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    Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’

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    Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences.If it was current and controversial in US politics, chances are that Kirk was talking about it. On his podcasts, and on the podcasts of friends and adversaries, and especially on college campuses, where he would go to debate students, Kirk spent much of his adult life defending and articulating a worldview aligned with Trump and the Maga movement. Accountable to no one but his audience, he did not shy away in his rhetoric from bigotry, intolerance, exclusion and stereotyping.Here’s Kirk, in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative media.On race
    If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

    If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022

    Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

    If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
    On debate
    We record all of it so that we put [it] on the internet so people can see these ideas collide. When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.
    – Kirk discussing his work in an undated clip that circulated on X after his killing.

    Prove me wrong.
    – Kirk’s challenge to students to publicly debate him during the tour of colleges he was on when he was assassinated.
    On gender, feminism and reproductive rights
    Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
    – Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

    The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.
    – Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024

    We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024
    On gun violence
    I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.
    – Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023
    On immigration
    America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025

    The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

    The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024
    On Islam
    America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April 2025

    We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025
    On religion
    There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022 More

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      in US Politics

      Texas bill allowing residents to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers reaches governor

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      A measure that would allow Texas residents to sue out-of-state abortion pill providers advanced to the desk of the governor, Greg Abbott, on Wednesday, setting up the state to be the first to try to crack down on the most common abortion method.Supporters say it’s a key tool to enforce the state’s abortion ban, protecting women and fetuses.Opponents see it not only as another way to rein in abortion but as an effort to intimidate abortion providers outside Texas who are complying with the laws in their states – and to encourage a form of vigilantism.If the measure becomes law, it’s nearly certain to spark legal challenges from abortion rights supporters.Under the measure, Texas residents could sue those who manufacture, transport or provide abortion-inducing drugs to anyone in Texas for up to $100,000. Women who receive the pills for their own use would not be liable.Under the bill, providers could be ordered to pay $100,000. But only the pregnant woman, the man who impregnated her or other close relatives could collect the entire amount. Anyone else who sued could receive only $10,000, with the remaining $90,000 going to charity.Lawmakers also added language to address worries that women would be turned in for seeking to end pregnancies by men who raped them or abusive partners. For instance, a man who impregnated a woman through sexual assault would not be eligible.The measure has provisions that bar making public the identity or medical details about a woman who receives the pills.It wasn’t until those provisions were added, along with the limit of a $10,000 payment for people who aren’t themselves injured by the abortion, that several major Texas anti-abortion groups backed the bill.The idea of using citizens rather than government officials to enforce abortion bans is not new in Texas. It was at the heart of a 2021 law that curtailed abortion there months before the US supreme court cleared the way for other state bans to take effect.In the earlier law, citizens could collect $10,000 for bringing a successful lawsuit against a provider or anyone who helps someone obtain an abortion. But that measure didn’t explicitly seek to go after out-of-state providers.Pills are a tricky topic for abortion opponents. They were the most common abortion method in the US even before the 2022 supreme court ruling that overturned Roe v Wade and allowed states to enforce abortion bans.They’ve become even more widely used since then. Their availability is a key reason that the number of abortions has risen nationally, even though Texas and 11 other states are enforcing bans on abortion in all stages of pregnancy.The pills have continued to flow partly because at least eight Democratic-led states have enacted laws that seek to protect medical providers from legal consequences when they use telehealth to prescribe the pills to women who are in states where abortion is illegal.Anna Rupani, executive director of Fund Texas Choice, said the measure is intended to threaten those out-of-state providers and women in Texas.“This is about the chilling effect,” she said. “This is yet another abortion ban that is allowing the state to control people’s health care lives and reproductive decisions.”Earlier this year, a Texas judge ordered a New York doctor to pay more than $100,000 in penalties for providing abortion pills to a Dallas-area woman.The same provider, Dr Maggie Carpenter, faces criminal charges from a Louisiana prosecutor for similar allegations.New York officials are invoking their state’s shield laws to block extradition of Carpenter and to refuse to file the civil judgment.If higher courts side with Louisiana or Texas officials, it could damage the shield laws.Meanwhile, the attorneys general of Texas and Florida are seeking to join Idaho, Kansas and Missouri in an effort to get courts to roll back US Food and Drug Administration approvals for mifepristone, one of the drugs usually used in combination for medication abortions, contending that there are safety concerns. They say it needs tighter controls because of those concerns.If the states are successful, it’s possible the drug could be distributed only in person and not by telehealth.Major medical organizations including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say the drug is safe. More

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      in US Politics

      Maha is backing this ‘natural’ infertility treatment. Is it the right’s path to limiting IVF?

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      View image in fullscreenFor Erica L and her husband, in-vitro fertilization was the “nuclear option”.After two years of trying to conceive, Erica and her husband had no idea why they could not have a baby. Doctors said only that they had “unexplained infertility”, a non-diagnosis of a diagnosis that is given to an estimated 15% of people trying to conceive. Erica was not ideologically opposed to trying IVF, but felt daunted by the price and unpredictability.Then Erica stumbled across a clinic that specialized in “restorative reproductive medicine”, or RRM. The clinic did bloodwork on Erica and her husband and urged them to eat well-balanced foods and take supplements, as well as prioritize exercise and sleep. Erica also started tracking her temperature and menstrual cycle in intense detail.“We wanted to do everything that we could to try to have a baby as naturally as possible,” said Erica, who asked that her full last name not be published. “There’s a lot of invasive things that I just wasn’t comfortable with.”Restorative reproductive medicine is a decades-old name for a constellation of therapies that are meant to revive the “natural” fertility of people trying to conceive. Often, RRM entails prescriptions for hormones, supplements and lifestyle changes – such as adopting a better diet – as well as closely analyzing one’s menstrual cycle. Its practitioners also sometimes use aggressive surgeries to root out endometriosis, a common and chronic condition that occurs when tissue that is similar to uterine tissue grows outside of the uterus. And, critically, RRM practitioners avoid the use of assisted reproductive technology such as IVF.Top Republicans, rightwing organizations and even White House officials have recently begun to rally behind RRM, seizing on its promise to enhance fertility without resorting to IVF. Many anti-abortion conservatives revile IVF because it can create unused embryos – a practice they see as unethical, if not murderous, as they believe life begins at conception.Yet IVF remains staggeringly popular, to the point that Donald Trump pledged to make it free in the wake of a 2024 Alabama supreme court decision that imperiled the procedure. Now, conservatives are trying to pare back that commitment – and some fertility doctors, including ones who offer RRM, worry that the right is co-opting RRM as a Trojan horse in order to sell a fertility agenda to voters while undermining IVF.Backed by several high-profile anti-abortion groups, Republicans in Congress have repeatedly introduced legislation to bolster government-funded research and education on RRM. In March, the Heritage Foundation – the influential thinktank behind the notorious Project 2025 – released a 63-page report that endorsed RRM and slammed IVF.Then, in July, the Department of Health and Human Services posted a notice soliciting applications for a $1.5m grant to fund an “infertility training center” that would expand access to resources for “holistic infertility treatments” rather than assisted reproductive technology. In August, the Washington Post reported that the Trump administration is backing away from the president’s campaign promises about IVF, although a White House spokesperson rebutted that claim.View image in fullscreenDr Kaylen Silverberg is a reproductive endocrinologist who has advised administration officials, including Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles, about IVF. During his discussions with officials, Silverberg said he was asked about RRM.“I’ve been doing this for 31 years, and I’d never even heard the term,” said Silverberg, who is also advisory board chair of the advocacy group Americans for IVF. “So I started doing research about it. I realized that restorative reproductive medicine is just a pseudonym for a basic infertility evaluation.”Silverberg’s view is shared by many mainstream fertility doctors and organizations, who say that the difference between their work and RRM is less scientific than ideological. In their view, RRM is a rebranded version of everyday fertility medicine, minus IVF.RRM, with its focus on optimizing the body’s “natural” rhythms, is tapping into a growing interest in holistic health and wellness – one that is being increasingly politicized and expertly leveraged by the “Make America Healthy Again” (Maha) movement.But support for RRM alone, Silverberg said, cannot fulfill Trump’s campaign promises. “The problem is going to be if – and this is a big if – anybody tries to limit expansion of fertility access and care and coverage to restorative reproductive medicine.”‘There is another option’RRM is not a monolith. Some of its leading organizations and adherents take no position on IVF and reject the idea that RRM is ideologically driven or a new name for old medicine. Instead, they are drawn to RRM’s stance that infertility is not itself a disease but a symptom of something else that has gone wrong.Established in 2000, the International Institute for Restorative Reproductive Medicine (IIRRM), the preeminent group championing RRM, maintains a registry of RRM clinicians and collects data about its techniques’ efficacy.Dr Monica Minjeur, who was trained in family medicine and serves as the US director of communications and development for the International Institute for Restorative Reproductive Medicine, said RRM is “not an anti-IVF movement”. As far as Minjeur knows, no one in Congress has approached the institute to discuss RRM.“We will never say: ‘IVF should go away.’ We just mostly want people to realize: ‘Hey, there is another option,’ because so many couples are told IVF is your only option,” said Minjeur, who added that she is a Democrat.View image in fullscreenSome RRM advocates and groups do oppose IVF and have long aligned themselves with conservative causes such as the anti-abortion movement. One of the most well-known RRM techniques is NaPro Technology, which usually involves such tactics as cervical mucus tracking and has been pioneered by the anti-abortion Saint Paul VI Institute since the 1980s, when the Vatican condemned IVF. The institute’s website presents NaPro Technology as an alternative to IVF, which it calls “a highly abortive technology that often forces women to make abortion-related decisions”.In June, a new thinktank, the Maha Institute, held a roundtable discussion about women’s health and fertility. In her introduction to the discussion, Maureen Ferguson, a commissioner for the US Commission on International Religious Freedom with longstanding ties to the anti-abortion movement, sang RRM’s praises.“Traditional women’s health and fertility care has relied heavily on big pharma bandaids and workarounds that circumvent a women’s reproductive system,” Ferguson said. “Women of all political stripes appreciate healthcare that works in harmony with their body and restores health.”IIRRM wants to harness Maha advocates’ enthusiasm but is wary of being equated with the movement, according to Minjeur and Dr Tracey Parnell, the institute’s global director of communications and development. They described RRM and Maha as two sides of a Venn diagram.“We want to bring increased health to women and men and families,” Minjeur said of Maha. “Beyond that, there are definitely a fair amount of differences.”Parnell added: “We really truly are open to quite broad collaboration without being co-opted.”The rise of wellness cultureThe Make America Healthy Again movement is perhaps the best illustration of a broader push within American conservatism to incorporate the historically leftwing language of holistic health and “natural” treatments – in short, “wellness” – to advocate for traditionally rightwing aims, such as convincing women to have big families.This push started to gain steam in the years after the Covid pandemic, as trust in mainstream medicine started to falter: a survey of nearly half a million US adults found that trust in physicians and hospitals declined from roughly 72% to just 40% between April 2020 – the month after the pandemic broke out – and January 2024. As trust eroded, the wellness industry exploded. Between 2019 and 2023, it grew from $5.3tn to $6.32tn, according to the Global Wellness Institute, which defines wellness as the ongoing and individual pursuit of “optimal holistic health and wellbeing”.“Wellness” can encapsulate a wide range of activities, from undeniably healthy behaviors (such as exercising and eating nutritious foods) to practices that may be dangerous (such as drinking raw milk). These activities are yoked together by a deceptively simple ethos, according to Amy Larocca, author of the book How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time.“In wellness, things that are natural are superior to things that are not,” Larocca explained.Wellness’s sales pitch can be particularly appealing to Americans, given the astronomical costs of traditional healthcare in the US. A single IVF cycle can run tens of thousands of dollars and most states do not require insurers to cover it. By contrast, countries such as Denmark and Sweden cover vast swathes of fertility treatments, including IVF.RRM treatments tend to cost far less than IVF, and may soon get even cheaper. In June, Arkansas’s Republican-dominated state legislature became the first in the country to pass a law requiring state insurance to cover RRM therapies.But critics say there is little quality evidence that RRM is more effective at helping people have babies than mainstream fertility medicine. The American Society for Reproductive Medicine, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine and the Society of Gynecologic Surgeons are worried that other states may follow Arkansas’s lead; last week, the medical organizations sent a letter to urging the National Governors Association to reject pro-RRM legislation.Women’s health and infertility are especially ripe breeding groups for wellness because mainstream medicine routinely fails to take either seriously. Between 2013 and 2023, just 8.8% of research funded by the National Institutes of Health focused on women’s health. Women are also more likely to have their medical concerns dismissed. When women and people of color show up at emergency rooms with signs of chest pain, they usually wait longer; women are also less likely to be admitted.‘Many sobbing women’A year after Erica started working with the restorative reproductive medicine clinic, the clinic told her: “We’re really concerned that you’re not pregnant yet. You should be pregnant.”The RRM specialists suggested that Erica might have endometriosis, which affects about one in 10 women and girls worldwide and is believed to be a leading cause of infertility.It is also profoundly understudied. In 2023, a mere 0.06% of the NIH’s $47bn budget was earmarked for endometriosis research. Because many doctors dismiss the symptoms of endometriosis or lack the expertise to recognize it, it generally takes between five and 11 years to get a diagnosis.Erica went ahead with a surgery to diagnose and remove endometriosis tissue. RRM practitioners have suggested that the condition can be treated by a “one-and-done surgery” – as one RRM surgeon put it in the Heritage Foundation report – that aggressively excises endometriosis tissue.A month later, Erica got pregnant. Erica estimated that she and her husband spent, in total, about $2,500 on RRM.“We definitely wouldn’t have our daughter without them,” she said of RRM specialists.View image in fullscreenMany of RRM’s prescriptions are common sense: if you are trying to get pregnant, it can be helpful to take a holistic view of your health and know as much about your menstrual cycle as possible. But mainstream reproductive endocrinologists are skeptical of RRM’s position that infertility itself is not a disease, which runs counter to the World Health Organization’s definition of infertility. They also suspect that RRM may over-rely on surgery to treat endometriosis. One recent review of infertility treatments published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that while surgery can help mild cases of endometriosis, doctors should use IVF when it is severe. When treated with IVF, almost 40% of women under 35 who have endometriosis get pregnant within a single cycle, the review found.“We do a lot of surgery and other treatment options that can optimize a woman’s fertility. But in the end, there are many diagnoses that cannot be solved with those elements alone and need a very effective tool like IVF,” said Dr Rachel Weinerman, a reproductive endocrinologist and associate professor at Case Western Reserve University’s school of medicine. “You need to have a whole toolbox available to decide what is the right tool for that specific patient.”Dr Eve Feinberg, a reproductive endocrinologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg school of medicine, first heard of RRM when she started treating patients who had tried it. If patients stick with RRM and defer the use of assisted reproductive technology for too long, Feinberg warned, some may become so old that they lose their chance to have biological children.“I’ve had many sobbing women in my office who really missed out on their fertility window by trying endless numbers of years of this method, who weren’t given the truth and weren’t given a chance to explore other methods because they were misled and they were told that this would work for them,” she said. “I counsel my patients that IVF has limitations. It doesn’t work for every patient. I didn’t feel like these women were adequately counseled in that way.”In an extensive memo it shared with the Guardian, IIRRM rejected many of the critiques of RRM as unfounded, including the idea that it over-relies on surgery. Physicians who provide IVF too often default to it, the institute contended, adding that it would welcome more research comparing RRM to conventional medicine.As someone who eats a mostly plant-based diet, runs religiously and avoids makeup, Feinberg considers herself to be more “natural” than most. She understands the appeal of the wellness-style language that surrounds RRM.“It’s being marketed as being holistic. It’s being marketed as being natural and ethical,” Feinberg said. But, she continued: “I think RRM plays into this fallacy that we can understand everything and we can fix everything. 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      Texas threatens to sue organizations and doctor for increasing abortion pill access

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      The heated US war over abortion pills warmed up another degree on Wednesday, as the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, sent cease-and-desist letters to two organizations and an individual that he accused of mailing abortion pills to Texans or facilitating their shipment. Paxton threatened to sue if they do not stop their alleged activities.“These abortion drug organizations and radical activists are not above the law, and I have ordered the immediate end of this unlawful conduct,” Paxton said in a news release announcing the letters.The state of Texas bans virtually all abortions.Paxton sent the letters to Plan C, a website that provides information about how to obtain abortion pills; Her Safe Harbor, an organization that provides abortions through telemedicine; and Rémy Coeytaux, a doctor who has been accused of mailing abortion pills to a Texan.Debra Lynch, a nurse practitioner who works with Her Safe Harbor, said that Paxton’s letter would not stop the organization from sending abortion pills to people. If anything, Lynch suggested, it would spur the group on.“None of our providers are primarily concerned with our own wellbeing or our own legal status,” Lynch said. “All the horrors that women are facing because of these ridiculous bans and restrictions outweigh anything that could possibly happen to us as providers, in terms of a fine or a lawsuit or even jail time, if it were to come to that.”Lynch said that in the hours after news of Paxton’s letter broke, Her Safe Harbor received more than 150 requests from Texans who were afraid about abortion access and want to obtain pills that they may use in the future. Normally, Her Safe Harbor has around four to five providers taking calls from patients. Now, they plan to have at least 10 working “until this wave of fear subsides”.Neither Plan C nor Coeytaux immediately replied to the Guardian’s request for comment.In the three years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and unleashed a wave of state-level abortion bans, abortions have surged in the United States. This rise is due in large part to the availability of abortion pills and the emergence of “shield laws”, which have been enacted by a handful of blue states and aim to protect abortion providers who mail pills across state lines from out-of-state prosecution.By the end of 2024, clinicians working through shield laws were facilitating an average of 12,330 abortions per month, according to data from #WeCount, a research project by the Society of Family Planning.Enraged by this development, anti-abortion advocates have in recent months stepped up their campaign to crush abortion pill providers. In his cease-and-desist letters, Paxton – a Republican who is running to become a US senator – repeatedly cited the Comstock Act of 1873, an anti-vice law that bans the mailing of abortion-related materials. Although legal experts have long regarded the Comstock Act as a dead letter, several anti-abortion activists now believe that the fall of Roe has left the federal government free to fully enforce the act.Alongside 15 other state attorneys general, Paxton earlier this summer signed onto a letter imploring Congress to pass a law that would pre-empt states’ shield laws. He has also sued a New York-based doctor whom he accused of mailing abortion pills into Texas. Then, after a New York county court official said that the state’s shield law prohibited New York from enforcing a fine against the doctor, Paxton sued the official.Paxton’s cease-and-desist letters also follow similar letters sent by the Arkansas attorney general, Republican Tim Griffin. In July, Griffin sent a cease-and-desist letter to Possibility Labs, the parent company of Plan C, and to Mayday Medicines, the parent company of Mayday Health. Like Plan C, Mayday Health offers information about abortion pills, but does not directly sell them.Other anti-abortion activists are going after abortion providers through other legal avenues. A Texas man who said that Coeytaux supplied abortion pills to aid his female partner’s abortion has also sued Coeytaux in a federal wrongful death lawsuit. The man is being represented in court by Jonathan Mitchell, an anti-abortion attorney who masterminded a six-week abortion ban that took effect in Texas in 2021.Last week, Mitchell filed another federal wrongful death lawsuit against a different abortion provider. More

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      Judge orders Trump administration to continue Medicaid funding to Planned Parenthood

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      The Trump administration must continue reimbursing Planned Parenthood clinics for Medicaid-funded services, a federal judge ruled on Monday, in an escalating legal war between the reproductive health giant and the White House over Republican efforts to “defund” Planned Parenthood.Days after Donald Trump signed his sweeping tax bill, Planned Parenthood sued over a provision in the bill that ended Medicaid payments for one year to abortion providers that received more than $800,000 from Medicaid in 2023, such as Planned Parenthood. The new court order, from US district judge Indira Talwani in Boston, will protect Medicaid funding for all Planned Parenthood clinics nationwide while litigation in the case continues.The order also replaces and expands a previous edict handed down by Talwani, which initially granted a preliminary injunction specifically blocking the government from cutting Medicaid payments only to Planned Parenthood affiliates that did not provide abortions or did not receive at least $800,000 in Medicaid reimbursements in a given year.“Patients are likely to suffer adverse health consequences where care is disrupted or unavailable,” Talwani wrote in her Monday order.“In particular, restricting members’ ability to provide healthcare services threatens an increase in unintended pregnancies and attendant complications because of reduced access to effective contraceptives, and an increase in undiagnosed and untreated STIs.”More than 80 million people rely on Medicaid, the US government’s insurance program for low-income people.It is already illegal to use Medicaid to pay for most abortions, but Planned Parenthood clinics – which treat a disproportionate number of people who use Medicaid – rely on the program to reimburse it for services such as birth control, STI tests and cancer screenings.In its lawsuit, Planned Parenthood had argued that it would be at risk of closing nearly 200 clinics in 24 states if it is cut off from Medicaid funds. These closures would probably be felt most strongly in blue states, since they are home to larger numbers of people who use Medicaid. A Planned Parenthood affiliate in California has already been forced to close five clinics as a result of the “defunding” provision.Planned Parenthood estimated that, in all, more than 1 million patients could lose care.“We will keep fighting this cruel law so that everyone can get birth control, STI testing and treatment, cancer screenings and other critical healthcare, no matter their insurance,” the Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s president and CEO, Alexis McGill Johnson, said in a statement after the Monday ruling.Planned Parenthood is battling overwhelming political and economic headwinds. Even if it prevails against the Trump administration, its affiliates could still be removed from Medicaid in red states, thanks to a June decision by the US supreme court in favor of South Carolina in a case involving the state’s attempt to kick Planned Parenthood out of its Medicaid program.  On Monday, the state of Missouri also sued the Planned Parenthood Federation of America – the mothership organization that knits together Planned Parenthood’s network of regional affiliates – over accusations that the organization downplayed the medical risks of a common abortion pill, mifepristone, “to cut costs and boost revenue”. The lawsuit, which asks for more than $1m in damages, is part of an ongoing campaign by anti-abortion activists to cut off access to mifepristone.More than 100 studies, conducted across dozens of countries and over more than three decades, have concluded that mifepristone is a safe way to end a pregnancy.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Trump administration to destroy nearly $10m of contraceptives for women overseas

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      The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need.A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000. The contraceptives are primarily long-acting, such as IUDs and birth control implants, and were almost certainly intended for women in Africa, according to two senior congressional aides, one of whom visited a warehouse in Belgium that housed the contraceptives. It is not clear to the aides whether the destruction has already been carried out, but said they had been told that it was set to occur by the end of July.“It is unacceptable that the State Department would move forward with the destruction of more than $9m in taxpayer-funded family planning commodities purchased to support women in crisis settings, including war zones and refugee camps,” Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, said in a statement. Shaheen and Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, have introduced legislation to stop the destruction.“This is a waste of US taxpayer dollars and an abdication of US global leadership in preventing unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal deaths,” added Shaheen, who in June sent a letter to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, about the matter.The department decided to destroy the contraceptives because it could not sell them to any “eligible buyers”, in part because of US laws and rules that prohibit sending US aid to organizations that provide abortion services, counsel people about the procedure or advocate for the right to it overseas, according to the state department spokesperson.Most of the contraceptives have less than 70% of their shelf life left before they expire, the spokesperson said, and rebranding and selling the contraceptives could cost several million dollars. However, the aide who visited the warehouse said that the earliest expiration date they saw on the contraceptives was 2027, and that two-thirds of the contraceptives did not have any USAID labels that would need to be rebranded.The eradication of the contraceptives is part of the Trump administration’s months-long demolition of the Agency for International Development (USAID), the largest funding agency for humanitarian and development aid in the world. After the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) erased 83% of USAID’s programs, Rubio announced in June that USAID’s entire international workforce would be abolished and its foreign assistance programs would be moved to the state department. The agency will be replaced by an organization called America First.In total, the funding cuts to USAID could lead to more than 14m additional deaths by 2030, according to a recent study published in the journal the Lancet. A third of those deaths could be children.“If you have an unintended pregnancy and you end up having to seek unsafe abortion, it’s quite likely that you will die,” said Sarah Shaw, the associate director of advocacy at MSI Reproductive Choices, a global family planning organization that works in nearly 40 countries. “If you’re not given the means to space or limit your births, you’re putting your life at risk or your child’s life at risk.”MSI tried to purchase the contraceptives from the US government, Shaw said. But the government would only accept full price – which Shaw said the agency could not afford, given that MSI would also have to shoulder the expense of transportingthe contraceptives and the fact that they are inching closer to their expiration date, which could affect MSI’s ability to distribute them.The state department spokesperson did not specifically respond to a request for comment on Shaw’s allegation, but MSI does provide abortions as part of its global work, which may have led the department to rule it out as an “eligible buyer”.In an internal survey, MSI programs in 10 countries reported that, within the next month, they expect to be out of stock or be on the brink of being out of stock of at least one contraceptive method. The countries include Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Senegal, Kenya and Sierra Leone.Shaw expects the stock to be incinerated. “The fact that the contraceptives are going to be burned when there’s so much need – it’s just egregious,” she said. “It’s disgusting.” The Department of State spokesperson did not respond to a request for information on the planned method of destruction.The destruction of the contraceptives is, to Shaw, emblematic of the overall destruction of a system that once provided worldwide help to women and families. USAID funding is threaded through so much of the global supply chain of family planning aid that, without its money, the chain has come apart. In Mali, Shaw said, USAID helped pay for the gas used by the vehicles that transport contraceptives from a warehouse. Without the gas money, the vehicles were stuck – and so were the contraceptives.“I’ve worked in this sector for over 20 years and I’ve never seen anything on this scale,” Shaw said. “The speed at which they’ve managed to dismantle excellent work and really great progress – I mean, it’s just vanished in weeks.”Other kinds of assistance are also reportedly being wasted. This week, the Atlantic reported that almost 500 metric tons of emergency food were expiring and would be incinerated, rather than being used to feed about 1.5 million children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, almost 800,000 Mpox vaccines that were supposed to be sent to Africa are now unusable because they are too close to their expiration date, according to Politico.The cuts to foreign aid are slated to deepen. Early on Friday morning, Congress passed a bill to claw back roughly $8bn that had been earmarked for foreign assistance.“It’s not just about an empty shelf,” Shaw said. “It’s about unfulfilled potential. It’s about a girl having to drop out of school. It’s about someone having to seek an unsafe abortion and risking their lives. That’s what it’s really about.” More

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      Republicans wanted fewer abortions and more births. They are getting the opposite | Judith Levine

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      Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the US supreme court case that rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, is failing on its own terms. Since the ruling, in June 2022, the number of abortions in the US has risen. Support for reproductive rights is on the upswing. And the rate of voluntary sterilization among young women – a repudiation of Trumpian pronatalism, if a desperate one – jumped abruptly after Dobbs, and there’s no reason to believe it will drop off.Also rising at an alarming clip are preventable maternal deaths and criminal prosecutions of pregnant people.Yet the 21 state legislatures that have imposed total or near-total bans are doing little or nothing to give doctors legal leeway to save the health and lives of pregnant women in medical distress, even if that means inducing abortion. In fact, rather than trying to save lives, they are prosecuting pregnant people who handle those emergencies on their own.The first three – more abortions, more pro-abortion sentiment, more contraception –have frustrated the anti-abortion crowd no end. They know they need stronger disincentives to abortion.Which brings us to the latter two: more punishment and more death. Was punishment the aim all along? And has the anti-abortion movement accepted pregnant people’s deaths as an unfortunate consequence of saving the pre-born?According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortions rose 1.5% in 2024 from 2023, on top of a 11.1% leap in the first year after Dobbs, compared with 2020, before the near-bans enacted in several states that presaged the ruling.It’s also probably an undercount. The statistics include only “clinician-provided abortions”, either surgical or medical (using abortion pills), performed in healthcare facilities or via telemedicine. Guttmacher does not estimate how many abortions are happening outside the formal healthcare system, with drugs obtained directly from suppliers or through feminist underground networks.Indeed, Plan C, the country’s biggest clearinghouse for pill access, reports 2m visits to its website and 500,000 click-throughs to resources and care in 2024, a 25% increase from the year before. How many of those people ended their pregnancies at home, with only a friend or lover in attendance? Anecdotal evidence gleaned from activists suggests they number in the tens of thousands.At the same time, rather than making abortion “unthinkable”, as the anti-abortion activists pledge, the bans may be having the opposite effect. An analysis of two restrictive states, Arizona and Wisconsin, and one with broad access, New Jersey, found that negative attitudes toward abortion are down and positive ones up, in both red and blue states.And if the goal of banning abortion is to produce more children, that’s not working either. Public health researchers saw “an abrupt increase in permanent contraception procedures” – sterilization – following Dobbs among adults in their prime reproductive years, ages 18 to 30. Unsurprisingly, the increase in procedures for women (tubal ligations) was twice that for men (vasectomies).The Trump administration is cheerleading for procreation. “I want more babies in the United States of America,” declared JD Vance in his first public appearance as vice-president, at the March for Life in Washington. He blamed the declining birth rate on “a culture of abortion on demand” and the failure “to help young parents achieve the ingredients they need to lead a happy and meaningful life”. The federal budget extends some of that help. It raises the annual child tax credit (CTC) from $2,000 to $2,200. It also creates “Trump accounts”, $1,000 per child, which parents or employers can add to.But only those with social security numbers are eligible for either program; the tax credit is available only to people who earn enough to pay taxes; and as with any investment, those able to sow more in the savings accounts reap more. It’s clear what sort of baby the administration wishes to be born: white babies with “American” parents, and not the poorest.The carrots are not appetizing enough. The stick is not effective enough. So red-state legislators and prosecutors are ramping up the punitive approach.This year, Republican lawmakers in at least 10 states introduced bills defining abortion as homicide, and, for the first time, criminalizing both the provider and the patient.No such bill has passed – yet – and anti-abortion organizations are usually quick to renounce them publicly, nervous about widespread opposition. But their passage might not be far off. The bills are based on fetal personhood – the concept of conferring full legal rights to a fetus from conception forward. The idea was introduced in 1884 and finally written into one state’s law in 1986. By 2024, 39 states had fetal homicide laws. Last year, there were three bills criminalizing the person who has an abortion; now there are 10. And though the federal courts rejected fetal personhood for a century, it is the bedrock of anti-abortion politics, and this US supreme court is looking much more friendly toward it.While they work toward straightforward criminalization of ending one’s own pregnancy, anti-abortion lawmakers and prosecutors are making creative use of existing law to punish miscarriage, an event indistinguishable from elective abortion, just in case the pregnant person induced the miscarriage. The most ghoulish is the prohibition on abusing corpses.For instance: last week a 31-year-old South Carolina woman who miscarried and disposed of the tissue in the trash was arrested for “desecration of human remains”, a crime carrying a 10-year sentence. In March, a woman found bleeding outside her Georgia apartment after a miscarriage was jailed for “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body” for placing the remains in the bin. A week before that, a Pennsylvania teenager was under investigation for corpse abuse after a self-managed pill abortion and burial of the fetus in her yard.In a grim sense, these are the lucky ones: they survived. Because Dobbs has indisputably been deadly.“Mothers living in states that banned abortion were nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after giving birth” as mothers living in states where abortion was legal and accessible, reports the Gender Equity Policy Institute. Maternal mortality rose 56% in Texas after it enacted a six-week ban; a Texan’s risk was one and a half times that of a Californian’s.The future isn’t sunny. A study of 14 total-ban states predicts that in the four years beginning a year after Dobbs, up to 42 mothers will die and as many as 2,700 will be afflicted with “severe maternal morbidity”, defined by the CDC as “unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short-term or long-term [health] consequences”. In one analysis Black women represented 63% of the deaths.The anti-abortion movement is indefatigable. “We abolishioners will not rest until we have effected the abolishment of human abortion,” one leader told Oklahoma Voice. But this is an unattainable grail. Where abortion is illegal, people still have abortions. They just take more risks. Globally, more than 39,000 women die yearly from unsafe abortions.As they run out of options, red-state lawmakers will harden criminal penalties against people who refuse to give up their reproductive self-determination. It may grow less outré to endorse Trump’s opinion, expressed in an unguarded moment, that women who get illegal abortions “deserve some form of punishment”. Whether intentional or not, the sentence for some of those women will be death.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

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      Pregnant doctor denied Covid-19 vaccine sues Trump administration

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      A pregnant physician who was denied a Covid-19 vaccine is suing the Trump administration alongside a group of leading doctors associations, charging that the administration sought to “desensitize the public to anti-vaccine and anti-science rhetoric”, according to their attorney.The lawsuit specifically takes aim at health secretary Robert F Kennedy’s unilateral decision to recommend against Covid-19 vaccines for pregnant women and healthy children.Kennedy’s announcement circumvented expert scientific review panels and flouted studies showing pregnant women are at heightened risk from the virus, and made it more difficult for some to get the vaccine.“This administration is an existential threat to vaccination in America, and those in charge are only just getting started,” said Richard H Hughes IV, partner at Epstein Becker Green and lead counsel for the plaintiffs in a statement.The American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Physicians and American Public Health Association are among a list of leading physicians associations named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit.“If left unchecked, secretary Kennedy will accomplish his goal of ridding the United States of vaccines, which would unleash a wave of preventable harm on our nation’s children,” said Hughes. “The professional associations for pediatricians, internal medicine physicians, infectious disease physicians, high-risk pregnancy physicians, and public health professionals will not stand idly by as our system of prevention is dismantled. This ends now.”In late May, Kennedy announced that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) would no longer recommend Covid-19 vaccines for healthy children or pregnant women. The announcement, made on social media, contradicted a raft of evidence showing pregnant women and infants are at especially high-risk from the disease, including from the administration’s own scientific leaders.In June, Kennedy went further by firing all 17 sitting members of a key vaccine advisory panel to the CDC. The advisory panel is a key link in the vaccine distribution pipeline, helping to develop recommendations insurers use when determining which vaccines to cover.That panel met for the first time in late June. Members announced they would review both the childhood vaccine schedule and any vaccines that had not been formally reviewed in seven years. They also recommended against a long-vilified vaccine preservative, in spite of a lack of evidence of harm.The news comes amid the largest annual measles case count in 33 years, and amid reports of more parents seeking early vaccination for their children, fearing vaccines will go into shortage or no longer be covered by insurance. More

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      Planned Parenthood sues Trump administration over funding cuts in big bill

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      Planned Parenthood sued the Trump administration on Monday over a provision in Donald Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill that would strip funding from health centers operated by the reproductive healthcare and abortion provider.In a complaint filed in Boston federal court, Planned Parenthood said the provision was unconstitutional, and its clear purpose is to prevent its nearly 600 health centers from receiving Medicaid reimbursements.Planned Parenthood said that would have “catastrophic consequences”, given that the health centers serve more than 1 million patients annually through Medicaid, the US government’s insurance program for low-income people. More than 80 million people use Medicaid.“The true design of the Defund Provision is simply to express disapproval of, attack, and punish Planned Parenthood, which plays a particularly prominent role in the public debate over abortion,” Planned Parenthood said in its lawsuit.The lawsuit continued: “Stripping away this patient volume and reimbursements for care provided will result in the elimination of services, laying off staff and health center closures. The public health consequences for Medicaid patients and non-Medicaid patients alike will be dire and compounding.”The organization has estimated that the defunding could force roughly 200 Planned Parenthood clinics to shutter. Blue states, which are home to more people on Medicaid, would probably see a disproportionate number of closures.Since it is illegal to use Medicaid to pay for most abortions, Planned Parenthood clinics rely on the insurance program to reimburse them for providing services like birth control, STI tests and cancer screenings. But if blue-state clinics are forced to close, people will no longer be able to seek abortions at those clinics – a possibility that has led some abortion rights supporters, including Planned Parenthood, to call the Trump bill’s provision a “backdoor abortion ban”. Planned Parenthood provides an estimated 38% of US abortions.“We’re facing a reality of the impact on shutting down almost half of abortion-providing health centers,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Federation of Americas’s CEO, told the Guardian last week. “It does feel existential. Not just for Planned Parenthood, but for communities that are relying on access to this care.”Planned Parenthood’s lawsuit asks the courts to declare the Trump bill’s provision unconstitutional on numerous grounds, or to at least preserve Medicaid funding for Planned Parenthood clinics that do not provide abortions. The reproductive health giant suggests in the lawsuit that Congress did not understand its structure when it passed the provision. The Planned Parenthood technically consists of a mothership group, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, and nearly 50 regional affiliate groups that operate as independent entities.Medicaid is overseen by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, part of the US Department of Health and Human Services. That agency did not immediately respond to requests for comment.Planned Parenthood is being buffeted by intense financial headwinds. This spring, the Trump administration froze tens of millions of dollars earmarked for family planning providers who participate in Title X, the nation’s largest family planning program. Although several of those providers have since had their funding restored, a Planned Parenthood spokesperson said last week their affiliates had not received funding.The US supreme court also ruled in late June in favor of South Carolina in a case involving the state’s attempt to kick Planned Parenthood out of its state Medicaid reimbursement program. Red states may see that ruling as a blessing to their own efforts to defund Planned Parenthood.Even if Planned Parenthood’s Monday lawsuit succeeds, the organization will probably have to grapple with the consequences of that supreme court ruling for years to come. More