Reproductive rights

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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

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      ‘Guys go where their buddies are’: the young men recruiting each other to fight for abortion rights

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      View image in fullscreen“Oh, no, no, I think you’re trying to get in contact with my wife.”That’s what a man in Florida recently told an activist who knocked on his door to talk about abortion rights. But the man was wrong. The activist, who represented a group called Men4Choice, was there to talk to him, because the group is dedicated to getting more men who support abortion rights involved in the fight for them.“They have to get off the sidelines,” said Dewayne Martin, the youth organizing director for Men4Choice, who relayed the activist’s account to the Guardian. “They have to become the foot soldiers of this movement.”Two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and allowed more than a dozen states to ban almost all abortions, most men in the United States support abortion rights. Within months of the decision, 65% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 said they supported abortion being legal in all or most cases. But Men4Choice calls these young men “passively pro-choice”.Young women still support abortion rights at higher rates than their male peers – and young men are just not as motivated to take a public stand on the issue. Just 43% of gen Z men say that abortion rights are a “critical issue”, compared with 68% of gen Z women, the political scientist Melissa Deckman found in her forthcoming book The Politics of Gen Z. This indifference has consequences: compared with women, men between the ages of 18 and 44 are less likely to say that abortion is motivating them to vote in the 2024 elections, according to polling from the firm PerryUndem. They are also less likely to say that the state of abortion rights will affect whom they vote for.Men4Choice’s goal is to get these young men to vote, canvass and otherwise act on their beliefs – instead of leaving the work to women.“When we think about our organizing strategy, it’s: help men see the harm,” said Oren Jacobson, a Men4Choice co-founder. “Help men understand how this issue is not just a woman’s issue. It’s not just about abortion. It’s about freedom, it’s about power, it’s about control. It is an issue that impacts all of us, our families, our loved ones.”View image in fullscreenIt affects young men’s futures, too. Compared with young men whose partners got pregnant and gave birth, young men whose partners had abortions are almost four times more likely to graduate college. Young men who have been involved in an abortion are also more likely to make more money than those whose partners gave birth. Overall, an estimated one in five men has impregnated somebody who has had an abortion.Democrats have made abortion rights one of their central issues in the 2024 elections, while Republicans – wary of how outrage over Roe’s downfall probably lost them a much heralded “red wave” in the 2022 midterms – have tried to downplay the issue and their own role in overturning Roe. However, as they’ve backed away, rightwing commentators and politicians have become far more adept at discussing masculinity than their leftwing counterparts, experts have told the Guardian. These rightwing public figures are not only willing to acknowledge that young men are struggling – with getting into college, with their finances, with their mental health – but also to portray these struggles as the result of women’s growing social and political power.This kind of talk – which is so popular it has essentially spawned a cottage industry – is believed to be a major reason why, despite their past support for liberal causes, so many young men are now pivoting towards conservatism (and potentially towards supporting Donald Trump).“It feels good. It’s telling men: ‘You’re the priority. You’re the superior being,’” said Davan’te Jennings, a Men4Choice fellow who lives in Georgia. “‘You act like this, this is when you get all the cars, the women, the mansion. Grind 24/7. Don’t think about mental health. Depression isn’t real.’”In Jennings’ view, such “toxic masculinity” is part of the reason why young men don’t feel like they can be openly passionate about abortion rights. He hears references to it all the time: when Jennings talks to men through Men4Choice, the men often use phrases like “to be a man” and “the manly thing to do”. Expressing emotions – including caring about abortion rights – doesn’t fit into that mold of masculinity.View image in fullscreenMen4Choice, then, aims to reframe how abortion fits into antiquated and restrictive notions of masculinity. “Masculinity is taking action,” Martin said. “Masculinity is caring for the people that you love. Masculinity is ensuring that you are building a pathway towards freedom for you and your people, and realizing that those two things are not separate.”Christian Shephard, a 26-year-old Men4Choice fellow who serves as an organizer for the group in central Florida, tries to open up conversations about abortion rights with men by discussing how some men treat women, including how they may objectify or sexualize women.“It may sound like that has nothing to do with reproductive justice, but it certainly does,” Shephard said. “There is a clear connection between how people talk about women and how these [anti-abortion] laws are being created to deprive them of fundamental rights.”In a recent Men4Choice “community conversation” – virtual and in-person discussions where fellows are expected to bring male friends – one man claimed he didn’t have to take any responsibility for abortion because “women should keep their legs closed”, Jennings recalled.“That was literally the words he used,” Jennings said. “Most of us who are pro-choice on the call are like: ‘Now we see why it’s important to dismantle that way of thinking.’”Jacobson launched Men4Choice in 2015, but the group has exploded in the years since Roe’s demise. The Men4Choice fellowship program, which runs three times a year and is training 70 men between the ages of 18 and 28 this summer, has almost tripled in size since the summer of 2022. Many Men4Choice fellows are based in Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina – all states with abortion bans.Though he was raised in a Democratic area of Miami, Martin, 22, said he hadn’t acted on his support for abortion rights until 2020. He was a high school senior working on organizing around school boards when a friend told him about Men4Choice.“It was in that moment that I realized, despite my being raised by a community of women who have served as my village and have made my life possible in several ways, I’ve never taken a direct action to support them on this issue,” recalled Martin, who became a Men4Choice fellow that year.View image in fullscreenIn the months before Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president, Men4Choice partnered with Doug Emhoff, Harris’s husband and the second gentleman of the United States, to host events centered on energizing men to fight for abortion rights. (“This is an issue of fairness to women. Women are dying,” Emhoff told NBC in May. “It’s affecting men’s ability to plan their lives.”) Now, the group is trying to mobilize male volunteers and funnel them towards partner organizations working on the ground.“Guys go where their buddies are,” Jacobson said. “You have to create an ecosystem of men to get them to show up.”Men4Choice is also heavily focusing on Florida, which has banned abortion past six weeks of pregnancy – before many people even know they’re pregnant – and where voters will decide in November whether to amend the state constitution to protect abortion rights.Abortion-rights ballot measures previously have succeeded in Republican strongholds, such as Ohio and Kentucky. Exit polls found that 73% of male voters between the ages of 18 and 29 voted in favor of the Ohio measure – a significant share of voters, but still less than the 81% of young female voters who supported it.The Florida amendment must garner 60% of the vote to pass. This fall, Men4Choice wants to reach 400,000 voters through phone and text banking, according to Martin. The group also wants to hold 100 community conversations with men.There is, however, a limit to the organization’s activism. Men4Choice focuses on men who already support abortion rights or are at least open to having a discussion about it – not men who are adamantly opposed to the procedure. “If there’s not an understanding or a clear line of wanting to understand,” Jennings said, “and we’re just going to sit here and get into a debate – it’s pointless.” More

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      Arizona to vote on enshrining abortion rights in state constitution in November

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      Arizona voters will decide this November whether to add abortion rights into their state constitution, a prospect that could turbocharge voter turnout in a critical battleground state in the 2024 election.Late Monday, the Arizona secretary of state’s office announced that it had validated an estimated 577,971 signatures in support of a ballot measure, the Arizona For Abortion Access Act, to establish a constitutional right to abortion in the state.On X, the office called the measure “the largest petition effort in Arizona history”. The measure will be listed on the ballot as Proposition 139.Arizona is not the only state to face the prospect of an abortion-related ballot measure this November. So far, states including Colorado, Florida and Nevada – another key battleground state – are also set to hold similar ballot measures. Tuesday also marks the deadline for the state of Missouri to determine whether to add its own abortion-related measure to its ballots.Since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, ballot measures that protect or preserve abortion rights have successfully passed even in red states such as Ohio, Kansas and Kentucky. However, they have never been tested during a presidential election. Democrats are hoping that enthusiasm for the measures will boost turnout among their base, especially since the vice-president, Kamala Harris, one of the Democrats’ most effective messengers on abortion rights, became the party’s nominee.Abortion is currently legal up until 15 weeks in Arizona. Earlier this year, the state supreme court ruled that a near-total abortion ban from 1864 – enacted before Arizona even became a state – could take effect. That ruling unleashed weeks of nationwide outrage and ultimately led a handful of Republicans to break with their party to vote in favor of a bill to repeal the 1864 ban.If passed, Arizona for Abortion Access Act would establish that Arizonans have “a fundamental right to abortion”. It would protect the right to abortion until fetal viability, which is typically dated to around 24 weeks of pregnancy, and allow for abortions past that point if a medical provider deems them necessary to protect a pregnant individual’s life, physical health or mental health.In May, a CBS poll found that 66% of Arizona adults want abortion to be legal in all or most cases. More

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      Harris urges Americans to vote after six-week abortion ban takes effect in Iowa

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      Kamala Harris, the likely Democratic nominee for president, urged Americans to vote after a six-week abortion ban took effect in Iowa on Monday.“This ban is going to take effect before many women even know they’re pregnant,” Harris said in a video posted to YouTube. “What this means is that one in three women of reproductive age in America lives in a state with a Trump abortion ban.”During the 33-second clip, Harris used the phrase “Trump abortion ban” three times – part of a wider effort by her campaign to blame her rival Donald Trump, who appointed three of the supreme court justices who overturned Roe v Wade and enabled states to outlaw abortion, for the spate of unpopular bans that now blanket the south and midwest.The Republican-dominated Iowa state legislature passed the ban last year, but a lengthy court battle initially stopped it from taking effect. Last month, the Iowa supreme court ruled that the ban could be enforced, leading a lower-court judge to rule it could take effect on Monday morning at 8am local time.“The upholding of this abortion ban in Iowa is an absolute devastation and violation of human rights, depriving Iowans of their bodily autonomy,” Leah Vanden Bosch, development and outreach director of the Iowa Abortion Access Fund, said in a statement. “We know a ban will not stop the need for abortions.”Up until Sunday, abortion had been legal in Iowa up to roughly 22 weeks of pregnancy. Now, abortion clinics in the state have indicated that they will continue offering the procedure to the legal limit. The closest options for Iowans who want abortions after six weeks of pregnancy will probably be Minnesota and Illinois, Democratic-run states that border Iowa and that have become abortion havens since Roe v Wade was overturned in 2022.The Iowa ban permits abortions past six weeks in cases of rape or incest, or in medical emergencies.Fourteen other states enacted near-total bans on abortion since the US supreme court overturned Roe. Three other states – Georgia, South Carolina and Florida – have banned abortion past about six weeks of pregnancy.Roe’s demise led to surge in support for abortion rights, even in red states. Sixty-one per cent of Iowans, including 70% of women, say that abortion should be legal in all or most cases, a Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa poll found last year.The end of Roe has made abortion rights one of the top issues in the 2024 election. Harris, the face of the issue for Democrats, has said that she would sign a bill codifying Roe’s protections into law. On the other side of the aisle, Trump, the Republican nominee has tried to downplay the issue as it has become a liability for Republicans.Kim Reynolds, Iowa’s Republican governor, celebrated the ban, calling it a “victory for life”. In a statement, she added: “There is nothing more sacred and no cause more worthy than protecting innocent unborn lives.” More

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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