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    ‘We are failing’: doctors and students in the US look to Mexico for basic abortion training

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    On paper, it should not be difficult for Dr Sebastian Ramos to learn to perform abortions. As a family medicine doctor, Ramos works in a specialty that frequently provides the procedure. He lives in deep-blue California, where it is still allowed. And the administrators running Ramos’s residency program – a kind of apprenticeship that US doctors must undergo to become full-fledged physicians – support Ramos’s desire to learn how to do it.But over the course of his three-year-long residency, Ramos is guaranteed just three days’ worth of training at Planned Parenthood. Residents get to participate in only a handful of abortions.“That’s just not enough if you want to practice abortion care,” said Ramos, who asked to go by a shortened version of his last name to protect his privacy. “I knew that if I wanted to do this, I needed more experience.”That’s why, earlier this month, Ramos traveled to a clinic in Mexico City for two weeks’ worth of training in abortion provision. During his first week at the clinic, which is run by the global organization MSI Reproductive Choices and its Mexican arm Fundación MSI, Ramos performed roughly 60 abortions.In the years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, paving the way for more than a dozen states to ban virtually all abortions, a small but growing number of would-be abortion providers have begun to leave the country in search of an education. In 2023, MSI trained nine American doctors to perform abortions at clinics in Mexico. In 2024, it trained 27. So far this year, it is on track to double that number.View image in fullscreen“On one hand, it’s a tremendous relief to know that medical students and residents aren’t going to have to forego this very important part of their training in their education,” said Pamela Merritt, executive director of Medical Students for Choice. Last year, Merritt’s organization helped eight medical students and residents receive abortion training in Mexico and the UK.Merritt continued: “It’s also incredibly sad that in the United States, we are failing to train people even to the standard of care indicated by abortion bans.”Every abortion ban in the US permits abortions to save a patient’s life. But without adequate training, doctors may not be skilled enough to perform abortions even in those dire circumstances.‘It’s a shame’Medical schools and residency programs are run by massive hospitals that are heavily dependent on public funding; such institutions tend to be, by nature, leery of anything as controversial as abortion. The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME) has required OB-GYN residencies to teach doctors how to perform abortions since the 1990s, but rather than offer training in-house, hospitals have often farmed their residents out to freestanding abortion clinics for training.Even before Roe fell, this system was faulty: a 2019 study found that, despite the ACGME requirement, just 64% of OB-GYN residency programs offered “routine training with dedicated time” for abortions. Family medicine residents who want to learn to perform abortions face a greater disadvantage, since the ACGME does not require their residency programs to offer any kind of abortion training.View image in fullscreenEven most OB-GYN residents, program directors reported in the 2019 study, did not achieve what doctors call “competency” when it came to abortion. Without competency – a qualification that’s measured through a melange of doctors’ knowledge, skills and attitudes – doctors may not be able to safely perform abortions on their own.Abortion training and competency is now even harder to come by. Since Roe’s collapse, more than 100 abortion clinics have closed. Those that are left are often besieged by patients fleeing abortion bans, leaving them without the time and space to teach everybody who wants to learn.If an OB-GYN residency program is located in a state that bans abortion, ACGME rules currently dictate that the residency “must provide access to this clinical experience in a different jurisdiction where it is lawful”. The ACGME declined to respond to a request for information about how many residency programs are currently compliant with its abortion-training requirement, although records show that no OB-GYN programs have lost their accreditation status in the last year. Patricia Lohr serves as the director of research and innovation for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (Bpas), a UK non-profit that provides abortions up until about 24 weeks of pregnancy. Lohr trained to become an OB-GYN in the US. “Having been a resident and a medical student in the United States, I could really see the importance of having access to abortion education that wasn’t entirely reliant on what was being delivered within academic training programs,” Lohr said. “Because often, abortions weren’t being provided in those academic hospitals.”View image in fullscreenWhen Lohr moved to the UK, she quickly moved to create a two-week training program at Bpas where medical students could learn about abortions and observe – but not perform – the procedure. In the years since Roe fell, that training program has received a surge of applications from American medical students and residents.“It’s a shame that people would have to travel to learn a basic part of women’s health care,” Lohr said. “There are many trainees out there at the moment who would like to obtain abortion skills, but cannot get it locally, and so they get diverted into doing something else.”Lauren Wiener, a New Jersey medical student, had originally planned to travel to Arizona in summer 2022 to learn how to provide abortions. But when Roe’s fall led Arizona abortion providers to temporarily stop working, Wiener had to cancel her trip. Instead, she ended up undergoing a week-long training at Bpas last fall.“It is something that you need to know how to do, because there are emergency situations,” Wiener said of abortions. “You might not want to electively perform an abortion at 24 weeks, but if someone comes in and they’re miscarrying, you need to know how to evacuate that uterus. It’s a skill you need to have to save a life.”‘We will be there’While training in the US dwindles, the country’s increasingly conservative approach to abortion has also put it at odds with much of the rest of the world. Only four countries – including the US – have tightened their abortion laws over the last 30 years, while more than 60 countries and territories have loosened theirs, according to a tally by the Center for Reproductive Rights.Mexico is one of them. In 2023, its supreme court decriminalized abortion nationwide; the procedure is now available in about half of all Mexican states. And providers aren’t the only people taking advantage of Mexico’s liberalized abortion laws: last year, Fundación MSI provided first-trimester abortions to 62 women from the United States.“Training, training, training – it is key, to have less danger for actual patients,” said Araceli López-Nava, managing director of MSI Latin America. “We understand how difficult the situation is becoming in the US, so we’re happy to help.”The organization has the capacity to train up to 300 doctors a year to perform abortions, López-Nava estimated.View image in fullscreenMSI is not, however, a solution for everybody. Would-be trainees need to speak Spanish. And although the organization has in past years trained medical students, MSI’s Mexico clinics have started focusing on teaching residents who have already performed 20 abortions. Because residents have already chosen their specialties and secured berths in residency programs – which can be highly competitive – they are more likely to become abortion providers.Training in Mexico can also be pricey, especially since the program does not pay for travel and lodging. Ramos’s entire trip cost about $5,000, although a scholarship helped him cover most of the costs.“It’s a way, at least for me, to be exposed to a different medical system, learn from different providers from a different country, exchange knowledge,” Ramos said. “I feel like I’m being adequately prepared to meet the needs of my patients in the US.” More

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      Trump administration eviscerates maternal and child health programs

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      Multiple maternal and child health programs have been eliminated or hollowed out as part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) layoffs, prompting alarm and disbelief among advocates working to make Americans healthier.The fear and anxiety come as a full accounting of the cuts remains elusive. Federal health officials have released only broad descriptions of changes to be made, rather than a detailed accounting of the programs and departments being eviscerated.“Pediatricians, myself included, are losing sleep at night – worried about the health of the nation’s children,” said Dr Sue Kressly, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics.“The one that stands out to me is the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. There is no way to make our country healthier by eliminating expertise where it all starts, and it all starts at maternal and child health.”The health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, announced HHS would eliminate 10,000 jobs as part of a restructuring plan. Together with cuts already made by Elon Musk’s unofficial “department of government efficiency”, HHS is likely to lose 20,000 workers – roughly one-quarter of its workforce.“We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl,” Kennedy said. “We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic.”Piecemeal and crowd-sourced information, which has filled the vacuum left by a lack of information from the health department, appears to show maternal health programs slated for elimination, many without an indication of whether they will be reassigned. The Guardian asked HHS to comment on the cuts but did not receive a response.The picture of cuts was further muddied on Thursday when Kennedy told reporters, according to Politico: “We’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstalled, because we’ll make mistakes.”In the aftermath of the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, there’s been much conservative criticism of public health agencies, particularly the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Pandemic policy continues to be an animating force within the Republican party, whose supporters are cynical about the value of federal public health programs following federal vaccine mandates.The cuts to maternal health programs may serve a second purpose for Republicans.Such programs have come under fire in some conservative states, in part because the experts involved investigate deaths that could have been prevented with abortion services – now illegal or severely restricted in nearly two dozen conservative states.As part of the restructuring, the administration announced 28 divisions would be folded into 15, including the creation of a new division, called the “Administration for a Healthy America”, or “AHA”.The administration argued the “centralization” would “improve coordination of health resources for low-income Americans and will focus on areas including, primary care, maternal and child Health, mental health, environmental health, HIV/Aids and workforce development”.Meanwhile, experts in HIV/Aids, worker health and safety, healthcare for society’s most vulnerable, and experts in maternal and child health have received “reduction in force” notices, a federal term for layoffs, or have been placed on administrative leave with the expectation of being eliminated.“It certainly appears there was a particular focus on parts of HHS that dealt with women’s or reproductive health,” said Sean Tipton, chief policy officer at the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, about the cuts.He added: “How in the world you can justify the CDC eliminating the division of maternal mortality is beyond me.”Among the divisions hard-hit was the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), an operating division of HHS like the CDC, which housed the the Maternal and Child Health Bureau. HRSA lost as many as 600 workers.The CDC’s division of reproductive health, which studies maternal health, appeared to have been nearly eliminated, according to multiple reports, with some of the division’s portfolio also expected to be folded into AHA.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe entire staff of a gold-standard maternal mortality survey, a program that was called the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, was also put on leave, Stat reported. The epidemiologist in charge of the CDC survey, Jennifer Bombard, wrote to colleagues on Tuesday: “[T]he entire CDC PRAMS team, including myself, has received the Reduction in Force (RIF) notice from HHS today.”A HRSA hotline that had fielded calls from new moms seeking mental health support was also cut, Stat reported. Layoffs at the Administration for Children and Families have jolted providers of federally backed high-quality childcare for low-income families, a program called Head Start.The CDC’s only experts on infertility were laid off, just days after Trump described himself as the “fertilization president” at an event marking Women’s History Month. The team had collected congressionally mandated statistics on fertility clinics’ success rates. Without the workers, it is unclear who at the department will help fertility clinics comply with the law.“I’m astounded, sad, perplexed,” said Barbara Collura, president of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “Infertility impacts one in six people globally, and now we don’t have anybody at the CDC who knows anything about infertility and IVF?”A division of the CDC called the National Center for HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention also appeared to be gutted, with the director Jonathan Mermin placed on administrative leave. Among the center’s many tasks, it worked to curb the spread of congenital syphilis, a debilitating disease that is on the rise in the US.The March of Dimes, an influential non-profit whose mission is to improve the health of mothers and babies, said the cuts “raise serious concerns” at a time when maternal mortality rates remain “alarmingly high”.“As an OB-GYN and public health leader, I can’t overstate the value these resources and programs – and our partners across CDC, HRSA, and NIH – have brought to families and frontline providers,” said Dr Amanda Williams, the interim chief medical Officer at the March of Dimes.“We rely on the data, research, clinical tools and partnerships built by the Division of Reproductive Health (DRH) and HRSA to protect maternal and infant health – especially in communities hit hardest.”Heads of National Institutes of Health (NIH) centers were also forced out – and, apparently, offered reassignment to the Indian Health Service to be stationed in Alaska, Montana or Oklahoma, the journal Nature reported. Such large-scale reassignments are unprecedented, according to Stat.Among those to be placed on leave was one of the federal government’s pre-eminent leaders of research, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) Dr Jeanne Marrazzo. Marrazzo had expertise in sexually transmitted infections and women’s reproductive tract infections – a background that gave health advocates hope of curbing the US’s sky-high STD rates. Dr Diana Bianchi, director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, was also forced out.“These cuts are significant,” Kressly said. “And the policy and program changes that are made because the cuts impact real people in real communities, and I’m not just talking about the people who lost their jobs.” More

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      Trump officials to cut Planned Parenthood family planning funds

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      The reproductive health provider Planned Parenthood said the Trump administration would cut federal family planning funding as of Tuesday, affecting birth control, cancer screenings and other services for low-income people.Planned Parenthood said that nine of its affiliates received notice that funding would be withheld under a program known as Title X, which has supported healthcare services for the poor since 1970.The Wall Street Journal reported last week the US Department of Health and Human Services planned an immediate freeze of $27.5m in family planning grants for groups including Planned Parenthood.Planned Parenthood says more than 300 health centers are in the Title X network and Title X-funded centers received more than 1.5m visits in 2023. It not say how much funding would be halted by the Trump administration.The White House and HHS did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. An HHS spokesperson said last week the department was reviewing grant recipients to ensure compliance with Donald Trump’s executive orders.Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, predicted that cancers would go undetected, access to birth control would be severely reduced, and sexually transmitted infections would increase as a result.“President Trump and Elon Musk are pushing their dangerous political agenda, stripping health care access from people nationwide, and not giving a second thought to the devastation they will cause,” McGill Johnson said in a statement.Trump has named billionaire Musk, who helped the president get elected, to head up an initiative to target government agencies for spending cuts.Conservatives have long sought to defund Planned Parenthood because it also provides abortions. However, US government funding for nearly all abortions has been banned since 1977. More

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      The rise of pronatalism: why Musk, Vance and the right want women to have more babies

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      In his first address to the United States after becoming vice-president, JD Vance stood on stage and proclaimed: “I want more babies in the United States of America.” Weeks later, Donald Trump signed an executive order pledging support for in vitro fertilization, recognizing “the importance of family formation and that our nation’s public policy must make it easier for loving and longing mothers and fathers to have children”.In late January, a Department of Transportation memo directed the agency to prioritize projects that “give preference to communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average”. And last week, it was reported that Elon Musk, the unelected head of the government-demolishing “department of governmental efficiency” and a man who has said that the “collapsing birth rate is the biggest danger civilization faces by far”, had become a father of 14.Republicans have long heralded the importance of “family values”. But in these developments, many see mounting signs of a controversial ideology at work: pronatalism.Pronatalism is so contentious that people often struggle to agree on a definition. Pronatalism could be defined as the belief that having children is good. It could also be defined as the belief that having children is important to the greater good and that people should have babies on behalf of the state, because declining birth rates are a threat to its future. Perhaps most importantly, pronatalism could be defined as the belief that government policy should incentivize people to give birth.While people on the left might agree with some pronatalist priorities, pronatalism in the US is today ascendant on the right. It has become a key ideological plank in the bridge between tech bro rightwingers like Musk and more traditional, religious conservatives, like the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson – who once said in a House hearing that abortions were harming the economy by eliminating would-be workers.But there are plenty of widening cracks in that bridge and, by extension, Trump’s incoherent coalition.‘Hipster eugenicists’In the US, interest in pronatalism has historically coincided with growing anxiety over changing gender norms and demographics, according to Laura Lovett, a University of Pittsburgh history professor and the author of the book Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1930. In the 1920s, pronatalism’s prominence grew after women gained the right to vote, as people worried about women working and wielding power outside the home.“When Theodore Roosevelt uses the term ‘race suicide’, he actually blames women who are going to college for the first time for that eventual suicide of the right, white race. There’s this linkage between women’s educational and aspirational futures and the declining birth rate,” Lovett said. “There was this anxiety that white, native-born, middle-class women were having smaller families.”Historically, US pronatalism was also tied to an interest in eugenics – and some of the more tech-minded, modern-day pronatalists do want to use breeding to fashion a better human race. Malcolm and Simone Collins, parents of four who have become standard-bearers for the burgeoning popularity of pronatalism among Silicon Valley venture capitalists, have championed “no-holds-barred” medical research to engineer the “mass production of genetically selected humans”. They have joked to Business Insider about making business cards declaring themselves “hipster eugenicists” – although they have also rejected the idea that they are performing eugenics, stressing that they think racism is “so dumb” and that the only bloodlines they are altering are their own.The Collinses, who support Trump, have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on in vitro fertilization (IVF) and screening their embryos for IQ, risk of depression and other markers. (Scientists aren’t convinced that it is possible to screen embryos for IQ.) These kinds of practices – which the Collins have called “polygenics” – draw a wedge between the Silicon Valley pronatalists who back Trump and his more traditional pronatalist supporters. The anti-abortion movement, which was critical to getting Trump elected in 2016, has long opposed IVF, largely because it can lead to unused or discarded embryos.In signing his pro-IVF executive order, Trump appears to be siding with the “tech right” (and the broader electorate, among which IVF remains extremely popular). When Musk recently brought his son X Æ A-Xii to the Oval Office, Trump called the four-year-old a “high-IQ individual”.View image in fullscreen‘Restructuring society’While the Collinses are avatars for the emerging pronatalist tech right, Lyman Stone is one of the highest-profile pronatalists from a more traditionally conservative background.“Pronatalism has to be disciplined by a commitment to human liberty and human flourishing – and this is coming out of work on reproductive justice, basically. People have a right to have the families they want to have, and for some people, that means no family,” said Stone, a demographer who in 2024 established the Pronatalism Initiative at the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies. “The focus of pronatalism, in my view, generally is not and certainly should not be on family gigantism, and instead should be on helping young people overcome the barriers and obstacles to romantic and family success in their life.”In practice, Stone said, pronatalists should help people get married earlier in life so that they can start having children younger. That could mean, he said, everything from improving mental health services to creating better childcare programs. Stone’s frequent collaborator, Brad Wilcox – a University of Virginia sociology professor and author of the book Get Married: Why Americans Should Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families and Save Civilization – pointed to several policies that he thinks would help strengthen “family formation”, such as expanding the child tax credit and converting federal land into affordable housing.“Pronatalism is not just a fiscal program. It’s a program of restructuring society in a way that treats family goals as worthy, worth supporting and socially important,” Stone said.Asked if he supports abortion rights, Stone clarified: “No, I would draw the line at destruction of human life.”Many of these policy proposals could comfortably fit into a left-leaning political platform – in fact, they may be more at home on such a platform than within today’s Republican party. Although Vance said on the campaign trail that he would like to expand the child tax credit, a move that could cost trillions of dollars in federal spending, Republicans have instead committed to slashing the government budget by at least $1.5tn.Instead, elected Republicans have tended to invoke pronatalist rhetoric in support of their top culture-war causes.They have repeatedly condemned gender-affirming healthcare for allegedly “sterilizing” people; in 2022, as Idaho weighed whether to ban kids from accessing the care, one Republican state legislator said: “We are not talking about the life of the child, but we are talking about the potential to give life to another generation.” When a Republican lawmaker from Michigan introduced a resolution to condemn same-sex marriage, he told reporters: “This is a biological necessity to preserve and grow our human race.” And last year, in a lawsuit to cut access to a common abortion pill, the Republican attorneys general of Idaho, Kansas and Missouri argued that access to the pill had “lowered birth rates for teen mothers”, leading to a falling state populations, “diminishment of political representation and loss of federal funds”.In practice, pronatalism – especially when paired with anti-abortion policy – often overlooks the disproportionate effect that having more babies has on women, according to Elizabeth Gregory, director of women’s gender and sexuality studies at the University of Houston. Childbearing can reshape a woman’s entire future.“This idea that the child is the only person in the dyad loses a real understanding of how embedded and dependent children are on their mothers,” Gregory said. “Fertility affects many, many parts of culture and talking about it can’t be reduced to just a few soundbites.”Falling birth ratesBirth rates are, indeed, on the decline. To remain stable, populations must reproduce at a “replacement rate” of 2.1; in other words, each mother must have 2.1 babies. The US currently averages closer to 1.6. (South Korea, which maintains the world’s lowest fertility rate, had a rate of just 0.75 in 2024.)Experts are split over how to address this problem. The world’s population is at a record high, and immigration to rich countries could offset declines in fertility – but, as the medical journal the Lancet warned in a 2024 issue, “this approach will only work if there is a shift in current public and political attitudes towards immigration in many lower-fertility countries”. If countries remain hostile to immigration while their birth rates fall, they will probably end up with a shrunken labor force that is unable to support an ageing population.There is evidence that Americans would like to have more children. A 2023 Gallup poll found that 47% of Americans think an ideal family has one or two children, while only 2% said families should have zero. At the same time, a Pew poll that same year found that 47% of American adults under 50 say they are unlikely to ever have children. Of those, nearly 60% say they just don’t want kids. Nearly 40% said they couldn’t afford to have kids or that the “state of the world” had convinced them not to.“We’re living in a moment where – I would say, unfortunately – marriage and parenthood have become ideologically polarized,” Wilcox said. More

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      Trump signs executive order expanding access to IVF, says White House

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      Donald Trump has signed an executive order to expand access to in vitro fertilization, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Tuesday.“The Order directs policy recommendations to protect IVF access and aggressively reduce out-of-pocket and health plan costs for such treatments,” Leavitt said in a post on Twitter/X.More details soon … More

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      Saying ‘women’ is not allowed, but ‘men’ and ‘white’ are OK? I’m (not) shocked | Arwa Mahdawi

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      From banning books to policing wordsThanks to the intolerant left, nobody can say the word “women” anymore! Do you remember when that was a major talking point in certain quarters? Prominent columnists wrote endless pieces declaring that the word “women” had “become verboten”. The thought police, these people claimed, were forcing everyone to say “bodies with vaginas” and “menstruators” instead. Even the likes of Margaret Atwood tweeted articles with headlines like: “Why can’t we say ‘woman’ anymore?”That, of course, was complete nonsense. While there was certainly a push for more inclusive language, nobody with any influence was trying to ban the word “women”.Now, however? Now, it’s a very different story. Thanks to Donald Trump’s sweeping executive orders attacking “gender ideology” and DEI programs, the word “women” – along with a number of other terms – is quite literally being erased. The likes of Nasa have been busy scrubbing mentions of terms related to women in leadership from public websites in an attempt to comply with Trump’s executive orders, for example. Agencies like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have taken down numerous webpages related to gender in the wake of Trump’s orders – although a federal judged ordered on Tuesday that they should be reinstated.Meanwhile, the National Science Foundation (NSF) has an internal list of hot-button words (which include “women”, “gender”, “minority”, “biases”) that they are cross-referencing against active research projects and grant applications. The Washington Post reports that once one of these very dangerous words is identified, staff then have to go through a flowchart to see whether a research project should be flagged for further review.The National Institutes of Health and multiple university research departments are going through a similar dystopian exercise. Researchers at the University of California at San Diego, for example, have said their work is now at risk if it contains language deemed potentially problematic, including the word “women”.Rebecca Fielding-Miller, a UCSD public health scientist, told KPBS that the list of banned words circling in scientific communities was Orwellian and would hamper important research. “If I can’t say the word ‘women,’ I can’t tell you that an abortion ban is going to hurt women,” Fielding-Miller said.Fielding-Miller also noted that it was illuminating to see which words hadn’t been flagged as problematic. “I guess a word that’s not on here is ‘men’, and I guess a word that I don’t see on here is ‘white’, so I guess we’ll see what’s going on with white men and what they need,” Fielding-Miller added.Amid all the anxiety about what you are allowed to say in this brave new world, a lot of researchers are erring on the side of caution. Some scientists have said that they are considering self-censoring to improve their chances of getting grants. Others are gravitating towards “safe” topics – like, you know, issues that concern white men. This is a dance we’ve seen many times before: Republicans will advance ambiguous, and possibly unconstitutional, legislation. Because no one knows what the hell is going on or how they might get punished for violating these vague new laws, people self-censor and aggressively police themselves.So, I guess this is where we are now: Republicans aren’t just banning books, they’re policing words. An administration effectively fronted by Elon Musk – a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” – is so touchy about the language that we use that scientists are now self-censoring. It’s so prescriptive about what things are called that it’s blocking journalists from events for continuing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico instead of the Gulf of America. It’s so obsessed with controlling how we think that it’s erasing references to trans people from the website for the Stonewall national monument. Under the disingenuous guise of “restoring freedom of speech”, the Trump administration has made clear it is intent on controlling the very words we use.Errol Musk, who impregnated his former stepdaughter, says Elon is a bad dadElon Musk seems to get some of his extreme views about pro-natalism from his father, Errol, who also has multiple children. Errol has even fathered two kids with his former stepdaughter, who was only four years old when he married her mother. I bring this up because Errol is currently in the news calling Elon a terrible father. He’s certainly not wrong about that – the Tesla billionaire seems to treat his kids like props rather than people – but his statements bring to mind certain adages about pots and kettles as well as glass houses.Investigation launched into human egg trafficking ringThailand and Georgia have said they are investigating a human-trafficking ring accused of harvesting human eggs from Thai women who came to Georgia thinking they’d be surrogates. Instead, they were reportedly held captive and had their eggs harvested. This story is just the latest example of the way in which the global egg trade has given rise to black markets and abuse. Last year, for example, a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation reported that Greek police had identified up to 75 cases of alleged theft of eggs taken from the ovaries of IVF patients at a clinic on Crete.Infant mortality rates rise in US states with abortion bans, study findsJust your latest reminder that anti-abortion activists are in no way “pro-life”.Domestic violence study that strangled rats should not have been approved, animal advocates argueThe rats were non-fatally strangled as part of research that aimed to improve the detection of brain injury resulting from intimate partner violence.The Syrian feminists who forged a new world in a land of warThe Guardian has a fascinating piece on the autonomous region of Rojava, in north-eastern Syria, which has a government with arguably the most complete gender equality in the world.A pregnant woman in the West Bank was shot by Israeli soldiersSondos Shalabi, 23, was eight months pregnant. Her killing comes as Israeli settlers are unofficially annexing large areas of the occupied West Bank and escalating violence has displaced around 40,000 Palestinians. The West Bank is becoming another Gaza.How Sasha DiGiulian broke climbing’s glass ceilingThe big-wall climber talks to the Guardian about sexism in climbing – including a tendency for routes that women have climbed getting “immediately downgraded by male climbers”.The ‘puppygirl hacker polycule’ leaks numerous police filesThe group told the Daily Dot there are not “enough hacks against the police”, adding: “So we took matters into our own paws.”The week in pawtriarchyPalmerston is a black-and-white cat who was – until recently – retired after a long and distinguished career as chief mouser for the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London. The “DiploMog” has emerged from retirement to start work work as feline relations consultant to the new governor of Bermuda. If only the US would learn from this: government needs more cats and fewer Doges. More

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      Missouri abortion rights in legal limbo after constitutional protections take effect

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      An amendment to Missouri’s constitution protecting the right to abortion took effect late on Thursday, two years after the state banned the procedure – but abortions have not yet resumed in the state.The day after Missouri voters supported the measure to amend the constitution, Planned Parenthood affiliates in the state filed a lawsuit asking the court to strike down the state’s near-total abortion ban as well as a raft of other restrictions that, Planned Parenthood said, make it impossible to perform the procedure. In a hearing on Wednesday, the groups asked the Jackson county circuit judge Jerri Zhang to quickly issue an order to freeze the restrictions and allow abortions in the state to resume on Friday.However, the judge has not acted, and Missouri abortion providers remain in legal limbo, caught between contradictory provisions in the state’s constitution and its statutes. Under the new amendment 3, Missouri residents possess a “fundamental right to reproductive freedom”, including access to abortions until fetal viability.“I think it’s a simple case. I don’t think we are asking for something particularly extraordinary,” said Emily Wales, president of Planned Parenthood Great Plains in Missouri. “We have Missouri providers who travel to Kansas currently to provide care. It’s absolutely their hope to provide abortion services in their home state. So as soon as we get notice, we will rearrange our plans to ensure that Missourians have access to care.”Even before the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in 2022, paving the way for Missouri to ban abortion outright, abortions in Missouri had dwindled dramatically. One Planned Parenthood affiliate had stopped offering the procedure altogether, while the other could only do so at a single clinic, according to Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit. This decline was due, the lawsuit alleges, to a series of “impenetrable, onerous and medically unnecessary restrictions” that are still technically in place – such as requiring medication abortion patients to undergo a vaginal exam or mandating that abortion patients visit a clinic for counseling, wait 72 hours and then return for the procedure.Without a favorable court order from Zhang, Wales said: “There will be too many restrictions on the books that we just can’t actually comply with.”Andrew Bailey, Missouri attorney general, has said that amendment 3 means its near-total abortion ban is unenforceable. However, other restrictions can remain in place, including the requirement of a “72-hour reflection period”, Bailey argued in a recent court filing. Removing those requirements would infringe on women’s right to choose childbirth, he said, which is also included in amendment 3’s guarantee of “reproductive freedom”.“Regulations that ensure individuals have adequate time to choose between options – and will not be racked by regret – do not ‘delay’ rights under amendment 3; those regulations foster those decisions,” he wrote.Bailey argued that, rather than issuing a court order that would impact numerous abortion restrictions, Zhang should instead let these restrictions’ futures be decided over the course of litigation.With amendment 3’s impact in question, Missouri state legislators this week proposed a number of potential new restrictions. Lawmakers pre-filed at least 11 anti-abortion bills, according to a tally by the Kansas City Star. The state legislature may take up these bills when it reconvenes in January 2025. Republicans will control the state house, senate and governor’s mansion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOne pre-filed bill would once again ask Missouri voters to amend the state constitution – this time to outlaw all abortions except in medical emergencies or in cases of rape. Another would endow embryos and fetuses with full rights and protections – a measure that, if enacted, would grant them a status known as “fetal personhood” and in effect ban all abortion.Yet another would ask voters to amend the Missouri constitution to, in the future, make it more difficult to pass ballot measures. Under that proposal, ballot measures would have to win both a simple majority of voters and win a majority of voters in more than half of the state’s congressional districts. (Right now, Missouri ballot measures must only win most voters in the state.)Mallory Schwarz, executive director of Abortion Action Missouri, remains committed to fighting these new efforts.“I think these attacks are only going to further enrage voters who just made a very clear decision,” Schwarz said. More

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      in US Politics

      Thanksgiving in America, when obsequious Trumpers genuflect to the president-elect | Arwa Mahdawi

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      JD Vance is being weird againMelania Trump has made it clear that her second stint at being first lady will be conducted entirely on her own terms. It’s been reported that she’s unlikely to move back to the White House and will spend a lot of the next four years flitting between New York and Florida. Maybe she’ll write another coffee table book. Maybe she’ll develop another caviar-infused skincare line. Who knows. But whatever she does, it’ll be in the service of her own interest, rather than the country’s.With Melania not particularly interested in being by Donald’s side, there’s a void to be filled. And it looks like JD Vance and Elon Musk are furiously competing to win the incoming president’s affections. Musk has basically been camping out at Mar-a-Lago since the election, and has earned “uncle status” according to Trump’s granddaughter Kai.The tech billionaire also had a seat at the Trump family table for Thanksgiving dinner, where he bopped to YMCA and presumably had a little giggle over a bizarre AI-generated video Trump tweeted which showed Donald popping out of a turkey Joe Biden was about to carve and gyrating. It’s not clear if Musk, who spent the rest of the day tweeting self-aggrandizing videos of himself, had any quality time with his children over the holiday but that seems to be his MO: urging people to have multiple kids while ignoring his own.JD Vance may be the next vice-president but from the looks of it, Musk very much seems to be Trump’s number two. Vance looks keen to change that, however, and celebrated Thanksgiving with a weird tweet of his own. The vice-president-elect posted an edited image of Norman Rockwell’s 1943 Thanksgiving painting Freedom from Want with Trump’s face Photoshopped on the patriarch and Vance Photoshopped over the wife. (To be clear: it’s not explicitly stated who the matriarch figure is in the painting but, while Rockwell’s cook is the model, the woman is often interpreted as being the wife of the man she’s standing next to.) In the original painting, the matriarch is holding up a turkey. In Vance’s version he – clad in an apron and blue dress – is holding up a very red map of America. Once upon a time Vance compared Trump to Hitler; now he’s eagerly doctoring pictures so he can depict himself as Trump’s trad wife.Why would Vance embarrass himself like this? Former Kamala Harris adviser Mike Nellis reckons “Vance is worried about Elon having more influence than him, so he thought posting this weird ass meme would win him favor again.” I’m not sure anyone should listen to a Democratic strategist about anything ever again but this interpretation does seem about right.While I couldn’t tell you exactly what went through Vance’s head when he posted an image of himself as an aproned matriarch, I can very confidently say that we have (at the very least) four more years of these sorts of posts. Forget the banality of evil, the Trump administration represents the inanity of evil: we’re going to see the passing of inhumane policies, the rollback of reproductive rights, and the gutting of public services alongside idiotic memes designed to “own the libs”. The online trolls have crawled out from below the bridge and now advise the president; the shitposters are in charge now.I guess it’s totally fine to threaten Muslim congresswomen in the US nowSpeaking of trolls, Trump-endorsed congressional candidate and Florida state senator Randy Fine tweeted a casual death threat to Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar – the only Muslim women in Congress – this week. “The Hebrew Hammer is coming,” Fine tweeted. “[Rashida Tlaib] and [Ilhan Omar] might consider leaving before I get there. #BombsAway.” Can you imagine if Tlaib or Omar had delivered a similar message to Fine? It would be front-page news and Biden would have made an outraged statement. This was barely covered. Fine is the same guy, by the way, who cheered the murder of 26-year-old American citizen Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, an activist reportedly killed by the Israeli forces while peacefully protesting illegal settlements in the West Bank.Blue Origin deletes video of female astronaut after sexist commentsAstronaut and MIT-trained engineer Emily Calandrelli became the 100th woman in space when she joined six space tourists in a Blue Origin launch. An Instagram video of her excited reaction to being in space was inundated with misogynistic comments, which led to Blue Origin taking it down. Being a woman in the public eye is a real barrel of laughs!A fifth woman has died as a likely result of abortion bansAccording to ProPublica, Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old Texas woman, is the fifth woman who is known to have died because their medical care was delayed after miscarriages or because they couldn’t undergo legal abortions.Fox News’ Jesse Watters: ‘Trump’s going to treat Denver like a woman. He’s going to protect the city whether they like it or not’Poor Denver.Brazilian congressional committee votes for bill to ban abortion in all casesThat includes in cases of fetal deformation, rape or when the mother’s health is in danger. The proposed bill has to go to a special committee before it can advance further but the fact it has got this far is alarming.Walmart is the latest company to abandon its DEI initiativesThe right has declared war on DEI and it looks as if they’re winning. Not a good time for my (satirical) company Rent-a-Minority, I’ve got to say.Gen Z isn’t a big fan of dating apps“There is a growing romanticisation of in-person meeting and interaction,” one expert told the Guardian.Former ICC chief prosecutor says she faced threats and ‘thug-style tactics’Fatou Bensouda has said she experienced direct threats to herself and her family just for doing her job. Meanwhile, the US government and its allies continue to undermine the ICC and international law.Israel’s finance minister proposes ‘thinning out’ Gaza’s population“It is possible to create a situation where Gaza’s population will be reduced to half its current size in two years,” the Israeli finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said on Monday. (While these remarks were covered by the Israeli press, they strangely didn’t seem to be deemed newsworthy by a lot of the US press.) Israeli settlers are already preparing to occupy the strip and build new houses next to mass graves.The week in pawtriarchyWould you like to see a picture of a poorly penguin named Flop who learned to walk again because zoo staff made her a bespoke baby bouncer and treadmill? Of course you do. This Guardian piece is guaranteed to make you pen-grin. More