted better days ahead for the beleaguered party:Lands yesterday was elected to Alabama’s state house in a special election to fill a vacant seat previously held by the GOP, in a rare instance of Democrats making inroads in one of the most thoroughly Republican states in the country.The recovery operation in Baltimore continues amid reports that a truck has been found amid the wreckage of the Francis Scott Key bridge.For more on the disaster, and the effort to get the economically vital port of Baltimore back up and running, follow our live blog:The White House media briefing is under way in the west wing now, with the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre, just introducing the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, who’s appearing as the guest today to talk about the bridge disaster in Baltimore.Buttigieg paid tribute to the six workers who are missing and presumed dead after the bridge collapse, and the two workers who survived, one badly injured, who were all repairing the bridge’s road surface “while we all slept”, he said.Buttigieg said that the port will be reopened as soon as possible.The National Transportation Safety Board is investigating the bridge’s collapse, with Buttigieg saying that the bridge, which was completed in the 1970s, was not build to withstand an impact from the size of container ship that operates these days and which hit the bridge strut in the early hours of Tuesday morning, leading to the entire bridge’s collapse, closing the port for all traffic.Guardian US has a dedicated live blog covering all the developments in the Baltimore bridge disaster and you can follow that news here.Israel has asked to reschedule a meeting with US officials to discuss its military plans in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah, a US official said on Wednesday, days after the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, abruptly scrapped the planned talks, Reuters reports.Netanyahu called off a planned visit to Washington by a senior Israeli delegation after the US allowed passage of a Gaza ceasefire resolution at the United Nations on Monday, in a move that appeared to reflect growing US frustration with the Israeli premier.US officials said the Biden administration was perplexed by the Israeli cancellation and considered it an overreaction to the security council resolution, insisting there had been no change in policy.On Wednesday, a US official said Netanyahu’s office “has said they’d like to reschedule the meeting dedicated to Rafah. We are now working with them to set a convenient date.”Netanyahu is considering sending a delegation for a White House meeting on Rafah as early as next week but the scheduling is still being worked out, an Israeli official in Washington told Reuters on condition of anonymity.There was no immediate comment from the Israeli prime minister’s office. The planned talks are expected to focus on Israel’s threatened offensive in Rafah, the last relatively safe haven for Palestinian civilians in Gaza.The White House said last week it intended to share with Israeli officials alternatives for eliminating the Palestinian militant group Hamas without a ground offensive in Rafah that Washington says would be a “disaster”.The US secretary of state, Antony Blinken, will travel to France and Belgium next week, a state department spokesperson, Matthew Miller, told reporters on Wednesday, Reuters reports.Blinken will meet with the Nato secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, and the Ukrainian foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, while in Brussels for a Nato meeting, Miller said at a regular news briefing.Meanwhile, the state department does not think hostage talks with Israel and Hamas are over, Miller said, adding that Washington thinks there is an ability to continue to pursue the release of hostages.He also said “we do” when asked if the department believed a limited military campaign in Rafah, in the south of Gaza, can take out remaining commanders of the Palestinian militant group Hamas.Hamas controls the territory and led the attack on southern Israel on 7 October last year in which more than 1,200 people were massacred and more than 240 people were taken hostage into Gaza, with more than 100 remaining captive at this time.Democrats are cheering Marilyn Lands, who managed to seize a state house seat from Republicans in deep-red Alabama, fueled by her promises to protect IVF access and repeal the state’s abortion ban. To be clear: the party does not have the numbers to make either of those promises happen in a state thoroughly dominated by the GOP, but it’s nonetheless the latest instance of Joe Biden’s allies using concerns about reproductive rights to win elections in hostile territory. Meanwhile, in Texas, a federal appeals court maintained the block on a Republican-backed law that would allow state police to arrest suspected illegal border crossers. The legislation will probably remain on hold until either appeals judges or the US supreme court rules on its merits.Here’s what else has happened today so far:
      Disney ended its feud with allies of Republican governor Ron DeSantis, which erupted after the entertainment giant criticized the state’s so-called “don’t say gay” law.
      Kansas Republicans moved to force abortion providers to ask patients the reason they are seeking the procedure, and probably have the votes to get around an expected veto by the Democratic governor, Laura Kelly.
      Donald Trump is under a new gag order in his hush-money case. But it does not apply to the presiding judge Juan Merchan, so the former president attacked him on his social media network this morning.
      Apparently in some kind of foul mood, Donald Trump also insulted his one-time ally Ronna McDaniel following her hiring from NBC yesterday, the Guardian’s Martin Pengelly reports:Donald Trump mocked the former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ronna McDaniel, for her firing by NBC days after being hired as a political analyst.“Wow!” the former president and presumptive Republican nominee, who ejected McDaniel from the RNC in favour of his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, wrote on his Truth Social platform.“Ronna McDaniel got fired by Fake News NBC. She only lasted two days, and this after McDaniel went out of her way to say what they wanted to hear. It leaves her in a very strange place, it’s called NEVER NEVERLAND, and it’s not a place you want to be.”McDaniel’s hiring was announced by NBC last Friday. Interviewed on Meet the Press on Sunday, she disavowed Trump’s lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election but also claimed there were electoral “problems” in battleground states.Protests from on-air talent and an NBC union group also concerned McDaniel’s combative relations with the press in seven years as RNC chair, a period coinciding with Trump’s takeover of the Republican party. On Tuesday evening McDaniel was gone – giving her a four-day NBC career, not the two claimed by Trump. More

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      Democrat wins election in conservative Alabama after focus on abortion and IVF

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      An Alabama Democrat who campaigned against the state’s near-total abortion ban has won a special election to the state legislature, a stark signal that reproductive rights is a potent issue for Democratic candidates, even in the deep south.Marilyn Lands won the state house seat on Tuesday, defeating Teddy Powell, a Republican, by 63% to 37%. Lands, a licensed professional counselor, previously ran for the seat in 2022 and lost by 7% to David Cole, a Republican who resigned last year after pleading guilty to voter fraud.Lands made Alabama’s abortion ban and access to contraception and in vitro fertilization central to her campaign, speaking openly about her own previous abortion experience in a TV ad that featured her saying that it was “shameful that today women have fewer freedoms than I had two decades ago”.Lands said that her win sent a clear message in the wake of Alabama’s near-total abortion ban, which came into effect after the US supreme court struck down Roe v Wade in 2022. In February, there was also a highly controversial state supreme court decision that threatened the use of IVF.“This is a giant step forward for Alabama, this is a victory tonight for women, for families, for Alabama in general,” Lands told WHNT News 19 in the wake of her win.“It feels like it’s the start of a change here,” she added of the state’s politics. “I think we are ready for something different, we are tired of Alabama being 49th and 50th in all the key metrics. We can do better, we are better and I want to make that happen.”Lands said she would work to overturn Alabama’s abortion law, one of the most stringent in the US, which outlaws abortion at any stage of pregnancy with no exceptions for rape or incest. It is only permitted in situations where the life of the pregnant person is in danger.“Today, Alabama women and families sent a clear message that will be heard in Montgomery and across the nation,” she said in a statement. “Our legislature must repeal Alabama’s no-exceptions abortion ban, fully restore access to IVF, and protect the right to contraception.”The special election does little to tip the balance of power in conservative Alabama, with Republicans holding a commanding 75 to 27 advantage over Democrats in the state house.However, Democrats have hailed the victory as a further sign that restricting access to abortion has proved electorally damaging to Republicans, particularly in the sort of seat contested by Lands. The Democrat won in the state’s 10th district, which comprises parts of Huntsville and Madison, a relatively affluent and educated area of northern Alabama only narrowly carried by Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election.“This special election is a harbinger of things to come – Republicans across the country have been put on notice that there are consequences to attacks on IVF – from the bluest blue state to the reddest red, voters are choosing to fight for their fundamental freedoms by electing Democrats across the country,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, in a statement sent to Politico. More