Public resources in Springfield, Ohio, were strained long before former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets derailed the presidential debate. Now, after days of vile disinformation from Senator JD Vance and other prominent Republicans, dozens of bomb threats, an immigration town hall that attracted thousands, and the possibility of a Trump visit to town, local and state services have been stretched to their limits. Even as officials hope the major waves of national attention are behind them, they’re preparing for more of the same.

On Thursday, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue announced that he has signed an emergency proclamation granting himself the power to bypass the usual contract procurement and bidding procedures, letting him quickly enter into agreements with vendors related to “public safety concerns.” The proclamation—which originated with Rue’s office, not the city council—will remain in place until further notice, according to the Springfield News-Sun. Flanked by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and regional and state officials, Rue told reporters that the emergency powers were a precaution that would also allow the city to recoup security costs from the state. “It is not an indication of immediate danger, but allows us to efficiently and effectively protect our public safety,” he said.

Dozens of buildings across Springfield—including schools, businesses, and city hall—have been targeted by bomb threats over the past week. Although every threat has turned out to be false, each has required significant time and resources—including federal bomb-detection dogs—to investigate. DeWine has deployed three dozen state police officers to conduct daily sweeps of every school building in the district; those officers will remain on hand, he says, until school officials call them off.

If Trump cancels his visit, “it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”

The national storm bearing down on the small western Ohio city has disrupted almost every aspect of daily life. Threats of violence have forced college classes online and city buildings to close. An annual cultural diversity festival was canceled. And while DeWine started off the news conference by focusing on how to address some of the impacts associated with the recent influx of 15,000 Haitian immigrants to the community—for example, adding another mobile health clinic and allocating millions of state dollars to increase the availability of vaccinations and primary medical care—it quickly devolved into a discussion about bomb threats and Trump.

Springfield’s mayor, who is a Republican, has been speaking out for months about how the surge in immigrants has strained schools, hospitals, and city resources. But on Thursday, Rue honed in on the toll that national attention has taken on the city’s public safety system. For example, later that day, former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was planning to hold an immigration town hall that ultimately attracted thousands of would-be attendees, forcing the city to close off the street. Rue reiterated his hope that Trump, who has announced he will travel to Springfield in “the next two weeks,” will reconsider. “A visit from the former president will undoubtedly place additional demands on our safety infrastructure,” Rue said. “Should he choose to change his plans, it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”

Meanwhile, Rue and DeWine pointed to signs that life in Springfield is returning to normal. The stream of bomb threats has become a trickle. Children are returning to school in greater numbers each day. In not-so-subtle terms, DeWine told reporters that what Springfield needs most in its quest for normalcy is for the national media to go away.

“We will return, in the not too distant future, to a point where you all are going to be writing and talking about, reporting on the nightly news about something else,” DeWine said. “And as soon as that happens, I think you’re going to see the temperature go down.”

Public resources in Springfield, Ohio, were strained long before former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets derailed the presidential debate. Now, after days of vile disinformation from Senator JD Vance and other prominent Republicans, dozens of bomb threats, an immigration town hall that attracted thousands, and the possibility of a Trump visit to town, local and state services have been stretched to their limits. Even as officials hope the major waves of national attention are behind them, they’re preparing for more of the same.

On Thursday, Springfield Mayor Rob Rue announced that he has signed an emergency proclamation granting himself the power to bypass the usual contract procurement and bidding procedures, letting him quickly enter into agreements with vendors related to “public safety concerns.” The proclamation—which originated with Rue’s office, not the city council—will remain in place until further notice, according to the Springfield News-Sun. Flanked by Republican Gov. Mike DeWine and regional and state officials, Rue told reporters that the emergency powers were a precaution that would also allow the city to recoup security costs from the state. “It is not an indication of immediate danger, but allows us to efficiently and effectively protect our public safety,” he said.

Dozens of buildings across Springfield—including schools, businesses, and city hall—have been targeted by bomb threats over the past week. Although every threat has turned out to be false, each has required significant time and resources—including federal bomb-detection dogs—to investigate. DeWine has deployed three dozen state police officers to conduct daily sweeps of every school building in the district; those officers will remain on hand, he says, until school officials call them off.

If Trump cancels his visit, “it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”

The national storm bearing down on the small western Ohio city has disrupted almost every aspect of daily life. Threats of violence have forced college classes online and city buildings to close. An annual cultural diversity festival was canceled. And while DeWine started off the news conference by focusing on how to address some of the impacts associated with the recent influx of 15,000 Haitian immigrants to the community—for example, adding another mobile health clinic and allocating millions of state dollars to increase the availability of vaccinations and primary medical care—it quickly devolved into a discussion about bomb threats and Trump.

Springfield’s mayor, who is a Republican, has been speaking out for months about how the surge in immigrants has strained schools, hospitals, and city resources. But on Thursday, Rue honed in on the toll that national attention has taken on the city’s public safety system. For example, later that day, former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was planning to hold an immigration town hall that ultimately attracted thousands of would-be attendees, forcing the city to close off the street. Rue reiterated his hope that Trump, who has announced he will travel to Springfield in “the next two weeks,” will reconsider. “A visit from the former president will undoubtedly place additional demands on our safety infrastructure,” Rue said. “Should he choose to change his plans, it would convey a significant message of peace to the city of Springfield concerning immigration.”

Meanwhile, Rue and DeWine pointed to signs that life in Springfield is returning to normal. The stream of bomb threats has become a trickle. Children are returning to school in greater numbers each day. In not-so-subtle terms, DeWine told reporters that what Springfield needs most in its quest for normalcy is for the national media to go away.

“We will return, in the not too distant future, to a point where you all are going to be writing and talking about, reporting on the nightly news about something else,” DeWine said. “And as soon as that happens, I think you’re going to see the temperature go down.”

Donald Trump may seek to obfuscate his stance on abortion and distance himself from Project 2025’s ultraconservative policy goals, but the anti-abortion record of his vice presidential pick is impossible to hide.

Ohio Sen. JD Vance has previously argued against abortion ban exceptions for rape and incest, supported the use of the Comstock Act to criminalize sending abortion medications in the mail, and called for a national abortion ban. “I certainly would like abortion to be illegal nationally,” Vance said on a podcast in 2022 when running for the Senate.

Add to that his recent support for the use of patients’ medical records by the police to investigate people who travel out of state for abortions. In a letter sent in June 2023 to the head of the US Department of Health and Human Services, Vance and 29 other Republican lawmakers urged HHS to reverse course on its recently finalized rule that protected patients’ reproductive healthcare information from law enforcement, particularly when patients travel to access lawful abortion care.

“Abortion is not health care—it is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women,” the letter reads. “​The Proposed Rule unlawfully thwarts the enforcement of compassionate laws protecting unborn children and their mothers, and directs health care providers to defy lawful court orders and search warrants.”

The rule, which became effective June 24, modifies privacy regulations under the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). HIPAA protects patients’ protected health information (PHI) from disclosure but generally makes allowances for court orders or law enforcement investigations. Under the new rule, medical providers, health plans, and clearinghouses cannot share health information to assist in criminal, civil, or administrative investigations related to the “mere act of seeking, obtaining, providing, or facilitating reproductive health care.” It specifically protects patients who travel to states where abortion is legal and instances in which federal laws like EMTALA require abortion care.

The HHS notes that Dobbs and the flood of abortion restrictions that states have enacted since then “increase the potential that use and disclosure of PHI about an individual’s reproductive health will undermine access to and the quality of health care generally.” In response, the conservative lawmakers call the rule “ideologically motivated fearmongering about abortion after Dobbs.” In fact, the concern is not hypothetical; Idaho and several other states have passed laws criminalizing assistance to minors seeking to travel out of state for abortion care. Meanwhile, some conservative state attorneys general have threatened to prosecute abortion funds.

The call to rescind the rule is just one of many anti-abortion proposals found in the pages of Project 2025’s policy book, which until recently was viewed as the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for the next Trump administration. Trump’s campaign has disavowed Project 2025, but its rhetoric and goals live on in Vance’s own anti-abortion proclivities. While the GOP and Trump have attempted to soften the image of their anti-abortion goals, as my colleague Julianne McShane has reported, opposing abortion is very much still part of the plan. That includes using the Fourteenth Amendment to establish “fetal personhood” and federally outlaw abortion.

The Democratic National Committee responded sharply to Vance’s prior calls to rescind the rule. As DNC National Press Secretary Emilia Rowland said in a statement, the Trump and Vance ticket would call “for every abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, and incidental pregnancy loss from medical treatments like chemo to be reported to the federal government…tearing away health data privacy protections under HIPAA, and allowing states to surveil patients and doctors, monitor pregnancies, restrict women’s freedom to travel for abortion care, and ultimately use health data against patients and providers in court. This isn’t about policy, it’s about control.”

On July 21, soon after President Joe Biden dropped out of the race, British pop icon Charli XCX broke the internet—and middle-aged political pundits’ brains—by declaring Vice President Kamala Harris “is brat.”

kamala IS brat

— Charli (@charli_xcx) July 22, 2024

It wasn’t out of the blue; for weeks, scores of chronically online posters flooded social media feeds with edits of Harris set to the songs from Charli XCX’s newest album, Brat.

Harris, who has emerged as the likely Democratic nominee for US president, capitalized on the viral firestorm. Within hours of Charli’s blessing, the new KamalaHQ account on X changed its banner image to the iconic green of Charli’s album cover and posted its own Brat edit, which has amassed over 1.5 million views. This has led many confused, exhausted people over the age of 35 (or so) to ask: What is Brat? Why is this happening? And please will someone help me I was just trying to pay attention to the election and now I feel old?

A good example would be this recent CNN panel:

If you told me 6 months ago that CNN would have a group of panelists discussing how Charli xcx’s 6th album is being a major voting influence in the 2024 US presidential election I’d laugh in your face pic.twitter.com/3elqmXCb1J

— frankie 𖤐 (@360_brat) July 22, 2024

We had a few of our staffers break down what brat is now that it is part of the 2024 campaign. And if you are still worried, don’t fret. Their main conclusion is this: brat is dead. So, you’re safe.

OK, so, I am your stand-in Old Person who just learned about Brat (brat, BRAT?) and am befuddled. I’m scared about a lot of things—but mostly about the future of democracy (which I post about in the comments to my favorite Washington Post articles). So, my first question is: Who is Charli XCX?

Siri Chilukuri: Charli XCX is a pop singer who first rose to prominence in the 2000s as a teenager—she would make great music and post it online. Her real name is Charlotte Aitchison.

Sarah Szilagy: She’s from the UK.

Sophie Hurwitz: Oh yeah. Really important that she’s British.

Siri: She’s from Essex, specifically.

Is she the brat?

Sophie: I think brat’s more an idea than a person.

Sarah: But an idea she strives to embody, especially through Brat the album.

Siri: The question of if she’s the brat, is sort of the existential backbone of the album Brat, it explores themes of who even is a brat? What kind of qualities does that person have? What does it mean to be labeled as one by someone else? Especially as a young woman.

Sarah: That’s so right, and especially reclaiming the word “brat” from the way it’s traditionally used to describe girls and women as spoiled little children.

Sophie: She described a brat as someone who “feels like herself but maybe also has a breakdown. But kind of like parties through it, is very honest, very blunt. A little bit volatile. Like, does dumb things. But it’s brat. You’re brat. That’s brat.” Brat is expansive.

So brat is a good thing that people want to be?

Siri: I think good or bad, those aren’t judgments that she or anyone who has embraced the title are making. It’s more like this is a type of person that exists and then the internet proceeded to say, “relatable”.

Sarah: I wouldn’t say “good”—as in you’re a “good person” if you’re brat.

Sophie: On the album she talks about ripping her tights, being awkward at parties, feeling depressed, feeling jealous—it’s not just this unequivocally good thing. Brat is about living the party girl lifestyle, but also about being honest with oneself.

Sarah: Being brat is definitely fitting for the moment that we’re in. I think a lot of Charli listeners—Gen Z generally—feel like they’re having to function day-to-day while confronting the horrors of reality (housing costs, work, climate change, global politics, etc.).

Siri: The trouble with defining Gen Z language/trends is it’s both so serious and not that serious at all.

Sophie: Right. It’s 100 percent for real but it’s also totally a shtick.

What does it mean then to have a “brat summer”? I hope it means getting engaged in politics to defeat Trump.

Siri: Brat summer really just means embracing those parts of you that are messy, overindulgent, vulnerable, and sometimes arrogant. It didn’t necessarily have any particular tie to politics except for the timing of it all.

Sophie: Yeah. It DIDN’T have a tie to politics…but then suddenly it sort of did.

Siri: It all started with a tweet:

why did I stay up till 3am making a von dutch brat coconut tree edit featuring kamala harris and why can’t I stop watching it on repeat pic.twitter.com/hqcmerD1Pb

— ryan (@ryanlong03) July 3, 2024

What is going on here? There are many symbols I do not know.

Siri: This is the coconut tree of it all.

Sarah: The song playing in the video is “Von dutch,” it’s from Brat.

Siri: The link is to a tweet featuring a clip of VP Kamala Harris quoting her mother as saying “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?’ ” She then laughs her iconic laugh. “You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.” The tweet sets that sentence to a song from the album and it went super viral.

Sarah: We’re not authoritatively saying THIS is the tweet that started it all, but it was after the presidential debate, when more politicos and pundits began publicly taking seriously the idea of a Kamala candidacy, and posters did what they always do, which is make memes.

Thank you. I found that explanation uncomfortable.

Sophie: One interesting thing: right-wingers tried to spin the coconut tree/the “you exist in the context of all in which you live” quote to make Harris look bad. But that didn’t work at all—people online want absurdity.

Siri: 100 percent, absurdity is the name of the game online. But in this case you’re right that it’s not that absurd. It makes sense that Kamala’s mother was talking about a coconut tree because she was a South Indian aunty and they just talk Like That. My mom says something similar on occasion. 

OK, so, if I am understanding properly. At the moment I was gravely concerned for our nation because President Biden appeared feeble on the debate stage, potentially allowing a Trump landslide, young people were making a video of Kamala Harris talking about her grandmother set to a song by Charli XCX (who is not American) and laughing about it?

Siri: Yes, but her mother. 

Okay. Her mother. And since then, has this kept happening? These memes?

Sophie: I’ve seen more and more Brat memes—as well as criticism of the memes, and even a couple guys claiming that the memes are a CIA psyop, which is a take, for sure. The memes might legitimately be detracting from real issues with Harris’ political history—the way she defended California’s right to seek capital punishment, or how she tried to block an incarcerated trans person from getting gender-affirming surgery—and that’s bad! But I don’t think that means the Brat memes are a literal CIA project. (Am I underestimating the CIA, though?) 

Siri: What’s important to note is that this wasn’t just from Kamala Harris fans, the KHIVE as they are known online. These were from people who during her 2020 presidential campaign criticized her heavily for her past as a prosecutor or her policies in general. There was even a KHIVE apology form meme going around.

Sarah: Yes, so the Harris campaign is capitalizing on what is essentially free digital campaigning. 

Siri: Biden’s unpopularity led to people wanting something different, maybe they something a little unhinged because people now really respond to unhinged energy. And it was funny. Especially after Biden’s campaign ran Dark Brandon into the ground.

I love Dark Brandon. He was so fun.

Siri: Dark Brandon made sense for a minute but a big part of memes is usually that the person being made fun of isn’t in on the joke, once they are it’s less funny.

Sophie: When campaigns/politicians/companies start embracing a meme they also start the process of killing that meme. It has to appear grassroots, or it’s over—people aren’t going to find it funny anymore. That’s what killed Dark Brandon.

OK so over the past few weeks, these Charli memes have kept floating around. What happened after Biden stepped down? Did people stop joking around and start talking seriously about the presidency?

Siri: Nope. They went even harder with the memes.

No…

Sarah: Yes, and the memes entered the whirlpool of cross-memeification, where to understand the joke you have to understand multiple layers. And with apps like TikTok, the process both intensifies and runs faster. Then the algorithms that feed you content based on the content you’ve already interacted with create a never-ending loop of Kamala Harris girlboss edits to various pop songs.

Has Charli XCX commented on any of this?

Sophie: Yes, she tweeted “kamala IS brat.”

That’s great. She’s a Democrat.

Sophie: No, she is British. 

And she’s never been much of a leftist savior, as much as some people might’ve liked to believe that. She had a song on the Brat album that’s at least somewhat about this edgelord podcaster who’s part of this whole “Dimes Square” scene, which is about racism and bad art, I’m pretty sure. Anyway, this podcaster’s career—as far as I can tell—mostly involves popularizing slurs (?), and Charli said yes, perfect, that’s my muse! So, anyway, Brat is not the revolution.

Anything involving downtown New York City I do not want to know about, as I believe in God. What did Kamala’s campaign do?

Sophie: Kamala’s campaign embraced brat. 

Great, and so this is helping with the youth vote.

Sophie: Not exactly. Now we’re seeing some backlash to that—some people are watching kamalaHQ turn their Twitter account Brat green, posting Brat memes, and seeing it as her trying to charm her way into people’s hearts without dealing with the actual policy problems her constituents very much want her to address.

Siri: Part of the thing with internet culture is there’s an underlying nihilism to all of this as well. There’s a strong contingent of young people who really reject the usage of memes by politicians to co-opt youth culture without materially responding to what people are demanding.

https://t.co/gKxgzqZjxz pic.twitter.com/8rjAHiinSX

— junebug (@swirlgirlxo) July 22, 2024

They don’t like that “kamala IS brat”?

Siri: ​​They don’t like that a career politician can use internetspeak to get votes while the US provides support for a regime that is killing people with little to no accountability.

Sarah: Right, a lot of Gen Z might engage with it ironically for a while, and to be sure, there’s probably a sizable base of young people who find Kamala more palatable than Biden and are willing to set aside their moral objections to her policies. But I wouldn’t mistake the memes for genuine support. The leftist faction of Gen Z—the very group Dems are hoping to make progress with, especially now that Biden’s out—is going to see the campaign’s attempts to “appeal” to them as a facade behind which there are no substantive policy changes.

Sophie: In calling Kamala brat, I think Charli put the final nail in the coffin of the brat summer meme. (Of course, discussing brat summer in Mother Jones also kills brat summer).

So I just learned about Brat and now it’s over? I can’t have a brat summer?

Sarah: By the time it makes its way here, it’s already over.

Siri: Anytime a mainstream outlet writes about something it’s over.

That’s fine. Final question. What is a favorite Charli song for people who want to get into her music now? (Mine is “Track 10”; this interview was actually conducted by a 30 year old.)

Sarah: To understand the dark side of being brat, I recommend “Sympathy is a knife.”

Siri: I love “Talk talk”, which is just about yearning to communicate better with someone. It’s pretty universal but especially for anyone who has been through a tough time with a friend.

Sophie: I like “Girl, so confusing”—it’s great for those who are confused, girl or not. 

The fate of gender-affirming care for transgender youth in Ohio will soon rest in one person’s hands. For the past week, Franklin County Judge Michael Holbrook has heard a case challenging a recent state law that includes a ban on the use of puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth. Now, it’s up to him to decide whether to turn a temporary block on the law into a permanent one—which would make Ohio just the third state to do so as a growing body of anti-trans laws moves through the courts.

From his chambers on the fifth floor of a downtown Columbus courthouse, the judge has heard pleas from the parents of trans children whose lives have been saved by gender-affirming care, physicians from the state’s children’s hospitals, and national experts in trans care. He’s also heard the state’s sharp defense of its law, featuring what is being framed as the “expert” testimony of nationally prominent anti-trans activists who made dubious claims about the efficacy and risks of puberty blockers, hormones, and other gender-affirming medical treatment.

Ohio’s sweeping law, dubbed the “Saving Adolescents from Experimentation” or “SAFE” Act, doesn’t just block the use of puberty blockers and hormones in trans youth (while allowing such medical interventions for cisgender children who may need them for precocious puberty or polycystic ovary syndrome). Passed by a GOP supermajority in January over Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto, it also prohibits trans girls and women from playing women’s sports, including college athletics. The ACLU of Ohio is challenging the entire law as a violation of the state’s single-subject rule for legislation, which requires that bills must pertain to one topic. The state says that topic is “addressing gender transition in children,” but the trial mainly focused on what the families of two trans girls have argued is the discriminatory, life-threatening impact of the ban on gender-affirming care.

“She laid down and wept in my bed. She is carrying looming anxiety and deep sadness surrounding this law.”

Ohio is among the 25 states with laws on the books restricting gender-affirming care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and 39 percent of trans youth live in states with such policies. While most bans have been challenged—and several temporarily blocked, like Ohio’s—the vast majority remain in effect. Only policies in Florida and Arkansas have been permanently enjoined, while the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case this coming term about the constitutionality of trans care bans.

On Monday, the mother of a 12-year-old trans girl testified that when her daughter began publicly identifying as a girl, her anxiety “melted away.” The daughter, going by the alias “Grace Goe,” has received gender-affirming mental health care for seven years and hopes to medically suppress puberty at its onset. The prospect of not being able to access that medical care has caused immense distress for Goe and her family. “She laid down and wept in my bed,” her mother said of Goe learning of the ban. “She is carrying looming anxiety and deep sadness surrounding this law.”

The state of Ohio showcased its line of experts, including Jamie Reed, a self-identified “whistleblower,” whose claims about a Missouri gender clinic have been widely disputed by families of the clinic’s current and former patients. Another Ohio witness was James Cantor, a Canadian sex researcher who has testified in support of gender-affirming care bans in trials across the country.

Cantor, a PhD who has never diagnosed a child with gender dysphoria or served on a child’s gender-affirming care team, claimed US studies on gender-affirming care are “sloppy” and that such care causes “sterility in children.” While hormones are known to cause temporary infertility, the long-term effects are unknown—which is why the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading professional organization for gender-affirming care providers, recommends providers and patients extensively discuss fertility impacts and options before initiating such treatments. (Some forms of gender-affirming surgery do cause permanent infertility, but for years the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association has assured lawmakers it is not being offered to trans youth in Ohio.)

And as my colleague Madison Pauly revealed last year, it’s not medical professionals or swaths of people who have stopped gender-affirming care proposing these bans to state legislators; many are conservative Christian organizations that believe transness is something to be “cured.”

As the trial wraps up on Friday, it bears repeating what actual experts testified: Dr. Sarah Corathers, an endocrinologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who has served on care teams for about 300 trans youth over the past decade, said she’s seen patients’ quality of life improve under her care. “When medically indicated, gender-affirming medical treatment is safe, effective, and well-established,” she said. Dr. Jack Turban, the director of the University of California, San Francisco’s Gender Psychiatry program, explained the widely accepted protocols clinicians in Ohio and elsewhere use for offering such care to trans youth, including using a multidisciplinary team of providers, offering comprehensive mental health support, and making every decision in concert with the trans child and their parents. He noted that every major medical organization opposes bans on gender-affirming care.

The fate of gender-affirming care for transgender youth in Ohio will soon rest in one person’s hands. For the past week, Franklin County Judge Michael Holbrook has heard a case challenging a recent state law that includes a ban on the use of puberty blockers and hormones for trans youth. Now, it’s up to him to decide whether to turn a temporary block on the law into a permanent one—which would make Ohio just the third state to do so as a growing body of anti-trans laws moves through the courts.

From his chambers on the fifth floor of a downtown Columbus courthouse, the judge has heard pleas from the parents of trans children whose lives have been saved by gender-affirming care, physicians from the state’s children’s hospitals, and national experts in trans care. He’s also heard the state’s sharp defense of its law, featuring what is being framed as the “expert” testimony of nationally prominent anti-trans activists who made dubious claims about the efficacy and risks of puberty blockers, hormones, and other gender-affirming medical treatment.

Ohio’s sweeping law, dubbed the “Saving Adolescents from Experimentation” or “SAFE” Act, doesn’t just block the use of puberty blockers and hormones in trans youth (while allowing such medical interventions for cisgender children who may need them for precocious puberty or polycystic ovary syndrome). Passed by a GOP supermajority in January over Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s veto, it also prohibits trans girls and women from playing women’s sports, including college athletics. The ACLU of Ohio is challenging the entire law as a violation of the state’s single-subject rule for legislation, which requires that bills must pertain to one topic. The state says that topic is “addressing gender transition in children,” but the trial mainly focused on what the families of two trans girls have argued is the discriminatory, life-threatening impact of the ban on gender-affirming care.

“She laid down and wept in my bed. She is carrying looming anxiety and deep sadness surrounding this law.”

Ohio is among the 25 states with laws on the books restricting gender-affirming care, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and 39 percent of trans youth live in states with such policies. While most bans have been challenged—and several temporarily blocked, like Ohio’s—the vast majority remain in effect. Only policies in Florida and Arkansas have been permanently enjoined, while the US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case this coming term about the constitutionality of trans care bans.

On Monday, the mother of a 12-year-old trans girl testified that when her daughter began publicly identifying as a girl, her anxiety “melted away.” The daughter, going by the alias “Grace Goe,” has received gender-affirming mental health care for seven years and hopes to medically suppress puberty at its onset. The prospect of not being able to access that medical care has caused immense distress for Goe and her family. “She laid down and wept in my bed,” her mother said of Goe learning of the ban. “She is carrying looming anxiety and deep sadness surrounding this law.”

The state of Ohio showcased its line of experts, including Jamie Reed, a self-identified “whistleblower,” whose claims about a Missouri gender clinic have been widely disputed by families of the clinic’s current and former patients. Another Ohio witness was James Cantor, a Canadian sex researcher who has testified in support of gender-affirming care bans in trials across the country.

Cantor, a PhD who has never diagnosed a child with gender dysphoria or served on a child’s gender-affirming care team, claimed US studies on gender-affirming care are “sloppy” and that such care causes “sterility in children.” While hormones are known to cause temporary infertility, the long-term effects are unknown—which is why the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the leading professional organization for gender-affirming care providers, recommends providers and patients extensively discuss fertility impacts and options before initiating such treatments. (Some forms of gender-affirming surgery do cause permanent infertility, but for years the Ohio Children’s Hospital Association has assured lawmakers it is not being offered to trans youth in Ohio.)

And as my colleague Madison Pauly revealed last year, it’s not medical professionals or swaths of people who have stopped gender-affirming care proposing these bans to state legislators; many are conservative Christian organizations that believe transness is something to be “cured.”

As the trial wraps up on Friday, it bears repeating what actual experts testified: Dr. Sarah Corathers, an endocrinologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital who has served on care teams for about 300 trans youth over the past decade, said she’s seen patients’ quality of life improve under her care. “When medically indicated, gender-affirming medical treatment is safe, effective, and well-established,” she said. Dr. Jack Turban, the director of the University of California, San Francisco’s Gender Psychiatry program, explained the widely accepted protocols clinicians in Ohio and elsewhere use for offering such care to trans youth, including using a multidisciplinary team of providers, offering comprehensive mental health support, and making every decision in concert with the trans child and their parents. He noted that every major medical organization opposes bans on gender-affirming care.

When the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that abortion was a fundamental right to be protected under the most stringent level of judicial review, reproductive justice advocates cheered. Even in a state where Republicans dominated every level of government, it seemed that abortion rights could still prevail—as long as the courts went along.

That didn’t sit well with Iowa’s first woman governor, Kim Reynolds, or her allies in the legislature, who set about rewriting the rules for how justices are picked. Last month, a much-altered Iowa Supreme Court reversed course. In a 4–3 vote, the court effectively upheld the state’s six-week abortion ban by overturning a block on that ban previously imposed by a lower court, thus handing Reynolds a significant, if unsurprising, victory. When the new ban takes effect, likely this week, Iowa will join North Dakota, Indiana, and other Midwestern states facing a drastic curtailment of abortion rights post-Dobbs—and will become the latest example of how conservatives have gamed state supreme courts to restrict reproductive rights and achieve other policy goals.

Reynolds, whose office didn’t respond to Mother Jones’ questions or request for comment, said in a statement after the ruling, “Iowa voters have spoken clearly through their elected representatives,” a sentiment echoed by other Republican lawmakers in support of the six-week ban. But Iowans’ support for the ban has not changed; in fact, multiple polls show a majority believe abortion should be legal in most cases. What has changed since the Iowa Supreme Court established a constitutional right to abortion in 2018 is who sits on the court and how they got there.

“There’s a lot of fear right now,” Alison Dreith, director of strategic partnerships of the Midwest Access Coalition, told Mother Jones shortly after the decision. “It’s already making an impact, and the details of the ruling haven’t even been established.”

State court politicization has been happening for years, of course. But Michael Milov-Cordoba, an attorney in the Judiciary Program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, says there’s been a “big uptick” in legislative attempts to politicize courts dating back to the 2019 US Supreme Court decision in Rucho v. Common Cause, which closed the door to federal challenges to partisan gerrymandering. By punting the gerrymandering issue to the states, the US Supreme Court incentivized state lawmakers to try to gain political influence over state courts, he says. 

Then came the Dobbs decision in 2022, which was “a real watershed moment for state judicial politics,” Milov-Cordoba says. “The public as a whole came to see that state supreme courts would be deciding the extent to which folks in the state would have access to abortion and the contours of that access.” Naturally, what matters most is who is on those courts.

The story of how Iowa’s highest court was transformed dates to 2017, when Reynolds succeeded longtime Gov. Terry Branstad to become Iowa’s chief executive. The election that ushered Donald Trump into the White House also gave Iowa its first Republican trifecta—control of the governorship and both houses of Legislature—in nearly two decades. Reynolds made it her mission to use the GOP’s new power to drastically restrict access to abortion, which was then legal until 20 weeks of pregnancy.  

Within a year, the legislature passed, and Reynolds signed, what was then the country’s most restrictive abortion law, banning the procedure after fetal cardiac activity can be detected, or around six weeks after a woman’s last menstrual period. In a May 2018 statement, Reynolds acknowledged the bill would almost certainly be challenged—but she promised that she wouldn’t back down until abortion was banned in Iowa.

By that point, the state’s highest court was already weighing the constitutionality of a different, less onerous law mandating a 72-hour waiting period before patients could terminate a pregnancy. The court eventually struck down the waiting-period requirement, ruling that the state constitution protected a fundamental right to abortion and that any restriction must overcome strict scrutiny, or be “narrowly tailored” to further a “compelling government interest.” That 5–2 decision also doomed Reynolds’ six-week ban. Undeterred, Reynolds said she wouldn’t continue the legal fight. Rather, she would focus on “other ways to advance the cause of protecting the unborn.” 

What Reynolds didn’t spell out: Republicans in the state legislature had already devised their own plan to achieve her goal, which involved overhauling the process of who gets appointed to the courts. Within months, Reynolds signed a law giving her majority control over deciding who sits on the commission that nominates justices and appellate judges. 

For nearly 60 years, Iowa judges were selected under their bipartisan version of the Missouri Plan, which authorized the governor to select appointees from lists provided by a nominating commission. Judges at all court levels face retention elections after a year on the bench. But in a last-minute addition to a budget bill in April 2019, Republican lawmakers pushed through legislation that removed the chief justice from the commission, instead giving the governor another opportunity to appoint a seat—and shifting majority control to those commission members chosen by the governor.

“We read in scripture that the author of life wants to give ‘a future and a hope’ to all his children. Who are we to stand in his way?”

“This is not a power grab,” Holt insisted on the House floor. “This is a majority party in this chamber exercising our authority when we recognize that changes are needed.”

By the time she signed the bill into law in 2019, Reynolds had already appointed two justices to the Supreme Court. At an annual gathering of the Family Leader—an evangelical Christian dark-money group that, according to its website, seeks to advance “God-honoring, righteous policy” in Iowa—she minced no words. “Elections matter, and fortunately the tide is turning in Iowa’s Supreme Court,” she said. “In two short years, we’ve moved the needle from left to right.”

After the change, Reynolds appointed two more justices. Three years later, a week before the Dobbs decision, the Iowa court handed down a ruling that significantly weakened their 2018 decision, holding that abortion restrictions need not satisfy strict scrutiny to be constitutional. But the splintered opinion didn’t establish what standard of judicial review needed to be employed. The next month, Reynolds named her fifth appointee to the Supreme Court.

But Reynolds still didn’t get the outcome she wanted. In a tie vote in June 2023, after one of Reynolds’ appointees recused herself, the court declined to resurrect the 2018 abortion ban. Incensed, Reynolds convened a special legislative session last July to pass another six-week abortion ban. “We read in scripture that the author of life wants to give ‘a future and a hope’ to all his children,” Reynolds told that year’s Family Leader convention, where she signed the ban into law. “Who are we to stand in his way?” 

The state’s abortion providers, Planned Parenthood and the Emma Goldman Clinic, challenged the ban, and a district court quickly blocked it. But this time around, the high court changed course. The majority noted nothing in the “history and tradition” of Iowa’s laws and customs supported a fundamental right to abortion, and that the lower court should employ the rational basis test, which would greenlight abortion restrictions that are “rationally” related to a “legitimate government interest.”

The six-week ban prohibits abortions before as many as a third of women know they’re pregnant. While the law outlines exceptions for reported rape and incest, risk to the patient’s health, and fatal fetal abnormalities, the stories of rape survivors who were denied abortions and women who were forced to leave states like Idaho and Texas to access lifesaving care suggest such exceptions are only theoretical.

Of Reynolds’ five appointees to the high court, only her first, Chief Justice Susan Christensen, voted to reject the six-week ban. In a passionate dissent joined by the two justices who predate Reynolds, Christensen accused the majority of ignoring the sexism underlying the state’s historic abortion bans—and other laws that rendered women “second-class citizens.”

“The only female lives that this statute treats with any meaningful regard and dignity are the unborn lives of female fetuses.”

“The only female lives that this statute treats with any meaningful regard and dignity are the unborn lives of female fetuses,” Christensen wrote. “After that, this statute forces pregnant women (and young girls) to endure and suffer through life-altering health complications that range from severe sepsis requiring limb amputation to a hysterectomy so long as those women are not at death’s door. All in the name of promoting unborn life—or, more accurately, birth.”

It’s not just Iowa lawmakers who are changing the rules of the game. 

For years, politicians across the country have set their legislative sights on state judiciaries, looking to manipulate the courts to benefit their policy goals, the Brennan Center’s Milov-Cordoba says. The Brennan Center annually tracks proposed legislation that, in many cases, can weaken judicial independence or aggrandize a majority party’s power. While legislators principally seek to influence the courts through changing judicial selection procedures, Milov-Cordoba says lawmakers have also sought to change judicial ethics commissions or limit courts’ ability to hear certain cases.

In Ohio, for instance, Republican lawmakers threatened to strip state courts of their jurisdiction to hear abortion law challenges after voters constitutionally protected access to the procedure last November. In 2023 alone, the Brennan Center identified 124 bills undermining judicial independence introduced in 29 states, with legislation passing in Utah, Idaho, and Mississippi. Both parties have sought greater political influence over the courts—in 2021, Illinois Democrats pushed through a first-in-decades redistricting plan for Supreme Court races after a Democratic justice lost a retention election. But Milov-Cordoba says efforts in Republican-controlled legislatures dominate overall tallies. “There’s an asymmetry here,” he says.

A lobbyist for the Family Leader has already called for Iowa lawmakers to enact a total abortion ban, according to the Des Moines Register, and GOP lawmakers haven’t ruled out the idea. Meanwhile, the Emma Goldman Clinic—founded the same year Roe was decided and the last independent abortion clinic in Iowa—will continue performing abortions, including as many as possible under the six-week ban, said its executive director, Francine Thompson.

“We’re going to work as hard as we possibly can to help folks get the care that they need between now and when the ban takes effect,” Thompson said at a news conference, adding that the clinic would refer patients out of state when necessary.

Only four Midwestern states have stricter abortion laws than Iowa’s impending six-week ban: Indiana, Missouri, North Dakota, and South Dakota ban it completely. Shortly after the ruling, the Iowa Abortion Access Fund began routing patients needing support to the Chicago Abortion Fund, announcing the two funds had partnered to help Iowans travel east to Illinois, where abortion is legal until fetal viability.

Iowans were already traveling to Illinois and Minnesota for abortions, says Dreith of the Midwest Access Coalition, which provides practical support, including transportation coordination and money for lodging and childcare. But patients were also traveling to Iowa for care—especially from neighboring Missouri, and Nebraska, which has a 12-week ban. In fact, as many as 10 percent of abortions performed in Iowa in 2023 were for out-of-state patients, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute. 

Abortion costs have risen exponentially in the past several years, in no small part due to state bans forcing women to travel hundreds of miles to obtain abortions. Those costs will certainly increase as more Iowans will need to go out of state for care. Dreith says before Dobbs, the average support the Midwest Access Coalition provided was about $350 per patient. Now, it’s closer to $1,200. And funneling patients out of states with total or near-total bans racks up a different type of cost, too.

“You have the case of just not enough appointments available to go around post-Dobbs,” Dreith said. “You used to be able to get an appointment within 24 hours, and now, some people are scheduling out weeks—still, two years later—because they can’t meet the demand.”