Roe v Wade

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      More Americans are stockpiling abortion pills without pregnancy – study

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      More Americans are now stockpiling abortion pills in case they get pregnant, according to new research published Tuesday.Before Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022, Aid Access, an organization that mails abortion pills to people across the US, received an average of 25 requests a day from people seeking the pills despite not being pregnant. After the leak of the supreme court decision to overturn Roe, that average shot up to 247 requests each day, the research published on Tuesday found.That number fell after the actual decision, but rose again to 172 a day in April 2023, as US courts signaled a willingness to restrict the availability of a major abortion pill.People have been turning to Aid Access for “advance provision” pills since September 2021, after Texas enacted a six-week abortion ban but long before the US supreme court overturned Roe and abolished the national right to abortion. Now, with wide swathes of the US south and midwest under abortion bans, an online market to request and obtain abortion pills is thriving.The study tracks requests between the beginning of September 2021 and the end of April 2023. In December 2023, the US supreme court announced that it would hear arguments in a case regarding the future of mifepristone, a major abortion pill. That case is expected to be decided by this summer.In total, over the study’s time frame, Aid Access tracked roughly 48,400 advance provision requests. It received more requests for advance provision pills from states that were anticipated to enact bans – even more than the requests from states that did enact bans.“It seems to suggest that what people are reacting to is the threat of reduced access, the threat of curtailment of reproductive rights,” said Dr Abigail Aiken, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the study. “When you think about what advanced provision is, that makes sense, right? Advanced provision is getting out ahead of things. Advanced provision is advanced planning. Advanced provision is a way to protect a potential need you might have in the future if you think access to the service that would fulfill that need is going away.”Over the study period, Aid Access also received more than 147,00 requests from people seeking to end their existing pregnancies. Medical experts widely agree that it is safe to “self-manage” your own abortion, or perform an abortion outside of the formal US healthcare system, using pills within the first trimester of pregnancy.Compared with the people who wanted to terminate their existing pregnancies, people who sought advance provision pills were more likely to be white, child-free and living in urban areas. Choosing from a list of reasons, they most frequently told Aid Access that they wanted the pills to “ensure personal health and choice” and to “prepare for possible abortion restrictions”.Aid Access was launched in 2018 by Dr Rebecca Gomperts, a Dutch physician and one of the most visible abortion providers in the world. Gomperts, who co-authored the study published Tuesday, previously founded Women on Web, an organization that, like Aid Access, shipped abortion pills. However, Women on Web didn’t provide pills to the United States. Ultimately, Gomperts decided that the state of abortion access in the country was too dire to ignore.Advance provision pills cost $150 and should arrive within a few days of ordering, according to Aid Access’s website. During the time frame of the study, most of the pills were being shipped by overseas pharmacies, Aiken said.Now, to send abortion pills, US-based physicians associated with Aid Access have begun to rely on what are known as “shield laws”: protections in Democratic states for abortion providers who prescribe pills for patients in abortion-hostile states. This transition to focusing on using US providers was part of the reason for the study’s conclusion in April, Aiken said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It made sense to look at a time period where the service was entirely outside of the formal US healthcare setting,” Aiken said. “Now, I think a lot of people would argue that it’s happening within the formal healthcare setting, because it’s US provider-led and -based.”But while the US providers in blue states may be operating with the formal healthcare system, their patients in red states are not necessarily afforded the system’s protections and guidance. Someone who wants to get a check-up after an abortion, or even just talk to their doctor about their experience, may not feel able to.“In terms of the experience of the person actually using the pills, it may still look a lot more like a self-managed abortion,” Aiken said. “What that means for the nature of the service is an ongoing, interesting question that we’re thinking about now in the research field.”There was not much data available on what people ended up doing with the advance provision pills, Aiken said, since only a fraction followed up with Aid Access. However, of that fraction, most people still had the pills on standby months later.Last year, Gompertstold the Guardian that she wanted people to stock up on pills to protect themselves.“Don’t wait for the decision. Just get the medication now, get it in your house, get it in your hands,” she said. “If you’re in a war zone and the war is coming, you also make sure you have enough food in your house. This is how it feels. It really is a war. It’s a war on women.” More

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      Republicans seek winning strategy on abortion for 2024 – with Democrats also in a tricky spot

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      As the 2024 election season ramps up, Republicans continue to struggle to find a winning national strategy on the flashpoint issue of abortion – where restricting the procedure has animated the conservative movement for half a century but tormented the party since the fall of Roe.The supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade delivered Republicans one of their most significant policy victories in a generation. But in the year and a half since the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the ruling has also become one of their biggest political vulnerabilities.Over the last 18 months, voters have favored abortion rights in seven consecutive ballot measures, including in conservative states. Republicans underperformed in the 2022 midterm elections while Democrats scored off-year election wins in Wisconsin, Kentucky and Virginia – results that again emphasized the enduring power of abortion rights.Now the presidential election year brings a further huge test.“With abortion, there’s really a kind of catch-22 for Republicans,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California, Davis and a leading expert on the history of abortion in the US. “On the one hand, you have a lot of base Republican voters who really care about opposing abortion and on the other you have a huge group of something like 70% of Americans who don’t like abortion bans.”The US supreme court meanwhile set the stage for another major showdown over abortion rights, this time just months before the 2024 presidential election. The court has agreed to decide a case that could determine the accessibility of a widely used abortion pill, including in states where the procedure remains legal.But whether abortion will continue to fuel Democratic victories in a presidential election year is also unclear.Despite delivering a long list of anti-abortion victories, voters tend to view the Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, a thrice-married former Democrat from New York, as less socially conservative than his rivals, says Gunner Ramer, political director for the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Pac.“Donald Trump likes to stoke culture wars and own the libs but on social issues he’s seen as more moderate,” Ramer said, adding: “If Trump is the nominee, Democrats are in a much trickier position on abortion.”For decades, the Republican party championed the mission of the anti-abortion movement – to overturn Roe – without clearly articulating what would follow. Now they are contending with the real-world consequences: pregnancy resulting from rape and incest, life-threatening complications, fatal fetal conditions and miscarriages that require the procedure.Sixteen states now ban abortion at conception or after six weeks, before many women know they’re pregnant. Among them is Texas, where Kate Cox, a pregnant woman whose fetus was diagnosed with a fatal condition, was forced to leave the state this month to receive an abortion after Ken Paxton, the state’s Republican attorney general, threatened legal action – “including first-degree felony prosecutions” – against doctors or anyone else who assisted in performing the procedure. The Texas supreme court ultimately ruled against Cox’s request to have an emergency abortion in the state.Seizing on the turn of events, top officials on Joe Biden’s re-election campaign assailed the “unspeakable reality” now facing women in states with limited or no access to abortion.They drew a direct line to Donald Trump, the former president and likely Republican presidential nominee, blaming his appointment of three supreme court justices who cast decisive votes to overturn Roe.“Kate had to leave her home state to seek the healthcare she urgently needs,” said Julie Chávez Rodriguez, Biden’s campaign manager. “This is happening right here in the United States of America and it’s happening because of Donald Trump.”In the increasingly noncompetitive race for the Republican presidential nomination, disagreements among the White House hopefuls over how to approach or even talk about abortion reflect a wide lack of unity within the GOP on the issue.Trump, in conspicuous fashion, is trying to have it both ways. He has blamed conservative activists’ uncompromising positions on “the abortion issue” for costing Republicans at the ballot box while touting his anti-abortion legacy to the party’s socially conservative base.In Iowa, which launches the Republican presidential primary contest next month, Trump is running ads declaring himself “the most pro-life president ever”. But on the major litmus test for anti-abortion activists – support for a national ban – he has been noncommittal.At a CNN town hall this month, Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is challenging Trump for the nomination, accused the former president of “flip-flopping on the pro-life issue”. Trump has said DeSantis made a “terrible mistake” when the governor signed into law earlier this year a six-week abortion ban. Pressed to commit to a national standard, DeSantis has said he would support a federal ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy.Nikky Haley, the former United Nations ambassador and the only woman in the race, has sought a different tack, calling for “consensus” and “compassion”. Haley, who as governor of South Carolina in 2016 signed a 20-week ban, has suggested that as president she would enact any abortion restrictions that reached her desk, but said such measures were unlikely in the narrowly divided and deeply polarized Congress.Chris Christie, the former New Jersey governor who is running for president, is incredulous that Republicans are calling for federal action on abortion after waging a 50-year legal battle to return the issue to the states.“I trust the people of this country, state by state, to make the call for themselves,” he said during a recent debate.It’s a view shared by the entrepreneur and author Vivek Ramaswamy, who opposes a federal ban but says he supports state laws outlawing abortion after six weeks.Among the Republican presidential candidates, the two most avowed abortion opponents Mike Pence, the former vice-president, and Tim Scott, the South Carolina senator, have already exited the race.Furthering the divide, leading anti-abortion groups are pressuring Republican candidates to back a national ban starting at least at 15 weeks of pregnancy if not earlier, while some party strategists are advising them to clearly state their opposition to any such federal limit.In a post-election memo Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the powerful anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, said the losses were “major disappointments for the pro-life movement” and “warning signs for the GOP”.“It is long past due for the GOP to define where it stands on the issue nationally,” she wrote. “Having a clear position and contrasting it isn’t enough – campaigns and the party must put real advertising dollars behind it, going toe-to-toe with the Democrats.”Her group has urged candidates to support a federal ban on abortions after 15 weeks of gestation at a minimum or risk losing its endorsement.Ronna McDaniel, chair of the Republican National Committee, has criticized Republicans for not confronting the issue more aggressively. “You can’t hide in a corner and think abortion’s not going to be an issue,” she said on NBC News in November, adding: “We can’t just say it’s a state’s issue and be done.”Others have urged candidates to emphasize its support for exceptions, while expressing more compassion and empathy when discussing what can be a deeply personal – and in some cases medically advisable – decision. Still, some say its a matter of semantics, suggesting Republicans avoid terms like “pro-life” and “ban”.According to Politico, a group of prominent Republican pollsters suggested candidates change the subject, presenting polling to members of Congress that showed they could sharpen their appeal with women and independent voters by focusing on protecting contraception rather than banning abortion.“Abortion is, as the courts decided, an issue for states to decide, not the federal government,” states the campaign website for Kari Lake, who is expected to be the Republican Senate nominee in the race for Kyrsten Sinema’s seat. It’s a retreat from her position as a candidate for governor in 2022, when the far-right Republican cast herself as an outspoken ally of the anti-abortion movement and embraced Arizona’s territorial-era law that would ban nearly all abortions in the state.Lake is one of several Republican candidates running in battleground Senate races who have adjusted their stance – and their rhetoric – on the issue.Meanwhile in the House, now led by Mike Johnson, the Louisiana congressman, one of the chamber’s staunchest anti-abortion crusaders, vulnerable Republicans have sought to distance themselves from absolutists in the party.“The supreme court needs to stand down,” said Mike Lawler, a New York Republican who represents a district Biden won in 2020, in response to the high court’s decision to take up the abortion pill case. In a statement, he emphasized his opposition to a national ban.**As Republicans struggle, Democrats say the problem is taking positions that are deeply unpopular with the American public.When Democrats won full control of the Virginia state legislature in November, the Republican governor, Glenn Youngkin, declared support for what he called a “reasonable” 15-week abortion ban.That same night Andy Beshear, the Democratic Kentucky governor, won re-election after his campaign ran a powerful ad featuring a woman who was raped by her stepfather as a child. In the video, she criticized Daniel Cameron, Beshear’s Republican opponent, for supporting Kentucky’s near-total abortion ban, which does not include exceptions in cases involving rape or incest.And in beet-red Ohio, 56.6% of voters chose to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.“In every election since the overturning of Roe, voters have sent a resounding message: they want more freedom, not less – and come 2024, Republicans will once again face the repercussions of their unrelenting crusade to strip away our rights,” Sarafina Chitika, a spokesperson for the Democratic National Committee, said in a statement.At the state-level, abortion-related ballot initiatives could help Democrats mobilize Republican women and independent voters who have helped make up their winning coalition in the years since Trump was elected.Building on the success of abortion-related ballot initiatives, abortion rights advocates are working to put the issue before voters in battleground states, including Arizona and Florida. An effort is also underway in Montana, where Democrats hope a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion protections could boost turnout and help one of the party’s most vulnerable incumbent senators, Jon Tester, win re-election.As long as abortion is severely restricted in large swaths of the country where Republicans hold power, candidates at the national level will likely struggle to convince voters that they have moderated on the issue, even if they now champion later-stage “consensus” limits and exceptions, Ziegler said.“If the pro-life movement has a different agenda that they continue to pursue in a large swath of the country, national Republicans either have to say, ‘that’s not what we’re doing. We’re not for that’; or they’re going to be associated with that,” she said.Even so, the road ahead for Democrats is not straightforward.A string of recent surveys found a mixed picture: Biden is trailing Trump nationally and in several swing states. In a Wall Street Journal poll, voters said Trump was better equipped to handle most major policy issues with the exception of abortion, which Biden led by a double-digit margin.The Biden campaign has vowed to put abortion front and center this election cycle. They have argued that Trump – or any of his Republican rivals – would seek to ban abortion as president, possibly through policy changes that would not require congressional approval as some conservatives have proposed.There are risks to the strategy, especially if Trump is the nominee, says Ramer, from the anti-Trump Republican Accountability Pac.Ramer says there was a key dynamic in play in 2022. While Democrats harnessed voter fury over the loss of constitutional abortion rights, he said they were helped by Republicans, who nominated candidates with “extreme” absolutist positions on the issue, such as Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Tudor Dixon in Michigan.That may not continue in 2024.“Abortion is a very nuanced issue for voters,” he said. “And the economy, at the end of the day, is more top of mind for Republicans and swing-state voters.” More

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      The fight for abortion rights: what to know going into 2024

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      More than a year after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, the dust from the landmark decision’s collapse has yet to settle.It has been a dramatic year of fallout, with abortion rights supporters and foes now waging a state-by-state skirmish for abortion rights. They are sparring in state legislatures, courtrooms, voting booths and hospitals, with each side racking up victories and losses.With a presidential election and another major supreme court case on the horizon, the coming year promises to be at least as eventful. Here’s what you need to know about the fight over abortion in 2023 – and what it means for 2024.Abortion rights supporters keep winning at the ballot boxIn 2022, Republicans underperformed in the midterms and abortion rights activists won a string of ballot measures to preserve abortion rights, even in conservative states. This year, activists extended their winning streak – and they hope to replicate their successes in 2024.In November, Ohio became the first reliably red state since Roe fell to vote in favor of proactively enshrining abortion rights in the state constitution, while Virginia Democrats successfully fended off Republicans’ attempt to retake the state legislature by campaigning on a 15-week abortion ban.For activists and Democrats, these victories were proof that abortion is an election-winning issue – and, potentially, an issue that can draw in voters from across both sides of the ideological spectrum. Activists are already at work on 2024 abortion-related ballot measures in roughly a dozen states, including swing states like Arizona and Nevada.Abortions are on the riseAfter abortion clinics across the south and midwest were forced to shutter, patients overwhelmed the country’s remaining clinics. In the first year after Roe’s demise, the average number of US abortions performed each month rose rather than fell. Clinics and their advocates are now struggling to keep up. “What actually is happening is a complete disruption,” one expert told the Guardian.There is also a gaping hole in the data, which was released in October by the Society of Family Planning: it does not include abortions performed at home, a practice known as “self-managed abortion”. Medical experts widely agree that it is safe to self-manage an abortion using pills early on in pregnancy, and a number of services shipping abortion pills have increased in visibility since Roe’s overturning. But while evidence suggests that self-managed abortion is on the rise, the lack of concrete data about the practice reflects a growing problem in the post-Roe United States: as abortion moves further into the shadows of US life, we will know less about it.Legal battles over abortion bans are ongoingAbortion bans continued to cascade across the country in 2023, with near-total bans taking effect in Indiana, North Dakota and South Carolina. South Carolina and Nebraska, meanwhile, enacted laws to ban abortion after 12 weeks of pregnancy. In total, 24 states or territories have now banned abortion before viability, or roughly 24 weeks of pregnancy, which would have been illegal under Roe.Litigation over abortion restrictions is still unfurling in many of these states, and court cases have frozen bans in states like Wyoming and Iowa. Wisconsin abortion providers, meanwhile, found themselves in a unique position this year: after a judge ruled that an 1849 law that had been interpreted to ban abortions instead only banned feticide and did not apply to what she called “consensual abortions”, providers resumed performing the procedure – even though the ban is still technically on the books.Lawsuits may force other hardcore anti-abortion states to soften their bans in 2024 to clarify exceptions when abortions are permitted in medical emergencies. While Tennessee and Texas carved out narrow exceptions in their abortion laws, abortion rights supporters have still filed lawsuits in those two states, as well as in Idaho, that challenge the language. One Texan mother of two filed a lawsuit seeking an emergency abortion while she was still pregnant. (She ultimately fled the state for the procedure.)Theoretically, people in medical emergencies should be able to access the procedure even in states with bans – but doctors say that, in reality, these bans are so vaguely worded that they block doctors from helping sick patients. This summer, one of these lawsuits led women to testify in a Texas court about their experiences of being denied abortions. It was the first time since Roe fell, if not the first time since Roe itself was decided, that women did so.Abortion pills are in perilThe most common method of abortion, abortion pills, is at the mercy of deeply conservative courts in 2024.In April, a conservative judge in Texas ruled to suspend the FDA’s approval of a key abortion pill, mifepristone, in response to a lawsuit brought by a coalition of rightwing groups determined to make the pill the next target in their post-Roe campaign against abortion. A federal appeals court soon scaled back that decision, ruling to keep the pill, mifepristone, available but impose significant restrictions on its use. The supreme court then stepped in and decreed that the FDA’s rules around mifepristone should stay the same while litigation plays out.The Biden administration and a manufacturer of mifepristone in September have asked the supreme court to formally hear arguments in the case. In December, the justices agreed.Although the justices indicated that they will only rule on the restrictions imposed by the appeals court, rather than on the overall legality of mifepristone, the case could still have enormous consequences. Rolling back the FDA’s rules could allow future lawsuits against other politicized medications, like gender-affirming care, HIV drugs or vaccines. Plus, the supreme court will probably rule by summer 2024 – just months before the presidential election.Mifepristone is used in more than half the abortions in the country. If access to the drug is curtailed, many abortion clinics have said they will pivot to using doses of a different drug, misoprostol, to perform abortions, but misoprostol-only abortions are less effective and associated with more complications.Doctors are fleeing states with abortion bansWith abortion bans endangering their patients and threatening to send doctors to prison, doctors are fleeing states where the procedure is banned. After Idaho banned abortion, at least 13 reproductive health physicians left the state and at least two rural labor and delivery wards have closed. Doctors in Tennessee, Texas, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida have also told reporters that they are leaving states with abortion bans or planning to do so.OB-GYNs are already in short supply in the United States. About half of US counties do not have a practicing OB-GYN, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. The US maternal mortality rates are also worsening, particularly for Black and Native people, at a time when the United States already has the worst maternal mortality rate among industrialized countries.Doctors are now even afraid to get trained in states with abortion bans. Applications to OB-GYN residencies in states with near-total bans fell by more than 10% the year after Roe’s demise, according to data from Association of American Medical Colleges. Applications to US OB-GYN residencies overall dropped by about 5% – indicating that fewer doctors are planning to become OB-GYNs at all. More

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      ‘A generational struggle’: abortion rights pioneer offers insights to the post-Roe US

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      The battle to bring back the federal right to abortion in the US hinges on much more than just the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, and winning will require proponents to be as organized and steadfast as their opponents, at least as one of the reproductive freedom movement’s most veteran voices sees it.Invoking scenes that played out all across the country after the supreme court’s Dobbs decision eliminated nationwide abortion rights, Merle Hoffman recently said: “It looks like thousands of people marching in the streets all over the country … [But] you can’t just do one action.“The pressure has to go, and go, and go.”Hoffman, 77, positioned herself at the forefront of the American reproductive freedom movement decades ago, when she helped open one of the US’s first abortion centers in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens in New York City two years before the supreme court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision established the national right to the procedure.Hoffman recently spoke to the Guardian about how Democratic control of the White House and one of the congressional chambers has offered little resistance to Republican command of the judiciary, which allowed the supreme court’s conservative majority to overturn Roe.She believes that gaining back the ground lost since Dobbs was handed down in the summer of 2022 requires more than just voting for pro-abortion candidates.“That’s one aspect, yes,” Hoffman said.But, given that the federal levers of power are divided among the two political parties, and the procedural blocks that one branch of government can leverage on another, “don’t assume – please don’t assume – that as soon as these people get into office, they’re going to put Roe v Wade right back,” Hoffman said.“They can’t.”Hoffman highlighted how little federal-level Democrats had done to protect abortion access with Joe Biden in the White House and a slim majority in the Senate since Roe v Wade was overturned.Biden has been unwilling to pursue an expansion of the nine-seat supreme court to add liberals to the bench and better balance its 6-3 conservative majority. Meanwhile, with control of the House and Senate split by thin margins, Congress has not been able to enact national protections for reproductive rights through legislation, creating a confusing checkerboard where abortion is nearly completely banned in 14 states.Hoffman had a hand in founding Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights shortly before Roe fell, with the aim of galvanizing popular opposition to abortion restrictions.She said the thousands who participated in mass street protests in cities across the US – including Washington DC, New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago – then and since have had the correct approach. And she complimented the energy younger advocates brought in organizing those events and similar, unrelated ones when unrest over Roe’s fall was at its highest.But Hoffman said such demonstrations have all but vanished in terms of size and intensity as other major events, including the Israel-Gaza war that erupted in October, have taken up the progressive left’s attention.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHoffman acknowledged that some believe street protests and walkouts in schools and workplaces have a limited effect within the current structure of power in the US. But she said she steadfastly believed enough actions like that, sustained over an adequate amount of time, would convince those in power to side with the majority of Americans who favor abortion rights over opposing special interests.She said reproductive rights supporters could also do more to advocate for the movement by contributing time or money to efforts aimed at improving healthcare for women who do want to have children.Meanwhile, Hoffman said, women who have had abortions but have chosen to remain silent because of the social stigma could help break that stigma by speaking up about their experiences and decisions.She likened it to LGBTQ+ people “coming out” about their sexualities, and how supportive that can be to members of their communities who feel shame and guilt in silence.“There’s an abortion closet,” Hoffman said. “The first thing you can do is come out.”Hoffman said it was perhaps most important to realize that truly taking back what was lost to Dobbs would take decades. That’s how long it took opponents of reproductive rights – as well as like-minded judges and lawmakers – to plot the seeds for the historic decision to end the right to abortion in the US.“This is a generational struggle,” said Hoffman, echoing the central point in her recent book Choices: A Post-Roe Abortion Rights Manifesto. “This is going to pass from me to the next generation to the next generation.“The opposition is extremely, extremely … relentless. They’re persistent, they’re creative – and they won’t stop until there is no abortion in this country.” More

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      Democrats won Virginia on abortion. Can it also win them the White House?

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      Days before Josh Cole won his toss-up race, the Democratic candidate for Virginia’s house of delegates predicted that his party would perform well on election day, largely because the issue of abortion had motivated many voters to turn out at the polls.“There are people who are absolutely passionate about reproductive freedom and making sure that an abortion ban doesn’t come to Virginia,” Cole said.Four days later, Cole was proven right, defeating the Republican candidate Lee Peters to represent house district 65 in Richmond, the capital of Virginia. Cole’s victory reflected Virginia Democrats’ broader success on election day, as the party flipped control of the house of delegates and maintained their majority in the state senate.Democrats’ wins in Virginia may now offer some helpful lessons for the party heading into a crucial presidential election. A year and a half after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, abortion continues to weigh heavily on voters’ minds, helping to lift Democrats’ prospects at the polls. Even as Biden remains unpopular and voters express pessimism about the state of the economy, Republicans have struggled to translate that dissatisfaction into electoral success.House district 65 in particular represents a fascinating example of how Republicans failed to win the support of swing voters who helped elect Glenn Youngkin, the Virginia governor, two years earlier. The district, which was newly redrawn following the 2020 census, lies roughly halfway between Washington and Richmond and encompasses the small city of Fredericksburg, as well as parts of Stafford and Spotsylvania counties.The battleground district supported Biden by 11.7 points in 2020, according to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Just one year later, the district went for Youngkin by 2.8 points. Both parties had targeted the seat, with Youngkin himself appearing alongside Peters at a get out the vote rally in Fredericksburg the day before polls closed.Republicans had hoped Peters’ biography as a sheriff’s captain and a former marine would help him defeat Cole, a local pastor and former delegate who narrowly lost his re-election race in 2021. But Cole ultimately won the seat by 6 points.“This was in no way a predetermined result. It’s not a solid blue district at all. It was a winnable one [for Republicans],” said Mark Rozell, dean of the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. “And probably among the house of delegates districts, it best represents what went wrong for the Republicans when it should have been a better year for them in the legislative races.”Democrats credit their success in the district and elsewhere to one issue: abortion. Democrats consistently reminded voters of Virginia’s status as the last remaining state in the US south without severe restrictions on the procedure, warning that Republicans would enact an abortion ban if they took full control of the legislature.Those warnings appeared to resonate with Virginians; according to a Washington Post-Schar School poll conducted in October, 60% of voters in the state said abortion was a “very important” factor in their election decisions. More than half of Virginia voters, 51%, said they trusted Democrats more when it came to handling abortion policies, while 34% said the same of Republicans.In this year’s race, Cole kept relentless attention on the issue, citing his support for abortion rights in nearly all of his ads and mailers while attacking Peters over his “anti-choice extremism”.“It was very interesting because it seemed as if people were showing up on one issue,” Cole said after election day. “Of course, we did talk about kitchen-table issues when we’re on the doors and different things like that, but our message was simple. We need to trust women and we need to protect a woman’s right to choose and we need to make sure that the government doesn’t interfere with that.”Virginia Republicans were clearly aware that their stance on abortion could become a liability in the legislative races, particularly after the party’s disappointing performance in the 2022 midterms. To address voters’ potential concerns over abortion, Youngkin chose to deploy a new and untested messaging tactic. He proposed a “reasonable 15-week limit” on the procedure, rejecting the label of an abortion “ban” and instead accusing Democrats of being out of step with voters on the issue.“Most people believe that abortion at the moment of birth is wrong, far beyond any reasonable limit. Not Virginia Democrats,” the narrator said in one Republican ad. “They fought to make late-term abortions the rule, not the exception.”Republicans also attempted to downplay the significance of abortion in the legislative races, insisting Virginia voters were more focused on other issues. Peters himself made this argument at a September debate, saying, “Everybody is not concerned or worried about women’s rights, even though there are many, many women who are. Some people worry about public safety. Some people worry about their schools.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut in the end, Virginia Republicans’ efforts to redefine and minimize the abortion debate were unsuccessful. Democrats maintained a majority of 21-19 in the Virginia senate while flipping control of the house of delegates with a majority of 51-49.“They tested some new messages around this issue – with the intention of getting to the same result, which was an abortion ban. And voters just outright rejected them,” said Heather Williams, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee. “Republicans are still scratching their head on how to talk about an issue that voters don’t want.”Even fellow Republicans have acknowledged that abortion has become a persistent problem for the party’s electoral prospects. Bill Bolling, a Republican and the former lieutenant governor of Virginia, attributed the party’s losses to three factors: abortion, Donald Trump and a lack of a clear policy vision.“It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to quickly analyze why Republicans did not perform better at the polls,” Bolling wrote last month. “Democrats successfully argued that Republicans wanted to ‘ban abortion’ in Virginia. While this argument was certainly not truthful, it was effective, especially with suburban women who have grown increasingly Democratic in their voting patterns in recent years.”In Cole’s view, his message to voters spread beyond abortion access to encompass other rights, allowing his campaign to embrace a central theme of safeguarding fundamental freedoms.“This election was about protecting rights, whether it’s the right to education, women’s rights, the right to live safely in the streets, or whatever have you. This race was about rights,” Cole said. “[Voters] understood that we definitely have to have people fighting for us on every level, who are looking out for us and our rights.”That theme was similarly present in the messaging of other Democratic candidates in Virginia, Williams said. She suggested that their success could offer a framework for candidates running next year, when Democrats will be fighting to hold the White House and the Senate and flip control of the House of Representatives.“The way that that [message] shows up in an individual community or state may look different. One community may gravitate much more towards having good safe schools and a planet to live on,” Williams said. “But that arc is still true – that fundamental freedoms matter and voters want to see their freedoms protected and not rolled back.”For Republicans, the results in Virginia present the latest in a series of warning signs about how the party is suffering because of its stance on abortion. Youngkin’s failure to take control of the legislature may signal that Republicans must find a way to shift the conversation away from abortion, although that strategy risks angering their rightwing base.“It seems to me that Republicans have just constantly squandered whatever advantage that they have by focusing on divisive social issues where the voters are not aligning with their position,” Rozell said. “So they need to find a way out of that trap that they’ve made for themselves. Otherwise, they’re going to keep losing winnable districts.” More

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      An ‘abortion abolitionist’ became an Oklahoma senator. The fringe is celebrating its big victory

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      When Dusty Deevers won his race to become an Oklahoma state senator on Tuesday night, he wasted no time in making sure his new constituents knew what he stood for.“Here in Oklahoma, it’s time to abolish abortion, abolish pornography, abolish the state income tax and give power and equal representation back to the people!” the Republican posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.Deevers’ use of the term “abolish abortion” is no mere rhetorical flourish. On his campaign website, Deevers has identified himself as an “abortion abolitionist” – an adherent of a hardline, fringe segment of the anti-abortion movement that, in Oklahoma and elsewhere, is growing in the wake of the fall of Roe v Wade.Opposition to abortion is rooted in the belief that fetuses are people, worthy of rights and protections. But the mainstream “pro-life” movement posits that abortion patients should not be punished, since they are seen as the bamboozled victims of nefarious doctors and the “abortion industry”. Typically, abortion bans target abortion providers, not patients.Abortion “abolitionists,” on the other hand, hold what they believe to be a more ideologically consistent stance: if a fetus is a person, then abortion is tantamount to murder. And patients should be punished accordingly.Roe’s overturning has made a broader range of anti-abortion ideas look acceptable, as well as cast a spotlight on the contradictions and limits in current anti-abortion law, said Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis School of Law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. In turn, that’s emboldened the abolitionists.“It’s not an easy question about how you can be consistent and exempt women from punishment,” Ziegler said. The abolitionists, she says, are essentially saying: “‘We’re the pragmatists, because if a lot of abortions are self-managed, or involve medical practitioners from out of state or even out of the US altogether, how do you propose meaningfully enforcing [bans] if you’re not going to punish women or other pregnant folks?“They’ve also been hated because people who are not opposed to abortion didn’t know that they existed,” Ziegler added. “And people who are opposed to abortion are not happy that people discovered that they existed.”Over the last several years, “abortion abolitionists” and their ideology have quietly amassed popularity in churches, state legislatures and online. Several abolitionist organizations filed an amicus brief in the decision that overturned Roe. Abolitionists Rising – which features a video of Deevers on its website – has almost 200,000 subscribers on YouTube, with at least one video with more than half a million views. (Deevers did not immediately reply to an interview request.) The YouTube account of Apologia Studios, which is run by prominent abortion “abolitionist” and pastor Jeff Durbin, has more than 500,000 subscribers.In 2023, legislators in at least nine states introduced bills that would advance the abortion abolition cause, such as by erasing provisions in laws that explicitly protect pregnant people from being prosecuted for having abortions. At least two of those bills explicitly cite the 14th amendment, which was originally passed to ensure that formerly enslaved people had equal rights, to extend rights and protections to fetuses.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe anti-abortion movement has a long history of drawing comparisons between their cause and that of pre-civil war abolitionists trying to end US slavery, as well as civil rights crusaders. For decades, they have tried to use the 14th amendment to establish fetuses’ right to personhood, a push that is seeing renewed interest post-Roe.However, anti-abortion “abolitionists” often draw a line between their work and that of the mainstream pro-life movement. Not only do they frequently disdain the pro-life label, but while the pro-life movement has increasingly sought to portray its mission as secular, anti-abortion “abolitionists” are staunchly and openly Christian.“I think that the abolitionist movement is a litmus test for how much the anti-abortion movement needs to win or wants to win in democratic politics versus other means,” Ziegler said. “If you need to win with voters, abolitionists are not going to get anywhere, ever.”There is little support for severe punishments for people who get illegal abortions. Although 47% of US adults believe that women who have illegal abortions should face some form of penalty, just 14% think they should serve jail time, according to a 2022 poll by the Pew Research Center. “Abolitionists” don’t necessarily believe that people should face the death penalty for abortions. “I do believe that the unjustified taking of human life, if provable, ultimately, justly, ought to be capital punishment,” Durbin told the New York Times last year. “However, I don’t trust our system today to deal that out.”None of the “abolitionist”-style bills ultimately advanced very far in state legislatures this year. Still, they can be something of a PR nightmare for Republicans and the mainstream pro-life movement. After a host of news articles about South Carolina’s Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which would allow people who have abortions to face the death penalty, 10 Republican state legislators asked to remove their names as sponsors of the bill.That bill died in committee.While these bills technically focus on abortion seekers, in reality they would probably also be used to penalize people of color or poor people who have unintended pregnancy losses, according to Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director of If/When/How, a legal advocacy group for reproductive justice.“We know who the targets of these laws would be, because they’re the people who are already criminalized for pregnancy outcomes. So we would see an escalation of that status quo,” Diaz-Tello said. “Things that for people of wealth and privilege would be considered a tragedy end up being charged as a crime against people of color, in particular Black women, and people who are in poverty.”Deevers won his seat in the Oklahoma state legislature after its former occupant resigned for another job. On his campaign website, Deevers says that he supports Oklahoma’s version of the Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which was introduced in 2023. That bill eliminates language that would block Oklahoma prosecutors from targeting pregnant people for “causing the death of the unborn child”. Its sponsor, whose 2020 election was supported by the abolitionist group Free the States, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.“This bill would abolish abortion by making preborn children equal under law and closing the loopholes which allow for self-managed abortion,” Deevers’ campaign website reads, adding, “I am 100% against abortion and for its abolition.” More

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      US supreme court agrees to consider abortion pill access

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      The US supreme court on Wednesday agreed to hear oral arguments in a case that could determine the future of a pill used in most abortions in the US, in the first major abortion rights case to land at the country’s highest court since the justices overturned Roe v Wade and abolished the national right to the procedure in 2022.A decision in the case will probably arrive in summer 2024, just months before the presidential election. The outcome of the case could affect not just access to the pill, which has been repeatedly deemed safe and effective, but the Federal Drug Administration’s authority to regulate all manner of medications.The drug at the heart of the case is mifepristone, one of the two drugs typically used in medication abortions, which make up the majority of US abortions. Last year, an association of anti-abortion organizations and doctors, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine, filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the FDA had overstepped its authority when it approved mifepristone in 2000.In April, a Texas federal judge appointed by former president Donald Trump issued a preliminary ruling to suspend the FDA’s approval of mifepristone and pull the medication off the market. The US court of appeals for the fifth circuit – one of the most conservative federal appeals courts in the US – ruled in August that, while it was too late to suspend the FDA’s approval, the agency should significantly restrict access to mifepristone. The Biden administration and Danco Laboratories, which manufactures mifepristone, then asked the supreme court to weigh in on the case.The supreme court paused lower-court rulings while the case plays out, so mifepristone remains widely available in states that permit abortion. If the court allows the fifth circuit ruling to stand, it would roll back recent FDA efforts that refined the drug’s dosage and expanded access by allowing it to be prescribed later on in pregnancy and through telehealth.On Wednesday, the supreme court agreed to hear the consolidated petitions from the Biden administration and Danco Laboratories, which asked the justices to focus on the legal attempts to roll back those later FDA efforts. Those petitions also asked the justices to consider whether the challengers have the legal right, or standing, to bring the case in the first place.“You can’t just bring random lawsuits in court. You actually have to have been harmed by something,” said Greer Donley, an associate law professor at the University of Pittsburgh Law School. “That’s really what standing analysis is all about, to try to figure out if if the people who bring the lawsuit actually have a stake in the case.” Numerous legal experts have questioned whether the challengers in this case have properly demonstrated that they have been harmed by mifepristone’s continued legality.The supreme court also denied a petition from the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine that asked the justices to explicitly consider the FDA’s 2000 approval of mifepristone. That move suggests that the supreme court is unlikely to pull mifepristone off the market entirely.In Donley’s view, the outcome of this case will probably signal whether the supreme court, which is controlled 6-3 by conservatives, wants to be involved in the post-Roe war over abortion rights. If the justices decide to focus on the standing issues in the case, they could sidestep having to rule on the substance of the case entirely.“I could see the more moderates on the supreme court thinking: ‘we don’t want to touch this,’” Donley said. “It might make the supreme court look like less of an activist court if it were to dismiss this case on the basis of really legitimate standing problems.”Any ruling by the court would affect all 50 states, including those that have protected abortion rights. (In recent months, officials in states such as Washington and California have announced that they have begun to stockpile mifepristone.)A ruling could also imperil the FDA’s regulatory power writ large and pose an existential threat to pharmaceutical companies. If courts can rewrite the FDA’s approval of abortion pills, any kind of drug – including, for example, drugs used to protect against HIV or to provide gender-affirming care – could end up in conservative jurists’ crosshairs.The ruling from the federal appeals court, Danco Laboratories warned in its briefs to the supreme court, “destabilizes the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries by questioning when scientific studies – accepted by FDA – are sufficient”. More than 100 studies, conducted across 26 countries, have concluded that mifepristone is safe, a New York Times review found.If deprived of access to mifepristone, several abortion clinics have said that they would keep providing medication abortions using only misoprostol, the other drug typically used in medication abortions. Although misoprostol-only abortions are still overwhelmingly safe, they can have more side-effects and are slightly less effective than the two-drug protocol.Ultimately, regardless of how the supreme court rules, its decision will not curtail the thriving underground networks that routinely supply mifepristone to women looking to end their pregnancies, including in the 16 states with near-total abortion bans. In fact, a move to ban mifepristone is likely to cause a sharp rise in demand for the drug through those networks.In the wake of Roe’s fall, a vast web of abortion rights supporters and opportunistic merchants have sprung up to ship abortion pills to Americans. Inducing your own abortion is not illegal in most US states, even in states that have banned in-clinic abortions, and medical experts widely agree that it can be safe to use pills to “self-manage” an abortion early in pregnancy. More

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      Kate Cox begged Texas to let her end a dangerous pregnancy. She won’t be the last | Moira Donegan

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      In most cases, we would never have learned her name. Kate Cox, a Texas woman, is in a sadly common set of circumstances: a 31-year-old mother of two, Cox was pregnant with her third child when doctors informed her that something was wrong. Pregnancy complications are common, but in a state like Texas, they have become newly dangerous, threatening women with potentially disfiguring health complications, along with unimaginable heartbreak, as the state’s multiple bans have mandated grotesque and inhumane treatment of doomed pregnancies.Cox’s fetus had trisomy 18, a chromosomal disorder. Trisomy 18 is a devastating diagnosis. Most pregnancies end in stillbirths; those infants born alive with the disorder live anguished, short and painful lives. Cox was informed that her fetus, in the sterile medical parlance, “could not sustain life”. The fetus had malformations of the spine, heart, brain and limbs. The pregnancy also posed dire threats to Cox’s health; most significantly, she was at risk of losing her future fertility if she remained pregnant.If Cox made it to delivery – a big if – the child would live for perhaps an hour, perhaps a week. It would have to be treated with pain medications for the entirety of its brief life. None of these were cognizable concerns under Texas’s abortion ban. The law said that she would have to remain pregnant – would have to get sicker, have to endure greater and greater pain and grief, and then would have to labor and give birth to a daughter, who she would watch suffer and die.There are hundreds of women like Cox living in Republican-controlled states, women carrying pregnancies in which there is no hope that a living baby will result at the end of nine months. These are pregnancies that – because of abortion bans that provide no actionable exemptions for medically futile pregnancies or maternal health – women are forced to keep carrying anyway.Most people in this situation suffer in private; they endure the cooing at their bellies from oblivious strangers while they remain pregnant, and they purchase tiny urns in the brutal days after. Cox is different only because she made the decision to share her situation publicly. As her health deteriorated and she made multiple visits to the emergency room, she published an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, and petitioned Texas courts for an abortion. It is the first recorded instance of an adult woman having to ask for government permission to end her pregnancy since Roe. On Friday night, the Texas supreme court refused. On Monday, Cox left the state, seeking an abortion elsewhere.There is a tendency, in coverage of abortion law, for writers to try and discipline their language. The issue is fraught and passionate enough, the thinking goes, surrounded as it is by stigma, ignorance and misinformation. There is one line of journalistic thought that holds that the best way to serve one’s readers, and to maintain their trust, is to write with as strict neutrality as the facts will allow. If I were to follow that line, I would tell you that the case raises vexed and unresolved legal questions about the extent of medical exemptions to abortion bans, and that the actions of Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, whose office intervened to prevent Cox from receiving an abortion, is signaling a maximalist view. I might not mention, in the interest of neutrality, that among the Texas supreme court justices who denied Cox her abortion was John Devine, an extremist Christian conservative with a long history of anti-choice activism, including, according to his boast at a campaign event, being arrested 37 times in harassment actions outside abortion clinics.But there is another line of thought that holds that euphemism is dishonesty, and that the effort to maintain journalistic neutrality in situations of grave injustice winds up obscuring more than it reveals. If I were to follow this latter method, I would tell you plainly that, by refusing to let her end this pregnancy, Paxton and the state of Texas in effect allowed Kate Cox to be tortured, and that she was forced to flee to escape that torture.Cox will not be the last woman in this position. She will not be the last woman to make a public plea to be permitted an abortion for a dangerous and non-viable pregnancy; she will not be the last one who is denied. She is part of a growing cast of abortion rights plaintiffs, a product of Dobbs’s cruelties and of the shifting strategic posture of the reproductive rights movement. These new claimants are not the traditional pro-choice litigators – clinics or doctors – but prospective patients themselves. In particular, the new plaintiffs are women who are seeking medical exemptions to terminate wanted but dangerous pregnancies. (In her op-ed, Cox referenced Zurwaski v Texas, a lawsuit in which 20 such women are suing to clarify and expand medical exemptions to Texas’s abortion ban.)Think of it as a crusade of the medically endangered: women who are faced with tragic, dangerous and heartbreaking circumstances in their pregnancies are emerging as a new face of the pro-choice legal movement. Like the anti-choice movement spent decades chipping away at the abortion rights and expanding restrictions, these women’s lawsuits seek to expand access in the most sympathetic of cases – those of medical emergencies – to carve out slightly larger loopholes for more women to access abortion through.It’s an incrementalistic strategy, one that assumes that legal abortion bans like those in Texas are here to stay for the foreseeable future. And it is also a strategy that makes some concessions to the bigotries and biases of the Texas court, to say nothing of American public opinion. Like many of the medically endangered plaintiffs, Cox is white and married. She is already a mother, and wants to be pregnant – she speaks extensively, and movingly, of desiring more children, and of wishing that she could have this one. Unlike many in her shoes, when faced with a horrible consequence of a sadistic law, she was able to seek both publicity and legal help. Unlike many in her shoes, when she was denied an abortion, she was able to flee.None of these things about Cox – neither her privilege not her palatability – make her a bad person, or make her suffering any less horrific. But they do make her an appealing face for a movement that is seeking to reason with a rabid and revanchist cadre of judges. There is nothing the right can object to in her, the thinking goes, and there is nothing they can get from making her suffer: her child will die. And yet her plea was rejected by the Texas courts, which suggests that the anti-choice movement does feel that they can get something out of Kate Cox. They get the ability to make her beg. Then, they get the satisfaction of saying no.The way we talk about abortion has warped in the wake of Dobbs. We use bloodless language of gestational limits; we may even be tempted to describe once-unheard of 15 week bans as comparatively “moderate”. We look on the bright side, like to the fact that Cox, denied the care that will keep her healthy and alive in Texas, was able to go elsewhere. Amid these adjusted expectations it is easy to lose track of how far we’ve fallen in our standards for women’s dignity and freedom. Two years ago, a woman in Cox’s shoes was able to control her own body and life on her own terms; now, she has to go before a court, all her virtues on display, and beg not to be maimed. “I am a Texan,” Cox said in her op-ed. “Why should I or any other woman have to drive or fly hundreds of miles to do what we feel is best for ourselves and our families, to determine our own futures?” It was an appeal to her dignity as a citizen. But Texas only saw her as a woman.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More