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      Today is a day of despair for America. We are plunged into an anticipatory grief | Moira Donegan

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      Today is a day of despair, and it would be futile to tell those who fear and grieve for what is to come in America that they will be OK. It would also be dishonest: many of us, in truth, will not be OK.Donald Trump appears to have decisively won the American election. He and his Republican allies have promised mass deportations that will ruin lives and sunder families; they have threatened to dismantle the Affordable Care Act and appoint the anti-vaccine conspiracy theorist Robert F Kennedy Jr to a position of authority on public health. They have pledged vast cuts to social security and Medicare, the persecution of dissidents and violent suppression of Trump’s political enemies. There will almost certainly be a nationwide abortion ban and this will further degrade women’s citizenship, rob them of their dignity, steal their dreams and ruin their health.For those of us aware of what Trump is capable of, this morning has plunged us into a cold kind of anticipatory grief. There are people in America who are reading the news with worry, who are bracing themselves for crackdowns and unrest, and who will, inevitably, be confirmed in their anxiety; who will discover that they have even more to fear from the coming administration than they now know. I’m thinking of all the ordinary Americans who are alive now, thriving or struggling in this declining country, who will have their lives destroyed or cut short by what is coming.For many, Trump’s victory will remind them of nothing so much as his 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton. Once again, his vulgarity, corruption, pettiness, narcissism and bigotry have been rewarded, at our expense; once again, the nation will be plunged into chaos as his vanity, greed, incompetence and anger take precedence over the national interest; once again, a violently and grossly misogynist man has been elevated to a position of superlative power over a flawed but competent, hardworking woman.But 2024 is not 2016. It is worse. In his first term, Trump’s incompetence was often an impediment to the worst of his agenda; no longer. Institutions, both in the government and in civil society, worked to slow or resist his program; now, many of them seem all too willing to participate, with universities and NGOs eager to launder Trumpism into respectability and the billionaire-controlled media eager to cut deals, suppress unfavorable coverage and minimize his misdeeds. And if in his first term Trump’s impulses were sometimes mitigated by moderates and institutionalists in his administration, by now those people have all been purged. He is surrounded by incels, bigots, conspiracists and sadists, and they are much better prepared to use the organs of the state to pursue their hateful aims. Trump himself even has the promise of broad criminal immunity, a recent gift from the supreme court that will enable his authoritarianisms in ways we cannot yet anticipate.But Trump’s victory, and his return to the White House, will not only be a catastrophe because of what they will mean for America’s future. They are also a horror for what they will do to our past. The last eight years, four under Trump’s governance and four under what American politics has become due to his influence, have prompted tremendous struggle and suffering. The groups he disparages – from immigrants, to women, to disabled people, to those from “shithole countries” – will be humiliated again by his return and betrayed by the countrymen who refused to vindicate their dignity with a vote against him. The people who have been harassed and threatened and attacked by his supporters have now seen their countrymen treat the violence that has been done to them with what they will read as indifference at best, and approval at worst.The historically marginalized among us – those who are Black, or trans, or female – have struggled to make their worthiness and citizenship meaningful in spite of the hatred and hierarchy that Trump has championed. This was the aim of the Women’s Marches, of #MeToo, of Black Lives Matter, which were in part rebukes to Trumpism, and symptoms of the desire for a different America, one that is less cruel to its citizens and more worthy of its stated ideals of liberty and justice for all. They dreamed of turning this country into a free nation of equals; instead, they must now settle for the smaller dream of keeping themselves safe from the worst of what is to come. Trump’s return to the presidency makes these bygone years of activism seem, in retrospect, like a humiliating exercise in futility.Does America deserve Trump? In the years since he rose to power, one theory posits that he is merely the manifestation of the nation’s unexorcised demons – a vestige of the racism that allowed this country to build its economy off the backs of the enslaved, of the casual relationship to violence that allowed it to build its territory and its global hegemony through violent conquest and coercion, of the grubby love of money and shameless disregard for principle that have always motivated our rapacious economy. In this version of the story, Trump is not merely a morbid symptom, but something like America’s comeuppance, a punishment for our sins. Living under his rule takes on the grim appropriateness of one of those ironic punishments in the underworlds of classical mythology, or in the hell of Dante’s Inferno. It is a feature of this horror that those who suffer most under his rule are usually those who are least culpable for these trespasses. Because we never really atoned – not for slavery, not for empire, not for the slaughter and dispossession of Indigenous Americans or the war and exploitation of foreign countries – this is what we now must endure: a figure who brings these cruelties home and who mocks our self-flattering delusion that we ever were, ever could have been, anything else.And yet there remain so many Americans who hope for this country to be something else, if only because they will not survive it otherwise. In the coming days, those who tried to prevent this outcome will turn on one another. Liberals and leftists will point fingers; various Harris campaign staffers will be named responsible for failed strategies in this or that state; someone will make a racist bid to scapegoat Arab Americans and the Uncommitted movement; and many people, smug and insulated from the worst of what is to come, will say that the Democratic party spent too much time campaigning on abortion rights issues.There is plenty of blame to go around. But for the most part, this finger-pointing will be a distraction, a way of putting off the confrontation with what is coming. Instead, I hope that we can turn our attention to the most vulnerable among us: those Trump has antagonized and ridiculed, those who are less safe today than they hoped they might be yesterday. It is those targeted groups who need us, our solidarity and careful attention. In turning to them, we can keep alive in ourselves some small part of the America that Donald Trump seeks to destroy.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      As I vote for president, I’ll be thinking of what Amanda Zurawski told me | Sophie Brickman

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      Shortly before America’s first presidential election since the fall of Roe v Wade, I want to tell you the story of Amanda Zurawski, a bright light in the center of a perfect, horrendous storm.A little over two years ago, Zurawski was 18 weeks pregnant with her first child, a child she and her husband had conceived after a year and a half of fertility treatments. When she started leaking fluid and sought medical help, her doctors told her there was no chance the fetus would survive. But Zurawski lives in Texas, a state with some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country: in May of the previous year, the governor, Greg Abbott, had signed into law the Texas Heartbeat Act, also known as SB8, which makes performing abortions after detection of embryonic or fetal cardiac activity, usually at six weeks, illegal. That was on top of several existing statutes. Then, in June 2022, Roe fell.And so Zurawski’s doctors told her that by the letter of the law – as far as they understood it; more on that later – in order to get the medical care she so desperately needed, either her daughter’s heart would have to stop, or her health would have to devolve into a “life-threatening situation”, something Zurawski has previous called “the most horrific version of a staring contest: whose life would end first? Mine, or my daughter’s?”Her doctors advised her not to leave a 15-minute radius of the hospital lest her situation spiral, nixing the already unfathomable idea of getting into a car or on to a plane to seek help from a less restrictive state, and risking going into septic shock in the middle of the Texas desert, or 30,000ft up in the air. So she went home to grieve her impending loss and brace for what might come – during which time, Texas’s total abortion trigger ban went into effect, which made performing an abortion punishable by life in prison. And there Zurawski sat, waiting.The next day, she developed sepsis – a condition her doctors felt was extreme enough to protect them from unintentionally violating the new law, allowing them to induce labor – and after three days in the ICU, she emerged from the experience having almost died, with her own future fertility compromised, and galvanized to make a change about the inhumane laws.“I admittedly didn’t realize the ways in which an abortion truly is just healthcare,” Zurawski told me this week when I reached her by phone during her early morning walk with her sheepadoodle, Millie, in Austin, where she lives with her husband, Josh. “I couldn’t imagine that I would ever need or want one, since I was desperately trying to have a baby.”The first moment abortion laws and her own fertility journey intersected was early on in the IVF process. The likelihood of a multiples pregnancy increases when using IVF, but as she is not able to carry multiples, her doctor had discussed the possibility of needing to perform selective reduction surgery if more than one embryo implanted, something that is currently illegal in Texas.“So I was aware that these laws could affect us, but not from the perspective that I would need it to save my life, and be denied healthcare,” she told me. When she found herself in the unimaginable situation of being turned away from the hospital by doctors who wanted to help her, but weren’t sure they could, her eyes opened, and she and Josh vowed to fight.Zurawski became the lead plaintiff in the landmark case, Zurawski v Texas, which sued the state of Texas to clarify the “medical emergency” exception in the law – a riveting and harrowing new documentary about the case follows Zurawski and two fellow plaintiffs through the legal fight – and soon found herself catapulted on to the national stage. Her natural charisma, straight talk, and tragic story calcified into a perfect trifecta with the power – so hopes Kamala Harris, who made her a campaign surrogate – of firing up the electorate.“Humanizing it is what’s really getting people to sit up and pay attention,” Zurawski told me. “When you see a face and a real human who’s been impacted by this, it’s impossible to say, ‘This is reasonable, this is exactly what we want for our country.’” She paused to take a breath. “That’s barbaric.”One of the most powerful scenes in the documentary shows Zurawski at home with her parents, her mother saying that she’s always voted Republican, but won’t after seeing her daughter almost die.“Will I say they’re converted Democrats? No!” Zurawski told me, laughing, as she huffed her way up a hill. “But I do think they are single-issue voters, at least in this election. It opened up their eyes a little bit to the legislature, and how laws are written, and how bans go into effect, and the real implications.”The real implications of, say, “medical exceptions” to a near-total abortion ban?“They don’t work! Categorically!” she scoffed, citing the multiple patient plaintiffs in her case, alongside other women who have died in our country awaiting care their doctors are prohibited, by law, from providing. “Every pregnancy is inherently unique. Where else in healthcare do we put a blanket rule over where you can and cannot receive treatment?”In her work over the years since she lost her pregnancy, she’s found that one key to changing minds lies in reframing the conversation from “pro-life” v “pro-choice” to one about healthcare access.“For 50 years, the right worked really hard to politicize and weaponize and stigmatize the word ‘abortion’,” she said. You say pro-choice or pro-life, and people are already on a side. But some of the time, she pointed out, people simply don’t understand what it means to be on one side or the other.“I’ll be at a rally, and someone will come up to me and say, ‘I didn’t realize that in 1985, when I had a D&C’” – a dilation-and-curettage surgical procedure that removes tissue from the uterus after miscarriage – “‘that’s an abortion.’ That’s the same as abortion care!”As Zurawski has crisscrossed the country, campaigning for the Harris-Walz ticket, another part of her family has also moved: her embryos. In February, the Alabama supreme court ruled that frozen embryos are “unborn children”. Zurawski, living in a state that has a similar political climate – one in which city councils have enacted abortion travel bans, in effect criminalizing the use of cities’ roads and highways to seek abortion care – panicked, and rushed to move them to a safer place.“The implications of the ruling are just staggering,” she said. But, by some estimates, she admits that moving the embryos is itself a stopgap measure. “If Trump is elected, it doesn’t matter where the embryos are, or where we are. He will unleash chaos.”She cited Project 2025, a rightwing policy manifesto for Trump’s second term that indicates plans not only to restrict birth control access and block access to abortion pills and medical equipment, but also potentially ban IVF and surrogacy in certain states.“Well, Josh and I have to use a surrogate now because of what my body went through. It’s like they’re saying, you’re out of luck!” She paused, catching her breath on the other end of the phone, perhaps reaching the top of a hill. “It could theoretically prevent us from having children.”So, what’s to be done? Watch the documentary. Share her story. Vote. Fight.

      Sophie Brickman is a contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times and other publications, and the author of Baby, Unplugged: One Mother’s Search for Balance, Reason, and Sanity in the Digital Age and the novel Plays Well With Others More

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      In Florida, the future of abortion might come down to men

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      When Maxwell Frost bounded on stage at a Saturday morning rally in support of Florida abortion rights, the 27-year-old congressman was quick to explain why he had shown up.“I’m so proud to be here as an ally and partner in this fight!” he yelled to the roughly hundred-strong crowd who had gathered in an Orlando church courtyard, clutching handwritten sings with messages like “abortion bans are killing us” and “womb-tang clan ain’t nothing to fuck with”.His biological mother had given him up for adoption, said Frost, who wore a black T-shirt that read “Abortion is Health Care”. “The thing that made it sacred was the fact that she had a choice,” Frost said. “I’ve had enough of people trying to use parts of all of our identities to take away freedoms from other people.”The crowd – mostly women – roared in response.In an election where women’s access to abortion has become a top issue, activists are now rushing to convince men that they also have a stake in the fight – and that, come Tuesday, they should vote accordingly.Although men support abortion rights at similar rates as women, they seem to be far less driven by the issue. Less than half of men identify as “pro-choice”, according to Gallup, and are far more likely to see the economy or immigration as their top issue. One poll of men of color found that, although more than 80% believe abortion should be legal, less than half prioritized candidates who supported abortion rights.“It’s that common misconception that abortion is a woman’s issue,” said Zach Rivera, a 24-year-old activist with Men4Choice, a national group dedicated to energizing men who support abortion rights.View image in fullscreenOver the last several weeks, Rivera has spent countless hours knocking on doors in Florida neighborhoods in support of amendment 4, a ballot measure that would enshrine abortion rights into the Florida constitution and overturn the state’s ban on the procedure past six weeks of pregnancy. Nine other states are also set to vote on similar ballot measures on election day, but amendment 4 may face the steepest odds. In order to pass, the measure must secure 60% of the vote in a state that has veered sharply to the right in recent years and whose state government has repeatedly tried to kneecap the campaign behind the amendment.Recent polling has found that support for measure hovers somewhere in the 50% range: while one poll found that 58% of Florida voters support it, another closer to 54%. In the latter poll, 55% of women supported the measure, compared to 53% of men. In an election as tight as Florida’s, nudging more men to vote yes could mean the difference between victory and defeat.As Saturday morning gave way to a humid afternoon punctuated by bursts of rain, Rivera trudged from house to house in a wealthy, blue area of Orlando, dropping off Men4Choice stickers and attempting to talk to voters about amendment 4. Numerous houses had blue “Harris/Walz” signs in their front lawns – but not a single one had a purple “Yes on 4” sign. Voters were reluctant to talk about it. “I’m friends with everyone,” one woman said.Rivera has had better luck, he said, with phone banking. In one recent conversation, Rivera described urging one reluctant man to think about his future wife and children: what if, 10 years down the line, his wife died because an abortion ban blocked her from accessing medical care? How would he reveal to his kids that he didn’t vote?“The whole point of this movement is to think about future you,” Rivera recalled telling him. The man, Rivera said, decided to vote in favor of amendment 4.At an early voting site in Tampa, 24-year-old Brandon McCray cited women’s rights as one of his greatest concerns in the 2024 elections. It helped convince him to vote for Kamala Harris. “Amendment 4 would just protect a lot of women,” he said. Banning abortion, he said, “is the biggest violation to a human right”.McCray may be a relative anomaly among his peers. Appalled by the triple-punch of Donald Trump’s victory in the 2016 election, the sexual violence exposed by the #MeToo movement in late 2017 and the 2022 overturning of Roe v Wade, young women have become the most progressive cohort ever measured in US history – but young men have inched towards the right. While 62% of young women now support Harris, 55% of young men back Donald Trump, according to recent New York Times polling. Moreover, young men’s participation in politics is falling, with young women now on track to vote, rally and donate more frequently.For many young women, the trend is so obvious that its unremarkable. “The right-leaning has more traditional values and more traditional values tends to benefit men more than it benefits women,” said Briana Valle, 22. “For obvious reasons, people are always gonna go for what benefits them.”Leila Wotruba, 22, added: “There’s a lot more at stake for women.”As a gay man, Rivera knows that he may appear to not have much at stake in the fight over abortion rights. But Rivera sees the future of the issue, especially in Florida, as a “litmus test” for other rights.“That’s what I tell people: Even if this might not be a personal issue to you overall … you are definitely next,” he said. “They are just waiting until there’s nobody left to defend you.” More

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      When Trump says he’s going to ‘protect’ women, he means ‘control’ them | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Could Republicans take away a woman’s right to a credit card?“Hello, I’d like a line of credit, please.”“Well, before we can even consider that, are you married? Are you taking a contraceptive pill? And can your husband co-sign all the paperwork so we know you have a man’s permission?”That may not be an exact rendition of an actual conversation between a woman and a US bank manager in 1970, but it’s close enough. Before the Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) was passed in 1974, it was considered good business practice for banks to discriminate against women. It didn’t matter how much money she had – a woman applying for a credit card or loan could expect to be asked invasive questions by a lender and told she needed a male co-signer before getting credit. All of which severely limited a woman’s ability to build a business, buy a house or leave an abusive relationship.Then came the ECOA, which was signed into law 50 years ago on Monday. Banking didn’t magically become egalitarian after that – discriminatory lending practices are still very much an issue – but important protections were enshrined in law. A woman finally had a right to get a credit card in her own name, without a man’s signature.When things feel bleak – and things feel incredibly bleak at the moment – it is important to remember how much social progress has been made in the last few decades. Many of us take having access to a credit card for granted, but it’s a right that women had to fight long and hard for. Indeed, the ECOA was passed five years after the Apollo 11 mission. “Women literally helped put a man on the moon before they could get their own credit cards,” the fashion mogul Tory Burch wrote for Time on the 50th anniversary of the ECOA being signed.If feels fitting that such an important anniversary is so close to such an important election. While we must celebrate how far we’ve come, it’s also important to remember that progress isn’t always linear. Rights that we have taken for granted for decades can, as we saw with the overturning of Roe v Wade, be suddenly yanked away.Is there any chance that, if Donald Trump gets into power again, we might see Republicans take away a woman’s right to her own credit card? It’s certainly not impossible. Trump’s entire campaign is, after all, about taking America back. The former president has also cast himself as a paternalistic protector of women.“I’m going to do it, whether the women like it or not,” Trump said at a rally on Wednesday. “I’m going to protect them.”Of course, we all know what “protect” really means in this context: it means “control”. Should he become president again, Trump and his allies seem intent on massively expanding the power of the president and eliminating hard-won freedoms. Conservative lawmakers and influencers want to control a woman’s access to reproductive healthcare. They want to control the sorts of books that get read and the type of history that gets taught. They want to control how women vote. They want to control whether a woman can get a no-fault divorce. They might not take away women’s access to credit, but they will almost certainly try to chip away at a woman’s path to financial independence.Elon Musk denies offering sperm to random acquaintancesA recent report from the New York Times alleges that he wants to build a compound to house his many children and some of their mothers. “Three mansions, three mothers, 11 children and one secretive, multibillionaire father who obsesses about declining birthrates when he isn’t overseeing one of his six companies: It is an unconventional family situation, and one that Mr Musk seems to want to make even bigger,” the Times notes. Apparently, in an effort to do this, he has been offering his sperm to friends and acquaintances. Musk has denied all this. This joins a growing list of sperm-based denials. Over the summer, he denied claims in the New York Times that he’d volunteered his sperm to help populate a colony on Mars.Martha Stewart criticises Netflix film that ‘makes me look like a lonely old lady’The businesswoman was also upset that director RJ Cutler didn’t put Snoop Dogg on the soundtrack: “He [got] some lousy classical score in there, which has nothing to do with me.”JD Vance thinks white kids are pretending to be trans so they can get into collegeLike pretty much everything the vice-presidential candidate says, this is insulting and nonsensical. Rather than having advantages conferred on them, trans people in the US are subject to dehumanizing rhetoric and laws that want to outlaw their existence. Meanwhile, it is well-documented that there are plenty of privileged children whose parents spent a lot of money so their kids could pretend to be athletes to get into college.What happened to the young girl captured in a photograph of Gaza detainees?The BBC tells the story of a young girl photographed among a group of men rounded up by Israeli forces. In her short life, Julia Abu Warda, aged three, has endured more horror than most of us could imagine.Pregnant Texas teen died after three ER visits due to medical impact of abortion banNevaeh Crain, 18, is one of at least two Texas women who have died under the state’s abortion ban.Sudan militia accused of mass killings and sexual violence as attacks escalateThe war in Sudan, which has displaced more than 14 million people, is catastrophic – particularly for girls and women. In a new report, a UN agency said that paramilitaries are preying on women and sexual violence is “rampant”. And this violence is being enabled by outside interests: many experts believe that, if it weren’t for the United Arab Emirates’ alleged involvement in the war, the crisis would already be over. The UAE, you see, is interested in Sudan’s resources. Meanwhile, the Guardian reported back in June that UK government officials have attempted to suppress criticism of the UAE for months.The week in pawtriarchyYou’ve almost certainly heard of the infinite monkey theorem: the idea that, given all the time in the world, a monkey randomly hitting keys on a typewriter would eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Now, two Australian mathematicians have declared the notion im-paw-ssible. Indeed, they only found a 5% chance that a single monkey would randomly write the word “bananas” in their lifetime. Meanwhile, the Guardian notes that Shakespeare’s canon includes 884,647 words – none of them “banana”. More

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      The women ‘cancelling out’ their Trump-loving partners’ votes: ‘No one will ever know’

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      Mackenzie Owens and her boyfriend strut toward the camera like models on a catwalk, posing as she takes a dramatic sip from her Stanley cup. “Just a bf and a gf going to cancel each other’s votes,” reads the caption of their TikTok – the couple, who live in Pennsylvania, support separate candidates this election season.Owens made the TikTok to join in on a trend of women disclosing that they’re voting against their partners’ preferred candidates. In one video, a woman mischievously tucks away a strand of hair as she mails in her ballot, “proudly” cancelling out her boyfriend’s ballot – “because someone paid attention in US History & has to care about keeping the Dept of Education!!!!” In another, a woman dances to Ciara’s Level Up before driving off to “cancel out” her “Trump loving Husband’s vote in a swing state”.View image in fullscreenThe dozens of women participating are, for the most part, Democrats supporting Kamala Harris’s bid, while their male partners are voting for Donald Trump. (Owens did not disclose who she or her boyfriend voted for.) Though their posts provide levity in the final days of an ugly presidential race, they also underscore the pivotal role gender is playing in the election.A late October national poll from USA Today/Suffolk University found that women resoundingly back Harris over Trump, 53% to 36%, a “mirror image” of men’s support for Trump over Harris, 53% to 37%. A September poll from Quinnipiac University similarly found a 26-point gender gap. An unknown – but certainly sizable – number of women are seeing this gender gap in their own relationships.Owens, who is 19, isn’t particularly bothered by her boyfriend’s politics. “Nowadays, people think that you have to have the same political opinions as your partner, because [hyper-partisan politics] is a big problem in society, but I personally think it’s cool to co-exist and learn about the other side, and get different opinions I didn’t think of before,” she said. “But in a way, that’s not socially acceptable.”Meanwhile, liberal TikTokers are weighing in to say they could never date or marry a Trump supporter, given the former president’s sexist remarks about women and his appointment of anti-abortion justices to the supreme court, which resulted in the 2022 reversal of Roe v Wade. “What do you mean you’re on your way to cancel out your husband’s vote?” reads one viral tweet. “You should be on your way to the courthouse. Divorce babe. Divorce.”Harris needs women to turn out on Tuesday, especially those who might take a page from the TikTokers’ playbook and vote differently from the men in their lives. But those posts come from mostly young, liberal women who feel safe publicly disagreeing on candidates. In recent days, Democratic groups have made overtures to Republican women, or women who project conservatism to their friends and family but quietly harbor doubts about Trump.Republican turnout among women – especially white women, who backed Trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections – can be partially explained by their husbands, who are seen as wielding influence over the family vote, said strategists and advocates who spoke with the Guardian.“Women often give deference to the presumed expertise of their husbands on politics, and then the men reinforce that presumption and express their intensity and so-called greater expertise,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. “We try to reinforce to women that you have your own way of doing things, your own point of view, you focus on what’s good for the whole family. Then we emphasize that the vote is private.”That’s a sentiment echoed in a new ad, narrated by Julia Roberts, from the progressive evangelical organization Vote Common Good. In the ad, a woman whose husband appears to be a Trump supporter enters the voting booth to cast her ballot for Harris. “In the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want and no one will ever know,” Roberts says in the voiceover.Doug Pagitt, executive director of Vote Common Good, said the group first conceptualized the ad during the 2022 midterms. “We kept hearing from women that they were going to pay an emotional price with their families, friends and church if they didn’t continue to toe the line [and vote for Trump],” Pagitt said.On a campaign stop in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Michelle Obama told swing state voters: “If you are a woman who lives in a household of men that don’t listen to you or value your opinion, just remember that your vote is a private matter.” Liz Cheney, a never-Trump Republican who campaigned alongside Harris in Detroit last week, reminded Republican women that there is no official way to look up how someone voted: “You can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody, and there will be millions of Republicans who do that on November 5.”The Lincoln Project, a moderate political action committee, also released a bluntly titled ad, Secret, where two Trump-supporting men assume their wives also back their candidate. However, when the couples get to the polls, one of the women mouths “Kamala” to the other, and after an affirmative nod, both fill in their ballots for the Democrat.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis messaging is stoking anger among conservative personalities, who say it is sexist and retrograde to assume women only vote for Trump to appease their husbands. They also, paradoxically, say this messaging is undermining traditional family values. Charlie Kirk, who last year said the “radical left” was being “run by childless young ladies” on antidepressants, called the ads “the embodiment of the downfall of the American family” on Megyn Kelly’s podcast.The Fox News host Jesse Watters said that if he found out his wife had secretly voted for Harris, “that’s the same thing as having an affair … it violates the sanctity of our marriage”. This, despite the fact that Watters had an affair with his current wife while still married to his first wife.In the final stretch, these complex – and often secretive – relationship dynamics are affecting Democrats’ ground game, said Kelly Dittmar, director of research and scholar at Rutgers University’s Center for American Women and Politics. “You see it in public women’s bathrooms or places where women can be directly appealed to without the barrier of the man in their life. There are stickers or signs that say, ‘Remember, your vote is private,’” she said.Nancy Hirschmann, a political scientist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, added that canvassers for Harris were trained to avoid outing wives who may be registered Democrats to their Republican husbands: “If a man answers the door who’s clearly in favor of Trump, you don’t ask for the woman by name, you ask if there are other voters in the house you can speak to.”View image in fullscreenIt is too early to tell if Republican-coded women may in fact turn out to be secret Harris voters. But back on TikTok, women vocally share their 2024 picks, even if they go against their partner’s choice – or an ex-partner’s choice.Jamisen Casey, a 21-year-old student who goes to school in California but is registered to vote in her home state of Tennessee, took part in the trend, with a twist. “My absentee ballot on its way home to cancel out my ex boyfriend’s vote,” Casey wrote in the caption of a video showing her dancing with the envelope while We Both Reached for the Gun from the musical Chicago plays.“It’s really hard to know that there are men out there who want to vote against reproductive rights, even though they shouldn’t have a say in it at all,” Casey, who voted for Harris, said. She doesn’t think she could date someone who doesn’t share her views again. “As a political science major, I made a decision that I don’t want to put myself in that position.” More

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      Some Maga men seem to think women don’t have rights – starting with their wives | Rebecca Solnit

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      This week, the fundamentalist Christian pastor Dale Partridge argued in a series of tweets that “in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction”. In other words, he pits his version of the religion against the constitution, which, since the 19th amendment passed a century ago, guarantees adult citizens the right to vote regardless of sex. He argues that in marriage, the husband annexes and owns his wife’s voice and rights, so that he in effect gets two votes and she gets none. The far-right preacher is not alone in this argument that women should not have the right to participate in public life and act on their views and values.Jesse Watters, the Fox News personality, has argued that if he found out his wife “was going into the voting booth and pulling the lever for Harris, that’s the same thing as having an affair”. It violates “the sanctity of our marriage; what else is she keeping from me?” Rightwing agitator Charlie Kirk also got upset about the idea that women might vote according to their agenda and not their husband’s.These men are offering warnings about what awaits women who marry men like them. Maybe it’s worth noting here that the rightwing opposition to marriage equality as same-sex marriage is in part because they’re opposed to marriage equality within heterosexual marriage. They want marriage to be an inherently unequal relationship with a subordinate wife and an entitled husband, a cozy little authoritarian regime at home.One of the things the 2024 US presidential election is about is whether or not women should be free and equal full citizens of this republic. Right now too many women are not – women in conservative states are denied reproductive rights, meaning jurisdiction over their own bodies and in some cases survival if an abortion or pregnancy becomes a medical emergency.But there’s another way that women are not free and equal which a few videos, a lot of tweets and reportedly some Post-It notes in women’s bathrooms have addressed – when women are afraid to vote for their chosen candidate, when their husbands or boyfriends are Trump supporters and they are Harris supporters. I just wrote a Guardian piece about the fact that so many women apparently are bullied over their political beliefs, despite assurances that there are ways to vote without being tyrannized, is troubling. It suggests that there’s a whole other kind of voting suppression and coercion that deserves investigation and raises questions about voting at home.The responses cited above confirm that a lot of women have good reason to fear their partners and hide their choices (and attention to the videos may be making Maga husbands even more angry and controlling). These Maga men don’t think that wives and girlfriends should be free to vote as they choose, nor that wives and girlfriends have the right to privacy in their political choices. They, in other words, do not believe she should have a choice. Which boils down to not believing she has rights, and if they don’t believe women have rights here, they don’t believe they have them in a lot of arenas.This aligns with the Republican party’s enthusiasm for ending reproductive rights and birth control and no-fault divorce and with Vance’s suggestion that women should stay in violent marriages. Vance’s campaign has said his remarks were taken out of context. It fits in with Trump’s ominous campaign speech on Tuesday in which he declared, “I want to protect the women of our country … I’m going to do it whether the women like it or not.”Those are alarming words from an adjudicated rapist who’s facing new sexual assault charges from both former model Stacey Williams and beauty pageant contestant Beatrice Keul. Or not facing, since neither of these stories have garnered much attention, Trump’s long history of adjudicated or alleged sexual abuse apparently being acceptable, denied, or both with his supporters.This election is about a lot of things, and whether women are endowed with certain inalienable rights is one of them.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

      This piece was amended on 1 November 2024 to clarify that the 19th amendment was passed 104 years ago, not 124 More

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      Why are so many women hiding their voting plans from their husbands? | Rebecca Solnit

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      Lots of memes and tweets and posts and videos are popping up, assuring women that they can keep their votes secret from their husbands and boyfriends. The unspoken assumption is that lots of women are bullied, intimidated or controlled by their partners, specifically in straight couples when she wants to vote for Harris and he supports Trump. The messages assure these intimidated voters that they can vote in peace and privacy at a polling place. But a lot of Americans now vote by mail, which generally means they fill out their ballots at home, where that privacy may not be available.On the one hand, I’m glad there’s outreach to those voters. On the other, the way these messages are framed seem to regard the grim reality that a lot of women live in fear of their spouses as a given hardly worth stating outright, let alone decrying. I get that right now we’re fighting for the future of democracy in America, the public version in which rights and norms and the rule of law are preserved – as the Washington Post humor columnist Alexandra Petri put it: “I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.”But a lot of households are not democracies; they’re dictatorships. This may impact public life, in that it seems to generate a meaningful amount of voter intimidation and suppression. As in previous election cycles, people doing door-to-door outreach to voters are encountering men who prevent their wives from even conversing at the door or who believe their registered-Democrat wives are Republicans and women fearful of speaking or of disclosing their party and chosen candidates.One Pennsylvania man who has been canvassing for several weeks told me: “So many times we … have knocked on doors and when both husband and wife or boyfriend and girlfriend have come to the door together, after hearing what we were there for so often the man stayed and the woman walked away ‘to do other things’, or the man came out to talk to us. Often the woman would come out by herself and say or whisper: ‘I’m with her and he doesn’t know it.’” Another friend reached a voter by phone, who told her that because her husband wasn’t in the car, she could admit she was voting Democratic. Coercive control is an issue in households of all races and political orientations, but only this configuration – Maga man, Democratic-leaning woman – seems to impact the right to vote in such a visible and potentially impactful way. Fox News host Jesse Watters asserted that his wife “secretly voting for Harris” was like having an affair and it would be “D day,” the d presumably standing for divorce.A Lincoln Project video shows a clutch of spectacularly mainstream white couples (they look like they fell out of a real estate brochure or are going to the golf course) entering a polling place. One of the men asks a second man who his wife is voting for. “She doesn’t like him but she’s voting for him,” he replies, and the first says: “Same with mine.” It’s followed by footage showing three women casting furtive glances at their husbands and each other as they choose Harris. It’s a hostage video. Another version of the video is narrated by Julia Roberts, who declares: “You can vote any way you want. And no one will ever know.” It’s not just that the party eager to deny women bodily autonomy is full of husbands eager to deny their wives political autonomy. It’s also a reminder that democracy and its opposites exist at all scales.

      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More

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      How a rightwing machine stopped Arkansas’s ballot to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans

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      Theresa Lee was 22 weeks pregnant last year when her doctor confirmed the news: she had no amniotic fluid and the baby she was expecting, who she had named Cielle, was not growing.In many states across the US, Lee would have been advised that terminating the doomed pregnancy was an option, and possibly the safest course to protect her own life.But in the state of Arkansas, Lee was told she had just one choice: wait it out.A doctor who had confirmed the diagnosis was apologetic but insistent: the state’s laws meant he could be fined or jailed if he performed an abortion. In the wake of the US supreme court’s 2022 decision to overturn Roe v Wade, Arkansas activated a so-called trigger law that made all abortion illegal except if a woman was in an acute medical emergency and facing death. There are no other exceptions: not for rape victims, minors or fatal fetal anomalies.For the next five weeks, on a weekly basis, doctors knew Lee – already a mother to one-year-old Camille at the time – was at risk because she had placenta previa, which could cause bleeding and death. But she returned regularly to her OB-GYN’s office to be scanned, waiting to hear if Cielle’s fetal heartbeat had stopped.“I was having to prepare for if I passed. Me and my husband had to have a lot of really tough conversations about all the outcomes, just to prepare in case I wasn’t going to be there for my husband and my daughter,” she said.Lee never seriously considered leaving the state to get an abortion because the cost seemed exorbitant, childcare would be an issue, and she was uncertain about whether she could face criminal charges once she came home. None of her doctors ever suggested it, either.“I would have had an abortion, 100%. I am very much a realist. I knew she was going to pass. Having to carry her week after week and knowing she was going to pass, it was a horrific waiting game,” she said.Once Cielle stopped moving, and no fetal heartbeat was detected, she traveled three hours to the UAMS hospital in Little Rock from her home in Fort Smith because doctors thought delivering at the larger hospital would be safer in case of complications.There, she was induced and delivered a stillbirth. Luckily, the labor proceeded without any incident.“When I came in they had blood ready just in case. I remember seeing it out of the corner of my eye,” Lee said.The delivery room seemed prepared especially for women like Lee. She saw signs on the wall that said her baby was in heaven.When she was told the cost of transferring Cielle’s remains back home would be more than $1,000, she opted to take her in her car by herself. She held the casket in her arms the whole way.A chance for changeVoters in 10 states will cast ballots next week to expand their state’s abortion protections or maintain the status quo. Arkansans won’t be among them.But for seven weeks this summer, it looked like Arkansas voters would have an opportunity to change the state’s constitution to roll back one of the strictest abortion bans in the country.There are few places in the US where it is more dangerous to be a pregnant woman than in Arkansas. The state had the worst maternal mortality rate in the country, according to data collected by the CDC from 2018-2021. It showed that about 44 mothers die for every 100,000 live births. An Arkansas maternal mortality review board, which reviews such data, found that 95% of pregnancy-related deaths in that period were considered preventable. The Guardian’s reporting has not identified specific cases in which the state’s ban on abortion has led directly to a death, but abortion rights advocates believe the risks are high.In July, a dedicated network of about 800 grassroots organizers in Arkansas had collected the necessary signatures to get a measure on the 5 November ballot that – if passed – would have changed Arkansas’s constitution to protect the right to abortion for any reason up to 18 weeks of pregnancy. It also would have legalized exceptions for abortion after 18 weeks, including in cases involving rape, incest, fatal fetal anomalies, and life and health of the mother.It would have saved a woman like Lee from facing potentially fatal outcomes, and emotional and financial distress.View image in fullscreenThe measure did not provide the same rights that existed under Roe – which protected abortion until viability, or around 24 weeks – a fact that organizers said kept national organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU from getting involved in the effort. But organizers believed that it was a measure that even conservative voters would support. After all, voters in neighboring Kansas, another Republican stronghold, overwhelmingly voted to protect abortion rights when its ballot was put to voters in a referendum in 2022.To the dismay and shock of the grassroots organizers, however, the Arkansas initiative was ultimately quashed before it ever reached voters. A paperwork error by organizers prompted a legal challenge by Arkansas’s secretary of state, John Thurston, who rejected the abortion amendment. On 22 August, the Arkansas supreme court upheld his decision.For Arkansas women, there is no end in sight.A Guardian investigation into the ballot’s demise tells a more complicated story than just a bureaucratic screw-up, revealing a confluence of rightwing actors working in parallel to ensure it never got to voters: a reclusive donor who has helped shape the anti-abortion movement across the US; the inner circle of the Arkansas governor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who has proclaimed Arkansas “the most pro-life state in the country”; and judges who are supposed to be non-partisan but are deeply aligned with the state’s Republican party.“Everyone knew there was going to be a pretty organized and well-funded effort to keep it off the ballot, said Ashley Hudson, a rising Democratic star who represents west Little Rock in the Arkansas state legislature. “Is it collusion, directly? I don’t know. But I think there are a lot of people with aligned interests.”Changing the rulesThe atmosphere was euphoric on 5 July 2024 when grassroots organizers and activists marched into the domed capitol building in Little Rock armed with dozens of boxes of signed petitions. They had accomplished the seemingly impossible: collecting more than 100,000 signatures across 50 counties in Arkansas in support of getting the abortion rights measure on November’s ballot.For grassroots organizers like Kristin Stuart, the effort had been all consuming. Stuart had previously worked as an escort at Little Rock’s only surgical abortion clinic, helping patients get through the throng of protesters who were usually assembled outside. The clinic no longer performs abortions but is used as resource center for women looking for financial support or information about how to get abortion pills from out of state.She was motivated to try to change the state’s constitution because she believed the ban was deeply unjust. Stuart was particularly incensed by circumstances that are especially dire for poor women and children in Arkansas, like the fact that it remains the only state in the nation that has not expanded postpartum Medicaid coverage to give poor women health insurance for a year after they give birth.“There was a small group of us that worked it like it was a full time job,” she said. The campaign, led by Arkansans for Limited Government (AFLG), divided the state into 50 clusters. There were cluster leaders and county leaders. Volunteers were trained three times a week. For a signature to be valid, they needed a person’s name, address, birth date, the date they signed and city. They also had to make sure the signer was a registered voter.“We knew we had to be perfect. We knew we had to do everything correctly, because they would be looking for anything to disqualify it,” Stuart said.They sometimes faced harassment, including protesters who could be “loud and mean and scary” who tried to stop people from signing, Stuart said. There were moles in chat and message groups where hundreds of volunteers were communicating. Sometimes the locations where canvassers were planning to collect signatures would be published ahead of time by Arkansas Right to Life, the state’s leading anti-abortion group. Organizers had to adjust the ways they communicated to adapt.But what volunteers discovered, said Lauren Cowles, was that there were “blue dots” in even the reddest counties of the state.View image in fullscreen“We found people who were desperate to connect. There are a lot of people out there who believe women should have the right to choose,” Cowles said. Voters were also being educated. Many did not understand that the total ban did not include any exceptions, including for rape.“There were many months when I did not believe we could get enough signatures. The last few weeks before the deadline, we saw such a surge of urgency,” Stuart said.Hudson, the Democratic legislator, believes the Republican effort to stop the measure from succeeding began in 2023, when Republicans first proposed an amendment to the Arkansas constitution that would make it significantly more difficult to get a constitutional amendment on the ballot. Instead of calling for signatures to be collected from at least 15 counties, as is stated in the Arkansas constitution, Republicans wanted to increase the number to 50 counties. Voters rejected the proposal in a referendum. But the Republican legislature passed a law to that effect anyway.“That was done in anticipation of a ballot like this,” says Hudson. It was a difficult challenge but organizers got the signatures they needed. In a move that would later prove to be a fatal flaw, leaders hired paid canvassers in the final weeks of the campaign to help get the petitions over the line.The chicken tycoonRonnie Cameron, a poultry billionaire from Arkansas, is one of the most important rightwing power players you’ve never heard of. While Republican megadonors like Harlan Crow, Charles Koch and Dick Uihlein have become well known as big conservative donors, Cameron, a conservative evangelical Christian, has shied away from the spotlight, even as he has donated tens of millions of dollars to anti-abortion causes nationwide.According to public records, Cameron was the largest single donor in the fight against the abortion amendment, giving about $465,000 to groups that fought the initiative. This included $250,000 to a group called Stronger Arkansas, which was formed to fight the petition as well as a separate ballot initiative that would have increased rights to medical marijuana.Stronger Arkansas was run by Chris Caldwell, a consultant who is Sanders’s closest political adviser and served as her campaign manager in 2022. Two other officials with close ties to Sanders served as vice-chair and treasurer of the group.View image in fullscreenCameron, the chairman of the chicken company Mountaire Farms, also donated about $215,000 to Family Council Action Committee 2024, a group formed by Jerry Cox, the conservative head of the Arkansas Family Council, which is staunchly anti-abortion. The conservative advocacy group was accused in June 2024 of using intimidation tactics when it published a list of names of paid canvassers who were working on the abortion petition. The names were obtained after the Family Council obtained them via a freedom of information request.AFLG said in a statement at the time that the publication of canvassers’ names put its team at great risk for harassment, stalking and other dangers.“The Family Council’s tactics are ugly, transparently menacing, and unworthy of Arkansas. We won’t be intimidated,” it said.In a 2020 New Yorker report by the investigative journalist Jane Mayer, Cameron was described as a reclusive businessman who had donated $3m to organizations supporting Trump’s candidacy in 2016. The report found that Trump had weakened federal oversight of the poultry industry even as he accepted millions of dollars in donations from Cameron and other industry figures. Cameron, whose grandfather founded Mountaire, also served on Trump’s advisory board on the pandemic’s economic impact.Cameron and his wife, Nina, reportedly attend Fellowship Bible church, which the New Yorker called a hub of social conservatism that lists condemnation of homosexuality as a key belief. Cameron also founded the Jesus Fund, and is a funder of both that private group and another called the Jesus Fund Foundation. According to public records, the Jesus Fund has donated $159m over the last decade to the National Christian Foundation, a highly influential multibillion-dollar charity that is considered the largest single funder of the anti-abortion movement.View image in fullscreenAccording to Opensecrets, Cameron and his wife are considered the 28th largest contributors to outside spending groups in this election cycle. One of the biggest beneficiaries of the couple’s donations is the Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton, who has called for fetuses to be given constitutional rights. Cameron also donated $1m to the pro-Trump Super Pac Make America Great Again Inc in July.Nina Cameron was reached by the Guardian at her home but she declined to answer questions about her political activity.A spokesperson for Mountaire did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. A spokesperson for the Family Council did not respond to a request for comment.A staple and a photocopyFive days after grassroots activists celebrated their milestone on 5 July, reality hit.Thurston, Arkansas’s secretary of state, who had participated in the state’s March for Life, an anti-abortion rally on state grounds, and had won the endorsement of Arkansas Right to Life in 2022, challenged the legality of the petition. In a claim that would be hotly contested, Thurston said AFLG had not submitted the documents that were required to name the paid canvassers and confirm they had been properly trained. He rendered 14,143 signatures they had collected in the final stretch invalid, leaving the final count at 88,000. They were a few thousand short of the 90,704 they needed under Arkansas’s legal requirements. Thurston offered no “cure period” for organizers to fix the issue. Abortion was off the ballot.Thurston seemed to be quibbling over a staple and a photocopy: AFLG had already submitted the required paperwork related to training a week earlier, but it should have stapled a copy of it to the petition it submitted on the due date.Privately, some grassroots organizers seethed at what they saw as an unforgivable mistake by AFLG leaders following a grueling campaign. Others say that even if the paperwork had been perfect, Thurston would have found another issue to challenge.In legal briefs and statements, AFLG argued that the 2016 secretary of state had counted signatures for other ballot measures even after those organizers failed to submit some paperwork. Thurston’s personal views on abortion, they said, meant he was discriminating against them. They also claimed that they had been verbally assured by Thurston’s assistant director of elections, Josh Bridges, that their paperwork was in order.Sarah Huckabee Sanders seized on the decision. In a post on X, the governor posted a photograph of Thurston’s letter and wrote “the far left pro-abortion crowd in Arkansas showed they are both immoral and incompetent”.Then the matter went to court.The judgesJudges in Arkansas are supposed to be non-partisan. But when Sanders announced in June 2023 that Cody Hiland, a former US attorney who served as the head of the Arkansas Republican party, would be appointed to the state’s supreme court following a vacancy, she boasted that her pick would give Arkansas a “conservative majority” for the first time.“I know it will have the same effect on our state as it has had on our country,” she said at the time, in a reference to the US supreme court.View image in fullscreenHiland would become one of four justices to strike down the abortion amendment on 22 August. The majority decision, written by the justice Rhonda Wood – who counts Ron Cameron’s Mountaire as one of the largest individual donors to her election campaign and had months earlier been endorsed by Arkansas’s state Republican party – found that Thurston had “correctly refused” to count the signatures by paid canvassers because the organizers had failed to file the necessary training certificate.The August ruling faced strong criticism, including from an unlikely source: a Washington DC lawyer named Adam Unikowsky, a parter in the supreme court practice at Jenner & Block, and former law clerk to the late conservative supreme court justice Antonin Scalia.“The Arkansas Supreme Court’s decision is wrong,” Unikowsky wrote in a lengthy post on his legal newsletter. The majority’s decision, Unikowsky wrote, said that the allegedly missing paperwork had to be stapled to the organizers petition. Except, he said, Arkansas law does not say that.The three dissenting judges made the point in their dissent, saying Thurston had “made up out of whole cloth” that such a requirement existed. The dissenting judges said the majority’s endorsement of Thurston’s rationale was inexplicable.View image in fullscreenWhen AFLG argued that it had relied on Thurston’s office’s alleged verbal assurance that their paperwork was in order, the court rejected the argument in their majority opinion saying his comments did not change the law.Unikowsky also argued that Arkansas law made it clear that AFLG should have been offered time to correct its mistake. “Taking a step back, I have to dwell on the injustice of it all. Arkansans are being disenfranchised,” he wrote. He also noted that conservative groups who had made similar errors in their own ballot initiatives had not faced pushback.Sanders celebrated the supreme court’s ruling. “Proud I helped build the first conservative supreme court majority in the history of Arkansas and today that court upheld the rule of law, and with it, the right to life,” she said.The governor has long made touting the state’s so-called “pro-life” stance a priority. In March 2023 she signed a bill to create a “monument to the unborn” near the Arkansas state capitol.Shortly after the judges’ made their decision, the Pike county Republican committee issued a flyer for a political event in October. It featured a picture of Wood, the justice, alongside Thurston. They were both scheduled to appear at the Republican event. Wood reportedly “panicked” over the flyer and had the Republicans remove her picture but still planned to attend.Organizers say they will probably try again in 2026. Sanders will also be up for re-election that year.‘There is no way we can stay here’Looking back, Danielle – an Arkansas resident – realized she had eloped and closed on a house in Little Rock in June 2022, in the same week that Roe fell. A native of Philadelphia, Danielle (who asked the Guardian not to use her last name) and her husband, a doctor, moved to Arkansas so that he could work in underserved communities.They tried to conceive for months before turning to IVF. Danielle quit her job and commuted back and forth to Texas to receive treatment – her options were limited in Arkansas – and ultimately got pregnant. She was 18 weeks pregnant when a routine scan revealed that there was no fluid around the fetus, which also had no kidneys and no stomach. The pregnancy was not viable, even though the fetus had a heartbeat.When she was told by her doctor in Arkansas that her only option after the Dobbs decision was carrying the pregnancy to term, she and her husband knew they needed to find another solution. Even her IVF doctor in Texas urgently advised her to terminate the pregnancy. If she ended up needing a C-section during labor, it would take a long time before she would be physically ready to try again, he said.View image in fullscreen“My husband and I scrambled and got the earliest appointment in the closest place we could, which was in Illinois,” Danielle says. It was a six-and-a-half-hour drive and a two-day medical procedure. They stayed in a hotel for two nights.Danielle knows she was relatively fortunate to have the means to leave the state, unlike many women in Arkansas who lack resources. She and her husband also understood her life was at risk, even though it was never made explicitly clear. Her local hospital had only offered “palliative care” for the fetus, which meant scans every two-three weeks to check on its fetal heartbeat – not the kind of care Danielle knew she would need to avoid the risk of becoming sick and septic.After terminating her pregnancy in April 2024 and returning to Arkansas, Danielle got involved in the grassroots effort to collect signatures for the abortion ballot initiative. She remembers how one protester called her a “murderer” for collecting signatures. The person doing the shouting was an anesthesiologist she recognized who had attended one of her husband’s lectures and worked at the UAMS hospital in Little Rock.She went to the statehouse when the signatures were turned in, full of hope. She was photographed by a friend that day holding a sign that read: “I deserved better.”“We felt so accomplished when we turned those in. I was so excited. I felt very triumphant. We did this in a state where it’s really hard to do,” she said.When the supreme court of Arkansas ruled against them, Danielle knew she would have to leave. Then she became pregnant again with the one IVF-created embryo she had left.View image in fullscreen“I said there is no way we can stay here and my husband agreed. It’s not a safe place for me to be,” she told the Guardian. “We cannot raise a daughter here.”There were things about life in Arkansas – like their nice home – that she loved. But now they are moving back to Philadelphia.“I think I was naive moving from a big city where I never would have thought twice about what I could do with my own body. It’s a shame. It’s so sad.”Theresa Lee, the woman who was forced to deliver a stillbirth, echoed Danielle’s disappointment. “You want to believe that we as citizens have a chance at voting for what we believe in, but with the precedent set by the supreme court in the state of Arkansas, it’s clear we don’t,” she said.“I do not desire to have another pregnancy in Arkansas. I don’t feel safe and I don’t feel cared for as a woman in our state. What happened to me can happen to any woman and it has. Arkansas is a dangerous place to be pregnant.” More