Roe v Wade

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      in Elections

      Tensions flare as Iowa passes six-week abortion ban – video report

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      Iowa’s state legislature voted on Tuesday night to ban most abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy, a time before most women know they are pregnant. Republican lawmakers, who hold a majority in both the Iowa house and senate, passed the anti-abortion bill after the governor, Kim Reynolds, called a special session to seek a vote on the ban. The bill passed with exclusively Republican support in a rare one-day legislative burst lasting more than 14 hours More

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      in US Politics

      Iowa Republicans pass six-week abortion ban

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      Iowa’s state legislature voted on Tuesday night to ban most abortions after around six weeks of pregnancy, a time before most people know they are pregnant.Republican lawmakers, which hold a majority in both the Iowa house and senate, passed the anti-abortion bill after the governor, Kim Reynolds, called a special session to seek a vote on the ban.The bill passed with exclusively Republican support in a rare, one-day legislative burst lasting more than 14 hours.The legislation will take immediate effect after the governor signs it on Friday and will prohibit abortions after the first sign of cardiac activity – usually around six weeks, with some exceptions for cases of rape or incest. It will allow for abortions up until 20 weeks of pregnancy only under certain conditions of medical emergency. Abortions in the state were previously allowed up to 20 weeks.“The Iowa supreme court questioned whether this legislature would pass the same law they did in 2018, and today they have a clear answer,” Reynolds said in a statement. “The voices of Iowans and their democratically elected representatives cannot be ignored any longer, and justice for the unborn should not be delayed.”The legislation is the latest in a raft of anti-abortion laws passed in states across the country since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade last year, ending the nationwide constitutional right to abortion. A number of states, including a swath of the southern US, have passed full bans on abortion without exceptions for cases of rape or incest.Preparations were already under way to quickly file legal challenges in court and get the measure blocked, once Reynolds signs it into law.A similar six-week ban that the legislature passed in 2018 was blocked by the state’s supreme court one year later. Since that decision, however, Roe has been overturned and a more conservative court ruled that abortion is no longer a constitutionally protected right in Iowa. The court was split 3-3 last month on whether to remove the block on the 2018 law, a deadlock which resulted in Reynolds seeking to pass new legislation in a special session this week.“The ACLU of Iowa, Planned Parenthood and the Emma Goldman Clinic remain committed to protecting the reproductive rights of Iowans to control their bodies and their lives, their health and their safety – including filing a lawsuit to block this reckless, cruel law,” the ACLU of Iowa’s executive director, Mark Stringer, said in a statement.In the meantime, Planned Parenthood North Central States has said it will refer patients out of state if they’re scheduled for abortions in the next few weeks. The organization, the largest abortion provider in the state, will continue to provide care to patients who present before cardiac activity is detected.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAs state lawmakers debated the bill, crowds of protesters gathered in the capitol rotunda in support of reproductive rights and chanted “vote them out” at Republican legislators. A Des Moines Register/Mediacom Iowa survey from last year showed that around 61% of Iowans were generally in favor of abortion access, a number that tracks with nationwide beliefs about the right to abortion.During a public hearing on Tuesday before the vote, lawmakers heard from advocates both for and against the bill who gave brief statements in the chambers. A range of medical professionals and reproductive rights activists urged the legislature to reconsider the bill, warning that it would cause immense societal harm, reduce bodily autonomy and prevent physicians from caring for patients.“You would be forcing a woman to a lifelong obligation which affects her education, career, family and community,” Amy Bingaman, an obstetrician and gynecologist, told lawmakers.Advocates of the bill, many from Christian organizations and hardline anti-abortion activist groups, thanked lawmakers during the hearing and touted the bill as a victory for their movement.The Associated Press contributed to this report More

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      in US Politics

      On the Fourth of July, a few reasons to feel encouraged about US democracy | Margaret Sullivan

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      It’s been a grim week or so in the United States, especially for those with progressive values.In Baltimore, a deadly mass shooting underscored, again, how desperately gun reform is needed, and, tragically, how unlikely it is to happen.And in Washington, a spate of supreme court rulings undid decades of forward movement – the court’s rightwing majority rejected affirmative action in college admissions, favored religion over anti-discrimination laws and knocked down Joe Biden’s plan to forgive student loan debt.Add to that the one-year anniversary of the court’s devastating overturning of Roe v Wade, and you could practically hear the sound of hard-won progress being sucked down history’s drain.Pretty depressing, all told.But despite that, there are reasons to feel encouraged about the future of the nation on this, its 247th birthday.First, the successful effort in Congress to protect democracy and electoral integrity known as the Electoral Count Act reform. Widely seen as the most important such reform in a generation, it developed in direct response to Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election which came to a violent head in the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Among its many admirable provisions, it prohibits state legislatures from changing how electors can be selected after an election.Then in one of two positive pieces of supreme court news in recent weeks, the court rejected a dangerous effort to allow states to ignore their own state constitutions. Undeterred, that could have radically transformed how federal elections are conducted by giving state legislatures a great deal of power to set rules for federal elections. The court also unexpectedly struck down Alabama’s racial gerrymandering plan under the Voting Rights Act.I find it oddly encouraging that, according to a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll, seven in 10 Americans think our democracy is “imperiled.” Of course, people define that peril according to their own politics and world views, but is is undoubtedly one reason why election denialists were roundly defeated during last year’s midterm elections.As NBC News’s Adam Edelman put it: “Nearly every single candidate in battleground state races who denied or questioned the results of the 2020 election was defeated for positions that oversee, defend and certify elections – a resounding loss for a movement that would have had the power to overturn future contests.”Most Americans apparently don’t want extremists running elections and they understand how high the stakes are.“Our democracy is fortifying itself on many levels,” Greg Sargent of the Washington Post wrote recently. That happened because citizens and government officials took post-2020 threats seriously.It’s a good thing that they did, since – according to one respected organization, the Virginia-based Center for Systemic Peace – the United States in late 2020 no longer could clearly be categorized as a democracy. It had become, for the first time, an “anocracy”, which shares qualities of both autocracy and democracy. America’s rating has more recently improved, putting us back, though not safely, in the democracy zone.In media, the continuing loss of local newspapers – in itself, a serious threat to democracy – has been offset somewhat as innovation-minded journalists and entrepreneurs have stepped into that void. Witness the growth of digital-first news organizations such as VoteBeat and States Newsroom, and collaborative efforts like Spotlight PA or the partnership between the Texas Tribune and ProPublica.A recent big pricetag for Fox News – $787.5m to settle a defamation case brought by Dominion Voting Systems – is another encouraging development. It provided some accountability for the way the cable network knowingly spread election-related lies after the 2020 election; when that settlement was followed by Fox’s firing the reprehensible Tucker Carlson, it began to look as if legal challenges could do what advertiser boycotts could not.The various criminal prosecutions and investigations to hold the January 6 insurrectionists accountable are heartening as well. Those potentially include Trump himself – in Washington, in Georgia, and according to the latest news, maybe in Arizona, too. To some degree, the democratic guardrails are holding and the rule of law prevailing.And while this is hard to quantify, I know of many citizens and advocates who are working hard to protect voting, to support the rights of the disenfranchised. to lessen the blows dealt by the recent court rulings, and to sustain local journalism.It’s a heavy lift, so we should all lend a hand.“Get engaged locally,” urged Yale University’s Asha Rangappa told me recently when I interviewed the former FBI agent for my podcast, American Crisis: Can Journalism Save Democracy? That could mean runing for office, signing up to be a poll worker, volunteering at school, participating in the arts.Rangappa wants more Americans to “cultivate the habits of democracy”. Those habits are developed when people leave their social-media echo chambers, get out into their communities, and simply talk to each other.On this Fourth of July, let’s make sure our ever-fragile democracy endures to celebrate many more birthdays.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture More

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      in US Politics

      Indiana supreme court clears way for Republican abortion ban

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      The Indiana supreme court ruled on Friday that the state’s abortion ban does not violate the state constitution, removing a major hurdle to enforcing the ban Republicans approved last summer.The court’s decision overturns a county judge’s ruling that the ban probably violates the state constitution’s privacy protections, which she said are stronger than those found in the US constitution. That judge’s order has allowed abortions to continue in Indiana since September, despite the ban.An opinion from three of the court’s five justices said that while Indiana’s constitution provides some protection of abortion rights, the “General Assembly otherwise retains broad legislative discretion for determining whether and the extent to which to prohibit abortions”.All five Indiana supreme court justices were appointed by Republican governors.The Republican state attorney general, Todd Rokita, issued a statement praising the decision: “We celebrate this day – one long in coming, but morally justified. Thank you to all the warriors who have fought for this day that upholds LIFE.”Although the court’s decision strikes down the injunction blocking the ban, it was not immediately clear how soon the ban would take effect. The justices returned the case to the county judge for further action, and left open the possibility of a narrower challenge to the ban.Indiana’s abortion ban also faces a separate court challenge over claims it violates the state’s 2015 religious freedom law signed by GOP the then governor, Mike Pence.Indiana became the first state to enact tighter abortion restrictions, acting in August, after the US supreme court’s eliminated federal protections by overturning Roe v Wade in June 2022.Most Republican-controlled states have enacted tighter abortion restrictions since the US supreme court’s ruling last summer. All the restrictions have been challenged in court.In the past year, judges in Arizona, Iowa and South Carolina have ruled that the bans are not permissible under the state constitutions.Besides Indiana, enforcement of restrictions are on hold as courts decide the cases in Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, Utah and Wyoming. In North Dakota, lawmakers hav since adopted a different ban to replace the one that was blocked. In South Carolina, another ban has been put into place and put on hold by a court. And in North Carolina, a federal judge weighed whether to temporarily block parts of new abortion restrictions set to take effect on Saturday.Democratic-led states, such as Indiana’s neighbors of Illinois and Michigan, have mostly taken steps to protect abortion access.The Indiana ban would eliminate the licenses for all seven abortion clinics in the state and ban the vast majority of abortions even in the earliest stages of a pregnancy. It includes exceptions allowing abortions at hospitals in cases of rape or incest before 10 weeks post-fertilization; to protect the life and physical health of the mother; and if a fetus is diagnosed with a lethal anomaly.The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana, which represented Planned Parenthood and other abortion clinic operators, argued before the supreme court in January that the state constitution’s liberty protections provide a right to privacy and to make decisions on whether to have children.The state attorney general’s office countered that Indiana had laws against abortion when its current constitution was drafted in 1851 and that the county judge’s ruling would wrongly create an abortion right.The Indiana supreme court’s decision said the state constitution “protects a woman’s right to an abortion that is necessary to protect her life or to protect her from a serious health risk”.The majority opinion, however, also found that the constitution “generally permits the General Assembly to prohibit abortions which are unnecessary to protect a woman’s life or health, so long as the legislation complies with the constitutional limits that apply to all legislation, such as those limiting legislation to a proper exercise of the police power and providing privileges and immunities equally”.A separate court challenge to the ban is ongoing as another county judge in December sided with residents who claim it violates the state’s religious freedom law, which Republican legislators pushed through in 2015 and sparked a widespread national backlash as critics argued it allowed discrimination against gay people.The state supreme court in January turned down a request from the attorney general’s office that it immediately take up the religious freedom lawsuit. The state’s intermediate court of appeals is scheduled to hear arguments over that lawsuit on 12 September.The Marion county judge Heather Welch in December agreed with five residents who hold Jewish, Muslim and spiritual faiths and who argued that the ban would violate their religious rights on when they believe abortion is acceptable. For now it only directly affects those plaintiffs – legal experts say anyone else claiming religious protections of their abortion rights would need their own court order. More

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      in US Politics

      ‘Conservative justices? Yeah, in what way?’ Key senator on a supreme court in thrall to special interests

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      The conservative-dominated US supreme court may be undergoing a “course correction” after witnessing a public backlash to its extremist rulings and ethics scandals, Sheldon Whitehouse, chairman of the Senate judiciary subcommittee on the federal courts, has told the Guardian.America’s highest court has made a series of radical decisions, including in the Dobbs case that overturned the constitutional right to abortion one year ago on Saturday, while two rightwing justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, have been exposed for failing disclose luxury gifts from billionaires.But with trust in the court collapsing, it has this month defended the Voting Rights Act by ruling in favor of Black voters in Alabama and preserved a law that aims to keep Native American children with tribal families. Both were unexpected victories for Democrats – and a sign that they might finally be awakening to public opinion.“Frankly, I think the recent Alabama decision would have gone the other way had it not been for the blowback on Dobbs,” Senator Whitehouse said in an interview. “The challenge that they’re not ‘conservative’ – they’re captured – and the preposterous behavior of Thomas. That was a pretty heavy course correction. Some of them said, ‘Oh, damn, looks like we’re going have to act like judges for a while. Till this blows over!’”Whitehouse found it strange that the Alabama voters decision rested so heavily on precedent – something that the current justices, three of whom were appointed by President Donald Trump, have often been content to ignore.He says: “Where was all that when you were throwing out Dobbs? They have not let precedent get in their way when they’ve wanted the result for quite a while and to have it pop up so flagrantly in the middle of the Alabama case? You guys, that’s funny.”The senator believes that the court’s new sensitivity to public opinion could extend to the upcoming case Moore v Harper, another gerrymandering case in which Republican legislators in North Carolina are asking the court to grant them unfettered power to set rules for voting and elections – a dangerous notion in the era of Trump’s “big lie” of a stolen election.“I’ve always thought that was probably a throwaway case for them. If you look at the people who are pitching the case to them, so many of them are under investigation, under indictment, in disbarment proceedings. It’s the whole creepy ‘big lie’ apparatus that came in with that and I’m not sure the court wants to take a look at that crowd and say, yeah, we’re going with them to develop a completely wacky new argument that nobody’s ever accepted as being anything but a fever dream before. That’s just a bad combo.”Whitehouse, 67, has been a senator for Rhode Island, America’s smallest state, since 2007 and is currently chairman of the Senate budget committee. He has spent years delivering speeches on the Senate floor in two series: “Time to Wake Up”, about the climate crisis, and “The Scheme”, about a decades-long plot to remake the supreme court in service to shadowy billionaires and big special interests.One of his “The Scheme” speeches came to the attention of Lawrence O’Donnell, an MSNBC host and former congressional aide, who suggested that the subject would make good podcast material. Whitehouse discovered that the Senate’s own studio could produce it. The first episode of Making the Case offers an accessible history lesson with Congressman Hank Johnson, Slate senior editor Dahlia Lithwick and Lisa Graves of True North Research.Whitehouse reflects on the new venture while sitting in an airy Capitol Hill office surrounded by photographs of himself with Democratic presidents Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Joe Biden. There are also pictures of Bruce Sundlun, a former governor of Rhode Island and mentor, and President Franklin Roosevelt – with a hand-signed note to Whitehouse’s grandfather, also named Sheldon Whitehouse, who served as a foreign service officer.The senator is speaking just hours before the ProPublica website published an article raising questions about Alito’s failure to report taking a private jet to Alaska for a luxury fishing trip in 2008, provided by a billionaire hedge fund manager whose business interests have come before the court. Whitehouse will tweet in response: “This just keeps getting worse.”ProPublica previously reported that Thomas accepted decades of undisclosed trips from a longtime friend, the Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow, that included stays at Crow’s private resort, flights on his jet, and a vacation onboard Crow’s yacht in Indonesia. Crow also purchased property from Thomas and paid private school tuition for a Thomas great-nephew.Opinion polls show that such revelations have shaken public faith in the court as never before. A Quinnipiac poll published this week found that it has a 30% approval rating among registered voters – the lowest since Quinnipiac first asked the question in 2004. This mood has created an appetite for speeches, podcasts and journalistic investigations to lift the curtain on an institution that once seemed above the political fray and beyond reproach.Whitehouse, who wrote about Thomas’s relationship with Crow in a book about dark money and the supreme court, tells the Guardian: “A couple of things are happening and they interact with each other. One is that people are just grossed out by the Harlan Crow/Clarence Thomas revelations.“I checked: in Rhode Island, if you’re a municipal employee, you can have three lunches not exceeding $25 and they have to be reported, and here’s this guy who’s supposedly a judge going on quarter-million-dollar free vacations and not reporting it.”He added: “Then people are beginning to realise that this is not a conservative court. This is a special interests-captured court. But we don’t have a very ready narrative in American society for explaining the difference and we still get people who cover the court and know a fair amount about it saying the ‘conservative’ justices. Yeah, in what way?”In 2022 the court upended precedents at an astonishing clip, curtailing or revoking rights such as abortion and due process while expanding religious rights and rights to carry guns. It twice delivered blows to the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to combat pollution.Whitehouse believes that the term conservative has been “obsolete” since dark money began funding groups such as Leonard Leo’s Federalist Society to handpick justices for the court. “There’s nothing about the way they’re behaving as judges that meets any definition of small ‘c’ conservative.”He continues: “Little by little, the facts of the decisions they’ve been up to are beginning to break through with something more than just them being ‘conservative’. There’s this overlay of who’s in charge behind the scenes. Of course that pops up everywhere, in the amicus briefs, in the dark money behind their confirmations. You can’t make it stop. Harlan Crow intersects with it. And then Dobbs was a clang the gong moment where everybody realised, oh, this is a little not normal.”One fix might lie with Congress. Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate judiciary committee, has announced plans to take up supreme court ethics legislation. But in April the chief justice, John Roberts, turned down an invitation from Durbin to testify, citing the “exceedingly rare” nature of such an appearance.Whitehouse comments: “I can understand that he had horrible questions he’d have to answer and, for that reason, he didn’t want to. I very much disagree that his separation of powers argument holds any water at all. That’s pure window dressing for, ‘I just don’t want to come over and have to explain what he did’ – thinking of Thomas. I have some human sympathy for him not wanting to come over and answer questions for his wayward colleague but he was very slippery about the way he did it,” he said.Whitehouse wants Roberts to demonstrate that he is taking the ethics issue seriously and believes he might be pushed to do so by the judicial conference, the policymaking body of the federal courts that has a code of conduct followed by lower court judges. At an awards ceremony last month, Roberts acknowledged that “we are continuing to look at things we can do” to adhere to the highest standards of conduct.But no action by the current court has been as tangible or devastating for millions of people as Dobbs, which resulted in the decision to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that had in effect legalised abortion nationwide. Alito’s majority opinion stated that “a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions”. The procedure is now almost completely banned in 14 states.Whitehouse naturally has a podcast episode marking the first anniversary. He reflects: “If you really are going to throw out a decision that stood for so long and matters so much to so many people, you expect that they try to keep within existing law. Instead, they make up a whole new analysis that allows them to get where they want to get – the whole ‘history and tradition’ shtick that they pulled together,” he said.The ruling was a prime example of the court being out of step with public opinion. Republicans paid the price in last year’s midterm elections. Now candidates for president in 2024 are tiptoeing around the issue, with Trump refusing to commit to a national abortion limit and rival Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, facing scrutiny over a six-week ban in his home state.Whitehouse comments: “There’s a huge liability that they’ve opened up for themselves in a party that has hung with the extremists.”The Dobbs decision galvanised activists to demand Thomas’s resignation, push for reforms such as expanding the number of justices and make the case to voters that the supreme court is a defining issue at the ballot box, not merely a nice-to-have.“A lot of the advocacy groups that work in this space – whether it’s environmental groups, civil rights groups, labour groups – have awakened to the nature of the problem at the supreme court and are now taking it on in a whole different way, looking at the dark money, looking at the capture, looking at the mischievous and mysterious briefing just prepared.“Looking at that whole scenario and realising, wow, we got outplayed for about 20 years now and we’re going to have to figure out how to fight back. This can’t be issue 15 for us any longer. This has to be right at the top across a whole array of advocacy areas.” More

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      in US Politics

      ‘How dare they?’ Kamala Harris says in fiery speech on Roe’s overturn as protests mark anniversary – as it happened

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      From 4h agoVice-President Kamala Harris took the stage in North Carolina on Saturday and delivered an impassioned address on restoring nationwide reproductive freedoms following a year since the supreme court’s decision to strip them.Speaking to a crowd full of supporters including healthcare professionals and activists, Harris said:
      “How dare they? How dare they attack basic healthcare? How dare they attack our fundamental rights? How dare they attack our freedom?…
      In the midst of this healthcare crisis, extremist so-called leaders in states across our nation have proposed or passed more than 350 new laws to restrict these freedoms and the right to have access to reproductive healthcare. Right now in our country, 23 million women of reproductive age live in a state with an extreme abortion ban in effect…
      Most of us here know is that many women don’t even know they are pregnant in six weeks. Which by the way tells us most of these politicians don’t even understand how the body actually works. They don’t get it,” Harris continued.
      She went on to issue a strong warning towards Republican lawmakers in Congress, saying:
      Extremist Republicans in Congress have proposed to ban abortion nationwide. But I have news for them. We’re not having that. We’re not standing for that. We won’t let that happen. And by the way, the majority of Americans are with us.
      The majority of Americans, I do believe, agree that one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do with her body…
      The United States Congress must put back in place what the Supreme court took away.”
      It is slightly past 4pm in Washington DC. Here is a wrap up of the day’s key events:
      President Joe Biden has issued a statement to mark the one-year anniversary of the supreme court’s overturn of Roe, which he said “has already had devastating consequences.” “States have imposed extreme and dangerous abortion bans that put the health and lives of women in jeopardy, force women to travel hundreds of miles for care, and threaten to criminalize doctors for providing the health care that their patients need and that they are trained to provide.”
      Vice-President Kamala Harris took the stage in North Carolina on Saturday and delivered an impassioned address on restoring nationwide reproductive freedoms following a year since the supreme court’s decision to strip them. Speaking to a crowd full of supporters including healthcare professionals and activists, Harris said: “How dare they? How dare they attack basic healthcare? How dare they attack our fundamental rights? How dare they attack our freedom?”
      A handful of Democratic lawmakers have pledged their support on Saturday to protect and fight for reproductive rights as the country marks first anniversary of Roe’s overturn. “House Dems are working hard to stop these extremists and restore reproductive freedom. Together we will win,” wrote Hakeem Jeffries, House minority leader. US representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland tweeted: “Pro-choice America won’t rest until we restore women’s freedom as law of the land.”
      As reproductive rights activists protested against the end of Roe v Wade, anti-abortion leaders celebrated one year since the landmark decision was overturned. Speaking at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Washington, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, framed the end of Roe as just the beginning of right-wing activists’ work.
      Arizona’s Democratic governor Katie Hobbs has signed an executive order that will further protect reproductive rights across the state and curtail restrictive reproductive legislation from Republicans. On Friday, Hobbs tweeted about her executive order, saying, “I will not allow extreme and out of touch politicians to get in the way of the fundamental rights of Arizonans.”
      Several reproductive rights organizations have announced their endorsement of the Biden-Harris administration in the upcoming 2024 presidential election. The organizations include Planned Parenthood, NARAL (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) Pro-Choice America , and EMILYs List, a political action committee dedicated to electing Democratic pro-choice women into office.
      More than a quarter of registered US voters say they will only vote for candidates who share their beliefs on abortion, according to a poll released earlier this week, a total (28%) one point higher than last year. The survey, from Gallup, was released before the first anniversary of Dobbs v Jackson, by which conservatives on the supreme court removed the right to abortion that had been safeguarded since Roe v Wade in 1973.
      That’s it from me, Maya Yang, as we wrap up the blog for today. Thank you for following along.Human rights organization Amnesty International has issued a statement condemning the supreme court’s decision a year ago to strip federal reproductive right protections.Tarah Demant, the national programs director at Amnesty International USA said:
      “One year after the Supreme Court shamefully stripped millions of their rights, women, girls, and people who can become pregnant in the United States are facing an unprecedented human rights crisis.
      A patchwork of devastating laws now blankets the country. One in three women and girls of reproductive age now live in states where abortion access is either totally or near-totally inaccessible…and a climate of fear is being purposefully sewn to restrict women, girls, and people who can get pregnant from finding legal abortion care.
      “Yet despite these coordinated and vitriolic attacks on our rights, Americans continue to overwhelmingly support access to safe and legal abortion, multiple states have added new protections, and activists across states continue to advocate for their rights. Abortion is a human right and basic healthcare, and activists across the country and around the world are more determined than ever to ensure that people across the USA will be able to access this right.”
      A Planned Parenthood abortion-providing clinic in Fairview Heights, Illinois saw a 700% increase in abortion-seeking patients from out of state.According to a new report by Jezebel, Planned Parenthood said that the 700% increase in out-of-stage patients seeking abortions in their Fairview Heights clinic comes along with a 35% increase in abortion patients overall who came to the clinic in the last year.Speaking to the outlet, Yamelsie Rodriguez, president and CEO of Reproductive Health Services of St. Louis region’s Planned Parenthood branch, said that the patients coming to her clinic hail from 29 states and are “mostly from the South.”The Guttmacher Institute has categorized Illinois as a state with “protective” abortion policies. Currently, abortion is banned at fetal viability, generally 24–26 weeks of pregnancy, and state Medicaid funds cover abortions.In addition, Illinois has a shield law that protects abortion providers from investigations launched by other states.Following the overturn of Roe vs. Wade, women of color have found themselves struggling even more to access reproductive healthcare in a medical and political landscape that has traditionally failed them.The Guardian’s reproductive rights reporter Poppy Noor profiled two women, Anya Cook and Samantha Casiano, on their experiences of being denied abortions in post-Roe America.Here is the full story on Cook and Samantha’s experiences and how they reflect the harsh realities faced by countless of other women of color in America:In a video address on Saturday, New York attorney general Letitia James reaffirmed New York’s status as a safe haven for abortion seekers and promised to continue fighting for reproductive rights. James said:
      “A ban on abortions will not ban abortions. It will only ban safe abortions.
      But it’s important to know that New York is a sanctuary city and state and that we provide assistance to young women, individuals who need reproductive care…
      Here in New York, we believe in you having control over your body and we believe in providing you with healthcare.
      I will continue to fight and to use the law to protect your rights each and every day.”
      Barbara Lee, a US representative from California since 1998, has pledged to continue fighting for reproductive rights in light of the first anniversary of Roe’s overturn.“I’m going to keep fighting for every person who finds herself in the same situation I was once in: pregnant, out of options, and forced to take extreme measures,” Lee tweeted.Lee, a longtime champion of women’s rights, is the author of the EACH Woman Act which would repeal the discriminatory Hyde Amendment that has restricted many women’s access to reproductive healthcare, her website said.Singer Demi Lovato has released a new song inspired by the first anniversary of Roe v Wade’s overturn.Lovato titled the pro-choice song “Swine,” which was released on Thursday.
      “It’s been one year since the Supreme Court’s decision to dismantle the constitutional right to a safe abortion, and although the path forward will be challenging, we must continue to be united in our fight for reproductive justice.
      I created ‘SWINE’ to amplify the voices of those who advocate for choice and bodily autonomy. I want this song to empower not only the birthing people of this country, but everyone who stands up for equality, to embrace their agency and fight for a world where every person’s right to make decisions about their own body is honored,” Lovato wrote in an Instagram caption.
      The music video features Lovato in front of men who appear to represent supreme court justices as she leads a revolt.
      “My life, my voice/My rights, my choice/It’s mine, or I’m just swine,” she sings. “My blood, my loins/My lungs, my noise/It’s mine, or I’m just swine,” she sings.
      Here are some images coming through the newswires as people across the country attend rallies marking the one-year anniversary of Roe’s overturn:Chelsea Clinton has also chimed in on first anniversary of the supreme court’s decision that stripped federal protections of reproductive rights from women, saying that she’s “really f**king angry.”In an interview at Aspen: Health in Aspen, Colorado, NBC host Kristen Welker asked the daughter of former president Bill Clinton and former secretary of state Hillary Clinton on her thoughts about the supreme court’s decision.Clinton replied:
      “I’m really f**king angry and I am — and that is an uncomfortable place to be because of the historical women tropes that so often have been used to kind of silence and diminish women and our voices, not just in this country but throughout human history. But I’m really angry because we know that women have died.”
      Vice-President Kamala Harris took the stage in North Carolina on Saturday and delivered an impassioned address on restoring nationwide reproductive freedoms following a year since the supreme court’s decision to strip them.Speaking to a crowd full of supporters including healthcare professionals and activists, Harris said:
      “How dare they? How dare they attack basic healthcare? How dare they attack our fundamental rights? How dare they attack our freedom?…
      In the midst of this healthcare crisis, extremist so-called leaders in states across our nation have proposed or passed more than 350 new laws to restrict these freedoms and the right to have access to reproductive healthcare. Right now in our country, 23 million women of reproductive age live in a state with an extreme abortion ban in effect…
      Most of us here know is that many women don’t even know they are pregnant in six weeks. Which by the way tells us most of these politicians don’t even understand how the body actually works. They don’t get it,” Harris continued.
      She went on to issue a strong warning towards Republican lawmakers in Congress, saying:
      Extremist Republicans in Congress have proposed to ban abortion nationwide. But I have news for them. We’re not having that. We’re not standing for that. We won’t let that happen. And by the way, the majority of Americans are with us.
      The majority of Americans, I do believe, agree that one does not have to abandon their faith or deeply held beliefs to agree the government should not be telling her what to do with her body…
      The United States Congress must put back in place what the Supreme court took away.”
      A handful of Democratic lawmakers have pledged their support on Saturday to protect and fight for reproductive rights as the country marks first anniversary of Roe’s overturn.“House Dems are working hard to stop these extremists and restore reproductive freedom. Together we will win,” wrote Hakeem Jeffries, House minority leader.“A year after SCOTUS’ disastrous Dobbs decision, I’m highlighting that districts like mine – and Black women in particular – are hurting the most,” said US representative Jasmine Crockett of Texas’s 30th district.
      “My district is 40% Black and majority women. It’s the people I represent that are hurt by life-saving medical care the most … North Texas has the highest rate of hospitalization due to pregnancy complications in the entire state … For all their talk about protecting babies, let me ask you this: What happens to the already born children of a mother who dies from pregnancy complications because she can’t get the treatment she needs during an ectopic pregnancy? Who’s protecting them?” Crockett added.
      US representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland tweeted: “Pro-choice America won’t rest until we restore women’s freedom as law of the land.”Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois echoed similar sentiments, saying:
      “Let’s be honest: Republicans’ anti-choice agenda is not about protecting life. If it was, perhaps they would help us tackle our maternal mortality crisis or do something–anything–to help end gun violence. But they don’t. Because it’s not about saving lives. It’s about control…
      Look, I know that a lot of us are tired from the seemingly endless fight to protect our most basic human rights. But we have to do more. Congress has to do more.”
      House Democrats also joined the pledges as they released compilation of various members promising to protect reproductive freedoms:As reproductive rights activists protested against the end of Roe v Wade, anti-abortion leaders celebrated one year since the landmark decision was overturned.Speaking at the Faith & Freedom Coalition’s Road to Majority conference in Washington, Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, framed the end of Roe as just the beginning of right-wing activists’ work.
      “We are at the starting line,” Dannenfelser said. “We have just begun. We have just begun a journey to start saving lives.”
      More people are feeling backed into a corner after the supreme court struck down the nationwide right to abortion last year, with many turning to birth control. In one of our latest features in our ‘A year without Roe’ series, Ema O’Connor explores the way that people’s relationships with birth control have evolved over the past year.O’Connor reports:Dr Rachel Neal, an OB-GYN working out of Atlanta, Georgia, said she has seen a trend toward LARCs nationally over the past six years, in part due to Trump’s presidency, as well as medicaid expansion and more insurance plans covering long term contraceptives. But in the past year Dr Neal has also seen an increased skepticism about any methods – including many birth control pills and IUDS – that pause or stop menstruation altogether. Before Roe was overturned, Dr Neal said that patients often saw not getting their periods as a positive side effect because they didn’t have to deal with cramps or spend money on tampons.
      “Now they’re uneasy towards methods that cause them to have no periods because they want to … prove to themselves that they’re not pregnant,” Dr Neal said.
      For the full story, click here:President Joe Biden has issued a statement to mark the one-year anniversary of the supreme court’s overturn of Roe, which he said “has already had devastating consequences.”
      “States have imposed extreme and dangerous abortion bans that put the health and lives of women in jeopardy, force women to travel hundreds of miles for care, and threaten to criminalize doctors for providing the health care that their patients need and that they are trained to provide.
      Yet state bans are just the beginning. Congressional Republicans want to ban abortion nationwide, but go beyond that, by taking FDA-approved medication for terminating a pregnancy, off the market, and make it harder to obtain contraception. Their agenda is extreme, dangerous, and out-of-step with the vast majority of Americans.
      My administration will continue to protect access to reproductive health care and call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe. vs. Wade in federal law once and for all.” More

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      Republicans scramble to limit electoral backlash against abortion bans

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      In the months since the supreme court voted to overturn Roe v Wade last year, the effects of the court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization have become clear. Over a dozen states across the country have passed legislation limiting or outright banning access to abortions, severely restricting reproductive rights for millions of people and threatening to imprison abortion providers.But as Republicans have pushed through these bills, voters have also taken every opportunity to rebuke them in elections – leading to defeats in midterms and emerging as one of the GOP’s largest vulnerabilities.After initially celebrating victory in their nearly five-decade campaign to end the constitutional right to abortion, Republicans now find themselves scrambling to simultaneously lessen their electoral losses and defend unpopular anti-abortion policies. Reproductive rights are set to be a key issue in the general election next year, with implications from the presidential campaign all the way down the ballot. While the GOP has not stopped passing anti-abortion bills, including in South Carolina and North Carolina last month, it has begun to worry about the price that it is paying for them.“As Republicans we need to read the room on this issue,” the South Carolina Republican representative Nancy Mace, who supports anti-abortion policies, said on ABC News in April. “We’re going to lose huge if we continue down this path of extremities.”Polling after the Dobbs decision showed that a majority of Americans disapproved of the court overturning Roe, with a Pew Research Center survey from last July showing that nearly six in 10 adults opposed the ruling. Pew’s survey also showed a majority of Americans in the largely conservative states where abortion bans were set to take place also disapproved of the decision. A separate NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll from April this year found support for abortion access around an all-time high, and notably showed that about one-third of Republicans mostly supported abortion rights.The electoral implications of Republicans’ post-Dobbs anti-abortion push began to reveal themselves early on, when heavily conservative Kansas voted no in a referendum last August on whether the state should remove abortion rights from its constitution.“The vote in Kansas sends a decisive message that Americans are angry about the efforts to roll back their rights and won’t stand for it,” Sarah Stoesz, then the president of Planned Parenthood for the region, said after the vote.Despite the warning from the Kansas contest, Republican leaders still believed they would capitalize on President Joe Biden’s low approval ratings and concern over inflation to sweep back into power in a “red wave” during midterm elections. That never materialized, and instead Republicans underperformed as an energized Democratic base came out to vote. Michigan Democrats flipped the state legislature for the first time in nearly 40 years, Pennsylvania Democrats secured victories against anti-abortion candidates and, ballot measures in five states, including Kentucky and Montana, all resulted in voters choosing to support abortion rights.Following the midterms, Republican leaders realize that they have a problem. The Republican National Committee chairwoman, Ronna McDaniel, appeared on Fox News Sunday in April to discuss the issue, saying that abortion had played a major role in key swing states and that party candidates needed to face the issue “head on”.“Many of our candidates across the board refused to talk about it, thinking, ‘Oh we can just talk about the economy and ignore this big issue,’ and they can’t,” McDaniel said.But Republicans have struggled to find a consistent line on abortion, with lawmakers divided over what level of restrictions they would put on reproductive rights. Republican leaders’ opinions range from insisting on total abortion bans to cutting access off at 15 weeks of pregnancy to washing their hands of the issue and saying it is up to states to decide.Presidential candidates have similarly found themselves caught between different factions of the party and voter interests. Donald Trump reportedly told allies that he views a federal abortion ban as a losing proposition for the election and his campaign spokesperson has said Trump believes bans should be left up to states, threatening a rift with evangelical voters that have been a large part of his base.Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida, who is currently Trump’s most prominent challenger, has taken a harder line and signed a six-week abortion ban in April – causing one major Republican donor to halt his funding to DeSantis. Other candidates have vacillated over taking a specific stance, including Nikki Haley who last month refused to name the specific number of weeks into pregnancy she would limit abortion.Influential and deep-pocketed Christian conservative groups have further complicated the dynamic, insisting that without Roe to stop them Republican politicians should pass strict abortion bans. Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a major anti-abortion non-profit and political organization, vowed to campaign against Trump if he would not support a 15-week abortion ban.Meanwhile, Democrats have been centering abortion access in speeches and campaigns. Vice-President Kamala Harris told a crowd at Howard University that “this is a moment for us to stand and fight” in an April speech, while the Democratic senator Dick Durbin chaired a Senate judiciary committee hearing that same month titled “The Assault on Reproductive Rights in a Post-Dobbs America”.Democrats also secured a huge victory in Wisconsin earlier this year when the liberal judge Janet Protasiewicz won a seat on the state supreme court. Protasiewicz, who openly discussed her personal support for abortion during the campaign, defeated a conservative opponent who had accepted $1m in campaign donations from an anti-abortion political action committee.Protasiewicz’s win ended a 15-year conservative majority on the court, and could mean that liberal justices overrule an 1849 law banning abortion which went into effect in the state when Roe was overturned. More

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      Biden puts abortion rights at center of campaign on Roe reversal anniversary

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      Joe Biden on Friday put reproductive rights squarely in the middle of his 2024 re-election campaign as the US president hosted a rally based around defending abortion rights, notched three high-profile endorsements from groups dedicated to the issue, and announced an executive order aimed at boosting access to contraception.The moves came in stark contrast to the Republican field of candidates, many of whom were attending the Faith & Freedom Coalition annual conference in Washington DC.Abortion has become a tough issue for Republicans because most Americans support the right to an abortion after the conservative-dominated US supreme court last year axed the federal right to terminate a pregnancy.Nonetheless, former vice-president Mike Pence on Friday doubled down on his hardline stance in a speech calling for national restrictions on abortion – a position seen as unlikely to win much wide support. Pence’s former boss Donald Trump will address the same conference on Saturday and has in recent weeks sought to take a less extreme stance.Biden and the Democrats, meanwhile, are on the attack on abortion, pointing out the huge loss of reproductive freedoms for millions of women since the US’s highest court overturned the landmark Roe v Wade decision that had protected abortion freedoms.Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris on Friday were being endorsed by Planned Parenthood Action Fund, Naral Pro-Choice America and Emily’s List. The groups are throwing their early support behind the re-election effort in part to highlight the importance of the issue for Democrats heading into the election year, the groups’ leaders told the Associated Press.“I think that President Biden has been an incredibly valuable partner, along with Vice-President Harris, in fighting back against the onslaught of attacks that we have seen,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and chief executive of Planned Parenthood Action Fund.Biden and fellow Democrats have already seen the power of the issue: a majority of Americans want legalized abortion nationwide. In the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections, many political pundits dismissed the issue, but it was among the top concerns for voters, who consistently rejected efforts to restrict abortion in the states when given the chance.Biden’s campaign manager, Julie Chavez Rodriguez, said the president and the vice-president were proud to have earned the support of the groups. Since the decision last year by the supreme court, “we have seen the horrifying impact that the extreme Maga agenda has on women’s health,” she said, referring to Trump’s “Make America Great Again” slogan.Biden has said he will work to protect reproductive health care, including enshrining abortion rights in federal law. He is expected to convey that message in remarks on Friday at a rally with the first lady, Jill Biden, Harris and the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff.Meanwhile, Biden’s executive order aims to strengthen access to contraception, a growing concern for Democrats after some conservatives have signaled a willingness to push beyond abortion into regulation of contraception. In 2017, nearly 65% – or 46.9 million – of the 72.2 million girls and women age 15 to 49 in the US used a form of contraception.In a statement, Biden highlighted reproductive health as a top priority of his administration in the wake of the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling from the conservative-led court that reversed Roe v Wade.“Contraception is an essential component of reproductive health care that has only become more important in the wake of Dobbs and the ensuing crisis in women’s access to healthcare,” Biden said.Biden is seeking to strengthen access to “affordable, high-quality contraception and family planning services”, the statement added. It’s his third executive order on reproductive health care access since the Dobbs ruling.The measures include expanding access and services through Medicaid, improving coverage of contraception through Medicare and seeking ways to compel private health insurance companies to provide contraception and family planning services as needed.The consequences of restricting abortion access in America have quickly moved beyond ending an unwanted pregnancy into miscarriage and pregnancy care in general.Women in states with tight restrictions are increasingly unable to access care for pregnancy-related complications. Doctors facing criminal charges if they provide abortions are increasingly afraid to care for patients who aren’t sick enough yet to be considered treatable.Over the last year 22 US states have passed either a ban or highly restrictive policies on abortion. Other states, though, have expanded access to abortion care. The Biden administration has brought together leaders from all 50 states to talk strategy on how to expand access and work together to help people in more restrictive states.Most of the states with severe abortion restrictions are also states that have a high maternal mortality rate and higher rates of stillbirth and miscarriage. Black women are disproportionately affected – they are more than three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.The Associated Press contributed to this story More