Roe v Wade

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      Louisiana’s move to criminalize abortion pills is cruel and medically senseless | Moira Donegan

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      This week, Louisiana moved to expand the criminalization of abortion further than any state has since before Roe v Wade was decided. On Thursday, the state legislature passed a bill that would reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol – the two drugs used in a majority of American abortions – as dangerous controlled substances.Under both state and federal classifications, the category of controlled substances includes those medications known to cause mind-altering effects and create the potential for addictions, such as sedatives and opioids; abortion medications carry none of this potential for physical dependence, habit-forming or abuse. The move from Louisiana lawmakers runs counter to both established medical opinion and federal law. Jeff Landry, the anti-choice Republican governor, is expected to sign the bill. When he does, possession of mifepristone or misoprostol in Louisiana will come to carry large fines and up to 10 years in prison.Louisiana already has a total abortion ban, with no rape or incest exceptions. But the Louisiana lawmakers are pursuing this new additional criminalization measure because while abortion bans are very good at generating suffering for women, they are not very good at actually preventing abortions. Data from the Guttmacher Institute suggests that the United States saw an 11% increase in abortions between 2020 and 2023 – a possible indication that pregnant people are still managing to obtain abortions in spite of post-Dobbs bans. As was the case in the pre-Roe era, women have continued to seek out ways to end their pregnancies, even in defiance of abortion ban laws.In the pre-Roe era, illegal abortions were often unsafe, and abortion bans caused a public health crisis: many hospitals had to open septic abortion wards, where women who had had incompetent or careless illegal abortions were treated for frequently life-threatening conditions. But the post-Dobbs reality is that advances in communications technology and medicine mean that illegal abortions need no longer be unsafe ones. Now, women living in states with abortion bans can access safe, effective abortion care in the comfort of their own homes, and often law enforcement and anti-choice zealots are none the wiser. Women can perform their own abortions, safely and effectively, without regard to the law’s opinion on whether they should be free to. They can do this because they can access the pills.The criminalization measure, then, is part of an expanding horizon of invasive, sadistic and burdensome state interventions meant to do the impossible: to stop women from trying to control their own lives. The Louisiana bill nominally will not apply to pregnant women – they’re exempted from criminal punishments for possession of the medications. But it will take square aims at the vital, heroic efforts of feminists, medical practitioners and mutual aid networks that have been distributing the pills in Louisiana: the people who have adhered to the principles of bodily autonomy and women’s self-determination even amid a hostile climate. These people’s courage and integrity is the greatest threat to the anti-choice regime, and so it is these people whom Louisiana’s new medical criminalization law will be used against first.But pro-abortion rights and women’s rights activists are not the only ones who will be hurt by the new law. For one thing, the criminalization of possession is likely to scare many Louisiana abortion seekers out of ordering the pills online, even if the bill itself technically excludes them from prosecution. These abortion seekers, dissuaded and threatened out of seeking the most reliable and safe method of self-managed abortion, may then turn to less safe options.But the new drug classification also has implications for a wide array of healthcare treatments. Mifepristone and misoprostol are not only used in elective abortions. They are also the standard of care for spontaneous miscarriages – the management of which has already become legally fraught for doctors in Louisiana, causing women to suffer needlessly and endanger their health. Misoprostol is used in labor, too, and in the treatment of some ulcers. The drugs’ needless, cruel and medically senseless reclassification as “controlled” substances will make these medical practices more difficult in a state that already has one of the worst rates of maternal mortality in the country. That’s part of why more than 200 Louisiana physicians signed a letter opposing the bill.The Republican legislators who have pushed the new criminalization do not pretend to actually believe that abortion drugs are habit-forming. Thomas Pressly, the state senator who introduced the bill, frankly said that his aim was to “control the rampant illegal distribution of abortion-inducing drugs”.But there is something to the notion that abortion access might be “habit-forming”. In the Roe era, after all, women began to conceive of themselves as full persons, able to exercise control over their own destinies – as adults, that is, with all the privileges and entitlements of citizenship. They formed a habit of independence, a habit of imagining themselves as people entitled to freedom, equality, self-determination and respect. It is these habits that the Republican party is trying to break them of.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Colorado voters to decide on abortion rights after measure qualifies for ballot

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      Voters in Colorado will have a say on abortion rights this fall after supporters collected enough valid signatures to put a measure on the ballot, part of a national push to pose abortion rights questions to voters since the US supreme court removed the nationwide right to abortion.The Colorado measure officially made the ballot on Friday and would enshrine abortion rights into the constitution in a state which already allows abortion at all stages of pregnancy despite the supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade.Since that 2022 decision, most Republican-controlled states have new abortion restrictions in effect, including 14 that ban it at every stage of pregnancy. Most Democratic-led states have laws or executive orders to protect access.The announcement on Friday about Colorado’s measure making the November ballot came from the state’s top election official. It would also include requirements that Medicaid and private health insurers cover abortions.Supporters had said they gathered more than 225,000 signatures to put the issue on the ballot, nearly double the requirement of more than 124,000 signatures.Amending the state constitution requires the support of 55% of voters.Those backing a dueling measure – a law to ban abortion – did not turn in signatures, and that measure will not go before voters.The news in Colorado came a day after South Dakota announced voters would decide on abortion rights there this fall as well.The Associated Press contributed reporting More

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      Arizona Democrat says enshrining abortion rights in constitution best remedy to 1864 ban

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      Repealing the 1864 near-total abortion ban that Arizona’s state supreme court recently ruled was enforceable would have little effect because “the damage is done”, the Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego said on Sunday.“Any initiative they pass right now wouldn’t even take effect for quite a while,” the US House member and Senate hopeful told NBC News on Sunday, referring to the 90-day delay such a maneuver would undergo before taking effect. He also said a repeal would be vulnerable to being neutralized by future iterations of the state legislature, remarking: “It could just get overturned later by another state house or state senate.”Gallego instead maintained that codifying abortion rights in Arizona’s constitution through a public referendum was the best countermeasure available for the state supreme court decision clearing the way for authorities to enforce a ban with exceptions for medical emergencies – but not for rape or incest.“The only protection we really, really have is to codify this and put this on the ballot and enshrine” the abortion rights once granted federally by the US supreme court’s landmark Roe v Wade decision in 1973, Gallego added. “Protect abortion rights.”His comments came five days after the rightwing court’s ruling allowing enforcement of a ban that pre-dates Arizona’s statehood by nearly five decades.The law has not immediately taken effect but is bound to supersede a separate 15-week abortion ban that the state passed separately.An Arizona state lawmaker quickly moved to repeal the 1864 ban but has so far been blocked from advancing his proposal by fellow Republicans.The ruling in question was made possible thanks to the removal of abortion rights at the federal level in 2022 by a US supreme court counting on three conservative justices appointed during Donald Trump’s presidency.The elimination of federal abortion rights have driven Democratic victories in elections ever since. And confronted with the reality that most in the US support at least some level of abortion access, Republicans who cheered the reversal of Roe v Wade scrambled to distance themselves from the Arizona supreme court’s 9 April ruling.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThat includes Kari Lake, the Republican who in the fall plans to run for the Arizona US Senate seat held at the moment by the independent Kyrsten Sinema.“This total ban on abortion the Arizona supreme court just ruled on is out of line with where the people of this state are,” Lake – who is endorsed by Trump – said in a video on Thursday. “This is such a personal and private issue.”Lake had previously expressed her approval of Arizona’s 1864 abortion ban after the US supreme court eliminated Roe v Wade – and before she lost the state’s 2022 gubernatorial election to her Democratic rival, Katie Hobbs.And Gallego has seized on that change of position, telling MSNBC recently: “Arizonans aren’t dumb. They know that Kari Lake is lying and is willing to say anything she can to win and to hold power, and they will not trust her with this.”Gallego’s campaign has helped a coalition of reproductive rights groups collect signatures aiming to put a referendum on Arizona’s ballot for the November elections proposing to enshrine abortion rights in the state’s constitution.The proposed constitutional amendment would establish a fundamental right to abortions up to about the 24th week of pregnancy, with exceptions to protect lives and physical or mental health of pregnant people.Ballot initiative campaign organizers say they have about 120,000 more signatures than needed to get the issue before voters in November. But that cushion is necessary because those opposed to the campaign have the right to scrutinize and challenge the validity of those signatures.An Iraq war veteran who served with the US marines, Gallego’s first term in the House began in 2015 and he has been representing his current district since early 2023.Both he and Lake are heavily favored to advance out of their respective parties’ Senate primaries in July to run in November for a seat being left vacant by Sinema, who chose to not seek re-election. More

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      Trump boasts ‘We broke Roe v Wade’ as abortion dogs GOP election hopes

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      Facing the press alongside the House speaker, fellow Republican Mike Johnson, Donald Trump bragged: “We broke Roe v Wade.”The former president made the stark admission about his dominant role in attacks on abortion rights at the end of a week in which the rightwing Arizona state supreme court ruled that an 1864 law imposing a near-total ban could go back into effect.Abortion rights were removed at the federal level in 2022 when a US supreme court to which Trump appointed three justices overturned Roe, which had stood since 1973. The issue has fueled Democratic wins at the ballot box ever since. This week, the Arizona ruling sent Republicans scrambling to minimise damage.Trump repeated his contention that the issue should rest with the states and there is no need for a national ban, a demand of the US’s political right. But he could not resist a boast on which his opponents are sure to seize.“We broke Roe v Wade,” Trump said. “Nobody thought was possible. We gave it back to the states and the states are working very brilliantly, in some cases conservative, in some cases not conservative, but they’re working. And it’s working the way it’s supposed to.“Every … real legal scholar wanted to have it go back to the states,” Trump claimed without offering evidence. “Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative. And we were able to do that … and now the states are working their way through it.“And you’re gonna, you’re having some very, very beautiful harmony, to be honest with you. You have, well, you have some cases like Arizona that went back to like 1864 or something like that. And a judge made a ruling, but that’s going to be changed by government. They’re going to be changing that. I disagree with that.”At the time of Trump’s remarks, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, was speaking in Arizona, hammering home Democratic attacks on Republican threats to reproductive rights. Her key message: Trump is to blame.“And just minutes ago, standing beside Speaker Johnson, Donald Trump just said the collection of state bans is, quote: ‘working the way it is supposed to’,” Harris said. “And as much harm as he has already caused, a second Trump term would be even worse.”Trump and Johnson appeared together at a time of intense legal jeopardy for the former president and great political danger for the House speaker that meant their intended message – a supposed need to focus on the canard of “election integrity” – seemed guaranteed to be drowned out.In New York on Monday, Trump will face trial on 34 of 88 pending criminal charges. The first ever criminal trial involving a former president will concern hush-money payments to an adult film star who claimed an affair.In Washington, Johnson must manage Congress with a tiny majority under pressure from an unruly Republican House caucus dominated by the pro-Trump right. The Georgia extremist Marjorie Taylor Greene has filed a motion to remove him.Opening the press conference at his Mar-a-Lago home, Trump exhibited his signature rhetoric on immigration, increasingly dehumanizing and vicious.View image in fullscreenJohnson said Republicans would seek to introduce legislation to “require proof of citizenship to vote”, claiming that if “hundreds of thousands” of migrants cast votes, it could affect the result of the elections.In reality, non-citizens voting is not even close to a problem.Some cities allow non-citizens to vote in municipal and non-federal polls. But non-citizen voting in federal elections is already illegal under a 1996 law. Offenders can be fined and jailed for up to a year. Deportation is possible.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Bipartisan Policy Center points to research by groups on the right and left which says non-citizen voting is exceptionally rare, saying: “Any instance of illegally cast ballots by non-citizens has been investigated by the appropriate authorities, and there is no evidence that these votes – or any other instances of voter fraud – have been significant enough to impact any election’s outcome.”Nonetheless, Johnson has long shown willingness to back Trump’s claims about elections regardless of reality, playing a key role in supporting the former president’s attempts to overturn his defeat by Joe Biden in 2020.In a recent memoir, the anti-Trump Republican Liz Cheney said Johnson “played bait-and-switch” with colleagues to get them to support his legal efforts to have key state results thrown out while misrepresenting himself as a constitutional lawyer.Johnson said Cheney was “not presenting an accurate portrayal”. His legal work failed but even after the deadly January 6 attack on Congress by Trump supporters in early 2021, he was among 147 Republicans who voted to object to results in Pennsylvania and Arizona.On Friday, a statement released by the Trump campaign said Johnson had “agreed to hold a series of public committee hearings over the next two months … in advance of potential legislation to further safeguard our elections from interference”.Subjects of supposed concern included “mail-in voting processes and mail-ballot handling”, “voter registration list maintenance and how states will … prevent illegal immigrants and noncitizens from voting in the 2024 presidential election”; and “general preparations” for Trump’s rematch with Biden.Reporters raised other issues that have roiled Republican politics. Earlier, in Washington, Johnson oversaw passage of a bill to reauthorise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or Fisa, including a key measure that allows for warrantless surveillance of American citizens. Trump and allies opposed the renewal, arising from his complaints about investigations of Russian election interference on his behalf in the 2016 race that sent him to the White House.Asked about the House bill, Trump said he still didn’t like Fisa and repeated his complaints about 2016. Johnson nodded behind him.Trump also opposes new aid for Ukraine, passed by the Senate but held up in the House. Johnson has said he wants to pass aid for Ukraine – but that could cause his downfall.At Mar-a-Lago, Trump kept the subject at arm’s length, verbally abusing Biden and claiming conflicts around the world would not have happened on his watch.He also castigated those prosecuting him criminally, including in the hush-money trial due to start in New York on Monday, over which he also complained about the judge. He was, he said, “absolutely” willing to testify in his own defence. More

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      For the future of US abortion rights under a second Trump presidency, look to Arizona | Margaret Sullivan

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      Sometimes, in 2024 America, you have to pinch yourself to make sure you’re not in a long-running dystopian nightmare. Then again, maybe we all are. And no amount of pinching will help.Two scenes from this week stand out.One, thoroughly bizarre, was on the floor of the Arizona senate, where – led by a Republican state senator, Anthony Kern – a fundamentalist Christian prayer group “spoke in tongues” as they knelt together over the state seal, praying for a civil war-era abortion ban to become law again. Kern and the group got their wish; a day later, the Arizona supreme court ruled to allow the law to go into effect.Kern, naturally, is one of those under investigation for falsely claiming to be an Arizona elector as Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election. He also got an Arizona bill passed allowing the Ten Commandments to be posted and read out loud in the state’s public school classrooms. If you had any lofty notions about the separation of church and state, consider them laid to rest.The other memorable scene was on the Larry Kudlow Show on the Fox Business channel, as three middle-aged white guys kicked around the aforementioned ruling by the Arizona supreme court. That 4-2 decision reinvigorates a 160-year-old law that says virtually all abortions are felonies. On the broadcast, radio host Mark Simone was blithe.“Buying a bus ticket to go somewhere to get it is not the worst thing in the world,” Simone – someone who will never be in that situation and apparently lacks the empathy to imagine it – opined.The bus-ticket solution might not even be an option. If Donald Trump is elected again, a national abortion ban is far from unlikely.Just a day before the Arizona ruling, the former US president came out with his long-promised, supposedly new stance on abortion rights, trying to spin up a moderate position. Declining to address whether he would support a national ban, he merely bragged about his role in the demise of Roe v Wade and suggested that abortion rights would now be up to the states, skipping over the obvious reality that they already are.He also blatantly lied about various things, like how Democrats think it’s fine to execute babies and how the entire spectrum of legal experts agreed that Roe should be overturned.Too many in the mainstream media swallowed this whole, at least in all-important headlines, presenting Trump’s position not only as news but as a politically savvy move toward the center.But something more like the truth was available if you turned your gaze from Washington to Arizona, where, in a matter of days, abortion providers can be sentenced to multiple years in prison for providing medical care.Some saw the meaning clearly.“This decision should serve as a warning for the rest of the country,” wrote lawyers Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern on Slate. “In the hands of a far-right court, a dead, openly misogynistic, wildly unpopular abortion ban can spring back to life with a vengeance.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHow it all will play out is unclear. Since Roe was overturned, voters have expressed their displeasure. Pro-choice measures have carried the day in state after state, including some bright-red ones like Kentucky and Kansas. Next up is Florida, where voters will decide in November whether to override a six-week abortion ban with one that allows access until 24 weeks.Americans in the rightwing media bubble may not hear much about the Arizona ruling. Fox News gave it a mere 12 minutes on Tuesday (as opposed to two hours across eight shows on CNN), according to Media Matters research, and none of Fox’s big-name opinion hosts addressed it on their evening shows. Apparently, the highest priority is getting the cult leader elected again.The draconian decision in Arizona has the potential to deliver at least one swing state – maybe more – to Joe Biden. As my colleague at Columbia Journalism School, professor Bill Grueskin, quipped Tuesday: “It’s not too early for the Fox News decision desk to call Arizona for Biden.” (Fox famously made that controversial – though accurate – call on election night 2020, much to team Trump’s angry displeasure.)Contradictions abound. Trump, having unleashed the dogs on longstanding abortion rights with his supreme court appointments, is simultaneously taking credit for that, and denying that it could go any further. The rightwing media protects him; the mainstream media lets him portray his position as moderate and somehow consistent with the public’s preferences.As for non-politicians, particularly women of child-bearing age, the reality could get much, much worse.It’s a mess. But that’s life in our national nightmare. Let’s hope enough Americans wake up by November to reverse some of the damage.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      Republicans want to use an 1873 law to ban abortion. Congress must overturn that law | Moira Donegan

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      They don’t need Congress. The anti-abortion movement is preparing to ban abortion nationwide as soon as a Republican takes the White House, and under a bizarre legal theory, they don’t think they even need congressional approval to do it. That’s because anti-choice radicals have begun to argue that an 1873 anti-obscenity law, the Comstock Act, effectively bans the mailing, sale, advertisement or distribution of any drug or implement that can be used to cause an abortion.For a long time, this was a fringe theory, only heard in the corners of the anti-choice movement with the most misogynist zealotry and the flimsiest concerns for reason. After all, the Comstock Act has not been enforced for more than half a century: many of its original provisions, banning contraception, were overturned; other elements, banning pornography and other “obscene” material, have been essentially nullified on free speech grounds.And, for decades, its ban on abortifacients was voided by Roe v Wade. Now that the US supreme court has thrown out the national abortion right, the anti-choice movement is reviving the long-forgotten law, claiming that the Comstock Act – named after a man who hunted down pornographers, threw early feminists in jail and bragged about driving abortion providers to suicide – should still be considered good law.It’s not a solid legal theory, but like a lot of flimsily reasoned, violently sexist and once-fringe arguments, it is now getting a respectful hearing at the supreme court. At last month’s oral arguments in a case regarding the legality of the abortion drug mifepristone, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas both mentioned Comstock, implying that someone – perhaps the FDA, perhaps drug companies – was obliged to suppress abortion medication under the law. Comstock was not at issue in the mifepristone case, but the comments from the justices were not really about the case before them. Rather, they were a signal, a message meant for the conservative legal movement: if you bring us a case that seeks to ban abortion under Comstock, the judges were saying, we will vote for it.So it is a bit puzzling why, in an election year that promises to be dominated by outrage over abortion bans and the erosion of women’s rights, Democrats have not done more to convey the dangers of Comstock to the public. Admittedly, the problem is somewhat complicated and obscure, not quite the kind of thing that can fit on a bumper sticker. But voters have shown that they are willing to pay prolonged attention to the abortion issue: the continued political salience of Dobbs almost two years after the decision has proved this.Democrats have an opportunity, this election year, to corner Republicans on an unpopular issue, to make a case to the voters about the uses of giving them continued electoral power, and to articulate a vision for a modern, pluralist and tolerant society in which women can aspire to a meaningfully equal citizenship and in which ordinary citizens are endowed with the privacy and dignity to control their own sexual lives – without interference from the pantingly prurient Republican party.This election cycle, Democrats must take the obvious stand, and do what is right both in terms of politics and in terms of policy: they must call, en masse, for the repeal of the Comstock Act. Anything less would be political malpractice.It’s not as if Comstock is not being thoroughly embraced by the other side. In addition to its revival by the conservative legal movement and anti-choice activists, Comstock has found enthusiastic backers both in conservative thinktanks and among members of Congress. The rightwing Heritage Foundation cited a maximalist approach to Comstock interpretation and enforcement – and the nationwide total abortion ban that would result – as one of their priorities in their “Project 2025”, a policy plan for a coming Trump administration. Meanwhile, in an amicus brief issued to the supreme court in the mifepristone case, 119 Republican representatives and 26 Republican senators asked the court to ban abortion nationwide using Comstock.These conservatives know that their abortion bans are unpopular; they know that voters do not support the overturning of Roe v Wade, and will never vote for the total abortion bans that they aim for. This is precisely why they are seeking to achieve their ends through the judiciary, the one branch of the federal government that is uniquely immune to democratic accountability. And it is why, rather than attempting to ban abortion through the regular legislative process, they are seeking to do so via the revival of a long-forgotten statute, ignoring that Comstock has been void for decades to exploit the fact that it is technically still on the books.To their credit, a few Democratic lawmakers have begun to vocally campaign to overturn Comstock. The first was Cori Bush, of Missouri, who called for the repeal of what she termed the “zombie statute” in the hours after Comstock was mentioned at the court’s mifepristone oral arguments.She was joined days later by Senator Tina Smith, of Minnesota, who wrote in a New York Times op-ed that she wanted to repeal the law and “take away Comstock as a tool to limit reproductive freedom”. Smith says that she is working to form a coalition of Democratic House and Senate members to “build support and see what legislation to repeal the Comstock Act might look like”. Smith says that she wants to wait to see what, if anything, the supreme court says on the matter in its mifepristone decision, expected by the end of June.There is no need to wait. It is unlikely that any bill to repeal Comstock will get the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate; it is impossible that any such bill would make its way through the Republican-controlled House. But this means that Democrats have nothing to lose in waging a political campaign to draw attention to Comstock, and to force their Republican colleagues to take a stand on it. Voters deserve to know what they’re in for if a Republican captures the White House – and they deserve to know what the Republicans on their ballot think about their own rights to dignity, equality, privacy and sexual self-determination.There might be no item on the current political agenda that more aptly symbolizes the Republican worldview than Comstock. Never really workably enforced and long ignored as out of date, Comstock has come to stand in, in the rightwing imagination, for a virtuous, hierarchically ordered past that can be restored in a sexually repressive and tyrannically misogynistic future.This past never existed, not really, but the fantasy of it now has power in many corners of our law: among the reasons given by Samuel Alito in his majority opinion overturning Roe v Wade was his estimation that the right to an abortion was not “deeply rooted in America’s history and traditions”. This grimly nostalgic Republican aim to allow only those freedoms delineated in “history and tradition” would foreclose an America that adapts with time, that allows new forms of freedom to emerge from history.Comstock is a relic, and a relic is what the Republican right wants to turn America into. Democrats have a chance to make a case for it to be something else – something more like a democracy.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      ‘Extreme’ US anti-abortion group ramps up lobbying in Westminster

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      A rightwing Christian lobby group that wants abortion to be banned has forged ties with an adviser to the prime minister and is drawing up ­policy briefings for politicians.The UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has more than doubled its spending since 2020 and been appointed a stakeholder in a parliamentary group on religious freedoms in a role that grants it direct access to MPs.The ADF’s efforts to boost its UK influence are revealed as part of an Observer analysis that shows a surge in activity within the wider anti-­abortion movement.Ahead of a historic vote on abortion later this spring, in which MPs will vote on a law that would abolish the criminal offence associated with a woman ending her own pregnancy in England and Wales, several anti-abortion campaign groups have expanded their teams, ramped up advertising and coordinated mass letter-writing campaigns targeting MPs.The findings have led to calls for greater transparency and accountability over the groups’ funding and lobbying activities. The ADF in particular is an influential player on the US Christian right and part of a global network of hardline evangelical groups that were a driving force behind the repeal of Roe v Wade – the supreme court ruling that gave women the constitutional right to abortion and was overturned in 2022.The group – which also supports outlawing sexual acts between consenting LGBTQ+ adults and funds US fringe groups attacking gay, trans and abortion rights – has faced claims its funding is not transparent due to its use of donor advised funds: a loophole in US charity law that allows people to give millions anonymously.The latest financial accounts for its UK entity ADF International UK, published last week, show it spent almost £1m in the year to June 2023, up from £392,556 in 2020, and that its income almost doubled between 2022 and 2023, from £553,823 to £1,068,552.ADF International UK, which has argued publicly against decriminalising abortion, has sought to develop closer relationships with MPs. Its latest accounts show a focus of its UK activity has been attempting to engage with “significant decision-makers” and that staff provided “briefing material and legal analysis” to several MPs ahead of a vote on introducing buffer zones to prevent anti-abortion activity outside abortion clinics.In September 2023 it spent £1,737.92 flying the prime minister’s special envoy on freedom of religion and beliefs, Fiona Bruce MP, paying for her hotel and travel to attend an unspecified conference. Last month Bruce – who reports directly to Rishi Sunak – appeared at an event sponsored by ADF International on religious freedom, speaking remotely alongside two members of the charity.Number 10 did not respond to questions about the links between the ADF and Bruce, who declared the donations in the MPs register of interests and previously voted against legalising abortion and same-sex marriage in Northern Ireland. Calls and emails to her office went unanswered late last week.View image in fullscreenHeidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said the ADF had “ramped up its spending” in the UK and Europe “aggressively” in recent years and that there was “no transparency” around “where the money’s actually coming from”. She said its relationship with MPs raised “huge concerns”. “Why are politicians openly working with an organisation that has such a hateful agenda?”Rose Whiffen, senior research officer at Transparency International UK, said the donations to Bruce raised questions about conflicts of interest and that her association with the group could give it credibility in the UK.Andrew Copson, chief executive of Humanists UK, said it was “very concerning” that the UK’s envoy on religious freedoms was “accepting donations from organisations that use religious liberty as a way of denying others their human rights”. “The Christian nationalist movement is increasingly investing in the UK on a number of fronts, and all supporters of freedom and choice should take seriously the threat to human rights that this represents,” he said.ADF International UK said it was committed to protecting “liberties dear to the British people” including free speech and freedom of religion, and that its stance on abortion aimed to “protect the lives of both mother and baby in every pregnancy”. “Like much of the British public, we are concerned about political initiatives to further liberalise abortion law,” a spokesperson added.The charity, which has an office in Westminster, said it received funds from many countries, like “many UK charities on both sides of the abortion debate”; that claims it was not transparent about its funders were “baseless” and that it complied with all charity regulations. It did not comment on its link to the PM’s special envoy.View image in fullscreenJonathan Lord, co-chair of the British Society of Abortion Care Providers and a consultant gynaecologist, said: “We’ve known for some time that these extreme groups from America are infiltrating the UK, having been emboldened following the US supreme court’s actions removing women’s right to abortion there. However the scale of their spending and influence in the UK is disturbing, especially as we know they are actively lobbying MPs and want to restrict women’s reproductive rights, whether that is fertility treatment, contraception or access to abortion.”Other anti-abortion groups have also ramped up activity here in recent months. Right to Life, a leading UK anti-abortion charity, has been coordinating a lobbying campaign encouraging people to write to their MPs to tighten abortion laws, and spent £117,000 on Facebook ads in 2023, 10 times the amount in 2020.The charity – whose overall spending overall has risen from £200k in 2019 to £705k last year – also provides the secretariat to the Pro-Life all-party parliamentary group and aims to “deepen and expand relationships with parliamentarians”, according to its latest accounts. It is currently advertising vacancies for eight full-time staff and says in one ad that the role will include “producing briefings” for MPs and peers.The Centre for Bio-Ethical Reform UK – another anti-abortion group, which notoriously launched a billboard campaign featuring graphic images in pro-choice MP Stella Creasy’s constituency – has increased its staff numbers from four to 12 since 2017. Due to its status as a small company, it does not have to publish details of its income but said it was happy to engage in public debate about its “funding, growth and activities” and that its targeting of Creasy “does not equate to animosity towards her as a fellow human being”.MPs are due to vote in the coming weeks on proposed changes to abortion law that would see abortion decriminalised in England and Wales, as it is in Northern Ireland, Australia, France and New Zealand. Under a Victorian-era law that remains in place today, it is an offence to procure your own abortion. There are exemptions under the 1967 Abortion Act, which permits abortion in cases where two doctors agree that continuing the pregnancy would be risky for the physical or mental health of the woman. But the old law was never repealed and is still used today to prosecute and jail women for terminating pregnancies without sign-off from medics or after the 24-week limit.The proposal on decriminalisation from backbench Labour MP Diana Johnson has cross-party support and is expected to pass. However some in the Labour party fear it could be counterproductive and further embolden anti-abortion campaigning on related issues, such as the remote access to abortion that was introduced during the pandemic.A government spokesperson said abortion was an “extremely sensitive issue” with “strongly held views on all sides of the discussion”, and that MPs would have a free vote on the proposed law change. “By longstanding convention, any change to the law in this area would be a matter of conscience for individual MPs rather than the government,” a spokesperson said. More

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      Florida just crushed abortion rights. But it also created a tool to fight back | Moira Donegan

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      It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which the Florida state supreme court would not have allowed Governor Ron DeSantis’s six-week abortion ban to go into effect. In a challenge to a previous 15-week ban, the court’s seven judges, all of whom were appointed by DeSantis, overturned 35 years of precedent this week in order to find that the right to privacy enshrined in the state constitution does not protect the right to an abortion, as Florida state law has acknowledged it does since 1989.The court’s approval of the 15-week ban will allow a stricter, previously stayed six-week ban to go into effect on 1 May. Justice Charles Canady did not recuse himself from the case, despite calls for him do so from no less an authority than the Florida supreme court’s former chief justice, Barbara Pariente. Justice Canady’s wife, the state representative Jennifer Canady, is a legislative co-sponsor of the newly approved six-week ban. There is no rape or incest exception.The harm this decision will do to women across the American south is immeasurable. Like many states, Florida dramatically restricted access to abortion in 2022, in the wake of the US supreme court’s Dobbs v Jackson decision that overturned Roe v Wade. Florida’s 15-week abortion ban, signed into law by DeSantis in April 2022, went into effect just days after the ruling. Despite those new restrictions, however, abortion remained much more available in Florida than it did elsewhere in the south.The south-east corner of the continental United States is home to some of the most restrictive abortion bans. A woman living in Florida finds herself without a right to an abortion at any stage of pregnancy as far west as Texas and Oklahoma and as far north as Missouri, Indiana and West Virginia. Abortion is also banned outright in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Kentucky and Tennessee; it is banned after six weeks in Georgia and South Carolina. Florida’s 15-week ban was a dramatic reduction of women’s healthcare rights from the pre-Dobbs status quo. But due to the even more sadistic anti-choice zealotry of its neighbors, it was among the most permissive states in the region.Under these circumstances, Florida became a haven for abortion seekers. Despite the new 15-week ban, abortions soared in Florida in the year after Dobbs, as women from across the south fled their homes in search of the care that was still legal in the Sunshine state. According to the abortion and contraception data project #WeCount, the number of abortions in Florida increased by a total of 20,460 in the 12 months following the Dobbs decision. Now, both Floridian women and those who traveled from out of state for care will be forced to look further afield, to more distant and more expensive locations, in search of legal abortions. Many will not be able to get them.View image in fullscreenBut in addition to this catastrophe for women’s rights, the Florida court also upended this fall’s election in the state. That’s because, in a narrow vote, the justices allowed a ballot measure to appear before voters this fall that would enshrine abortion rights explicitly in the state constitution.The proposed constitutional amendment would declare Floridians have a right to an abortion before “viability”, the medically imprecise but politically palatable standard that governed the Roe v Wade legal regime for 30 years and is usually interpreted to allow abortion until about 24 weeks of pregnancy. After that, women whose medical providers declare their pregnancies a danger to their health would also be able to receive abortions.The ballot measure would need to receive approval from at least 60% of Florida voters in order to be enshrined in the state constitution. But if the measure is successful, it would invalidate both the six- and 15-week bans, and could theoretically be used to expand abortion access even beyond pre-Dobbs levels.The addition of the abortion rights ballot measure to the November election has dramatically changed the political calculus in Florida overnight. Long the home of a growing sunbelt Republican base and an uncommonly weak state Democratic party, Florida has been considered a shoo-in for Donald Trump, who won the state by three points in 2020. But abortion ballot measures have proven a persistent electoral winner, with measures to preserve or expand access to the procedure winning every time they have been put to voters since Dobbs – including in heavily Republican districts such as Kansas, Kentucky and Ohio, as well as in swing states like Michigan.And the salience of abortion to an election has been an excellent predictor of Democratic success since Dobbs, with the 2022 midterms and subsequent special elections all delivering Democratic victories whenever the abortion question is at the front of voters’ minds.In Florida, the new ballot measure may not just influence the presidential election, but the re-election bid of the Republican senator Rick Scott – a one-time governor and fierce abortion rights opponent who has said that he would have signed the six-week ban if he were still in the governor’s mansion. That stance has come under harsh criticism in Florida, where even the comparatively less strict 15-week ban has had horrible human costs.Anya Cook, a Florida woman whose water broke too early in her pregnancy, almost died from blood loss after the 15-week ban prevented her doctors from administering miscarriage care. Deborah Dorbert was forced to remain pregnant for months after her fetus was given a fatal diagnosis; she delivered an infant who died in her arms. These stories have made an indelible impression on the public. In Florida, more than 60% of voters say that they oppose the six-week ban. Now that it is slated to actually go into effect, that opposition is likely to grow.If the post-Dobbs era has shown us anything, it is that abortion is controversial only in theory. When faced with the material consequences of banning it, Americans find themselves unequivocally on freedom’s side.Democrats, then, may find that they have an unusual asset in the Republican opposition to abortion. The bans are consistently unpopular, and the issue has proved persistently salient, moving voters to the polls even two years after the Dobbs decision. But this political boon for the Democrats has come at an unbearable cost: women’s health, happiness and freedom.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More