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      High stakes for abortion rights as Pennsylvania votes on key judge pick

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      Pennsylvania voters will select a new member of the state’s supreme court on Tuesday in a judicial election that has become the unlikely focus of Republican billionaire donors, political action committees and abortion rights advocates.Democrat Daniel McCaffery is facing off against Carolyn Carluccio, a conservative judge whose apparent opposition to abortion access has drawn the ire of Planned Parenthood and other reproductive justice groups.As McCaffery and Carluccio compete for a seat on the Pennsylvania supreme court, total spending in the race surpassed $17m, according to the Associated Press – an unusually high price tag for an election that typically sees low voter turnout. But Democrats and abortion rights advocates hope Pennsylvania voters view Tuesday’s ballot as a proxy for reproductive freedom in Pennsylvania.“This election, Pennsylvania voters have a choice between Carolyn Carluccio, who has tried to hide her anti-abortion positions and dodge questions about the judiciary’s role in protecting abortion rights, and Daniel McCaffery, a proven champion of reproductive freedom,” said Breana Ross, campaigns director of Planned Parenthood Votes Pennsylvania.Abortion rights advocates hope to energize Pennsylvania voters by casting Carluccio as an existential threat to abortion access. This strategy delivered liberals a resounding victory in the Wisconsin supreme court race earlier this year, when record numbers of voters turned out to elect Janet Protasiewicz, a Democrat who pledged to defend abortion rights. Protasiewicz’s conservative opponent, Dan Kelly, refrained from voicing his opinion on voting rights.Carluccio’s campaign, taking its cues from Kelly’s unsuccessful playbook, has avoided sharing her views on abortion. After winning the primary election in May, Carluccio removed information about her opposition to abortion from her campaign website, according to a May report from the Keystone.Carluccio’s campaign site previously vowed to defend “all life under the law”.“When we redesigned our website, we chose to no longer include a résumé link. Judge Carluccio listed on her résumé that she would ‘defend all life under the law’, and she meant just that: under the law,” Rob Brooks, a spokesman for Carluccio’s campaign, told the Guardian.Carluccio has frequently branded herself as a non-political actor who operates outside the bounds of traditional partisanship.“I reject calls to rule based on partisan or ideological grounds and instead rule according to our laws,” Carluccio wrote in an August op-ed about her candidacy.Despite Carluccio’s insistence on her own ideological neutrality, her campaign has invited the support of distinctly rightwing groups. In a February letter to the Pennsylvania Coalition for Civil Justice Reform, Carluccio disclosed that her candidacy was endorsed by the Pennsylvania Pro-Life Federation, a leading anti-abortion group in the state.According to campaign finance reports, her campaign received over $4m from Commonwealth Leaders Fund, a political organization funded by the billionaire GOP donor Jeffrey Yass.Pennsylvania Democrats said Carluccio is hiding her ties to the anti-abortion movement in a disingenuous bid for primary voters. The general electorate is supportive of abortion access – 64% of all Pennsylvania voters in the 2022 midterms said abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to polling from the Associated Press.“Her campaign is clearly trying to portray her as acceptable to a primary audience,” said JJ Abbott, executive director of Commonwealth Communications, a progressive political consulting firm. “They know abortion is a motivator for voters, since the Dobbs decision, voters are more likely to engage in elections because of what is at stake for abortion.”But the stakes of Tuesday’s election are not straightforward. Unlike Wisconsin, where the threat of the 1849 near-total abortion ban loomed overhead, the outcome of Pennsylvania’s supreme court race will not directly affect abortion access in the state. Tuesday’s race will not change the composition of Pennsylvania’s high court – four of the seven seats on the current bench are held by Democrat-affiliated justices. Carluccio is operating in what appears to be a much less dire political environment than Kelly, whose campaign struggled to avoid the topic of abortion while Wisconsin was feeling the effects of the 1849 ban.Still, Planned Parenthood and other reproductive justice advocates said the abortion rights movement needs to look ahead to the 2025 election, when three of Pennsylvania’s Democratic justices will appear on the ballot.The long-term maintenance of Pennsylvania’s liberal supreme court majority is a priority for abortion rights advocates. In September, Planned Parenthood Votes launched a seven-figure advertisement campaign against Carluccio, the largest ad buy in the group’s history.As anxieties mount, abortion rights supporters are hopeful that Pennsylvania voters, as in Wisconsin, will heed the warnings offered by Planned Parenthood on the long-term consequences of Carluccio’s candidacy.Dr Benjamin Abella, a medical professor and emergency physician in Philadelphia, said voters like him are “paying attention” to Carluccio’s efforts to hide her campaign’s ties to rightwing anti-abortion groups.“The public understands that we should not be lulled into a false sense of security on abortion rights, especially if a judge is keeping quiet on their intentions and positions,” he said. “There’s no such thing as a safe state any more and that any and every election poses a risk.” More

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      She was censored over trans rights. But lawmaker Zooey Zephyr won’t be silenced

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      Zooey Zephyr had just arrived on the outskirts of far-flung Libby, Montana, this summer when a text message came through with a warning. There were anti-LGBTQ+ protesters at the Pride celebration that was already under way on the banks of the Kootenai River.Calm and steady, she pulled her white rental sedan into the lot and brought it to a stop. Instead of protesters, the car was immediately thronged by a cluster of fans. One, a middle-aged woman with long, wavy brown hair cascading from under a bedazzled baseball cap, asked Zephyr with urgency: “Do you remember me?”Later that afternoon, the woman who approached Zephyr took to the Pride stage to tell her story.She had feared coming out as transgender for years in this small, conservative town, but finally got the courage to do so when she witnessed Zephyr, 35, a Democratic state representative from Missoula, stand up to a legislative body controlled by Republicans hellbent on silencing her and driving her out of the state capitol where she was elected to serve. Seeing another trans woman refuse to be silenced gave her the power to live her own truth.This is what it’s like traveling with Zephyr – even to a remote, Republican-controlled corner of the massive state where she was born and raised. Montanans from all walks of life – many of whom have been cast aside and told their lives and politics don’t matter and won’t be heard – show up to tell her their stories and look for some hope in return.There is the fantasy of Montana that gets too much national attention, fawning stories of pristine public lands, macho cowboys and sprawling ranches. Amid rapid gentrification, those relics are all becoming figments of the collective American imagination.And then there is truly remote, rural Montana, the barely mentioned places like Libby. This community of fewer than 3,000 sits on the lush curves of a river beneath the Cabinet mountains in the north-west corner of the state, closer in place and conservative politics to north Idaho and eastern Washington than any major city in Montana.It’s a former asbestos mining town, one that voted Democratic for decades. It weathered a huge industrial poisoning scandal linked to the mine in the 1990s and early 2000s, which killed nearly 700 residents over the years. It’s a place beaten up by extractive corporate interests and nearly forgotten. But this year’s Pride celebration, one of the first organizers have ever pulled off, was vibrant, joyous and filled with dozens of supporters. (It was smaller than last year’s event, the organizers say, and they fear that was due to the wave of anti-queer and anti-trans rhetoric that has flooded Montana and other parts of rural America.)The protesters Zephyr was warned about, a cluster of angry-looking white men, were there, walking menacingly through the crowd. One carried a placard that read: “If you’re looking for a sign to kill yourself, this is it.” No one paid them much attention.I ask Zephyr what she would have done if confronted by the protesters. She smiled and said without missing a beat: “What do you think I’d do? I’d talk with them.”We’ve spent enough hours together now that I know she’s serious.Zephyr has become a symbol of graceful defiance in a state recently flooded with hate-riddled speech and politics. But how did she – a gamer, an elite wrestler as a child and later a dance instructor – become one of Time magazine’s “100 Next”, leaders the publication anointed as people who could change the world?Her rise to international fame began in 2022, when she became the first openly transgender woman elected to the Montana legislature, after a grassroots campaign prompted by the Republican majority’s mounting attack on trans rights and the independent judiciary system.The 2023 legislature, which convened in January, included a spate of legislation that undercut medical care and other essential rights for trans people. To be clear, these were not issues rising from a groundswell of popular support. Montana has only recently flipped to being deep red politically, and the most talked-about topic across the state these days is the unaffordability of housing.Making life difficult for trans people is not something most voters were demanding. But Republicans insisted that trans rights were a threat and pursued legislation, ignoring hours of testimony against the bills.The severity of the attack on trans rights in Montana was new; far-right conservatives targeting the marginalized as a tactic is not. Ken Toole, who was director of the Montana Human Rights Network through battles over gay rights and marriage equality in the 1990s and 2000s, recalls a similar landscape. “The conservative movement in the state used these kinds of issues to characterize the political debate [then and now],” he said. “Essentially, it’s scapegoating.”This spring, during a debate over a bill to limit gender-affirming care for youth, Zephyr spoke passionately against the legislation: “I hope the next time there’s an invocation, when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands,” she told the house.It was then that the Republican leadership decided her words went too far.Leadership demanded she apologize; she refused. Multiple studies have shown that trans youth have higher suicide rates, she argued, and this kind of legislation would have a detrimental impact on kids.In retaliation, the legislative leadership, run largely by one family, cut her microphone for three days, a move unprecedented in a citizen legislature with a long history of spicy rhetoric and fiery debates.On the third day of her silencing, a group of protesters filled the house gallery, a collection of seats above the grand chamber, to challenge what was happening. They chanted “Let her speak” as Zephyr held up her microphone and put a hand over her heart.Police in riot gear swept the protesters from the capitol and, in another historic move, the Republican leadership closed off public access to the gallery for the remainder of the legislative session. Republicans later voted to banish Zephyr from the house chambers, leaving her to set up a makeshift office on a bench outside the door of the body where she had been elected to serve. The next day, several women related to Republican legislators showed up and took over her bench, seemingly hoping to drive her out of sight.It was this anti-democratic wave against Zephyr and her own calm, deliberate opposition to fading away quietly that shot her into media stratosphere. The story spread fast and far in a country watching democratic norms fall away in Republican-controlled states.She appeared on ABC’s The View, was featured across national and international media, and was invited to national events. For months, her message seemed to be everywhere. Montana Republicans, in trying to silence one opposing voice, had accidentally turned her into a national star. For Zephyr, though, the moment was about much more than fleeting celebrity. She’s planning to build a lasting movement out of it.In each conversation I’ve had with Zephyr, her fiancee figures prominently. She proposed to Erin Reed, the trans journalist and activist, shortly after the legislative session ended this spring; they traveled to France to celebrate. Reed lives on the east coast, and for now Zephyr is committed to her work in Montana, making this state a more inclusive and safe place for families like her own.Zephyr was born in 1988 in Billings, Montana, still the state’s largest city. It’s long been the heart of conservative Montana politics, a place where ranchers and Chamber of Commerce types ran the show. Her own family was conservative and religious.She describes her childhood there as fairly unremarkable, like that of any other Montana kid. In 2000, her father’s work prompted the family to move to Seattle. There, Zephyr found her passion in sports, winning five state wrestling titles and finishing high school with an offer of a wrestling scholarship. She opted to stay closer to family and go to the University of Washington instead, but it’s clear that competitive sports shaped her. She still recites by memory the words of a banner that hung over the practice room: “Every day I leave this room a better wrestler and a better person than when I entered,” she says, adding how the coach made them slap the sign as they left the room.It’s become a personal motto.After graduation, Zephyr was called back to Montana. This time, as an adult, she went to Missoula to study creative writing at the University of Montana. She found a job at the university and worked part-time teaching the Lindy Hop at a local dance studio. In 2018, she reached the point in her life when it was time to come out to her community and transition. Her family’s response caused her to cut ties, but as she tells the story, Missoula, one of Montana’s more progressive cities, surrounded her with love and warmth.It was then that she chose her name: Zooey Simone Zephyr. Zooey, meaning life, Simone, a tribute to her paternal grandmother, and Zephyr, “a gentle breeze blowing from the west”.“I thought, ‘I want to be that, a gentle breeze,’” she says.Her community rallied around her. Her boss immediately had the restroom signs changed to remove gender markers, getting ahead of any questions. Her dance students didn’t bat an eye when she told them her name and identity as a woman. And her friends gathered at a brewery to celebrate the transition. The response from Missoula made her certain she was in the right place.In the years since, she has at times debated leaving Montana as the attacks on trans people mounted. But now, she says, “I’m not going anywhere. This is my state. I was born here. You can’t kick me out.”She toyed with the idea of running for a different office, but her heart is in organizing.We talked at length about the changing face of Montana and what it means to have grown up here, particularly when it seems the politics have been hijacked by a national agenda that has very little to do with ordinary people’s lives. She felt no one in elected office was listening to her, and so once she decided to run, she was dead set on winning.“I remember thinking to myself: if you really want to move the needle, you need representation,” she said.In Missoula, representation is spreading. Gwen Nicholson, a young Indigenous transgender woman who was born and raised there, is running for city council on a progressive platform centered on affordable housing.Nicholson worked in the capitol during the anti-trans onslaught this winter. She remembers thinking: “Why am I not welcome? Why does it feel like this place, which is my home and has been home to my family for generations, is trying to push me out?”Nicholson said she had confessed to a friend: “‘All this shit makes me want to run,’ and they were like, ‘Run away, or run for office?’ There has to be some material way to fight back.”This is the kind of movement Zephyr wants to see catch fire all across Montana. The state has been defined for generations by complex, sometimes surprising politics – but contemporary rhetoric has flattened its identity in recent years to that of just another deep red state. In traveling throughout her home state, she has found opinions that go far beyond the standard talking points that overwhelm political debate.“Every conversation you have with someone, you go to a community where Democrats haven’t run a candidate in a long time, and you talk to folks there, and they want to fight back,” Zephyr says.Zephyr will kick off a different kind of political effort in Montana beginning this fall. She’s creating a political action committee to raise money that will help her travel the state and recruit and train candidates for state office. In the last election, Democrats didn’t even appear on the ballot in one-third of legislative races, and the resulting landslide gave Republicans a supermajority and nearly unlimited power over Montanans’ lives. Dissenting voices were ignored and written off. Zephyr intends to build a movement that will empower progressives to run and win in places like Libby where Democrats haven’t won in years.“We can make that difference on the ground, we can move the needle on the ground here in a way that the national Democratic party wouldn’t know how to do,” she says. “It starts from the bottom.” More

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      The war on abortion pills takes a terrifying new turn | Arwa Mahdawi

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      The war on abortion pills takes a terrifying new turnHave you ever come across a scientific study and immediately thought to yourself: why? What was the point of this work exactly? Why were resources and brainpower devoted to figuring this particular thing out?Normally I have this thought when a study comes out about whether, for example, Viagra can help hamsters recover from jet lag (it can!) or whether mosquitoes like electronic dance music (not really!). On this occasion, however, it was prompted by news that researchers in Poland have developed tests that can detect whether a woman has taken mifepristone and misoprostol, the drugs that are used in a medication abortion and colloquially known as abortion pills.Why the desperate need to figure this out? According to the researchers, one of whom apparently identifies as pro-choice, it’s because they were very worried about whether abortion pills on the black market posed a threat to public health. Which seems rather a strange explanation, since those drugs have been around for decades and there is an overwhelming amount of evidence that they are safe and effective.The real reason there was a state-funded study to try detect the use of abortion pills is probably because Poland has draconian abortion laws – a near-ban on legal abortion was implemented in 2020 – and the government wants to crack down on any woman who dares to exercise autonomy over her own body. Under Polish law, you can’t go to jail for taking abortion pills, but if you help someone else procure them you can be prosecuted. Last March, for example, a Polish human rights activist was sentenced to eight months of community service for sending pills to a woman who was a victim of domestic violence.In the past, trying to prove someone had taken abortion pills was tricky. It was impossible to tell whether a woman had experienced a miscarriage or had a medical abortion: the symptoms are the same and the technology didn’t exist to find evidence mifepristone and misoprostol had been ingested. Now, however, a government intent on controlling women has chilling new tools at its disposal. And, according to a New York Times piece by Patrick Adams, it is using them: Polish authorities have already leveraged the new tests to investigate the outcomes of pregnancies.While there is no evidence that these tests are being used anywhere else in the world I imagine that anti-abortion activists in the US are champing at the bit to get their hands on them. Conservatives, after all, are already trying to clamp down on the availability of abortion pills in the US: in August, a federal appeals court ruled that access to mifepristone should be limited. Extremists are going to continue trying to chip away at access to medication abortions; they are going to continue their calls for women who get abortions to be charged with murder. A small but frighteningly zealous group of lawmakers will not be happy until every woman who so much as thinks about abortion is thrown in jail. And once they’ve outlawed all abortion they’ll move on to birth control.You think I’m exaggerating? I wish I was. Daniel Cameron, the Republican candidate for governor in Kentucky, has said he believes hormonal birth control (ie the morning-after pill) is abortion and should be criminalized. Last year, the Republican governor of Mississippi refused to rule out the possibility he might ban certain forms of contraception. Meanwhile, a number of states have passed “personhood” laws, which state that life begins at the moment of fertilization – a position which paves the way for charging women who use emergency contraception with murder. No doubt all these lawmakers are watching Poland’s development of abortion pill testing methods with glee. It seems depressingly inevitable that technology like this is coming to a red state near you soon.Young women in the US are afraid to get pregnant in a post-Roe worldThirty-four per cent of women aged 18-39 questioned in a new poll said they or someone they know personally has “decided not to get pregnant due to concerns about managing pregnancy-related medical emergencies … the Dobbs decision, it seems, has fundamentally altered how people feel about having families and the calculus for getting pregnant”.DeSantis does not support criminalizing women who get abortions after allThe Florida governor recently insisted that it is only the doctors who perform the abortion that will be liable for fines and imprisonment under the extreme six-week abortion ban he signed the law. So that’s OK, then!Happiness of girls and young women at lowest level since 2009, shows UK pollThe biggest drop in happiness is among seven- to 10-year-olds. Only 28% say they are happy compared with well over half in 2009.Silicon Valley bros are having testosterone partiesTickets to the “T parties” cost between $100 and $400. According to founder Jeff Tang, guests can get blood tests to check their testosterone levels while discussing approaches to “optimizing T naturally, endocrine disrupters, and supplements” while dining on “home-made kefir, beef patties (heart, spleen, kidney) and pork loin (blood, liver), and delicious Colombian coffee”. Tang, by the way, is not a doctor or a scientist. “Just a guy who likes experimenting with his health and productivity.”Mahsa Amini and a year of brutality and courage in IranIt’s the first anniversary of the death in custody of 22-year-old Amini, who was allegedly detained for not wearing a headscarf. The Iranian illustrator Roshi Rouzbehani powerfully recaps a year of tumult for the Guardian.Man accused of groping Spanish reporter live on air arrestedJournalist Isa Balado was just trying to do her job when a passerby groped her live on air. He’s now been arrested for sexual assault.The week in paw-triarchyWhat happens to robot dogs when they get old? Sony Japan’s pack of digital canines are heading to a nursing home. Five years after releasing a reboot of the ERS-1000 Aibo robot dogs from the late 90s, Sony is launching an “Aibo foster parent program” that lets owners who have cancelled their digital subscriptions send the dogs to nursing homes and medical facilities where they can provide emotional support and spread paws-itivity. More

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      The Women of NOW review: superb history of feminist growth and groundswell

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      What do a bestselling author, a segregationist congressman and a Black legal scholar have in common? Through a series of serendipitous events, Betty Friedan, Howard Smith and Pauli Murray lit fires that ignited the largest social revolution of the 20th century.Friedan wrote the 1963 blockbuster The Feminine Mystique. Smith added “sex” to Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. In 1965, Murray wrote the first legal analysis comparing Jim Crow to gender discrimination. With the benefit of hindsight, this unwitting but timely partnership can be seen as the launchpad of the second wave feminist movement, a movement synonymous with the National Organization for Women, or NOW.Almost 60 years after its inception, we think of NOW as a mainstream national feminist group. But in 1966 it was founded on the radical idea, as Katherine Turk describes it, “to organize and advocate for all women by channeling their efforts into one association that sought to end male supremacy”.In a world where most women were denied credit cards and mortgages, entrance into marathon races, medical school and law school, jobs as bar tenders, editors, pilots, and factory managers, ending male supremacy seemed unfathomable.Turk’s The Women of NOW is a fascinating account of the foundational organization that for many decades served as the central tentpole of this multifaceted movement. Despite the hundreds of books that make up the rich cannon of modern women’s history, Turk has done a much-needed service, writing the first full history of NOW.A professor at the University of North Carolina, Turk devoted 20 years, beginning with her undergraduate thesis, to telling this complex story. With gumshoe reporting precision, she traveled the country, unearthing hundreds of boxes and thousands of files that had been collecting dust in library archives. Combining this detailed documentary roadmap with interviews, Turk weaves the root story of an organization that drove the most transformative mass movement of the modern age.Turk makes sense of NOW’s unwieldy geographic spread and 60-year history by telling it from the points of view of three very different leaders: Aileen Hernandez, Mary Jean Collins and Patricia Hill Burnett. Hernandez, an experienced Black union organizer, Collins, a young working-class political activist, and Burnett, a rich Detroit housewife and former Miss Michigan, personify the broad reach of the organization which tried, and sometimes failed, to represent all women.Collins, who became president the Chicago chapter in 1968, greeted her new cause with giddy enthusiasm, saying joining NOW was “like waking up from a dead sleep, like ‘this is wrong; and everything is wrong.’ And away we went.” Their goal was nothing short of reprograming American society; revamping the way people lived, worked and loved.Hernandez, the most professional of the three, was one of the first five commissioners of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. When the commission opened in 1965, its main mission was to strike down workplace race discrimination. To the surprise of its leaders, a third of complaints came from women. When the agency decided it would do nothing in response to complaints from stewardesses who were fired when they turned 32, and AT&T telephone operators denied higher-level jobs, it became clear to Washington insiders like Pauli Murray, Catherine East, Mary Eastwood and Sonia Pressman that the country needed a women’s version of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. On 30 June 1966, 28 women, with Friedan their fearless if flawed leader, created an organization to “bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society and in truly equal partnership with men”. NOW was born.Turk thoughtfully recounts the feminist groundswell and the growth of NOW. It counted just 120 members in 1966 but it grew to 18,000 members and 250 chapters in 1972 and to 40,000 members and 700 chapters in 1974. NOW took on big corporations like Sears, AT&T and the New York Times (over its gender-segregated classified ads). Covered by the mainstream press, lawsuits, protests and press conferences helped spread the word. But as grassroots chapters proliferated, so did different priorities.Growing pains started early and never really subsided. Riven by divisions over race, class and sexual orientation, the organization that aimed to represent all women would eventually sink from its own weight, if not before powering the women’s movement in the 1960s and 70s.Hernandez and Murray, two of the most influential and strategic members of NOW, winced at white women’s “racist slights and oversights”. Lesbians like Rita Mae Brown rebelled against homophobia. But on 26 August 1970, hundreds of thousands of women from all backgrounds took part in the largest nationwide women’s protest in history, the Women’s Strike for Equality. This was the moment the movement went viral.Two years later, when the Equal Rights Amendment passed the House and Senate with huge majorities, Now had enjoyed a five-year run of victories in its righteous and politically popular cause. Seeing the ERA as a one-shot inoculation against systemic sexism, NOW leaders made the fateful decision to double down on the amendment’s 38-state ratification, a single-issue mission that would alienate Black women and invite organized opposition. The effort to amend the US constitution ultimately foundered in the face of powerful conservative forces lead by Phyllis Schlafly and Ronald Reagan.As Turk deftly guides her readers through NOW’s roller coaster of victories and defeats, we come away with a clear blueprint for change – replete with cautionary tales – as we face new challenges to women’s freedom and equality. The Women of NOW can show today’s feminists the path forward. It is a must-read.
      The Women of NOW: How Feminists Built an Organization That Transformed America is published in the US by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

      Clara Bingham’s book The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Remade America 1963-1973 will be published in May 2024 More

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      Abortion providers on two years of Texas ban: ‘We’re living in a devastating reality’

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      Nearly a year before the US supreme court eviscerated Roe v Wade, the court allowed an unprecedented abortion ban to take effect in Texas, serving as a harbinger of what was to sweep over the rest of the country.The most restrictive abortion law at the time, with no exception for rape, incest, or lethal fetal abnormality, Senate Bill 8 barred care after six weeks of pregnancy, and carried a private enforcement provision that empowered anyone to sue a provider or someone who “aids or abets” the procedure.The move successfully wiped out almost all abortion care in the second-most populous state in the US. When Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization hit, the state doubled down, criminally banning all care and solidifying itself as the largest state in the US to outlaw abortion.In the two years since, Texas abortion providers – some of the first in the US to experience a nearly post-Roe world – reflect on the devastating and lasting effect of the severe law, the trauma they felt denying patients care, and the struggle they faced when deciding whether or not to flee the state or stay put.Dr Jessica Rubino: ‘The law forced me to be a bad doctor’ When Senate Bill 8 took effect, Dr Rubino felt like she was on a “sinking ship”. The abortion provider and family medicine specialist was forced to turn away dozens of patients at Austin Women’s Health Center – including one who was experiencing kidney failure. At the same time, patients below the six-week mark were rushing to choose abortion care before it was too late, leaving thoughtful decision-making behind.“I had to tell people there’s nothing I can legally do for you, unless you’re on death’s doorstep,” said Rubino. “The law forced me to be a bad doctor.”“It was heartbreaking and soul-crushing,” she continued. “I was watching a healthcare disaster play out in real time, knowing that this law not only affects our state but is causing a ripple effect in every other state. With SB 8 – and even years before the law – we saw the writing on the wall with Roe and tried to warn everyone, but I’m not sure who was listening.”Rubino also recalled a conversation she had six months prior to SB 8 with colleagues across the state who appeared united, vowing to continue providing care despite the law’s consequences. People are going to die, she told them, we should take the “personal hit”. However, that wave of defiance never materialized. Rubino lacked critical mass.She soon fell into an “extreme” depression; it was difficult to get out of bed each day and she eventually sought mental health therapy and antidepressants. Her brain felt “broken”, she said. After Dobbs, she stopped performing abortion for nearly a year, exacerbating her gloom.“Having to deny patients the healthcare you are trained – and able – to give them is something you never get over. It’s not only medically unethical, it’s morally wrong,” said Rubino. “It was traumatizing, and it still haunts me.”SB 8, she said, was the tipping point for abortion providers in Texas like her who have been forced to navigate onerous laws over the years that compromise the care they give, including a mandatory sonogram and 24-hour waiting period that incorporates relaying erroneous medical information, bans on insurance coverage for care, restrictions on minors’ access to abortion, and more.In May, under the advice of attorneys and those closest to her, Rubino and her family left Texas with no plans to return. She worked at a clinic in Bristol, Virginia, where she largely served patients in banned southern states, before moving to DC in late August to help expand abortion services at a reproductive health clinic there.Rubino still struggles with the decision to flee Texas, while also acknowledging the legal inability to continue her calling.“There is a sense of guilt, of letting down the community I serve. Sometimes I feel like I gave up on these people,” she said.She also worries that a national abortion ban could once again pull her away from the community she now treats. She considers one day working in the UK or New Zealand.Rubino feels deeply anxious about the fate of the patients she has left behind and mentioned a recurring patient, a victim of domestic violence, whose partner blocked her access to birth control.“She’s going to call and I’m not going to be there,” said Rubino. “She’s not in a safe situation and we know staying pregnant can lead to more abuse, and even death by an abusive partner. The safest thing for her would be to get an abortion but now she’s not going to have that choice.”Dr Ghazaleh Moayedi: ‘Inhumane and illogical’ Testifying before Congress three separate times to oppose abortion bans and uplift the right to access, Dr Ghazaleh Moayedi has made her mark as an outspoken and passionate reproductive justice advocate for Texans.But the road wasn’t always clear for the doctor: unsure of what to do after graduating college, Moayedi’s friend recommended she take a nanny job. Her boss was Amy Hagstrom-Miller, the head of a network of abortion clinics and then major figure in Texas reproductive rights who would go on to lead several legal challenges against the state, including a 2016 US supreme court victory. Moayedi began working in Miller’s clinic, where she saw her interests collide.As a “brown, Muslim” n Iranian American woman who grew up in Texas, Moayedi quickly realized the majority of state abortion doctors – largely white men – did not reflect the diversity of the patients they treated, and vowed to fix that.“I could feel a palpable racial and cultural divide,” she said. “None of the doctors looked like the people we take care of. I wanted to be a provider that helped represent the communities we serve. I decided to go to medical school with that goal as a driving force.”Moayedi has worked in Texas abortion care since 2014, weathering the roller coaster of state abortion laws, including a 2020 order to ban abortion under the pretense of the Covid emergency, which, at the time, upended her plans to start her own practice.After SB 8, she transitioned her care to Oklahoma. When Oklahoma’s abortion law took effect, she switched gears, providing ultrasounds in Texas to those traveling to and from out-of-state abortion care. Moayedi then became uncertain if she could safely venture to states where abortion was still legal, as the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, encouraged local prosecutors to go after providers shortly after Roe fell. She and abortion funds sued the state for legal protection, and paused their services in the meantime.After securing a court victory, Moayedi has worked to build an abortion and miscarriage telemedicine practice, still in the process of getting off the ground. She is now licensed in 20 states – but only half allow abortion telemed. She also travels to Kansas, a safe haven state, to provide care.“I’ve had to really pivot quite a bit. It’s been absolutely wild,” she said. “My practice doesn’t look anything like I thought it would. For now, my goal is to stay in Texas but we’ll see what happens.”Moayedi says the law’s “inhumane and illogical” impact is especially pronounced when she is treating a patient in another state only to discover they’re from not just the same city as her, but the same neighborhood.“Here we both are, hundreds of miles away from our home and support system, just to receive healthcare,” she said. “Moments like those just hit you in the gut.”As a complex family planning specialist, Moayedi constantly worries for patients with “potentially catastrophic” high-risk pregnancies, especially as the Texas law offers only vague medical emergency exceptions, leading patients to near-death experiences. She receives calls from colleagues wondering if pregnant patients with complications, like C-section scar ectopic pregnancies, can receive care in Texas. She often refers them out of state to be safe.“I really don’t have words to describe the deep, deep pain I feel,” said Moayedi. “These laws are insulting, disgusting, cruel, and absolutely pointless.”The provider and advocate expresses disappointment with the federal administration, who she feels has failed to meaningfully protect abortion providers and patients since SB 8 took effect.“The Biden administration’s response has been a limp handshake,” she said. “We want to see tangible, bold action to restore or at least prevent the further erosion of reproductive rights. We need unwavering support – not a leader who can barely say the word ‘abortion’.”Kathy Kleinfeld: ‘SB 8 was meant to be a fear tactic that paralyzed care’ Kathy Kleinfeld will never forget the desperation that swept over Houston Women’s Reproductive Services after SB 8 took effect. Anxious patients begged her and her staff to perform abortion care past the six-week mark, even offering money under the table and other favors.“They were crying and pleading with us, saying ‘I’ll do whatever you want,’” said Kleinfeld. “It was so heartbreaking, there was nothing we could do.”Patients – as well as clinic staff – held their breath during each ultrasound, hoping the pregnancy would fall under the state-mandated time frame. For those past the mark, Kleinfeld and colleagues became “dystopian travel agents” connecting patients with out-of-state care.After 30 years of providing abortion in Houston, Kleinfeld had never experienced anything so chaotic and devastating. Then Dobbs hit.“It felt like everything we experienced with SB 8 was magnified – it was like SB 8 on steroids,” said Kleinfeld. “The intensity, the confusion, the chaos all became so overwhelming.”While she was forced to halt abortion care, Kleinfeld did not want to leave her patients behind. One month after the fall of Roe, she regrouped, considerably downsizing her 5,000 sq-ft clinic and cutting her staff by more than half. She now provides pre- and post- abortion ultrasounds for those traveling out of state, as well as abortion clinic referrals. Her clinic is only one of two former independent abortion providers in Texas – and just a handful across the US – that have not closed or moved away.“We did not want to completely abandon pregnant people in Houston,” said Kleinfeld. “We felt it was still really important to adapt and provide this necessary service. It feels absolutely awful to not be able to offer abortion care, but at the same time, we feel grateful to be able to still help patients in whatever way we can.”Her clinic received around 1,200 visits this year, with most traveling to and from New Mexico, Colorado and Kansas.The fear unleashed by SB 8 two years ago still lingers today: Patients are scared to disclose that they want or have had an abortion; they are fearful to bring a partner or family member with them to a procedure out-of-state or even to the ultrasound at Kleinfeld’s clinic, worrying that a loved one may be in legal trouble for “aiding or abetting” care.“We still have to explain to patients all the time that it is not illegal to help someone obtain a legal abortion,” said Kleinfeld. “SB 8 was meant to be a fear tactic that paralyzed care and instilled anxiety in patients, and even after Dobbs, we are still seeing its impact.”Dr Alan Braid and Andrea Gallegos: ‘Waving our hands hands on top of a burning building’As a medical resident in 1972, Dr Alan Braid will never forget treating a 15-year-old girl in a San Antonio emergency room who was suffering from sepsis – a life-threatening blood infection – after a botched and illegal abortion, her vaginal cavity packed with rags. Braid and doctors did everything they could but the infection was so severe, she died a few days later from massive organ failure. That year, he saw another two teenagers die from illegal abortions.It was then that Braid realized that abortion care was vital and medically necessary, an inextricable component of overall healthcare. One year later, Roe would help solidify and protect Braid’s mission.For the next 45 years, he provided ob-gyn and abortion care in Texas. When Senate Bill 8 hit, it felt like 1972 all over again, he said.“To repeat history and expect a different outcome is insanity. Women will be injured and women will die – again – without access to healthcare,” said Braid.With a passion for reproductive rights, Andrea Gallegos joined her father’s practice as manager of Alamo Women’s Reproductive Services a few years ago. She describes the impact of SB 8 as “devastating” to patients, many of whom were saddled with multiple barriers to care. Even when staff would offer to pay for travel or the procedure itself, patients – still bound by the inability to find child care or time off work – couldn’t make the journey out of state.Braid felt like he had to fight back. In an act of overt defiance, the provider performed an abortion on a patient beyond the six-week limit. He was not only acting out of medical duty but hoped to invoke a legal challenge that would eventually halt SB 8.“I don’t think any of us really thought SB 8 would last – it’s so blatantly unconstitutional and just crazy, we figured the courts – even a court as conservative as the fifth circuit – would recognize the law needs to be stopped,” said Gallegos.While Braid’s intentional act of resistance attracted an outpouring of nationwide support, the lawsuits against him ultimately failed to halt SB 8, leaving the provider feeling largely defeated.He and his team continued to navigate the draconian law, routinely sending patients to their Tulsa, Oklahoma, clinic, where the caseload tripled within the first couple of months, placing a strain on the out-of-state provider.When Oklahoma’s governor signed into law an abortion ban – modeled after Texas’s SB 8 – in April 2022, Braid was forced to shutter the critical pipeline for Texans.“It felt like we were waving our hands on top of a burning building, trying to warn everyone else that this is what it’s going to look like for the rest of the country soon,” said Gallegos. “While we see the lack of access, the forced travel, the domino effect on surrounding clinics now everyday post-Dobbs, in Texas we were experiencing it first.”Following Roe’s demise, Braid was forced to close the doors to his San Antonio clinic and stopped practicing abortion care in Texas after nearly five decades. In May, he officially moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he has set up a clinic in the safe haven state.Gallegos relocated to Carbondale, Illinois, in July, a spot nestled between abortion-hostile states, to oversee a new clinic there.Leaving Texas – and friends and family behind – is deeply “bittersweet” for the father-daughter duo: there is a sense of “abandonment” but also a recognition that the move was necessary.“It’s not easy to completely start over but I know this is where I’m supposed to be,” said Gallegos.For the abortion providers, it’s also a painful reminder of the growing inequity of reproductive healthcare across the US.“It hits me hard knowing geography has played such a significant role in privilege to access to what I consider basic healthcare,” said Gallegos. “Geography should not determine if you can have a safe or dangerous pregnancy. We are living in a devastating reality.”Braid, now in his late 70s, describes working in New Mexico as “refreshing”, as he can “just be a doctor” and not “have to call attorneys” for guidance every step of the way, as he did in Texas.However, he has left his home state – and the place where he learned to be a physician so many years ago – with a tinge of regret, wishing he not only provided one abortion in violation of SB 8, but several more, convinced that the act of rebellion would have eventually led to a successful court battle that brought down the law. His daughter seeks to allay his remorse.“I remind my dad that the law was so unprecedented, so hard to predict and navigate, none of us knew what would happen,” said Gallegos. “In the end, the whole point of SB 8 was to elicit fear in abortion providers and sadly, that’s exactly what it did.” More

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      Girl, 13, gives birth after she was raped and denied abortion in Mississippi

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      A 13-year-old girl in Mississippi gave birth to a boy after she was raped as well as impregnated by a stranger – and then was unable to get an abortion, according to a Time magazine report published on Monday.The mother of the girl, who uses the pseudonym Ashley in the report, was looking to get an abortion for her daughter but was told the closest abortion provider was in Chicago – a drive of more than nine hours from their home in Clarksdale, Mississippi.Ashley’s mother, referred to as Regina in the report, told Time that the cost of getting an abortion in Chicago was too expensive when considering the price of travel, taking time off work and getting the abortion for her daughter.“I don’t have the funds for all this,” Regina told Time.The report is the latest in a series of horrific personal accounts that have surfaced after the US supreme court overturned the nationwide abortion access rights which had been established by the Roe v Wade precedent. Since the decision, titled Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 14 state laws banning abortion have gone into effect, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.The women’s health clinic that was at the center of the case was the last abortion provider in Mississippi until it closed last summer after the Dobbs decision.Last summer, just a week after the ruling, a local newspaper in Ohio reported that a 10-year-old who was raped had to travel to Indiana for an abortion because of restrictions in her state. A man was found guilty last month of raping and impregnating the girl in that case, and he received a sentence of life imprisonment.Other stories detail how women nearly died because doctors had to wait until their life was at risk to perform an abortion – or that many women now have to travel long distances to get any kind of reproductive healthcare. An estimated 25 million women ages 15 to 33 live in states that have abortion restrictions.With respect to Monday’s Time report, Ashley discovered she was pregnant after her mother took her to the hospital for uncontrollable vomiting. Regina noticed that Ashley was behaving differently, staying in her room when she used to enjoy going outside to record TikTok dances. Upon receiving bloodwork showing Ashley was pregnant, the hospital contacted the police.“What have you been doing?” a nurse asked Ashley at that time, according to the report. The hospital ultimately directed Ashley to the Clarksdale Women’s Clinic, which provides OB-GYN services. The clinic did not respond to requests from the Guardian for comment.“It was surreal for her,” Dr Erica Balthrop, Ashley’s physician, told Time. “She just had no clue.”Before Dobbs, Balthrop could have directed Regina to a Memphis abortion clinic that was a 90-minute drive north, or to Jackson Women’s Health, which is a 2.5-hour drive south. But Mississippi – along with all the states surrounding it – has banned abortion.Mississippi, along with many other states that also ban abortions, technically make exceptions for when the pregnancy is from rape or is life-threatening. But abortions granted under these exceptions are extremely rare and poorly tracked.In January, the New York Times reported that Mississippi made two exceptions since the state’s abortion ban went into effect. The state requires that a rape be reported to law enforcement in order to qualify for a legal abortion.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionTwo out of three sexual assault cases in the US are not reported to the police, according to Rainn, or the Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, an anti-sexual assault nonprofit. Even if an exception is made, a person must travel out of their state to get an abortion procedure if their state bans it.The laws exacerbate longstanding health inequalities in Mississippi, where Black women are four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications compared with white women, according to the state’s health department. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 60% of women who seek abortions are people of color and about half live below the federal poverty line.Regina said she filed a complaint with the Clarksdale police department after she learned Ashley was pregnant. She told Time that her daughter ultimately opened up about what happened: a man came into their front yard while she was making TikToks outside while her uncle and sibling were inside and assaulted her. Ashley said she did not know who the man was and that no one witnessed the attack.The police department confirmed to Time that a report had been filed. But the agency declined to comment publicly on the case since it involved a minor.After 39 weeks of pregnancy, Ashley gave birth to a boy, whom they nicknamed Peanut. Ashley told Time the birth was “painful”.“This situation hurts the most because it was an innocent child doing what children do, playing outside, and it was my child,” Regina told Time. “It still hurts, and is going to always hurt.”
      Information and support for anyone affected by rape or sexual abuse issues is available from the following organisations. In the US, Rainn offers support on 800-656-4673. In the UK, Rape Crisis offers support on 0808 500 2222. In Australia, support is available at 1800Respect (1800 737 732). Other international helplines can be found at ibiblio.org/rcip/internl.html More

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      ‘Better martyrs’: the growing role of women in the far-right movement

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      Researchers who track how the far right in the US mobilizes, self-promotes and recruits are reporting that women are playing a growing role in the movement.They often work behind the scenes to advance conspiracy theories through social media and softly attract new women into the fold. But at the same time, in recent years “alt-right” women have also shifted to influential public-facing roles in rightwing media production and far-right national politics.They have taken prominent roles in events like the January 6 attack on the Capitol, count US congresswomen in their number and have seen the emergence of powerful new groups like Moms for Liberty.“[Far-right women] have a lot more power than you think,” said Dr Sandra Jeppesen, a professor of media and communications at Lakehead University in Ontario, Canada.Despite their seemingly understated presence in extremist groups and far-right politics, they can be effective organizers, responsible for bringing thousands of people to the Capitol for the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally and now mobilizing against inclusive education.Some women figures on the far-right scene have a lot of money, especially the most prominent ones, said Tracy Llanera, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. The most high-profile far-right conservative women are involved in social media production because they fit the mold of what Llanera calls “the acceptable faces of conservative propaganda”.They include Fox News commentator Tomi Lahren and Canadian far-right YouTuber Lauren Southern, who produce conservative media and rightwing propaganda, amassing a huge following and millions of dollars.Even so-called “Tradwives” – such as the TikToker Estee Williams, who promotes strict adherence to traditional gender roles – generate income from their social media content. The Global Network on Extremism & Technology recently linked Tradwives to “alt-lite” and “alt-right” ideologies.“I think women definitely want power,” Jeppesen argued. “I don’t think ‘alt-right’ women go into politics for altruistic reasons.”Like men in the movement, women commit to far-right politics believing there is a crisis and they have to commit to extraordinary action, she stated. In the days leading up to 6 January 2021, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the extremist congresswoman from Georgia, paid tens of thousands of dollars for a promoted Parlor post stating the need for a grassroots army and created a Photoshopped image of her and Donald Trump.The post, used as an election fundraiser for Greene’s campaign, garnered millions of views and played a strong role in mobilizing people to the Capitol, Jeppesen explained.While Greene’s social media presence attracted insurrectionists to Washington DC, the far-right election-denial group Women for America First ultimately held the permit for the rally outside the White House, helped to coordinate the march that became the January 6 riot, and eventually organized fundraisers for election audits in Georgia and Arizona in 2021, Vice News reported.Other female insurrectionists played a pivotal role in the riots and spreading election denial conspiracies during and after.Jessica Watkins, an Oath Keepers member and founder of the Ohio State Regular Militia, arranged for both militias to travel to the Capitol, organizing and communicating on site with the encrypted walkie-talkie-style app Zello. She was sentenced to eight and a half years in prison; people such as Watkins are considered political prisoners to members of the far-right movement.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhen Ashli Babbit was killed by Capitol Hill police during the January 6 attack, she was promoted as a martyr, with even the former US president Donald Trump calling her parents. “Women make better martyrs in the ‘alt-right’,” Jeppesen said about Babbit’s lingering effect.Another growing power on the far right is Moms for Liberty, a group that began as a small parents’ rights group but which has spread across the US and is a leading force in promoting book bans.The group – with a fervent membership of conservative mothers – aims to affect US education, attacking anything that meddles with the far-right view of what is suitable for bringing up children, said Llanera of the University of Connecticut. “Mothers protect their offspring, out of the private sphere where they are most relevant,” she added.Iowyth Ulthiin, a PhD student at Toronto Metropolitan University and researcher at Lakehead University, explained that rightwing sects will use a broad appeal to a general issue like children’s safety in order to spread far-right ideas.“Who doesn’t love children and want them to be safe?” Ulthiin said.Far-right mothers start building rapport with other parents, using the vulnerability of their children to open the door to QAnon conspiracy theories and anti-government sentiment.The far right can take the same recruitment posture online. Ulthiin’s research has seen women in the “mommy blogger aesthetic” on Instagram, known for sharing photos of “lovely, enviable lives”, become subtly political and then escalate rapidly into conspiracy theories.Most notably, film-maker Sean Donnelly produced an eight-minute documentary, QAmom: Confronting My Mom’s Conspiracy Theories, about his mother’s transformation from a new age Californian to an outright conspiracy theorist who believed well-known celebrities would be arrested for pedophilia.Ulthiin said that women who fall into the far-right trap often have similar psychological profiles. “It would be a similar crowd to those who are in danger of joining a cult,” they said. More

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      What it’s like to cover abortion while pregnant: ‘People saw me as a container for a child’

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      I was six weeks and two days gone when I found out I was pregnant. I had just gotten back from covering the US midterms in such a sickeningly frantic way that I hadn’t had time to think about the changes going on in my body, but the signs were there: a creeping nausea that felt like seasickness, breasts as sore as swollen pimples, sheer exhaustion that willed me into bed for three days upon my return.I had reasoned this was a normal response to a week spent shuttling across hundreds of miles, working 21-hour days on the abortion beat in the fury of election season.If I had wanted an abortion at that stage of my pregnancy, I would have already lost that right in 15 US states. On 24 June 2022, five months before I discovered my pregnancy, the US supreme court had undone the constitutional right to abortion, curtailing the rights of some 22-million women of reproductive age as easily as untying a shoelace.An influx of bans and restrictions quickly followed suit. Old laws sprang back into action, some of which had been written in the Victorian era – before women had the right to vote or had a legal protection against being raped within marriage. New laws were introduced, too, although their content – including murder charges for people who have abortions, and allowing members of the public to track anyone down like a bounty hunter, clearing the way for them to sue for “aiding and abetting” abortions – felt equally antiquated.I’ve driven across America’s varied terrain as a reporter throughout this tidal wave, bearing witness to a monumental assault on women’s rights. I have faced, head on, the fury that comes from anti-abortion extremists for daring to write about abortions. And I have seen the dogged organization and jubilance of those who have protected abortion rights in their states after months of pounding on doors, rain or shine.None of it has changed the way I’ve reported the news. It’s our job as journalists to see what is happening, not what we want to see. But covering this beat, especially while pregnant, has changed my depth of vision. To see this assault up close and personal is to see it for what it is: not a journey to protect life; but to stifle, suppress and suffocate freedom.I am not one of those people who loves the experience of being pregnant. I’m not excited about birth; I don’t believe it will be magical. I’ve been lucky enough to be healthy throughout my pregnancy but I miss being able to put my own socks on and being able to bend over with ease; I miss playing sports; I miss getting a full night’s sleep.I have, at the best of times, felt complicated emotions when it comes to learning to love the thing inside me, and all the changes in my body that come with it. I’m a fiercely independent person, and I have a tendency towards wanting to control my body and what happens to it. I’ve often fixated on the idea that I can undo bad experiences in my life by bolstering my health. In that vein, I have raced in a mini-triathlon, learned to do clap pushups and lifted heavy weights at the gym.Early in pregnancy, as double the amount of blood began to flood my body like an enemy army, ramping up my blood pressure, I felt I no longer knew myself. I felt trapped in my new body, denied all my usual escape routes. I realized I wouldn’t be able to compete in the New York City half marathon, an event I was looking forward to. I was used to running regularly, now speed-walking to the station felt like a humiliatingly difficult ordeal. My old stress relievers became suddenly out-of-bounds.These are all small things. But small details about a person matter. Small things make a person who she is, and influence how she interacts with a life-changing, all-consuming, body-throttling experience like pregnancy.Here in America, where abortion is now banned or severely restricted in 20 US states every person I report on is as complicated as me.It’s July, and I am hurtling across Kansas City in a rental car covering a monumental vote. In just a few days, Kansas will be the first state to directly ask its people if they want to protect abortion rights under the new status quo.Republicans are wide-eyed and hopeful: recent polls suggest people in Kansas, a ruby-red midwestern state, have far more complicated feelings about abortion restrictions than the rest of the country. While lots of American voters do not want more abortion restrictions, in Kansas, in 2022, polling analysis by the New York Times suggests they might be equally split. Nonetheless, it is currently a safe haven for abortion rights in the midwest, where a slew of bans have come down since Roe was overturned. If voters restrict abortion rights in the coming week, a refuge for millions who want access to abortion may soon be lost.I found Christy McNally – a former science teacher, a grandmother and dog lover – through a friend of hers who was working at the Johnston county Republican party. McNally is soft-spoken and sweet. She is the kind of person you feel would stop to pick up a stranger in the middle of a storm and take them where they needed to go.One night, before we speak on the phone, she sends me a photo of her meeting Bill Clinton in 1996. Back then, she was lobbying for an abortion bill aiming to criminalize doctors for performing a dilation and extraction procedure. These procedures are a rarity in the grand scheme of abortion care, because most abortions happen in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy, when simpler, less invasive options are available. Dilation and extraction in the third trimester, which anti-abortion advocates often reference, accounts for less than 1% of abortions each year and is used primarily in cases where the pregnancy is incompatible with life or puts the pregnant person at risk.The language used by the National Right to Life Committee around that bill in the 1990s was deliberately emotive and included a newly invented term: “partial-birth abortion”.Despite the fact these abortions are most commonly performed at a time when the scientific consensus agrees fetuses feel no pain, and often when life is not viable outside the womb, lobbyists switched to a graphic depiction of the procedure, which requires forceps to pass a fetus through the birth canal, in an attempt to foster anti-abortion sentiment.People outside the US often ask me how a country shifts to having no federal right to abortion. This is how: by evoking emotion that humanizes the fetus at all costs – often on shaky scientific grounding – while diminishing the humanity of the person delivering it. Eventually, these ideas are repeated enough, and become part of the mainstream. Today in America, federal judges refer to “unborn children”, “killing” and “personhood” when talking about abortion care even in the earliest stages of pregnancy.In 1996, the bill McNally lobbied Clinton over had no chance of passing. But in 2022 that rhetoric – of broken limbs, fetal pain and the murderous intent of those who perform and seek out abortions – already sat comfortably in the US vernacular.It is also this language that activates a lot of the anti-abortion advocates I have met during my reporting, who do not see themselves as radical. McNally tells me she believes abortions should be allowed in medical emergencies (she has a friend whose fetus had no skull). She also supports exceptions for rape and incest. When I probe, I can see McNally is conflicted on abortion: there are very particular, intimate circumstances where the case for abortion has won her over, but mostly, outright bans are appealing to her. To me, she most wants to talk about abortions in the third trimester – the most unusual, and incredibly rare type of abortion – as do most anti-abortion advocates I speak to.But the vast majority of bills that have been passed since Roe v Wade was overturned don’t target late-term abortions. Almost every single ban is instead a full ban on abortion with limited exceptions.Those limited exceptions are rarely enacted, because doctors are too scared to intervene. I have talked to women who were denied abortions after they were told their fetuses had no skulls – precisely because of the types of restrictions that would surely come if this referendum in Kansas were to pass.Perhaps most American people, including Republicans, know and care about this. In August 2022, 59% of Kansans voted to protect abortion rights in a state where, just a decade earlier, the abortion doctor George Tiller had been murdered. At the watch party on the night of the vote, the room interrupted in cheers, screams and tears as the result was read out.Nearing the end of the night, I noticed an older man happily perched on the corner of the stage, cradling his drink and looking a little giddy. His name was James Quigley. He was a 72-year-old Republican and a retired doctor, and he looked like he wanted to have his say.“Abortion is a much more nuanced issue than anti-choice individuals would have you think,” Quigley told me.“It is deeply personal, sometimes tragic, but also sometimes a liberating decision – and we should trust women, their physicians, and their God on that.”At some point during my pregnancy, I realized that I was no longer considered a full, complete, messy human – one with autonomy, quirks and desires. At best, what I wanted was important only in proportion to my ability to protect my pregnancy. At worst, people saw me as a container for a child.I was frequently advised that from now on, I should not “take any risks”, which, of course, is ridiculously unhelpful advice. “I just don’t see why you would [take any],” one friend told me – seemingly unaware that to leave your house in the morning is a risk. To drive at 28mph on a stressful day when you’re late for an appointment, instead of at 25mph, is a risk. Going for a run is a risk – but so is choosing to forgo exercise.I have found being treated like a child in this way difficult. I don’t have to listen to any of these people, but the experience of constantly being told what to do is tiring; usually becoming an adult means we get to make our own calculations over what’s best for us, pregnant or not.For many pregnant people in America, this is no longer the case. By accident of birth, circumstance, or both, they live in a state that now limits their opportunity to end a pregnancy. If they’re rich, and unafraid, they might travel for care. But often, they don’t have the money, or can’t get the time off work, or can’t spend the numerous days and thousands of dollars to travel to another state for care. Their personhood has been reduced beyond all measure, in defense of the potential person living inside them.In March, I reported on the case of a South Carolina woman who was arrested a year after allegedly taking pills to end her pregnancy. On the police report, her offense was listed simply as: “abortion”.Pregnancy now converts legal behavior for everyone else, into a potential charge of child abuse, or child neglect, or attempted murder just for women – as the CEO of a charity explained it to me at the time.It is hard for me not to feel that viscerally, in a context where I have sometimes had to decide whether it’s worth it for me to go to report in a state with a total abortion ban, where I know miscarriage could make me a crime suspect, or result in me being denied healthcare. Other people don’t get to make that choice, they just live there.In a country where drinking alcohol, overexerting yourself in a yoga class, or hanging out the top of a truck while someone drives fast is not a crime, it could become illegal just for pregnant people. Teenagers whose grade point averages don’t satisfy judges are told they are too immature to have abortions; but not to raise a child. This is not rhetoric: politicians have spoken brazenly about manipulating laws not meant for abortion to police proper conduct in pregnancy since Roe was overturned.Reporting on this while pregnant means I’ve sometimes found it hard not to feel anger when I should have been feeling happy. At our first ultrasound appointment, at six weeks and five days, I struggled to feel joy when the nurse played the “fetal heartbeat” to me and my husband.Watching the zigzags bounce up and down on the screen in a dimly lit room, and seeing my husband’s face light up, I suddenly felt indignant. At that point, our “baby” was barely a yolk sac and some villi. Still, in many places it had more rights than me.“That’s not actually a heartbeat, you know?” I told my husband as soon as the nurse left the room. I felt like a killjoy. This was supposed to be an intimate moment. But all I could think about was the many US states that had brought “fetal heartbeat bills” in recent years. Those were now a legal reality, banning abortions at a point when I did not yet know I was pregnant.At six weeks, a fetus has not yet developed a heart. It has developed a small cluster of cells that may eventually turn into a heart – if the pregnancy is healthy – and the noise is the electrical activity coming from those cells. This is amazing, sure, but it’s not a heartbeat. There is no heart, no chambers, no blood pumping.In these early stages of pregnancy – between four and 12 weeks – pregnancy tissue removed in an abortion looks, first, like something that comes out of your nose; then tiny little egg whites; then more like a sprawling jellyfish. I know this because I worked with doctors to publish photos of what pregnancy tissue looks like after it’s extracted in an abortion before 12 weeks of pregnancy. I have seen early abortions performed at a clinic, and looked at the tissue directly after.Still, to point out what early abortion tissue looks like is often met with rage, sometimes with confusion and disbelief. In a way, I understand this. I wanted to report this story precisely because it goes against the grain of the pregnancy images we are shown. So many pregnancy images show the fetus through a microscope, or make it seem more humanized: when you look at images of early fetal development online, or even scientific imagery provided in textbooks, the depictions are very human-like. Even the perspective on an ultrasound can be misleading, highlighting the fetus in black and white so features are more visible, and showing the growing form in contrast to the tiny surrounding container of the amniotic sac.After I published this story, angry readers sent me ultrasound images; graphic descriptions of what fetuses look like in miscarriage; and videos of early fetal development under microscope. Some sent me the Guardian’s own coverage of Lennart Nilson’s photos of the earliest stages of life, taken in 1965. That imagery shows a nascent embryo, which first forms around 11-12 weeks, at a time when, if you view the fetus through a macro lens, you will see the early beginnings of a trunk and head developing.These are all different perspectives of life – neither I nor any single person can determine which is right. Different perspectives don’t have to discount one another. Sometimes, they just add to the knowledge we draw upon to make decisions about the world. I see it as my job as a journalist to give people more of this information, so they can make more informed decisions.I understand that images are incredibly powerful; I often come back from my scans feeling bursts of excitement; rare moments when I feel ready. I also understand the way in which personifying my pregnancy helps me to connect with it. Early on, my husband and I debated for a long time whether or not to find out the sex. Still feeling detached and confused about the changes going on inside me, I reasoned that knowing more might help me to feel more connected. It has.Later in my pregnancy, I have paid attention to when the little kicks come – sometimes after I eat raspberries, or drink orange juice, or when I have a chocolate bar. “He loves sugar!” I tell my husband – although I actually have no idea what the correlation is.I have also reported on the stories of people who do not feel this way about kicks or scans. One woman, Samantha Casiano, told me every new kick was a reminder of the inevitable moment when her baby would die, after she was refused an abortion in the state of Texas, despite her pregnancy not being viable.I can imagine how the descriptions of whether her fetus is now the size of a mango, or a cantaloupe, might bring on horror and fear. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be bombarded with this imagery after being told you no longer have agency over your own body.Carrying many perspectives can be helpful. It’s not my job to tell you what to believe, or even what to feel – just to let you know that these images are factual, and the lens you choose to put on them is yours, not mine.When I think about the decisions a person who wants an abortion has to make in places where it is banned, I think about the hormones that have cascaded through my body like a tornado during pregnancy.One day was so bad I had to call my friend to come over and console me while I cried for hours in my living room. That was a day when every decision I made felt certain to result in the sky falling in on me: the offending decision was over whether to buy a more expensive bar of soap, that smelled nicer. One day, I cried after a friend gave me a batch of her maternity clothes. I was in my 16th week of pregnancy, and increasingly feeling like nothing was my own. I wanted to go home to London. I worried about losing my career. I was watching my body balloon up in real time, and worried about looking at myself after pregnancy and not knowing who I was any more.Recently, when I couldn’t sleep at 4am, I read a book about the first month postpartum. The author used the word “capacious” to describe the vagina after birth. Even though I knew the word, I felt a need to Google it. “She rummaged in her capacious handbag,” was the sentence example returned to me in the search. I cried again.The changes the body goes through during pregnancy are not small. But in an abortion context obsessed with a very particular kind of religious morality, the changes a body goes through in a pregnancy sometimes feel like an afterthought.When 22-year-old Chloe tells me about being forced to deliver a baby at 37 weeks that did not go on to live, I feel a crushing sense of empathy for her. It is her struggles with her body image that she finds difficult, precisely because it is seen as so unimportant.“I’ve gained a ton of weight. And you know, I don’t know what to do about it,” she told me in a recent phone call. “If I ask anybody for help, people will probably just tell me, you should go work out. It sucks, a lot,” she says.On a reporting assignment last winter, I sat in a doctor’s office nextdoor all day while they saw clients. One woman came in, her face flooded with tears, already knowing the doctor couldn’t help – the state had a total ban. The woman was too poor to afford another child, and too poor to travel out of state to get an abortion.This is not unusual, the doctor told me: people still need abortions all the time. The conflict for the doctor has become what to do. Help, and you risk losing your license, or going to jail. Don’t help, and the patient might be failed at a time when one doctor’s decision could change their lives forever.One doctor told me about a single weekend during which she saw two infected pregnant women on her emergency shift when she checked in. One had gone into sepsis; the second patient eventually hemorrhaged, although she did not die. The doctors, one on the prior shift, and one at another hospital, had ignored them both – too scared to intervene, because administering an abortion was legally risky.They are not wrong to be scared. I’ve documented the consequences for doctors who stick their heads above the parapet: one was fined thousands for speaking out about a 10-year-old rape victim forced to travel to her state for care, another was publicly chased from her job.Working on those stories, I’m often told by people denied abortions that they feel America should be described as pro-birth, rather than pro-life. States have no intention of cleaning up the mess after an abortion has been denied, just to stop it happening in the first place.This exact scenario unfolded for Samantha Casiano, the Texas woman who was forced to deliver her baby with ancephaly. Her baby was breech – for which people are often offered a C-section, to reduce pain and severe complications. Casiano was not offered this, and found the entire birthing experience traumatic. “Your baby is going to pass away so we don’t need to do all that,” the doctors told her.“I felt degraded,” Casiano told me. “There was a lot of things I felt like wouldn’t have happened in a normal pregnancy, but with me, it’s like they were like, ‘OK, let’s just get this over with,” she said.She was made to carry the pregnancy for 13 weeks, knowing her daughter wouldn’t survive – just so, in her eyes, the doctors could “get it over with”.Mostly, the impacts of abortion bans don’t fall on people who are sick; or who have wanted pregnancies; or medically complicated pregnancies. They fall on people who want abortions because giving birth doesn’t fit with school work, with work-work, with raising the children they already have. They fall on people with few economic options, further entrenching inequality along race and class lines. Sometimes, they fall on people in domestically violent relationships. Other times, on people who know they won’t make good parents.These are all complicated reasons why someone might not be ready to have a child. In America, they aren’t good enough reasons to justify an abortion, but what happens after the abortion is denied?I recently moved back to England to give birth and be closer to family for a while. Here, I have often felt that people like to exaggerate America’s differences with the UK, because it helps deflect from our own very sordid political realities. “At least we’re not America,” people often say with a wink and a nod, often bypassing shattering political moments like Brexit, the story of a young Black boy being murdered, or our own legacy of slavery.These are the assurances I am sure people may feel reading this article: that the rest of the world is nothing like America when it comes to abortion.That may be true, but our prime minister has abstained every time he has been asked to vote on abortion since he became an MP; this includes voting to stop protesting outside of abortion clinics and to legalize abortion in Northern Ireland. In the UK, our chancellor of the exchequer has called to cut the time that abortions are legal in half, from 24 weeks to 12. Our health minister said that protesters outside clinics could just be trying to “comfort” women.This is the UK, too: where a woman was this month sentenced to two years in prison for taking abortion pills after the legal limit.As I write this, two weeks before my due date, I don’t know whether to feel hope or despair. Nor do I know what to make of America’s complicated abortion landscape, where people have repeatedly shown at the ballot box that they do not want abortion restrictions; that they are willing to oust politicians who want to bring them; and that they will continue to find innovative ways to continue to protect abortion.It’s a strange dynamic to see play out in a country where people are so obsessed with freedom. Because this is, at its core, an issue of freedom, as well as an issue of equality and fairness. When you curtail abortion – whether it is an abortion you agree with or not – you fundamentally alter someone’s right to make choices about their own chequebooks, their bodies and their families.I’m glad I had a choice, but I still burn with rage at how normal it has become in America for people not to. More