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The Forgotten—and Incredibly Important—History of the Abortion Pill

7 February 2025 at 16:33

At his Senate confirmation hearings to head the Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. surprised no one by admitting that he planned to order a new review of the safety of abortion pills. While Kennedy claimed that President Donald Trump has not taken a position—yet—on medication abortion, “he’s made it clear to me that he wants me to look at the safety issues,” Kennedy said. “And I’ll ask [agencies] to do that.”

This, of course, is exactly what anti-abortion groups have been pushing for. Since 2022, when the US Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, abortion opponents have been ramping up unfounded claims that mifepristone and misoprostol are dangerous. Their efforts have included a flurry of letters to the new administration, explicit directives in the far right’s Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump term, and a barrage of ever-more-extreme lawsuits and state bills.

Never mind that medication abortion has an exemplary safety record stretching back decades. “It really is safer than Tylenol,” says Carrie N. Baker, a Smith College professor and Ms. magazine contributing editor who has been writing about the abortion pill for years. The unexpected problem for conservatives is that, despite the overturn of Roe v. Wade, medication abortions have contributed to a rise in pregnancy terminations since 2022 and now account for nearly two-thirds of all abortions in the US. A fact that, Baker says, explains “why they’re now laser-focused on removing mifepristone and misoprostol from the market.”

Only in late 2022 did many Americans notice that there was a sweeping new strategy to gut access to abortion pills. That’s when a group of medical providers calling themselves the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine sued the Food and Drug Administration in Texas over its regulation of mifepristone going back to 2000, when the drug was first approved for use in the US. “I read the brief,” Baker says, “and they completely misrepresented both the safety of abortion pills and the history of how they had originally been approved. It was really frustrating to me.” But when she went to do her own research in hopes of correcting the record, she discovered that the true history of abortion pills was largely unwritten. So she decided to write it herself.

That book, Abortion Pills: US History and Politics—also available on an open-source platform to make it more accessible—could not be more timely. Based on interviews with more than 80 people, including many of the key figures in scientific and political battles going back decades, the book takes readers back to the earliest days of mifepristone, when it was still known as RU-486. It also delves into the lesser-known controversies over misoprostol, which is used in tandem with mifepristone under the FDA-approved protocol for medication abortion.  

The biggest surprise for Baker? “How unnecessarily long it took for the drug to gain FDA approval and how unnecessarily restrictive the FDA was.” RU-486, she notes, was invented by French researchers in the 1970s, patented in France in 1980, and approved by the French government in 1988. But it wasn’t approved in the US for another 12 years. “In their lawsuit, the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine frames the narrative as: The Clinton administration rushed through approval of mifepristone very quickly,” Baker says. “In fact, it took much longer to approve mifepristone than it did to approve most drugs at the time.” 

I spoke with Baker recently from her office on the Smith campus, where she heads the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Our interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Mifepristone was controversial from its inception, but not because it was unsafe. 

By the time the drug started going up for review by the French government in the 1980s, its effectiveness and safety were pretty well established. But the Catholic Church and Catholic groups very quickly opposed it on moral grounds, and when word got to the United States, anti-abortion groups began to organize to prevent it from coming here. 

“In France, opponents firebombed one movie theater and tear-gassed another. They harassed company executives and their families. They called the Jewish scientist who developed RU-486 a Nazi and accused him of turning wombs into crematoriums.”

From the very beginning, the resistance to RU-486 was characterized by terroristic threats and violence. In France, opponents firebombed one movie theater and tear-gassed another. They harassed Roussel Uclaf executives and their families. They called the Jewish scientist who developed RU-486 a Nazi and accused him of turning wombs into crematoriums—things like that.  

In the US, this was when extremists began threatening abortion doctors and people who worked at abortion clinics. Operation Rescue was blocking clinic entrances and terrorizing staff and patients. So the whole environment around abortion was one of fear. 

The FDA used highly unusual security protocols throughout the whole review process because they were worried about bombs, threats, and terroristic acts. They didn’t reveal the names of the people involved in approving the drug, which normally they would have. All of that set the tone and contributed to why the FDA was so deliberate and conservative about how they dealt with this medication. 

And now, decades later, anti-abortion groups are using the FDA’s caution to argue that this drug is unsafe.  

Ironically, back in the 1980s, some of the loudest concerns about the safety of RU-486 came from feminists. 

When mifepristone first arrived on the scene, it was not a given that the feminist movement was going to support this new medication. There was a widespread feeling in feminist circles that the medical system was paternalistic. It had a history of betraying women—for example, with the birth control pill. When the pill was first put on the market, the dosage of hormones was really high—10 times higher than what we have today—which was causing strokes and other medical problems. The researchers had tested it in Puerto Rico, but were so eager to get this medication approved they didn’t take the women’s feedback seriously.

There were problems with other drugs and devices, too, like the Dalkon Shield [an early IUD that could cause severe injuries, infertility, and even death]. And so when mifepristone came around, lots of women were very mistrustful. 

“There was a widespread feeling in feminist circles that the medical system was paternalistic. It had a history of betraying women.”

What changed feminists’ minds? 

Women’s health advocates in Washington, DC, convened what became known as the Reproductive Health Technologies Project as a way to learn about this new drug: Is this something we want to get behind? Do we believe it will be good for women? Is it safe?

One of the skeptics was Carol Downer, who recently died. She was a very influential figure in the natural feminist movement and had taught women how to use manual vacuum aspiration to do at-home abortions. She called the process “menstrual extraction” and saw it as a way for women to take control of their health. In the late ’80s, Downer traveled to France to do research on behalf of the skeptics. She talked to women who had used mifepristone, she talked to medical professionals, and came away convinced that actually, RU-486 was a safe and good technology—a “momentous discovery,” she told me. 

The Reproductive Health Technologies Project was also very intentional about consulting women of color, who had been treated especially poorly by birth control researchers. That helped get the women’s movement on board as well. 

Meanwhile, the French company behind the drug was having second and third thoughts, though not for safety reasons. They feared the political and economic ramifications of being associated with abortion.

Roussel Uclaf was majority owned by a German company, Hoechst AG, whose CEO was Catholic. In the wake of the protests and violence, just a month after RU-486’s approval by the French government in 1988, Roussel’s board of directors actually voted to withdraw it from the French market. Then it quickly backtracked after the French health minister threatened to transfer the RU-486 patent to another company in order to serve the public good, calling the medication “the moral property of women.” But that same year, under pressure from Hoechst and fearing further backlash, Roussel did suspend all other plans to market the drug themselves in other countries, including the United States. 

What was the US response among abortion supporters in the US?

The Feminist Majority Foundation, they were heroic. They collected over 700,000 petitions from people across the United States, then took them in huge boxes to Roussel Uclaf’s headquarters in Paris, and said, We in the United States want this drug. Please bring it to market in the United States. 

The patent ended up with a New York-based NGO, Population Council, which supports research on contraceptives. Population Council conducted clinical trials and sought a company to distribute the medication. A new privately funded company, Danco Laboratories, was formed for this purpose, but they still had to find a manufacturer. That took a while. At one point, a Hungarian drug manufacturer agreed to do it, then it withdrew because of anti-abortion pressure. They eventually found a Chinese pharmaceutical company, Shanghai Hualian Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., to supply the medication

Mifepristone was finally approved in the US at the very end of the Clinton administration. But the terms were really strict—and two decades later, that has come back to haunt its supporters.

The FDA is, by its nature, a cautious, rigorous scientific organization. They move slowly, they move incrementally, and they’re careful. That’s especially true when they’re facing cuts in funding, which anti-abortion members of Congress were threatening to do if mifepristone was approved. The agency was under a lot of political pressure. 

They approved it under a very restrictive protocol, and then later it was put in the Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategy, or REMS, program, which is supposed to apply to the most dangerous drugs. The FDA didn’t allow pharmacies to dispense the drug—only registered doctors could dispense it in person in clinics or hospitals. Patients had to have three different appointments. The medication could only be used in early pregnancy, through the first seven weeks. 

This wasn’t because mifepristone was unsafe. By 2000, there was an enormous amount of research showing that it was safe, including widespread clinical trials. The FDA was worried if something went wrong, the drug would lose approval and go away forever. The restrictions were a way of closely monitoring the abortion pill, not because it was dangerous, but because they wanted to have a good, solid safety record so that they could then justify expanding access. The theory was that they would loosen that protocol after a couple of years of evidence showing how safe it was. 

“The restrictions were a way of closely monitoring the abortion pill, not because it was dangerous, but because they wanted to have a good, solid safety record so that they could then justify expanding access.”

But then George W. Bush was elected president in November 2000. Republicans took over the FDA, and they weren’t going to loosen the abortion protocol at all. And so the abortion pill remained under these very strict rules for 16 years before the FDA began to loosen them. 

This seems to happen over and over. People will try to act responsibly to get a policy passed. They go slowly and make compromises that don’t seem especially significant at the time. Then, years later, those well-meaning efforts are used against them.

We’ve seen this in the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine lawsuit. They’re pointing to the REMS protocol and saying, See, the FDA put all these restrictions on mifepristone. That means they didn’t think it was safe. 

Mifepristone is not the only drug used in medication abortions. The standard protocol also includes misoprostol. How it came to be used in abortions is a fascinating story. 

When the FDA approved mifepristone in 2000, it actually approved a two-drug regimen. Mifepristone blocks the absorption of progesterone, so the lining of the uterus begins to shed. Then 24 hours later, you take misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract and the pregnancy to be expelled. Misoprostol is an ulcer medication that has other important uses, too—for example, to induce labor and stop postpartum hemorrhaging. In most states, any doctor can prescribe it. Veterinarians, toodogs take it for ulcers

But, misoprostol can also be used alone for abortion. In the 1980s, Brazilian women looked at the misoprostol label and saw a warning: Do not use if you’re pregnant, may cause miscarriage. Abortion was illegal in Brazil. And misoprostol was widely available—you could just go to a pharmacy and get it. So women started using it. Public health authorities noticed that abortion-related deaths were dropping precipitously, and they wondered why. They discovered that women were using misoprostol, which is very effective and very safe. And so, of course, they pulled it off the shelves and the death rate went back up. But at this point, women knew. 

In 1990, feminist advocates from across South America met in Argentina and shared this knowledge among themselves. And so an underground network developed that spread across the world. Now, post-Dobbs, this knowledge is flowing north into the United States. 

As a side note, Searle—the drug company that developed misoprostol—was afraid that having their medication in the abortion medication protocol would subject them to protests and boycotts by the anti-abortion movement. So Searle was like, No, don’t, don’t associate us with abortion in any way. But by the time mifepristone was approved in the US, misoprostol had gone generic, which was less of a problem for Searle. 

The Obama administration finally loosened the FDA rules in 2016 to allow medication abortion up to 10 weeks of pregnancy and a wider array of health care providers to dispense abortion pills. Then the first Trump administration, which was packed with anti-abortion appointees, didn’t target mifepristone the way pro-choicers might have expected—in fact, they actually okayed a generic version that made it much more affordable. 

You know, the abortion pill really wasn’t a high priority for Donald Trump’s allies because they were having so much success in other ways. Capturing the Supreme Court and queuing up cases in the states that could be used to overturn Roe v. Wade—that was really their focus. The FDA’s approval of generic mifepristone in 2019 slipped under the radar. 

When the Trump administration really cracked down on abortion pills was during the pandemic. As part of the Covid emergency, the president lifted the REMS for many restricted drugs—including fentanyl and OxyContin—so that they could be dispensed through the mail. But not mifepristone. Doctors and advocates sued, and in July 2020, a Maryland federal judge ruled that the Trump administration had imposed a substantial burden on abortion by not lifting that restriction and by forcing women to expose themselves to Covid to get this medication. And all of a sudden, that opened the door to telemedicine abortion, which was groundbreaking. 

The door was only open for about six months before the Supreme Court reversed the lower court. But data that was collected during that period about the safety of telemedicine abortion ended up being submitted to the Biden administration’s FDA, which permanently removed the in-person dispensing requirement in December 2021. Telehealth abortions exploded. Today, 20 percent of all abortions in the US are done by telemedicine.

So you could argue that Covid, followed by Dobbs, revolutionized abortion care by facilitating telemedicine and then encouraging states to pass shield laws protecting telehealth providers.

Today, there are more abortions in Mississippi than there were before Dobbs. There are more abortions overall in the US. According to the Guttmacher Institute, the lowest point was 850,000 in 2017, at the start of, before the first Trump administration. Now we’re over a million a year, and it’s going up. 

In eight states with shield laws, telehealth clinics are now serving more than 10,000 people a month living in states with abortion bans. That probably wouldn’t have happened without Covid and Dobbs

And that’s why the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine filed suit in 2022 challenging the FDA’s regulation of mifepristone. That’s why states like Louisiana are reclassifying mifepristone and misoprostol as dangerous controlled substances and trying to remove them from the market. It’s why anti-abortion groups are seeking to enforce a 19th-century anti-obscenity law, the Comstock Act, to prohibit the mailing of abortion pills—a de facto federal abortion ban. 

Even the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine lawsuit—which the Supreme Court rejected last term, though several states have moved to revive it—has had unintended benefits for the abortion rights cause.

Obviously, it was a terrible lawsuit. But it did a lot of work to raise public awareness of abortion pills. Today, many more people understand: Oh, you can just take a pill for an abortion. Oh, that pill is safer than Tylenol.

How does all this make you feel as Donald Trump and his allies once again take power?

Trump intends to do a lot of harmful stuff. But how can we use this terrible turn of events to motivate people? How can we create something surprising, something revolutionary, out of this moment? We have everybody’s attention. Let’s use it.

I mean, yes, we have to defend our rights, but let’s not only think defensively. That’s been our problem all these years. We’ve always just thought, Oh, we need to defend Roe. We haven’t been thinking: Wait a minute, Roe’s not enough. How do we go further? And I feel like this is an opportunity to do that.

Louisiana Indicts NY Doctor for Telemedicine Abortion

1 February 2025 at 01:02

In what is believed to be the first criminal case of its kind in the post–Roe v. Wade era, a New York-based telemedicine provider has been indicted in Louisiana—which has one of the strictest abortion bans in the country—for supplying the abortion pill to a teenage patient in that state.

The Louisiana indictment against Dr. Margaret “Maggie” Carpenter signals a major escalation in legal challenges by red states against telemedicine providers in blue states who are dispensing abortion drugs under shield laws meant to protect them from prosecution. As my Mother Jones colleagues have reported, those shield laws—which are on the books in 22 states and the District of Columbia—are a major reason why the number of abortions has continued to rise despite the overturn of Roe in June 2022.

The Louisiana case involves a pregnant minor whose mother allegedly purchased abortion medications from Carpenter’s business, Nightingale Medical PC, in April 2024, The Advocate reported. In addition to Carpenter, a grand jury in West Baton Rouge Parish also indicted the mother for allegedly coercing her to take the medicine to terminate the pregnancy. The felony charge against the two women carries a sentence of up to five years in prison and up to $50,000 in fines, WWNO reported.

The indictment comes as the anti-abortion movement has ramped up attacks on the abortion pill on multiple fronts—from pressuring the new Trump administration to reconsider the safety of mifepristone and use the Comstock Act to institute a federal abortion ban, to filing lawsuits challenging the FDA’s regulation of the drug, to introducing a flurry of new bills targeting medication abortion in numerous states. These include Louisiana, which last year became the first state to reclassify mifepristone and misoprostol, the drugs commonly used in medication abortions, as “controlled dangerous substances.” As my colleague Julianne McShane reported:

To say that this designation—the same one applied to opioids and other addictive drugs—is without scientific or medical merit is an understatement. More than 100 studies have found that mifepristone and misoprostol offer a safe and effective way to terminate a pregnancy.

Abortion foes have also begun to challenge the shield laws that blue states have been enacting to protect telemedicine abortion providers operating from within their borders. In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton brought a civil suit accusing the same New York doctor—Carpenter—of prescribing abortion pills to a 20-year-old woman near Dallas. But the Texas case doesn’t involve criminal charges; instead, Paxton is seeking an injunction against Carpenter, $100,000 in civil penalties for each violation of Texas law, and legal costs.

Officials in New York, which enacted its abortion shield law in 2023, immediately criticized today’s indictment. “This cowardly attempt out of Louisiana to weaponize the law against out-of-state providers is unjust and un-American,” New York Attorney General Leticia James said in a statement. Meanwhile, Governor Kathy Hochul promised to “never back down from this fight…. We will remain a safe harbor.”

But Louisiana prosecutors defended the charges, which were brought under a 2022 statute that makes it a crime to “knowingly [cause] an abortion to occur by means of delivering, dispensing, distributing, or providing a pregnant woman with an abortion-inducing drug.” Tony Clayton, district attorney of an area that includes West Baton Rouge Parish, told The Advocate, “The daughter wanted the pregnancy and had a reveal party planned.”

“The allegations in this case have nothing to do with reproductive health care,” Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill echoed in a statement. “This is about coercion. This is about forcing somebody to have an abortion who didn’t want one.” 

Louisiana’s near-total abortion ban, which doesn’t include exceptions for rape or incest, targets physicians in the state with up to 15 years in prison, $200,000 in fines and the loss of their medical licenses. Last year’s law reclassifying abortion medications as controlled substances carries penalties of up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. Both laws specifically exempt pregnant women.

This story has been updated to correct Carpenter’s name.

How This State Supreme Court Ruling Could Set Up a Battle Over Comstock

20 January 2025 at 11:00

The harder Texas has worked to ban abortion, the more New Mexico has done to welcome patients fleeing the state—and vice versa. In the months after the Dobbs decision, as New Mexico became one of the most important reproductive health havens in the US, anti-abortion activists in Texas struck back by lobbying conservative communities in the state to pass local ordinances banning abortions within their jurisdictions. Those measures explicitly cited the Comstock Act, the long-defunct Victorian-era sexual purity law that prohibits the sending or receiving of anything used to perform or obtain an abortion—and they had a not-so-hidden agenda: to use “sanctuaries for the unborn” as a mechanism to force the imposition of a de facto federal abortion ban.

The Texans met with success in a handful of towns and counties before New Mexico’s Democratic attorney general, Raúl Torrez, asked the state’s highest court to shut them down. “This, ladies and gentlemen, is not Texas,” Torrez declared at a press conference announcing the emergency petition. “Local communities are not empowered to regulate medical services. They are not empowered to regulate access to health care.”

Now, more than a year after oral arguments, the New Mexico Supreme Court has struck down the local ordinances, ruling unanimously that they violate state law and “invade the Legislature’s authority to regulate access to and provision of reproductive health care.” But the decision in State of New Mexico v. Board of County Commissioners for Lea County also gives anti-abortion groups something they have been yearning for: an opportunity to put the Comstock Act—and their argument that as it remains the law of the land, the measure preempts state protections for abortion—before the US Supreme Court.

“This is the best loss I’ve ever had in my life,” Michael Seibel, an anti-abortion attorney working on the case, told a Christian news outlet soon after the ruling was handed down last week.

“We are thrilled,” echoed Jonathan Mitchell, the anti-abortion legal strategist from Texas who helped draft the New Mexico ordinances. Mitchell has been a leading proponent of using what has become known as “zombie” laws—pre-Roe v. Wade abortion bans that were unenforceable for almost a half-century but remained on the books—to outlaw abortion post-Dobbs.

“There’s this cloak of neutrality that gets attached to Comstock—’we’re just applying the law that’s been on the books, nothing new,’ which is misleading.”

It remains to be seen, of course, whether the New Mexico decision will lead to the epic legal showdown Mitchell and his allies are hoping for. But even if it doesn’t, anti-abortion groups have teed up plenty of other cases and legislation that invoke Comstock, with the same goal of getting the issue to the nation’s highest court as quickly as possible.

That’s because, two-and-a-half years after Dobbs, abortion rights are more popular than ever in the US—and, thanks largely to the abortion pill, abortions actually have been increasing despite state bans. But Donald Trump—who waffled about his abortion positions during the presidential campaign—appears to have other priorities as he takes office that take precedence over instituting a Project 2025-style federal abortion ban. So anti-abortion groups are doubling down on using the courts to impose their will.

This Comstock-focused backup plan has the added advantage (for the GOP) of insulating Trump and his Republican-controlled Congress from having to act, says Rachel Rebouché, dean at Temple University’s law school, letting the US Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority do the work for them. “There’s this cloak of neutrality that gets attached to Comstock—’We’re just applying the law that’s been on the books, nothing new,’ which is misleading,” Rebouché adds. “What the Jonathan Mitchells of the world claim Comstock did and does is, in fact, never what it did and never what it was supposed to do.”

The Comstock Act of 1873, named for the 19th-century anti-vice crusader who championed it, made it a federal crime to send or receive any “obscene, lewd, or lascivious” writings, or “any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring an abortion.” For decades, the statute was used to prosecute a broad range of so-called “crimes,” including the mailing of materials discussing birth control, medical textbooks depicting human anatomy, and even letters discussing dating among unmarried people. By the 1930s, Americans had largely repudiated what came to be known as “Comstockery” and courts had greatly narrowed the statute’s scope. In 1971, Congress removed most of its restrictions on contraceptives. 

But Congress never formally repealed the statute’s abortion-related provisions, even after the Roe decision in 1973 rendered them moot. When Roe was overturned, anti-abortion activists began arguing that Comstock was once again in force nationwide—even in states that sought to protect abortion after Dobbs

This movement has been led by Mitchell, the former Texas solicitor general who has been a key architect of some of that state’s most radical and punitive anti-abortion laws, and Mark Lee Dickson, founder of the Texas-based “Sanctuary Cities for the Unborn” movement. Mitchell and Dickson have been close allies for years, pioneering the “bounty hunter” strategy—the use of private civil lawsuits to enforce anti-abortion measures such as the 2021 Texas “heartbeat” law that banned abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The tactic, which gives private individuals the right to sue anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion, with potential damages of $10,000 per violation, has made it significantly harder for abortion-rights advocates to challenge some extreme restrictions.

Starting in late 2022, Dickson and Mitchell began targeting New Mexico border communities, urging them to pass local measures that were a variation of the Texas “sanctuary cities” ordinances. The New Mexico measures cited Comstock, asserting that the federal statute preempted the state’s abortion protections. Mitchell’s goal, he told The Nation’s Amy Littlefield in 2023, was to provoke a legal challenge from New Mexico officials. “I want to get Comstock to the [US] Supreme Court as quickly as possible,” he told her.

Mitchell and Dickson had symbolic as well as practical reasons to go after New Mexico. The state has some of the strongest abortion protections in the country, including a bill passed in 2023 that guarantees broad access to reproductive health care and another that shields providers and patients from civil or criminal liability for abortion or gender-affirming care. Abortions have more than tripled in the past two years, with most new patients crossing the border from Texas. Yet many rural New Mexico towns are more aligned politically and culturally with their Texas neighbors than with the Democrats who dominate state government.

Four conservative New Mexico towns and two counties eventually passed broadly similar ordinances. Some of the laws contained bounty-hunter provisions that echoed the draconian tactics previously championed by Mitchell and Dickson in Texas; several also imposed restrictive licensing rules for abortion clinics and physicians.

According to emails obtained by the independent news outlet Source NM, Mitchell and Dickson wrote the templates for the legislation and promised to defend the towns in court free of charge—but only if they obtained Mitchell’s approval in advance for any tweaks in the ordinances’ language. Mitchell, representing Eunice (population 3,020), eventually filed suit against Attorney General Torrez, urging a local court to declare that Comstock was still in force and “trump[s] any state-law right to abortion.” Torrez filed his own emergency writ directly to the state Supreme Court.

The New Mexico battle has drawn leading conservative groups into the fray, including the Alliance Defending Freedom, a religious-right legal powerhouse that has played a pivotal role in most of the big anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ+ court and policy fights of recent years.

But the five state Supreme Court justices—three of whom are women and all of whom are Democrats—clearly didn’t want to play Mitchell’s game. They made a point of keeping their ruling as narrow as possible, rejecting the chance to opine about Comstock or federal law. “We…decline to address Respondents’ arguments with respect to the Comstock Act and federal preemption, which we deem unnecessary to the resolution of the issues before this Court,” Justice Shannon Bacon wrote in the January 9 ruling. Instead, they found that the ordinances were preempted under state law, including the 2023 Health Care Freedom Act, which prohibits any public body from interfering with access to reproductive or gender-affirming health care, and statutes regulating the licensing of medical facilities. Its decision, the court said, “rests solely on state law grounds.”

But the five New Mexico justices—three of whom are women and all of whom are Democrats—clearly didn’t want to play Mitchell’s game.

In addressing the issues as narrowly as possible, the justices also declined to give reproductive rights advocates something else they wanted: a sweeping ruling that abortion is protected under New Mexico’s constitution. “We heed the canon of constitutional avoidance and refrain from deciding constitutional issues unnecessary to the disposition of this case,” Bacon wrote.

The ruling is “really trying to shut down US Supreme Court review,” Rebouché says. “But it doesn’t mean that the Alliance Defending Freedom or Mitchell won’t petition the US Supreme Court to hear an appeal that there is a federal preemption issue that the [New Mexico] court did not address.”

Such an appeal seems virtually guaranteed. “This is what we planned,” Seibel, an anti-abortion attorney based in Albuquerque, told the Christian news site The World. “We knew we were going to lose from the day we drafted the ordinance.”

In a statement posted on X, Mitchell himself suggested that the New Mexico ruling had given anti-abortion groups all the grounds they needed for an appeal.

“This is the first court to hold that an ordinance requiring compliance with the federal Comstock Act prohibits the shipment and receipt of abortion-related paraphernalia in states where abortion remains legal,” Mitchell said. “We look forward to litigating these issues in other states and bringing the meaning of the federal Comstock Act to the Supreme Court of the United States.”

What People Get Wrong About Christian Women Who Voted for Trump

7 January 2025 at 11:00

You probably saw the cartoon that went viral before the election: A long line of women enter the voting booth wearing handmaiden-esque robes and bonnets, only to emerge in slinky black dresses and take-no-bullshit pantsuits. Or the ads in which white women accompany their obviously GOP husbands to vote, blinking each other a silent signal of solidarity behind the men’s backs: “Actually, I’m with her.” The disobedient-trad-wives trope reflected Democrats’ conviction that Donald Trump’s misogyny and temperament—not to mention his relentless assaults on reproductive freedom and the rule of law—must be deeply, albeit secretly, alienating to many Christian women. All they needed was a Liz Cheney–size nudge to cast their ballots for Vice President Kamala Harris. 

Not only did that notion turn out to be utterly deluded, it was “a profound misreading” of how Christian women view themselves and their role in American society, says sociologist Katie Gaddini—a mistake that helped cost Harris the presidency and could resonate throughout US politics and policy for years to come. 

On election night, Gaddini, an associate professor at University College London who studies Christian women in US politics, was at San Francisco International Airport, boarding a red-eye to Virginia to do research for her next book, due out in 2026. “Trump had just won Georgia,” she recalls. “It was like a funeral in that airport. Faces were drawn. It was silent.” When Gaddini arrived the next morning at the far-right Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, Trump had retaken the White House, and the mood was euphoric. Decked out in MAGA gear, women students were just as thrilled as the young men—maybe more so. “They felt like this was God’s will,” Gaddini says. “He has spared the nation by giving us Trump. Even after we’ve made so many mistakes, He’s giving us one last chance to get it right.”

These young women aren’t just relying on Trump to transform the country into a Christian bastion—this is their fight, too. “A new generation of them are entering politics,” Gaddini says, “influencing and controlling this country.” Yet many on the left, she says, dismiss Christian women “as being kind of brainwashed, just servants to the patriarchy and not free-thinking,” thus minimizing both their agency and their effectiveness. Among progressives, “there’s an inability to see how intelligence and political acumen could lead you to a place of supporting Trump,” she adds. “And yet it has for millions of women, and they’re not going away.”

Gaddini’s mission is to “disrupt” that longstanding (and, she points out, “sexist”) narrative about Christian women and “understand them a little bit more generously.” And not just in the United States; Gaddini helps run a network of scholars studying religion and politics across the Americas and in parts of Europe.

I count myself among those who’ve never understood the appeal of Trump and the misogyny-fueled MAGA movement for women, especially young, religious ones, who I imagined would find the well-documented sexual misconduct offensive. In the wake of the November election, with its vast implications for reproductive and gender justice, I was more mystified than ever. But I was also deeply curious. So I reached out to Gaddini at her home office in Northern California, where she is a visiting scholar at Stanford University. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Katie GaddiniLily Bungay

How did you become interested in Christian women in politics? 

I have a personal connection. My father was a Baptist minister. I have two uncles, an aunt, and a cousin who are pastors as well. The Sacramento suburbs where I grew up are known as the Bible Belt of California. There is a huge conservative presence there—it’s very Republican and very evangelical. 

There wasn’t any moment where I became conservative. It’s just what happened if you were a woman in this kind of environment. Then I left the faith, and my personal politics changed, but I’ve always had an interest in who I could have been if I had remained in that world—in the women who have stayed committed to conservative politics and have moved even further to the right. 

What about the Trump effect? 

When Trump won the presidency in 2016, I wanted to understand why so many women voted for him. I’m really interested in this idea of paradox, of things that don’t make sense. It doesn’t make sense to a lot of progressives or feminists that women would vote for Trump, right? It doesn’t make sense that evangelicals would vote for him. And then you put the two together: Why would a female evangelical vote for Trump? I wanted to untangle that seeming paradox—to understand not only why do they like him, but why do they like him so overwhelmingly and so enduringly?  

I’ve also been looking at Christian women more broadly—not just evangelicals, but also Catholics and mainline Protestants. Because what I’ve seen over the last few years is that those groups have come together to do politics in a new way. They’re putting aside some of their theological differences and focusing on the larger political project.

Democrats find it almost impossible to see past Trump’s failings as a leader and a human being. The 2024 campaign hammered on those failings: “He sides with fascists and dictators. He’s corrupt. He’s trying to destroy democracy. He’s misogynistic, he’s racist. Oh, and he’s incoherent and falling apart.” What are the strengths that Christian women see in Trump that others are blind to?

It’s this sense of having a protector and a defender in Trump. That operates on a symbolic level in terms of: “He’s going to protect us from this woke liberal elite that wants to take us down and destroy us.” This idea was captured by one of the Trump campaign’s most effective ads: “She’s for they/them. I’m for you.” 

“Trump said at a few campaign rallies, ‘I want to protect the women.’ One Christian woman I interviewed said she wept when she heard that, because it was so resonant with what she needed.”

It also operates on the material level: “The left is concerned with wokeness and identity politics, while Trump is concerned that you can’t afford a tank of gas. He’s going to protect our country from China. He’s going to protect our economy. He’s going to protect our borders.” That protector identity operates on so many different planes, and it’s hugely effective with these women. 

Trump said at a few campaign rallies, “I want to protect the women.” One Christian woman I interviewed said she wept when she heard that because it was so resonant with what she needed. 

Meanwhile, the feminist mantra is very different: Do not rely on any man to take care of you. Why do women on the Christian right feel that they need to be protected?  

Within their gendered system of how women and men are meant to operate, women are the soft, nurturing ones, the caretakers. Men are the strong ones, protectors, and defenders. This gendered system is built into conservative Christianity, it’s built into their whole worldview, so it makes sense that they would apply that to politics and want a candidate who fits that mold. They can behave like traditional women if they have a traditional man fulfilling that protector role. 

Among these women, there’s also a deep feeling of being under attack. This isn’t new—the religious right has been saying it’s under siege from a secular left for decades. But this sense of being embattled has become more inflamed since 2016. Several of the [Liberty] students I’ve interviewed told me that when they were younger, they were bullied by liberals in their home state or high schools. I’ve had them sit across from me and read me the messages they got on social media from classmates calling them horrific things because they posted a picture with a Trump sign. These experiences pushed them even further to the right and reinforced the sense that they needed to be protected. And who’s better to do the job than someone who’s got blood streaked down his face and a fist in the air, saying, “Fight!”

The assassination attempts were key in securing Trump’s support among Christian women. They solidified the belief that the left is out to get us, they will stop at nothing, and we have to make sure we win.

How does the idea of protection resonate differently if you are, say, a 20-year-old college student versus a 35-year-old mom, versus a Baby Boomer retiree in the suburbs? 

The younger women are getting a lot of their news from social media. They don’t check mainstream news at all. Some women tell me they get their news not just from a single conservative outlet, but from a single influencer. And what they’re hearing is that the liberal left hates them. I think the online sphere is where a lot of their sense of attack is coming from. 

“The assassination attempts were really key in securing Trump’s support among Christian women. They solidified the belief that the left is out to get us, they will stop at nothing, and we have to make sure we win.”

For the moms’ cohort, their sense of needing protection is all around children. It’s a sense that critical race theory, trans rights—which they would call gender ideology—and, to a much lesser extent, gay rights have infiltrated their schools and are trying to indoctrinate their children. They need to protect their children as mothers, and they need a paternalistic figure as president to protect their children on a larger scale. This sentiment also plays out in some of the movements to ban books and put conservative activists on school boards.

With older women, their primary concern tends to be immigration. A lot of their focus is on defending our borders, keeping our country safe, keeping our neighborhoods safe, keeping women and girls safe from perceived physical threats from immigrant men. Trump is going to protect us in that way.

But what is the response to people who point out: “Donald Trump is a criminal, a corrupt bully, an abuser. Trump is a sinner, and he’s unrepentant. Why does he get a pass?”

On a literal level, people on the right would say those accusations and criminal charges have been fabricated and are part of a larger attack program against Trump and his allies. On a symbolic level, I would point to an event I attended at Liberty two days after the election. The speaker, who was a professor, gave a talk about a somewhat obscure character from the Old Testament. After an hour, she finally came to the point: This imperfect king had made all these mistakes, yet God had used him to deliver His promises. Nobody at that event said Trump’s name. Nobody mentioned the election. But the message was clear: That is our situation now.

I have a sister who is an ardent Trump supporter. In 2016, her reaction to the Access Hollywood leak and the multiple accusations of sexual assault was weirdly positive: “All men do that” and “It shows his power.” She loved Trump’s swagger—that he was the type of person who does what he wants and if you don’t like it, fuck you.

“In 2016, Trump projected a kind of devil-may-care masculinity that [many of these women] found quite attractive. Whereas in 2024, he’s seen as more of a protective, fatherly or grandfatherly figure.”

I think “swagger” is a really good word for how a lot of people I interviewed saw Trump in 2016. To them, he projected a kind of devil-may-care masculinity they found quite attractive. Whereas in 2024, especially amongst these conservative religious women, he’s seen as more of a protective, fatherly, or grandfatherly figure. In terms of his appeal, the sexualization has dialed down, and there’s more of a sense of him being older, strong, and reliable.

Looking back at the last three elections, what else shifted in terms of how very religious voters viewed Trump? How did their reasons for supporting him change? 

In the first election, immigration was a top concern, specifically focused around Muslims and Muslim Americans. In 2020, top of mind for a lot of conservatives, men and women, was Black Lives Matter, critical race theory—“We need law and order to protect against these BLM protesters.” In 2024, it was immigration again, only this time focused on keeping Latin Americans out of the country. The three elections are an interesting barometer for the way that primarily white Christians have viewed a racial “other”—what group they want to protect the nation from. This year, the anti-Black policies they had been prioritizing fell by the wayside. 

So Christian conservatives didn’t reject Harris because of her race or gender?  

Oh, I don’t doubt sexism and racism played a role in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. But my sense is, for a lot of religious conservatives, this election was more about love for Donald Trump than dislike for Kamala Harris. That’s different from 2016. Hillary Clinton very much defied the role of what a woman should be, she had a long history of that, and the religious right hated her. This time around, Christians weren’t holding their noses and voting for Trump. I think a lot of Christians genuinely like this man.

For years, I’ve been hearing that fewer and fewer Americans view themselves as religious. And as the numbers dwindle, the think tanks say, the influence of Christian conservatives will fade.

It’s true that the numbers of evangelicals and devout Christians have been declining in this country. But what has stayed steady, or even gone up, is their level of political engagement. If you report being a practicing Christian, you are more likely than the average American to vote and to be involved in politics. 

Your next book is a history of Christian women in US politics over the past 50 years. And a lot of the women students you spoke with at Liberty University are envisioning careers in politics and law. Yet much of the work they take on will be aimed at eroding women’s rights. Some on the religious far right don’t even want women to vote. 

This has been a contradiction that has entangled right-wing Christian women since the 1970s. On the one hand, they are fighting for traditional gendered roles; on the other hand, they themselves want to be in politics. They’re embracing elements of feminism such as equality in women’s work. But they would never call themselves feminists and in fact, their work is to oppose feminism. Phyllis Schlafly, who led the fight against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, then headed the ultra-conservative Eagle Forum for decades, is a great example of someone who really pushed for these traditional gendered roles and yet was out there in public, being active in politics, traveling and speaking. 

In other words, not practicing what she was preaching. How does someone like Schlafly compare with this new generation of Christian women?

I think what’s different now is that there’s not such an outward opposition to feminism. That’s not what’s fueling their politics. Feminism has infiltrated their conservative sphere and is propelling these women forward, without them maybe wanting to acknowledge that, and certainly without secular feminists wanting to acknowledge that.

“Feminism has infiltrated their conservative sphere and is propelling these women forward, without them maybe wanting to acknowledge that, and certainly without secular feminists wanting to acknowledge that.”

The new role model, and not just for the younger ones, is Amy Coney Barrett. She’s married to a man, she has tons of kids, and yet she’s on the Supreme Court advocating conservative values. It’s a version of having it all. I’ve heard religious women say that line—“we can have it all”—without recognizing that it comes from secular liberal feminism. Similarly, they embrace the choice elements of feminism, for example: “I want to have the choice to work part-time, or to work full-time, or to stay home with my kids and homeschool—I want to have that option available to me.” And yet they very much espouse these ideas that women are the nurturers, women are the caregivers, women have a very different sensibility than men do. Men should be in charge of the finances. 

Did the outcome of this election surprise you, as it did so many Democrats? Or did you think, Yeah, it all makes sense? 

I’m not surprised that Christians would be so allied with Trump, or that Christian women would view him as a protector. What has surprised me is that Trump made gains with some of these other populations—Gen Z women, even Black women.  

Does this suggest Americans are feeling really afraid? That they want a protector?

Maybe. But certainly among the Christian right, I also think there’s a strong desire for outsiders and anti-establishment characters to take charge and disrupt the status quo.

Like Elon Musk? 

Yes, exactly. He’s a businessman like Trump who’s been wildly successful. And the people I interview want someone who’s wildly successful running the country, because, deep down in their bones, they believe in capitalism. Musk has that devil-may-care attitude that Trump shares—he is anti-establishment and does what he wants to do. People on the religious right like that. He’s not beholden to the political old guard. And they think he’s going to do what he says he’s going to do, and not just make false, empty promises.

For progressives—and possibly even moderates—the idea that somebody who became a gazillionaire by doing whatever the heck he wanted, with no guardrails, would now take charge of our democracy and run it like he runs Twitter/X is, well, terrifying. Whereas to conservative Christians…?

It’s exciting.

I’ve Covered Kamala Harris for 20 Years. One Thing About Her Has Never Changed.

5 November 2024 at 21:20

The first time I met Kamala Harris, in 2007, I was a reporter profiling her for San Francisco magazine. She was in a basement near City Hall, trying to persuade a roomful of low-level ex–drug dealers to find time in their lives for a little self-care. “I have a job that’s just crazy,” she told the crowd of 100 or so young men and women, sounding more like a motivational speaker than the San Francisco district attorney and possible future president of the United States. “I get calls day and night. That’s a lot of stress.” What helped her stay sane, she explained, was waking up early every morning, jumping on the treadmill, and tuning the TV to something upbeat. “My life is like the news, and I don’t need to watch the news. So I watch MTV and VH1. I know every song!” 

Her audience—participants in a program Harris created for young, nonviolent ex-offenders called Back on Track—was there because, if they fulfilled all the program’s requirements and stayed out of trouble, their criminal records would be wiped clean. Harris knew that for these mostly Black and brown young people, the keys to their eventual success included educational opportunities, decent jobs, stable housing, and affordable childcare. Helping them move toward economic security was Back on Track’s—and Harris’—primary mission. 

But taking care of their bodies and their emotional health was also important. Instead of self-medicating with booze and drugs, she wanted to help them develop the mental habits that could help them persevere when they felt worn down by the world—a mindset for believing they did have the power to determine the course of their futures. Going to the gym wasn’t the point, she told them— though she had wrangled free passes to 24-Hour Fitness for anyone who wanted one. “It’s about being happy and healthy and figuring out ways to cope.” Scanning the room, I could see that many of her listeners seemed … baffled. Since when did the city’s top law enforcement official care about how a bunch of former drug dealers felt?

Scanning the room, I could see that many of her listeners seemed … baffled. Since when did the city’s top law enforcement official care about how a bunch of former drug dealers felt?

Flash forward almost two decades: The Democratic presidential nominee who has spent the past 107 days running an ultramarathon on a tightrope in designer pantsuits and high heels seems light years away from that earnest young DA preaching about the healing power of cardio. Consider Harris’ urgent closing message on the Ellipse a week before the election, flanked by a parade of flags and 75,000 people who were terrified by the prospects of a second Trump presidency. Donald Trump is a “petty tyrant,” the vice president declared—“unstable, obsessed with revenge, consumed with grievance and out for unchecked power.” America is better than he is, she insisted, “America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised, a nation big enough to encompass all our dreams, strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us, and fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.”

The 2024 election feels like a second chance, if not the last chance, for the nation, a back-on-track moment. In much the same way that she was encouraging young offenders to seize control of their lives decades ago, Harris spent a good chunk of her speech trying to convince her listeners that they can control the fate of a democracy threatened by bullies, demagogues, and oligarchs. “Each of you has the power,” she told the cheering but jittery crowd, “to turn the page and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.” 

For me, the most striking moment in her speech came when Harris talked about her adored mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who died from colon cancer in 2009 at the age of 70. “I took care of my mother when she got sick, cooking foods that she had a taste for, finding clothes that would not irritate her skin,” Harris told her audience, describing intimate acts of love and kindness that public figures, much less politicians, rarely discuss. Harris the candidate was touting her plan to expand Medicare coverage to include home health care for seniors: “Currently, if you need home care and you don’t have some money to hire someone, you and your family need to deplete your savings to qualify for help. That’s just not right.” Harris the daughter was speaking from a personal place that she has often tried to guard. “Caregiving is about dignity,” she said. “It is about dignity.” 

It was a profoundly empathetic moment. And I wondered if her capacity to communicate empathy might just end up saving democracy.

As Americans reach the finish line of the most stomach-wrenching, soul-sucking, exhausting, consequential presidential campaign in memory, many factors will help determine whether Harris will be able to beat back Trump and pull America from the brink. 

If she wins, pundits will point to the innumerable GOP mistakes. Abortion bans transforming health care for women (and families) across the US, infuriating not just the tens of millions of people capable of getting pregnant but also their mothers and grandmothers old enough to remember the coat-hanger-abortion era before Roe v. Wade. Then there is the far-right’s embrace of Project 2025 and other extreme policies that would catapult the country back to the 19th century. The grotesque, proto-fascist spectacle at Madison Square Garden. Trump’s rapidly degenerating mental capacity, his accelerating physical decline, his unapologetic embrace of corrupt dictators, his incessant lies. His vice presidential pick, Ohio Sen. JD Vance’s repulsive views about women, especially unmarried ones with no children. Elon Musk’s full-on transformation into a Marvel supervillain, one who turns out to be clueless about politics even as he spends hundreds of millions of dollars trying to disrupt a democracy that helped make him the richest person on the planet. 

“Considering they had such little time, some say this is a minor miracle. But it isn’t—it is the result of the right people and the right candidate. It will be a case study for future political scientists.”

Then there’s the Harris campaign, which people who pay close attention to these things are calling one of the best Democrats have ever run. “Considering they had such little time, some say this is a minor miracle,” the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin posted on Twitter. “But it isn’t—it is the result of the right people and the right candidate. It will be a case study for future political scientists.” Harris, who spent four years being dismissed as a DEI lightweight, has been a revelation since President Joe Biden bowed out of the race in July, even to her longtime supporters. “It seems to us that something happened to you,” Oprah Winfrey marveled in September, as if “a veil or something dropped… and you just stepped into your power.” Harris responded by (of course) laughing, then added, “You know, we each have those moments in our lives where it’s time to step up.” In the weeks since that virtual rally, despite a schedule that has sometimes seemed to require her to be in 12 places at once, Harris has seemed to gain in strength and clarity of purpose. Through it all, her sunny stamina has been one of her greatest attributes.

But for me, another quality that distinguishes Harris and may even be a determinative superpower in this race is empathy. Obviously, empathy can be a double-edged sword for women politicians, making them seem “soft” and “weak,” their feminine/maternal instincts writ inappropriately large in an arena requiring steely strength. At least that’s what Trump and Vance and Musk and their ilk seem to think—people who at minimum lack any semblance of emotional intelligence and at worst, seem to have learned their social skills on 4chan. It’s not what Democratic strategists have emphasized when they’ve framed her candidacy; she’s the tough-talking prosecutor who recognizes in Trump the type of criminal and predator she spent much of her career trying to put in jail. But scratch the surface of her prosecutorial rigor and consider the policy ideas she’s been talking about on the campaign trail—health care, reproductive care, child care, elder care.

Empathy can be a double-edged sword for women politicians, making them seem “soft” and “weak,” their feminine/maternal instincts writ inappropriately large in an arena requiring steely strength. At least that’s what Trump and Vance and Musk and their ilk seem to think.

Of course, those are perennially Democratic issues, embraced with special fervor by female candidates and their voters. It’s hardly surprising that Harris—who was raised by a single mother and focused on victims of violence and crime for much of her career—would espouse a public policy agenda that is fundamentally about treating people with dignity and kindness.

But you can support empathic policies and still be a terrible person. What’s notable is how many people have a story about her kindness out of the public eye, going back decades. A young woman named Tanene recently went viral on TikTok, talking about how, when she was a homeless teenager in the early 2000s, Harris—not yet a politician—plucked her from the San Francisco streets, deciding “she was going to love me and guide me and cheer me on for literally my entire life.” Twenty years later, she considers Harris her “big sister Auntie mentor friend.”

Lateefah Simon, a MacArthur fellow who ran Harris’s Back on Track program for a few years in the mid-2000s, recalls how, soon after she’d been hired, she showed up to work wearing a hoodie and sweats, like the kids she would be meeting with that day. Harris was not amused. “Why would you ever disrespect your people?” Harris demanded, sending her home to change. “You work for this office. You work for the state, so you represent. Would you go to Pacific Heights”—one of the city’s whitest and wealthiest neighborhoods— “wearing that?” But the next day, Harris presented Simon with a brand-new suit, the very first she ever owned. (Today, Simon is expected to be elected to replace Representative Barbara Lee, representing Berkeley and Oakland in Congress.)

Some of these stories can edge into a kind of Frank Capra sentimentality—except they happen to be true. One of them comes from her former boss, one-time San Francisco city attorney Louise Renne. One day Harris—then a young lawyer heading their division on children and families—arrived in Renne’s office with an armful of stuffed toys for kids whose adoptions were being finalized. “She said, Louise, it’s Adoption Day, we’re going to hand out teddy bears to the children so they can remember this day.” Renne recalled. “So off we went, teddy bears in arms, over to the courthouse. Well, that had never been done before. And I just thought, what an insightful thing to do.” 

Now, 25 years later, what Renne remains struck by is Harris’s unusual alchemy of toughness and kindness. “Nobody should ever mistake her for not being tough enough,” Renne told me recently. But Harris also cares about people and consequences, Renne says: “What’s going on in the real world? What is the impact here? Who’s it hurting most? How do we solve the problem to get around the hurt?”

Imagine JD Vance handing out teddy bears. As Adam Serwer famously wrote about the first Trump presidency, “The cruelty is the point.” Four years later, that cruelty continues to be manifest in hideous, even jaw-dropping ways—were we still able to be shocked—but especially in Trump and Vance’s ugly rhetoric about immigrants and in their callous reactions to stories about women who have died and nearly died because of restrictions on abortion care.

Harris, meanwhile, has reached out to Republicans in part by acknowledging their misgivings about voting for a Democrat. The quality of empathy helps explain why she and her vice presidential running mate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz—the football coach who helped launch his high school’s Gay/Straight Alliance club, the governor who supported free meals and tampons for school kids, the proud dad of a special-needs son—seem to genuinely connect. Theirs is not the Bill Clinton-esque “I feel your pain” schtick that often seems performative. 

Empathy has likewise been at the heart of Harris’s messaging on abortion. Where she really catches fire is when she talks about how abortion bans have brutalized the lives of women and families.

Empathy has likewise been at the heart of Harris’s messaging on abortion. From the moment that the Dobbs decision was announced and Biden gave her the responsibility to lobby for reproductive rights in ways he never did, she has offered a full-throated defense of reproductive freedom the likes of which we have never before heard from a sitting vice president or a presidential candidate. She’s been exceptional in her attacks on Trump and his allies overturning Roe v. Wade, passing extreme abortion bans, threatening access to birth control and IVF, and stripping away the ability of women and girls to make decisions about their own bodies. Admittedly, on the what-she-plans-to-do-about-it side, Harris is more circumspect. During the debate, for example, when asked if there were any limits to abortion care that she would support, she replied that she wanted to “restore Roe.” She knows how limited her powers are likely to be on that front, especially if she lacks majorities in the House and/or Senate. 

Harris really catches fire when she talks about how abortion bans have brutalized the lives of women and families, like the young Georgia woman, Amber Thurman, whose 2022 death from delayed abortion care left her six-year-old son without a mother. Or what happens to victims of rape or incest or domestic violence: “The idea that a woman who survives a crime of a violation to her body should not have the authority to make a decision about what happens to her body next—that is immoral,” Harris declared in her speech on the Ellipse. “That is immoral.” 

So now it’s Election Day and the polls continue to forecast a tight race, though with some unexpected, late-breaking reasons for optimism for Democrats. If Harris wins, it will be because she has managed to break through the Trump–Musk–Fox News chaos machine and convince millions of people who knew hardly anything about her three months ago to support her and her vision of America’s future. Voters have myriad choices this election, with down-ballot races and ballot measures. But at the top of the ticket, if voters don’t choose empathy, that future will be cruel indeed.

Abortion Is on the Ballot in These 10 States

Two years after the US Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion, tens of millions of Americans will go to the polls this November hoping to protect access to the procedure—whether their lawmakers like it or not. Ten states— some already with robust protections, others with near-total bans—have measures on their ballots to enshrine abortion rights in their constitutions. The expected outpouring of voters, including in key swing states, could help determine control of the White House, Congress, state legislatures, and state supreme courts.

Reproductive freedom has proved to be one of the strongest currents shaping the outcome of American elections since 2022. So far, voters in seven states have reacted to the end of Roe v. Wade by passing ballot measures aimed at restoring, and even expanding, Roe’s protections. In a few of those states, the voter-initiative process empowered the public to bypass GOP-dominated legislatures and supersede decades-old restrictions. Reproductive rights organizers are hoping to continue that winning streak on November 5. 

But faced with the broad appeal of abortion initiatives in GOP-led states such as Ohio, Republican officials have gone to sometimes extreme lengths to undermine the latest measures. In Florida, for example, Gov. Ron DeSantis has waged a multifront war on Amendment 4, threatening television stations that air ads favoring the measure and issuing a 348-page report accusing the Floridians Protecting Freedom campaign of “widespread petition fraud.” 

While most of this year’s measures have a common objective—protecting reproductive access—they take very different approaches to reaching that goal. Here is a rundown of what’s on the November ballot, which we will update as election results become available. 

Arizona

In anticipation of the end of Roe, Arizona Republicans passed a 15-week abortion ban in early 2022. But they also left in place an 1864 statute that outlawed nearly all abortions and threatened providers with jail time—a “zombie” law that was moot as long as Roe was in effect. This past April, the Arizona Supreme Court revived that Civil-War era ban by a 4–2 vote. The GOP-controlled legislature quickly repealed the old law, but many Arizonans were outraged at what the court had done, and the campaign to put Proposition 139 on the November ballot exploded. Prop 139 would enshrine a fundamental right to abortion in the Arizona Constitution and prohibit the state from restricting or banning abortion until the point of fetal viability—about 24 weeks. Abortions would be allowed later in pregnancy to save the mother’s life or to protect her physical or mental health. The amendment would also protect anyone who helps another person obtain an abortion.

A coalition of reproductive rights groups certified more than 575,000 signatures this past summer—the most ever validated for a citizens initiative in the state’s history, supporters said. In a New York Times/Siena College poll in late September, Prop 139 was ahead among likely voters by a resounding 58 percent. If it passes, Prop 139 could be used to challenge almost 40 abortion laws on Arizona’s books, including the existing 15-week ban, a prohibition on telehealth abortions, and a parental consent requirement for teenagers.

Colorado

Long before the Dobbs decision, Colorado legislators passed numerous laws safeguarding access to abortion. But after Dobbs, reproductive health advocates in the state concluded that even the strongest statutes weren’t strong enough—Colorado needed to enshrine those protections in its constitution. The measure they put on the November ballot, Amendment 79, wouldn’t just establish a right to abortion; it would repeal a 40-year-old constitutional provision that prohibited the use of state dollars to fund abortion. Sponsored by a coalition called Coloradans for Protecting Reproductive Freedom, the measure needs 55 percent of votes to pass. 

Surrounded by states with bans or heavily restrictive laws, Colorado is a crucial abortion access point for the West. With no gestational limits, the state is also a haven for anyone seeking an abortion later in pregnancy, as it is home to one of four clinics in the US that offer third-trimester procedures. Repealing the ban on state funding would allow Colorado to use its state Medicaid dollars to pay for abortions, making the procedure more accessible for low-income patients.

Florida

Florida’s Amendment 4 would enshrine in the state’s constitution the freedom to seek an abortion before fetal viability, and after viability if a medical provider determines that the procedure is necessary to preserve a patient’s health.

Gov. DeSantis and his GOP administration have done everything they can to sabotage the amendmentincluding sending “election police” to the homes of people who signed the petitions.

If the measure passes, it would dramatically improve access to reproductive care in Florida, which since May has banned abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. Before that, the state permitted abortions up to 15 weeks, and before Dobbs, until 24 weeks. The impact of the Florida vote will be felt throughout the Southeast: Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky all have near-total abortion bans; Georgia and South Carolina have six-week bans, and North Carolina’s 12-week ban is made more burdensome by a 72-hour waiting period. 

The stakes for passage are high, and so are the barriers. Over the last several election cycles, Florida has turned out more conservative voters than liberal ones. While reproductive rights are popular across the political spectrum, the state has a 60 percent threshold to approve constitutional amendments; the other red states that have passed abortion-protective measures since Dobbs—Kansas, Kentucky, Ohio—only required simple majorities. Meanwhile, Gov. DeSantis and his GOP administration have done everything they can to sabotage the amendment—including sending “election police” to the homes of people who signed the petitions, ostensibly to root out fraud. If the measure passes, DeSantis and his allies are widely expected to fight just as hard to overturn the results.

Maryland

Maryland’s Question 1, which was placed on the November ballot by the state legislature, does not mention “abortion”—much to the chagrin of supporters and opponents alike. Instead, the amendment broadly establishes the constitutional right to “reproductive freedom,” including the freedom to decide whether to continue or end a pregnancy. It needs a simple majority to pass.

Maryland already has some of the least restrictive abortion laws in the country: There is no gestational limit, state Medicaid covers the procedure, and a shield law protects patients who travel from states with abortion bans. This has made the state a critical access point for abortion seekers further along in pregnancy, as well as people traveling from the South. Abortion protections are widely popular in the state; in a recent poll by the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, 69 percent of respondents said they plan to vote for Question 1.

Missouri

Missouri’s near-total abortion ban took effect mere minutes after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022—making it the first state in the nation to broadly prohibit abortion. Abortion-rights advocates soon set about crafting a ballot initiative to end the ban, inspired by wins in other states. Now, with Amendment 3, voters will decide whether they want the right to “reproductive freedom”—defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about contraception, abortion, and healthcare during pregnancy. If approved by a simple majority, the amendment would set up a legal battle to overturn the current ban and challenge the many other Missouri laws that regulated abortion providers nearly out of existence even when Roe was still in effect.

Amendment 3’s proponents, a coalition known as Missourians for Constitutional Freedom, have traveled a rocky road just to get the measure before voters. They’ve overcome blatant obstruction by top state GOP officials, multiple legal challenges, and deep internal divisions over whether the initiative should allow the state to ban abortions after fetal viability. The final text protects abortion rights until viability, and permits later abortions if needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant person.

Montana

Constitutional Initiative 128 establishes the right to make and carry out decisions about one’s own pregnancy, including abortion. If passed, it would allow the state to regulate abortion after fetal viability, so long as those restrictions don’t prevent abortions that health care providers deem medically necessary. The amendment, which requires more than 50 percent of the vote, would also prevent the government from criminalizing patients and anyone who helps a person exercise her abortion rights.

If top Republican state officials had it their way, the measure would not even be on the ballot. State courts intervened at multiple points; the Montana Supreme Court overruled Attorney General Austin Knudsen’s initial rejection of the proposed amendment, nixed Knudsen’s drafted ballot language saying the amendment “may increase the number of taxpayer-funded abortions,” and threatened Secretary of State Christi Jacobsen with a contempt charge because she refused to hand over the sample ballot petition to the campaign behind the amendment, Montanans Securing Reproductive Rights. After abortion rights supporters submitted nearly double the required 60,000 signatures, Jacobsen even tried changing the rules to throw out the signatures of inactive registered voters, until a district court ordered her to stop.

Thanks to the state supreme court, abortion is currently legal in Montana until fetal viability, despite the best efforts of Republican state legislators to restrict access. Montanans have already brushed off one GOP attempt to stigmatize abortion; in November 2022, 52 percent of voters rejected a legislature-initiated statute that would have made it a felony for doctors to not provide care to infants born alive after induced labor, a cesarean section or an “attempted abortion.” (The law wasn’t necessary since Montana, like every other state, already makes infanticide a crime.)

Nebraska

Nebraska voters will see dueling abortion amendments on their November ballots. Initiative 434 restricts abortion rights, banning the procedure after 12 weeks of pregnancy with limited exceptions. That’s essentially the same law already on the state’s books—but the measure would enshrine it as a constitutional amendment, making it much harder to repeal. And because the amendment doesn’t protect abortion before the 12-week mark, state politicians could always go further and pass a complete ban, as Republican Gov. Jim Pillen has pledged to do.

By contrast, Initiative 439 expands abortion rights, creating a “fundamental right to abortion until fetal viability, or when needed to protect the life or health of the pregnant patient.” In practice, the amendment would roughly double the length of time for pregnant people in Nebraska to get an abortion. Crucially, it would block lawmakers from passing a total ban.

If the double initiatives sound confusing, well, that’s the point. Anti-abortion activists have repeatedly tried to muddy the waters about which ballot initiative is which, as Rachel Cohen at Vox has reported. They’ve also tried to get the pro-abortion initiative thrown off the ballot on a technicality, but the Nebraska Supreme Court shot them down.

Given the confusion, it is possible that both measures could pass. In that case, the one with the most votes wins.

Nevada

Nevada, one of the swingiest states in the 2024 election, has its own version of the Equal Rights Amendment, passed by voters in 2022. But it didn’t explicitly mention protections for abortion. Question 6 constitutionally enshrines the right to abortion until fetal viability or for the health or life of the mother, as determined on a case-by-case basis by health care providers. Any pre-viability restrictions must be directly related to promoting the health of the pregnant person and “consistent with accepted clinical standards of practice.” This year’s vote is just the first step in a multiyear process; assuming a simple majority of voters approve it, the measure must be passed again in 2026 to become part of the constitution.

Thanks to a law passed in 1973, abortion has been legal in Nevada until 24 weeks. Because voters passed a referendum on that law in 1990, it can only be changed by a direct ballot measure. Protections for abortion are very popular in Nevada; a University of Maryland poll conducted over the summer found that about 70 percent of state voters oppose criminalizing abortion at any stage of pregnancy. The campaign behind the amendment, Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, has raised nearly $10 million since January, according to campaign finance reports; the Coalition for Parents and Children PAC, which successfully sued to block an initial version of the amendment that covered reproductive healthcare more broadly, hasn’t raised or spent any money.

New York

New York’s Proposal 1 may not include the word “abortion,” but it would create first-in-the-nation protections for the rights of pregnant people.

The proposal is a broad version of the Equal Rights Amendment, the long-running feminist effort to guarantee women’s rights in state and federal constitutions. Right now, New York’s constitution only forbids government discrimination on the basis of race and religion. Prop 1 adds more protected categories to that list: disability, age, ethnicity, national origin, and sex, including sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. Those types of discrimination are already banned under state law, but by enshrining protections in the constitution, Prop 1 would make them harder for legislators to attack in the future—for example, if New York politics keep trending rightward.

Here’s where abortion comes in: The amendment also bans discrimination based on “pregnancy status, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care and autonomy.” Not only does that definition go farther than any other state, it leaves little room for judges to interpret in ways that might limit abortion access, according to Katharine Bodde, of the New York Civil Liberties Union.

Yet while New York Democrats initially viewed Prop 1 as a surefire way to boost voter turnout, their right-wing opponents have seized on transphobic messaging to great effect—making this blue-state fight unexpectedly close.

South Dakota

South Dakota’s current abortion ban is one of the most extreme in the country, with all abortions banned except when needed to save a pregnant person’s life. Amendment G, backed by a group called Dakotans for Health, would replace that law with a trimester-based system allowing increasing restrictions on abortion as a pregnancy progresses.  

In the first trimester, the state would be banned from interfering with “a woman’s abortion decision and its effectuation.” In the second trimester, the state could restrict abortion in ways “reasonably related to the physical health of the pregnant woman.” Third-trimester abortions could be banned, except when necessary to preserve a pregnant person’s life or health. The amendment needs a simple majority to pass.

Planned Parenthood and other abortion-rights groups aren’t supporting Amendment G, which they’ve said doesn’t go far enough. But the conservative Republicans who dominate state politics are still so terrified of the measure that they passed an emergency law to let voters revoke their petition signatures—then opponents of the measure led a phone banking effort to dupe signers into pulling their support. Why are state Republicans spooked? “If you can do it in South Dakota, it will strike fear into the hearts of every red-state legislature in the country,” Dakotans for Health co-founder Adam Weiland told the American Prospect.

Madison Pauly, Abby Vesoulis, Julianne McShane, and Nina Martin contributed reporting. This is a developing story. Check back for updates.


Top image photo credits: Octavio Jones/AFP/Getty; RJ Sangosti/The Denver Post/Getty; William Campbell/Getty; Rachel Aston/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Getty; Getty(3)

Swing States of Anxiety

26 October 2024 at 14:14

After Joe Biden’s debate debacle and Donald Trump’s near-assassination, the 2024 election looked like it could be a GOP blowout. Then Biden dropped out, Kamala Harris stepped up, the Democrats raised $1 billion-plus, the Republicans went full fascist … And here we are, a week before what feels like (another) Most Momentous Election of Our Lifetimes, and—if you believe the polls—no one has a clue who will win. 

Much depends on the outcome of the vote in seven states—the same ones that mattered in 2016 and 2020. This week on Reveal, my Mother Jones colleagues turn their attention to two of the swingest states of this election cycle, while I dig through my reporting archives to unearth a never-before-broadcast interview from 2013 that provides an intriguing glimpse into what makes Harris tick. 

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First, national correspondent Tim Murphy goes to Arizona, where flag-waving, gun-toting protesters swarmed outside the Maricopa County election center in 2020, insisting the election had been stolen from Trump. Since then, dozens of court cases across the US have found those claims to be a big fat lie. Yet threats and harassment against Arizona election workers continue to be so common, Stephen Richer, the Maricopa County recorder, told Tim, that top election officials in the state “have been turning over at the rate of a lunch shift at Taco Bell.”

Richer, a Republican who voted for Trump in 2020, has spent much of the past four years trying to dispel the election lies Trump helped create. To see how it’s going, Murphy visits the recently fortified Maricopa County election center, where Richer’s staff are on a mission to demonstrate to voters that the election process is free and fair and deserving of their trust. 

Meanwhile, in Georgia, where Trump and his minions have been indicted for their attempts to find enough votes (11,780, to be exact) to undo Biden’s victory in 2020, new MAGA-friendly members of the State Election Board have been trying to rewrite the rules to favor the former president this time around. Mother Jones national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman explains the fight to control election results in this crucial 2024 battleground and how it mirrors similar efforts in other swing states.

For the show’s final segment, I travel back almost 12 years, to when Harris was California’s attorney general—the first woman and first African American ever elected to that job—and I was an editor and reporter covering San Francisco. By then, Harris was a rising star in national Democratic politics, and editors at New York-based DuJour magazine wanted their readers to understand why. I jumped at the assignment.

I’d written about Harris a couple of times before; I’d even interviewed her mother. So when we reconnected in 2013, Harris was comfortable in my presence—far more so than with some of the journalists who’ve interviewed her in recent years. We spent about an hour together—an unimaginably generous amount of time in the current political climate—talking about many of the same substantive issues (the housing crisis, gun control, prosecuting sex crimes, and tech privacy and regulation) at the center of her campaign today. After my profile was published, I stored the audio on my laptop’s hard drive and forgot about it—until Harris replaced Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket and reporters started complaining about how few interviews she was granting.

Listening back to our conversation, I’m struck by the similarities between Harris then and now—and not just when it comes to policy priorities. When she ran for AG in 2010, very few people—even in her own circle—thought she could win. Her Republican opponent Steve Cooley, the district attorney of Los Angeles County, was extremely popular with the tough-on-crime types who had long dominated California criminal justice circles, not to mention he was older and white. “A lot of people thought it couldn’t happen,” Harris told me then. “What motivated me was I really wanted the job. I felt that I could do it well.” She campaigned hard in communities that were not her obvious constituencies. “I never foreclosed any group or constituency as being off limits,” she explained. “Everything and everybody is on the table, and I’m not going to accept that that door is not open to me.” On Election Night, Cooley declared victory—and many Harris supporters assumed she would concede. But she didn’t.

Three weeks later, in one of the closest elections in California history, Cooley was the one to finally concede, and Harris became the new attorney general.

The big unknown, of course, is whether she can do it again—this time against a Republican opponent who refuses to believe that he will lose and a disinformation machine intent on making sure he doesn’t. Here’s what Harris told me then: “I’m an eternal optimist. I really am. I’m a realist and an optimist. I think that those two can coexist, and they do in me.”

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