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      JD Vance called for ‘federal response’ to block women from traveling for abortions

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      JD Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump’s running mate, promoted a baseless rightwing talking point in 2022 when he warned of George Soros-funded planes transporting Black women across state lines for abortions.“I’m sympathetic to the view that like, okay, look here, here’s a situation – let’s say Roe v Wade is overruled,” Vance said in a recently resurfaced podcast interview. “Ohio bans abortion in 2022, or let’s say 2024. And then, you know, every day George Soros sends a 747 to Columbus to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California. And of course, the left will celebrate this as a victory for diversity – uh, that’s kind of creepy.”The US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022. Vance’s statements echo a common anti-abortion talking point accusing abortion providers and their supporters of targeting people of color.Black women did seek abortions at a higher rate before Roe fell, but public health experts say that this is far from proof of a racist conspiracy. They point to a number systemic factors – for example, Black women are more likely to live in areas where it’s harder to access contraception. They are also disproportionately harmed by abortion bans.Vance continued: “And, and it’s like, if that happens, do you need some federal response to prevent it from happening? Because it’s really creepy. And I’m pretty sympathetic to that actually. So, you know, how hopefully we get to a point where Ohio bans abortion in California and the Soroses of the world respect it.”While Open Society Foundations, which was founded by Soros, does support reproductive rights, the billionaire philanthropist is not directing planes to swoop up Black women for abortions. He has been the target of antisemitic conspiracy theories for years.Vance’s comments were reported by CNN. On Thursday evening, Kamala Harris’s campaign posted audio of the remarks on X.Vance’s record on abortion has come under national scrutiny since Trump picked the Hillbilly Elegy author as his vice-presidential running mate. In 2022, Vance suggested he would support a national 15-week abortion ban with exceptions. But, like other Republicans wary of the political fallout of Roe’s demise, Vance has more recently sought to soften his position and said in an interview that “we have to accept people do not want abortion bans”. He has also expressed support for the availability of mifepristone, a common abortion pill, and said he agrees with Trump’s position that states should decide their own abortion laws. (Trump has flip-flopped on this stance.)But in January 2023, Vance signed ont o a letter urging the Department of Justice to use the Comstock Act, a 19th-century anti-obscenity law, to ban the mailing of abortion pills nationwide. Since Roe’s fall, anti-abortion activists have begun claiming that the Comstock Act remains good law and can be used to enforce a federal abortion ban. Project 2025, a wish list for a conservative administration written by the influential thinktank Heritage Foundation, reiterates this argument.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Senator Vance has made his position clear: he agrees with President Trump that each state should have the chance to individually set their own abortion laws,” Taylor Van Kirk, a spokeswoman for Vance, said in a statement. “Desperate attacks from Democrats will not distract voters from the deadly effects of Kamala’s wide-open border, the untenable cost of living caused by her inflationary spending or any other aspect of her far-left, radical agenda.”Vance’s vice-presidential run is off to a rocky start, and he has spent the last week haunted by other resurfaced remarks. In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, Vance said that the United States and the Democratic party wwere run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies, who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too”.He then named Harris, who has two step-children, as an example, along with Pete Buttigieg (who has since had children) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “The entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children,” he said. “And how does it make sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”Those comments have provoked an uproar, drawing condemnation even from relatively apolitical celebrities like Jennifer Aniston. Kerstin Emhoff, the ex-wife of Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff, called the attacks on the presumptive Democratic nominee “baseless” and praised her co-parenting. In an Instagram story, Harris’s step-daughter Ella Emhoff posted: “I love my three parents.” More

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      The Republican party remains the party of denying women human rights | Rebecca Solnit

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      The Republican party of the United States remains the party of denying women fundamental human rights. The US press as a whole remains the instrument of softening up or ignoring this reality.“Trump has long been criticized for his public treatment of women,” ran a CNN headline. “The ones in his life argue he’s different in private.” What follows is a puff piece in which prominent Republican women say nice things about him, and his history of alleged sexual assault is mentioned several paragraphs down.The first Mrs Trump is no longer in his life, though she’s buried on his New Jersey golf course, but she charged him with raping her – at home, in private – in her 1990 sworn divorce testimony. E Jean Carroll is only casually in his life, but she won a civil lawsuit against him for sexual assault in the privacy of a department store dressing room and a second one for public defamation, and he owes her tens of millions of dollars for these cases. CNN does get around to mentioning Carroll in passing, but praise from Trump’s protege Sarah Huckabee Sanders and his lawyer and daughter-in-law get the lionesses’ share of attention, and headlines are often all viewers read.Rape is an assault on the victim’s body but also on her (or his or their) agency and right to bodily autonomy, though the assault on agency and autonomy can and does take many forms – and the Republican party and its candidates for president and vice-president support many of them. The Republican party has uncomplainingly offered up an adjudicated rapist as their presidential candidate and rallied behind a vice-presidential candidate, JD Vance, who has shown great enthusiasm for denying women basic rights and safety and sometimes survival.One of the crucial ways Vance has sought to deny women basic rights is by what has been dubbed menstrual surveillance. In 2023, the federal Department of Health and Human Services proposed a revision to medical privacy regulations “to shield the protected health information of patients seeking lawful reproductive health care from disclosure for the purpose of criminal, civil, and administrative investigations”. Vance was one of the eight Republican senators who filed a letter of protest declaring: “Under the Proposed Rule, however, States would be forced to cede their powers to investigate criminal abortion-related activity.”In other words, the revision would protect women’s right to privacy around pregnancy and birth control-related healthcare, and Vance was having none of it. As Talking Points Memo put it: “The news has been filled with proposed or actual laws which would attempt to restrict travel to receive abortions in other states, charge those who travel or criminalize those who might facilitate such travel or facilitate the legal shipment of prescribed abortion drugs through the mail. But to enforce these laws or know when there’s something to enforce you really need access to medical records. You need to know and be able to prove when a woman was pregnant and then, before the end of normal gestation, stopped being pregnant.”In other words, to carry out these laws, the state needs to criminalize being female and fertile and put those who are under surveillance. Vance is an anti-abortion hardliner who supports a national abortion ban with no exceptions. He’s also taken to sneering at women who don’t have children, which is, I suppose, consistent with his attacks on reproductive rights and advocacy of regressive gender roles.Another way Vance supported violence against women is with his infamous 2022 declaration that women should stay in violent marriages for the sake of the kids. “This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like: ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy,” but ending them “didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages”.It’s an astonishing statement if an insufficiently unusual one, the idea that the heterosexual two-parent household is somehow so magically beneficent that even if the dad is beating the mom, it’s better for the kids than having an unbattered mom and a peaceful home.Vance defended his statement by saying: “In fact, modern society’s war on families has made our domestic violence situation much worse,” which is outrageously untrue. The feminist movement brought attention to domestic violence, created domestic violence shelters, put pressure on law enforcement to address that violence, and worked to give women the economic equality and rights that give them more power to leave abusers. The cumulative effect of these measures has, along with a new ethos recognizing that women are possessed of certain inalienable rights, reduced the incidence of this often-hidden crime.What breaks up families in which there is violence is the violence, not the victims’ ability to escape that violence. The man who is beating his wife is often also beating his children, and intimate-partner violence all too often ends in the victim’s death, especially if there are guns on hand. One parent killing the other is bad for the kids, too, and male partners are the leading cause of death for pregnant women and women who have recently given birth in the USA, which the right-to-life advocates should show an interest in – but don’t.This is why coercive control, including intimate-partner violence (IPV), and abortion are not separate issues. The man who is beating his wife may also be raping her or engaging in sexual and reproductive coercion, in this country where feminists first made marital rape a concept and then got it recognized by the law (only in 1993 did all US states recognize marital rape, but there are still many loopholes, including states that don’t recognize marital rape in cases when the partner was unconscious or incapacitated). And that brings us back to reproductive rights.The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists notes that reproductive coercion includes “explicit attempts to impregnate a partner against her will, control outcomes of a pregnancy, coerce a partner to have unprotected sex, and interfere with contraceptive methods”.The college’s website adds: “One quarter of adolescent females reported that their abusive male partners were trying to get them pregnant through interference with planned contraception, forcing the female partners to hide their contraceptive methods,” and: “One study found that women with unintended pregnancies were four times more likely to experience IPV than women whose pregnancies were intended.”In other words, a lot of unwanted and unplanned pregnancies are the result of male coercion, not, as the right would have you believe, female carelessness. Which is why abortion is a crucial part of reproductive rights; a person whose pregnancy was the result of the violation of her rights needs to retain the right to terminate it. Pregnancy, as many women who have borne children have reminded us recently, is a life-changing experience that can result in incapacitation, lasting injury, economic hardship including the inability to work and care for other children, and sometimes death, especially in the absence of adequate medical care.The denial of access to abortion is bringing women in states such as Texas and Idaho to the brink of death – as the journalist Jessica Valenti recently reported.Idaho women are weekly being airlifted to states where they can receive life-saving healthcare and doctors are sometimes recommending they buy evacuation insurance. Valenti also reports: “Rape victims are being denied emergency contraception in medical centers and hospital emergency rooms” because the war against reproductive rights is expanding to go after in-vitro fertilization and birth control, two more ways women can choose whether and how to have children.In his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance writes of his grandfather: “I couldn’t believe that mild-mannered Papaw, who I adored as a child, was such a violent drunk.” In the next sentence, he blames his grandmother: “His behavior was due at least partly to Mamaw’s disposition,” adding: “she’d fight back. In short, she devoted herself to making his drunken life a living hell,” itemizing more of her violence than his, though he does mention in passing the grandfather also gave his own daughter a black eye when she tried to break up a fight between the couple. It’s not hard to imagine this poor woman first impregnated by this man when she was 13 stayed with him for lack of better options; it’s clear Vance approves of her staying.The November election is a referendum on major issues – the climate, the economy, the survival of democracy in America, the makeup of the supreme court – other than the personalities of the candidates on the top of the ticket. The horse-race journalism and its relentless focus on Biden’s age and oratorical shortcomings obscured that. But those personalities connect to the issues, and while perhaps Biden’s decades of leadership on legislation on violence against women is no longer relevant, the bill itself is.It was reauthorized and expanded in 2022 to add protections for Native American, trans and immigrant women, and to address cyberstalking and cyberporn. The majority of Republicans in the House and Senate voted against it. On the other hand, we now have a race for the presidency between a prosecutor and a man convicted of 34 felonies, with a Yale law school graduate on the ticket with Trump: the JD Vance of 2016 tweeted: “What percentage of the American population has @realDonaldTrump sexually assaulted?” but the JD Vance of 2024 has made it clear he doesn’t care. More

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      Unlike Joe Biden, Kamala Harris will be a genuine champion for abortion rights | Moira Donegan

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      When he was still the nominee, Joe Biden’s preferred euphemism for abortion was “Roe”. He would talk about “upholding” Roe v Wade even after June 2022, when the US supreme court struck it down. Reproductive rights advocates bristled at this, pointing out how many people had been denied abortions under Roe, and how flimsy the decision’s protection of reproductive rights had been on personal-autonomy or sex-equality grounds.Frankly, it was hard to get the president to talk about abortion at all. He seemed to avoid even the word “abortion”. When he did talk about the procedure – and the bans on it that Republicans have unleashed across the country – he preferred to focus on women who had been denied emergency abortions for wanted pregnancies in the midst of tragic health complications.Abortion, in his hands, became an issue in which sad, troubled and helpless women could be aided by the mercy of heroic men like himself – or like that of the imagined doctor he referenced in his disastrous June debate with Donald Trump, a man, Biden said, who would determine whether an abortion seeker “needed help or not”. Abortion, in his telling, was an unpleasant but necessary evil that men mediated for women. It was decidedly not a matter of adult women’s rights, dignity or right of autonomy over their own bodies and lives.Kamala Harris, Biden’s successor at the top of the Democratic ticket following his withdrawal last Sunday, has taken a different approach. The Biden administration had largely delegated abortion rights messaging to the vice-president, out of deference both for Biden’s obvious personal discomfort with the issue and his growing inability to campaign effectively at all. (The anti-choice group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America named Harris as Biden’s “abortion czar”, a name that perhaps sounds a little cooler than they intended.) She made a multistate tour focusing on the issue earlier this year, which included what is believed to be the first public visit to an abortion clinic by a president or vice-president: a stop at a Planned Parenthood in St Paul, Minnesota, where Harris appeared with the clinic’s medical director, and commended the clinic’s staff for their “true leadership”.“It is only right and fair that people have access to the healthcare they need,” she said.The result was a divergence of abortion messaging within the White House, with Harris making a much more robust case for abortion, and for reproductive justice more broadly, in much more affirmative and unapologetic terms. The preferred catchphrase that she repeated when speaking about the issue was not Biden’s tepid and euphemistic “restore Roe”. Instead, Harris has made apparent reference to Dr George Tiller, an abortion doctor who was murdered by anti-choice extremists in 2009, who summarized his own approach to abortion in two words: “Trust women.”Before Biden dropped out of the race, November’s presidential election was set to be little more than a referendum on his age. But now that he has stepped aside, Harris has an opportunity to make a much stronger case for a Democratic policy vision. And reproductive rights, an issue that has motivated women voters in large numbers even in deep-conservative states since the Dobbs decision, appears to be at the center of her agenda.The move is good politics. Abortion rights are extraordinarily popular, and have only become more so in the years since Dobbs, mobilizing voters who would stay home or vote for Republicans when other issues are more salient. A new poll from the Associated Press finds that six in 10 Americans support abortion for any reason; other polls show even higher levels of support for abortion, especially early in pregnancy.It’s not just that abortion, in the abstract, is popular: abortion bans, in particular, are profoundly unpopular. The reality of post-Dobbs bans has dramatically moved public opinion on the issue: since May 2019, the percent of Americans who say that abortion should be legal under all circumstances has increased by 10 points, to 35%. The percent who say it should be illegal under all circumstances – the position advocated by the Republican party platform, which supports recognition of fetuses and embryos as persons under the 14th amendment – has fallen dramatically during that same period, to just 12%.These shifts in public opinion have had a marked impact at the ballot box. Democrats’ better-than-expected showing in the November 2022 midterms is credited to outrage against the Dobbs decision that June. But a desire to protect or restore abortion rights has driven large turnout even in heavily Republican states: Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio have all voted overwhelmingly in favor of abortion rights since Dobbs. Harris has seized on this shift in a way that Biden has not been able to, speaking passionately – and credibly – about abortion as a matter of not only health, but also dignity.Harris has also cannily and repeatedly drawn connections between Trump’s last term, in which three anti-choice zealots were appointed to the US supreme court, and the suffering that abortion bans have caused in Republican-controlled states. She refers to the state laws prohibiting the procedure as “Trump abortion bans”. This focus could bear fruit in November: alongside Harris’s presidential bid, a total of five states – Nevada, Colorado, South Dakota, Maryland and Florida – will have abortion-rights measures on the ballot.The Republican ticket, meanwhile, has leaned further and further into an ideology of misogyny and gender reaction. Trump’s vice-presidential pick, JD Vance, is a passionate and lurid misogynist; he recently referred to Harris and other Democratic women as “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives”, and that childless women “have no direct stake” in America’s future. He has also suggested that citizens without children should have their votes diluted.Childless women seem to be a particularly irksome demographic for the Trump camp’s army of prurient creeps: both the media personality Laura Loomer and the lawyer and thinktank gadfly Will Chamberlain quickly joined Vance in attacking Harris for not having biological children. It’s a fitting line of attack; after all, the very reason why Republicans are pursuing abortion bans in the first place is because they have an extremely narrow view of what women should be, one they want to enforce with the law.Abortion-rights advocates will certainly seek to push Harris for even more commitments for reproductive freedom and justice. But Harris, at least, is willing to argue that women can be things other than mothers. Like maybe the president.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Biggest US abortion rights groups back Kamala Harris as effective messenger

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      The biggest abortion rights groups in US politics are lining up behind Kamala Harris’s bid for president, a show of faith in a politician who has already become the face of the White House’s fight over abortion rights – which is not only one of the election’s biggest issues but one of the few where Democrats have the advantage.Within hours of Joe Biden’s stunning announcement on Sunday that he would drop out of the presidential race and endorse the vice-president, Emilys List, which champions Democratic women who support abortion rights, and Reproductive Freedom for All, which advocates for abortion access and was previously known as Naral Pro-Choice America, officially endorsed Harris. Emilys List plans to pour at least $20m into the race in support of Harris.Planned Parenthood Action Fund, whose endorsement must be ratified by local chapters, has not officially weighed in. However, its CEO and president, Alexis McGill Johnson, warmly commended Harris for keeping “the needs and experiences of patients and providers front and center”.Harris has spent much of this year on a tour of the country in support of abortion rights, where she has proven to be a far more effective messenger on the issue than Biden. The president was infamously reluctant to even say the word “abortion” and fumbled answers to questions about it in the June debate that ultimately cost him his candidacy.“Just right off the bat, she’s primed to run with the message around abortion rights,” said Jean Sinzdak, associate director of the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers. “Her messaging around abortion and being out there forcefully on the issue is going to be a net positive for her.”Harris, the first sitting vice-president or president to visit an abortion clinic, has described the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade and the abortion bans that now blanket the US south as “a healthcare crisis” and frames abortion rights as an issue of personal freedom.“One does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do with her body,” she told a crowd in Savannah, Georgia, in February.Democrats hope that outrage over Roe’s downfall, which hobbled Republicans in the 2022 midterms and led GOP strongholds such as Ohio and Kansas to pass ballot measures protecting abortion rights, will boost turnout among their base – especially in battleground states like Nevada and Arizona. Both states are set to hold abortion–related ballot measures this year.Donald Trump, his running mate, JD Vance, and other Republicans have attempted to neutralize the importance of abortion rights in the 2024 election by downplaying the issue as well as their party’s role in Roe’s demise. During last week’s Republican national convention, the issue was conspicuously missing onstage. Neither Trump, who appointed three of the supreme court justices who overturned Roe, nor Vance, who has previously supported a national abortion ban, mentioned abortion.“Trump and Vance can downplay the abortion message all they want, but the political reality speaks for itself,” said Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute.Deckman suspects that a Harris candidacy will invigorate young women, young women of color and suburban women.“We see in our polling that young women in particular are the most staunchly supportive of abortion rights,” Deckman said. “I think it’s gonna be an extremely close election. But I think the benefit for the Democrats is now they have a new narrative. There’s some enthusiasm happening, where there wasn’t with the Biden campaign.”Before Roe fell, anti-abortion Republicans were far more likely than pro-abortion rights Democrats to identify as single-issue abortion voters.That picture has changed somewhat. One in eight voters say abortion is the “most important issue” to their vote, while more than half say that it is “very important issue but not the most important”, according to polling from KFF conducted before Biden’s departure from the race. Two-thirds of the voters who describe abortion as their most important issue say it should be legal in all or most cases. The voters who think it should be legal in all cases tend to be Democratic, Black, female or between the ages of 18 and 29.But voters are also deeply concerned with the economy and immigration – issues where, polls indicate, Trump is seen as the stronger candidate. Although six in 10 Democrats think Harris would make a good president, only about three in 10 overall adults feel the same, according to polling released by the Associated Press on Friday.As vice-president, Harris has backed Biden’s promise to codify abortion rights into law.“Here’s what a second Trump term looks like: more bans, more suffering, less freedom,” Harris said in a May speech. “But we are not going to let that happen.”While abortion rights groups are backing Harris, anti-abortion activists are already mobilizing against her. SBA Pro-Life America, which plans to spend $92m across eight states this election cycle, has started calling Harris “the “abortion czar”. More

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      A Trump-Vance administration would be ‘the most dangerous’ for abortion rights, say advocates

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      Within minutes of Donald Trump’s announcement that he had tapped Ohio senator JD Vance as his running mate in the 2024 elections, abortion rights groups vociferously condemned the pick.“A Trump-Vance administration will be the most dangerous administration for abortion and reproductive freedom in this country’s history,” Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All, said in a statement.“By naming Vance to his ticket, Trump made clear that his administration will sign a national abortion ban and put birth control and IVF at risk,” said Jessica Mackler, president of Emily’s List, an organization that supports Democratic women who support abortion rights running for office.Vance, the venture capitalist turned Hillbilly Elegy author turned GOP standard-bearer, has long opposed abortion.In 2021, while running for Ohio senate, Vance told an Ohio news outlet that he did not support rape and incest exceptions in abortion bans. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term,” he said. “It’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”But voters’ outrage over the overturning of Roe v Wade has grown, leading abortion rights supporters to a string of victories at the ballot box, and harnessing that outrage is widely considered Democrats’ best hope for winning the November elections. As Trump and other Republicans have tried to project a moderated stance on the issue – despite the fact that Trump handpicked three of the supreme court justices who overturned Roe – Vance has also tempered his public position.“We have to accept that people do not want blanket abortion bans. They just don’t,” Vance told CNN’s Jake Tapper last year. “I say this as a person who wants to protect as many unborn babies as possible. We have to provide exceptions for the life of the mother and rape and so forth.”In 2022, Vance said he would support a national 15-week abortion ban with exceptions. He also told NBC News that he wants mifepristone, a common abortion pill that was at the heart of a major supreme court case this year, to remain accessible.Even while supporting a national ban, Vance has said he would like abortion to be “primarily a state issue”.“Ohio is going to want to have a different abortion policy from California, from New York, and I think that’s reasonable,” he said. “I want Ohio to be able to make its own decisions, and I want Ohio’s elected legislators to make those decisions.”But, he added: “I think it’s fine to sort of set some minimum national standard.”Much of Vance’s public persona, however, remains defined by his support of what he sees as the traditional nuclear family. He has backed policies that he says will increase birth rates, such as making childbirth free, and said that people who are childfree by choice “do not have any physical commitment to the future of this country”.“I think the rejection of the American family is perhaps the most pernicious and the most evil thing that the left has done in this country,” said Vance, a father of three. He then went on to suggest that several Democratic politicians, like Kamala Harris and New Jersey senator Cory Booker, should not have political power because they do not have children.“Why have we let the Democrat party become controlled by people who don’t have any children? And why is this just a normal fact of American life?” Vance asked. “That the leaders of our country should be people who don’t have a personal and direct stake in it via their own offspring, via their own children?” (The vice-president has two stepchildren.)“Many of the most unhappy and most miserable and most angry people in our media are childless adults,” he continued.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionVance has also called people who fear having kids “cat ladies” who “must be stopped” and said that universal daycare is “class war against normal people”.Two days after the US supreme court overturned Roe, Vance tweeted: “If your worldview tells you that it’s bad for women to become mothers but liberating for them to work 90 hours a week in a cubicle at the New York Times or Goldman Sachs, you’ve been had.”Shortly after Trump announced he had chosen Vance as his running mate, Joe Biden’s campaign started to circulate a clip of comments Vance made in 2021 about violence in marriages.“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that, like: ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy. And so getting rid of them and making it easier for people to shift spouses like they change their underwear, that’s going to make people happier in the long term,’” Vance said in response to a question on fatherlessness.Vance has said that he was not defending men who commit domestic abuse and that he himself is a victim of domestic abuse.Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group SBA Pro-Life America, praised Vance on Monday.“His ability to compellingly share these stories on a national stage will surely be an asset,” Dannenfelser said in a statement. “With approximately 750,000 babies in states like California and New York still lacking basic protections, we need champions whose boldness will not waver.” More

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      Donald Trump claims to ‘know nothing’ about Project 2025

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      Donald Trump is trying to claim he has “nothing to do” with Project 2025, a political roadmap created by people close to him for his potential second term.The project, which is led by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative thinktank, seeks to crack down on various issues including immigration, reproductive rights, environmental protections and LGBTQ+ rights. It also aims to replace federal employees with Trump loyalists across the government.Trump wrote in a post on his Truth Social network: “I know nothing about Project 2025. I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”The former president’s post came a day after the Heritage Foundation’s president, Kevin Roberts, said the US was in the midst of a “second American revolution” that can be bloodless “if the left allows it to be”. He made the comments on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, adding that Republicans are “in the process of taking this country back”.In response to Trump’s post, several critics were quick to point out that it appears unlikely that he is unaware of Project 2025, given that many individuals involved in the project are his closest allies.“Many people involved in Project 2025 are close to Trump world & have served in his previous admin,” CNN’s Alayna Treene said.Economist and Guardian columnist Robert Reich wrote: “Don’t be fooled. The playbook is written by more than 20 officials Trump appointed in his first term. It is the clearest vision we have of a 2nd Trump presidency.”The Trump campaign has previously pushed back on claims that he would follow the policy ideas set out in Project 2025 or by other conservative groups. His campaign told Axios in November 2023 that the campaign’s own policy agenda, called Agenda47, is “the only official comprehensive and detailed look at what President Trump will do when he returns to the White House”, though the campaign added that it was “appreciative” of suggestions from others.Still, Heritage claimed credit for a bevy of Trump policy proposals in his first term, based on the group’s 2017 version of the Mandate for Leadership. The group calculated that 64% of its policy recommendations were implemented or proposed by Trump in some way during his first year in office.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Heritage Foundation also created the first Mandate for Leadership that heavily influenced Ronald Reagan’s administration in 1981.The foundation claims that Reagan gave copies of the manifesto to “every member of his Cabinet” and that nearly two-thirds of the policy recommendations it laid out were either “adopted or attempted” by Reagan. More

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      Democrats move to repeal 1873 law they say could pave way for national abortion ban

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      Democrats introduced legislation on Thursday to repeal a 19th-century anti-obscenity law that bans mailing abortion-related materials, amid growing worries that anti-abortion activists will use the law to implement a federal abortion ban.The bill to repeal the Comstock Act was introduced by the Minnesota Democratic senator Tina Smith, whose office provided a draft copy of the legislation to the Guardian. The Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren and Nevada senator Catherine Cortez Masto also back the bill, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the news of Smith’s plans. Companion legislation was also set to be introduced in the House.“We have to see that these anti-choice extremists are intending to misapply the Comstock Act,” Smith said in an interview. “And so our job is to draw attention to that, and to do everything that we can to stop them.”Passed in 1873, the Comstock Act is named after the anti-vice crusader Anthony Comstock and, in its original iteration, broadly banned people from using the mail to send anything “obscene, lewd or lascivious”, including “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion”. In the 151 years since its enactment, legal rulings and congressional action narrowed the scope of the Comstock Act. For years, legal experts regarded it as a dead letter, especially when Roe v Wade established the constitutional right to an abortion.But after the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022, some anti-abortion activists started arguing that the Comstock Act’s prohibition against mailing abortion-related materials remained good law. Project 2025, a playbook written by the influential thinktank the Heritage Foundation, recommends that a future conservative presidential administration use the Comstock Act to block the mailing of abortion pills. Other activists have gone even further, arguing that the Comstock Act can outlaw the mailing of all abortion-related materials.Because abortion clinics rely on the mail for the drugs and tools they need to do their work, such an interpretation of the Comstock Act would be a de facto ban on all abortion.The Biden administration has issued guidance arguing that someone only violates the Comstock Act if the sender intends for abortion-related materials “to be used unlawfully”. However, although Joe Biden has focused his re-election campaign on reproductive rights, he has steered clear of addressing the potential return of the Comstock Act.Smith said that it “seems impossible” that her repeal bill will garner the 60 votes necessary to advance legislation in the Senate. Republicans recently stymied Democratic efforts to establish federal rights to contraception and in vitro fertilization.But Smith views her bill as a chance to raise awareness of the nationwide consequences of a Comstock Act revival, particularly among voters living in states where abortion rights are currently protected.“You talk to somebody in Minnesota or Nevada or Pennsylvania, places where people feel secure that they have control over their own decisions and their own potential to decide for themselves about abortion – and then come to find out that Donald Trump has a plan to take away that control that you have, even without a vote or an act of Congress,” Smith said. “It makes it much more real, what the difference is and what the contrast is, what the choices are for you even in those states where state law protects you. That could all change.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a New York Times April op-ed where she first aired her plans to repeal the Comstock Act, Smith suggested that she planned to introduce the legislation once the supreme court ruled on a case involving access to mifepristone, one of the two drugs typically used in US medication abortions and a top target of anti-abortion activists. In a unanimous opinion earlier this month, the supreme court ruled on technical grounds to let access to mifepristone remain unchanged for now. Although rightwing justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito brought up the Comstock Act during oral arguments in the case, neither the majority opinion nor a concurrence by Thomas ultimately mentioned the anti-obscenity law.“The court, in its decision, left the door wide open for future challenges based on Comstock,” Smith said, adding: “There was nothing in the court’s decision that gave me any sense of security.” More

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

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