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      Where will abortion be on the ballot in the 2024 US election?

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      This November, abortion will be on the ballot in 10 states, including the states that could determine the next president.In the two years since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, abortion has become the kind of issue that decides elections. Outrage over Roe’s demise led Republicans to flounder in the 2022 midterms, and abortion rights supporters have won every post-Roe abortion-related ballot measure, including in red states such as Ohio, Kentucky and Kansas.This year, most of the ballot measures are seeking to amend states’ constitutions to protect abortion rights up until fetal viability, or about 24 weeks of pregnancy. Because a number of the measures are in states that have outlawed abortion, they could become the first to overturn the post-Roe ban. Others are in states where abortion is legal, but activists say the measures are necessary to cement protections so they can’t be easily overturned if Republicans control the government.These are the states slated to vote on abortion this election day.ArizonaAbortion rights supporters in Arizona, a key battleground state in the presidential election, are vying to pass a measure that would enshrine the right to abortion up until viability in the state constitution. A provider could perform an abortion after viability if the procedure is necessary to protect the life or physical or mental health of a patient.Arizona currently bans abortion past 15 weeks of pregnancy. Earlier this year, the state supreme court reinstated a 19th-century near-total abortion ban, generating nationwide outrage that prompted the state legislature to quickly repeal it in favor of letting the 15-week ban stand.ColoradoColorado’s measure would amend the state constitution to block the state government from denying, impeding or discriminating against individuals’ “right to abortion”. This measure also includes a one-of-a-kind provision to bar Colorado from prohibiting healthcare coverage for abortion – which could very well pass in the deep-blue state.Because Colorado permits abortion throughout pregnancy and neighbors five states with bans – Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, Utah and Nebraska – the state has become a haven for people fleeing abortion bans, especially those seeking abortions later in pregnancy.FloridaOnce the last stronghold of southern abortion access, Florida in May banned abortion past six weeks of pregnancy, which is before many women know they’re pregnant. Its measure, which needs 60% of the vote to pass, would roll back that ban by adding the right to an abortion up until viability to the state’s constitution. Providers could perform an abortion after viability if one is needed to protect a patient’s health.Florida Republicans’ tactics in the fight against the measure has alarmed voting rights and civil rights groups. Law enforcement officials have investigated voters who signed petitions to get the measure onto the ballot, while a state health agency has created a webpage attacking the amendment.MarylandLegislators, rather than citizens, initiated Maryland’s measure, which would amend the state constitution to confirm individuals’ “right to reproductive freedom, including but not limited to the ability to make and effectuate decisions to prevent, continue, or end the individual’s pregnancy”. Like Colorado, Maryland has become an abortion haven because it permits the procedure throughout pregnancy. It is also relatively close to the deep south, which is blanketed in bans. MissouriAbortion opponents went to court to stop Missouri’s measure from appearing on voters’ ballots, but the state supreme court rejected their arguments and agreed to let voters decide whether the Missouri constitution should guarantee the “fundamental right to reproductive freedom, which is the right to make and carry out decisions about all matters relating to reproductive healthcare, including but not limited to prenatal care, childbirth, postpartum care, birth control, abortion care, miscarriage care, and respectful birthing conditions”.Missouri, which was the first state to ban abortion after Roe fell, only permits the procedure in medical emergencies. If the measure passes, it is expected to roll back that ban and permit abortion until viability.MontanaIn the years since Roe fell, Montana courts and its Republican-dominated legislature have wrestled over abortion restrictions and whether the right to privacy embedded in Montana’s constitution includes the right to abortion. Abortion remains legal until viability in Montana, but the measure would amend the state constitution to explicitly include “a right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including the right to abortion” up until viability. Providers could perform an abortion after viability to protect a patient’s life or health.NebraskaNebraska, which bans abortion past 12 weeks of pregnancy, is the lone state with two competing ballot measures this November. One of the measures would enshrine the right to abortion up until viability into the state constitution, while the other would enshrine the current ban. If both measures pass, the measure that garners the most votes would take effect.NevadaAlongside Arizona, Nevada is one of the most closely watched states in the presidential election. Its measure would amend the state constitution to protect individuals’ right to abortion up until viability, or after viability in cases where a patient’s health or life may be threatened. Nevada already permits abortion up until 26 weeks of pregnancy.New YorkNew York state legislators added a measure to the ballot to broaden the state’s anti-discrimination laws by adding, among other things, protections against discrimination on the basis of “sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health”.Although sky-blue New York passed a law protecting reproductive rights in 2019, advocates say this measure could be used to defend abortion rights against future challenges. However, the ballot language before voters will not include the word “abortion”, leading advocates to fear voters will not understand what they are voting on. Democrats pushed to add the word “abortion” to the description of the measure, but a judge rejected the request, ruling that the amendment poses “complex interpretive questions” and its exact impact on abortion rights is unclear.South DakotaSouth Dakota’s measure is less sweeping than other abortion rights measures, because it would only protect the right to abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy. Under this measure, South Dakota could regulate access to abortion “only in ways that are reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman” in the second trimester of pregnancy. In the third trimester, the state could ban abortion except in medical emergencies. Right now, South Dakota only allows abortions in such emergencies.Although this measure will appear on the ballot, there will be a trial over the validity of the signatures that were collected for it. Depending out the outcome of the trial, the measure – and any votes cast for it – could be invalidated. More

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      ‘One death is too many’: abortion bans usher in US maternal mortality crisis

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      In Louisiana, doctors will no longer be able to carry a lifesaving medication with them during pregnancy emergencies. In Texas, the infant mortality rate is soaring. In Idaho, pregnant people drive hours just to give birth. And in Oklahoma and Georgia, women are bleeding out in hospital parking lots and facing dangerous infections before they can find care – and sometimes, that care comes too late.The limitations and outright bans on abortion that have taken hold in half of the US in the wake of the Dobbs decision have wreaked enormous changes to the reproductive health landscape.The restrictions put a growing burden on the health and wellbeing of patients and providers, even as more Americans find it difficult to find and access care.“The United States is, and has been for quite some time, in the midst of a maternal and infant mortality crisis,” said Dr Jamila Perritt, a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist and president of Physicians for Reproductive Health.Banning access to reproductive healthcare, including abortion care, is “directly causing an increase in morbidity and mortality in our community”, she said. “We have really robust evidence that shows us that when people have sought abortion care and are unable to obtain it, their psychological, social, physical and emotional health is harmed.”Maternal and infant mortality will probably increase because of the restrictions – especially if national limitations, like enforcement of the Comstock Act, are put into place.“I expect in the next few years, we’re going to start to see the infant mortality, pre-term birth, maternal mortality, and maternal morbidity numbers rise for everyone, and particularly for folks from racially marginalized and low-socioeconomic communities,” said Rachel Hardeman, professor of reproductive health and founding director of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity at the University of Minnesota.Calculating mortality is often a complicated and controversial endeavor. When maternal mortality dropped in 2022, anti-abortion advocates credited the success to the Dobbs decision.But that’s not the case, according to new research in Jama Network Open.Maternal deaths surged during the first two years of the pandemic, when Covid, a deadly illness during pregnancy, accounted for one-quarter of all maternal deaths. But in 2022, that rate dropped to levels similar to pre-pandemic levels, from 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births in 2021 to 22.3 in 2022.That rate is still higher than maternal mortality rates in peer nations, and research indicates it will increase if officials clamp down on abortion nationally – which, with the Comstock Act, would require no additional anti-abortion legislation or bans.Right now, “people can still travel to other states, but once there’s a federal ban, that won’t be an option any more,” says Amanda Jean Stevenson, co-author of the new Jama research and a sociologist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “And there could be this very different set of outcomes when people’s options are gone.”In the United States, more than 80% of pregnancy-related deaths and more than 60% of infant deaths in the first week are preventable – and those figures were estimated before the Dobbs decision.Because of abortion restrictions, there are already significant challenges to accessing reproductive healthcare – and it’s not just abortion care.In Louisiana, misoprostol – a drug used for medication abortion and other lifesaving purposes – will be labeled a controlled substance beginning on 1 October. One of its uses is keeping patients from bleeding out after childbirth, which is the No 1 cause of postpartum mortality.Yet physicians cannot keep controlled substances in their emergency carts, and they fear they won’t have enough time to fill prescriptions for patients when minutes and even seconds make the difference between life and death.In the year following Texas’s abortion ban, child mortality shot up by 12.9% – compared with a 1.8% increase in the rest of the country, according to a recent study. Congenital anomalies are the leading cause of infant death in the US – but while they went down by 3.1% in the rest of the country, they went up by 22.9% in Texas.“That study was chilling. That is a huge change,” Stevenson said.It echoed previous research finding that states with the most restrictive abortion laws saw 16% more infant deaths between 2014 and 2018.The trauma and costs of carrying to term pregnancies that are incompatible with life inflict an incalculable toll on families and providers.States are closing obstetric units and losing experienced providers who worry about not being able to offer lifesaving care as patients die on the table in front of them, and facing jail time if they provide care.More than two-thirds (68%) of obstetricians and gynecologists say the Dobbs decision has made it harder for them to respond to pregnancy-related emergencies, according to the non-partisan health research organization KFF. They also believe it has worsened mortality in pregnancy while increasing racial and ethnic inequities, and fewer doctors are now interested in entering the field.In 2022, soon after the Dobbs decision, medical residency applications dropped for states with bans.More than half of doctors surveyed in states with bans and limitations said they were very concerned about legal repercussions to providing the standard of care in pregnancy.“That can just exacerbate already pretty large gaps in the workforce,” said Usha Ranji, associate director for women’s health policy at KFF.In the past two years, more than 100 hospitals have closed their obstetric units entirely, according to a new March of Dimes report. More than one-third of US counties are now maternity care deserts, with no obstetricians or places to give birth. North Dakota, South Dakota, Alaska, Oklahoma and Nebraska have the least access to maternity care.The majority of rural hospitals (57%) no longer deliver babies, with more than 100 of the rural hospitals ending labor and delivery services in the past five years.“We’ve created policy and legislation to limit access to abortions and also have closed the exact places that people need to go to get care if they are pregnant,” Hardeman said. That puts pressure on neighboring states that still provide care, she said.“Where you live matters for your health. And I think that the Dobbs decision and the fall of Roe have demonstrated that in a very real and very obvious way, because there are literally places in this country where there is essentially no access to reproductive healthcare,” she said.“It started out in rural spaces, but more and more, there’s reports popping up of labor and delivery units closing in, like, urban Chicago.”In states with restrictions on abortion, women of color and pregnant people from low-income communities often suffer the most, said Hardeman. “Taking away access to reproductive healthcare is exacerbating those disparities.”Black women die because of pregnancy at twice the national rate, and three times more than white women, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.“The fact that black women and birthing people are dying at three to four times greater risk than white women is shameful – and it’s preventable,” Perritt said.It’s important to shore up protections for reproductive health for all Americans before health complications and mortality rise even more, she said. “One death is too much. One is too many.” More

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      Abortion measures are on the ballot in 10 states this year. Democrats can win them | Katrina vanden Heuvel

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      If you’re tired of breathlessly following the horserace polling of the presidential and congressional races, you might consider instead breathlessly following the horserace polling of ballot initiatives to protect reproductive rights. In a sense, they’re more revealing.Pending some outstanding court challenges from Republicans – whose dogged commitment to “leaving this issue to the states” curiously disappears when they realize they’re going to lose – up to 10 states will have abortion referendums on the ballot this year. And it happens that they’ll share that ballot with competitive Senate races in states like Montana, Nevada, Arizona, Florida and Maryland.In Nevada and Arizona, which could also play a decisive role in the presidential race, a Fox News poll found that over 70% of voters in both states plan to vote in favor of codifying abortion rights.Giving voters the opportunity to vote directly on abortion rights is a strategic win for progressives on a few levels. Of course, in a time when 22 state legislatures have acted to restrict abortion access since Dobbs, it’s a powerfully effective way to protect the right to choose. It also helps keep the subject in headlines when the Trump campaign would prefer voters to be distracted by mythical, racist claims about Haitian immigrants. And perhaps most significantly, it could motivate otherwise unenthusiastic voters to show up for what seems to be yet another excruciatingly close election.Ballot initiatives are a useful exercise in revealed preference. It has long been observed that millions of Americans end up voting against their economic self-interest each election cycle. In presidential elections, voters choose candidates, not policy papers. It’s why swing voters were not compelled by the argument that Joe Biden could serve four more years as president because he “surrounds himself with the right people”.Yet when voters have the chance to vote up or down on an issue that will directly impact their lives, they aren’t in the habit of denying themselves civil rights or quality of life improvements. And in the wake of Roe v Wade getting overturned, that has proved especially true.In 2022, every state referendum on abortion was a victory for pro-choice advocates. Voters in California, Michigan and Vermont voted to enshrine reproductive rights in their respective constitutions, while voters in Kentucky and Montana decisively voted down measures that would have restricted them. This coincided with progressive overperformance in gubernatorial and congressional races, where abortion proved highly salient.Ballot initiatives on other issues have also demonstrated sizable majorities for the right progressive priorities, even in so-called conservative states. Since 2012, measures to legalize recreational marijuana have passed in over a dozen states – including Alaska, Montana, Missouri and Ohio. Meanwhile, per Ballotpedia, there have been 22 statewide measures to raise the minimum wage since 1998; they’ve all passed.In this election, too, there are opportunities for waves of support for progress in unexpected places.Take Florida (please). The citizen-led group Floridians Protecting Freedom has been tirelessly pushing for amendment 4, which would enshrine the right to an abortion in the state’s constitution if it can garner 60% of the vote. One poll found that the initiative is positioned nicely to pass, with 69% support.Meanwhile, Florida amendment 3, which would legalize marijuana in the state, has already broken the record for the most money spent on any state cannabis measure, with more than $100m raised and counting. On that issue, the Republican party seems to recognize which way the smoke is blowing, since Trump has come out in favor of it.For all the talk of Florida falling out of reach for progressives, these amendments could serve as yet another signal that the left shouldn’t give up on the state. This is the same state that voted to restore the voting rights of more than 1 million felons in 2018 (despite immediate efforts that followed by the Republican government to subvert the will of the people). There is such a sizable bloc for progress, in fact, that despite Florida’s 60% threshold for constitutional amendments being the highest in the country, Republicans have proposed raising it even higher, to 66.67%.Beyond the Sunshine state, putting abortion rights front and center could also help address the Harris campaign’s nationwide challenges with younger voters. While Kamala Harris has managed to earn back some of the support that Biden lost among voters under 30, she still isn’t matching his 2020 performance.Sure, maybe touting Taylor Swift’s endorsement on Instagram or sending Barack Obama to juice voter registration on TikTok will move the needle. But with women under 45 citing abortion as their most motivating issue this election, it would seem wise to keep spotlighting a rare issue that is both persuasive to swing voters and galvanizing for young activists.At the St Petersburg campus of the University of South Florida, the 20-year-old college senior Alexis Hobbs can be found wearing a pink T-shirt behind a pink table recruiting her peers to vote “Yes on 4.”In an interview with New York Magazine, Hobbs shared just how motivated her fellow young people are to fight this fight: “They don’t want to live out their entire adulthood this way.”

      Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of the Nation, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and has contributed to the Washington Post, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times More

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      Gretchen Whitmer calls Trump ‘deranged’ after comments on abortion

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      Gretchen Whitmer, the governor of Michigan, called Donald Trump “just deranged” on Sunday after he said women would no longer be thinking about abortion if he is elected as president in November.“This guy just doesn’t understand what the average woman is confronting in her life in this country, and how could he? He’s not lived a normal life,” Whitmer said in an interview on CNN’s State of the Union.Whitmer also reaffirmed her support for Kamala Harris, describing her as a person “who has worked hourly jobs, who knows how important it is that women have healthcare and access to the medical care that they need”.Whitmer was asked to comment about a speech the former president delivered on Saturday, saying women “will be happy, healthy, confident, and free” if he is elected president.“He’s just deranged,” the governor of Michigan said.On Friday, Trump made similar comments about women on his Truth Social platform.“WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO … AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO!” Trump said.Harris is a staunch supporter of abortion rights. The vice-president delivered two speeches on Friday, first in Georgia and then Wisconsin, highlighting the case of Amber Thurman, who died in Georgia due to a strict abortion ban.Whitmer’s comments on Sunday come a week after participating in an online campaign event with TV host, producer and author Oprah Winfrey, which was livestreamed nationally from Michigan.The Michigan governor was previously named as a possible candidate for the Democratic nomination for president before ruling herself out in July. Michigan is a must-win prize for candidates, a state that has voted for the presidential winner in the last four national elections.Joe Biden took Michigan by 154,000 votes in 2020. Two years later, Whitmer defeated a Trump-backed candidate and Democrats took full control for the first time in 45 years. More

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      Harris condemns Trump in Georgia after news of abortion-related deaths

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      In her first speech dedicated exclusively to abortion rights since becoming the presidential nominee, Kamala Harris spoke on Friday afternoon in Atlanta, Georgia, blaming Donald Trump for the abortion bans that now blanket much of the United States.Harris spoke days after news broke that two Georgia mothers died after being unable to access legal abortions and adequate medical care in the state.“Two women – and those are only the stories we know – here in the state of Georgia, died, died, because of a Trump abortion ban,” Harris said. She repeatedly referred to “Trump abortion bans” in the speech.“Suffering is happening every day in our country,” Harris continued. “To those women, to those families – I say on behalf on what I believe we all say, we see you and you are not alone and we are all here standing with you.”In the weeks since becoming the Democratic nominee for president, Harris has made reproductive rights a central part of her campaign. She has toured the country to highlight the healthcare consequences of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, which paved the way for more than a dozen states to ban almost all abortions.On Friday, Harris blamed the former president for Roe’s demise because Trump appointed three of the supreme court justices who overturned the landmark decision. She also also condemned Republicans for repeatedly blocking Senate bills that would have guaranteed a federal right to in vitro fertilization, a popular fertility treatment that had its future cast into doubt after Roe’s overturning.“On the one hand, these extremists want to tell women they don’t have the freedom to end an unwanted pregnancy,” Harris said. “On the other hand, these extremists are telling women and their parents they don’t have the freedom to start a family.”The raucous crowd grumbled loudly at Harris’s words. “Make it make sense!” someone shouted.Although Joe Biden won Georgia in the 2020 presidential election, becoming the first Democrat in decades to take the state, Democrats seemed unlikely to recapture it until Harris replaced Biden as nominee. Now, Georgia is once again a swing state. Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina and a major Trump surrogate, has said that Trump must win Georgia if he wants to win the White House. Meanwhile, Harris in August embarked on a two-day bus tour of the state and giving her first major network interview there.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe deaths of the Georgia mothers, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, were first reported earlier this week by ProPublica and occurred after Georgia enacted a six-week abortion ban. Georgia’s maternal mortality review committee looked at both women’s cases and deemed their deaths “preventable”, according to ProPublica.Although Georgia permits abortions in medical emergencies, doctors across the country have said that abortion exceptions are worded so vaguely as to be unworkable. Instead, doctors have said, they are forced to watch until patients get sick enough to legally intervene.After Thurman took abortion pills to end a pregnancy in 2022, her body failed to expel all of the fetal tissue – a rare but potentially devastating complication. Doctors delayed giving the 28-year-old a routine procedure for 20 hours, and she developed sepsis. Her heart stopped during an emergency surgery.“Under the Trump abortion ban, her doctors could have faced up to a decade in prison for providing Amber the care she needed,” Harris said on Friday. “Understand what a law like this means. Doctors have to wait until the patient is at death’s door before they take action.”Harris met with Thurman’s mother and sisters on Thursday night. “Their pain is heartbreaking,” she said.While on the campaign trail, Trump has alternated between bragging about helping to demolish Roe, complaining about how Republicans’ hardline anti-abortion stances have cost the Republican elections, and flip-flopping on his own position on the procedure.Access to abortion has become one of voters’ top issues over the last two years, and Democrats are hoping that outrage over Roe will propel them to victory at the ballot box this November. Ten states, including the key battleground states of Nevada and Arizona, are set to hold abortion-related ballot measures, which could boost turnout among Democrats’ base. More

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      Florida officials investigate voters who signed abortion ballot initiative

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      Florida law enforcement officials are investigating voters who signed a petition to get a closely watched abortion rights measure on the ballot this fall, showing up at the homes of some residents unannounced in what activists say is an effort to intimidate voters.Organizers turned in more than 900,000 signatures in January to get a measure that would enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution. The deadline to challenge signatures has passed, but a state agency created by DeSantis to investigate voter fraud recently began investigating whether there was fraud in the gathering process.Isaac Menasche, a Fort Myers voter, said he signed a petition months ago when he was approached at a local farmer’s market. He wrote down his name, birthday, address, and scribbled a quick version of his signature. He didn’t think much of it until last week when a law enforcement officer showed up at his door and pulled out a copy of his signature on the petition, asking him to confirm that it was his – which it was.“The experience left me shaken. What troubled me was he had a folder on me containing my personal information – about 10 pages. I saw a copy of my driver’s license and copy of the petition I signed,” Menasche wrote in a Facebook post last week. “It was obvious to me that a significant effort was exerted to determine if indeed I had signed the petition. Troubling that so much resources were devoted to this. I wonder if the same could be said if the petition were for some innocuous issue.”The Florida governor, Ron DeSantis, has defended the investigation. “They’re doing what they’re supposed to do,” he said at a press conference on Monday, according to the Tampa Bay Times. “It may be that the signature is totally different, and that voter will say, ‘No, I actually did do that.’ Maybe they signed their name. That is absolutely possible. And if that’s what you say, I think that’s probably the end of it.”But the investigation also comes as DeSantis and Florida Republicans have made other aggressive efforts to thwart the amendment, which needs the support of 60% of voters to pass this fall. The Florida agency for health care administration, a state agency, posted a webpage last week attacking the amendment, which DeSantis has denied amounts to electioneering.The Florida supreme court also allowed a misleading financial impact statement to be printed alongside the amendment on the ballot.Local election officials in Florida are responsible for verifying signatures that are turned in. Groups that sponsor the petitions are responsible for paying for the robust process, which requires verifying the voter’s signature with the one on file for registration purposes as well as their name, address and date of birth, said Lori Edwards, the supervisor of elections in Polk county (Edwards said the state had not requested any information from her office on the abortion amendment).The office of election crimes and security, a multimillion-dollar effort and first-of-its kind agency created by DeSantis to investigate voter fraud, said earlier this year that it had been “inundated with an alarming amount of fraud related to constitutional initiative petitions”.A spokesperson for Mary Jane Arrington, the supervisor of elections in Osceola county in central Florida told the Associated Press that her office had never received a request to review signatures that had already been validated in the 16 years she had been in her role.Florida Democrats and voting groups have ripped DeSantis for the investigation, saying it is an obvious effort to intimidate voters.“This is all about theater, this is all about intimidation of the voters as people are about to go to the ballot box,” Nikki Fried, the chair of the Florida Democratic party, said at a press conference on Monday.The Florida department of state told the Florida department of law enforcement in a letter earlier this summer it had opened an investigation into more than 40 people paid to circulate the abortion-focused petitions. The letter also says the department had obtained “credible information” that several petition circulators in Palm Beach county had submitted fraudulent signatures.The local supervisor of elections had secured some signed complaints from voters saying they did not actually sign petitions, the letter says. “Some of the above-named circulators also signed petitions on behalf of individuals who were deceased at the time the petition was allegedly signed. The circulators appear to have forged the voters’ signatures and inserted the voters’ personal identifiable information into the petitions without consent,” the letter says.The department of state provided copies of petition forms alleged to contain fraud, with the signature and voter information redacted. The agency also released three complaints from voters saying they had not in fact signed the petition.“We have a duty to seek justice for Florida citizens who were victimized by fraud and safeguard the integrity of Florida’s elections. Our office will continue this investigation and make referrals to FDLE as appropriate,” Mark Ard, a spokesperson for the Florida department of state, said in a statement.The campaign behind the amendment, Floridians Protecting Freedom, hired a private company, PCI Consultants, to handle most of the signature gathering. Angelo Paparella, the company’s president, said in an interview that his company reviewed all the signatures it collected before submitting them to local election officials. When they found some that looked fraudulent – a tiny fraction of the more than 1m they collected – they submitted those separately and flagged that they were suspicious.“My staff is pretty good at ferreting this out,” said Paparella, who has been collecting signatures in Florida since 1998. “Sometimes people are idiots and they try to take a shortcut, you know, taking names out of a phone book. It’s a very stupid thing to do. It’s a crime.”Still, he said, the tiny amount of fraud does not come anywhere close to the overwhelming number of valid signatures that were submitted.“If they find someone who committed any kind of forgeries, then prosecute them,” he said. “It takes nothing away from the nearly million valid signatures that the counties found.”It is not clear how many voters have been targeted in the abortion petition investigation, but the Tampa Bay Times reported that at least six counties had been asked to provide information on signatures that had already been approved.One of those counties is Alachua county, where state officials requested to review 6,141 petitions. All of them had been submitted by six circulators that the state believed had submitted fraudulent petitions. In Osceola county, the state requested to review around 1,850 petitions from specific circulators, Arrington’s office said. In Hillsborough county, officials wanted to review nearly 7,000 petitions to the state for review, the supervisor of elections’ office said.The state requested to review 17,000 signatures in Palm Beach county, according to the Tampa Bay Times. In Orange county, home to Orlando, they requested to review 11,500 petitions.The investigation is the latest salvo of the office of election crimes and security, whose mission has been criticized since voter fraud is extremely rare. In 2022, the agency drew scrutiny for arresting people with felony convictions who had voted but appeared to be confused about their eligibility. It has also pursued fines against voter registration groups for relatively minor errors. Many voter registration groups have ceased activity in Florida since.“It’s been clear from day one that the purpose of the election police was to harass voters who don’t have the same viewpoints as the governor,” said Brad Ashwell, the director of the Florida chapter of All Voting is Local, a voting rights group.“By going after a petition for Amendment 4, which is already on the ballot, Governor DeSantis is undermining the will of voters and stomping over their democratic freedoms for his own political gain.” More

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      Democrats unite to center reproductive rights as Republicans flail on abortion

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

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

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

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