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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

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

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

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

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

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      Elizabeth Warren condemns Trump for ‘changing his tune’ on IVF

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      The US senator Elizabeth Warren has accused Donald Trump of trying to have it “both ways” with in vitro fertilization (IVF), two days after the former president vowed to force health insurance companies or the federal government to pay for the treatments if he is elected in November.Speaking on MSNBC, Warren said Trump was simply adapting his positions according to what he perceived his audience’s preference to be.“So when he thinks he’s talking to his radical base, he says: how radical do you need for me to be?” Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, said Saturday.“Donald Trump will go there and go further. But when he’s talking to the overwhelming majority of Americans, who very much oppose that radical approach to abortion and IVF, he tries to change his tune, and then is shocked when each side now is starting to call him out on that.”The Republican nominee for November’s presidential election has recast his position on IVF as a strong supporter of the pricey treatment – a characterization Democrats reject, accusing him of shifting his position only after US voters signaled broad support for reproductive rights.Similarly, Democrats accuse Trump of shifting his position on abortion rights. On Friday, he said he would vote against a ballot measure in his home state of Florida that would protect abortion rights beyond six weeks after facing backlash from conservative supporters.A day earlier, Trump upset anti-abortion activists when he told NBC News that he supported the measure. “You need more time than six weeks,” said Trump, who has repeatedly boasted about how his three appointees on the US supreme court created a conservative supermajority which eliminated federal abortion rights in 2022.“I’ve disagreed with that right from the early primaries when I heard about it.”Kamala Harris issued a statement saying her opponent “just made his position on abortion very clear”.“He will vote to uphold an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant,” Harris said.On Saturday, Warren accused Trump of playing games on IVF.She said: “Are you kidding me? He also supports – and it’s also there in his platform – that IVF will effectively be banned all across the United States. Sorry, Donald, can’t have it both ways.”Warren also accused the former president of lacking principles – which is why, she said, women do not trust him.“There’s no principle here for him other than, ‘Does it help Donald Trump?’” Warren said. “That is his single guiding principle, and American women are just flat calling him out on that and saying we are not going to trust Donald Trump.” More

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

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

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      Ilona Maher, US rugby and social media star, endorses Kamala Harris

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      The Democratic nominee for US president, Kamala Harris, picked up an endorsement from a key social media influencer: the Olympic rugby star Ilona Maher.“I think it’s going to be cool because there is an opportunity to have female representation and to change this country in a way that I think will benefit us,” Maher told Sports Illustrated, in an interview accompanying a swimwear shoot which saw the 28-year-old center praised as “a feminist trailblazer”.“That’s a Kamala Harris endorsement,” Maher told the magazine, which said she cited abortion rights and access to contraception as key concerns as the presidential election looms.Harris, the current vice-president, has made protecting such rights a central part of her campaign against Donald Trump. As president, the Republican nominee appointed three hardline rightwingers to the US supreme court, which then removed the federal right to abortion and suggested contraception access could also be brought into question.“I have enough money that if I didn’t need an abortion, I could raise a baby myself,” Maher said. “If I wanted to get abortion, I could do that. So I have that privilege [but] it scares me about the other girls. I have options and I want to remember that my followers don’t all have that. And so it’s like, for me, but also mostly for them.”Maher took up rugby in high school in Vermont then won three national collegiate titles with Quinnipiac University in Connecticut. She built a significant social media following in the first phase of her international career, which began in sevens in 2018 and has also brought her two 15-a-side caps. The recent Paris Games saw her rocket to global fame.Maher is now the most-followed rugby player in the world, eclipsing giants such as Siya Kolisi, the South Africa captain and double World Cup winner, and the former New Zealand fly-half Dan Carter.Speaking to SI, Maher said men “get to play rugby and they get paid millions of dollars while we make minimum wage and this won’t be a career for us. I have teammates going into the workforce now, whereas these guys are down there and rugby’s it” for them.Nonetheless, Maher has achieved fame (and endorsement deals) with a message based on body positivity and irreverent humor but also the sort of dynamic and aggressive play that helped the US win bronze in Paris. This week, Maher told followers she wanted to win a place on the US squad for the 15-a-side World Cup, to be held in England next summer.Such has been Maher’s impact since Paris, her Sports Illustrated shoot followed an appearance on NBC’s Late Night with Seth Meyers in which she called rugby “a sport that just really encourages you to be physical and show what your body’s capable of”.“I know what it’s done for me,” Maher said, “and how it’s changed my body confidence by making me feel so good about myself, and I know it can do it for so many other girls.”Speaking to Sports Illustrated, Maher said she “was a big girl growing up so I didn’t love being in pictures” and “was always … called masculine or whatever. But I never felt that way. But I don’t think you’re going to bully the girl who could probably beat you up in a rage. I love that [rugby] showed me what I can do. It showed me how capable my body is and it’s not just like a tool to be looked at and objectified.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionShe also said: “If my cellulite was lower in that perfect range, I wouldn’t be doing what I could do. I wouldn’t be that powerful for it [so] I just really think sports have been so helpful.”MJ Day, editor in chief of Sports Illustrated Swimsuit, called Maher a “revolutionary athlete and feminist trailblazer… a modern-day role model of strength, conviction and authenticity”.Maher expressed unease with being seen as a role model, saying: “I just try to really stress like I am human. But I think I do really care a lot. And I do want people to like me.”Harris, 59, has no known ties to rugby. But her current boss, Joe Biden, has often spoken of his love for the game, having played at college in New York and through following the Irish national team, two recent members of which, Rob and Dave Kearney, are the president’s distant cousins.The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. More