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      The supreme court is signalling that it’s ready to end Roe v Wade | Moira Donegan

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      The supreme court is signalling that it’s ready to end Roe v WadeMoira DoneganPredictions that the court would keep abortion as a constitutional right are starting to look incredibly optimistic It went worse than had been expected, and expectations were already low. As the supreme court prepared to hear oral arguments in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a lawsuit over a 15-week abortion ban in Mississippi that constitutes the most serious challenge to Roe v Wade in a generation, many court watchers predicted a massive rollback of abortion rights. But the line among reasonable pundits was that the court, fearing censure from a largely pro-choice American public, would attempt to have its cake and eat it too – allowing states to impose abortion bans earlier in pregnancy, but keeping abortion as a constitutional right intact.The most convincing version of this argument came from Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern, who predicted that the court, like it did in 1992’s Planned Parenthood v Casey, might weaken the abortion right without abandoning it entirely. In Casey, the supreme court lessened the standard of scrutiny applied to state abortion restrictions – from a robust “strict scrutiny” standard to a more malleable “undue burden” standard – and affirmed that states could ban abortions outright after fetal viability, the point of gestation at which a fetus can survive outside the womb, usually at about 24 weeks.Stern, like many others, predicted that the court might impose an even more deferential legal test on abortion restrictions – “rational basis review” – and eliminate the viability standard. The result would be that states could ban and restrict abortions more easily, even before viability, but they would still not be allowed to ban abortions entirely. “The court could move back the point at which states can prohibit abortion outright from 24 weeks to 15 or perhaps 12, the end of the first trimester,” Stern wrote. “A diminished right to abortion would survive, battered but extant.”And yet the end of the viability standard would still have been practically disastrous for abortion access on the ground, as well as for women’s freedom and dignity. This much was elegantly explained by New York’s Irin Carmon, who wrote that attacks from conservatives over the past 30 years have increased the abortion right’s legal reliance on the viability standard, even as developments in pre- and neo-natal care have pushed viability itself earlier in pregnancy. “If a ban on abortion at 15 weeks is allowed for whatever reason, why not draw the line at six?” Carmon asked.Getting rid of the viability standard, but still leaving the right to abortion technically intact, would in practice invite an anarchic scramble, as conservative states rushed to ban abortion as early as possible and push the limit back sooner and sooner in pregnancy. Julie Rickelman, a longtime abortion rights advocate and the lawyer representing Mississippi’s lone abortion clinic in the Dobbs case, put it bluntly: if viability goes, Roe is effectively no longer good law. “If the court upholds this law, it will be discarding the viability line and overruling Roe,” she told Carmon. “That is the key line in the law that has protected people’s access to abortion.”In other words, the best-case scenario was legal chaos, misogynist lawmaking, a diminished right to bodily autonomy for women, and millions more people subject to forced pregnancy.But even these predictions – which pass for “optimism” among legal observers now that the supreme court is held in the chokehold of a conservative supermajority – proved too rosy. At oral arguments in Dobbs on Wednesday, five of the court’s six conservatives showed little interest in maintaining Roe while getting rid of viability. Instead, they were focused on eliminating Roe, and the abortion right, entirely. By the end, it seemed likely that conservatives have a crucial five votes to rule that the constitution does not protect the right to end a pregnancy: Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.The lone exception among the conservatives was Chief Justice John Roberts, who seemed almost desperate to direct attention to the viability line. Over the course of arguments, Roberts repeatedly returned to the viability question, emphasizing that it was rejected as a possible standard in the initial 1973 Roe decision and only adopted later, in Casey. But none of the other conservatives took the bait.The two “swing” votes – if such an extremely and committedly conservative court can be said to have such a thing – are Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. In a display of the impotence that has marked his career as chief justice, Roberts was unable to persuade either of them to take up his apparently preferred proposition of maintaining a shell of Roe while gutting the viability standard.Instead, Kavanaugh spent much of his speaking time assuring his colleagues that they need not be bound by Roe’s precedent, listing a long litany of cases in which the supreme court reversed its own prior decisions. Barrett, meanwhile, emphasized the availability of adoption as a supposedly adequate alternative to abortion, at one point asserting that so-called “safe haven” laws, which allow birth mothers to surrender their parental rights and leave their infants in the care of others without punishment immediately after they give birth, offer an adequate remedy for pregnant women who cannot or do not wish to become parents. The idea was that if a woman is pregnant and does not want to be, an acceptable outcome would be for her to gestate and birth a child, and then simply give it away.The hardest-line conservatives, meanwhile, offered even more grim and ominous assessments of abortion as a matter of law, and their sadistic and extremist views give some indication of where the court may be heading in future cases. Both Alito and Thomas referred repeatedly to abortion as “taking a life”, and indicated that they would be open to recognizing fetal personhood. Until now, post-viability abortion bans have rested on the legal idea that the state has an interest in protecting fetal life that overrides a woman’s interest in controlling her own body after that point. But Alito and Thomas suggested that they think that interest belongs not only to the state, but to the fetus itself, and that this interest begins very early. “The fetus has an interest in having a life,” Alito said at one point. “That doesn’t change from the point before viability and after viability.”The suggestion that a fetus might have interests in its own right – interests that can be seen as equal or greater than the interests of the woman carrying it – is a dramatic step in anti-choice jurisprudence, one with dramatic implications for women’s healthcare, freedoms, and access to public life. After Wednesday’s oral arguments, it seems certain that Roe v Wade will soon be overturned. For this court, that’s just the beginning.
      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
      TopicsUS politicsOpinionUS supreme courtAbortionLaw (US)WomencommentReuse this content More

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      After a lifetime in the background, Huma Abedin steps forward | Podcast

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      As Hillary Clinton’s most trusted aide, it was her job to stay out of view. Even when her husband Anthony Weiner’s scandalous behaviour dragged her into the spotlight, she mostly stayed silent. In this interview, Huma Abedin explains why she is ready to tell her own story, in a new memoir that sheds remarkable light on what it cost her to become a public figure against her will

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      When Huma Abedin joined Hillary Clinton’s team in the White House as an intern in 1996, she could not have imagined she would still be working for the same boss, as her most trusted and intimate aide, a quarter of a century later. But that is far from the most surprising aspect of Abedin’s story. In this episode, she talks to Nosheen Iqbal about the extraordinary upbringing that took her from Kalamazoo in Michigan to Saudi Arabia, and what it meant to be the Muslim daughter of an Indian father and a Pakistani mother working in Washington. She reflects on the privileges and costs of working at the centre of political power at such a young age, always having to choose between family and friends, and the job that turned into a vocation. And she talks frankly about her marriage to Anthony Weiner, whose scandalous and ultimately criminal behaviour made her a household name against her will. “I never wanted to be the story, or be part of the story. I didn’t even want to be in the picture,” she says. “So to be elevated in this way … yes, shame is the word.” Throughout all of the crises that arose from Weiner’s behaviour – up to and including a huge and arguably terminal blow to Clinton’s campaign for the presidency – Abedin either stayed silent or spoke in brief, carefully constructed statements, even as she found herself hounded by the paparazzi or splashed across the front pages. Now she has written a memoir – and, she says, she has found huge strength in telling her story in her own words. “I know I have been judged; I know I will continue to be judged,” she says. “But it feels amazing, I have to say.” • Read an extract from the book “If Hillary Clinton loses this election, it will be because of you and me” here. • Huma Abedin’s memoir, Both/And: A Life in Many Worlds, is published by Simon & Schuster at £20. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply. Archive: NBC; CBS; Clinton Library; CNN; ABC; AP; VOA News; C-Span More

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      Springsteen and Obama on friendship and fathers: ‘You have to turn your ghosts into ancestors’

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      Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen discuss their dads, their unlikely friendship, and second careers – as podcast hosts Sat 23 Oct 2021 04.00 EDTPresident Barack ObamaGood conversations don’t follow a script. Like a good song, they’re full of surprises, improvisations, detours. They may be grounded in a specific time and place, reflecting your state of mind and the current state of the world. But the best conversations also have a timeless quality, taking you back into the realm of memory, propelling you forward toward your hopes and dreams. Sharing stories reminds you that you’re not alone – and maybe helps you understand yourself a little bit better.When Bruce and I first sat down in the summer of 2020 to record Renegades: Born in the USA, we didn’t know how our conversations would turn out. What I did know was that Bruce was a great storyteller, a bard of the American experience – and that we both had a lot on our minds, including some fundamental questions about the troubling turn our country had taken. A historic pandemic showed no signs of abating. Americans everywhere were out of work. Millions had just taken to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd, and the then occupant of the White House seemed intent not on bringing people together but on tearing down some of the basic values and institutional foundations of our democracy.Almost a year later, the world looks a shade brighter. But for all the change we’ve experienced as a nation and in our own lives since Bruce and I first sat down together, the underlying conditions that animated our conversation haven’t gone away. And in fact, since the podcast was released, both of us have heard from folks from every state and every walk of life who’ve reached out to say that something in what they heard resonated with them, whether it was the imprint our fathers left on us; the awkwardness, sadness, anger and occasional moments of grace that have arisen as we navigate America’s racial divide; or the joy and redemption that our respective families have given us. People told us that listening to us talk made them think about their own childhoods. Their own dads. Their own home towns.Bruce SpringsteenWhen President Obama suggested we do a podcast together, my first thought was: “OK, I’m a high school graduate from Freehold, New Jersey, who plays the guitar … What’s wrong with this picture?” My wife Patti said: “Are you insane?! Do it! People would love to hear your conversations!”The president and I had spent some time together since we met on the campaign trail in 08. That time included some long, telling conversations. These were the kind of talks where you speak from the heart and walk away with a real understanding of the way your friend thinks and feels. You have a picture of the way he sees himself and his world.So I took Patti’s advice and followed the president’s generous lead, and before we knew it we were sitting in my New Jersey studio, riffing off each other like good musicians.There were serious conversations about the fate of the country, the fortunes of its citizens, and the destructive, ugly, corrupt forces at play that would like to take it all down. This is a time of vigilance when who we are is being seriously tested. We found a lot in common. The president is funny and an easy guy to be around. He’ll go out of his way to make you feel comfortable, as he did for me so that I might have the confidence to sit across the table from him. At the end of the day we recognised our similarities in the moral shape of our lives. It was the presence of a promise, a code we strive to live by. Honesty, fidelity, a forthrightness about who we are and what our goals and ideas are, a dedication to the American idea and an abiding love for the country that made us.We are both creatures stamped Born in the USA. Guided by our families, our deep friendships and the moral compass inherent in our nation’s history, we press forward, guarding the best of us while retaining a compassionate eye for the struggles of our still young nation.My father’s houseBruce Springsteen and Barack Obama talk about the impression their fathers made on their lives and their concept of manhoodSpringsteen From when I was a young man, I lived with a man who suffered a loss of status and I saw it every single day. It was all tied to lack of work, and I just watched the low self-esteem. That was a part of my daily life living with my father. It taught me one thing: work is essential. That’s why if we can’t get people working in this country, we’re going to have an awful hard time.Obama It is. It is central to how people define themselves in the sense of self-worth. For all the changes that have happened in America, when it comes to “What does it mean to be a man?”, I still see that same confusion, and the same limited measures of manliness today, as I had back then. And that’s true, whether you’re talking about African American boys or white boys. They don’t have rituals, road maps and initiation rites into a clear sense of a male strength and energy that is positive as opposed to just dominating.I talk to my daughters’ friends about boys growing up, and so much of popular culture tells them that the only clear, defining thing about being a man, about being masculine, is excelling in sports and sexual conquest …Springsteen And violence.Obama And violence. Those are the three things. Violence, if it’s healthy at least, is subsumed into sports. Later, you add to that definition: making money. How much money can you make? And there are some qualities of the traditional American male that are absolutely worthy of praise and worthy of emulating. That sense of responsibility, meaning you’re willing to do hard things and make some sacrifices for your family or for future generations. But there is a bunch of stuff in there that we did not reckon with, which now you’re seeing with #MeToo, with women still seeking equal pay, with what we’re still dealing with in terms of domestic abuse and violence. There was never a full reckoning of who our dads were, what they had in them, how we have to understand that and talk about that. What lessons we should learn from it. All that kind of got buried.Springsteen Yeah, but we sort of ended up being just 60s versions of our dads, carrying all the same sexism.Obama You don’t show emotion, you don’t talk too much about how you’re feeling: your fears, your doubts, your disappointments. You project a general “I’ve got this”.Springsteen Now, I had that tempered by having a father who was pretty seriously mentally ill, and so in high school I began to become very aware of his weaknesses even though, outwardly, he presented as kind of a bullish guy who totally conformed to that standard archetype. Things went pretty wrong in the last years of high school and in the last years that I lived with him at our house. There was something in his illness or in who he was that involved a tremendous denying of his family ties. I always remember him complaining that if he hadn’t had a family he would’ve been able to take a certain job and go on the road. It was a missed opportunity. And he sat there over that six-pack of beers night after night after night after night and that was his answer to it all, you know? So we felt guilt. And that was my entire picture of masculinity until I was way into my 30s, when I began to sort it out myself because I couldn’t establish and hold a relationship; I was embarrassed simply having a woman at my side. I just couldn’t find a life with the information that he’d left me, and I was trying to over and over again.All the early years I was with Patti, if we were in public I was very, very anxious. I could never sort that through, and I realised: “Well, yeah, these are the signals I got when I was very young: that a family doesn’t strengthen you, it weakens you. It takes away your opportunity. It takes away your manhood.” And this is what I carried with me for a long, long time. I lived in fear of that neutering, and so that meant I lived without the love, without the companionship, without a home. And you have your little bag of clothes and you get on that road and you just go from one place to the next.And you don’t notice it when you’re in your 20s. But, right around 30, something didn’t feel quite right. Did you have to deal with that at all?Obama So there’s some stuff that’s in common and then there’s stuff that tracks a little differently. So my father leaves when I’m two. And I don’t see him until I’m 10, when he comes to visit for a month in Hawaii.Springsteen What brought him to visit you eight years after he left?Obama So the story is that my father grows up in a small village in the north-western corner of Kenya. And he goes from herding goats to getting on a jet plane and flying to Hawaii and travelling to Harvard, and suddenly he’s an economist. And in that leap from living in a really rural, agricultural society to suddenly trying to pretend he’s this sophisticated man about town, something was lost. Something slipped. Although he was extraordinarily confident and charismatic and, by all accounts, could sort of run circles around people intellectually, emotionally, he was scarred and damaged in all kinds of ways that I can only retrace from the stories that I heard later, because I didn’t really know him. Anyway, when he’s a student in Hawaii, he meets my mother. I am conceived. I think the marriage comes after the conception.But then he gets a scholarship to go to Harvard and he decides: “Well, that’s where I need to go.” He’s willing to have my mother and me go with him, but I think there are cost issues involved and they separate. But they stay in touch. He goes back to Kenya, gets a government job, and he has another marriage and another set of kids.Springsteen When he comes back to visit you, he has another family …Obama He’s got another family, and I think he and his wife are in a bad spot. And I think he was probably trying to court my mother and to convince her to grab me and move all of us to Kenya, and my mother, who still loved him, was wise enough to realise that was probably a bad idea. But I do see him for a month. And … I don’t know what to make of him. Because he’s very foreign, right? He’s got a British accent and he’s got this booming voice and he takes up a lot of space. And everybody kind of defers to him because he’s just a big personality. And he’s trying to sort of tell me what to do.He’s like, “Anna” – that’s what he’d call my mother; her name was Ann – “Anna, I think that boy … he’s watching too much television. He should be doing his studies.” So I wasn’t that happy that he had showed up. And I was kind of eager for him to go. Because I had no way to connect to the guy. He’s a stranger who’s suddenly in our house.So he leaves. I never see him again. But we write. When I’m in college I decide: “If I’m going to understand myself better, I need to know him better.” So I write to him and I say: “Listen, I’m going to come to Kenya. I’d like to spend some time with you.” He says: “Ah, yes. I think that’s a very wise decision, you come here.” And then I get a phone call, probably about six months before I was planning to go, and he’s been killed in a car accident.But two things that I discovered, or understood, later. The first was just how much influence that one month that he was there had on me, in ways that I didn’t realise.He actually gave me my first basketball. So I’m suddenly obsessed with basketball. How’d that happen, right? But I remember that the other thing we did together was, he decided to take me to a Dave Brubeck concert. Now, this is an example of why I didn’t have much use for the guy, because, you know, you’re a 10-year-old American kid and some guy wants to take you to a jazz concert.Springsteen Take Five, you’re not going to love …Obama Take Five! So I’m sitting there and … I kind of don’t know what I’m doing there. It’s not until later that I look back and say: “Huh.” I become one of the few kids in my school who’s interested in jazz. And when I got older my mother would look at how I crossed my legs or gestures and she’d say: “It’s kind of spooky.”The second thing that I learned was, in watching his other male children – who I met and got to know later when I travelled to Kenya – I realised that, in some ways, it was probably good that I had not lived in his home. Because, much in the same way that your dad was struggling with a bunch of stuff, my dad was struggling, too. It created chaos and destruction and anger and hurt and long-standing wounds that I just did not have to deal with.Springsteen The thing that happens is: when we can’t get the love we want from the parent we want it from, how do you create the intimacy you need? I can’t get to him and I can’t have him. I’ll be him. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll be him … I’m way into my 30s before I even have any idea that that’s my method of operation. I’m on stage. I’m in workmen’s clothes. I’ve never worked a job in my life.My dad was a beefy, bulky guy. I’ve played freaking guitar my whole life, but I’ve got 20 or 30 extra pounds on me from hitting the gym. Where’d that come from? Why do I spend hours lifting up and putting down heavy things for no particular reason? My entire body of work, everything that I’ve cared about, everything that I’ve written about, draws from his life story.Here is where I was lucky. At 32, I go into hardcore analysis. I don’t have my children until I’m 40, so I’m eight years into looking into a lot of these things, because what I found out about that archetype was it was fucking destructive in my life. It drove away people I cared about. It kept me from knowing my true self. And I realised: “Well, if you wanna follow this road, go ahead. But you’re going to end up on your own, my friend. And if you want to invite some people into your life, you better learn how to do that.”And there’s only one way you do that: you’ve got to open the doors. And that archetype doesn’t leave a lot of room for those doors to be open because that archetype is a closed man. Your inner self is forever secretive and unknown: stoic, silent, not revealing of your feelings.Well, you’ve got to get rid of all of that stuff if you want a partnership. If you want a full family, and to be able to give them the kind of sustenance and nurture and room to grow they need in order to be themselves and find their own full lives, you better be ready to let a lot of that go, my friend.My dad never really spoke to me through [to] the day he died. He didn’t know how. He truly did not. He just didn’t have the skills at all. And once I understood how ill he was, it makes up for a lot of it. But when you’re a six-year-old or an eight-year-old or a nine-year-old boy, you’re not going to have an understanding of what your father is suffering with, and …Obama You end up wrestling with ghosts.Springsteen I guess that’s what we all do.Obama And ghosts are tricky because you are measuring yourself against someone who is not there. And, in some cases, I think people whose fathers aren’t there – and whose mothers are feeling really bitter about their fathers’ not being there – what they absorb is how terrible that guy was and you don’t want to be like that guy.In my mother’s case, she took a different tack, which was that she only presented his best qualities and not his worst. And in some ways that was beneficial, because I never felt as if I had some flawed inheritance; something in me that would lead me to become an alcoholic or an abusive husband or any of that. Instead, what happened was I kept on thinking: “Man, I got to live up to this.” Every man is trying to live up to his father’s expectations or live up to his mistakes.You know, Michelle wonders sometimes: “Why is it that you just feel so compelled to just do all this hard stuff ? I mean, what’s this hole in you that just makes you feel so driven?” And I think part of it was kind of early on feeling as if: “Man, I got to live up to this. I got to prove this. Maybe the reason he left is because he didn’t think it was worth staying for me, and no, I will show him that he made a mistake not hanging around, because I was worth investing in.”Springsteen You’re always trying to prove your worth. You’re on a lifetime journey of trying to prove your worth to …Obama Somebody that’s not there.Springsteen The trick is you have to turn your ghosts into ancestors. Ghosts haunt you. Ancestors walk alongside you and provide you with comfort and a vision of life that’s going to be your own. My father walks alongside me as my ancestor now. It took a long time for that to happen.This is a condensed and edited extract from Renegades: Born in the USA by Barack Obama and Bruce Springsteen. It is published on Tuesday (Viking, £35).TopicsPodcastsBarack ObamaBruce SpringsteenFamilyMenUS politicsfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Biden administration sues Texas over abortion law: Politics Weekly Extra

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      On Thursday night, the US Attorney General Merrick Garland announced that the US Justice Department would launch a federal lawsuit against Texas over the extreme abortion law that the state introduced last week. Jonathan Freedland speaks to Moira Donegan about what all of this means for Roe v Wade

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      Archive: C-Span, NBC, MSNBC Read all of our Guardian coverage on the new abortion law in Texas Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      US abortion law: A conservative-leaning supreme court doesn’t bode well for women

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      The US Supreme Court’s failure to block a new law from entering into force in Texas means that abortions after six weeks are effectively banned in that state, even in cases of rape or incest. In the Whole Woman’s Health v Austin Reeve Jackson case, a five-four majority of the court denied the application to block Senate Bill 8 (SB 8) in Texas.From 1 September, SB 8 “makes it unlawful for physicians to perform abortions if they detect cardiac activity on an embryo or fail to perform a test to detect such activity”. This is around six weeks after a woman’s last period, much sooner than many women find out that they are pregnant.Fierce debate has taken place over women’s sexual reproductive rights since the US Supreme Court’s 1973 landmark decision inRoe v Wade when the court ruled that a woman has a constitutional right to abortion due to her “right to privacy”, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution. This was hailed as a momentous step towards the protection of women’s rights.Yet anti-abortion campaigners have been fighting to restrict a woman’s right to choose, most notably through the case of Planned Parenthood v Casey in 1992. In this case, the Supreme Court upheld Roe, but allowed states to place restrictions on first-trimester abortions, such as government-mandated delays between consultation and abortion, so long as they do not impose an “undue burden” on the woman. Previously states had been banned from introducing restrictions on first-trimester abortions.Allowing the Texas abortion ban to take effect is an attack on women’s rights and will have a devastating impact on women in Texas. It will undoubtedly galvanise other states to further restrict abortions too, with the ultimate goal of these restrictions being a complete overruling of Roe v Wade. This would effectively ban abortions across the US. The likelihood of this happening has increased due to the current politics of the US Supreme Court.The politics of the US Supreme CourtA key role of the Supreme Court is to rule on points of constitutional and federal law. It hears around 100 cases per year on a range of constitutional issues from administrative law to criminal justice. Some decisions of the court, such as in Roe v Wade, can bind the entirety of the US. More