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      Guess what, women can vote! Is that why even hardline anti-abortion Republicans are backtracking? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Guess what, women can vote! Is that why even hardline anti-abortion Republicans are backtracking?Arwa MahdawiIn the weeks after Roe v Wade was overturned, there was a huge rush to register to vote. Now rightwing candidates are toning down their rhetoric but history tells us they can’t be trusted Want to know a fun fact about women in the US? They comprise half the population and they’ve got the right to vote. Pissing them off en masse is a risky political move –as Republicans are quickly finding out. A few months ago it looked like Republicans would decimate the Democrats in the midterm elections in November; now they are on much shakier ground. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that 60% of voters support abortion rights in most or all cases, and that the supreme court overturning Roe v Wade earlier this year is “the single issue most likely to make them vote this November”. In the two weeks after Roe was overturned, the number of people registering to vote increased by 10%, new women voters far outnumbering men.Cue furious back-pedalling from the right on women’s rights. Numerous Republican congressional candidates have removed or amended references to abortion from their online profiles in recent months, the Washington Post reports. Colorado state senator Barbara Kirkmeyer, for example, no longer refers to the “sanctity of life” on her campaign website. Arizona senate candidate Blake Masters has also been hitting the delete button. In an interview this year with a Catholic news outlet, Masters compared abortion to “child sacrifice”, saying: “It needs to stop.” Last month he toned down his language and clarified he simply supports “a ban on very late-term and partial-birth abortion”. He also amended his website so it no longer proclaims he is “100% pro-life” and instead says: “Protect babies, don’t let them be killed,” followed with: “Democrats lie about my views on abortion.”Minnesota Republican gubernatorial nominee Scott Jensen has similarly moved away from publicly espousing hardline views on abortion. In March, Jensen said in a radio interview that he would “try to ban abortion … There is no reason for us to be having abortions going out.” In a video released in July, Jensen said his previous comments were clumsy, and announced he supports abortions in cases of rape or incest or if the life of the woman is in danger. (Thank you, sir, very nice of you to suggest it’s OK for a woman not to be forced to give birth if she will almost certainly die doing so!)‘A wakeup call’: more Republicans are softening staunch anti-abortion stanceRead moreThere’s nothing wrong with politicians changing their minds; on the contrary, politicians should be commended for thoughtfully evolving their positions based on feedback from the people they represent. Sadly, I don’t think that’s what is happening here. What’s happening here is that a lot of Republicans are morally bankrupt idiots who are happy to tone down their rhetoric to win elections and are likely to rapidly revert to their extremist agenda as soon as they get into power. That’s what supreme court justice Brett Kavanaugh appeared to do, after all. Senator Susan Collins, one of the few Republicans to support abortion rights, said she would nominate Kavanaugh because he had reassured her that he was a big fan of judicial precedent and wouldn’t overturn Roe. Though others have challenged Collins’ account of what Kavanaugh said.We’re often told abortion is a divisive issue. The thing is, it’s not. Poll after poll shows most Americans support abortion being broadly legal. Just look at Kansas. Last month the conservative state decisively voted to reject a ballot measure that would restrict abortion rights. (A “ballot measure” is a form of direct democracy where proposed legislation is approved or rejected by voters rather than legislators.) Instead of reflecting on what happened in Kansas, Republicans across the US are now working overtime to try to make it harder to pass ballot measures.Republicans may be doing their best to suppress democracy but it’s not dead yet. “To those of you who feel that women are inferior, remember you were warned,” Republican South Carolina state senator Sandy Senn recently told colleagues. “I think it’s going to be interesting to see what happens in the November elections. Because this issue is huge. You don’t think that women will vote single-issue on something like this? Because they will.” The problem is, where there’s a will, there’s often a Republican way to subvert it.
      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
      TopicsAbortionOpinionUS politicsRepublicansHealthWomencommentReuse this content More

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      Why Do Women Support Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi?

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      The Fair Observer website uses digital cookies so it can collect statistics on how many visitors come to the site, what content is viewed and for how long, and the general location of the computer network of the visitor. These statistics are collected and processed using the Google Analytics service. Fair Observer uses these aggregate statistics from website visits to help improve the content of the website and to provide regular reports to our current and future donors and funding organizations. The type of digital cookie information collected during your visit and any derived data cannot be used or combined with other information to personally identify you. Fair Observer does not use personal data collected from its website for advertising purposes or to market to you.As a convenience to you, Fair Observer provides buttons that link to popular social media sites, called social sharing buttons, to help you share Fair Observer content and your comments and opinions about it on these social media sites. These social sharing buttons are provided by and are part of these social media sites. They may collect and use personal data as described in their respective policies. Fair Observer does not receive personal data from your use of these social sharing buttons. It is not necessary that you use these buttons to read Fair Observer content or to share on social media. More

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      The Guardian view on the Kansas abortion vote: voice of America | Editorial

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      The Guardian view on the Kansas abortion vote: voice of AmericaEditorialThis week’s vote to defend women’s rights mirrors US opinion on the issue more generally and may shape the midterm elections Nearly 20 years ago, the political writer Thomas Frank authored a bestseller to which he gave the title What’s the Matter with Kansas? It was one of the first books of the post-Bill Clinton era to try to nail the rightwing populism redefining middle America. Mr Frank, who is himself from Kansas, chose the title deliberately. Despite an earlier history of grassroots antitrust activism, 20th- and 21st-century Kansas had dug in ever deeper against progressivism; no Democratic presidential candidate has now won there since 1964. Donald Trump, who epitomises everything about which Mr Frank wrote, carried Kansas with ease in 2016 and 2020.At the heart of Mr Frank’s argument was the view that culture war campaigns on abortion and gay equality have been crucial in persuading economically insecure Kansas voters to move ever more solidly rightwards. Much of the book focuses on how the Democratic party itself contributed to the shift. The consequence of this process seemed to reach an even darker place in 2009 when the pro-choice doctor George Tiller was murdered in the Kansas city of Wichita.Yet on Tuesday voters in Kansas chose to make a stand. In an unexpectedly high turnout contest, they voted to uphold the state’s abortion rights by a 59% to 41% margin. They did this in the face of the widely held view that the US supreme court’s decision to overturn the Roe v Wade judgment has reset America’s political landscape more conservatively. They also defied the expectation that Republicans, not Democrats, would be more energised by the campaign.It is possible that there were special local factors at play in Kansas. The voting paper was confusingly written; abortion rights supporters had to vote “No” not “Yes” to keep the state’s protections. Tuesday was also a day in which hardline conservatives, supporting and supported by Mr Trump, scored well in other states, such as Arizona. Caution is therefore in order in extrapolating too recklessly from the Kansas vote. Nevertheless, the vote was a rallying call. If 59% of the people can vote for abortion rights in Kansas, the likelihood is that at least 59% will vote for them in many other states too, perhaps in at least 40 of the 50. It is also very much in line with national polling showing 57% national disapproval after the supreme court’s ruling. President Biden was right to emphasise in his reaction to the Kansas vote that the majority of Americans support women’s abortion rights.In Kansas at least, the justices have not, after all, had the last word. Most of all, this vote was important for the women of the state. But it has two wider implications. The first is that democracy has hit back, not just at the supreme court ruling, but also at the false idea that the court should have the final say in American politics. The second is that abortion rights may prove to be a potent mobilising issue in the November midterm elections more generally, which indeed they should be. It is high time that Democrats realised they do not have to campaign on economic issues alone and instead took the fight for abortion rights to the Republicans. The Kansas vote should embolden them to do so.TopicsAbortionOpinionHealthWomenUS politicseditorialsReuse this content More

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      Justice department sues Idaho over state’s near-total abortion ban

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      Justice department sues Idaho over state’s near-total abortion banLawsuit is DoJ’s first piece of litigation aimed at protecting abortion access since the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade The Biden administration’s Department of Justice is suing Idaho over the state’s near-total abortion ban, set to take effect on 25 August.The lawsuit is the justice department’s first piece of litigation aimed at protecting abortion access since the US supreme court in June overturned the landmark Roe v Wade decision that established federal abortion rights nearly 50 years earlier.During a press conference on Tuesday, the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, announced the lawsuit alongside representatives from the justice department’s reproductive rights taskforce.Garland said Idaho’s abortion ban violates federal law which mandates that medical providers offer emergency care in the face of serious health consequences – not just in life-saving circumstances. The law makes no exceptions for abortions, regardless of what any state law says.Under Idaho’s law, abortions are only legal for victims of rape or incest as well as to save the life of a pregnant person. Doctors who do not provide sufficient evidence that an abortion was provided under those circumstances could face two to five years in prison and the forfeiture of their medical licenses.“The justice department is going to use every tool we have to ensure reproductive freedom,” Garland told reporters on Tuesday.More than half of US states have either banned or are expected to ban abortion after the supreme court’s decision earlier this summer returned regulation of abortion to the state level.Bans like the one Idaho has imposed are forcing patients seeking abortions to travel hundreds of miles from home, among other consequences.TopicsIdahoAbortionUS politicsHealthWomennewsReuse this content More

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      Female journalist told skirt too short when reporting on Alabama execution

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      Female journalist told skirt too short when reporting on Alabama executionOne journalist reporting on the lethal injection was told her skirt was too short and another said she had a full-body inspection Last Thursday night, the state of Alabama took three hours to find a vein in Joe Nathan James Jr through which officials could pump lethal injection drugs and execute him, a process that the department of corrections insisted was “nothing out of the ordinary”.Alabama appears to specialize in its extraordinary sense of the ordinary, particularly when it comes to the death penalty. It has now emerged that, during that execution, prison officials subjected female reporters who came as witnesses to the proceeding to a clothing inspection, attempting to bar one woman from the death chamber on grounds that her skirt was too short.Ivana Hrynkiw, a journalist for Alabama’s pre-eminent news outlet AL.com, recounted how she was pulled aside by a prison official and told that her skirt was too diminutive to meet regulations. “I tried to pull my skirt to my hips to make the skirt longer, but was told it was still not appropriate,” she recounted on Twitter.The paradox that the state went to such lengths to uphold what it regards as propriety in clothing even as it prepared to kill a man appears to have been lost on the department of corrections. Officials also subjected an Associated Press reporter, Kim Chandler, to a full-body inspection, making her stand to have the length of her clothing checked. Chandler said that such an indignity had never happened to her before in the many times she had covered executions since 2002.Hrynkiw was eventually allowed to enter the death chamber after she borrowed a pair of waterproof fisher’s waders from a photographer, attaching their suspenders under her shirt to keep them up. That was deemed appropriate attire when watching a judicial killing.But even then it didn’t stop. The reporter was informed that her open toe heels were a breach of regulation and she was forced to change into tennis shoes retrieved from her car.“I felt embarrassed to have my body and my clothes questioned in front of a room of people I mostly never met,” Hrynkiw said. “I sat down, tried to stop blushing, and did my work.”After all that, the reporter did her job, and so did Alabama. After three hours digging around for a vein, it found one, and went ahead with the execution.James Jr was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in the 1994 killing of 26-year-old Faith Hall. James Jr and Hall had briefly dated before she rejected him, authorities have said.Hall’s daughters wanted James Jr to spend the rest of his life in prison but pleaded for him to not be executed.TopicsUS newsAlabamaUS politicsWomenWomen in journalismnewsReuse this content More

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      Americans lose faith in the US supreme court

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      The US supreme court has struck down the constitutional right to an abortion, one of several landmark decisions that will affect the lives of millions of Americans for decades to come.
      Jonathan Freedland and Jill Filipovic discuss whether it’s still possible for a deeply divided court of nine judges, a group that now has a 6-3 conservative majority, to keep the promise to the American people of ‘equal protection’, and what happens if it can’t

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      This episode was originally played on Politics weekly America You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts and Spotify Archive: CNN, CBS, C-Span More

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      Anti-abortion movement achieved goal of reversing Roe – but it is far from done

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      Anti-abortion movement achieved goal of reversing Roe – but it is far from done A total end to abortion in the US is the next goal – and how the movement aims to accomplish that depends on who you askThe anti-abortion movement has historically been among the best organized factions in American politics, and for decades has had a seemingly singular goal: overturn Roe v Wade.Last week, that was accomplished and as the anti-abortion movement celebrated its victory via the US supreme court, one question has emerged: what will they do next?The court’s conservative supermajority reversed the landmark 1973 decision, which had granted US women the federal right to terminate a pregnancy. The end to the constitutional right almost immediately led more than half a dozen states to ban the procedure. In the coming weeks and months, more than half of US states are expected to institute severe restrictions or outright bans.But that does not mean the end of the movement. Far from it, in fact.“There still is a singular goal,” said Mary Ziegler, a historian of abortion laws in the US, a visiting law professor at Harvard, and recent author of Dollars for Life: The Anti-Abortion Movement and the Fall of the Republican Establishment. That goal “has never been the overruling of Roe” but fetal personhood – a legal concept that would establish “some kind of recognition of fetal rights”.Global healthcare groups and human rights advocates have called the US court’s decision “an unconscionable attack” on the health and rights of US women and girls, warned it will cause a global chilling effect on reproductive healthcare, and that abortion bans and forced birth will exacerbate already egregious maternal mortality disparities in the US.Nevertheless, the anti-abortion movement has made clear its work is not done. But how to set about achieving the next goal – a total end to abortion in the US – depends on who you ask.Ruth Bader Ginsburg, former liberal supreme court justice and famous supporter of reproductive rights, had argued Roe provided opponents of abortion, “a target to aim at relentlessly”.With the landmark case no longer an impediment to anti-abortion ambitions, “there’s much more of a kind of free-for-all about how you should achieve personhood”, Ziegler said. Now, the once rigidly cohesive movement is wrestling with the best way forward.In Georgia, where a ban on abortion at six weeks gestation is likely to go into effect, anti-abortion leaders immediately called on the Republican governor, Brian Kemp, to impanel to pass a “personhood” amendment to the state’s constitution.Such a law would imbue fertilized eggs with the rights of people, ban embryo selection for in vitro fertilization, and call into question treatment for ectopic pregnancies (in which an embryo implants outside the uterus and is never viable).“We are petitioning him to call a special legislative session,” said Zemmie Fleck, executive director for Georgia Right to Life. “Brian Kemp says he is pro-life, and if he is truly pro-life, then we’re saying this is your time to protect every innocent human life.”Fleck also opposes emergency contraception and some forms of birth control, said there should be no exemptions to allow abortions for rape, incest or fetal abnormalities, and that ectopic pregnancies should be “reimplanted” – though no such procedure exists, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.Whether Georgia Right to Life will endorse prosecuting women, Fleck said, is something the group is now actively considering.“The fact someone is intentionally taking a life is a huge consideration, because we have laws in Georgia that pertain to someone who murders someone,” said Fleck. “But again [we] do not have a strict position statement.”However, anti-abortion campaigners’ strategy in Georgia is just one of many to emerge in the days leading up to and following Roe’s reversal.Former vice-president Mike Pence called for a national abortion ban. The anti-abortion group National Right to Life (NRL) issued model legislation to ban abortion except to save a woman’s life. It also suggested states ban “giving instructions over the telephone, internet or any other medium of communication regarding self-administered abortion”, a suggestion with enormous free speech implications.Anti-abortion leaders in several states called for constitutional amendments to clarify there is no right to abortion, such as in Alaska and Kentucky. West Virginia pioneered this path before the fall of Roe, and Kansas voters are already scheduled to cast ballots on a similar measure on 2 August.Meanwhile, the largest US anti-abortion online media site, Live Action, has been furiously fundraising to “cut through the lies about what the ending of Roe really means for children, women, and families”. One email argued treatment for ectopic pregnancy and miscarriage will remain legal, although reproductive rights advocates said access to such procedures is will probably diminish when obstetricians and gynecologists fear prosecution.Addia Wuchner, executive director of Kentucky Right to Life, argued assertions that anti-abortion activists want to ban some forms of contraception, in vitro fertilization and “monitor ovulation” were not true.“These are the great lies of an industry – I know they want to be called a healthcare service – that has made great profits off the back of women,” Wuchner said about abortion providers, such as obstetricians and gynecologists.Similarly, Wuchner said concerns about the right to contraception and same-sex marriage being overturned in the courts are “blown out of proportion”. Kentucky right to life is neither working to ensure access to birth control, nor to “make it illegal”, she said.When the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, conservative supreme court justice Clarence Thomas explicitly stated the court should “reconsider” cases that established same-sex marriage, same-sex intimacy and the right to contraception. Thomas’s opinion, advocates fear, was an invitation for such rights to be challenged.Debates about how to enforce abortion bans have also emerged. Some progressive prosecutors have made national headlines for refusing to enforce abortion bans. However, conservative local prosecutors have also vowed to vigorously investigate alleged abortion ban violations, such as Benton county, Arkansas, prosecuting attorney Nathan Smith.“We’ll approach it like any other potential crime,” said Smith, who sent a letter to a local Planned Parenthood affiliate assuring them he would seek criminal charges. “If somebody reports an initial violation of the statute, law enforcement will investigate it, and we’ll proceed on a case by case basis like anything else”.In the chaos that has followed the Dobbs decision, the long-term direction of the movement is difficult to predict, Ziegler said, though one aim remains – a total ban on abortion.“Ultimately, the end goal is the same for everybody,” Ziegler said.TopicsUS supreme courtAbortionWomenLaw (US)US politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Louisiana judge blocks abortion ban amid uproar after Roe v Wade ruling

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      Louisiana judge blocks abortion ban amid uproar after Roe v Wade rulingState temporarily blocked from enforcing ban as other US states pass ‘trigger laws’ designed to severely curtail access to abortion A Louisiana judge on Monday temporarily stopped the state from enforcing Republican-backed laws banning abortion, set to take effect after the US supreme court ended the constitutional right to the procedure last week.Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez calls for supreme court justices to be impeachedRead moreLouisiana is one of 13 states which passed “trigger laws”, to ban or severely restrict abortions once the supreme court overturned the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that recognized a right to the procedure. It did so on Friday, stoking uproar among progressives and protests and counter-protests on the streets of major cities.In New Orleans on Monday, an Orleans Parish civil district court judge, Robin Giarrusso, issued a temporary restraining order, blocking the state ban.The case before Judge Giarruso, a Democrat, was brought by Hope Medical Group for Women in Shreveport, one of three abortion clinics in Louisiana.“We’re going to do what we can,” Kathaleen Pittman, administrator of Hope Medical Group, told the Associated Press. “It could all come to a screeching halt.”The Louisiana lawsuit is one of several challenging Republican-backed abortion laws under state constitutions.In Utah, a branch of Planned Parenthood sued on Saturday over a trigger ban. In Ohio, abortion rights advocates plan to challenge a ban on abortions after six weeks that took effect on Friday. A Florida ban on abortions after 15 weeks is also the subject of a request for a temporary block.In Arizona, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and an abortion-rights group filed an emergency motion on Saturday, seeking to block a 2021 law they worry can be used to halt all abortions.On the national stage on Monday, a group of 22 attorneys general issued a statement promising to “leverage our collective resources” to help women in states where abortions are banned.A statement said: “Abortion care is healthcare. Period.”The statement was signed by the attorneys general of California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, the District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.They said: “We stand together, as our states’ chief law officers, to proudly say that we will not back down in the fight to protect the rights of pregnant people in our states and across the country.“While the US supreme court’s decision reverses nearly half a century of legal precedent and undermines the rights of people across the United States, we’re joining together to reaffirm our commitment to supporting and expanding access to abortion care nationwide.”The statement added: “Ultimately, what harms people in some states harms us all. The future and wellbeing of our nation is intrinsically tied to the ability of our residents to exercise their fundamental rights.“… If you seek access to abortion and reproductive healthcare, we’re committed to using the full force of the law to … fight for your rights and stand up for our laws.“We will support our partners and service providers. We will take on those who seek to control your bodies and leverage our collective resources – thousands of lawyers and dedicated public servants across our states. Together, we will persist.”02:03As of Saturday, abortion services had stopped in at least 11 states. Speaking to the Associated Press, Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project, said the group was looking at “all options” to protect access.But lawsuits may only buy time. Even if courts block restrictions, lawmakers could address any cited flaws.That is likely to be the case in Louisiana. The plaintiffs in the suit there do not deny that the state can ban abortion. Instead, they contend Louisiana has multiple and conflicting trigger mechanisms in law.The suit says the trigger laws, the first of which was passed in 2006, make it impossible to tell when they are in effect, if one or all are in force and what conduct is prohibited. The lawsuit contends that such vagueness has resulted in state and local officials issuing conflicting statements about whether the trigger bans are in effect.Judge Giarruso wrote: “Each of the three trigger bans excepts different conduct, making it impossible to know what abortion care is illegal and what is allowed, including what care can be provided to save a woman’s life or end a medically futile pregnancy.”Giarruso scheduled an 8 July hearing to decide whether to further block enforcement of the ban. The Center for Reproductive Rights, which filed the suit on behalf of the clinic, said abortion care was resuming in Louisiana.The Republican state attorney general, Jeff Landry, did not immediately comment. On Friday, he said those who challenged state bans would be “in for a rough fight”.Prosecutors in some Democratic-led cities in Republican-led states have indicated they will not enforce abortion bans.The New Orleans district attorney, Jason Williams, said he would not criminalize abortions and that the overturning of Roe v Wade “is a cruel and irresponsible stripping of a woman’s agency”.‘A matter of life and death’: maternal mortality rate will rise without Roe, experts warnRead moreCondemning leaders for not focusing on issues such as lifting children out of poverty, he added: “It would not be wise or prudent to shift our priority from tackling senseless violence happening in our city to investigating the choices women make with regard to their own body.”On Monday, in light of moves by Cincinnati city leaders to support abortion access, Joseph Deters, the Republican county prosecutor, said: “I have repeatedly stated it is dangerous when prosecutors pick and choose what laws they want to enforce. When prosecutors do not follow their oath, it will promote lawlessness and challenge the basic structures of separation of powers.”Regarding the Louisiana case, Nancy Northup, chief executive of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said: “A public health emergency is about to engulf the nation. We will be fighting to restore access in Louisiana and other states for as long as we can.“Every day that a clinic is open and providing abortion services can make a difference in a person’s life.”TopicsRoe v WadeLouisianaAbortionWomenHealthUS politicsUS supreme courtnewsReuse this content More