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    Planned Parenthood CEO warns Trump bill will lead to $700m loss and ‘backdoor abortion ban’

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    Planned Parenthood stands to lose roughly $700m in federal funding if the US House passes Republicans’ massive spending-and-tax bill, the organization’s CEO said on Wednesday, amounting to what abortion rights supporters and opponents alike have called a “backdoor abortion ban”.“We are facing down the reality that nearly 200 health centers are at risk of closure. We’re facing a reality of the impact on shutting down almost half of abortion-providing health centers,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Federation of Americas’s CEO, said in an interview Wednesday morning. “It does feel existential. Not just for Planned Parenthood, but for communities that are relying on access to this care.”Anti-abortion activists have longed to “defund” Planned Parenthood for decades. They are closer than ever to achieving their goal.That $700m figure represents the loss that Planned Parenthood would face from a provision in the spending bill that would impose a one-year Medicaid ban on healthcare non-profits that offer abortions and that received more than $800,000 in federal funding in 2023, as well as the funding that Planned Parenthood could lose from Title X, the nation’s largest family-planning program. In late March, the Trump administration froze tens of millions of dollars of Title X funding that had been set aside for some Planned Parenthood and other family-planning clinics.“Essentially what you are seeing is a gutting of a safety net,” said McGill Johnson, who characterized the bill as a “backdoor abortion ban” in a statement.Medicaid is the US government’s insurance program for low-income people, and about 80 million people use it. If the latest version of the spending-and-tax bill passes, nearly 12 million people are expected to lose their Medicaid coverage.Donald Trump has said that he would like the bill to be on his desk, ready for a signature, by 4 July.The provision attacking Planned Parenthood would primarily target clinics in blue states that have protected abortion rights since the overturning of Roe v Wade three years ago, because those blue states have larger numbers of people on Medicaid. Although not all Planned Parenthood clinics perform abortions, the reproductive healthcare giant provides 38% of US abortions, according to the latest data from Abortion Care Network, a membership group for independent abortion clinics.Among the clinics at risk of closure, Planned Parenthood estimated, more than 90% are in states that permit abortion. Sixty percent are located in areas that have been deemed “medically underserved”.In total, more than 1.1 million Planned Parenthood patients could lose access to care.“There’s nowhere else for folks” to go, McGill Johnson said. “The community health centers have said they cannot absorb the patients that Planned Parenthood sees. So I think that we do need to just call it a targeted attack because that’s exactly how it is.”Nationally, 11% of female Medicaid beneficiaries between the ages of 15 and 49 and who receive family-planning services go to Planned Parenthood for a range of services, according to an analysis by the non-profit KFF, which tracks healthcare policy. Those numbers rise in blue states like Washington, Oregon and Connecticut.In California, that number soars to 29%. The impact on the state would be so devastating that Nichole Ramirez, senior vice-president of communication and donor relations at Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties, called the tax-and-spending package’s provision “a direct attack on us, really”.“They haven’t been able to figure out how to ban abortion nationwide and they haven’t been able to figure out how to ban abortion in California specifically,” said Ramirez, who estimated that Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties stands to lose between $40m and $60m. Ramirez continued: “This is their way to go about banning abortion. That is the entire goal here.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a post on X, the prominent anti-abortion group Live Action reposted an image of a Planned Parenthood graphic calling the provision “backdoor abortion ban”. “They might be onto us,” Live Action wrote.The Planned Parenthood network is overseen by Planned Parenthood Federation of America, but it also consists of dozens of independent regional affiliates that operate nearly 600 clinics across the country. In June, as the spending-and-tax bill moved through Congress, Autonomy News, an outlet that focuses on threats to bodily autonomy, reported that Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s accreditation board had sent waivers out to affiliates to apply for approval to cease providing abortions in order to preserve access to Medicaid funding. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that a memo sent to the leadership of one California affiliate suggests that leaders there had considered ending abortion services.McGill Johnson said that there have been discussions within Planned Parenthood’s network about what it would mean to stop offering abortions. But no affiliates, to her knowledge, are moving forward with plans to stop performing the procedure.“Educating our volunteers and teams around hard decisions to stand and understand the impact of that is different than weighing and considering a stoppage of abortion,” McGill Johnson said.The budget bill and Title X funding freeze aren’t the only sources of pressure on the group. The US supreme court last week ruled in favor of South Carolina in a case involving the state’s attempt to kick Planned Parenthood out of its state Medicaid reimbursement program – a ruling that will likely give a green light to other states that also want to defund Planned Parenthood.At least one other organization that provides abortion and family-planning services, Maine Family Planning, will be affected by the provision, according to the organization’s CEO, George Hill. Maine Family Planning directly operates 18 clinics, including several that provide primary care or are in rural, medically underserved areas. If the provision takes effect, Hill estimates, the organization would lose 20% of its operating budget.“It’s dressed up as a budget provision, but it’s not,” Hill said. “They’re basically taking the rug out from under our feet.” More

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      As Trump targets birthright citizenship, the terrain is once again ‘women’s bodies and sexuality’

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      One day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, five pregnant immigrant women – led by an asylum seeker from Venezuela – sued over the president’s executive order limiting automatic birthright citizenship, out of fear that their unborn children would be left stateless.The case went before the supreme court, which sided with the Trump administration Friday by restricting the ability of federal judges to block the order.The legal drama recalls a scene a century and a half earlier, when a different cohort of immigrant women went to the country’s highest court to challenge a restrictive California law. In 1874, San Francisco officials detained 22 Chinese women at the port after declaring them “lewd and debauched” – a condition that allowed for denial of entry.The supreme court sided with the women and struck down the law, delivering the first victory to a Chinese litigant in the US. But its ruling also established the federal government’s exclusive authority over immigration, paving the way for the passage of the Page Act of 1875, the first piece of federal legislation restricting immigration.Trump’s hardline immigration-enforcement strategy, which has focused on birthright citizenship and sparked a family-separation crisis, bears resemblance to the restrictive laws against Chinese women in the late 19th century, which historians say led to lasting demographic changes in Chinese American communities. Political campaigns of both eras, experts say, sought to stem the growth of immigrant populations by targeting women’s bodies.“What the Page Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act and birthright citizenship all have in common is the battle over who we deem admissible, as having a right to be here,” said Catherine Lee, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University whose research focuses on family reunification in American immigration. “And the terrain on which we’re having these discussions is women’s bodies and women’s sexuality.”The Page Act denied entry of “lewd” and “immoral” women, ostensibly to curb prostitution. While sex workers of many nationalities immigrated to the US, experts say local authorities almost exclusively enforced the law against women of Chinese descent. More than curbing immigration, Lee said, the legislation set a standard for determining who was eligible for citizenship and for birthing future generations of Americans.The law placed the burden of proof on Chinese women themselves, research shows. Before boarding a ship to the US, the women had to produce evidence of “respectable” character by submitting a declaration of morality and undergoing extensive interrogations, character assessments and family background checks.At the same time, doctors and health professionals smeared Chinese women as carriers of venereal diseases, Lee said. J Marion Sims, a prominent gynecologist who led the American Medical Association at the time, falsely declared that the arrival of Chinese women had caused a “Chinese syphilis” epidemic.Bill Hing, a law and migration studies professor at the University of San Francisco and author of Making and Remaking Asian America, said the Page Act was “an evil way at controlling the population” to ensure that the Chinese American community wouldn’t grow.The law did drastically alter the demographics of the Chinese population. In 1870, Chinese men in the US outnumbered Chinese women by a ratio of 13 to 1. By 1880, just a half decade after the law’s passage, that gap had nearly doubled, to 21 to 1.One legacy of the Page Act, Hing said, was the formation of “bachelor societies”. The de facto immigration ban against Chinese women made it virtually impossible for Chinese men to form families in the US, as anti-miscegenation laws forbade them from marrying women outside their race.Today, Hing said, attempts to repeal birthright citizenship is another way of suppressing the development of immigrant populations. “It falls right into the same intent of eliminating the ability of communities of color to expand,” he said.View image in fullscreenTrump’s January executive order, which would deny citizenship to US-born babies whose parents aren’t citizens or green-card holders, employs a gendered line of argument similar to that of the Page Act, Lee said. (The government has lost every case so far about the executive order, as it directly contradicts the 14th amendment.)In a 6-3 vote Friday, the supreme court ruled that lower courts could not impose nationwide bans against Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship. The ruling, which immigrant rights advocates say opens the door for a partial enforcement of the order, doesn’t address the constitutionality of the order itself.“Birthright citizenship assumes that women are having sex,” Lee said, “and whether she’s having sex with a lawful permanent resident or a citizen determines the status of her child.”Congressional Republicans continue to employ gendered and racialized rhetoric in their attacks on birthright citizenship and so-called “birth tourism”, the practice of pregnant women traveling to the US specifically to give birth and secure citizenship for their children. Political and media attention on the latter issue has been disproportionately focused on Chinese nationals.Last month, the Republican senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee introduced a bill that bans foreign nationals from “buying” American citizenship. She called “birth tourism” a “multimillion-dollar industry” exploited by pregnant women from “adversaries like communist China and Russia”.Although the extent of “birth tourism” is unknown, studies have shown that it comprises just a small portion of US-born Chinese infants. Many are born to US citizens or permanent residents, who form more than a majority of the foreign-born Chinese population. (A decade ago, Chinese “birth tourists” accounted for just 1% of all Chinese tourists visiting the US.)Virginia Loh-Hagan, co-executive director of the Asian American Education Project, said a long-lasting ramification of the Page Act is the “exploitation, fetishization and dehumanization” of Asian women that has led to deadly hate crimes, such as the spree of shootings at three Asian-owned Atlanta spas in 2021.“If immigrants in this country were denied the opportunity to build families and communities,” Loh-Hagan said, “then they have less community strength, less voice and power in politics and governance of this country.” More

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      US supreme court to hear case involving anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center

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      The US supreme court agreed on Monday to consider reviving a New Jersey anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center operator’s bid to block the Democratic-led state’s attorney general from investigating whether it deceived women into believing it offered abortions.The justices took up an appeal by First Choice Women’s Resource Centers of a lower court’s ruling that the Christian faith-based organization must first contest Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s subpoena in state court before bringing a federal lawsuit challenging it.The justices are expected to hear the case in their next term, which begins in October.Crisis pregnancy centers provide services to pregnant women with the goal of preventing them from having abortions. Such centers do not advertise their anti-abortion stance, and abortion rights advocates have called them deceptive. The case provides a test of the ability of state authorities to regulate these businesses.First Choice, which has five locations in New Jersey, has argued that it has a right to bring its case in federal court because it was alleging a violation of its federal rights to free speech and free association under the first amendment of the US constitution. First Choice is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that has brought other cases on behalf of anti-abortion plaintiffs including an effort to restrict distribution of the abortion pill that has since been taken over by Republican states.New Jersey is targeting First Choice because of its views, Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer Erin Hawley said.“We are looking forward to presenting our case to the supreme court and urging it to hold that First Choice has the same right to federal court as any other civil rights plaintiff,” Hawley said in a statement.Platkin said that his office may investigate to ensure nonprofits are not deceiving residents and that First Choice has for years refused to answer questions about “potential misrepresentations they have been making, including about reproductive healthcare”.“First Choice is looking for a special exception from the usual procedural rules as it tries to avoid complying with an entirely lawful state subpoena, something the US Constitution does not permit it to do. No industry is entitled to that type of special treatment – period,” Platkin added.First Choice sued Platkin in New Jersey federal court in 2023 after the attorney general issued a subpoena seeking internal records including the names of its doctors and donors as part of an investigation into potentially unlawful practices. First Choice argued that there was no good cause for the subpoena, which it said chilled its first amendment rights.Platkin moved to enforce the subpoena in state court. Essex county superior court Judge Lisa Adubato granted that motion, finding that First Choice had not shown that the subpoena should be quashed at the outset of the investigation, but ordered the parties to negotiate a narrower subpoena and said that the constitutional issues could be litigated further going forward.The US district judge Michael Shipp then dismissed the federal case, finding that First Choice’s federal claim was not ripe because it could continue to make its constitutional claims in the state court and did not face any immediate threat of contempt.The Philadelphia-based third circuit court of appeals in a 2-1 ruling in December 2024 upheld Shipp’s ruling, prompting First Choice to appeal to the justices.In asking the supreme court to hear the case, First Choice argued that federal civil rights law is intended to guarantee parties a federal forum to assert their constitutional rights. It said that forcing it to litigate in state court would effectively deny it that forum, since the constitutional claims would be decided before a federal court could ever hear them.Crisis pregnancy centers have also drawn the attention of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who in 2024 sued 11 centers for advertising abortion pill reversal, a treatment whose safety and effectiveness is unproven. That case remains pending. Several New York crisis pregnancy centers sued James and in August won an order allowing them to continue touting abortion pill reversal. More

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      Trump rescinds Emtala guidance protecting women in need of emergency abortions

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      The Trump administration on Tuesday rescinded Biden-era guidance clarifying that hospitals in states with abortion bans cannot turn away pregnant patients who are in the midst of medical emergencies – a move that comes amid multiple red-state court battles over the guidance.The guidance deals with the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (Emtala), which requires hospitals to stabilize patients facing medical emergencies. States such as Idaho and Texas have argued that the Biden administration’s guidance, which it issued in the wake of the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, interpreted Emtala incorrectly.In its letter rescinding the guidance, the Trump administration said that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) “will continue to enforce Emtala, which protects all individuals who present to a hospital emergency department seeking examination or treatment, including for identified emergency medical conditions that place the health of a pregnant woman or her unborn child in serious jeopardy. CMS will work to rectify any perceived legal confusion and instability created by the former administration’s actions.”Abortion rights supporters said on Tuesday that rescinding the Biden administration’s guidance will muddy hospitals’ ability to interpret Emtala and endanger pregnant patients’ lives. Since Roe’s collapse, dozens of women have come forward to say that they were denied medical treatment due to abortion bans. A reported five pregnant women have died after having their care denied or delayed, or being unable to access legal abortions.“This action sends a clear message: the lives and health of pregnant people are not worth protecting,” Dr Jamila Perritt, an OB-GYN and the president of Physicians for Reproductive Health, said in a statement. “Complying with this law can mean the difference between life and death for pregnant people, forcing providers like me to choose between caring for someone in their time of need and turning my back on them to comply with cruel and dangerous laws.”Last year, the US supreme court heard arguments in a case involving Idaho’s abortion ban, which at the time only allowed abortions in cases where a woman’s life was at risk. In contrast, most state abortion bans permit abortions when a patient’s “health” is in danger – a lower standard that could make it easier for doctors to intervene. Idaho’s standard, the Biden administration said, blocked doctors from providing abortions in some emergencies and thus violated Emtala’s requirement that hospitals must stabilize patients.Ultimately, the supreme court punted on the issue by ruling 6-3 on procedural grounds that the case had been “improvidently granted”, indicating they should have never taken it up in the first place.“This court had a chance to bring clarity and certainty to this tragic situation and we have squandered it,” wrote Ketanji Brown Jackson, the supreme court justice, at the time. “And for as long as we refuse to declare what the law requires, pregnant patients in Idaho, Texas and elsewhere will be paying the price.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration’s Tuesday move is not unexpected. In March, the administration moved to drop out of the case over the Idaho abortion ban. A local Idaho hospital later filed its own lawsuit over the ban. More

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      Is ‘chic’ political? In Trump 2.0, the word stands for conservative femininity

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      The idea of “chic” is a fashion-world cliche. At best it is a know-it-when-you-see-it vibe, at worst a lazy adjective chosen by a writer to describe something that reminds her of Jane Birkin. It feels inoffensive enough. But now, “chic” has become something of a lightning rod online – a shorthand for a type of conservative-coded aesthetic.It began last month, when a creator named Tara Langdale posted a video to her TikTok following of just over 30,000 in which she sipped from a long-stemmed wine glass and read off a list of things she finds “incredibly UN-chic”. Wearing stacks of gold bracelets and a ballet-pink manicure, Langdale called out fashion choices like tattoos, Lululemon, visible panty lines, baggy denim and hunting camouflage as unchic, because, to her, these choices seemed “cheap”.“Remember, money talks, wealth whispers,” Langdale said.The not-entirely-serious video racked up views and sparked a conversation about how style preferences can carry political baggage. “This is giving mean girl,” one user wrote in the comments. “Classism isn’t chic, hope this helps,” wrote another. “Voting for Trump is unchic,” went a third. Many took particular issue with Langdale’s anti-tattoo stance, which they saw as stuffy or downright rude.View image in fullscreenSuch comments came with a strong dose of projection: Langdale, a lifestyle influencer, does not post about politics, sticking to fashion, makeup or motherhood. Nevertheless, many in the fashion TikTok community felt her commentary on “chic” aligned with the feminine aesthetic of Trump 2.0, where the rigid and airbrushed beauty standards of Maga officials such as Karoline Leavitt, Kristi Noem and Nancy Mace are celebrated.“Chic is starting to feel like a conservative dogwhistle that polices women’s looks,” said Elysia Berman, a creative director and content creator based in New York who posted a takedown of Langdale’s unchic list. “What chic has come to mean to a lot of people is a very narrow definition of elegance. It’s this thin, white, blonde woman who speaks softly and is basically Grace Kelly.”The ideal vision of womanhood from Donald Trump’s first term was caked foundation and clumpy mascara, as seen on the likes of Kimberly Guilfoyle and Lara Trump. But the facial augmentation and overly sexy aesthetic tied to the president’s inner circle – see “Ice Barbie” Noem, who posts full glam videos while deporting immigrants – does not necessarily match that of the president’s more social media savvy supporters, many of whom are now opting for a sleeker presentation.Momfluencers and tradwives celebrate RFK Jr’s “Make America Healthy Again” policies while wearing breezy milkmaid dresses. Evie Magazine, a politically conservative version of Cosmo, appropriates the trending visuals of feminist magazines with headlines that decry body positivity and promote vaccine skepticism. As the New York Magazine writer Brock Colyar described young Republicans at a post-election night party: “Many are hot enough to be extras in the upcoming American Psycho remake.”The word “chic” has always been tied to a French, or francophile, sense of femininity, usually in reference to a woman who subscribes to Vogue and innately understands how to look good. But those turning it into a dirty word on TikTok, taking note of how it aligns with a changing conservative aesthetic, see it as having a more prescriptive, even oppressive, meaning for women’s fashion.Suzanne Lambert, a DC-based comedian whose “conservative girl” mock makeup tutorials went viral earlier this year, described the right’s obsession with all things ultra-feminine as “just this soulless, boring kind of fashion”.“Republicans are more focused on assimilating than we are on the left, so it makes sense that they all end up looking the same,” Lambert said.Ultimately, anyone who’s attempting to look chic – or wealthy – is probably neither of those things. Those TikTok imitators who equate chicness with pearls and a Leavitt-esque tweed shift dress? “They think it’s giving Reagan, but it’s really giving Shein,” said Lambert.(Ironically, some of the unchic pieces on Langdale’s list – Lululemon leggings, Golden Goose sneakers, a Louis Vuitton carryall bag – come with hefty price tags and could connote liberal elitism.)In an email, Langdale said that her definition of chic had nothing to do with politics. “Chic by definition means simplicity and timelessness,” she wrote. “Reading a neutral palette as ‘conservative’ conflates style choice with ideology. Conservatism as a moral or political stance varies widely across cultures and religious communities, so tagging a fitting tank top and trousers as ‘Republican’ is lazy stereotyping.”Langdale called chic “this year’s version” of “old money” dressing, a TikTok trend that prioritized subdued, luxury items over the loud, brash and individualistic. “You can own every item on my unchic list and still be considered chic,” she wrote. “Labeling an item chic or unchic speaks only to its aesthetic, not a person’s style or worth.The conversation around chic is ongoing. Other creators, inspired by Langdale’s video, posted about what they considered chic in their niches. A medical student said it was “incredibly chic” to color coordinate scrubs with personal accessories; an office worker considered not letting colleagues in on their personal lives the height of chicness.Kat Brown, a 25-year-old New Yorker who works in fashion PR, made a video talking about how it’s “not chic” to be overly trendy, with chicness coming from a more sustainable wardrobe. “Smart consumption is chic,” Brown said. “Chicness is more reflective of your resourcefulness and creativity, rather than any sort of socioeconomic element.”For all the angst on chic-Tok, true insiders probably aren’t paying much attention. Fashion editors often make lists of words they consider so dull and unspecific that they prohibit writers from using them in copy; “chic” is usually right at the top. And when a word like chic is so bland to begin with, who cares if its wielded as an insult? As a British couturier played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the 2017 period drama Phantom Thread bemoaned of “chic”: “That filthy little word. Whoever invented that ought to be spanked in public. I don’t even know what that word means.” More

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      Trump is using his assault on government to retaliate against women | Judith Levine

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      Last week, a federal judge blocked the justice department from canceling $3.2m in federal grants to the American Bar Association (ABA). The court agreed with the ABA’s claim that the administration was retaliating against it for taking public stances against Donald Trump.But how had the US president retaliated? Which grants had he clawed back? Those supporting programs that train lawyers to defend victims of domestic and sexual violence.It was just one of Trump’s many acts of aggression against perceived enemies that just happen to – or quite deliberately – target women.During the 2016 presidential campaign, after the release of the “grab ’em by the pussy” tape, Vox’s Libby Nelson noted that there was something fundamentally different about Trump’s sexism from the sexism of his predecessors. “Usually, the critique of Republican candidates has been based on policy – healthcare access and abortion rights – or on attitudes heavily influenced by religion,” she wrote. But “Trump’s anti-feminism owes more to the gleeful vulgarity and implicit threats of violence of 4chan than the traditional debate over what a woman’s role should be in the public square.”Trump II is both a personal and a political misogynist – a chimera with the soul of a snake and the brains of a policy wonk, transplanted from the authors of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025.The widest target of Trump’s aggression is the universe of people capable of having babies. Four days after the inauguration, his administration directed the justice department’s civil rights division to cease enforcing the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (Face) Act, which prohibits harassment or blockage of patients entering abortion clinics. His administration dismissed three ongoing cases, pardoned 23 convicted violators of the law, and limited future prosecutions to “cases presenting significant aggravating factors, such as death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage”.In March, he began withholding tens of millions of dollars from Title X, the only federal program supporting reproductive healthcare. The move was not explicitly anti-abortion – the Hyde Amendment banned federal funding for abortion 50 years ago – but it was surely aimed at pleasing religious fundamentalists who oppose all interference with “natural” baby-making. Lots of providers, including some Planned Parenthood affiliates, immediately collapsed, leaving millions of people with no family planning, cancer screening or prenatal services. Now, having failed repeatedly to defund Planned Parenthood through legislation, Republicans are trying to hide the dirty deed in the budget. And like much of the “waste, fraud, and abuse” targeted by the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge), these cuts would cost taxpayers far more than they would save: according to the Congressional Budget Office, the cost will be $300m over the next 10 years in unwanted births and shifts of reproductive services to other providers.Trump isn’t sparing mothers who want to be mothers, either. A week ago, funding to study maternal mortality was rescinded and most of the workers who monitor and improve maternal and child health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were placed on leave. The cuts came just after researchers at the National Institutes of Health published a paper documenting a huge rise in mothers’ deaths in childbirth or within a year afterward, most notably among Native American and Black women; the authors urged the government to make combatting these deaths “an urgent public health priority”.Where women’s bodies are now subject to harm by intentional neglect, they will also be more vulnerable to harm by violence. Before his inauguration, Trump called for the execution of rapists. A few months later, the justice department suspended grant applications from non-profits providing emergency shelter, legal assistance, and crisis services to victims of domestic and sexual violence under the Violence Against Women Act. The agencies were caught promoting “woke” agendas – evident from the word “gender”, as in “gender-based violence”, in their mission statements. The grant program appears to be back up on the justice department website, but no one knows for how long.In late April, the administration zeroed out all funding for training, auditing, data collection and victim support under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (Prea), which Congress passed unanimously in 2003. Prea does not protect migrants in detention, but the Department of Homeland Security was nevertheless subject to oversight, and that included investigating sexual abuse by Ice employees. Not any more. In spite of thousands of complaints of sexual violence against detained women and children, the Trump administration closed the department’s three watchdog agencies, including the offices through which detainees could lodge complaints.As part of its elimination of anything suggestive of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), the administration halted the military’s sexual assault prevention training. The defense department reported in 2023 that nearly a quarter of active-duty women were subject to sexual harassment – and they are just the ones who risked coming forward.The policies that smash the legal bulwarks against sexual violence and those that put pregnant people’s lives at risk make for the most compelling subject lines on fundraising emails from advocates for women, people of color and other legally protected classes hardest.But the disproportionate harm these folks are suffering from the decimation of the federal workforce by Doge is possibly most consequential, because it may not be reversible. Women and Black people are more likely to work in government jobs than in the private sector; a recent McKinsey analysis found that women, particularly women of color, are promoted at higher rates in public institutions than in private corporations. But government jobs also provide union representation, job security, pensions and other benefits that lift people of color into the middle class and allow them to accumulate the property and wealth denied them since slavery – benefits that do not accrue to home health aides, chambermaids and workers in the other low-paid, precarious occupations where women and people of color predominate.“For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” vowed candidate Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference early in 2023. But it is Trump himself who feels most wronged and betrayed, with women – the pussy-hatted protesters who overran Washington on the second day of his first administration, the sex worker Stormy Daniels, who publicly poked fun at his self-celebrated endowment, the magazine writer E Jean Carroll, awarded tens of millions of dollars in damages for his sexual assault and defamation – perhaps the greatest wrongdoers and traitors. Even Melania is no longer pretending to like him.Like his woman-hating followers, this man, who has used his wealth and his body to impose his will on women, feels sorely victimized by them. Now he has more power than any other man in the world to exact his revenge.

      Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books. Her Substack, Today in Fascism, is at judithlevine.substack.com More

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      Republicans are attacking childcare funding. Their goal? To push women out of the workforce | Moira Donegan

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      Last month, the White House issued a proposed budget to Congress that completely eliminated funding for Head Start, the six-decade-old early childhood education program for low-income families that serves as a source of childcare for large swaths of the American working class.The funding was restored in the proposed budget after an outcry, but large numbers of employees who oversee the program at the office of Head Start were laid off in a budget-slashing measure under Robert F Kennedy Jr, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. On Thursday, Kennedy said funding for the program would not be axed, but more cuts to childcare funding are likely coming: some Republicans have pushed to repeal a five-decade-old tax credit for daycare. The White House is entertaining proposals on how to incentivize and structurally coerce American women into bearing more children, but it seems to be determined to make doing so as costly to those women’s careers as possible.That’s because the Republicans’ childcare policy, like their pro-natalist policy, is based on one goal: undoing the historic gains in women’s rights and status, and pushing American women out of the workforce, out of public life, out of full participation in society – and into a narrow domestic role of confinement, dependence and isolation.The New York Times reported this week that the White House is now not only looking for ways to make more women have children, but to encourage “parents” to stay home to raise them. “Parents” here is a euphemism. Roughly 80% of stay-at-home parents are mothers: cultural traditions that encourage women, and not men, to sacrifice their careers for caregiving, along with persistent wage inequalities that make women, on the whole, lower earners than their male partners, both incentivize women, and not men, to drop out of the workforce and stay home when they have children.This state of affairs has been worsened by the dramatic rise in the cost of childcare, which is prohibitively expensive for many parents. The average cost of childcare per child per year in the US is now well north of $11,000, according to Child Care Aware of America, an industry advocacy group. In major cities such as New York, that price is significantly higher: from $16,000 to $19,000 per year. Existing tax credits need to be expanded, not eliminated, to reduce this burden on mothers and their families and to enable women to join the workforce at rates comparable to men and commensurate with their dignity and capacities. Currently, 26% of mothers do not engage in paid work, a figure that has barely budged in 40 years. Largely because of the unequally distributed burdens of childcare, men participate in the paid labor force at a rate that is more than 10% higher than women.One might think that the solution would be to invest more in high-quality childcare, so that providers could open more slots, children could access more resources, and women could go to work and expend their talents in productive ways that earn them money, make use of their gifts and provide more dignity for women and more stability for families. This is not what the American right is proposing: Brad Wilcox, a sociologist who promotes traditional family and gender relations, has called such policy initiatives “work-ist”. Conservatives are proposing, instead, that women go back to the kitchen.The Trump administration, and the American right more broadly, wants the rate of women’s employment to be even lower, because it is advancing a lie that women are naturally, inevitably, uniformly and innately inclined to caregiving, child rearing and homemaking – and not to the positions of intellectual achievement, responsibility, leadership, ingenuity or independence that women may aspire to in the public world. “We cannot get away from the fact that a child is hardwired to bond with Mom,” says Janet Erickson, a fellow at the rightwing Institute for Family Studies, who once co-authored an op-ed with JD Vance calling on “parents” to drop out of the workforce to raise children. “I just think, why should we deny that?”This kind of vague, evidence-free gesturing toward evolutionary psychology – the notion that babies are “hardwired” to prefer mothers who are not employed – is a common conservative tick: a recourse to dishonest and debunked science to lend empiricism to bigotry. There is in fact no evolutionary reason, and no biological reason, for mothers, and not fathers, to abandon independence, ambition or life outside the home for the sake of a child. The only reason is a sexist one.Over the past decade, the left launched few vigorous defenses of a feminist politics that seeks to advance and secure women’s access to public life, paid work and fair remuneration. The American left has launched vigorous criticisms of the “girlboss”, a figure of malignant female ambition who seemed to make the exploitations of capitalism more offensive by virtue of her sex, and it has instead offered critiques of women’s ambition and romantic defenses of the labor of “care” that just happens to overlap with women’s traditional – and traditionally unpaid – roles in the home. This leftwing rhetoric has at times mirrored the similar romanticization of the unpaid housewife of yesteryear from the right, which has embraced tradwives, homesteading fantasies and an aestheticized rustic simplicity that aims to contrast feminist gains in the workforce with a fantasy of women’s rest. Together, these strains of rhetorical opposition to women in the workforce have made anti-feminism into a new kind of “socialism of fools” – a misguided misdirection of anger and resentment at the rapaciousness of capitalism towards a social justice movement for the rights of an oppressed class.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut what is on offer from the political right is not about the refashioning of work and life to be less extractive and exploitative for women, and particularly for mothers. It is instead about a sex segregation of human experience, an effort to make much of public life inaccessible to women. Combined with the right wing’s successful attack on the right to abortion, the Trump administration’s dramatic cuts to Title X programs that provide contraceptive access, and the rescinding of federal grants aimed at helping working women, what emerges from the rightwing policy agenda is an effort to force women out of education, out of decently paid work and into pregnancy, unemployment and dependence on men.Theirs is an effort to shelter men from women’s economic competition, to revert to the regressive cultural modes of an imagined past, and to impose an artificially narrow vision of the capacities, aspirations, talents and desires of half of the American people.Murray Rothbard, the paleoconservative 20th-century economist whose ideas have had a profound influence on the Trumpist worldview, once vowed: “We shall repeal the 20th century.” As far as the Republican right is concerned, it seems to want to repeal the gains of 20th-century feminism first.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Why is Maga-land so obsessed with Kai Trump turning 18? Do you really need to ask? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Kai Trump, the president’s granddaughter and the eldest of Donald Trump Jr’s five children, has just turned 18. To be clear, I do not have a list of Trump family birthdays on my fridge. But it has been forced upon my consciousness because an awful lot of people in Trumpworld are being weird about it.Fox News, for example, decided to post both an Instagram message (which got more than 87,000 likes) and a tweet wishing Kai a very happy 18th birthday. Which is a little odd considering that the high school student is not a public figure. Kai, who has a large social media following, did briefly speak at the Republican national convention last year and has posted support for her grandfather, but that doesn’t seem to justify a birthday announcement by a major media network.Especially, by the way, as Fox News doesn’t appear to have been so excited about Barron Trump when he turned 18. (Although it did put up an Instagram post on Barron’s 19th birthday, with a quote from Donald calling him a “a very smart guy”.) It’s almost – and bear with me here – as if they have some sort of weird interest in the fact that a teenage girl has turned 18.Am I accusing the folk at Fox News of being a bunch of creeps? Absolutely not! I’d never do that. Although if you look at the reactions to the Fox News posts or the comments attached to a New York Post Page Six piece about Kai’s birthday, there are plenty of people out there who should be on some sort of watchlist or registry. Particularly the people who have read far too much into the fact that Kai recently posted a TikTok video of her and three friends dancing to Promiscuous by Nelly Furtado and Timbaland with the caption: “last day being 17″.While things have moved on somewhat, there’s also a very depressing history of media figures counting down to young girls turning the age of consent. Look at British singer Charlotte Church, who got a record deal as an opera singer when she was just 12. There was a media frenzy in 2002 when she turned 16 (the age of consent in England). On her birthday, Chris Moyles, a BBC radio DJ who was 28 at the time, publicly announced he wanted to “lead her through the forest of sexuality now she had reached 16”. Making this disgusting comment didn’t ruin Moyles’s career, by the way. Just like 38-year-old Jerry Seinfeld dating a 17-year-old high schooler hasn’t hurt the billionaire comedian’s career at all either.Harry Potter star Emma Watson has also talked about being sexualized by the media when she was a teenager. Watson has said the paparazzi even took photos up her skirt, and published them in an English tabloid, the moment she turned 18 and it was “legal”.It was a similar story with twins Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, who have been on TV since they were tiny. In 2004 numerous websites started counting down to their 18th birthday including the “Olsen Twin Jailbait Countdown Clock” run by radio shock jocks Lex Staley and Terry Jaymes. The New York Post also crowed about the twins being “legal”.More recently, in 2018, a radio host called Patrick Connor called Olympic athlete Chloe Kim, then just 17 years old, a “little hot piece of ass”. Conner then referenced Wooderson, a character in the film Dazed and Confused who pursues high school girls. “Her 18th birthday is 23 April, and the countdown is on baby, ’cause I got my Wooderson going,” said Connor. “‘That’s what I like about them high school girls.’” In a sign that some progress has made when it comes to mainstream misogyny, Connor was forced to apologize for the remark and fired.Since we live in litigious times I would like to reiterate, once again, that while some people (not me!) have accused Fox News of being creepy about Kai, I’m sure they meant nothing sinister by their post. After all, unlike depraved liberals, the Maga crowd are an extremely wholesome bunch who live and die for family values.I will concede, however, that it is sometimes hard to wrap one’s head around the Maga definition of “family values”. The president, for example, is a legally defined sexual predator who has also been accused, by Miles Taylor, a staffer in Trump’s first administration, of sexualizing his oldest daughter Ivanka.In a book published in 2023, Taylor writes: “[Trump] said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that once led [former chief of staff] John Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter.”Former Fox News star Tucker Carlson also seems to have a strange definition of family values. I’m sorry to remind you of this if you’ve wiped it from your memory but last year Carlson made an extraordinary (even by Maga standards) speech at a Trump rally in which he likened the now president to an angry father spanking his daughter.“I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me,” Carlson said. “And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. You’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did. It has to be this way.’” The crowd then erupted into chants of “Daddy Don”!Maga also seems to adopt different values, depending on what sort of family they’re looking at. Conservative influencers were vile about Ella Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s stepdaughter, when Harris was running for president. Newsweek senior editor Josh Hammer wrote: “Doug Emhoff’s daughter is like something out of a horror film,” for example. Podcast host Benny Johnson also called Emhoff and her father “creepy” for having their arms around each other in a video. The right seems eager to scrutinize the family of politicians when they don’t agree with their politics. They went on the warpath, however, when a former NBCUniversal executive joked about Barron being “fair game” (meaning that it was OK for the press to criticize him) when he turned 18.Anyway, happy birthday to Kai Trump. At 18 she is still very young – but it would seem like it’s the Maga adults who have the real growing up to do. More

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      Conservatives are trumpeting a new abortion-pill study. One problem: it’s bogus | Moira Donegan

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      Almost two-thirds of US abortions are induced with pills. The drug mifepristone blocks the pregnancy hormone progesterone, ending the growth of the fetus. Mifepristone was designed for abortions: its primary purpose, from its development through its regulatory approval and now on the market, has always been to allow women to control their own bodies and lives by ending their pregnancies. Because it exists as a tool of women’s independence, mifepristone has been the object of controversy, misinformation and intense scrutiny for the entirety of its existence. Originally synthesized by French pharmaceutical researchers in 1980, the drug went through a rigorous, prolonged and heavily politicized approval process in the US, and wasn’t approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the US market until 2000.The anti-abortion movement – including several prominent Republican lawmakers – is looking to undo that. Since the 2022 Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that eliminated the nationwide right to abortion, women living in anti-choice states have relied increasingly on mifepristone, particularly pills shipped by mail from providers in pro-choice states who prescribe the drug via telehealth. It is estimated that as many as 20% of abortions in the US are now accessed via telehealth appointments, a technological marvel that has allowed many people living in anti-choice states to avert the worst consequences to their lives, health and dignity that were threatened by the Dobbs decision by circumventing the unjust abortion bans that their states have attempted to impose on them. Dobbs has already been devastating for American women, causing needless deaths, driving up maternal mortality, derailing women’s lives, constraining their prospects, and injuring their standing as equal citizens. The post-2022 explosion of telehealth abortion using mifepristone is the reason why the consequences have not been even worse.Now, Trump’s new FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, is under pressure to restrict access to the drug. Pressed by reporters at the Semafor World Economy Summit late last month, Makaray said that he had “no plans” to review the status of mifepristone. But he added a crucial caveat: that he would reconsider the drug’s accessibility if new information emerged about the drug’s safety. “If the data suggests something or tells us that there’s a real signal, we can’t promise that we’re not going to act on that data,” he said.As if on cue, a conservative thinktank published a new study just days later that purported to find that mifepristone caused serious adverse effects in more than 10% of patients. The study – which contradicts all previous tests of the drug and the resounding consensus of the medical field – was published by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a rightwing advocacy group that aims to “apply the richness of the Jewish and Christian traditions to contemporary questions of law” and “push back against the extreme progressive agenda while building a consensus for conservatives”.The study was rapidly amplified on conservative social media, and was pushed by several Republican senators who had previously called on Makaray to ban mifepristone at his March confirmation hearing. Missouri’s Josh Hawley, the author of a book on “manhood” who once raised a fist in solidarity with the January 6 insurrectionists, declared in a statement directed at Makaray: “Well, the new data is here. And it’s a signal that can’t be missed: Mifepristone is not safe.” Hawley went on to urge the FDA to restrict access to the drug and revert to pre-pandemic regulations, in which mifepristone could only be dispensed by a doctor after multiple in-person visits: a regulatory regime that would cut off abortion access to millions of women in anti-choice states.But the study that is being proposed as a pretext for restricting abortion access has come under scrutiny from doctors and statisticians for its questionable methodology. Drawing from insurance claim data from 2017 to 2023, the EPPC study claims that 10% of women who take mifepristone experience “sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging, an emergency room visit, or another serious adverse event within 45 days”. This would be alarming if it were true, but it isn’t.Instead, the study seems to have been designed to dramatically overstate the side-effects of mifepristone, in part by counting the normal and intended functioning of the drug – such as vaginal bleeding as the pregnancy terminates and post-medication doctor visits to confirm the completion of the miscarriage – as serious adverse effects. The study also claimed that a vast range of health experiences in the 45 days following the medication – such as mental health symptoms – were caused by the drug, a claim that the data does not support. The EPPC study also seems to include those who were prescribed mifepristone for non-abortion uses, such as miscarriage management, as well as those who took it alone, without the standard misoprostol dose that accompanies it. The study is not peer-reviewed and has not been published in a medical journal, because its authors could not meet the standards that such publication requires: their work is not up to snuff. Dr Stella Dantas, the president of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, called the paper “seriously flawed” and said that it “manipulates data to drive a myth that medication abortion isn’t safe”.The truth is that abortion pills have a lower rate of serious complications than Tylenol, and that the anti-abortion movement is in fact a great danger to American women’s health. It is because of abortion bans – not abortion access – that women in America are facing dramatically rising rates of “sepsis, infection, hemorrhaging” and death in pregnancy. In Texas alone, the rate of sepsis in pregnant women experiencing second-trimester miscarriages increased by more than 50% in the years since the state’s near-total abortion ban went into effect, and experts say that the laws prohibiting abortion are the cause. The adverse effects that the anti-abortion movement sees in mifepristone’s availability is not a matter of women’s health, which they are indifferent to. It is women’s freedom.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More