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      An ‘abortion abolitionist’ became an Oklahoma senator. The fringe is celebrating its big victory

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      When Dusty Deevers won his race to become an Oklahoma state senator on Tuesday night, he wasted no time in making sure his new constituents knew what he stood for.“Here in Oklahoma, it’s time to abolish abortion, abolish pornography, abolish the state income tax and give power and equal representation back to the people!” the Republican posted on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.Deevers’ use of the term “abolish abortion” is no mere rhetorical flourish. On his campaign website, Deevers has identified himself as an “abortion abolitionist” – an adherent of a hardline, fringe segment of the anti-abortion movement that, in Oklahoma and elsewhere, is growing in the wake of the fall of Roe v Wade.Opposition to abortion is rooted in the belief that fetuses are people, worthy of rights and protections. But the mainstream “pro-life” movement posits that abortion patients should not be punished, since they are seen as the bamboozled victims of nefarious doctors and the “abortion industry”. Typically, abortion bans target abortion providers, not patients.Abortion “abolitionists,” on the other hand, hold what they believe to be a more ideologically consistent stance: if a fetus is a person, then abortion is tantamount to murder. And patients should be punished accordingly.Roe’s overturning has made a broader range of anti-abortion ideas look acceptable, as well as cast a spotlight on the contradictions and limits in current anti-abortion law, said Mary Ziegler, a University of California, Davis School of Law professor who studies the legal history of reproduction. In turn, that’s emboldened the abolitionists.“It’s not an easy question about how you can be consistent and exempt women from punishment,” Ziegler said. The abolitionists, she says, are essentially saying: “‘We’re the pragmatists, because if a lot of abortions are self-managed, or involve medical practitioners from out of state or even out of the US altogether, how do you propose meaningfully enforcing [bans] if you’re not going to punish women or other pregnant folks?“They’ve also been hated because people who are not opposed to abortion didn’t know that they existed,” Ziegler added. “And people who are opposed to abortion are not happy that people discovered that they existed.”Over the last several years, “abortion abolitionists” and their ideology have quietly amassed popularity in churches, state legislatures and online. Several abolitionist organizations filed an amicus brief in the decision that overturned Roe. Abolitionists Rising – which features a video of Deevers on its website – has almost 200,000 subscribers on YouTube, with at least one video with more than half a million views. (Deevers did not immediately reply to an interview request.) The YouTube account of Apologia Studios, which is run by prominent abortion “abolitionist” and pastor Jeff Durbin, has more than 500,000 subscribers.In 2023, legislators in at least nine states introduced bills that would advance the abortion abolition cause, such as by erasing provisions in laws that explicitly protect pregnant people from being prosecuted for having abortions. At least two of those bills explicitly cite the 14th amendment, which was originally passed to ensure that formerly enslaved people had equal rights, to extend rights and protections to fetuses.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe anti-abortion movement has a long history of drawing comparisons between their cause and that of pre-civil war abolitionists trying to end US slavery, as well as civil rights crusaders. For decades, they have tried to use the 14th amendment to establish fetuses’ right to personhood, a push that is seeing renewed interest post-Roe.However, anti-abortion “abolitionists” often draw a line between their work and that of the mainstream pro-life movement. Not only do they frequently disdain the pro-life label, but while the pro-life movement has increasingly sought to portray its mission as secular, anti-abortion “abolitionists” are staunchly and openly Christian.“I think that the abolitionist movement is a litmus test for how much the anti-abortion movement needs to win or wants to win in democratic politics versus other means,” Ziegler said. “If you need to win with voters, abolitionists are not going to get anywhere, ever.”There is little support for severe punishments for people who get illegal abortions. Although 47% of US adults believe that women who have illegal abortions should face some form of penalty, just 14% think they should serve jail time, according to a 2022 poll by the Pew Research Center. “Abolitionists” don’t necessarily believe that people should face the death penalty for abortions. “I do believe that the unjustified taking of human life, if provable, ultimately, justly, ought to be capital punishment,” Durbin told the New York Times last year. “However, I don’t trust our system today to deal that out.”None of the “abolitionist”-style bills ultimately advanced very far in state legislatures this year. Still, they can be something of a PR nightmare for Republicans and the mainstream pro-life movement. After a host of news articles about South Carolina’s Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which would allow people who have abortions to face the death penalty, 10 Republican state legislators asked to remove their names as sponsors of the bill.That bill died in committee.While these bills technically focus on abortion seekers, in reality they would probably also be used to penalize people of color or poor people who have unintended pregnancy losses, according to Farah Diaz-Tello, senior counsel and legal director of If/When/How, a legal advocacy group for reproductive justice.“We know who the targets of these laws would be, because they’re the people who are already criminalized for pregnancy outcomes. So we would see an escalation of that status quo,” Diaz-Tello said. “Things that for people of wealth and privilege would be considered a tragedy end up being charged as a crime against people of color, in particular Black women, and people who are in poverty.”Deevers won his seat in the Oklahoma state legislature after its former occupant resigned for another job. On his campaign website, Deevers says that he supports Oklahoma’s version of the Prenatal Equal Protection Act, which was introduced in 2023. That bill eliminates language that would block Oklahoma prosecutors from targeting pregnant people for “causing the death of the unborn child”. Its sponsor, whose 2020 election was supported by the abolitionist group Free the States, did not immediately reply to a request for comment.“This bill would abolish abortion by making preborn children equal under law and closing the loopholes which allow for self-managed abortion,” Deevers’ campaign website reads, adding, “I am 100% against abortion and for its abolition.” More

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      Kate Cox begged Texas to let her end a dangerous pregnancy. She won’t be the last | Moira Donegan

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      In most cases, we would never have learned her name. Kate Cox, a Texas woman, is in a sadly common set of circumstances: a 31-year-old mother of two, Cox was pregnant with her third child when doctors informed her that something was wrong. Pregnancy complications are common, but in a state like Texas, they have become newly dangerous, threatening women with potentially disfiguring health complications, along with unimaginable heartbreak, as the state’s multiple bans have mandated grotesque and inhumane treatment of doomed pregnancies.Cox’s fetus had trisomy 18, a chromosomal disorder. Trisomy 18 is a devastating diagnosis. Most pregnancies end in stillbirths; those infants born alive with the disorder live anguished, short and painful lives. Cox was informed that her fetus, in the sterile medical parlance, “could not sustain life”. The fetus had malformations of the spine, heart, brain and limbs. The pregnancy also posed dire threats to Cox’s health; most significantly, she was at risk of losing her future fertility if she remained pregnant.If Cox made it to delivery – a big if – the child would live for perhaps an hour, perhaps a week. It would have to be treated with pain medications for the entirety of its brief life. None of these were cognizable concerns under Texas’s abortion ban. The law said that she would have to remain pregnant – would have to get sicker, have to endure greater and greater pain and grief, and then would have to labor and give birth to a daughter, who she would watch suffer and die.There are hundreds of women like Cox living in Republican-controlled states, women carrying pregnancies in which there is no hope that a living baby will result at the end of nine months. These are pregnancies that – because of abortion bans that provide no actionable exemptions for medically futile pregnancies or maternal health – women are forced to keep carrying anyway.Most people in this situation suffer in private; they endure the cooing at their bellies from oblivious strangers while they remain pregnant, and they purchase tiny urns in the brutal days after. Cox is different only because she made the decision to share her situation publicly. As her health deteriorated and she made multiple visits to the emergency room, she published an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, and petitioned Texas courts for an abortion. It is the first recorded instance of an adult woman having to ask for government permission to end her pregnancy since Roe. On Friday night, the Texas supreme court refused. On Monday, Cox left the state, seeking an abortion elsewhere.There is a tendency, in coverage of abortion law, for writers to try and discipline their language. The issue is fraught and passionate enough, the thinking goes, surrounded as it is by stigma, ignorance and misinformation. There is one line of journalistic thought that holds that the best way to serve one’s readers, and to maintain their trust, is to write with as strict neutrality as the facts will allow. If I were to follow that line, I would tell you that the case raises vexed and unresolved legal questions about the extent of medical exemptions to abortion bans, and that the actions of Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general, whose office intervened to prevent Cox from receiving an abortion, is signaling a maximalist view. I might not mention, in the interest of neutrality, that among the Texas supreme court justices who denied Cox her abortion was John Devine, an extremist Christian conservative with a long history of anti-choice activism, including, according to his boast at a campaign event, being arrested 37 times in harassment actions outside abortion clinics.But there is another line of thought that holds that euphemism is dishonesty, and that the effort to maintain journalistic neutrality in situations of grave injustice winds up obscuring more than it reveals. If I were to follow this latter method, I would tell you plainly that, by refusing to let her end this pregnancy, Paxton and the state of Texas in effect allowed Kate Cox to be tortured, and that she was forced to flee to escape that torture.Cox will not be the last woman in this position. She will not be the last woman to make a public plea to be permitted an abortion for a dangerous and non-viable pregnancy; she will not be the last one who is denied. She is part of a growing cast of abortion rights plaintiffs, a product of Dobbs’s cruelties and of the shifting strategic posture of the reproductive rights movement. These new claimants are not the traditional pro-choice litigators – clinics or doctors – but prospective patients themselves. In particular, the new plaintiffs are women who are seeking medical exemptions to terminate wanted but dangerous pregnancies. (In her op-ed, Cox referenced Zurwaski v Texas, a lawsuit in which 20 such women are suing to clarify and expand medical exemptions to Texas’s abortion ban.)Think of it as a crusade of the medically endangered: women who are faced with tragic, dangerous and heartbreaking circumstances in their pregnancies are emerging as a new face of the pro-choice legal movement. Like the anti-choice movement spent decades chipping away at the abortion rights and expanding restrictions, these women’s lawsuits seek to expand access in the most sympathetic of cases – those of medical emergencies – to carve out slightly larger loopholes for more women to access abortion through.It’s an incrementalistic strategy, one that assumes that legal abortion bans like those in Texas are here to stay for the foreseeable future. And it is also a strategy that makes some concessions to the bigotries and biases of the Texas court, to say nothing of American public opinion. Like many of the medically endangered plaintiffs, Cox is white and married. She is already a mother, and wants to be pregnant – she speaks extensively, and movingly, of desiring more children, and of wishing that she could have this one. Unlike many in her shoes, when faced with a horrible consequence of a sadistic law, she was able to seek both publicity and legal help. Unlike many in her shoes, when she was denied an abortion, she was able to flee.None of these things about Cox – neither her privilege not her palatability – make her a bad person, or make her suffering any less horrific. But they do make her an appealing face for a movement that is seeking to reason with a rabid and revanchist cadre of judges. There is nothing the right can object to in her, the thinking goes, and there is nothing they can get from making her suffer: her child will die. And yet her plea was rejected by the Texas courts, which suggests that the anti-choice movement does feel that they can get something out of Kate Cox. They get the ability to make her beg. Then, they get the satisfaction of saying no.The way we talk about abortion has warped in the wake of Dobbs. We use bloodless language of gestational limits; we may even be tempted to describe once-unheard of 15 week bans as comparatively “moderate”. We look on the bright side, like to the fact that Cox, denied the care that will keep her healthy and alive in Texas, was able to go elsewhere. Amid these adjusted expectations it is easy to lose track of how far we’ve fallen in our standards for women’s dignity and freedom. Two years ago, a woman in Cox’s shoes was able to control her own body and life on her own terms; now, she has to go before a court, all her virtues on display, and beg not to be maimed. “I am a Texan,” Cox said in her op-ed. “Why should I or any other woman have to drive or fly hundreds of miles to do what we feel is best for ourselves and our families, to determine our own futures?” It was an appeal to her dignity as a citizen. But Texas only saw her as a woman.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Dozens of independent abortion clinics closed in 2023 post-Roe, study finds

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      Dozens of independently owned reproductive health clinics shuttered in 2023, the year after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, according to a new report from the Abortion Care Network.The group found that 23 independently owned clinics closed this year, on top of the 42 that shuttered in 2022, leaving over a dozen states, mainly in the American south and midwest, without a single brick-and-mortar clinic that provides abortion.“Even before Roe fell, we were the only abortion clinic in a very rural, very underserved state with limited access to health care, and now that’s all been exacerbated,” said Katie Quinonez-Alonzo, executive director of Women’s Health Center of West Virginia.Like most independent clinics in the United States, the Women’s Health Center of West Virginia struggled to keep its doors open after the supreme court decision paved the way for the state to ban abortion last year. The clinic still provides other reproductive and sexual health services, like gender-affirming care for transgender patients.“We want to stay here in our community and help the patients that are still counting on us, but it’s been one uphill battle after another,” Quinonez-Alonzo told the Guardian.The Women’s Health Center of West Virginia is an especially crucial lifeline for low-income, uninsured people in the state, who rely on the clinic for routine gynecological check-ups. Those services became harder to offer after West Virginia banned abortion, slashing the clinic’s revenue by roughly half a million dollars.This year, Quinonez-Alonzo anticipates a roughly $350,000 budget deficit.Independently owned clinics – in contrast with bigger players like Planned Parenthood – provide the majority of abortions in the United States. According to the ACN report, “indie” clinics make up the majority of clinics operating in states that are most hostile to abortion, and offer the broadest range of options for patients seeking the procedure. ACN researchers found that 73% of indie brick-and-mortar clinics offer both medical and surgical abortions, compared with just 42% of Planned Parenthood affiliates – so as they dwindle in number, so do options for women seeking care.Before the supreme court overturned Roe, the West Alabama Women’s Center provided over half of the abortions in the state.“In the deep south, it was always indie providers that were the ones providing abortions. Very few Planned Parenthoods existed in our region,” said Robin Marty, executive director of West Alabama Women’s Center.“Alabama used to have three Planned Parenthoods, we have just one now, the others have closed,” Marty said. “We’re still here, though.”After Alabama enacted a sweeping ban on abortion, the Tuscaloosa clinic refocused on protecting newly pregnant people’s access to affordable prenatal healthcare.But Alabama is one of 10 states that has not expanded Medicaid, leaving roughly one in seven women of childbearing age without any form of health insurance. The state allows newly pregnant women to apply for Medicaid, but that requires a doctor’s letter confirming the pregnancy.“But of course, as these people do not have insurance, they can’t get into a doctor in order to get this letter for Medicaid,” Marty said. “This is why we’re seeing so many people in Alabama who don’t have prenatal care in the first trimester.”Even after a patient receives a doctor’s letter confirming their pregnancy, it can take four to six weeks for the state to approve coverage. To help care for uninsured and pregnant people in Alabama, Marty said her clinic provides free prenatal care until a patient’s Medicaid coverage is approved. If financial trouble forces the clinic to close, a bad maternal health landscape will get worse.“The people in our community need prenatal care and birth control and STI testing just as much as they need abortion,” Marty said. “For these patients, there isn’t another healthcare provider here for them.” More

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      High stakes for abortion rights as Pennsylvania votes on key judge pick

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      Pennsylvania voters will select a new member of the state’s supreme court on Tuesday in a judicial election that has become the unlikely focus of Republican billionaire donors, political action committees and abortion rights advocates.Democrat Daniel McCaffery is facing off against Carolyn Carluccio, a conservative judge whose apparent opposition to abortion access has drawn the ire of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive justice groups.As McCaffery and Carluccio compete for a seat on the Pennsylvania supreme court, total spending in the race surpassed $17m, according to the Associated Press – an unusually high price tag for an election that typically sees low voter turnout. But Democrats and abortion rights advocates hope Pennsylvania voters view Tuesday’s ballot as a proxy for reproductive freedom in Pennsylvania.“This election, Pennsylvania voters have a choice between Carolyn Carluccio, who has tried to hide her anti-abortion positions and dodge questions about the judiciary’s role in protecting abortion rights, and Daniel McCaffery, a proven champion of reproductive freedom,” said Breana Ross, campaigns director of Planned Parenthood Votes Pennsylvania.Abortion rights advocates hope to energize Pennsylvania voters by casting Carluccio as an existential threat to abortion access. This strategy delivered liberals a resounding victory in the Wisconsin supreme court race earlier this year, when record numbers of voters turned out to elect Janet Protasiewicz, a Democrat who pledged to defend abortion rights. Protasiewicz’s conservative opponent, Dan Kelly, refrained from voicing his opinion on voting rights.Carluccio’s campaign, taking its cues from Kelly’s unsuccessful playbook, has avoided sharing her views on abortion. After winning the primary election in May, Carluccio removed information about her opposition to abortion from her campaign website, according to a May report from the Keystone.Carluccio’s campaign site previously vowed to defend “all life under the law”.“When we redesigned our website, we chose to no longer include a résumé link. Judge Carluccio listed on her résumé that she would ‘defend all life under the law’, and she meant just that: under the law,” Rob Brooks, a spokesman for Carluccio’s campaign, told the Guardian.Carluccio has frequently branded herself as a non-political actor who operates outside the bounds of traditional partisanship.“I reject calls to rule based on partisan or ideological grounds and instead rule according to our laws,” Carluccio wrote in an August op-ed about her candidacy.Despite Carluccio’s insistence on her own ideological neutrality, her campaign has invited the support of distinctly rightwing groups. In a February letter to the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform, Carluccio disclosed that her candidacy was endorsed by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, a leading anti-abortion group in the state.According to campaign finance reports, her campaign received over $4m from Commonwealth Leaders Fund, a political organization funded by the billionaire GOP donor Jeffrey Yass.Pennsylvania Democrats said Carluccio is hiding her ties to the anti-abortion movement in a disingenuous bid for primary voters. The general electorate is supportive of abortion access – 64% of all Pennsylvania voters in the 2022 midterms said abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to polling from the Associated Press.“Her campaign is clearly trying to portray her as acceptable to a primary audience,” said JJ Abbott, executive director of Commonwealth Communications, a progressive political consulting firm. “They know abortion is a motivator for voters, since the Dobbs decision, voters are more likely to engage in elections because of what is at stake for abortion.”But the stakes of Tuesday’s election are not straightforward. Unlike Wisconsin, where the threat of the 1849 near-total abortion ban loomed overhead, the outcome of Pennsylvania’s supreme court race will not directly affect abortion access in the state. Tuesday’s race will not change the composition of Pennsylvania’s high court – four of the seven seats on the current bench are held by Democrat-affiliated justices. Carluccio is operating in what appears to be a much less dire political environment than Kelly, whose campaign struggled to avoid the topic of abortion while Wisconsin was feeling the effects of the 1849 ban.Still, Planned Parenthood and other reproductive justice advocates said the abortion rights movement needs to look ahead to the 2025 election, when three of Pennsylvania’s Democratic justices will appear on the ballot.The long-term maintenance of Pennsylvania’s liberal supreme court majority is a priority for abortion rights advocates. In September, Planned Parenthood Votes launched a seven-figure advertisement campaign against Carluccio, the largest ad buy in the group’s history.As anxieties mount, abortion rights supporters are hopeful that Pennsylvania voters, as in Wisconsin, will heed the warnings offered by Planned Parenthood on the long-term consequences of Carluccio’s candidacy.Dr Benjamin Abella, a medical professor and emergency physician in Philadelphia, said voters like him are “paying attention” to Carluccio’s efforts to hide her campaign’s ties to rightwing anti-abortion groups.“The public understands that we should not be lulled into a false sense of security on abortion rights, especially if a judge is keeping quiet on their intentions and positions,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a safe state any more and that any and every election poses a risk.” More

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      She was censored over trans rights. But lawmaker Zooey Zephyr won’t be silenced

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      Zooey Zephyr had just arrived on the outskirts of far-flung Libby, Montana, this summer when a text message came through with a warning. There were anti-LGBTQ+ protesters at the Pride celebration that was already under way on the banks of the Kootenai River.Calm and steady, she pulled her white rental sedan into the lot and brought it to a stop. Instead of protesters, the car was immediately thronged by a cluster of fans. One, a middle-aged woman with long, wavy brown hair cascading from under a bedazzled baseball cap, asked Zephyr with urgency: “Do you remember me?”Later that afternoon, the woman who approached Zephyr took to the Pride stage to tell her story.She had feared coming out as transgender for years in this small, conservative town, but finally got the courage to do so when she witnessed Zephyr, 35, a Democratic state representative from Missoula, stand up to a legislative body controlled by Republicans hellbent on silencing her and driving her out of the state capitol where she was elected to serve. Seeing another trans woman refuse to be silenced gave her the power to live her own truth.This is what it’s like traveling with Zephyr – even to a remote, Republican-controlled corner of the massive state where she was born and raised. Montanans from all walks of life – many of whom have been cast aside and told their lives and politics don’t matter and won’t be heard – show up to tell her their stories and look for some hope in return.There is the fantasy of Montana that gets too much national attention, fawning stories of pristine public lands, macho cowboys and sprawling ranches. Amid rapid gentrification, those relics are all becoming figments of the collective American imagination.And then there is truly remote, rural Montana, the barely mentioned places like Libby. This community of fewer than 3,000 sits on the lush curves of a river beneath the Cabinet mountains in the north-west corner of the state, closer in place and conservative politics to north Idaho and eastern Washington than any major city in Montana.It’s a former asbestos mining town, one that voted Democratic for decades. It weathered a huge industrial poisoning scandal linked to the mine in the 1990s and early 2000s, which killed nearly 700 residents over the years. It’s a place beaten up by extractive corporate interests and nearly forgotten. But this year’s Pride celebration, one of the first organizers have ever pulled off, was vibrant, joyous and filled with dozens of supporters. (It was smaller than last year’s event, the organizers say, and they fear that was due to the wave of anti-queer and anti-trans rhetoric that has flooded Montana and other parts of rural America.)The protesters Zephyr was warned about, a cluster of angry-looking white men, were there, walking menacingly through the crowd. One carried a placard that read: “If you’re looking for a sign to kill yourself, this is it.” No one paid them much attention.I ask Zephyr what she would have done if confronted by the protesters. She smiled and said without missing a beat: “What do you think I’d do? I’d talk with them.”We’ve spent enough hours together now that I know she’s serious.Zephyr has become a symbol of graceful defiance in a state recently flooded with hate-riddled speech and politics. But how did she – a gamer, an elite wrestler as a child and later a dance instructor – become one of Time magazine’s “100 Next”, leaders the publication anointed as people who could change the world?Her rise to international fame began in 2022, when she became the first openly transgender woman elected to the Montana legislature, after a grassroots campaign prompted by the Republican majority’s mounting attack on trans rights and the independent judiciary system.The 2023 legislature, which convened in January, included a spate of legislation that undercut medical care and other essential rights for trans people. To be clear, these were not issues rising from a groundswell of popular support. Montana has only recently flipped to being deep red politically, and the most talked-about topic across the state these days is the unaffordability of housing.Making life difficult for trans people is not something most voters were demanding. But Republicans insisted that trans rights were a threat and pursued legislation, ignoring hours of testimony against the bills.The severity of the attack on trans rights in Montana was new; far-right conservatives targeting the marginalized as a tactic is not. Ken Toole, who was director of the Montana Human Rights Network through battles over gay rights and marriage equality in the 1990s and 2000s, recalls a similar landscape. “The conservative movement in the state used these kinds of issues to characterize the political debate [then and now],” he said. “Essentially, it’s scapegoating.”This spring, during a debate over a bill to limit gender-affirming care for youth, Zephyr spoke passionately against the legislation: “I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” she told the house.It was then that the Republican leadership decided her words went too far.Leadership demanded she apologize; she refused. Multiple studies have shown that trans youth have higher suicide rates, she argued, and this kind of legislation would have a detrimental impact on kids.In retaliation, the legislative leadership, run largely by one family, cut her microphone for three days, a move unprecedented in a citizen legislature with a long history of spicy rhetoric and fiery debates.On the third day of her silencing, a group of protesters filled the house gallery, a collection of seats above the grand chamber, to challenge what was happening. They chanted “Let her speak” as Zephyr held up her microphone and put a hand over her heart.Police in riot gear swept the protesters from the capitol and, in another historic move, the Republican leadership closed off public access to the gallery for the remainder of the legislative session. Republicans later voted to banish Zephyr from the house chambers, leaving her to set up a makeshift office on a bench outside the door of the body where she had been elected to serve. The next day, several women related to Republican legislators showed up and took over her bench, seemingly hoping to drive her out of sight.It was this anti-democratic wave against Zephyr and her own calm, deliberate opposition to fading away quietly that shot her into media stratosphere. The story spread fast and far in a country watching democratic norms fall away in Republican-controlled states.She appeared on ABC’s The View, was featured across national and international media, and was invited to national events. For months, her message seemed to be everywhere. Montana Republicans, in trying to silence one opposing voice, had accidentally turned her into a national star. For Zephyr, though, the moment was about much more than fleeting celebrity. She’s planning to build a lasting movement out of it.In each conversation I’ve had with Zephyr, her fiancee figures prominently. She proposed to Erin Reed, the trans journalist and activist, shortly after the legislative session ended this spring; they traveled to France to celebrate. Reed lives on the east coast, and for now Zephyr is committed to her work in Montana, making this state a more inclusive and safe place for families like her own.Zephyr was born in 1988 in Billings, Montana, still the state’s largest city. It’s long been the heart of conservative Montana politics, a place where ranchers and Chamber of Commerce types ran the show. Her own family was conservative and religious.She describes her childhood there as fairly unremarkable, like that of any other Montana kid. In 2000, her father’s work prompted the family to move to Seattle. There, Zephyr found her passion in sports, winning five state wrestling titles and finishing high school with an offer of a wrestling scholarship. She opted to stay closer to family and go to the University of Washington instead, but it’s clear that competitive sports shaped her. She still recites by memory the words of a banner that hung over the practice room: “Every day I leave this room a better wrestler and a better person than when I entered,” she says, adding how the coach made them slap the sign as they left the room.It’s become a personal motto.After graduation, Zephyr was called back to Montana. This time, as an adult, she went to Missoula to study creative writing at the University of Montana. She found a job at the university and worked part-time teaching the Lindy Hop at a local dance studio. In 2018, she reached the point in her life when it was time to come out to her community and transition. Her family’s response caused her to cut ties, but as she tells the story, Missoula, one of Montana’s more progressive cities, surrounded her with love and warmth.It was then that she chose her name: Zooey Simone Zephyr. Zooey, meaning life, Simone, a tribute to her paternal grandmother, and Zephyr, “a gentle breeze blowing from the west”.“I thought, ‘I want to be that, a gentle breeze,’” she says.Her community rallied around her. Her boss immediately had the restroom signs changed to remove gender markers, getting ahead of any questions. Her dance students didn’t bat an eye when she told them her name and identity as a woman. And her friends gathered at a brewery to celebrate the transition. The response from Missoula made her certain she was in the right place.In the years since, she has at times debated leaving Montana as the attacks on trans people mounted. But now, she says, “I’m not going anywhere. This is my state. I was born here. You can’t kick me out.”She toyed with the idea of running for a different office, but her heart is in organizing.We talked at length about the changing face of Montana and what it means to have grown up here, particularly when it seems the politics have been hijacked by a national agenda that has very little to do with ordinary people’s lives. She felt no one in elected office was listening to her, and so once she decided to run, she was dead set on winning.“I remember thinking to myself: if you really want to move the needle, you need representation,” she said.In Missoula, representation is spreading. Gwen Nicholson, a young Indigenous transgender woman who was born and raised there, is running for city council on a progressive platform centered on affordable housing.Nicholson worked in the capitol during the anti-trans onslaught this winter. She remembers thinking: “Why am I not welcome? Why does it feel like this place, which is my home and has been home to my family for generations, is trying to push me out?”Nicholson said she had confessed to a friend: “‘All this shit makes me want to run,’ and they were like, ‘Run away, or run for office?’ There has to be some material way to fight back.”This is the kind of movement Zephyr wants to see catch fire all across Montana. The state has been defined for generations by complex, sometimes surprising politics – but contemporary rhetoric has flattened its identity in recent years to that of just another deep red state. In traveling throughout her home state, she has found opinions that go far beyond the standard talking points that overwhelm political debate.“Every conversation you have with someone, you go to a community where Democrats haven’t run a candidate in a long time, and you talk to folks there, and they want to fight back,” Zephyr says.Zephyr will kick off a different kind of political effort in Montana beginning this fall. She’s creating a political action committee to raise money that will help her travel the state and recruit and train candidates for state office. In the last election, Democrats didn’t even appear on the ballot in one-third of legislative races, and the resulting landslide gave Republicans a supermajority and nearly unlimited power over Montanans’ lives. Dissenting voices were ignored and written off. Zephyr intends to build a movement that will empower progressives to run and win in places like Libby where Democrats haven’t won in years.“We can make that difference on the ground, we can move the needle on the ground here in a way that the national Democratic party wouldn’t know how to do,” she says. “It starts from the bottom.” More

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      The war on abortion pills takes a terrifying new turn | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The war on abortion pills takes a terrifying new turnHave you ever come across a scientific study and immediately thought to yourself: why? What was the point of this work exactly? Why were resources and brainpower devoted to figuring this particular thing out?Normally I have this thought when a study comes out about whether, for example, Viagra can help hamsters recover from jet lag (it can!) or whether mosquitoes like electronic dance music (not really!). On this occasion, however, it was prompted by news that researchers in Poland have developed tests that can detect whether a woman has taken mifepristone and misoprostol, the drugs that are used in a medication abortion and colloquially known as abortion pills.Why the desperate need to figure this out? According to the researchers, one of whom apparently identifies as pro-choice, it’s because they were very worried about whether abortion pills on the black market posed a threat to public health. Which seems rather a strange explanation, since those drugs have been around for decades and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that they are safe and effective.The real reason there was a state-funded study to try detect the use of abortion pills is probably because Poland has draconian abortion laws – a near-ban on legal abortion was implemented in 2020 – and the government wants to crack down on any woman who dares to exercise autonomy over her own body. Under Polish law, you can’t go to jail for taking abortion pills, but if you help someone else procure them you can be prosecuted. Last March, for example, a Polish human rights activist was sentenced to eight months of community service for sending pills to a woman who was a victim of domestic violence.In the past, trying to prove someone had taken abortion pills was tricky. It was impossible to tell whether a woman had experienced a miscarriage or had a medical abortion: the symptoms are the same and the technology didn’t exist to find evidence mifepristone and misoprostol had been ingested. Now, however, a government intent on controlling women has chilling new tools at its disposal. And, according to a New York Times piece by Patrick Adams, it is using them: Polish authorities have already leveraged the new tests to investigate the outcomes of pregnancies.While there is no evidence that these tests are being used anywhere else in the world I imagine that anti-abortion activists in the US are champing at the bit to get their hands on them. Conservatives, after all, are already trying to clamp down on the availability of abortion pills in the US: in August, a federal appeals court ruled that access to mifepristone should be limited. Extremists are going to continue trying to chip away at access to medication abortions; they are going to continue their calls for women who get abortions to be charged with murder. A small but frighteningly zealous group of lawmakers will not be happy until every woman who so much as thinks about abortion is thrown in jail. And once they’ve outlawed all abortion they’ll move on to birth control.You think I’m exaggerating? I wish I was. Daniel Cameron, the Republican candidate for governor in Kentucky, has said he believes hormonal birth control (ie the morning-after pill) is abortion and should be criminalized. Last year, the Republican governor of Mississippi refused to rule out the possibility he might ban certain forms of contraception. Meanwhile, a number of states have passed “personhood” laws, which state that life begins at the moment of fertilization – a position which paves the way for charging women who use emergency contraception with murder. No doubt all these lawmakers are watching Poland’s development of abortion pill testing methods with glee. It seems depressingly inevitable that technology like this is coming to a red state near you soon.Young women in the US are afraid to get pregnant in a post-Roe worldThirty-four per cent of women aged 18-39 questioned in a new poll said they or someone they know personally has “decided not to get pregnant due to concerns about managing pregnancy-related medical emergencies … the Dobbs decision, it seems, has fundamentally altered how people feel about having families and the calculus for getting pregnant”.DeSantis does not support criminalizing women who get abortions after allThe Florida governor recently insisted that it is only the doctors who perform the abortion that will be liable for fines and imprisonment under the extreme six-week abortion ban he signed the law. So that’s OK, then!Happiness of girls and young women at lowest level since 2009, shows UK pollThe biggest drop in happiness is among seven- to 10-year-olds. Only 28% say they are happy compared with well over half in 2009.Silicon Valley bros are having testosterone partiesTickets to the “T parties” cost between $100 and $400. According to founder Jeff Tang, guests can get blood tests to check their testosterone levels while discussing approaches to “optimizing T naturally, endocrine disrupters, and supplements” while dining on “home-made kefir, beef patties (heart, spleen, kidney) and pork loin (blood, liver), and delicious Colombian coffee”. Tang, by the way, is not a doctor or a scientist. “Just a guy who likes experimenting with his health and productivity.”Mahsa Amini and a year of brutality and courage in IranIt’s the first anniversary of the death in custody of 22-year-old Amini, who was allegedly detained for not wearing a headscarf. The Iranian illustrator Roshi Rouzbehani powerfully recaps a year of tumult for the Guardian.Man accused of groping Spanish reporter live on air arrestedJournalist Isa Balado was just trying to do her job when a passerby groped her live on air. He’s now been arrested for sexual assault.The week in paw-triarchyWhat happens to robot dogs when they get old? Sony Japan’s pack of digital canines are heading to a nursing home. Five years after releasing a reboot of the ERS-1000 Aibo robot dogs from the late 90s, Sony is launching an “Aibo foster parent program” that lets owners who have cancelled their digital subscriptions send the dogs to nursing homes and medical facilities where they can provide emotional support and spread paws-itivity. More

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      in US Politics

      The Women of NOW review: superb history of feminist growth and groundswell

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      What do a bestselling author, a segregationist congressman and a Black legal scholar have in common? Through a series of serendipitous events, Betty Friedan, Howard Smith and Pauli Murray lit fires that ignited the largest social revolution of the 20th century.Friedan wrote the 1963 blockbuster The Feminine Mystique. Smith added “sex” to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1965, Murray wrote the first legal analysis comparing Jim Crow to gender discrimination. With the benefit of hindsight, this unwitting but timely partnership can be seen as the launchpad of the second wave feminist movement, a movement synonymous with the National Organization for Women, or NOW.Almost 60 years after its inception, we think of NOW as a mainstream national feminist group. But in 1966 it was founded on the radical idea, as Katherine Turk describes it, “to organize and advocate for all women by channeling their efforts into one association that sought to end male supremacy”.In a world where most women were denied credit cards and mortgages, entrance into marathon races, medical school and law school, jobs as bar tenders, editors, pilots, and factory managers, ending male supremacy seemed unfathomable.Turk’s The Women of NOW is a fascinating account of the foundational organization that for many decades served as the central tentpole of this multifaceted movement. Despite the hundreds of books that make up the rich cannon of modern women’s history, Turk has done a much-needed service, writing the first full history of NOW.A professor at the University of North Carolina, Turk devoted 20 years, beginning with her undergraduate thesis, to telling this complex story. With gumshoe reporting precision, she traveled the country, unearthing hundreds of boxes and thousands of files that had been collecting dust in library archives. Combining this detailed documentary roadmap with interviews, Turk weaves the root story of an organization that drove the most transformative mass movement of the modern age.Turk makes sense of NOW’s unwieldy geographic spread and 60-year history by telling it from the points of view of three very different leaders: Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins and Patricia Hill Burnett. Hernandez, an experienced Black union organizer, Collins, a young working-class political activist, and Burnett, a rich Detroit housewife and former Miss Michigan, personify the broad reach of the organization which tried, and sometimes failed, to represent all women.Collins, who became president the Chicago chapter in 1968, greeted her new cause with giddy enthusiasm, saying joining NOW was “like waking up from a dead sleep, like ‘this is wrong; and everything is wrong.’ And away we went.” Their goal was nothing short of reprograming American society; revamping the way people lived, worked and loved.Hernandez, the most professional of the three, was one of the first five commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When the commission opened in 1965, its main mission was to strike down workplace race discrimination. To the surprise of its leaders, a third of complaints came from women. When the agency decided it would do nothing in response to complaints from stewardesses who were fired when they turned 32, and AT&T telephone operators denied higher-level jobs, it became clear to Washington insiders like Pauli Murray, Catherine East, Mary Eastwood and Sonia Pressman that the country needed a women’s version of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On 30 June 1966, 28 women, with Friedan their fearless if flawed leader, created an organization to “bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society and in truly equal partnership with men”. NOW was born.Turk thoughtfully recounts the feminist groundswell and the growth of NOW. It counted just 120 members in 1966 but it grew to 18,000 members and 250 chapters in 1972 and to 40,000 members and 700 chapters in 1974. NOW took on big corporations like Sears, AT&T and the New York Times (over its gender-segregated classified ads). Covered by the mainstream press, lawsuits, protests and press conferences helped spread the word. But as grassroots chapters proliferated, so did different priorities.Growing pains started early and never really subsided. Riven by divisions over race, class and sexual orientation, the organization that aimed to represent all women would eventually sink from its own weight, if not before powering the women’s movement in the 1960s and 70s.Hernandez and Murray, two of the most influential and strategic members of NOW, winced at white women’s “racist slights and oversights”. Lesbians like Rita Mae Brown rebelled against homophobia. But on 26 August 1970, hundreds of thousands of women from all backgrounds took part in the largest nationwide women’s protest in history, the Women’s Strike for Equality. This was the moment the movement went viral.Two years later, when the Equal Rights Amendment passed the House and Senate with huge majorities, Now had enjoyed a five-year run of victories in its righteous and politically popular cause. Seeing the ERA as a one-shot inoculation against systemic sexism, NOW leaders made the fateful decision to double down on the amendment’s 38-state ratification, a single-issue mission that would alienate Black women and invite organized opposition. The effort to amend the US constitution ultimately foundered in the face of powerful conservative forces lead by Phyllis Schlafly and Ronald Reagan.As Turk deftly guides her readers through NOW’s roller coaster of victories and defeats, we come away with a clear blueprint for change – replete with cautionary tales – as we face new challenges to women’s freedom and equality. The Women of NOW can show today’s feminists the path forward. It is a must-read.
      The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

      Clara Bingham’s book The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Remade America 1963-1973 will be published in May 2024 More

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      in US Politics

      Abortion providers on two years of Texas ban: ‘We’re living in a devastating reality’

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      Nearly a year before the US supreme court eviscerated Roe v Wade, the court allowed an unprecedented abortion ban to take effect in Texas, serving as a harbinger of what was to sweep over the rest of the country.The most restrictive abortion law at the time, with no exception for rape, incest, or lethal fetal abnormality, Senate Bill 8 barred care after six weeks of pregnancy, and carried a private enforcement provision that empowered anyone to sue a provider or someone who “aids or abets” the procedure.The move successfully wiped out almost all abortion care in the second-most populous state in the US. When Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization hit, the state doubled down, criminally banning all care and solidifying itself as the largest state in the US to outlaw abortion.In the two years since, Texas abortion providers – some of the first in the US to experience a nearly post-Roe world – reflect on the devastating and lasting effect of the severe law, the trauma they felt denying patients care, and the struggle they faced when deciding whether or not to flee the state or stay put.Dr Jessica Rubino: ‘The law forced me to be a bad doctor’ When Senate Bill 8 took effect, Dr Rubino felt like she was on a “sinking ship”. The abortion provider and family medicine specialist was forced to turn away dozens of patients at Austin Women’s Health Center – including one who was experiencing kidney failure. At the same time, patients below the six-week mark were rushing to choose abortion care before it was too late, leaving thoughtful decision-making behind.“I had to tell people there’s nothing I can legally do for you, unless you’re on death’s doorstep,” said Rubino. “The law forced me to be a bad doctor.”“It was heartbreaking and soul-crushing,” she continued. “I was watching a healthcare disaster play out in real time, knowing that this law not only affects our state but is causing a ripple effect in every other state. With SB 8 – and even years before the law – we saw the writing on the wall with Roe and tried to warn everyone, but I’m not sure who was listening.”Rubino also recalled a conversation she had six months prior to SB 8 with colleagues across the state who appeared united, vowing to continue providing care despite the law’s consequences. People are going to die, she told them, we should take the “personal hit”. However, that wave of defiance never materialized. Rubino lacked critical mass.She soon fell into an “extreme” depression; it was difficult to get out of bed each day and she eventually sought mental health therapy and antidepressants. Her brain felt “broken”, she said. After Dobbs, she stopped performing abortion for nearly a year, exacerbating her gloom.“Having to deny patients the healthcare you are trained – and able – to give them is something you never get over. It’s not only medically unethical, it’s morally wrong,” said Rubino. “It was traumatizing, and it still haunts me.”SB 8, she said, was the tipping point for abortion providers in Texas like her who have been forced to navigate onerous laws over the years that compromise the care they give, including a mandatory sonogram and 24-hour waiting period that incorporates relaying erroneous medical information, bans on insurance coverage for care, restrictions on minors’ access to abortion, and more.In May, under the advice of attorneys and those closest to her, Rubino and her family left Texas with no plans to return. She worked at a clinic in Bristol, Virginia, where she largely served patients in banned southern states, before moving to DC in late August to help expand abortion services at a reproductive health clinic there.Rubino still struggles with the decision to flee Texas, while also acknowledging the legal inability to continue her calling.“There is a sense of guilt, of letting down the community I serve. Sometimes I feel like I gave up on these people,” she said.She also worries that a national abortion ban could once again pull her away from the community she now treats. She considers one day working in the UK or New Zealand.Rubino feels deeply anxious about the fate of the patients she has left behind and mentioned a recurring patient, a victim of domestic violence, whose partner blocked her access to birth control.“She’s going to call and I’m not going to be there,” said Rubino. “She’s not in a safe situation and we know staying pregnant can lead to more abuse, and even death by an abusive partner. The safest thing for her would be to get an abortion but now she’s not going to have that choice.”Dr Ghazaleh Moayedi: ‘Inhumane and illogical’ Testifying before Congress three separate times to oppose abortion bans and uplift the right to access, Dr Ghazaleh Moayedi has made her mark as an outspoken and passionate reproductive justice advocate for Texans.But the road wasn’t always clear for the doctor: unsure of what to do after graduating college, Moayedi’s friend recommended she take a nanny job. Her boss was Amy Hagstrom-Miller, the head of a network of abortion clinics and then major figure in Texas reproductive rights who would go on to lead several legal challenges against the state, including a 2016 US supreme court victory. Moayedi began working in Miller’s clinic, where she saw her interests collide.As a “brown, Muslim” n Iranian American woman who grew up in Texas, Moayedi quickly realized the majority of state abortion doctors – largely white men – did not reflect the diversity of the patients they treated, and vowed to fix that.“I could feel a palpable racial and cultural divide,” she said. “None of the doctors looked like the people we take care of. I wanted to be a provider that helped represent the communities we serve. I decided to go to medical school with that goal as a driving force.”Moayedi has worked in Texas abortion care since 2014, weathering the roller coaster of state abortion laws, including a 2020 order to ban abortion under the pretense of the Covid emergency, which, at the time, upended her plans to start her own practice.After SB 8, she transitioned her care to Oklahoma. When Oklahoma’s abortion law took effect, she switched gears, providing ultrasounds in Texas to those traveling to and from out-of-state abortion care. Moayedi then became uncertain if she could safely venture to states where abortion was still legal, as the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, encouraged local prosecutors to go after providers shortly after Roe fell. She and abortion funds sued the state for legal protection, and paused their services in the meantime.After securing a court victory, Moayedi has worked to build an abortion and miscarriage telemedicine practice, still in the process of getting off the ground. She is now licensed in 20 states – but only half allow abortion telemed. She also travels to Kansas, a safe haven state, to provide care.“I’ve had to really pivot quite a bit. It’s been absolutely wild,” she said. “My practice doesn’t look anything like I thought it would. For now, my goal is to stay in Texas but we’ll see what happens.”Moayedi says the law’s “inhumane and illogical” impact is especially pronounced when she is treating a patient in another state only to discover they’re from not just the same city as her, but the same neighborhood.“Here we both are, hundreds of miles away from our home and support system, just to receive healthcare,” she said. “Moments like those just hit you in the gut.”As a complex family planning specialist, Moayedi constantly worries for patients with “potentially catastrophic” high-risk pregnancies, especially as the Texas law offers only vague medical emergency exceptions, leading patients to near-death experiences. She receives calls from colleagues wondering if pregnant patients with complications, like C-section scar ectopic pregnancies, can receive care in Texas. She often refers them out of state to be safe.“I really don’t have words to describe the deep, deep pain I feel,” said Moayedi. “These laws are insulting, disgusting, cruel, and absolutely pointless.”The provider and advocate expresses disappointment with the federal administration, who she feels has failed to meaningfully protect abortion providers and patients since SB 8 took effect.“The Biden administration’s response has been a limp handshake,” she said. “We want to see tangible, bold action to restore or at least prevent the further erosion of reproductive rights. We need unwavering support – not a leader who can barely say the word ‘abortion’.”Kathy Kleinfeld: ‘SB 8 was meant to be a fear tactic that paralyzed care’ Kathy Kleinfeld will never forget the desperation that swept over Houston Women’s Reproductive Services after SB 8 took effect. Anxious patients begged her and her staff to perform abortion care past the six-week mark, even offering money under the table and other favors.“They were crying and pleading with us, saying ‘I’ll do whatever you want,’” said Kleinfeld. “It was so heartbreaking, there was nothing we could do.”Patients – as well as clinic staff – held their breath during each ultrasound, hoping the pregnancy would fall under the state-mandated time frame. For those past the mark, Kleinfeld and colleagues became “dystopian travel agents” connecting patients with out-of-state care.After 30 years of providing abortion in Houston, Kleinfeld had never experienced anything so chaotic and devastating. Then Dobbs hit.“It felt like everything we experienced with SB 8 was magnified – it was like SB 8 on steroids,” said Kleinfeld. “The intensity, the confusion, the chaos all became so overwhelming.”While she was forced to halt abortion care, Kleinfeld did not want to leave her patients behind. One month after the fall of Roe, she regrouped, considerably downsizing her 5,000 sq-ft clinic and cutting her staff by more than half. She now provides pre- and post- abortion ultrasounds for those traveling out of state, as well as abortion clinic referrals. Her clinic is only one of two former independent abortion providers in Texas – and just a handful across the US – that have not closed or moved away.“We did not want to completely abandon pregnant people in Houston,” said Kleinfeld. “We felt it was still really important to adapt and provide this necessary service. It feels absolutely awful to not be able to offer abortion care, but at the same time, we feel grateful to be able to still help patients in whatever way we can.”Her clinic received around 1,200 visits this year, with most traveling to and from New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas.The fear unleashed by SB 8 two years ago still lingers today: Patients are scared to disclose that they want or have had an abortion; they are fearful to bring a partner or family member with them to a procedure out-of-state or even to the ultrasound at Kleinfeld’s clinic, worrying that a loved one may be in legal trouble for “aiding or abetting” care.“We still have to explain to patients all the time that it is not illegal to help someone obtain a legal abortion,” said Kleinfeld. “SB 8 was meant to be a fear tactic that paralyzed care and instilled anxiety in patients, and even after Dobbs, we are still seeing its impact.”Dr Alan Braid and Andrea Gallegos: ‘Waving our hands hands on top of a burning building’As a medical resident in 1972, Dr Alan Braid will never forget treating a 15-year-old girl in a San Antonio emergency room who was suffering from sepsis – a life-threatening blood infection – after a botched and illegal abortion, her vaginal cavity packed with rags. Braid and doctors did everything they could but the infection was so severe, she died a few days later from massive organ failure. That year, he saw another two teenagers die from illegal abortions.It was then that Braid realized that abortion care was vital and medically necessary, an inextricable component of overall healthcare. One year later, Roe would help solidify and protect Braid’s mission.For the next 45 years, he provided ob-gyn and abortion care in Texas. When Senate Bill 8 hit, it felt like 1972 all over again, he said.“To repeat history and expect a different outcome is insanity. Women will be injured and women will die – again – without access to healthcare,” said Braid.With a passion for reproductive rights, Andrea Gallegos joined her father’s practice as manager of Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services a few years ago. She describes the impact of SB 8 as “devastating” to patients, many of whom were saddled with multiple barriers to care. Even when staff would offer to pay for travel or the procedure itself, patients – still bound by the inability to find child care or time off work – couldn’t make the journey out of state.Braid felt like he had to fight back. In an act of overt defiance, the provider performed an abortion on a patient beyond the six-week limit. He was not only acting out of medical duty but hoped to invoke a legal challenge that would eventually halt SB 8.“I don’t think any of us really thought SB 8 would last – it’s so blatantly unconstitutional and just crazy, we figured the courts – even a court as conservative as the fifth circuit – would recognize the law needs to be stopped,” said Gallegos.While Braid’s intentional act of resistance attracted an outpouring of nationwide support, the lawsuits against him ultimately failed to halt SB 8, leaving the provider feeling largely defeated.He and his team continued to navigate the draconian law, routinely sending patients to their Tulsa, Oklahoma, clinic, where the caseload tripled within the first couple of months, placing a strain on the out-of-state provider.When Oklahoma’s governor signed into law an abortion ban – modeled after Texas’s SB 8 – in April 2022, Braid was forced to shutter the critical pipeline for Texans.“It felt like we were waving our hands on top of a burning building, trying to warn everyone else that this is what it’s going to look like for the rest of the country soon,” said Gallegos. “While we see the lack of access, the forced travel, the domino effect on surrounding clinics now everyday post-Dobbs, in Texas we were experiencing it first.”Following Roe’s demise, Braid was forced to close the doors to his San Antonio clinic and stopped practicing abortion care in Texas after nearly five decades. In May, he officially moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he has set up a clinic in the safe haven state.Gallegos relocated to Carbondale, Illinois, in July, a spot nestled between abortion-hostile states, to oversee a new clinic there.Leaving Texas – and friends and family behind – is deeply “bittersweet” for the father-daughter duo: there is a sense of “abandonment” but also a recognition that the move was necessary.“It’s not easy to completely start over but I know this is where I’m supposed to be,” said Gallegos.For the abortion providers, it’s also a painful reminder of the growing inequity of reproductive healthcare across the US.“It hits me hard knowing geography has played such a significant role in privilege to access to what I consider basic healthcare,” said Gallegos. “Geography should not determine if you can have a safe or dangerous pregnancy. We are living in a devastating reality.”Braid, now in his late 70s, describes working in New Mexico as “refreshing”, as he can “just be a doctor” and not “have to call attorneys” for guidance every step of the way, as he did in Texas.However, he has left his home state – and the place where he learned to be a physician so many years ago – with a tinge of regret, wishing he not only provided one abortion in violation of SB 8, but several more, convinced that the act of rebellion would have eventually led to a successful court battle that brought down the law. His daughter seeks to allay his remorse.“I remind my dad that the law was so unprecedented, so hard to predict and navigate, none of us knew what would happen,” said Gallegos. “In the end, the whole point of SB 8 was to elicit fear in abortion providers and sadly, that’s exactly what it did.” More