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      We must defend elective abortions, not just the most politically palatable cases | Moira Donegan

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      A Kentucky woman known by the pseudonym Mary Poe recently filed a lawsuit against her state, seeking an abortion for what was once a banal reason: because she wanted one.Poe, who was about seven weeks pregnant at the time of the lawsuit’s filing, has since had an abortion out of state. But her attorneys argue that she still has standing to sue to overturn Kentucky’s two abortion bans – a six-week ban and a separate total ban – arguing that the laws violate the state constitution. This much, at least, is typical: lawsuits challenging abortion bans have sprung up across the country since Dobbs, with women and their families seeking to overturn bans, expand exceptions, or get some compensation from the state for the graphic, distressing, disabling or deadly outcomes that the bans have made them suffer.The US supreme court justices who voted to overturn Roe in Dobbs cited the surge in activist litigation around abortion – a product of conservative investment in anti-choice legal shops – as part of their reason for doing so. Surely this must be a contentious, controversial issue that the federal bench is ill equipped to resolve, the judges from the conservative legal movement reasoned – because look how many complaints the conservative legal movement has filed against it!This rationale was always disingenuous, but it has also been proved flatly wrong: Dobbs has not got the courts out of the abortion business. Instead, lawsuits over abortion have exploded. The anti-choice camp has pounced, seeking to further restrict abortion by banning pills; targeting reproductive rights advocates, abortion funds and sexual health educators; claiming rights for fetuses or embryos; or by asserting that men who father pregnancies have a right to keep women from terminating them.But the pro-abortion rights side has been busy with litigation, too. Women who have been put at great health risk or made to suffer terrible, painful complications as a result of bans brought a class-action lawsuit in Texas. Bans have been challenged over and over again – on religious liberty grounds, on the grounds of state constitutional provisions securing the right to make individual healthcare decisions, under a federal law that guarantees emergency room treatment for patients needing stabilizing care, and under state constitutional clauses guaranteeing liberty, due process and privacy.The Kentucky lawsuit is part of this latter camp. Mary Poe has cited Kentucky’s constitutional guarantees of individual rights to both privacy and self-determination, which she says have been violated by the bans. “I feel overwhelmed and frustrated that I cannot access abortion care here in my own state,” she said in a statement delivered via her lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union. “I am bringing this case to ensure that other Kentuckians will not have to go through what I am going through, and instead will be able to get the healthcare they need in our community.”This kind of desire for an abortion – the dignified simplicity of it – has been missing from much of the post-Dobbs abortion rights discourse. After the ruling, as trigger bans shot into effect across the country, clinics shuttered their doors, and scared women tried to discern their options, there was no shortage of tragic stories highlighting the brutality, indignity and gendered bigotry of the laws. But as the dust settled and members of the Democratic party, the major reproductive rights advocacy groups and the liberal legal movement surveyed the national scene, a consensus emerged that the face of the mainstream pro-choice movement would be the patient who experienced a medical emergency.Women who had suffered horrific medical complications became lucid, moving and highly sought after tellers of their own stories, explaining how abortion bans has risked their health: Amanda Zurawski, for example, was denied an emergency abortion at 18 weeks, subsequently went into septic shock twice, and one of her fallopian tubes was so scarred that it is now permanently closed, inhibiting her future fertility. Kate Cox was denied an abortion after discovering that her fetus has trisomy 18, a rare genetic condition which is incompatible with life, and which, because of Cox’s own medical history, also endangered her fertility and life.During her presidential run, Kamala Harris ran an ad featuring a woman identified only as Ondrea, who suffered a miscarriage at 16 weeks and was denied the standard care due to her state’s abortion ban. She developed sepsis and almost died. The ad features a shot of Ondrea in a bathroom, staring at her body in a mirror wearing only a sports bra. Her belly bears the scars of the emergency surgery that eventually saved her life – the surgery that she never would have had to have if it weren’t for the ban.It does not diminish these women’s bravery, their suffering, or the wrongness of what was done to them to say that they are only one small fraction of those who need abortions in America. These are married, middle-class women with wanted pregnancies; Zurawski and Cox are both white. Cox has spoken movingly about her hopes to meet her future child, a girl; in the ad that features Ondrea, she and her husband hold a baby blanket. These are women whose suffering at the hands of abortion bans has nothing to do with a refusal or distaste for heterosexual, married, middle-class life. Their suffering can be made visible precisely because they are so acceptable.Not so with Mary Poe. Poe may well be married, middle-class and white; from her statement, in which she talks about the difficulty of finding childcare, we can infer that she, like most abortion patients, is already a mother. But Poe is not suffering a physical emergency; she is not enduring any pain or medical misfortune that she can use to purchase social license. She is not, in other words, a woman whose claim to an abortion is based on a plea for mercy. She is merely a woman who seeks to be in control of her own life, one who believes that things like privacy and self-determination apply to her, too.“I have decided that ending my pregnancy is the best decision for me and my family,” Poe writes in her public statement. “This is a personal decision, a decision I believe should be mine alone, not made by anyone else.”This was not always a radical proposition. But in the post-Dobbs world, it has sadly become one.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump’s White House is filling with alleged sexual abusers … led by him

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      Donald Trump was found civilly liable last year for the defamation and sexual abuse of the writer E Jean Carroll – just one of the more than 27 women who have accused him of sexual misconduct. In January 2025, he will again be president of the United States – the first to take office with a court-adjudicated history of sex crimes.And it seems he’s eager to pack the White House with people just like him.Four of president-elect Trump’s cabinet-level nominees have faced serious allegations of sexual misconduct, ranging from workplace sexual harassment to assault, and a fifth is embroiled in a sexual abuse-related lawsuit.As Americans brace themselves for Trump 2.0, it’s time to be clear-eyed about the Maga machine: a history of alleged sexual criminality isn’t a bug, it’s a central part of the hardware; an organizing principle that clarifies how Trump and those like him view their power and how they intend to wield it.Trump’s first choice for attorney general, the former representative Matt Gaetz, was concurrently under investigation by the Department of Justice and the House ethics committee for allegedly violating federal sex-trafficking laws and statutory rape. The disgraced representative also reportedly bragged about his sexual conquests and showed nude photos of women to his fellow lawmakers. On Thursday afternoon, Gaetz announced he would be withdrawing his name from consideration to avoid being a “distraction to the critical work of the Trump/Vance Transition”, just hours before CNN published a report about a second alleged sexual encounter between Gaetz and a 17-year-old. (The age of consent in Florida is 18.)Gaetz’s withdrawal provided a brief moment of relief. But, still, Trump’s would-be cabinet is filled with alleged criminals, all of whom the president-elect has vociferously defended, and all of whom deny wrongdoing.Elon Musk, whom Trump has tapped for the made-up position of “efficiency czar”, reportedly exposed his penis to a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016 and offered to buy her a horse in exchange for sex. Musk’s company SpaceX paid her $250,000 in 2018 to settle the sexual misconduct claim. He was also sued this year by eight former SpaceX employees, who alleged that the CEO treated “women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size, bombarding the workplace with lewd sexual banter”.Then there’s the nominee for secretary of defense, the Fox News host Pete Hegseth, who was accused of sexually assaulting a staff member of the California Federation of Republican Women in 2017.In the police report that was filed at the time, and which was obtained by the New York Times, the unnamed woman told law enforcement that Hegseth had taken her phone and blocked her exit from his hotel room before assaulting her. Though Hegseth was never charged with a crime, he did enter into a nondisclosure agreement with the woman, which included a financial settlement.Robert F Kennedy Jr was accused of sexually assaulting Eliza Cooney, a former family babysitter, in the late 90s. Trump now wants him to run the Department of Health and Human Services.Finally, Trump’s pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, was recently named in a lawsuit alleging that she and her husband, Vince McMahon, failed to stop an employee from sexually abusing children in the 1980s and 90s, when the McMahons were running World Wrestling Entertainment. (An attorney for McMahon told CNN that the lawsuit is “filled with scurrilous lies.”)These picks feel comically brazen, like shots fired directly at the #MeToo movement, which erupted in the wake of Trump’s election in 2016. It’s not a stretch to imagine that Trump, a man who has threatened to sue every one of his accusers and has openly bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” without their consent, is attempting to exact revenge on a movement designed to use the collective to force consequences for a handful of powerful predators.#MeToo was just one piece of a slate of shifting gender norms over the last decade. Now, we’re living in the middle of a backlash.Roe v Wade has fallen, a known sexual abuser is re-entering the Oval Office, and the very online far right has found a new slogan: “Your body, my choice.”In Susan Faludi’s 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women,she writes that these moments of backlash are not random. They are “preemptive strikes”, which “have always been triggered by the perception – accurate or not – that women are making great strides”.The perception that women were gaining status at the expense of men’s, combined with the real ways in which many men in this country are struggling economically, socially and mentally, has seemingly helped fuel the Trump campaign.Trump sneered at “childless cat ladies”, courted Joe Rogan listeners and crypto-bros, and trotted out Hulk Hogan to perform hyper-macho drag at the Republican national convention. The campaign deployed far-right influencers to wax poetic on X – which Musk owns – about the dangers of “toxic femininity” and mock the peeing habits of men who supported Kamala Harris.On election day, Trump senior adviser and noted white nationalist Stephen Miller tweeted a very particular plea: “Get every man you know to the polls.” After Trump’s win, the far right were out in full force celebrating what they clearly perceived not just as a win for their preferred political leader, but for their gender as a whole; they flooded X and TikTok with the phrases “your body, my choice” and “get back in the kitchen” and crafted supercuts of liberal women crying.Perhaps what Trump is counting on is that people who oppose the draconian agenda of his administration will be so exhausted by the piling horrors that they’ll get overwhelmed and give up – that all of the allegations will blend together and the backlash will become the norm. And yet, we know where a backlash brews, so does a resistance to it. More

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      Women and LGBTQ+ people take up guns after Trump’s win: ‘We need to protect ourselves’

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      The misogyny and anti-trans rhetoric that were hallmarks of the 2024 election campaign have seemingly ramped up since Donald Trump’s win, prompting some women, queer and trans people to respond by buying guns – and learning how to defend themselves from potential attackers.The Guardian spoke to various Americans from marginalized groups taking firearms classes, arming themselves with stun guns and pepper spray and taking their friends shooting in an effort to protect themselves from bigots they fear will be emboldened by the president-elect’s return to power. A few left-leaning gun clubs say their numbers are increasing dramatically.“I am thinking about carrying every day,” said Ashley Parten, 38, a Douglasville, Georgia, resident who purchased stun guns for herself, her daughter and three nieces after the election. Parten, who is Black and bisexual, is also eyeing a maroon handgun that she plans on buying after taking a firearms class.“We all feel the need to make sure that we’re aware of our surroundings and protect ourselves in general, but even more so now,” she said.Earlier this week, the Republican House speaker, Mike Johnson, in effect targeted Sarah McBride, the first openly trans person elected to Congress, by stating single-sex bathrooms in the Capitol “are reserved for individuals of that biological sex”. Trump, whose campaign released a firehose of anti-trans attack ads, has promised to ban gender-affirming care for minors and “keep men out of women’s sports”.The president-elect and several of his cabinet picks are also facing sexual misconduct allegations; he and his allies have bragged about the overturning of Roe v Wade and denigrated childfree women.“Our identities are politicized every single day,” said Parten.View image in fullscreenA few days after Trump’s first presidential win in November 2016, Parten said she was filling up with gas in Charleston, South Carolina, when a white man in a red Maga hat shoved her against the pump. She says she elbowed the man and then drove off.“He told me that my N-word president couldn’t protect me any more, because it was Trump country,” she recalled.Some firearms sellers and trainers who serve marginalized groups said they had seen an explosion of interest following the election.“It’s been massively overwhelming,” said Tom Nguyen, founder of LA Progressive Shooters, a gun club that caters to Bipoc and LGBTQ+ people.His beginner pistol course is sold out until June 2025 and he says he’s been “getting more bookings on a daily basis, every single day since the election than I ever have in the past four years that I’ve been doing this work”.The nationwide Liberal Gun Club said it had fielded thousands of new membership requests since the election, about half of which have come from women, with queer and trans people also accounting for a bulk of newcomers. One Wisconsin-based instructor has already trained 100 new members, according to the club spokesperson, Lara Smith. The Pink Pistols, a national gun group catering to LGBTQ+ people, said it had opened six new chapters since the election.Politically motivated gun sales aren’t new, nor are they unique to progressive voters.Barack Obama’s 2008 election resulted in a sustained surge in gun sales throughout his tenure.Just a few days before the election, Michael Cargill, who owns Central Texas Gun Works in Austin, said he saw a spike in sales from conservatives stocking up on firearms and ammo because they believed Kamala Harris winning would result in a second amendment crackdown. (The US vice-president has said she owns a Glock.) Cargill, a Black, gay Republican, said his firearms classes have doubled in size since Trump’s win and are now at capacity. The influx is primarily coming from women and LGBTQ+ people worried about their rights and potential “civil unrest”, he said.The manosphere, an anti-feminist online ecosystem, has embraced Trump’s win with posts celebrating male dominance and the loss of bodily autonomy for women and LGBTQ+ people.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAfter the election, the white nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes wrote on X: “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Smith, the Liberal Gun Club spokesperson, said many new members said the post motivated them to join.“If there’s men out there that really think like that, I want at least a fighting chance if I ever encounter one,” said Kylee Ortega, a 24-year-old Texan who bought a pink stun gun featuring a cartoon Grim Reaper and a strawberry keychain that can be used to stab people.Trans gun enthusiasts and content creators are also hearing from their previously gun-shy friends who want to learn defensive shooting.View image in fullscreenJessie McGrath, 63, a lifelong Republican who is trans, grew up around guns on farms in Colorado and Nebraska. She decided to vote for Harris when Republicans started attacking gender-affirming care and “wanting to basically outlaw my ability to exist”. She ended up being a delegate at the Democratic national convention.“Government getting involved in making healthcare decisions is something that I never thought I would see the Republican party doing,” she said.McGrath, a veteran and prosecutor, now splits her time between Los Angeles and Omaha, and said she plans on taking a group of friends shooting when she’s back in Nebraska next month.“I’ve seen a huge uptick in women who don’t like guns who are thinking about at least getting trained on it,” she said. “It is a real, valid feeling that these people have, because the attacks have gotten larger. They’ve gotten more vitriolic.”While many women and LGBTQ+ folks cite protection as a reason for owning a gun, and may feel comforted having one, Harvard University research shows that it’s relatively rare to use a gun in self-defense. A meta-analysis by the University of California, San Francisco found that women with access to firearms are three times more likely to be killed than women who don’t have access.Tacticool Girlfriend, a trans woman and gun YouTuber with more than 62,000 subscribers, said she was concerned that people were panic-buying guns because of Trump’s win.“Guns are not going to answer most of people’s problems, even in the realm of self-defense. Training to use and carry pepper spray and studying martial arts will always be far more practical and useful in everyday self-defense scenarios,” she said, noting that gun ownership is costly in both time and money.“If you can’t dry-fire at least once a week and go out to the range once a month on average, you’re likely to become more of a liability to yourself and everyone around you in the event that you ever needed a gun.” More

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      Are US women protesting Trump by ‘swearing off sex with men’? | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Have rumours of a US sex strike been greatly exaggerated?Sex sells. Sex strikes, meanwhile, make for an irresistible headline. Ever since Donald Trump overwhelmingly won the election, there have been endless headlines about how American women are emulating South Korea’s fringe 4B movement (which encourages heterosexual women not to date, procreate, marry or have sex with men) and “swearing off sex with men” in protest.“A Sex Strike Is a Losing Strategy for American Women,” a recent op-ed in the New York Times proclaimed, for example.“No sex. No dating. No marriage. No children. Interest grows in 4B movement to swear off men,” a PBS headline declared.“Ahead of Trump’s Second Term, Calls for a Sex Strike Grow Online,” the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) wrote.It’s certainly true that there has been a spike in US interest in the 4B movement. Voluntary celibacy was growing in popularity long before the election but Trump’s victory gave it a huge boost. There are more than 100,000 videos about 4B on TikTok and there has been a surge in Google searches relating to it. There have also been various viral calls for women to withhold sex in order to protest against Trump. (Just in case you’re wondering if you have a severe case of deja vu, there were also calls for a sex strike during Trump’s first term.)But is this online chatter actually translating to offline action? It doesn’t seem that way yet. There is zero evidence that there are large-scale sex strikes protesting against Trump happening in the US. All the hand-wringing by the likes of the New York Times seems to be over something that doesn’t actually exist. The headlines treating women as some sort of monolith also obscure the fact that, according to AP VoteCast, 53% of white women voted for Trump this year.Still, that doesn’t mean that growing interest in 4B should be written off as some sort of meaningless fad. On the contrary, engagement with the movement points to the fact that many women are not taking Trump’s victory lying down. While there may be no proof of widespread strikes in the sheets, there have been plenty of demonstrations on the streets. Meanwhile, online sales of emergency contraceptives and abortion pills are rocketing before the “reproductive apocalypse” that will be Trump’s second term. With rights being rolled back and pregnancy growing increasingly dangerous in the US, women are also reconsidering whether they want to have children.Let’s say that sex strikes did actually take off, however. Might they be effective? The most famous sex strike certainly was. In the ancient Greek comedy Lysistrata by Aristophanes, women withhold sex in an attempt to end the Peloponnesian war and the ruse pays off: peace is declared. Since then, there have been plenty of other real-world sex strikes with varying results, waged everywhere from Belgium to Liberia. A small town in Colombia held a “crossed legs” protest in 2011, for example; women refused sex with their husbands until the government paved a road linking their town to the rest of the province. The protest is widely considered to have been successful.Less headline-worthy forms of protest, however, tend to be rather more effective. This, by the way, is the rather less talked-about message in Lysistrata itself. As the cultural critic and classicist Helen Morales told the Guardian back in 2022, the play isn’t just about sex strikes: “There are elder women seizing control of the treasury and the younger women withdraw their unpaid labour at home. They’re much more a model for effecting political change.”How the Taliban are erasing Afghanistan’s women – photo essay“It was important for us to look beyond the traditional representations of Afghan women as passive victims of the Taliban and show them as active players in their own lives,” say journalist Mélissa Cornet and photographer Kiana Hayeri in this piece for the Guardian.Argentina votes alone against UN resolution combating misogynistic online violenceWhich is not a huge surprise as Argentina’s President Javier Milei is incredibly rightwing and a vocal critic of the UN.Gender-fluid Mary, Queen of Scots ballet to debut at Edinburgh festival 2025It’s the latest example of a trend of gender-neutral casting in artistic productions. You can guarantee that this will drive the usual suspects completely bonkers.Armie Hammer’s mother gifted him a vasectomy for his birthdayThe disgraced actor, who has been accused of sexual abuse by multiple women, has returned to public life via a podcast. He seems to be having trouble rustling up guests so recently had his mum on the podcast, where she shared this little snippet of info.What happened to Palestinian-Egyptian actor May Calamawy’s role in Gladiator II?When Calamawy was originally cast (long before 7 October 2023) it was reported that she’d have an “important” or leading role. Now it seems like she has been all but cut from the movie – relegated to a tiny non-speaking background part. There has been a lot of speculation that this is punishment for her pro-Palestinian advocacy. As we have seen, talking about a genocide and ethnic cleansing can be a real career-killer.Sydney Sweeney says female solidarity in Hollywood is ‘fake’Wait, you’re telling me that Hollywood – a place that fetishizes unrealistic beauty ideals and where women over 40 struggle to find roles – isn’t a utopia of intersectional feminism? You’re kidding me!Iran announces ‘treatment clinic’ for women who defy strict hijab laws“It won’t be a clinic, it will be a prison,” one young woman from Iran told the Guardian.Sweden’s minister for gender equality is terrified of bananasAs someone who also hates bananas with a passion, I would like to extend my solidarity to Paulina Brandberg, whose banana-phobia has made international headlines. As one of her colleagues noted, we should be focusing on her work to help vulnerable women rather than her hatred for an alarmingly yellow fruit.The week in pawtriarchyJust in case you were wondering whether the US could get any more dystopian, it turns out that robot dogs are guarding Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago. Still, probably better to have robots rather than the real thing considering how close Trump is to Kristi Noem. The South Dakota governor, whom Trump has just picked for head of homeland security, famously wrote about shooting and killing her family dog, Cricket, and an unnamed goat. More

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      ‘Your body, my choice’: what misogynistic Trump supporters feel about sexual power | Moira Donegan

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      You can’t say it was a fluke. If in 2016, Donald Trump’s novelty, combined with his loss of the popular vote, allowed liberals to retain a bit of plausible deniability about what his presidential win meant about America, this time, there is no such comfort. Donald Trump is no longer a mystery or an amusing diversion: no one can claim that they do not understand full extent of his malignant corruption, or the seriousness of his movement’s hostility to pluralist democracy. And he won the popular vote.Many postmortems of last week’s election have tried to preserve the notion that Trump’s voter’s did not endorse him and his vision – that they know not what they do. This is dishonest, and a bit patronizing toward Trump’s supporters. Trump’s voters, for the most part, know exactly what he is, and what voting for him means. They are not ignorant or mistaken about him. They endorse him and what he is.A large part of what a majority of Americans voted for last week was the Trump campaign’s virulent misogyny. Trump himself, an adjudicated rapist who has bragged about both committing sexual assault and engineering the reversal of Roe v Wade, speaks of women in vulgar, degrading terms. He picked a running mate who has denigrated childless women as “psychotic” “cat ladies”. His adviser and funder Elon Musk, who seems to have designs on becoming something of a shadow president in Trump’s second term, is a techno-fascist pro-natalist who goes around offering women insemination.The Trump campaign positioned itself as a champion of a hierarchical gender order, aiming to restore men to a place of wrongfully deprived supremacy over women. Many of his voters cast their lot in with Trump hoping that he would do just that.Now, in the wake of Trump’s victory, some of his supporters have adopted a slogan which neatly joins the movement’s twin projects of forced sex and forced pregnancy: “Your body, my choice.”“Your body, my choice,” was coined by the far-right, pro-Nazi internet troll and Trump dinner guest Nick Fuentes on the night of the election. “Your body, my choice,” Fuentes tweeted. “Forever.” It’s a taunting inversion of the pro-choice slogan “my body, my choice”, meant to assert women’s autonomy: instead, “your body, my choice” presents women’s full citizenship and freedom as laughable, asserting, in gleeful terms, the male supremacy that will now carry for the force of policy and law under a new Trump administration.In response to Fuentes’s post, pro-Trump men have adopted the slogan en masse to troll women online. An analysis from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue found that the use of the phrase soared on social media in the days following the election, along with similar misogynist phrases like “get back in the kitchen”, and the use of sexist slurs directed at liberal and progressive women like Kamala Harris and Rachel Maddow. Female TikTok users reported a flood of such comments, with “your body, my choice” chief among them on the platform. And young girls in schools, along with their teachers and parents, reported incidents of the phrase being yelled out by boys in taunting jeers of harassment and intimidation in the days following the election.“Your body, my choice” is a rejection of women’s rights to control their own bodies in more ways than one. In addition to the phrase’s sneering inversion of a pro-choice phrase, rejecting the abortion right and claiming the overturn of Roe as a victory for men, the phrase has a second, dual meaning: as a rape threat. The men and boys who use it are not merely taunting women with the threat of an unwanted, forced pregnancy. They are taunting them with the threat of forced sex.It is not always a connection that the misogynist right has made so explicit. In other eras, the anti-choice movement has adopted an overtly religious attitude of sexual repression, aiming to restrict abortion as a means of restricting sexuality across the board. But this preacherly, sexually repressed masculinity is not the masculinity of today’s misogynist rightwing movement. Rather, the Maga right is one that sees sex not as something that must be rendered shameful and pushed out of the public sphere, but as a weapon that can be used to punish, humiliate and dominate women.This new, avowedly and vulgarly sexual rightwing masculinity is what Fuentes was crystalizing in his snide little coinage of “your body, my choice”: it is one that aims to use physical and sexual force to coerce women into a degraded gendered role, one subject to men’s domination and only partial, limited and conditional in its citizenship and access to the public sphere. In this sense, their projects in joyfully celebrating rape and restricting women’s access to abortion are two sides of the same coin: the right seeks to dominate women and to commandeer the inside of their bodies so as to force them into a gendered role against their will, be that role as sex object or as mother.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThis is why it is fitting that Trump, who was found liable for the rape of one woman and accused of sexual assault by two dozen others, was the president to secure the overturning of Roe v Wade; it is why it is fitting that two of the justices who voted to overturn Roe, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, have been credibly accused of sexual misconduct, each by more than one woman. It is because the sex politics of the right is not an anti-sex, puritanical politics. It is a politics of sexual domination.There is no use pretending that this is not what the Trump movement is. And there is no use in pretending that this is not what many of the men who voted for Trump hoped to achieve when they supported him. Much of the pre-election coverage of the gender dynamics of Trump’s campaign has disappeared in the days following the election, and perhaps this unpleasant reality is why: most Americans voted for a man they have every reason to believe is a rapist. For some of them, at least, that was not a liability, but an asset.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Make no mistake: this Trump presidency will continue to attack abortion rights | Moira Donegan

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      Abortion rights initiatives were on the ballot in 10 states on Tuesday, and won in seven of them. One of the losers was prop 4, Florida’s abortion rights measure, which received a whopping 57% of the vote but failed to meet the state’s unusually high 60% threshold, meaning that the state’s six-week ban will remain in place. Asked about the Florida abortion rights proposition ahead of the election, Trump said that when he went to cast his ballot near Palm Beach, he would vote against it.It has always been a little hard to believe that Donald Trump personally hates abortion, even if it is abundantly clear how little he thinks of women. Trump, after all, has claimed to have numerous conflicting positions on abortion rights throughout his life. And his brand of masculinity is boorish, vulgar, and above all, sexually entitled – far from the priggish, repressed moralism of more classical anti-abortion figures like Mike Pence.Maybe this is why, though Trump appointed three of the six justices who overturned Roe v Wade and has boasted about his role in ending the right to an abortion, many voters seem to not quite believe that he will continue to suppress the procedure further in his coming second term. Abortion rights measures won in several states that Trump carried on Tuesday – including Arizona, Nevada, Montana and Missouri, all states that Trump won. A lot of people, it seems, voted for abortion rights in their own states, and then also voted for Donald Trump – who, make no mistake, will move to restrict abortion access nationwide when he returns to the White House next year.Trump, of course, has insisted that this will not happen – which on its own might be a decent indication that it will. But there is evidence that the new Trump administration will pursue a broad agenda restricting women’s rights, including nationwide attacks on abortion access, even beyond that offered by Trump’s habitual pattern of self-serving dishonesty.Republicans have won control of the Senate and are likely to capture the House of Representatives; if they do, they may well advance legislation to ban abortion nationwide. (And to pass it: there is no reason to believe that a Republican governing trifecta will preserve the filibuster.) A bill like this would probably not be termed a “ban” by its sponsors: Republicans, wary of the public disapproval of abortion bans, have started calling their new abortion restrictions by chillingly imprecise euphemisms, such as “standard” or even “protection”. But the effect of the laws are the same: to outlaw abortions. This could take the form of a gestational limit, or of the federal recognition of fetal personhood. Trump may well sign such legislation into law, eliminating abortion rights even in Democratic-controlled states and those that have recently passed abortion rights referendums with the stroke of a pen.But Republicans do not even need to manage to pass a bill through Congress to make abortion much more difficult to get. Trump can simply restrict abortion through federal agencies. He will soon be in control of the FDA, for example, which regulates the abortion drug mifepristone, part of a two-drug regimen that now accounts for most abortions in the United States. Mifepristone is a safe, effective drug that allows abortions to be performed in the privacy of patients’ homes, with little of the expensive clinical involvement and overhead that makes surgical abortions more time-intensive and costly for providers and patients alike.Naturally, the anti-abortion movement hates it. Since Dobbs, a coalition of anti-choice groups and Republican attorneys general have been suing the FDA, seeking to overturn the agency’s 2000 approval of the drug. Trump will be able to rescind access to it almost immediately, taking the drug off the legal US market. If he gives the anti-choice movement what they want, he may also direct the FDA to revoke approval of the most reliable forms of female-controlled contraception, like Plan B, IUDs, and certain birth control pills, which the anti-choice movement falsely claims cause abortions.Trump is likely to also revive enforcement of the Comstock Act, a long-dormant 1873 law that bans the shipment of anything that could be used to induce an abortion through the US mail. The Comstock Act has not been enforced in decades – parts of it were repealed in the 20th century, and other sections were long rendered moot by supreme court precedents like Roe and Casey – and would have the effect of criminalizing much abortion care. Since Dobbs, several Democratic-controlled states have passed what are called shield laws, which protect doctors who mail abortion drugs from states where the procedure is legal into states that have bans. This mail-order abortion operation is, for now, technically legal: it has preserved women’s independence and dignity and no doubt saved thousands of lives.But when the Comstock Act is enforced, much of this sector of abortion provision will disappear. Combined with the revocation of FDA approval for mifepristone, this will inevitably mean that many women seeking abortions will turn to black market surgical abortion providers, and suffer the risks attendant to such procedures. A return to pre-Roe levels of abortion ban-related mortality could probably follow.Trump is also likely to reverse the Biden administration’s guidance on Emtala, the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, a federal law that requires emergency rooms to provide stabilizing care to all patients facing health crises. Emtala has been the subject of much post-Dobbs litigation, as states like Idaho and Texas have sought to argue that their abortion bans supersede the federal law, thus requiring hospitals in their states to withhold emergency abortions from women in medical emergencies who will suffer or die without them. The US supreme court declined to decide the issue last summer; a Trump administration may help to resolve it for them.This is all just what Trump could do on his own in his first years back in office. But the impact of a Trump term on American women’s access to abortion will be felt long after Trump himself is no longer with us. Trump will probably appoint at least two supreme court justices to lifetime seats in his coming term; he will also fill an unknown number of vacancies on the lower federal courts, whose judges also serve for life. These judges are all likely to be anti-abortion zealots, as are the federal bureaucrats Trump will bring in to staff agencies such as the FDA, CDC and Department of Health and Human Services.We are already living in an era when abortion access is restricted more than it has been in decades. Now, it will be restricted more. We may well never have as much reproductive freedom as we do now ever again.American women are well advised to prepare for this, to not wait for the Trump administration to restrict the tools they use to control their own bodies. Sterilization and long-acting birth control remain accessible, for now; women who want these should move quickly to get them. Plan B and abortion pills can both be purchased ahead of time and kept on hand in the privacy of a medicine cabinet; such purchases may provide security and peace of mind to those staring down the barrel of another Trump term. Abortion, as we know, will never be eliminated; it can only be less safe, and less dignified. But there are few things as strong as women’s determination to control their own lives. That determination is certainly stronger than the law.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Wisconsin supreme court seems hostile to 1849 abortion ban in oral arguments

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      During heated oral arguments on Monday morning, the Wisconsin supreme court appeared poised to find an 1849 law banning most abortions cannot be enforced.The legal status of abortion in Wisconsin has been contested since the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade and ended the right to abortion nationwide, triggering bans across the country – including in Wisconsin, where a 175-year-old ban immediately went into effect.Democrats in Wisconsin have seized on abortion as a campaign issue, with Justice Janet Protasiewicz expressing her support for abortion rights and winning a seat on the court in spring 2023. Protasiewicz’s election to the court helped flip the ideological balance on the bench, which is now controlled by a narrow liberal majority.It is highly unlikely the liberal-controlled court will uphold the ban.The 1849 statute, which was nullified by Roe v Wade and then reanimated when the landmark decision was overturned, declares that ending “the life of an unborn child” is a felony, except when required to save the life of the mother. In July 2023, a Dane county judge ruled that the 1849 ban applies only to feticide and not “consensual” abortion, citing a previous ruling that interpreted the statute as an anti-feticide law, and in September, providers including Planned Parenthood resumed offering abortion care.The Sheboygan county district attorney Joel Urmanski appealed the ruling, which is now before the Wisconsin supreme court.“The position of the circuit court below … is ultimately indefensible,” said Matthew Thome, an attorney representing Urmanski, during his opening argument. Thome argued that the 1849 law should be interpreted to “prohibit consensual abortions from conception until birth, subject to an exception when it is necessary to save the life of the mother”.Justice Jill Karofsky interrogated Urmanski’s interpretation of the law, asking if it would provide exceptions for rape, incest, the health of the mother, or fetal abnormalities.“Just to be clear, a 12-year-old girl who was sexually assaulted by her father and as a result, became pregnant, under your interpretation … she would be forced to carry her pregnancy to term?” asked Karofsky. She noted that the “penalty for aborting after a sexual assault would be more severe than the penalty for the sexual assault”.In response to a question about the medical consequences of a ban, Thome responded that he was unsure, given that he is “not a doctor”.“I fear that what you are asking this court to do is to sign the death warrants of women and children and pregnant people in this state, because under your interpretation, they could all be denied life saving medical care, while the medical professionals who are charged with taking care of them are forced to sit idly by,” said Karofsky.The court weighed the question of whether laws that were passed regulating abortion while Roe was in effect “impliedly repealed” the 1849 ban and rendered it unenforceable.“All of those statues” passed after 1973 and before it was overturned, “just go to the dust pile?” asked Karofsky.Justice Brian Hagedorn, a conservative-leaning judge, argued, of the 1849 ban, that “the law is still there”, adding that “the judiciary doesn’t get to edit laws, the judiciary doesn’t get to rewrite them, we didn’t delete it, we prevented its enforcement”.The assistant attorney general Hannah Jurss disagreed, arguing that “there is nothing in the text of these statutes that says in the event that Roe is overturned we somehow go back to the old law and throw out all of the new ones,” drawing a distinction between Wisconsin’s more than a century old law and “trigger” laws passed in certain states that were specifically designed to go into effect after Roe v Wade was overturned.A separate case, which the Wisconsin supreme court has also agreed to hear, would decide whether the right to abortion is protected under the state’s constitution – possibly opening the door to challenge other laws regulating abortion in the state. More

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      ‘A big cratering’: an expert on gen Z’s surprise votes – and young women’s growing support for Trump

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      Long before voting closed in the 2024 elections, pundits predicted that young Americans would be riven by a canyon-wide gender gap. Those predictions turned out to be correct.As a whole, Kamala Harris won voters between the ages of 18 and 29 by six points. But preliminary exit polling indicates that Donald Trump opened up a 16-point gender gap between young men and young women: 56% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Trump while just 40% of their female peers did so.Even more surprisingly, Trump managed to improve on his 2020 performance among young women, despite that gap. In 2020, 33% of young women voted for him.Earlier in the campaign, polling indicated that abortion was the top issue for women under 30. Other surveys also found that young women have veered to the left, becoming, by some measures, the most progressive cohort ever measured in US history – but many did not vote like it. In fact, many appeared not to vote at all. Early estimates show that only 42% of young people turned out to vote. That’s less than in the 2020 election.The political scientist Melissa Deckman runs the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and recently published The Politics of Gen Z: How the Youngest Voters Will Shape Our Democracy. Although she’s an expert on the youth vote, and in particular on how young women vote, even she was taken aback by Tuesday’s results – and especially by the diminished turnout, as her research has found that young women are more politically engaged than ever.We discussed what we can glean from the youth vote, what it indicates about young people’s lives and what it means for the future of the United States.We’re still waiting for more detailed data on how young men and women prioritized issues in this campaign, but what do we know so far about the issues that were most important to gen Z?By and large, it was the economy. For gen Z voters who care about the economy, they really broke for Donald Trump.Abortion really dropped as being the most salient issue for younger people. I think that was the most surprising to me.If you look at the youth vote in 2022 – and this is all young voters, not just men or women – 44% said abortion was the issue they put at their top priority. Whereas this fall, the issue was only 13% [exit polling shows]. That’s a pretty big cratering.Typically, why do we see gender gaps like this?The gender gap among gen Z voters reflects the larger gender gap we’ve often seen historically in this country. Women have tended to vote for Democrats while men have tended to vote for Republicans, and we saw that same pattern among women more generally and men more generally this election cycle. Historically, that’s been because women have tended to want a larger size and scope of government. They tend to be more supportive of government programs. Men have tended to vote pocketbook issues and want less government.Why do you think we saw such a gender gap between gen Z men and women?A lot of young women came of age politically during the Trump presidency. We often in political science talk about these being “the impressionable years” – that a lot of people often develop their orientations toward government as late teens, early adults. They’re witnessing the election of Trump, who has said openly misogynistic things, who many women have [spoken out] about how they’ve been harassed and even assaulted by him. He bragged about sexual assault on that infamous Access Hollywood tape.You combine that with the #MeToo movement a couple years later, which was a larger, broader conversation about sexual harassment and its prevalence in society. That made a cognitive dissonance for these young women: America’s elected Trump in an era where we’re recognizing that sexual harassment is a problem. It made them far less likely to embrace the GOP.This generation of young women is strongly supportive of abortion legality, and they’re having fewer rights than their mothers and grandmothers. All of those things together have fomented for them a gender consciousness in ways that we don’t see with older generations of American women.What’s notable about gen Z, however, is that unlike perhaps the last several election cycles – where you had a majority of young men voting for Democrats, either for Congress or for Biden in 2020 – we saw a more rightward turn in voting behavior among young men, and that’s probably driven by two things. One: the Democratic party didn’t have a convincing message for a lot of young men, especially on the economy. Secondly: Donald Trump’s decision to meet young men where they are – going on Joe Rogan – it sent the message that he cared about their votes. When you don’t have someone willing to fight for your votes and talk about your interests, you’re less interested in voting for that party.View image in fullscreenThe 2022 midterms took place only months after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in the decision Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Since then, we’ve seen more than a dozen states ban almost all abortions and heard reports of at least four women dying as a result of abortion bans. After all that, why has abortion become less important to young women?Dobbs – it was such a political earthquake. It really, really motivated young women to vote at much higher levels in that midterm election. But you also have to remember the electorate in a midterm is different than the electorate in a general election, and midterm elections tend to draw more motivated voters to begin with. To think that that was going to carry over in 2024 maybe was not the most accurate prediction.I’m really struck that gen Z stayed home in ways they didn’t in 2020. It was one of the biggest surprises for me – mainly because we’ve seen, in the last three federal election cycles, gen Z outperforming younger voters in earlier cycles.Gen Z is really mistrustful of institutions – at higher rates than an older Americans. Perhaps they felt like they’ve gone to the ballot box, they’ve tried to make these changes and they haven’t really seen enough action. Maybe this is a reflection of the fact that increasingly younger voters are are less in tune to government and don’t think government can provide them solutions to their problems.So why was the economy so important to gen Z?skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEconomic anxiety is really palpable among this generation. They’re disproportionately more likely to feel the pain of the economy because they want to move out of their parents’ basement. They can’t afford rent or to buy a house. They have massive student loan debt. There’s a sense among younger people that the American dream isn’t really available for them.Even though you have, on a macro level, some indicators of the economy doing quite well – low unemployment, some growth, there’s even actually been a reduction in inflation – that doesn’t matter. Because you have younger Americans really feeling the pinch of higher prices.In many ways, maybe young voters were just like older Americans, in voting their pocketbook and being unhappy with the status quo politically.Do you think the Harris campaign then erred in centering abortion so much?Public opinion polls show that most Americans are broadly supportive of abortion legality – like more than two-thirds. It’s even higher for young women. We find about seven in 10 say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. So I don’t think it was necessarily a bad strategy.I do think, though, that it’s a strategy that assumes that abortion was the top issue that voters cared about. Perhaps focusing more on the economy and how her policies would help young people – maybe more attention should have been focused there.We expected – and my data has shown – that when gen Z women have been able to vote, they tend to have voted for Democrats, for House or Senate or president. They broke really wide for Biden in 2020.It was still a pretty big gap [in 2024]. Most young women really preferred Harris over Trump, by far.What do you think this portends for the future? Are these younger women a little bit more amenable to Republicans – or are they just amenable to Trump?That’s the million-dollar question.[On the issues] young women are really to the left, and I don’t see any evidence that any of those things will change. They’re far more likely to prioritize climate change than gen Z men are. They want to do more to mitigate gun violence. They want to have more spending on mental health. They are very, very supportive of LGBTQ+ rights and racial justice.If young people find that their economic situation hasn’t improved in four years, I could totally see them going in the other direction. I don’t see a massive switch or any kind of realignment happening necessarily.Notably, young men are more liberal [than conservative] on these same policies. But I think that young men who are disaffected, who feel like women’s gains have come at their expense – this is a common theme you hear on the manosphere – they were receptive to a change.This interview reflects two conversations and has been edited for length and clarity.Read more of the Guardian’s 2024 US election coverage

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