Roe v Wade

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      Anti-abortion centers raked in $1.4bn in year Roe fell, including federal money

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      Anti-abortion facilities raked in at least $1.4bn in revenue in the 2022 fiscal year, the year Roe v Wade fell – a staggering haul that includes at least $344m in government money, according to a memo analyzing the centers’ tax documents that was compiled by a pro-abortion rights group and shared exclusively with the Guardian.These facilities, frequently known as anti-abortion pregnancy centers or crisis pregnancy centers, aim to convince people to keep their pregnancies. But in the aftermath of Roe’s demise, the anti-abortion movement has framed anti-abortion pregnancy centers as a key source of aid for desperate women who have lost the legal right to end their pregnancies and been left with little choice but to give birth.Accordingly, abortion opponents say, the centers need an influx of government cash.“Those are the centers that states rely on to assist expecting moms and dads,” Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, told anti-abortion protesters at the March for Life in January. The Louisiana Republican praised the centers for providing “the important material support that expecting and first-time mothers get from these centers”.Earlier this year, under Johnson’s leadership, the House passed a bill that would block the Department of Health and Human Services from restricting funding for anti-abortion pregnancy centers. State governments are also in the midst of sending vast sums of taxpayer dollars to programs that support anti-abortion pregnancy centers. Since the demolition of Roe, at least 16 states have agreed to send more than $250m towards “alternative to abortion” programs in 2023 through 2025. Those programs funnel money towards anti-abortion pregnancy centers, maternity homes and assorted other initiatives meant to dissuade people from abortions.Still, abortion rights supporters say, much of the anti-abortion pregnancy center industry remains shrouded in mystery – including their finances.“Stewards of both taxpayer and charitable funds should insist on a real impact analysis of the industry, whether investments that are being made are achieving their desired outcomes and are cost-effective,” said Jenifer McKenna, the crisis pregnancy center program director at Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch, the group behind the analysis of tax documents. “Taxpayers deserve performance standards and hard metrics for use of their dollars on these centers.”The analysis by Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch examined 990 tax documents, which most US tax-exempt organizations must file annually, from 1,719 anti-abortion pregnancy centers in fiscal year 2019 and from 1,469 in fiscal year 2022. The analysis confirms that the anti-abortion pregnancy center industry is growing: while the centers’ revenue in 2022 exceeds $1.4bn, it was closer to $1.03bn in 2019, even though more centers were included in the earlier analysis.Centers reported receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in donations from private funders between 2018 and 2022. While only a relatively small fraction of the centers reported receiving grants from state and federal governments in both 2022 and 2019, that number is on the rise, according to the Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch analysis memo. In 2022, the centers said they received $344m in such grants, but they received less than $97m in 2019.Just 21 centers identified the federal grants that they received in 2022, the analysis found. Those grants included the Fema-funded Emergency Food and Shelter Program, which is primarily meant for organizations that alleviate hunger and homelessness, and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a program for low-income families.This accounting does not represent the full financial picture of the anti-abortion pregnancy center industry. More than 2,500 anti-abortion pregnancy centers are believed to dot the United States – a number that far outstrips the number of abortion clinics in the country.‘What did they do with all that money?’Much of the modern, publicly available information on anti-abortion pregnancy centers comes from one of their biggest cheerleaders: the Charlotte Lozier Institute, which assembles reports on the industry and operates as an arm of Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, one of the top anti-abortion organizations in the United States.In 2019, the Charlotte Lozier Institute said that 2,700 anti-abortion pregnancy centers provided consulting services to 967,251 new clients on-site. In 2022, the Institute said 2,750 centers provided consulting services for 974,965 new clients – an increase of 0.08%.Even though the US supreme court overturned Roe at the halfway point of 2022, it did not appear to result in a crush of new clients – despite anti-abortion advocates’ argument that the pregnancy centers need an infusion of funding to handle post-Roe clients.“The new client numbers alone don’t fully tell the story,” a bevy of Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars – Moira Gaul, Jeanneane Maxon and Michael J New – said in an email to the Guardian, adding that anti-abortion centers and groups have seen an increase in violence following the fall of Roe. (The abortion clinics that remain post-Roe have also faced rising violence. That has not stoppered the demand for their services, as rates of abortions have risen since Roe’s demise.)Anti-abortion pregnancy centers are seeing a dramatic rise in calls for certain kinds of help. Data from the Charlotte Lozier Institute reports show that centers handed out 64% more diapers, 52% more baby clothing and 43% more wipes in 2022, compared to 2019. Demand for new car seats and strollers also increased by about a third.All of these items would presumably go to new parents. The fall of Roe led to an estimated 32,000 more births, particularly among young women and women of color, a 2023 analysis found.The total dollar value of these goods and services was about $358m, according to the Charlotte Lozier Institute report. Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch found that the roughly 1,500 centers included in the group’s 2022 analysis reported expenses of more than $1.2bn on their 990 tax documents.“They took in – according to the 990s – $1.4bn, and they spent $1.2bn on expenditures,” McKenna said. “What did they do with all that money? There’s so many questions begged by their own reporting.”The Charlotte Lozier scholars said there were other expenses not listed in the report, such as maternity clothing, property-related payments, fundraising, marketing and staff salaries. Data from their report indicates that, between 2019 and 2022, the number of volunteers who work at the centers fell while the number of paid staffers rose. (Volunteers still make up the overwhelming bulk of the workforce.)“Most non-profits prefer to use staff when possible. Centers are attracting more professionals that desire to help women,” the scholars said. “Many centers are now in a place where they can pay them so they are less reliant on volunteers.”The institute’s report on anti-abortion pregnancy centers in 2022 is a very different document to the reports that it released to cover the centers in 2019 and 2017. The earlier reports span dozens of pages; the 2022 report is only four. A longer report is now in the works, the Charlotte Lozier scholars said, which will include information about government funding of centers.A lack of regulationAlthough anti-abortion pregnancy centers may appear to be local mom-and-pop organizations, in reality many are affiliated with national organizations like NIFLA, Care Net and Heartbeat International. These centers thrive in a kind of regulatory dead zone, providing medical services like ultrasounds. But many are not licensed as medical facilities, leaving them unencumbered by the rules or oversight imposed on typical medical providers.“They are changing their names a lot and changing their names in ways like including ‘clinic’ or ‘medical’ or ‘healthcare’ into their names and dropping things like ‘Care Net’ and other types of wording that might instantly identify them as a CPC,” said Andrea Swartzendruber, an associate professor at the University of Georgia College of Public Health who tracks anti-abortion pregnancy centers.These centers, she said, are “changing their names in ways that make them seem more like medical clinics”.The Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars said “calls for governmental regulation are nothing new” post-Roe and that “such efforts have been ongoing for decades”.“They have been found to be politically motivated and have been largely unsuccessful,” the scholars said. “Abortion facilities are in need of far greater government regulation.”Anti-abortion pregnancy centers’ taxes can also be deeply intricate. The analysis by Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch found that the centers used a variety of tax codes to describe themselves, frequently describing themselves as organizations that provide “family services” or “reproductive healthcare”. They were sometimes listed as organizations that work to outlaw abortions, or as explicitly Christian, religious organizations.The National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a charity watchdog group, has previously found that many centers share tax identification numbers with much larger organizations that do multiple kinds of charity work, such as non-profits run by Catholic dioceses. By sharing numbers, these organizations are effectively collapsed into one legal and tax entity, the committee said.The Charlotte Lozier Institute scholars told the Guardian that “this is not our understanding at all”. NIFLA, Care Net and Heartbeat International do not share tax identification numbers with affiliated centers, they said.Just because these particular groups do not share tax identification numbers does not preclude centers from sharing them with other organizations. For example, Care Net is affiliated with a string of Florida pregnancy centers – which, rather than sharing Care Net’s tax ID, are instead listed on tax documents for a wide-ranging charity run by a local Catholic diocese.Anti-abortion pregnancy centers tend to be faith-based. Given the industry’s religious bent, courts have proven reluctant to restrict centers in order to avoid treading on their free speech rights.In 2018, the US supreme court ruled to toss a California law that would have forced centers to disclose whether they were a licensed medical provider. Then, last year, a federal judge in Colorado paused a law that would have banned “abortion reversal”, an unproven drug protocol that aims to halt abortions and is often offered by anti-abortion pregnancy centers. (The first randomized, controlled clinical study to try to study the “reversal” protocol’s effectiveness suddenly stopped in 2019, after three of its participants went to the hospital hemorrhaging blood.)“More regulation could lead to better reporting, which would also then help with reducing all of these risks,” said Teneille Brown, a University of Utah College of Law professor who studies anti-abortion pregnancy centers. “Then the consumers could get some sense of like, ‘Oh, this clinic has had a bunch of violations,’ and if there were regulation, they could actually even shut them down.” More

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      Inside the youth anti-abortion movement in the US: ‘Victory is on its way’ – video

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      Since the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, 16 states have enacted stringent bans on nearly all abortions. But that is not enough for a new generation of organised and passionate activists intent on pushing even stricter laws across the country. Carter Sherman spends time with students and organisers at the annual March for Life in Washington DC and meets the influential woman spearheading the national movement More

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      Kamala Harris kicks off abortion rights tour on 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade

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      Kamala Harris kicked off her much-vaunted abortion rights nationwide tour in Wisconsin on Monday as Joe Biden convened a meeting of his taskforce on reproductive healthcare access, in a tag-team effort to double down on what is likely to be a key campaign issue this year.The vice-president chose the 51st anniversary of the Roe v Wade ruling to begin the Reproductive Freedoms Tour, announced in December, in the battleground state of Wisconsin, which the president won in the 2020 presidential election by just over 20,000 votes.Roe v Wade, the supreme court decision that enshrined the federal right to abortion, was overturned in June 2022 after then president Donald Trump nominated three conservative justices to the nation’s highest court.The decision was a major blow to supporters of reproductive rights, but since the ruling seven states – including the conservative strongholds of Kentucky, Kansas and Montana – have held ballot referendums where voters chose to protect abortion rights. The issue also appeared to hurt Republicans in the 2022 midterm elections.Wisconsin is a notable starting point for Harris’s reproductive freedoms tour. Last year, abortion rights propelled a Democratic victory in a critical election for the state supreme court.In the first of many similar scheduled events, Harris is expected to announce support for increased access to abortion and contraceptives through the new emergency care law, Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala).She will also denounce Trump, the runaway frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, for his hand in overturning the federally protected right to abortion.“Proud that women across our nation are suffering?” Harris will say, according to excerpts from her speech obtained by the Associated Press. “Proud that women have been robbed of a fundamental freedom? That doctors could be thrown in prison for caring for patients? That young women today have fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers?”The following day, Harris will be joined by Biden for another abortion-focused event, along with their spouses, Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff.Biden’s re-election campaign also rolled out a new campaign ad Sunday, titled Forced, which aims to tie Donald Trump directly to the abortion issue.In Dobbs v Jackson, the 2022 supreme court case that overturned Roe, a Mississippi law that banned most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy with certain medical exceptions was upheld, negating the constitutional right to abortion and overruling the precedent set by Roe more than half a century ago.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a statement on the 51st anniversary of Roe V Wade, Biden said: “Fifty-one years ago today, the Supreme Court recognized a woman’s constitutional right to make deeply personal decisions with her doctor – free from the interference of politicians. Then, a year and a half ago, the Court made the extreme decision to overturn Roe and take away a constitutional right.“As a result, tens of millions of women now live in states with extreme and dangerous abortion bans. Because of Republican elected officials, women’s health and lives are at risk.”When announcing her tour in December, Harris said: “Extremists across our country continue to wage a full-on attack against hard-won, hard-fought freedoms as they push their radical policies – from banning abortion in all 50 states and criminalizing doctors, to forcing women to travel out of state in order to get the care they need.“I will continue to fight for our fundamental freedoms while bringing together those throughout America who agree that every woman should have the right to make decisions about her own body – not the government.” More

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      ‘They hate God’: US anti-abortion activists aim to fight back on 51st Roe anniversary

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      Within the subterranean levels of a fancy hotel in downtown Washington, just a few days before the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, the anti-abortion movement was trying to mount a comeback.Kevin Roberts stood on stage in a cavernous ballroom aglow with neon shades of blue, purple and pink. As president of the Heritage Foundation, Roberts leads one of the main thinktanks behind recent conservative attacks on abortion. And he is not happy with how things are going.“We meet today amid a pro-abortion media narrative of smug triumphalism,” Roberts told hundreds of young abortion foes, who had gathered in the ballroom from across the country to hear him and other anti-abortion leaders speak.“You’ve heard the story. Less than two years after the supreme court overturned Roe, the abortion-industrial complex is celebrating an unprecedented political winning streak. Across the country, pro-life bills have failed. Abortion referenda have passed. Democrat leaders are crowing while too many Republican leaders are cowering from the fight.”Roberts was speaking at the annual National Pro-Life Summit, a one-day organizing camp for high school- and college-aged anti-abortion activists. This year, the summit faced a monumental task: organizers and attendees alike hoped to reinvigorate a movement that, 18 months ago, soared to the height of its power with the overturning of Roe – and then, in the months that followed, has repeatedly crashed-landed back on earth.Since Roe’s demise, seven states have voted on abortion-related ballot referendums. In each case, voters have decisively moved to protect abortion rights, even in ruby-red states like Kentucky, Kansas and Montana.The stakes are even higher in 2024. Not only are roughly a dozen more states gearing up to potentially vote on abortion-related referendums, but the future of the White House is on the line. If abortion hurts Republicans the election – as it’s widely thought to have done in the 2022 midterms – anti-abortion activists may see the GOP brand their movement as ballot-box poison.The National Pro-Life Summit is generally a peek into what the anti-abortion movement is telling itself about itself – and at present, it is not happy with Republicans. For years, the anti-abortion movement has corralled voters for Republicans. On Saturday, they repeatedly condemned the GOP for failing to adequately support their cause.The last Republican president appointed the justices who overturned Roe, while red states have enacted more than a dozen near-total abortion bans since the ruling fell. But many Republicans have begun to back away from the issue. Before the 2022 elections, several quietly downplayed their stances, while dozens of House Republicans have delayed signing onto a bill to nationally ban abortions.“Our friends in the Republican party need to touch some grass,” said Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America, the organization behind the summit. “Those who say now that we shouldn’t be talking, that Republican candidates, those seeking for office, should hide from the abortion issue – they continue to be wrong. We won’t win if we put our head in the sand.”Democrats are already attempting to use Roe’s impact on doctors to win votes, as Joe Biden’s re-election campaign has launched a blitz of events and ads timed to the Roe anniversary on Monday. Vice-President Kamala Harris will kick off a tour devoting to spotlighting abortion access, while Biden will assemble a meeting of his reproductive health taskforce.His administration has also announced plans to expand access to contraception under the Affordable Care Act as well as an initiative to spread information about a law that, the administration says, guarantees Americans’ legal rights to emergency abortions, even in states that ban the procedure.A thin lineThe mood on Saturday wasn’t totally dour.Attendees could buy baseball caps that read “I’m just out here saving babies,” sweatshirts that bore an image of a newspaper front page that proclaimed “ROE REVERSED”, as well as red hats adorned with the words “Make America Pro-Life Again” in the unmistakable style of Trump’s Maga hats. Young people excitedly posed for group photos in front of a backdrop that read, “EQUAL RIGHTS FOR THE PREBORN!” An illustrated fetus was curled up in one corner.Yet, in speech after speech, activists told young people that they were the victims of vast forces arrayed against them. They accused abortion rights supporters of spreading misinformation about ballot referendums and said they were simply outspent by the opposition. In Ohio, abortion rights supporters reported receiving about three times as much money as a coalition that opposed abortion rights.“These people love chaos. That is the left. The left is inherently chaotic at its core,” said Will Witt, a conservative influencer who, like Roberts, spoke at the morning address to all attendees.After quoting from the Bible in an effort to demonstrate that God originated order, Witt continued: “This is why the left, this is why these pro-choicers, this is why they hate God. Because God represents order in the world, whereas they love chaos.”The summit speakers were attempting to walk a fine line. At the same time that they were attempting to convince attendees that they were the victims of a world turned against them, they also had to make the case that opposition to abortion is a majority view – and one issue that can get Republicans elected.“Our opinion on this issue, the issue, is not outside of the mainstream, no matter how many times ABC wants to try to tell me it is,” Hawkins told attendees at a workshop dedicated to understanding what went wrong with the abortion referendums. Most millennials and members of Gen Z, she added, “want some sorts of limits on abortion”.Polling on abortion is complex, since respondents’ answers can vary widely depending on how a question is asked or how much context is provided. Most Americans believe that abortion should be restricted after the first trimester of pregnancy, according to polling from Gallup. However, over the last two decades, more and more people have become open to keeping abortion legal later into pregnancy. Republicans in Virginia failed to take control of the state legislature last year after they ran on a promise of banning abortion past 15 weeks of pregnancy.Gallup has also found that, since 2020, more Americans identify as “pro-choice” than “pro-life”. More people have started to call themselves “pro-choice” since the US supreme court overturned Roe in 2022.Hawkins is not in favor of only “some sorts of limits on abortion”.“I want to see no abortions be legal, ever,” she said in an interview. She rejected the notion that abortions performed to save women’s lives qualify as abortions. “When you’re looking at a case where a woman’s life is at risk, where the physician believes that she can no longer safely carry her child in her womb, or she may lose her life – we wouldn’t consider that an abortion unless the abortionist goes in with the intention to killing the child.”Instead, she said, it’s a “maternal-fetal separation”.Hawkins’ point was an effort to contend with a phenomenon that has been particularly damaging for the movement: stories from women who have sued after they said they were denied medically necessary abortions.Every state with an abortion ban has some kind of exception for cases of medical emergencies, but doctors in those states have widely said that the exceptions are so vague as to be unworkable. In a recent study of 54 OB-GYNs in states with post-Roe abortion restrictions, more than 90% said that the law prevented them from adhering to the best clinical standards of care.‘You vote pro-life’Last year, when the National Pro-Life Summit held a straw poll asking attendees about their preferred 2024 president candidate, Ron DeSantis won. This year, with DeSantis a day away from dropping out of the presidential primary, Hawkins cheerfully proclaimed the latest straw poll victor: Donald Trump.As much as their leaders may lock heads with Republicans or Trump – who has suggested that hardline abortion stances hurt Republicans – they are ultimately unlikely to withhold votes from the GOP. Even Trump’s former vice-president, Mike Pence, who was a target of the January 6 riot and who spoke at the summit, indicated that people need to simply get on with it.“That’s why we have primaries. We sort ’em out at every level. But after the primary’s over, you vote pro-life,” Pence said. “You go get behind men and women who are going to stand for the right to life.”A booth for the Heritage Foundation was emblazoned with logos for its “Project 2025”, which includes a playbook for the next conservative president. It recommends that the US government stop funding or promoting abortion in international programs, turbocharge the government’s existing “surveillance” efforts to collect data about abortion, and enforce the 19th-century Comstock Act to ban the mailing of abortion pills. That would effectively result in the removal of abortion pills from the market, which Hawkins said is a policy goal of hers.“If Donald Trump would be elected again, the people he would appoint to his presidential administration would not be abortion activists,” Hawkins said in an interview. “Hands down, that’s a guarantee. And they’re going to be coming to Washington to protect the people and the people includes the pre-born children.” More

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      Biden abortion ad marks campaign shift to emphasize reproductive rights

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      The Biden re-election campaign rolled out a new campaign ad Sunday, signaling a shift in emphasis to reproductive rights that the White House hopes will carry and define Democrats through the 2024 election cycle.The campaign ad, titled Forced, is designed to tie Donald Trump directly to the abortion issue almost 18 months after his nominees to the supreme court helped to overturn a constitutional right to abortion enshrined in Roe v Wade, which would have turned 51 this week.Dr Austin Dennard, a Texas OB-GYN and mother of three tells the camera her story about traveling out of her state to terminate her pregnancy after learning her fetus had a fatal condition, calling her situation “every woman’s worst nightmare”.In Texas, she said, her choice “was completely taken away and that’s because of Donald Trump overturning Roe v Wade”.The launch of the ad comes as anti-abortion activists descended on Washington DC this weekend. One event, the National Pro-Life Summit, activists came to celebrate anti-abortion activism in the US. At another, the March for Life, marchers called for advocacy against abortion rights.Vice-President Kamala Harris is now being placed to the forefront of the administration’s messaging on reproductive rights, a position Biden has said he is not “big on” because of his Catholic faith, though he believes the landmark 1973 decision “got it right”.On Monday, Harris will embark on a nationwide tour to focus attention on the administration’s efforts to protect the right of women to choose. Her tour will start in Wisconsin, where abortion rights propelled a Democratic victory in a key state supreme court election.A statement from Harris’s office said the vice-president will “highlight the harm caused by extreme abortion bans and share stories of those who have been impacted in Wisconsin and across the country”.“She will also hold extremists accountable for proposing a national abortion ban, call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe, and outline steps the Administration is taking to protect access to health care,” the statement added.Democrats this year are hoping to emphasize that a second Trump presidency would establish new personal health restrictions.“Donald Trump is the reason that more than 1 in 3 American women of reproductive age don’t have the freedom to make their own health care decisions. Now, he and MAGA Republicans are running to go even further if they retake the White House,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Biden-Harris 2024 campaign manager, said in a statement to The Hill.On Sunday, the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, told CBS Face the Nation that “it would be good” if Biden talked about abortion more than he does. “I know that one tenet of his belief system is that women and only women with their families and healthcare professionals are the one who know what decision is right for them.”Asked if the president needs to take up that message more forcefully, Whitmer said: “I don’t think it would hurt. I think people want to know that this is president that is fighting … but maybe to use more blunt language would be helpful.” More

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      ‘We don’t want to be the bad guys’: anti-abortion marchers seek post-Roe stance

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      While Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are planning a cascade of ads and events to coincide with the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade, hundreds of anti-abortion activists gathered on the National Mall in Washington DC on Friday in hopes of re-energizing a movement that has repeatedly stumbled since Roe’s overturning.Originally organized around the goal of overturning the Roe precedent that established federal abortion rights, the March for Life has seen what was once its greatest victory become a political liability. In the 18 months since Roe’s demise, abortion rights supporters have trounced anti-abortion activists in state-level ballot referendums. Yet the march’s message was largely similar to past years: speakers and attendees alike talked about the need to make abortion “unthinkable” rather than just illegal – with scant details on how to make that happen.“We don’t want to just go in and be the bad guys,” said Elijah Persinger, a 19-year-old from Fort Wayne, Indiana. “We want to make make people understand and help them understand the science behind things and the logic that we’re going by as well.”As in years past, march attendees skewed young. Schools and universities organize trips for students to attend the march, and groups often carry banners and flags with their schools’ names. Some groups all wear bright-colored, matching hats in order to keep from getting lost in the crowd.Persinger took a 12-hour, overnight bus ride to attend Friday’s March for Life. His group planned to leave DC after the event.But the crowd on Friday seemed relatively sparse. When the US House speaker, Mike Johnson, stood on a podium to speak, he was met with only muted applause – despite being a high-profile attendee for the march. The greatest response came when he mentioned Biden: when he said that the president’s administration planned to restrict funding to crisis pregnancy centers, the crowd booed loudly.Organizers also spoke from the stage about the need to support maternity homes and crisis pregnancy centers, facilities that aim to convince people to keep their pregnancies.“Christians don’t mean to impose what we believe on anyone. But this nation was founded as a Christian nation,” said Laurel Brooks, a march attendee from North Carolina.Brooks works for an organization called My Faith Votes, which aims to mobilize Christian voters, but she clarified that she was sharing her own views, not her organization’s.“The foundation of America is truly Christian,” Brooks remarked. “That doesn’t mean we reject, hate, dislike anyone who does not believe as we do. That’s not who Christians are. We accept people for their free will. God honors free will.”After the speakers finished, marchers spent three hours slowly walking from the National Mall to the steps of the US supreme court. The weather was unusually wintry, with marchers braving wind and several inches of snow.To keep from getting cold, some marchers danced to the Cha Cha Slide. Others started a call-and-response chant of, “We are pro-life, marching for life, saving the babies, one at a time!”Icons of fetuses and babies dominated the march. Many carried signs with ultrasound images above phrases such as “Future Doctor”, “Future Dancer”, and “Future Wife”. Others had signs with images of babies above the conservative slogan “Don’t Tread on Me”.“There are no mistakes, just happy accidents,” read another sign, complete with a hand-drawn beaming baby and portrait of the painter Bob Ross. One young woman even carried a baby made out of snow.At least one man was trying to sell Trump 2024 merchandise to marchers. But overall, Donald Trump had a minimal presence at the march despite being the frontrunner for the Republican White House nomination as he seeks a second presidency.Trump has waffled on his stance on abortion: while he has taken credit for installing supreme court justices who helped overturn Roe, he has also suggested that hardline stances on abortion can backfire on Republicans.“I’m not voting for Trump, I know that much,” said Ali Mumbach, 26. She carried a sign listing police brutality, gun violence and other issues that should matter to anti-abortion activists who call themselves “pro-life”.“Trump is anti-life, especially in regards to Black lives and the lives of immigrants. So, yeah, I don’t think that he is pro-life. I don’t think that he cares about people who live in poverty. I don’t think he has the best interests of the American people,” Mumbach said.Democrats, meanwhile, are hoping sustained outrage over Roe will propel them to victory up and down the general election ballot.The Biden campaign is now launching a paid media campaign, timed to Roe’s anniversary, to target women and swing voters in battleground states.Harris plans to appear on Monday in Wisconsin to spotlight post-Roe attacks on reproductive rights before holding a campaign rally alongside Biden in Virginia.In the November 2023 state elections, Virginia Republicans tried to take control of the state legislature by promising to enact a “reasonable” ban on terminating pregnancies that were 15 weeks or beyond – an effort that failed. More

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      Democrats condemn ‘cruel’ abortion bans ahead of 51st anniversary of Roe

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      Senate Democrats underscored their commitment to abortion rights in a press conference on Wednesday, ahead of the 51st anniversary of Roe v Wade. The now-overturned supreme court case provided American women with a constitutional right to abortion for nearly 50 years.Experts at the briefing described Republican-backed abortion bans across the country as “cruel”, “extreme” and causing untold “suffering” for American women, thousands of whom are forced to travel across state lines for abortions or be forced to remain pregnant.“Senate Democrats will not let anyone turn away from the devastation Republicans have caused,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Washington state Democrat. “And we will not stop pushing to restore the federal right to abortion.”The briefing comes at the start of the 2024 presidential election cycle, in which abortion rights are expected to be a defining issue. Former president Donald Trump, called the “most pro-life president” by anti-abortion activists and national organizations alike, has already won the Iowa Republican caucuses handily, and is widely expected to become the Republican party’s nominee.Trump nominated and the Senate confirmed three right-leaning supreme court justices, all of whom voted to overturn Roe v Wade in the case that now governs federal abortion rights – Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization.Even so, anti-abortion laws have become a politically poisonous issue for Republicans. Abortion rights have won at the ballot box again and again, as in Michigan and Kansas. Polls show more Americans than ever support abortion rights. Even Republicans in the House, where caucus members have repeatedly signed on to federal legislation that would amount to a total abortion ban, are now backing away from anti-abortion messaging bills.“The anniversary of Roe v Wade should be a joyous day for our country, a day when the supreme court decided to value a woman’s right to privacy and autonomy,” said the Democratic Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer. “In 2022, tragically, alarmingly and outrageously they succeeded when a hard-right majority voted to overturn Roe v Wade,” he said.In addition to the anniversary of Roe, the briefing also comes ahead of the March for Life, the largest gathering of anti-abortion activists of the year. Before the Dobbs decision, anti-abortion activists marched in protest of Roe v Wade. Today, activists strategize about further abortion bans – including a federal 15-week ban on abortion.Dr Austin Dennard is an obstetrician and gynecologist who said she was forced to “flee” her state for an abortion after her fetus was diagnosed with anencephaly, a severe and fatal condition where a fetus develops without parts of the brain or skull.“We have to flee the state,” she said. “My state” – she is a sixth-generation Texan – “where I practice medicine, where I’m raising my family,” said Dennard. “Then my doctor gave me a hug. ‘I’m so sorry,’ was all she was able to say.”Dennard was forced to travel east, but said she was afraid to use credit cards or tell people where she was going for fear she would be criminally prosecuted under Texas’s anti-abortion laws.“It was absolutely humiliating and I felt physically and emotionally broken,” said Dennard.Dr Serina Floyd, an OB-GYN in Washington DC and the chief medical officer of Planned Parenthood, said only last week she provided an abortion for a woman, who she referred to under the pseudonym “Nina”.Nina traveled by bus from North Carolina, where a 12-week abortion ban recently went into effect. She missed her first bus, was able to board a second but arrived too late for her scheduled appointment. Nina was rescheduled for the next day. When Floyd asked Nina where she would stay the night, Nina said she had found a homeless shelter 15 minutes from the clinic.“Nina had no money – not for a hotel, not for food, not for nothing. All she had was a bus ticket home,” said Floyd.Another expert, feminist and columnist Jessica Valenti, said she regularly documented “suffering”, and received more messages from women than she could ever respond to.“When Republicans feign surprise or compassion over post-Roe horror stories – they are lying,” said Valenti. She said she has documented a “quiet campaign” by national abortion groups to undermine prenatal testing that reveals fetal abnormalities and to sow doubt about the accuracy of maternal mortality numbers (the US has among the worst in the developed world).“The question I get asked most often is, ‘Why?’” said Valenti. Republicans, she said, are trying to enforce, “a world view that it is women’s job to be pregnant and stay pregnant – no matter the cost or consequence”. More

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      Many Republicans support abortion. Are they switching parties because of it?

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      The first time Carol Whitmore ever had sex, she got pregnant.It was 1973, and Whitmore was a teenager. Whitmore’s parents were in and out of trouble with the police, Whitmore said. When they told Whitmore they would help her raise the child, she thought, nope.Instead, Whitmore got an abortion. That same year, the US supreme court legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v Wade.“I made that choice myself, and to this day, I don’t regret it,” Whitmore told the Guardian. A half-century later, Whitmore is still staunchly supportive of abortion rights. She’s recently taken to collecting petitions in support of a Florida ballot measure to enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution.Whitmore is also a deeply committed Republican, who has held multiple positions in Florida local government. For her, abortion rights are part and parcel of her Republican worldview.“Do you want more government overreach to tell us how to take care of ourselves?” Whitmore said. She’s not the only conservative who feels this way, she said: “Everybody I talked to says: ‘Well, we aren’t coming out publicly, but we are definitely going to sign that petition, we are definitely going to vote for that amendment to be passed.’”In the year and a half since the US supreme court overturned Roe in June 2022, Republicans have floundered over how to handle abortion. The issue is widely thought to have cost them the promised “red wave” in the 2022 midterms, as well as control of the Virginia state legislature in 2023. Abortion rights supporters have triumphed on every abortion-related ballot measure since Roe’s demise, including in states that are traditionally believed to be conservative strongholds like Kansas, Kentucky and, most recently, Ohio.Experts still have questions about the driving forces behind these victories. Was it a surge in Democratic turnout? Or Republicans breaking with their party platform on abortion? And will abortion convince Republicans to leave the GOP behind entirely?The outcome of the 2024 elections, when roughly a dozen states may vote on abortion referendums, could hinge on the answers.“It may be in the narrowest sense possible to win with only Democrats, but that’s not even on our radar,” Jodi Liggett, the senior adviser for Reproductive Freedom for All Arizona, said late last year. Liggett’s organization is championing a proposal for a 2024 abortion-related ballot measure in Arizona. “I think if anything, you’re for sure gonna need independents,” she said. “And we think people actually agree across parties, on the pure issue of who should be deciding: physicians, medical professionals and families, not politicians.”Democrats, who once avoided the issue of abortion in election campaigns, are now banking on the issue to amplify anger and turnout overall. Yet in interviews with eight Republican or formerly Republican women who support abortion rights, hailing from six states across the country, a complex portrait emerged, suggesting Republicans might not be the silver bullet that Democrats are hoping for in November.When the US supreme court first legalized abortion nationwide in Roe v Wade, neither party was unified in its position on the issue. Over the next five decades, Republicans grew increasingly opposed to the procedure. Although abortion rights are broadly popular in the United States today, support is sharply split by party: while 80% of Democrats say abortion should be legal in all or most cases, just 38% of Republicans say the same, according to polling from the Pew Research Center.Still, that is a significant fraction of Republicans. Men and women make up equal shares of these abortion rights-supporting Republicans – but women consistently vote at higher rates than men, making them a critical voting bloc for abortion-rights supporters to win.For Stephanie Tyler, a longtime Republican in Nevada, Roe’s overturning “was the proverbial last straw”.“I believe so fundamentally in a woman’s right to choose,” Tyler said, adding: “Any party that would make that a key piece of its platform, and then support a supreme court that obviously pushed that as a primary agenda, is not my party.”Weeks after Roe fell, Tyler dropped her affiliation with the Republican party and registered as an independent.‘There will be no Republicans left’Some prominent Republican women have started to urge the GOP to stop focusing on banning abortion so much – including Ann Coulter, the conservative firebrand not generally known for moderation. “The demand for anti-abortion legislation just cost Republicans another crucial race,” Coulter tweeted in April. “Pro-lifers: WE WON. Abortion is not a ‘constitutional right’ anymore! Please stop pushing strict limits on abortion, or there will be no Republicans left.”This week, Donald Trump similarly warned that Republicans have been “decimated” over extreme abortion stances, even as he took credit for what he called the “miracle” of overturning Roe.Many of the interviewed women shared Coulter’s concern about what the GOP’s hardline stance on abortion would mean for the party’s future.Sandy Senn, a Republican state senator from South Carolina, , believes abortion should be outlawed after the first trimester of pregnancy (with exceptions). But last year, she banded together with the four other female senators in South Carolina’s state legislature – two Republicans, a Democrat and an independent – to stop a total abortion ban from passing in South Carolina. They called themselves the “sister senators”.At one point, the sister senators filibustered for three days. Their efforts worked, for a while. By the end of the year, though, South Carolina had banned abortion past six weeks of pregnancy.“You cannot have laws that are going to thumb a group of people down, because they’re ultimately not going to listen, and they’re going to find a workaround,” Senn said. “If we continue down this path – we hate gays, we hate women, we hate transsexuals – if we become the party of hate, we lose independents. We’re gonna lose young voters.”She continued: “You’re gonna see moderate Republicans walk away from the party on certain issues, or maybe not even vote top-ballot or in some elections, just because they feel like they can’t.”Gauging how many Republicans will break away from the party to support abortion rights, though, is complicated by much of the GOP’s recent tack to the far right. Kelly Dittmar, the director of research and a scholar at the center for American women and politics at Rutgers University–Camden, said that it’s become increasingly difficult to even locate moderate Republican women, either as voters or as elected officials. So many have simply left the party.“Women in general have been more likely to be liberal, and that includes among Republicans,” Dittmar said. “In surveys, it’s hard to compare Republicans over time, because you’re actually talking about a really different group of people. Instead of seeing Republican women say, ‘Oh, we don’t agree with the party’, they just don’t even come up in the count, because they don’t identify at the beginning of a survey as Republican.”Mirabel Batjer is one of those women. She left the GOP around 2010, after supporting Barack Obama for president in 2008.“I just decided that it was silly for me to pretend any longer that it was a party for me, because it certainly was not,” said Batjer, who now calls herself a “rabid liberal Democrat”. “I was almost a single-issue voter when it came to being concerned about Roe v Wade and what the supreme court could do. And I guess my fears were right.”Some Republicans, such as Kellyanne Conway, a former Trump adviser, have suggested the GOP should pivot to emphasizing contraception or risk losing in 2024. At a GOP presidential debate, candidate Nikki Haley, who has urged “consensus” on abortion, asked the audience: “Can’t we all agree contraception should be available?”But that plan might not get far in the modern Republican party. Anti-abortion activists, who have long been wedded to the GOP and have helped propel it to electoral victories across the country, have mixed views on hormonal birth control. The powerful Students for Life of America, for example, has labeled oral contraceptives and IUDs “abortifacients”, meaning that they cause abortions, which is false.This year, Senn was enraged by the introduction of a South Carolina bill to require that parents give consent before doctors can fulfill minors’ requests for medication, including birth control – in apparent defiance of a federal program, Title X, that allows minors to receive confidential family-planning help.“Here they are, making an attempt to basically keep women barefoot and pregnant, because now they don’t even want them to have birth control,” Senn said. “The bill is asinine, and women aren’t going to put up with that.”But multiple Republican women who support abortion rights said they prefer to stick with the GOP come November, even if they vote for access to the procedure in states that are holding referendums. Even those who were undecided on or opposed to Trump said that they couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Joe Biden.Yuripzy Morgan, a Republican who ran to represent Maryland’s third congressional district in 2022, supports some access to abortion. But, she said, abortion is not a “primary issue of mine” when she enters the voting booth.“When I say it is a complicated topic, I don’t say that because it’s the speaking point. I’ve felt the baby kick in my tummy. I’ve given birth. I know what that feels like,” Morgan said. “One of my biggest pet peeves is when people make this a black-and-white issue.”Melissa Deckman, the CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, doesn’t believe women are ditching the Republican party in significant numbers because of abortion. According to her organization’s research, Republican women remain much more likely to think that abortion should be illegal in all cases.Instead, it’s Democrats who now feel more strongly than ever about supporting abortion access. Before Roe fell, most Democrats did not consider abortion their top issue; post-Roe, it’s become a litmus test for half of Democrats, according to research from the Public Religion Research Institute. If anything, Deckman says, Democrats are likely to benefit from boosted turnout among independents or relatively weak Democrats.“Generally speaking, most Republicans are opposed to abortion. That’s become the party line and party voters really feel that way,” Deckman said. “I don’t think there’s any indication that there’s mass exodus from the GOP because of the decision that happened.”Even Whitmore, the Florida woman who had an abortion in 1973, said that access to the procedure will not be a factor in her vote for president.“The president or whoever is not going to decide this issue,” she said. “It’s going to be the citizens of Florida.” More