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

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

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      Abortion rights are Biden’s most powerful re-election issue. He should act like it | Moira Donegan

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      For years, the beltway set had a standard line of advice for Democratic candidates: stick to the economy. The idea was that white, male, blue-collar voters – those magical creatures, somewhere out there in the windswept lands of the upper midwest, who always qualify in the pundit imagination as “real Americans” – would be turned off by so-called culture-war issues.These guys, we were told, didn’t want to hear about civil rights or social equality: they wanted to hear about economic growth. According to this advice, Democrats could be pro-choice, pro-racial justice, or pro-LGBTQ+ rights, but not openly, avowedly so. They had to play their progressive social positions in a minor key.It’s not clear that this advice ever really paid off for Democratic candidates. At any rate, you don’t hear it much any more. That’s because, for the past two years, Democratic electoral victories up and down the ballot have been driven disproportionately by one of those culture-war issues that candidates were typically told to avoid: abortion.American women’s anger over the US supreme court’s Dobbs ruling is the single most potent political force in America right now, and if Joe Biden wins re-election – a distinct if imperiled possibility – it will be because his campaign succeeded in making the election a referendum on Republicans’ abortion bans. There is no one issue with greater importance; there are few issues that have ever motivated voters so dramatically.You would think that this would be a gift to the Biden campaign. On paper, Republicans are almost solely responsible for the overturning of Roe and the draconian, morbid and dangerous abortion bans that have followed.Donald Trump continually brags about appointing three of the six justices who ruled to eliminate the abortion right; Republican politicians nationwide, not content with being able to ban abortion, have sought to eliminate life and health exemptions, to further restrict gestational age limits, and to impose criminal and civil penalties for things like advocating for abortion rights or transporting a patient across state lines. These are hateful, bigoted, invasive and lawless moves, ones that degrade women’s citizenship and are hated by the public. And they’re Republican moves.But the new prominence of abortion in electoral politics presents something of a conundrum for the Biden campaign: because while Republicans are vehemently anti-choice, Biden himself is not a particularly convincing abortion rights advocate.He is, at best, unenthused about the issue. Biden speaks of abortion in stilted, euphemistic terms, talking about “restoring the protections of Roe” or “a woman’s right to choose” more than “abortion”. (He did not use the word in public remarks until he was forced to after facing pressure from activists.) On the stump, he frequently ad libs, straying from prepared remarks to make his dislike of abortion clear. In one set of remarks last year, he unhelpfully offered that he was “not big on abortion”.In remarks this past week, he characterized his own position using anti-choice buzzwords, saying he was opposed to “abortion on demand”. Most of the campaigning on the issue has been passed off to Kamala Harris, admittedly a more comfortable messenger for a women’s rights platform. But outsourcing such a prominent issue to the vice-president is itself fraught with symbolic dangers: the campaign risks signaling that they consider abortion to be a second-tier issue by assigning it to their second-tier principal. And Harris is limited in what she can say by the somewhat narrow extent of the president’s comfort.And so Biden has taken on the task of marketing himself as a champion of abortion rights with all the relish of a third-grader told to eat his broccoli: he has been informed that doing so is good for him, but he really, really doesn’t want to. This week, as the Biden administration launched a series of policy and public relations efforts meant to frame the stakes of the elections for voters invested in reproductive freedom, things got off to something of a rocky start.Last Monday, on what would have been Roe’s 51st anniversary, Biden held a task force meeting in which he said that his administration would defend laws legalizing things like the FDA approval of mifepristone, which is being challenged by anti-choice lawyers in court. He said he would create a team to educate the public about when emergency abortions are legal in hospitals – a growing need in an era when more and more pregnant women are facing disastrous health risks because of abortion bans that prohibit the procedure from being used to spare them from catastrophic harm. He said he would encourage access to birth control.It was a tepid announcement, one where Biden seemed self-satisfied for doing the bare minimum. It was a policy agenda, too, that leaves all the agenda-setting power in the anti-choice movement’s hands: what the Biden campaign is offering American women – the ones who are angry and distraught, the ones that have suffered a blow to their dignity and an endangering of their safety – is that his administration might be willing to make minimal efforts to stop the people who are working maximally hard to make it worse.At a rally in Wisconsin the next day, Harris seemed more interested in describing the post-Dobbs landscape as one of a “healthcare crisis” – emphasizing, as Biden has, the stories of women denied life – and health-preserving abortions in moments of medical emergency. And it is true that the post-Dobbs world is one where it has become dramatically more dangerous to be pregnant, one where a capricious law, or a doctor’s fear of one, could cost you your life, your health or your fertility in the event that something goes wrong. And it is true, too, as Harris told the crowd, that a Republican victory would almost certainly result in a national ban on abortion – something a Republican president could effect in practice even without a filibuster-proof majority in Congress.But the campaign’s focus on these aspects of the Dobbs catastrophe – the women suffering complications from wanted pregnancies, the potential that things could get worse – does too little to grapple with the harm that’s happening right now, to women who simply do not want to be pregnant, and who deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity of citizens, not talked down to like children who cannot be trusted to act as custodians of their own bodily functions.Biden was not wrong when he said that women who were forced to become sicker and sicker during miscarriages before they were allowed to obtain abortions were subjected to an indignity. But so, too, are those who the law treats as de facto incompetent or suspicious: those who want and deserve their abortions, in Biden’s contemptuous phrasing, “on demand”.If anything, Biden is talking like he believes that abortion remains a delicate issue, as if it is something he thinks he will lose by being too strong on. But that advice, which maybe never quite worked, was from another time. It is not advice for this moment. Biden needs to change his strategy on abortion, to bring it more in line with both the sentiments of voters and the demands of our era. It is time for him to grow up, and eat his vegetables.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

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

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

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

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

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      Biden abortion ad marks campaign shift to emphasize reproductive rights

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

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      ‘Showing the world what’s possible’: St Paul makes history with first all-woman city council

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      When Rebecca Noecker first decided to enter politics in 2016, she was a young mom with two kids and many questions. She had a background in education but no knowledge of how to run for office.“There were so many systems that I saw around me that just felt broken and people were in pain and I wanted to do something about that,” Noecker, 39, said. “And it felt like politics was a way to do it.”She found a teacher in the only woman on her city council in St Paul, Minnesota.“She would walk around the lake with her constituents and called them ‘lake laps.’ I went on a lake lap with her, and I was just so struck by how authentic and genuine she was,” Noecker said of her mentor, former council member Amy Brendmoen.“She had three children and talked a lot about how despite the fact that you make sacrifices and you’re not necessarily home every night, your kids have this remarkable opportunity to see you in leadership and see what a difference you can make.”Today, Noecker, who represents the second ward, is St Paul’s longest serving member on the council. But she is far from the only woman.Last fall, all seven city council seats were up for grabs. On 7 November, after a campaign season packed with candidates, Minnesota’s capital city elected its new city council – comprised entirely of women. Last week marked the group’s inauguration.Noecker’s fellow council members – Nelsie Yang, Cheniqua Johnson, Hwa Jeong Kim, Saura Jost, Anika Bowie and Mitra Jalali – are all women of color and, like her, progressive in their politics. All council members are also below the age of 40.The diversity of the group is something newly elected council member Johnson, AGE, called “amazing and affirming”.“When you spend almost a year and a half working to earn your community’s trust during the cycle and vocalizing the community’s priority, you see – as the elections come in – that community heard you, they showed up and essentially, they want you to continue the work with them,” Johnson said. “It means voters elected who they wanted to see represent them. Many candidates ran and yet, our city said, ‘We want an all-woman city council.’”A 2023 Pew research report on women leaders in US politics found that women’s representation in politics continues to grow across all forms of government including the US senate, house of representatives, state legislatures and governors.In 2019, Nevada became the first state with a majority-women state legislature. Today, women make up 62% of the Nevada state legislature – the largest percentage of any state.But experts have noted that no major city has achieved the feat of electing an all-woman city council like St Paul.Notably, St Paul has a population of roughly 300,000 people, the second most populous city in the state after fellow Twin city, Minneapolis. Around 46% identify as a race other than white, according to the US census.Jalali was also reelected to the council and will now serve as its leader. Elected president in a unanimous vote, she said an all-woman city council should be considered normal.“St Paul voters are showing the world what’s possible on city councils, county boards and local and state government everywhere,” Jalali, 37, said. “This shouldn’t be an exceptional story, but a quiet normal that communities everywhere get to experience.”Jalali is the first Iranian-American to hold office in Minnesota and her resume includes experience teaching and working for fellow political pioneer, Keith Ellison, a former US house representative for Minnesota. He was the first Muslim elected to Congress and the first African American representative from the state.“I’m excited to lead our council forward with our community’s voices at the table,” Jalali said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionKelly Dittmar, director of research and scholar at Rutger University’s Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP), said women’s representation in US politics is generally trending upward.“If you look across levels of office, we’re seeing pretty steady gains,” she told the Guardian. “Although for many years they were incremental, but they were still upward.”In a CAWP study titled Rethinking women’s political power, 192 political actors were interviewed within five states – Georgia, Illinois, Nevada, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania – “to examine both the state of and change in women’s political power from 2010 to 2023”.Several barriers to women’s political representation were discovered: women’s unequal access to monied networks in campaign fundraising, low salaries for public service jobs and political party influence.“State-level and national mapping of existing organizations and programs shows that the support infrastructures for Democratic women in politics are more robust than those available to Republican women,” the report said. “This is true as well in our case states, where fewer gender-targeted resources are available to Republican women than their Democratic counterparts, even where Republicans hold statewide control.”While Dittmar pointed out that some of these barriers are easing, she said it’s also important to note that women are still underrepresented across different levels of office. It is uncommon for women to hold at least one third of offices at any level of government.“In the cases where we do see women make up either a majority, or in this case, all of a governing body, they are still very few and far between,” Dittmar said.Dittmar also credited, in part, societal changes that have allowed women to have a more noticeable presence in politics.“Beyond politics, there are [elements] that better situate women to run and win. Those are not only things on an individual level – where women have more access to positions of power across institutions, access to capital, and access to time outside the home due to a shift in expectations of gender roles – but also in the private and public spheres,” Dittmar said.“You’re seeing shifts in perceptions, both in the importance of having women in office, as well as women’s qualifications – things that historically have been more biased in ways that could really present significant hurdles to women. Voters may be more prone to think about the potential, value, and capacity for women to hold political positions.” More

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      A skirt served my grandfather well in the first world war | Brief letters

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      Re your letters about men’s skirts (12 January), I am proud to say that my grandfather fought his way through the whole of the first world war wearing a khaki skirt. As a soldier he was part of the London Scottish regiment fighting in the trenches. Furthermore, it is said that his fellow soldiers told that he shaved every day.Mary TippettsBristol It’s useful to get a clear sight of what really matters to the UK and US governments. The prompt military action against Houthis in Yemen (Report, 11 January) shows clearly that any threat to global trade and the smooth running of capitalism is far more important than meaningful action to protect Palestinian civilians in Gaza.Norman MillerBrighton I agree with the first eight reasons (Yes, it’s cold, it’s wet and it’s dark – but here are nine reasons to love January, 14 January), but I take issue with number nine: “It really can’t get any worse.” What about February?Geoff SmithEndon, Staffordshire Re dramas that have changed history (Letters, 14 January), Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin, was allegedly greeted by Abraham Lincoln during the American civil war with the words: “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.”Tom StubbsLondon What’s all this about men in their 70s wearing underpants (Letters, 14 January)? Gosh, I must try it sometime.Toby WoodPeterborough More

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      US supreme court allows Idaho’s strict abortion ban to stand pending hearing

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      The US supreme court on Friday allowed Idaho to enforce its strict abortion ban, even in medical emergencies, while a legal fight continues.The justices said they would hear arguments in April and put on hold a lower court ruling that had blocked the Idaho law in hospital emergencies, based on a lawsuit filed by the Biden administration.Hospitals that receive Medicare funds are required by a federal law to provide emergency care, potentially including abortion, no matter if there’s a state law banning abortion, the administration argued.The legal fight followed the court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade and allow states to severely restrict or ban abortion. The Joe Biden White House issued guidance about the law, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act – or Emtala – two weeks after the high court ruling in 2022. The Democratic administration sued Idaho a month later.US district judge B Lynn Winmill in Idaho agreed with the administration. But in a separate case in Texas, a judge sided with the state.Idaho makes it a crime with a prison term of up to five years for anyone who performs or assists in an abortion.But the administration argues Emtala requires healthcare providers to perform abortions for emergency room patients when needed to treat an emergency medical condition, even if doing so might conflict with a state’s abortion restrictions.Those conditions include severe bleeding, pre-eclampsia and certain pregnancy-related infections.“For certain medical emergencies, abortion care is the necessary stabilizing treatment,” the solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, wrote in an administration filing at the supreme court.The state argued that the administration was misusing a law intended to prevent hospitals from dumping patients and imposing “a federal abortion mandate” on states. “[Emtala] says nothing about abortion,” Idaho’s attorney general, Raul Labrador, told the court in a brief.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionJust on Tuesday, the federal appeals court in New Orleans came to the same conclusion as Labrador. A three-judge panel ruled that the administration cannot use Emtala to require hospitals in Texas to provide abortions for women whose lives are at risk due to pregnancy. Two of the three judges are appointees of Donald Trump, and the other was appointed by another Republican president, George W Bush.The appeals court affirmed a ruling by US district judge James Wesley Hendrix, also a Trump appointee. Hendrix wrote that adopting the Biden administration’s view would force physicians to place the health of the pregnant person over that of the fetus or embryo even though Emtala “is silent as to abortion”.After Winmill, an appointee of Democratic president Bill Clinton, issued his ruling, Idaho lawmakers won an order allowing the law to be fully enforced from an all-Republican, Trump-appointed panel of the ninth US circuit court of appeals. But a larger contingent of ninth circuit judges threw out the panel’s ruling and set arguments in the case for late January. More