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      How the fall of Roe shattered Republicans’ midterm dreams

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      How the fall of Roe shattered Republicans’ midterm dreamsWomen and young people, furious over losing federal abortion protections, helped Democrats defy expectations This summer, after a tectonic decision by the supreme court to overturn Roe v Wade eliminated the nearly 50-year-old constitutional right to abortion, Joe Biden predicted American women would revolt. Republicans, however, saw a “red wave” brewing, fueled by widespread economic discontent.On Thursday, after Democrats defied historical expectations in the first major election of the post-Roe era, Biden effectively declared: “I told ya so.”Young voters hailed as key to Democratic successes in midtermsRead more“Women in America made their voices heard, man,” the president told a crowd of supporters at the Howard Theater in Washington on Thursday. “Y’all showed up and beat the hell out of them.”The 2022 midterm elections were expected to usher in staggering losses for Democrats. The party in power typically fares poorly, and with Biden’s approval ratings mired in the low 40s, Republicans were expected to make significant gains.That is not how the results unfolded. As the vote count continues in several key races, Republicans appear on track to win a far narrower House majority than they hoped, while Democrats may retain control of the Senate.As a fuller portrait of the results emerges, advocates, Democrats and even some Republicans say one thing is clear: abortion proved a defining issue. Fury over the loss of federal abortion protections galvanized women and young people and delivered a string of unexpected victories for Democrats and new protections for reproductive rights.“You cannot have half of the population have their body autonomy put under threat and not expect it to be mobilizing,” said Heidi Sieck, the CEO and co-founder of #VoteProChoice. “And that’s what we saw across the board with young people showing up, women showing up, newly registered women being more than two- thirds of the newly registered voters.”Exit polls conducted for news networks by Edison Research showed that abortion was the top issue for many Americans, especially people under the age of 30. And about 60% of voters said they were dissatisfied or angry with the supreme court’s decision to overturn Roe, according to exit polls conducted by AP Votecast.In every state where an abortion-related measure was on the ballot, voters chose either to enshrine protections or reject new limits. And it was a decisive issue in battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania, where the future of abortion access was at risk.In Michigan, voters decisively approved a ballot initiative establishing a state constitutional right to reproductive freedom, effectively stopping a 1931 abortion ban from ever taking effect.They also lifted Democrats to power at all levels of government, re-electing Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Attorney General Dana Nessel and wresting control of the state legislature from Republicans for the first time in decades. Whitmer defeated Tudor Dixon, a Trump-backed Republican who said she opposed abortion in nearly all cases, including when the pregnancy resulted from rape or incest.Before the election, the Michigan congresswoman Elissa Slotkin, who was considered one of the most vulnerable Democrats, told the Guardian that she believed her political fate was tied to the result of the state’s abortion proposal. On Tuesday, she held on comfortably.In Pennsylvania, where exit polls showed that abortion was the top issue on voters’ minds, Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor, won in a landslide. He defeated Doug Mastriano, a far-right Republican and one of his party’s most strident opponents of abortion rights.The Democrat John Fetterman won Pennsylvania’s race for Senate against Republican Mehmet Oz, after seizing on a remark that Oz made during a debate in which he appeared to suggest that the decision to have an abortion should rest with women, doctors and “local political leaders”.The issue resonated in red states and blue ones. Like Michigan, California and Vermont approved ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights in their state constitutions. Meanwhile, in deep red Kentucky, voters rejected a ballot initiative that would have explicitly denied constitutional protections for abortion, even as they granted the Republican senator Rand Paul another term. And in Montana, another reliably conservative state, an attempt to impose new restrictions on the procedure failed.David Shor, a Democratic data analyst, told the Guardian’s Politics Weekly America that abortion had been “absolutely instrumental” in Democrats’ successes this cycle.“Abortion really up until very recently was a pretty neutral issue for Democrats – that didn’t mean it was bad, but it wasn’t necessarily a vote-getter in most of the country,” he said. But following the the supreme court decision, he said, abortion suddenly became “the single best issue for Democrats”.“The extent to which voters cared about abortion also skyrocketed,” he said. “Out of the 33 issue areas that we track, abortion went from being the 30th out of 33 most important issues to being the 12th basically overnight.”In the wake of Roe’s fall, Democrats took every opportunity to highlight their support for abortion rights and contrast it with their opponents’ views. They flooded the airwaves with nearly half a billion dollars on abortion-related ads.Voters gave Democrats a wide advantage on the issue, as debates over the loss of abortion rights raised new questions about miscarriage care and exceptions for rape, incest and life of the mother. Republicans, on the defensive, sought to avoid the issue. In several instances, Republican candidates removed references to abortion from their campaign websites.But months later, as the campaign season came to a close, Democrats were second-guessing the strategy. Many pre-election polls showed voters worried more about inflation and crime than abortion. These surveys prompted a bout of angst and finger-pointing. Some Democrats argued that the party had focused too singularly on reproductive rights at the expense of offering a clear economic message.But abortion rights advocates say that logic is flawed – that abortion is an economic issue.“If you’re saying inflation, if you’re saying economy, you’re saying reproductive freedom as well,” Sieck said. “We absolutely miss that connection at our peril.”After Tuesday night, there was little doubt that the issue had been decisive in key races.“For everyone who said abortion was a losing issue; for everyone who said abortion is controversial; for everyone who said abortion is a fringe concern and not the meat-and-potatoes kitchen table problem Michiganders care about: you’re wrong, and the ‘yes’ votes prove it,” said Mini Timmaraju, the president of Naral Pro-Choice America.Even some Republicans conceded the issue may have cost them electorally.“If we lost because of abortion, an issue that was not on the ballot, if we lost because I’m pro-life, because I believe every life has dignity, I’m OK with that,” Matt Birk, the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor in Minnesota said in a concession speech.The string of victories for supporters of abortion rights followed an August vote in Kansas, when voters overwhelmingly rejected an attempt to remove abortion rights from its state constitution. The result underscored the political potency of an issue Democrats had long tiptoed around.On Tuesday, Laura Kelly, the state’s Democratic governor, held off a Republican challenge as did Democratic congresswoman Sharice Davids. With the veto pen, Kelly, like Wisconsin’s governor, Tony Evers, who also won re-election in a closely watched race, can block any potential legislation that would impose new restrictions on the procedure.In Wisconsin and North Carolina, Democrats kept Republicans from winning a supermajority in their state legislatures, meaning lawmakers will not have the power to override a Democratic governor’s veto and pass new abortion restrictions.There were some bright spots for anti-abortion advocates. Conservative judges were elected to the state supreme courts in Ohio and North Carolina, an encouraging sign for proponents bracing for a barrage of challenges to new laws restricting the procedure. Though Democrats may keep the US Senate, they failed to win 52 seats, enough to overcome the resistance in their party to eliminating the filibuster and codifying Roe.And key races have yet to be called, including in Arizona, where the Republican nominee for governor, Kari Lake, has backed a territorial-era abortion ban temporarily halted by a judge.None of what unfolded this election cycle surprised longtime supporters of reproductive rights, but they hope the results will finally convince Democrats that abortion is not only a winning political issue, but a foundational one that should be central to their campaign strategy and governing agendas at the state and federal level.“Abortion is a winning issue and will continue to be in elections to come,” Timmaraju said on Friday. “That means Democrats need to keep reproductive freedom at the top of their policy agenda and fight to not only codify Roe but expand access to abortion and birth control.”TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsAbortionWomenUS supreme courtDemocratsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      The US made women second-class citizens. Now we must give a stinging rebuke | Moira Donegan

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      The US made women second-class citizens. Now we must give a stinging rebukeMoira DoneganThe supreme court edict overturning Roe v Wade said women are ‘not without electoral and political power’. That feels almost like a dare Organized feminism has been on the decline in the US since the 1980s, with the radicalism of the second wave giving way to a more diffuse, less focused feminist movement consisting of NGOs, campus activists, online discourse and HR inclusion initiatives. In a way, this is normal. Students of the movement have long spoken of feast and fallow years for feminism, eruptions of activism that are followed by long and virulent backlashes.But feminism has perhaps never received such a dramatic and immediate setback as it did this June. The supreme court’s decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization undid the major legal achievement of the second wave era, reversing Roe v Wade and ending the constitutional right to an abortion.The result has been chaos, with so-called “trigger bans” blasting into enforcement in some states, long-dormant laws from before the era of women’s suffrage being revived in others and still other states left in limbo, as abortion flickers in and out of legality, depending on the proclivities of whichever judge is determining whichever injunction. Children and teens who are pregnant as a result of incest, rape or exploitation are now forced to travel across state lines for abortions, because they live in states where a fetus or embryo is valued more highly than their own health and potential. Women whose pregnancies are doomed are forced to wait, carrying fetuses they know will not live, or to slowly bleed out their miscarriages until either the fetus dies or they go septic.There’s an incalculable amount of cruelty now being forced on pregnant women, and there’s also an insidious kind of debasement being imposed on all women, pregnant or not. Millions of American women and trans people are now living in states where their lives are not their own, where an unplanned pregnancy can derail their educations, careers or plans, where they must live under the indignity of the knowledge that the state can compel them to give birth. That injury is not the kind of acute horror story that we see coming out of states where bans are now in effect. But it is an injury that has been done to each and every woman in America.This indignity is political. For the past five decades, during the Roe era, American women were endowed with a basic level of respect by the right to abortion. They could not be forced to carry a pregnancy to term; their bodies, at least on paper, were their own. This principle lent women a sense of worth and equality under the law, the sense that the freedoms and responsibilities of self-determination and self-respect – of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness – so revered in the American tradition were theirs, too. The idea was that women were made, by Roe, into full citizens – not members of some lesser class needing monitoring or protection, but equal participants in the American project.This idea was so powerful and potent to American women’s identity that it did not matter what the reality of Roe was. It did not matter that the decision itself was built on legal reasoning about a right to privacy, instead of a more secure, more honest reasoning about equality; it did not matter that the supreme court had never recognized American women as having their own individual right to reject pregnancy. Over the 49 years of its existence, Roe became more than just the 1973 court decision and its logic. It became a symbol, a shorthand for the baseline preconditions of women’s full citizenship.Dobbs erased both the law and the symbol. Women no longer have a constitutional right to an abortion, and we no longer have the dignity that that right gave us. We are now, in many states, subject to laws that criminalize and surveil us, that assess our needs for medical care based on whether we are suffering enough to deserve it, that in many cases treat blobs of tissue, laughably far from anything human, as having rights and interests that trump our own. In one of the most intimate and life-defining aspects of our existence, we find ourselves not quite treated as adults, not allowed to make our own choices, not trusted to know our own interests and not valued in our own right. In pregnancy, women are now less citizens than they are subjects.In his majority opinion ending the constitutional right to abortion, Samuel Alito asserts that he’s not hurting women on the basis of their sex at all, that he is merely handing the issue “back to the states”, as if any state law banning or restricting abortion did not inherently make women less equal. But Alito asserted that women who did not like the Dobbs decision could simply vote to reverse its effects in their own states, and hope that a majority of other voters agreed with them that they should be full citizens with self-determination. “Women are not without electoral or political power,” Alito said, perhaps somewhat regretfully. If they didn’t like the status of second-class citizenship to which his ruling had consigned them, why didn’t they simply vote themselves out of it? Maybe we will. During the midterm elections, American women can vote en masse to restore reproductive freedom.Of course, voting will not be sufficient to restore abortion rights and women’s full citizenship in America. For that, we will need a revival of an organized and radical feminist movement, committed to local engagement, long-term relationship – and institution-building and direct action. The seeds of that movement are already beginning to germinate in the local abortion funds, clandestine mutual-aid efforts and grassroots mobilizations that have helped fill the well of need in the wake of Dobbs. And of course, voting is not easy for everyone – it has been made less easy, and less meaningful, by the actions of the same supreme court.But the midterm elections represent an immediate opportunity for American women to exercise that political power of which Alito spoke. The elections can preserve Democratic majorities in the House and Senate, which can stave off Republican ambitions to ban abortion nationwide; if the majorities are large enough, they may even be able to fulfill Joe Biden’s promise to reinstate Roe by statute. Voting for Democratic governors, attorneys general and state legislators can blunt or reverse the impact of state abortion bans and misogynist laws: a local election, for many women voters, means a choice between a district attorney who will prosecute patients and providers of abortions, and one who will not.Alito’s whole opinion drips with contempt, but the line about American women – that we are “not without electoral and political power” – felt like a dare. American women do have power, perhaps more than Samuel Alito realizes. It’s time to call his bluff.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionAbortionWomenRoe v WadeUS supreme courtLaw (US)HealthcommentReuse this content More

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      ‘My gut-felt, heartbreaking decision’ – Tracey Emin on her ‘A-Z of abortion’ blanket

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      ‘My gut-felt, heartbreaking decision’ – Tracey Emin on her ‘A-Z of abortion’ blanketThe artist made The Last of the Gold to help women considering a termination. With the issue dominating tomorrow’s US midterms, the work seems more potent than ever “I felt pretty vulnerable. I was so broke, homeless, in debt … I had worked so hard at my education and coming from my background … I knew I wanted to be an artist and I knew that if I had a baby on my own, I felt that I had zero chance of that happening. It seemed ironic that now after all my education and fighting … that I was going to end up being a single mother … And I just thought, I can’t bring a baby into the world with all this …”These are the words of Tracey Emin reflecting on her two abortions from the early 1990s. They highlight the reality endured by so many women around the world. Emin has been making highly political work for decades. Through painting, textiles, films and more, she unveils the rawness and truths of life. Abortion is an issue she has constantly explored, yet its importance in her work has too often been dismissed.TopicsArt and designThe great women’s art bulletinTracey EminAbortionUS politicsWomenfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Abortion bans create ‘insurmountable barriers’ for incarcerated women in US

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      Abortion bans create ‘insurmountable barriers’ for incarcerated women in USSupreme court’s overturning of Roe will make reproductive healthcare in prisons a lot worse than it already is, experts warn When the US supreme court decided to strip away constitutional abortion protections in June, it effectively made the situation for many pregnant incarcerated women who are seeking abortions a lot worse.Conditions for reproductive healthcare in many US prison facilities are already often abysmal. With many pregnant inmates regularly facing dire circumstances including being denied abortions or being forced to give birth while shackled, experts warn that the overturn of Roe v Wade will now result in even more severe consequences for an already marginalized community.From 1980 to 2020, the number of incarcerated women across the country increased by over 475%, according to the Sentencing Project. In 2020, Idaho led the nation in the highest female state imprisonment rate at 110 per 100,000 female residents, followed by Oklahoma, South Dakota, Arizona, Wyoming, Kentucky and Montana. As of two years ago, the imprisonment rate for Black women was 1.7 times the rate of the imprisonment for white women. Meanwhile, Latinx women were imprisoned at 1.3 times the rate of white women.The Prison Policy Initiative found that an average of 58,000 people are pregnant each year when they enter local jails or prisons. In many of the states that already have the highest female state imprisonment rates, they also now have strict abortion laws ban the procedure almost entirely.As a result, the overturn of Roe v Wade is expected to make the lives of pregnant incarcerated people who are seeking abortions increasingly difficult.“People experiencing incarceration and pregnancy in states where abortion has been severely restricted or outlawed altogether, will likely face new barriers as jails and prisons seek to hide behind the supreme court’s decision to avoid their constitutional obligation to provide healthcare (including abortion) to people in custody,” Alexa Kolbi-Molinas, deputy director of the Reproductive Freedom Project at the American Civil Liberties Union told the Guardian.“Even where correctional staff and officials do not deliberately block access to care, the reduced availability of services and need to travel even greater distances to access legal abortion, and the greater demand for services in states where abortion is still legal, will only exacerbate all the financial and logistical obstacles that already existed,” she added.A study led by Carolyn Sufrin, the director of the Advocacy and Research on Reproductive Wellness of Incarcerated People program at Johns Hopkins University, surveyed incarcerated people’s abortion access across 22 state prison systems and six county jail systems.The study, which collected policy data for 12 months in 2016 to 2017 and was eventually published in 2021, found that there were already a myriad of obstacles such as self-payment requirements that can prevent a pregnant inmate from obtaining the care. Out of the 19 states that then permitted abortions, two-thirds required the pregnant inmate to pay.Only 11 of the 816 pregnancies in state and federal prisons that ended during the study time period were abortions, or 1.3%. 33 out of 224 pregnancies that ended at study jails were abortions, with over half of those happening during the first trimester.“There were already few abortions in prison settings…so will [the overturn of Roe] impact abortion access for an incarcerated individual? Absolutely,” Sufrin told the Guardian.For a lot of incarcerated women across the country, many remain behind bars because they are unable to afford bail. As a result, self-payment requirements for those seeking abortions are often times very difficult to fulfill.“State prison systems or jails sometimes would force pregnant people to pay for the procedure, sometimes including even the cost of transport or the time to have prison guards with them, which is problematic because normally if an incarcerated person is going off site for any other medical procedure, they wouldn’t be charged for the cost of transport or the time for the guards,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, told the Guardian.“Trying to expect those people in jails to come up with the money for transport to an offsite abortion procedure when they can’t even come up with the money to make bail, to go home to their families, really creates an insurmountable barrier.”In 2017, Kei’Choura Cathey, a former inmate who discovered she was pregnant in August 2015 while awaiting trial, sued the Maury county sheriff in Tennessee, claiming that he denied her the right to an abortion because her pregnancy was not a threat to her health nor the result of rape or incest.Cathey’s only option at the time was to post bail so she could leave jail to receive the abortion. However, her bail was set at a staggering $1m. Eventually, her bond was lowered to $8,000. However, according to the lawsuit, by the time Cathey was able to post bond, she was already more than six months into her pregnancy, thus making her abortion illegal.For a lot of pregnant incarcerated women seeking abortions in a post-Roe reality, experts fear that they are likely going to face similar circumstances like Cathey.“Prisons or jails will argue…that’s an elective procedure so we are not going to cover it,” said Kendrick, which in turn will potentially force many incarcerated pregnant women who are unable to cover the procedure to carry their pregnancies to term.For a lot of pregnant inmates, birthing conditions in prison facilities are already dire. Numerous reports in recent years have emerged of inmates either being forced to deliver while shackled to their beds or having to deliver their babies on their own.While some states – and in effect, prison facilities – are seeing outright bans in abortions as a result of the supreme court’s ruling in June, others have not overhauled abortion protections just yet.In Wyoming, for example, abortion is currently legal but remains restricted as it is only allowed to be performed until fetal “viability”.In a statement to the Guardian, Wyoming’s department of corrections said that the supreme court ruling on Roe in June has not affected its policies on abortion related issues.“The WDOC has not had any change in policy or care for abortion related issues in the WDOC for inmates or offenders. The WDOC does on occasion have female inmates that are pregnant during incarnation and they are cared for at the Wyoming Medium Correctional Institute in Torrington, WY. We rely upon the expertise of expert medical advice in all decisions related to the health and wellness of our inmates.”Ultimately, according to Sufrin, “There’s tremendous variability in what healthcare service deliveries look like on the ground and systems are not really set up to provide the full scope of comprehensive pregnancy and postpartum care for people.”For pregnant incarcerated people who are sent off-site for abortions, another issue that has emerged since Roe’s overturn is the hesitancy or even outright refusal from external healthcare providers to perform the abortions.“We’ve already seen instances of local hospitals turning people away and not providing medically necessary care because of ambiguities in the law, [such as] there might still be a heartbeat, those sorts of things. Then the carceral facility is left to manage dangerous bleeding or an ectopic pregnancy and they’re just very much ill-equipped to do that and don’t want to and should not,” explained Sufrin.“Even in the best of circumstances, there’s still a lot of constraints and a lot of trauma that pregnant folks experience. So now after the Dobb’s decision, we anticipate… that we’re going to have more pregnant people in our country and fewer people with access abortion. And I believe that we will see that in incarcerated settings as well,” she said.TopicsUS prisonsWomenUS politicsAbortionUS supreme courtLaw (US)newsReuse this content More

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      Republican abortion bans restrict women’s access to other essential medicine

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      Republican abortion bans restrict women’s access to other essential medicine Many pharmacies and physicians are forced to deny patients access to drugs, such as methotrexate, that can be used to help induce an abortionA few weeks after the supreme court’s 24 June decision to overturn the nationwide abortion rights established by Roe v Wade, the pharmacy chain Walgreens sent Annie England Noblin a message, informing her that her monthly prescription of methotrexate was held up.Noblin, a 40-year-old college instructor in rural Missouri, never had trouble getting her monthly prescription of methotrexate for her rheumatoid arthritis. So she went to her local Walgreens to figure out why, standing in line with other customers as she waited for an explanation.When it was finally her turn, a pharmacist informed Noblin – in front of the other customers behind her – that she could not release the medication until she received confirmation from Noblin’s doctor that Noblin would not use it to have an abortion.Since the supreme court’s elimination of federal abortion rights, many states have been enacting laws which highly restrict access to abortion, affecting not only pregnant women but also other patients as well as healthcare providers.As a result, many pharmacies and physicians have been forced to deny and delay patients’ access to essential medications – such as methotrexate – that can be used to help induce an abortion.Noblin is one of the 5 million methotrexate users across the US and one of the country’s many autoimmune patients. Although she was eventually given her prescription, Noblin and other patients are now forced to grapple both with a monthly invasion of privacy at pharmacies that ask them about their reproductive choices as well as the possibility of being wholly denied the medication in the future due to restrictive laws.For 60 years, methotrexate has been considered a cheap, standard treatment for nearly 60% of rheumatoid arthritis patients. It is also widely used to treat other autoimmune diseases, including Crohn’s disease, lupus and psoriasis. And, because it inhibits certain cellular functions, it has been used to treat a variety of cancers including leukemia, breast cancer, lung cancer and lymphoma.But methotrexate also treats ectopic pregnancies, in which a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus. Although rare, with only about 100,000 occurring annually, ectopic pregnancies are fatal for fetuses and can severely jeopardize mothers’ health. Therefore, the only treatment is abortion, and methotrexate commonly is combined with other medicine to perform the procedure.Methotrexate’s versatility prompted the World Health Organization to classify it as an “essential medicine”. Yet Roe v Wade’s reversal has significantly stunted access to the drug – even for patients who are not pregnant and simply require the drug to treat other conditions.Numerous health organizations have confirmed reports of methotrexate being denied to women since the federal abortion rights were eliminated.Calling the drug “an important part” of caring for the illness it is dedicated to fighting, the Lupus Foundation of America said: “We are aware of reports that some people are having difficulty accessing methotrexate in the wake of the supreme court’s ruling [in June].”Similarly, the American College of Rheumatology said that it is aware of the “emerging concerns surrounding access to needed treatments such as #MTX [methotrexate] after the recent decision” from the supreme court in the Dobbs case that led to Roe v Wade’s reversal.In Missouri, abortion is completely banned with limited exceptions for saving the pregnant person’s life or to prevent serious risk to that person’s physical health. As a result, for someone like Noblin, being banned from getting access in Missouri to her monthly doses of methotrexate – even if temporarily – was and is still quite damaging.Methotrexate helps Noblin and others alleviate pain as well as swelling in their hands and shoulder joints that occasionally becomes so excruciating that it hinders their ability to get dressed or drive to work.“If I weren’t taking it,” Noblin told the Guardian, “I don’t know how I would be able to function.”After her pharmacy got confirmation from her doctor that she was not going to be using the drug to induce an abortion, Noblin was finally able to get her prescription for July. In August, Noblin went into the pharmacy again, expecting the process to be smoother this time around. However, to her surprise, she was required to consult with a pharmacist before getting the medication and confirm that she was not pregnant and didn’t intend to become pregnant while taking the medication.Noblin told the pharmacist it was not their business. The pharmacist then told Noblin that she would not be able to get her medication if she did not answer the question.“I’m going to have to answer [that] every single month before they will even consider giving me the medication,” Noblin said.Additionally, another problem that Noblin and many others face is potentially being forced to spend $14,000 a month without insurance for Humira as a brand-name alternative. And they are worried about prosecution by their states.Noblin said she is on birth control but frets to think if she still gets pregnant.In that case she said she would get an abortion in Illinois, which has protected abortion rights. But would she be exposed to prosecution, accused of lying because she would have told a pharmacist she didn’t intend to get pregnant?“It feels like I don’t have any control over my own body,” Noblin said. “My body belongs to Missouri.”Jennifer Crow, a 48-year-old from Tennessee, faced similar issues after the supreme court eliminated federal abortion protections. On 1 July, Crow, who has inflammatory arthritis, received an automated call from her CVS pharmacy, informing her that her refill was declined.The call came in during Friday evening on a holiday weekend. As a result, Crow was left without her weekly dose of methotrexate.Before she started methotrexate, Crow’s joints would become too stiff and sore for her to move without pain in the mornings, limiting her mobility significantly.“Methotrexate gave me back my independence,” she told the Guardian. “I knew without it, I’d be right back to limited mobility and lots of pain.”Four days later, the pain and stiffness started to return. She also began panicking, unsure if she’d ever be able to get her medication because she and her Georgia-based medical providers were both in states that implemented abortion bans after the Dobbs decision.She couldn’t understand why she was in that position, given that she’d had a hysterectomy years earlier. Eventually, Crow found out that CVS refused her refill because the chain had asked pharmacists to decline filling methotrexate prescriptions unless they indicated a diagnosis unrelated to an abortion, a practice Crow finds “invasive and unnecessary”.Crow, like Noblin, eventually got her prescription refilled. But since her treatment’s disruption she’s struggled with increased pain and decreased mobility.“The Dobbs decision has many unintended consequences, and as a middle-aged woman without a uterus, I didn’t think it would affect my care,” she said.Complicating matters: methotrexate is not the only essential medication that many are now struggling to access, despite the US health and human services department’s guidance on laws prohibiting pharmacies from rejecting patients with prescriptions for medications that may end a pregnancy.People on misoprostol – which prevents stomach ulcers for those who take aspirin, ibuprofen or naproxen – are also facing access hurdles because the drug can also be combined with other medication to induce abortion, said the Global Healthy Living Foundation’s chief legal officer, Steven Newmark. Such disruptions not only can lead to “serious health consequences”, but they violate patients’ treatment preferences, Newmark added.Nonetheless, methotrexate vividly illustrates the uncertainty created by Roe’s reversal. Texas lawmakers have made it a felony to dispense methotrexate there to someone who is past seven weeks pregnant and uses the medication to terminate a pregnancy.There have been reports from doctors that some pharmacies are refusing to carry methotrexate and other certain essential medication entirely. And some physicians have refused to prescribe those medications to patients who may become pregnant, citing concerns about prosecution.In a joint statement by multiple pharmacy organizations across the country, pharmacists and healthcare providers expressed concern towards “state laws that limit patients’ access to medically necessary medications and impede physicians and pharmacists from using their professional judgment”.The statement went on to call for clear guidance from state boards of medicine and pharmacy, agencies and other policymakers.To Rachel Rebouché, an expert in reproductive health law and dean of Temple University’s law school, the largest problem is clear.“The biggest issue is the confusion,” Rebouché said.TopicsAbortionRepublicansHealthWomenUS politicsMissourinewsReuse this content More

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      Nearly all abortions become illegal in Arizona

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      Nearly all abortions become illegal in ArizonaSeveral clinics halt procedure as dual measures, including 19th-century ban with no exception for rape or incest, take effect Almost all abortions became illegal in Arizona on Saturday, after a new law banning abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy took effect and a judge lifted an almost 50-year-old injunction that blocked a near-total ban on abortions from being enforced in the state.Judge Kellie Johnson of Pima county’s superior court released a ruling on Friday that allowed the enforcement of the decades-old ban, a day before a new law that would ban most procedures after 15 weeks was scheduled to take effect, reported the Washington Post.The law Johnson reinstated dates from 1864 and bans all abortions with no exception for rape or incest. The only exception involves a recipient whose life is in danger.The law was later updated and codified in 1901, before the 1973 US supreme court decision known as Roe v Wade that established nationwide abortion rights. Many states failed to update their laws after the provision of those federal abortion protections, which the US supreme court’s current conservative majority eliminated in June.Immediately after Johnson’s ruling, several Arizona clinics that provided abortions stopped carrying out the procedure to avoid criminal charges for their medical professionals, forcing almost all patients in need of an abortion to travel out of state.Those who have already stopped offering abortions included Planned Parenthood along with two other abortion providers, the Associated Press reported.Under Arizona’s new anti-abortion law, doctors or other healthcare professionals who terminate pregnancies could face between two and five years in prison.Abortion rights advocates and Democratic legislators condemned the new law in Arizona as well as Johnson’s ruling.The president and CEO of the Arizona branch of Planned Parenthood, Brittany Fonteno, called the ban “archaic” and said it was “sending Arizonians back nearly 150 years”, referring to when the law was first written, according to the Arizona Republic.The Arizona senator Krysten Sinema called out Johnson’s ruling on Twitter, writing in part: “A woman’s healthcare decisions should be between her, her family, and her doctor. Today’s decision removes basic rights Arizona women have relied upon for over a century and endangers their health, safety, and wellbeing.”Arizona’s other US senator, Mark Kellyposted on Twitter: “Repealing Roe v Wade set Arizona women’s rights back decades. This decision sets them back 158 years, to before Arizona was even a state. I won’t stop until we restore abortion rights so my granddaughter can have the same freedoms my grandmother did.”What’s the difference between miscarriage and abortion? For some women, it’s hard to tellRead moreJohnson’s ruling has also caused confusion statewide, with some calling for the enforcement of the harsher ban codified in 1901 and others wanting only the 15-week ban to be enforced, reported the Post.The Arizona attorney general, Mark Brnovich, who filed to have the injunction blocking the older ban lifted, has argued that the harsher of the two laws will take precedent, reports the New York Times.Meanwhile, Arizona’s governor, Doug Ducey, has stated the 15-week ban will be followed, with a representative of his office telling the Times that the governor is proud to have signed the ban. However, Ducey has not clarified whether the more restrictive law will be enforced.Johnson, for her part, has indicated that the more restrictive law should be followed versus the 15-week ban.“Most recently in 2022, the legislature enacted a 15-week gestational age limitation on abortion,” the judge wrote. “The legislature expressly included in the session law that the 15-week gestational age limitation” would not “repeal” the previous ban.Legal experts have also warned that the previously approved 15-week ban may no longer be tenable, with Loyola Marymount University family law professor Kaiponanea Matsumura telling the Post that Brnovich’s position as attorney general “opens the door to prosecutions under that law”.Arizona is now among at least 14 states which have outlawed most abortions. Several more have similar bans that are temporarily blocked amid legal wrangling over whether or not they can be enforced.TopicsArizonaAbortionUS politicsWomenHealthnewsReuse this content More

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      A new generation of voters empowered by Roe: Politics Weekly America – podcast

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      Poppy Noor has been looking into how the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v Wade back in June might influence midterm elections this November.
      She tells Jonathan Freedland that after Kansas voters chose to keep abortion legal in their state in a surprise result last month, she spoke to three people in Michigan about why they’re canvassing to get more voters registered before a similar ballot on reproductive rights.

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      Want to see political change? Look to the margins | Rebecca Solnit

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      Want to see political change? Look to the marginsRebecca SolnitChange begins in the shadows, not the limelight. Once you see that you see how powerful we can be These days I think of myself as a tortoise at the mayfly party. By that, I mean I try to see the long trajectory of change behind current events, because it takes time to see change, and understanding change is essential to understanding politics and culture, let alone trying to participate in them. The short view generates incomprehension and ineffectuality.Events, like living beings, have genealogies and evolutions, and to know those means knowing who they are, how they got there, and who and what they’re connected to. If you follow them either in real time or the historical record, you can often see power that emerges from below and ideas that move from the margins to the center. You can see how it all works. And yet these trajectories and genealogies are often left out of the news, the conversation and apparently the conception of how something came to pass.Change itself becomes invisible when your timeframe is shorter than that change, and the short-term view breeds defeatism and despair. Not long ago, people would announce to me that feminism had failed, apparently unable to recognize the extraordinary changes in the legal and cultural status of women over the past half century, or assuming that dismantling millennia of patriarchy was a simple task that should be all wrapped up in a few decades. We have just begun.Forgetting is everywhere. Take the Biden administration’s August announcement of a broad package of student loan relief. If you didn’t follow the history, you could believe that it was a gift from above rather than an achievement long fought for from below. If you did follow it, you would have remembered how student debt emerged as a focus in 2011’s Occupy Wall Street uprising. By raising up the voices of those crushed by debt and decrying the system that crushed them, it changed the national conversation.Nevertheless as soon as Occupy began, pundits were asserting it was a failure, and when the Zuccotti Park presence in Lower Manhattan was violently broken up by police in November 2011, they declared that it was over. But even when the rock’s on the bottom of the pool, the ripples are still spreading.Occupy’s impact had just begun. It inspired other occupations far beyond New York City, some of them outside the United States. Across the country, police-accountability groups, solidarity organizing with foreclosure victims and the unhoused, and many other progressive projects emerged. Some of them lasted.‘A truce with the trees’: Rebecca Solnit on the wonders of a 300-year old violinRead moreOne of them was the Debt Collective, founded in 2012. It has successfully taken on all forms of debt – housing, medical and educational – and began to organize to abolish debt directly, campaign for debt abolition and legal changes, and draw public attention to the devastating cruelty of the system.In 2015, the Debt Collective announced that a student debt strike it organized initiated “an ongoing campaign that has helped win changes to federal law and over $2bn in student debt abolition to date”. Activists made student debt a public issue and then part of the Biden campaign’s platform and that ultimately led to last month’s debt-relief measures.The year the Debt Collective started its campaign, the supreme court recognized marriage equality as a constitutional right. The mayfly version would have seen that right as likewise handed down from above by the US supreme court, rather than built from below. But the court merely gave legal force to long-term campaigns that encouraged and built on broader shifts in acceptance and support of queer rights and inclusion. To see those shifts, you also have to remember what things were like beforehand.Early in this country’s history, John Adams wrote to Thomas Jefferson that the war of independence from the British throne was not the revolution; “the revolution was in the minds of the people and this was effected from 1760 to 1775 … before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington.” It’s an assertion that the crucial change came through culture, through beliefs and values, that the most important territory to take is in the imagination.Once you create a new idea of what is possible and acceptable, the seeds are planted; once it becomes what the majority believes, you’ve created the conditions in which winning happens. It may be the least tangible, but most important, part of a campaign. Ideas are powerful and dangerous, as their enemies know, and everyone else often forgets.One of the joys of being a tortoise is watching the slow journey of ideas from the margins to the center, seeing what is invisible, then deemed impossible, become widely accepted. The other day the Salt Lake City Tribune editors called for draining Lake Powell, the now failing reservoir created 60 years ago by Glen Canyon Dam, to make its beautiful canyonlands into a new national park. That was considered an outrageous idea 20 years ago. The city of Oakland just announced plans to return five acres of open space to its original Ohlone owners, an act modest in scale but huge as a sign of how Native American land rights have gained recognition. Barack Obama himself tweeted in support of the student debt relief he did not support as president.If people are shortsighted about the past, so they are about the future – a lot of complaining about the incompleteness of the student loan reform and cancellation was met with the Debt Collective’s vow that they were far from done.That nearly all change is incremental and even a comprehensive victory usually has intermediary steps preceding it is one of the things that disappears in the short view. Imperfect and frustrating though those steps may be, they can still lead us to our destination. We can’t reach the summit without climbing the mountain.Perhaps some of this is built into the news system, which tends to report on events as sudden ruptures rather than the consequence of long-term forces. More of it may come from the attachment to the idea of revolution, of everything changing overnight, though it’s no longer sensible, if it ever was, to believe regime change can change everything – and the long revolutions around gender, nature, race and the rest in our time have been incremental and largely cultural in means even as they produce concrete ends as changed laws, policies and finance.Perhaps the problem is embedded in the very word news, as in new. In the sense that everything has a history, nothing is entirely new. (Even mayflies can live for a year or two as underwater larvae before they emerge into the air for their few days of winged life.) I have been a witness and sometimes a participant to change and I’ve seen so many versions of people fail to see change, believe change is impossible, walk away prematurely, dismiss those who are trying because of this lack of perspective.So far as I can tell, the mayfly view is of a perpetual present in which the order of things is largely immutable. Martin Luther King Jr memorably said: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”You can argue about how it bends – we’ve certainly seen it bend other ways of late – and how to bend it. But you have to stick around for that long view to see it bend at all. Conservatives have been recognized for their long-term strategy, building power from the ground up, taking over local government, winning state races to take over state legislatures to control redistricting to gerrymander their way to minority power in the federal government, bending democracy into something worse. Happily, they’re not the only ones with tenacity.The examples are everywhere. In 2020, after 31 years of organizing, the coalition of ranchers, Native Nevadans and other rural people who came together as Great Basin Water Network finally defeated Las Vegas’s attempt to extract the water from one of the driest places on the continent. The plan would have taken 58bn gallons of water annually from eastern Nevada, devastating wildlife and rural communities. As Eric Siegel’s report in High Country News put summarized it, “the Vegas Pipeline, had it succeeded, threatened to make a dust bowl of 305 springs, 112 miles of streams, 8,000 acres of wetlands and 191,000 acres of shrubland habitat, almost all of it on public lands.”Siegel quoted the Ely Shoshone tribal elder Delaine Spilsbury, who declared: “Never give up the ship. Never. That’s the kind of feeling that I think most of us had. Just do the best we can and let’s make something happen, even if it does take forever.”It didn’t take forever but it took decades. For much of that time it would have been easy to look at the struggle and conclude that it was doomed or losing because it hadn’t won. You could say the same of many other campaigns, including the student-led movement to get Harvard University to divest from fossil fuels, which took 10 years to reach victory in 2021. As my friend Astra Taylor of the Debt Collective remarked to me when I congratulated her, “We’re all losers until we win.”Another of my friends, Joe Lamb, is a poet and arborist who sports a T-shirt that says: “70 is young for a tree.” In a recent essay about the epic tree-planting program that was part of the New Deal’s effort to stop the erosion that produced the Dust Bowl, he wrote, “We need to remember that we can learn from and repeat the successes of our past.” It was a gorgeous revision of the old “those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.”There are past victories you want to repeat, or build on, or learn from. Which is why understanding how they unfold is so essential, recognizing that an oak was once an acorn and then a spindly sapling, remembering this law was once a radical idea and then a campaign. That means seeing the world like a tortoise, not a mayfly.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her most recent books are Recollections of My Nonexistence and Orwell’s Roses
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionAbortionWomenHealthcommentReuse this content More