What do anti-vaxxers and abortion opponents have in common? They both see an ally in David Weldon, who is now President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to run the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The physician and ex–Florida congressman’s track record includes introducing legislation that would have stripped the CDC of its authority to conduct research on vaccine safety and instead given it to an independent agency within the Department of Health and Human Services. Weldon has also promoted the unfounded theory that vaccines lead to childhood autism—a false claim boosted infamously in the past by Trump’s pick for HHS Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And on abortion, Weldon is responsible for an eponymous federal law that prohibits HHS from funding any entities that “discriminate” against health care providers, hospitals, or insurance plans who opt out of providing abortion care—which the Trump administration “weaponized” to enact its anti-abortion agenda during his first term, according to the National Women’s Law Center. Weldon introduced the amendment in the House in 2004, and it has been passed as part of the HHS spending bill every year since 2005.

While in Congress, Weldon also co-sponsored legislation that sought to bar HHS from providing any Title X family planning funding to entities that provide abortions. (Then-Rep. Mike Pence sponsored that bill, and Trump enacted that policy in office, when Pence was vice president.) Weldon also supported a bill that proposed studying unsubstantiated links between abortion and depression.

Neither Weldon nor Trump have been shy about acknowledging these positions. On Weldon’s campaign site for his unsuccessful run for the Florida statehouse earlier this year, he promotes his record on so-called “vaccine safety,” as well as his “100% pro-life voting record” and the anti-abortion amendments he passed in Congress. When Trump announced Weldon as his choice to run the CDC on Nov. 22, he noted Weldon’s history “addressing issues within HHS and CDC,” including that he “worked with the CDC to enact a ban on patents for human embryos.”

“Dave will proudly restore the CDC to its true purpose, and will work to end the Chronic Disease Epidemic, and Make America Healthy Again!” Trump wrote.

Anti-vaxxers and abortion opponents are now celebrating the fact that Weldon could potentially control the CDC’s more than $9 billion budget.

“He is one of us!! Since before our movement had momentum,” the co-director of the anti-vaxx group Mississippi Parents for Vaccine Rights wrote on social media.

“This is YUGE!” a similar group in Oklahoma claimed, praising Weldon’s efforts to stop the CDC from conducting vaccine research.

And both the anti-abortion site Live Action and the right-wing Daily Signal ran pieces highlighting Weldon’s anti-abortion record, following Trump’s announcement. Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told the Daily Signal that Weldon “is a proven leader for life, and we look forward to working with him.”

Now in the national spotlight, Weldon appeared to walk back his most ardent anti-vaccine beliefs of the past: He told the New York Times this week, “I give shots, I believe in vaccination.” On abortion, though, Weldon seems to be more status quo: His campaign website from this year says, “I will always vote to protect the unborn and support a culture that celebrates the value of life.”

Last month, Louisiana became the first state to begin classifying misoprostol and mifepristone—the two pills used in medication abortion—as schedule IV controlled substances.

The move, driven by anti-abortion Republicans and unsupported by evidence, left the state’s doctors bracing for the worst—the pills also are used to manage miscarriages and treat postpartum hemorrhages, and the new law requires they be locked away with other narcotics, potentially wasting precious minutes in an emergency. Hundreds of Louisiana doctors opposed the law, and one of them, Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell, a board-certified OB-GYN in New Orleans, told me she feared other states would follow.

That fear may now come to pass: Pat Curry, a Republican lawmaker in Texas, pre-filed a bill in the state legislature this week that would classify the two drugs as schedule IV substances there. The next legislative session does not begin until January 14—if passed, the bill would take effect in September 2025. Curry did not immediately respond to a Facebook message from Mother Jones on Sunday, and appeared to block me from messaging him further after I inquired about the bill.

The news, which appears to have first been reported by the Louisiana Illuminator, is just the latest example of right-wing attacks on abortion pills. Project 2025, the extremist guidebook to a second Trump term, recommends that the Department of Justice invoke the 19th-century Comstock Act to prosecute providers of abortion pills, as I have previously reported. It also recommends that the Food and Drug Administration revoke its approval of abortion pills. Conservative attorneys general in three states are trying to revive a US Supreme Court case seeking to restrict access to mifepristone after the justices unanimously dismissed it earlier this year. And as the Guardian reported on Sunday, anti-abortion advocates hope to outlaw abortion pills nationwide during Trump’s next term.

There is no scientific or medical evidence base to support the notion that the pills are dangerous or should be regulated as controlled substances, which federal law describes as drugs that have “potential for abuse.” More than 100 studies have found that mifepristone and misoprostol are safe and effective methods to terminate a pregnancy, and research has shown abortion pills are just as safe and effective when prescribed via telemedicine and mailed to patients as when prescribed and dispensed in person. Post-Dobbs, Americans have taken to stockpiling abortion pills just in case they need them in the future; medication abortion provided via telehealth has also become an increasingly popular option in the face of rising abortion restrictions—it now accounts for approximately one in five abortions nationwide.

The Texas bill certainly has a shot. The legislature is solidly Republican and has historically been strongly anti-abortion, having passed SB 8, a six-week ban, then the nation’s most restrictive, in 2021. (As my colleague Nina Martin reported this summer, new research shows that a huge increase in infant deaths followed the implementation of SB 8, due in part to an increase of babies born with birth defects. After Dobbs, abortion became fully outlawed in Texas, with no exceptions for rape or incest—just the life or health of the mother.)

A spokesperson for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott—who, as I reported, falsely claimed Texas would “eliminate rape” as an attempt to justify passing SB 8—did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday asking if the governor would support the “controlled substances” bill.

When Texas lawmakers return to work in January, they will likely have to contend with protests from doctors and abortion rights advocates, who have evidence on their side. As Gillispie-Bell, the New Orleans doctor, told me: “It’s really a dangerous slippery slope when we have legislation that interferes with what we know to be evidence-based medicine.”

Last month, Louisiana became the first state to begin classifying misoprostol and mifepristone—the two pills used in medication abortion—as schedule IV controlled substances.

The move, driven by anti-abortion Republicans and unsupported by evidence, left the state’s doctors bracing for the worst—the pills also are used to manage miscarriages and treat postpartum hemorrhages, and the new law requires they be locked away with other narcotics, potentially wasting precious minutes in an emergency. Hundreds of Louisiana doctors opposed the law, and one of them, Dr. Veronica Gillispie-Bell, a board-certified OB-GYN in New Orleans, told me she feared other states would follow.

That fear may now come to pass: Pat Curry, a Republican lawmaker in Texas, pre-filed a bill in the state legislature this week that would classify the two drugs as schedule IV substances there. The next legislative session does not begin until January 14—if passed, the bill would take effect in September 2025. Curry did not immediately respond to a Facebook message from Mother Jones on Sunday, and appeared to block me from messaging him further after I inquired about the bill.

The news, which appears to have first been reported by the Louisiana Illuminator, is just the latest example of right-wing attacks on abortion pills. Project 2025, the extremist guidebook to a second Trump term, recommends that the Department of Justice invoke the 19th-century Comstock Act to prosecute providers of abortion pills, as I have previously reported. It also recommends that the Food and Drug Administration revoke its approval of abortion pills. Conservative attorneys general in three states are trying to revive a US Supreme Court case seeking to restrict access to mifepristone after the justices unanimously dismissed it earlier this year. And as the Guardian reported on Sunday, anti-abortion advocates hope to outlaw abortion pills nationwide during Trump’s next term.

There is no scientific or medical evidence base to support the notion that the pills are dangerous or should be regulated as controlled substances, which federal law describes as drugs that have “potential for abuse.” More than 100 studies have found that mifepristone and misoprostol are safe and effective methods to terminate a pregnancy, and research has shown abortion pills are just as safe and effective when prescribed via telemedicine and mailed to patients as when prescribed and dispensed in person. Post-Dobbs, Americans have taken to stockpiling abortion pills just in case they need them in the future; medication abortion provided via telehealth has also become an increasingly popular option in the face of rising abortion restrictions—it now accounts for approximately one in five abortions nationwide.

The Texas bill certainly has a shot. The legislature is solidly Republican and has historically been strongly anti-abortion, having passed SB 8, a six-week ban, then the nation’s most restrictive, in 2021. (As my colleague Nina Martin reported this summer, new research shows that a huge increase in infant deaths followed the implementation of SB 8, due in part to an increase of babies born with birth defects. After Dobbs, abortion became fully outlawed in Texas, with no exceptions for rape or incest—just the life or health of the mother.)

A spokesperson for Republican Gov. Greg Abbott—who, as I reported, falsely claimed Texas would “eliminate rape” as an attempt to justify passing SB 8—did not immediately respond to a request for comment Sunday asking if the governor would support the “controlled substances” bill.

When Texas lawmakers return to work in January, they will likely have to contend with protests from doctors and abortion rights advocates, who have evidence on their side. As Gillispie-Bell, the New Orleans doctor, told me: “It’s really a dangerous slippery slope when we have legislation that interferes with what we know to be evidence-based medicine.”

In the days before the election, when too many stories about deadlocked polls and undecided voters and the MAGAfication of young men began to wear on my soul, I turned to TikTok to see what women were thinking. Soon enough I was swimming in a sea of female excitement and angst. I watched videos of ordinary women of all ages and races—in deep blue districts and deep red ones—describing what this election meant to them. Women who had just voted, sitting in their cars and sobbing about what it would mean to elect the first female president, what it would mean to defeat a vitriolically sexist candidate who’s been found liable for sexually assaulting one woman and who stands accused by dozens more, whose campaign gleefully demeaned women as “trash” and “childless cat ladies.” What it would mean to elect someone who’d spent the last three months, and the two years before that, connecting reproductive freedom to economic concerns. What it would mean to elect someone taking the stress of caring for both kids and parents seriously, who recognizes the housing crisis is hurting all but the richest, who has more than a concept of a plan for how to address such problems.

I watched one young woman driving 10 hours to her home state because her absentee ballot never arrived, muttering “10 and 2, 10 and 2” as she stared out at the road ahead. I watched women flying across the country to vote. I watched women take part in the “They both reached for the gun” Chicago meme as they talked about canceling out the vote of their Trump-supporting father, brother, or husband. Or bragging on husbands or dads whose vote they didn’t have to cancel. One who said she wouldn’t have to cancel out her husband’s vote because he’d forget to do it if she didn’t remind him.

One woman told of breaking off her engagement when she found out her fiancé was for Trump. (“I can’t share my life with someone who is going to vote in that direction…Ladies, we need to stick together.”) I watched as young woman after young woman testified that they’d never, ever consider dating anyone who voted for Trump. I watched as women who were in middle or high school in 2016 reacted in horror at seeing, for the first time, Trump bragging on an Access Hollywood bus about grabbing women by the pussy and moving on them “like a bitch,” or stalking Hillary Clinton around a debate stage, or seeing the testimonies of the more than 25 women who have reported being sexually assaulted by him. “Dads voted for this?” read one incredulous caption.

There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women.

I was well aware that algorithmic offerings are not reality, particularly on TikTok, which serves you things akin to the things you’ve engaged with. But the videos seemed to be representative of a record gender divide, clocked by pollsters at about 30 points nationally at the time and even higher in key districts and among certain demographics. Would women, horrified by Trump’s and Vance’s statements and actions, furious that their reproductive rights were rolled back, foreclose another Trump term? Would enough white women finally cleave from white men, and vote for a woman who was also Black and Asian?

We know the answer now, and while conclusive demographic data will take months to emerge, exit polls in 10 historic battleground states indicate that women there favored Harris by 8 points overall—less than the margin for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020—resulting in an 11 point gender gap. (The exit polls’ ongoing inclusion of Florida, Ohio, and Texas might being warping our conclusions, but we don’t yet know.) Black women, Democrats’ most loyal constituency, voted for her in those states at a rate of 91 percent. Latinas, 60 percent. Young women, 61 percent. Other age groups, 49–54 percent. Harris won 57 percent of women with college degrees and 66 percent of women with even more education. But she lost white women with little or no college education by a mile. Only 35 percent of them supported her, and since those women constitute about one-fifth of the total electorate, they drove down her margins with women overall.

The questions that feel most burning right now—like what is up with those who voted against abortion bans but also for Trump, and which part of his gains can be attributed mostly to racism and/or sexism—are complex and will take more data and analysis to really understand. But it’s safe to say Trump’s margin of victory was powered by men, who, those same polls found, voted for him by 55 percent—a few points more than went for him in 2020. Trump looks to have made gains with almost every type of man, especially younger men and Latino men. (Despite a lot of pre-election angst, Black men overwhelmingly backed Harris, though Trump increased his margins there, too.) White men of all education levels went for Trump, but white men who didn’t go to college overwhelmingly so.

The Trump campaign knew that men were his ticket back to power, and it targeted them—pointedly young men, and men of color—with a sophisticated campaign of grievance and disinformation. And in that, they were massively aided by the manosphere and its billionaire mascot: Elon Musk.

Since he bought Twitter in 2022, Musk has been on a mission to turn it into an amplifier of toxicity. He allowed hate-mongers—including virulent misogynists such as Andrew Tate—back on the platform, now called X, and dismantled tools to help users fight harassment while making sure everyone was far more likely to see posts and replies from MAGA fans, foremost himself. He personally promoted disinformation of all kinds—about voting, about transgender kids (despite, or because of, having one), about Harris (his PAC literally called her a “c-word”), about science—to his more than 204 million followers. Who can forget his promise to impregnate Taylor Swift after she announced her support for Harris? His misleading election posts, including ones falsely claiming Democrats were “importing” millions of migrants to vote for Harris, were viewed 2 billion times according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which estimated his posts were worth $24 million to the Trump campaign. (Musk, who likes to claim he’s a defender of free speech, sued the center in 2023; a federal judge tossed the case, ruling it was an obvious attempt to both stifle criticism of X and bankrupt the organization.)

Musk gave, directly and through super-PACs, about $200 million to help Trump’s campaign in the final months, and mounted a parallel ground game in Pennsylvania, which Trump carried. He stumped for Trump, made the “brocast” rounds for Trump, and urged other tech billionaires to support Trump. He gave millions—possibly tens of millions—to Building America’s Future, a group focused on dividing communities of color and wooing Black men to vote for Trump.

Musk dismantled tools to help users fight harassment while making sure everyone was far more likely to see posts and replies from MAGA fans—foremost himself.

Musk’s efforts are both part of and indicative of the fact that more and more men are cocooned in a YouTube/podcast/Twitch information ecosystem that connects sports, gaming, and other male-dominated hobbies to politics. And in that space, algorithmic forces and concerted efforts by far-right influencers and adjacent grifters are normalizing disdain or hate for women, part of a conveyor belt of extremism. A good example of that came immediately after the election, when neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes (who famously dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago) posted “Your body, my choice.” Soon that slogan was screamed at high school girls all over the country by their male classmates, many of whom had likely never heard of Fuentes himself. (Similarly, Black people, including kids at my son’s school, were subjected to a decentralized but nationwide campaign of racist texts.)

There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women. For decades, men have been losing ground relative to women, be it in education or job opportunities. Women are increasingly likely to be a household’s primary breadwinner or raise families by themselves. The MeToo movement was a massively needed corrective for sexual harassment and abuse, but the ferocity of it (and some occasional overreach) did destabilize many men. 

This has all happened before. Women in the 1940s were sent to the factories and then back to the kitchen. The feminist movement of the 1970s led to big gains—we finally got those credit cards, ladies!—and then to a backlash, as Susan Faludi famously chronicled. An “anti-PC” movement arose too. But eventually the pendulum swung back, and new waves of female empowerment began to swell. Hopefully this election will do the same, and figuring out how to reach young men before they calcify into hardened misogyny needs to be a big part of that.

After the 2016 election, I wrote that Trump’s victory was a “brutal affront to women” and “all who value kindness and tolerance.” His administration plumbed new depths of chaos, corruption, and cruelty, and while some voters are too young to fully remember, his 2024 campaign made sure that no one could say they didn’t get what he stands for. 

The women who voted for Harris know that—and they are not okay. About one-third of women now live in states with abortion bans, and anybody who believed that Trump won’t try for a national ban, or revive the Comstock Act to stop distribution of mifepristone or even contraception, is likely to be bitterly disappointed. Even if nationwide prohibitions don’t come to pass, women in red states, and their doctors, will be further surveilled to prevent abortions, and women trying to have children will continue to die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid to provide lifesaving care. What else do the “pronatalist” policies that JD Vance and Elon Musk have been so eager to enact hold for women? 

Women are suspicious, guarded, and apoplectic, knowing that some in our families or neighborhoods voted us back into second-class status.

When I went back to TikTok after the election, I saw sorrow and disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage. Women are furious—in a Greek mythology sort of way. Black women are especially flattened and yet unsurprised that white women didn’t break for Harris. Some young women began shaving their heads and embracing the South Korean feminist 4B movement, in which women swear off dating, sex, and childrearing. (“The good news is that men hate us, so there’s no point in catering to them,” posted one.) Not many are likely to go that far, but it was clear even before the outcome that this election could have far-reaching impacts on dating and marriage and divorce. Certainly sex: If women can’t get abortions and are prevented from obtaining contraception, young men will awake to a very different world, soon enough. “If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue,” posted one woman. (And guys? Project 2025 wants to come after porn, too.) 

Will the backlash, once the election’s consequences become fully apparent, help power a reckoning with misogyny and racism once more? Perhaps. But right now, so many of us fear for ourselves, fear for our daughters, fear for women whom we’ve never met, and all others with a target on their backs, and we are walking around, suspicious and guarded and apoplectic, knowing that some in our families or neighborhoods voted us back into second-class status, and wondering what else they’re ready to go along with.

In the days before the election, when too many stories about deadlocked polls and undecided voters and the MAGAfication of young men began to wear on my soul, I turned to TikTok to see what women were thinking. Soon enough I was swimming in a sea of female excitement and angst. I watched videos of ordinary women of all ages and races—in deep blue districts and deep red ones—describing what this election meant to them. Women who had just voted, sitting in their cars and sobbing about what it would mean to elect the first female president, what it would mean to defeat a vitriolically sexist candidate who’s been found liable for sexually assaulting one woman and who stands accused by dozens more, whose campaign gleefully demeaned women as “trash” and “childless cat ladies.” What it would mean to elect someone who’d spent the last three months, and the two years before that, connecting reproductive freedom to economic concerns. What it would mean to elect someone taking the stress of caring for both kids and parents seriously, who recognizes the housing crisis is hurting all but the richest, who has more than a concept of a plan for how to address such problems.

I watched one young woman driving 10 hours to her home state because her absentee ballot never arrived, muttering “10 and 2, 10 and 2” as she stared out at the road ahead. I watched women flying across the country to vote. I watched women take part in the “They both reached for the gun” Chicago meme as they talked about canceling out the vote of their Trump-supporting father, brother, or husband. Or bragging on husbands or dads whose vote they didn’t have to cancel. One who said she wouldn’t have to cancel out her husband’s vote because he’d forget to do it if she didn’t remind him.

One woman told of breaking off her engagement when she found out her fiancé was for Trump. (“I can’t share my life with someone who is going to vote in that direction…Ladies, we need to stick together.”) I watched as young woman after young woman testified that they’d never, ever consider dating anyone who voted for Trump. I watched as women who were in middle or high school in 2016 reacted in horror at seeing, for the first time, Trump bragging on an Access Hollywood bus about grabbing women by the pussy and moving on them “like a bitch,” or stalking Hillary Clinton around a debate stage, or seeing the testimonies of the more than 25 women who have reported being sexually assaulted by him. “Dads voted for this?” read one incredulous caption.

There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women.

I was well aware that algorithmic offerings are not reality, particularly on TikTok, which serves you things akin to the things you’ve engaged with. But the videos seemed to be representative of a record gender divide, clocked by pollsters at about 30 points nationally at the time and even higher in key districts and among certain demographics. Would women, horrified by Trump’s and Vance’s statements and actions, furious that their reproductive rights were rolled back, foreclose another Trump term? Would enough white women finally cleave from white men, and vote for a woman who was also Black and Asian?

We know the answer now, and while conclusive demographic data will take months to emerge, exit polls in 10 historic battleground states indicate that women there favored Harris by 8 points overall—less than the margin for Hillary Clinton in 2016 or Joe Biden in 2020—resulting in an 11 point gender gap. (The exit polls’ ongoing inclusion of Florida, Ohio, and Texas might being warping our conclusions, but we don’t yet know.) Black women, Democrats’ most loyal constituency, voted for her in those states at a rate of 91 percent. Latinas, 60 percent. Young women, 61 percent. Other age groups, 49–54 percent. Harris won 57 percent of women with college degrees and 66 percent of women with even more education. But she lost white women with little or no college education by a mile. Only 35 percent of them supported her, and since those women constitute about one-fifth of the total electorate, they drove down her margins with women overall.

The questions that feel most burning right now—like what is up with those who voted against abortion bans but also for Trump, and which part of his gains can be attributed mostly to racism and/or sexism—are complex and will take more data and analysis to really understand. But it’s safe to say Trump’s margin of victory was powered by men, who, those same polls found, voted for him by 55 percent—a few points more than went for him in 2020. Trump looks to have made gains with almost every type of man, especially younger men and Latino men. (Despite a lot of pre-election angst, Black men overwhelmingly backed Harris, though Trump increased his margins there, too.) White men of all education levels went for Trump, but white men who didn’t go to college overwhelmingly so.

The Trump campaign knew that men were his ticket back to power, and it targeted them—pointedly young men, and men of color—with a sophisticated campaign of grievance and disinformation. And in that, they were massively aided by the manosphere and its billionaire mascot: Elon Musk.

Since he bought Twitter in 2022, Musk has been on a mission to turn it into an amplifier of toxicity. He allowed hate-mongers—including virulent misogynists such as Andrew Tate—back on the platform, now called X, and dismantled tools to help users fight harassment while making sure everyone was far more likely to see posts and replies from MAGA fans, foremost himself. He personally promoted disinformation of all kinds—about voting, about transgender kids (despite, or because of, having one), about Harris (his PAC literally called her a “c-word”), about science—to his more than 204 million followers. Who can forget his promise to impregnate Taylor Swift after she announced her support for Harris? His misleading election posts, including ones falsely claiming Democrats were “importing” millions of migrants to vote for Harris, were viewed 2 billion times according to the Center for Countering Digital Hate, which estimated his posts were worth $24 million to the Trump campaign. (Musk, who likes to claim he’s a defender of free speech, sued the center in 2023; a federal judge tossed the case, ruling it was an obvious attempt to both stifle criticism of X and bankrupt the organization.)

Musk gave, directly and through super-PACs, about $200 million to help Trump’s campaign in the final months, and mounted a parallel ground game in Pennsylvania, which Trump carried. He stumped for Trump, made the “brocast” rounds for Trump, and urged other tech billionaires to support Trump. He gave millions—possibly tens of millions—to Building America’s Future, a group focused on dividing communities of color and wooing Black men to vote for Trump.

Musk dismantled tools to help users fight harassment while making sure everyone was far more likely to see posts and replies from MAGA fans—foremost himself.

Musk’s efforts are both part of and indicative of the fact that more and more men are cocooned in a YouTube/podcast/Twitch information ecosystem that connects sports, gaming, and other male-dominated hobbies to politics. And in that space, algorithmic forces and concerted efforts by far-right influencers and adjacent grifters are normalizing disdain or hate for women, part of a conveyor belt of extremism. A good example of that came immediately after the election, when neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes (who famously dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago) posted “Your body, my choice.” Soon that slogan was screamed at high school girls all over the country by their male classmates, many of whom had likely never heard of Fuentes himself. (Similarly, Black people, including kids at my son’s school, were subjected to a decentralized but nationwide campaign of racist texts.)

There can be no doubt that there is fertile ground for those who find prominence and profit in nurturing resentment of women. For decades, men have been losing ground relative to women, be it in education or job opportunities. Women are increasingly likely to be a household’s primary breadwinner or raise families by themselves. The MeToo movement was a massively needed corrective for sexual harassment and abuse, but the ferocity of it (and some occasional overreach) did destabilize many men. 

This has all happened before. Women in the 1940s were sent to the factories and then back to the kitchen. The feminist movement of the 1970s led to big gains—we finally got those credit cards, ladies!—and then to a backlash, as Susan Faludi famously chronicled. An “anti-PC” movement arose too. But eventually the pendulum swung back, and new waves of female empowerment began to swell. Hopefully this election will do the same, and figuring out how to reach young men before they calcify into hardened misogyny needs to be a big part of that.

After the 2016 election, I wrote that Trump’s victory was a “brutal affront to women” and “all who value kindness and tolerance.” His administration plumbed new depths of chaos, corruption, and cruelty, and while some voters are too young to fully remember, his 2024 campaign made sure that no one could say they didn’t get what he stands for. 

The women who voted for Harris know that—and they are not okay. About one-third of women now live in states with abortion bans, and anybody who believed that Trump won’t try for a national ban, or revive the Comstock Act to stop distribution of mifepristone or even contraception, is likely to be bitterly disappointed. Even if nationwide prohibitions don’t come to pass, women in red states, and their doctors, will be further surveilled to prevent abortions, and women trying to have children will continue to die in hospital parking lots because doctors are too afraid to provide lifesaving care. What else do the “pronatalist” policies that JD Vance and Elon Musk have been so eager to enact hold for women? 

Women are suspicious, guarded, and apoplectic, knowing that some in our families or neighborhoods voted us back into second-class status.

When I went back to TikTok after the election, I saw sorrow and disbelief and terror, but also incandescent rage. Women are furious—in a Greek mythology sort of way. Black women are especially flattened and yet unsurprised that white women didn’t break for Harris. Some young women began shaving their heads and embracing the South Korean feminist 4B movement, in which women swear off dating, sex, and childrearing. (“The good news is that men hate us, so there’s no point in catering to them,” posted one.) Not many are likely to go that far, but it was clear even before the outcome that this election could have far-reaching impacts on dating and marriage and divorce. Certainly sex: If women can’t get abortions and are prevented from obtaining contraception, young men will awake to a very different world, soon enough. “If his ballot was red, his balls stay blue,” posted one woman. (And guys? Project 2025 wants to come after porn, too.) 

Will the backlash, once the election’s consequences become fully apparent, help power a reckoning with misogyny and racism once more? Perhaps. But right now, so many of us fear for ourselves, fear for our daughters, fear for women whom we’ve never met, and all others with a target on their backs, and we are walking around, suspicious and guarded and apoplectic, knowing that some in our families or neighborhoods voted us back into second-class status, and wondering what else they’re ready to go along with.

Trump’s reelection has been described by advocates and experts as a final blow to reproductive rights.

These fears are not unfounded. Trump appointed three of the five conservative Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion and unleashing a health care apocalypse. Vulnerable women found themselves in even greater danger thanks to abortion bans in more than a dozen states that have enabled abusers and left doctors fearful of prosecution if they intervene in pregnancy-related emergencies that require abortion care. ProPublica reported such bans appeared to have led to the deaths of several women in Georgia and Texas who were unable to get necessary abortion care when faced with dire medical complications. Add to this, Project 2025—the 900-plus-page extremist guidebook to a second Trump term—recommends that various federal agencies take sweeping actions to roll back abortion access.

Trump’s convictions on abortion have been flexible throughout his career. During the presidential campaign, he tried to distance himself from Project 2025 and claimed he would leave abortion policy “to the states.” Immediately after the election, however, his acolytes admitted that “Project 2025 is the agenda.”

Given all this, reproductive rights experts and advocates agree that the future of abortion access is bleak. But there are several actions President Biden and his administration could take before Inauguration Day that could make it harder for the next administration to enact their absolutist anti-abortion agenda. “Some of [the ideas] are just throwing monkey wrenches into the gears,” says David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University whose scholarly work focuses on abortion access, “and maybe with the chaotic Trump administration that helps delay some of the harm.”

“Some of [the ideas] are just throwing monkey wrenches into the gears, and maybe with the chaotic Trump administration, that helps delay some of the harm.”

While Vice President Kamala Harris campaigned on “restoring reproductive freedom,” it’s unclear if the Biden administration will prioritize these requests before the transition. The White House did not respond on the record to the specific proposals mentioned in this story, but pointed to the administration’s record of defending and expanding reproductive rights. But some say there’s more they can, and should, do. “If the administration was hesitant or holding off, now is the time, I think, to not hesitate,” Rachel Rebouché, reproductive rights legal scholar and dean of Temple Law School, says.

Here’s a look at some of what the administration could do to stymie the Trump administration’s anti-abortion agenda before he’s back in the White House.

Preemptively Pardon Providers of Abortion Pills

The Comstock Act is a 19th-century anti-obscenity law still on the books that anti-abortion Republicans argue should be used to “enforce federal law against providers and distributors of [abortion] pills.” In December 2022, Biden’s DOJ issued a memo arguing that the law cannot be used to prosecute abortion pill providers. Earlier this year, Democrats in Congress introduced legislation to repeal parts of the bill lawmakers say could be most relevant to abortion, but the measure has languished in House and the Senate committees.

Given that Project 2025 advises Trump’s DOJ to invoke the Comstock Act to prosecute providers of abortion pills, some advocates suggest that Biden preemptively pardon anyone who could be implicated for doing so. Cohen, from Drexel, notes that a preemptive pardon “would make it so that the people who have been mailing [abortion] pills, or mailing procedural instruments or supplies, are not at risk of being prosecuted.”

Jodi Jacobson, founder and executive director of the initiative Healthcare Across Borders, described the proposal as “a proactive thing that the Biden administration can do to automatically protect people over the five-year statute of limitations” for federal offenses. Jacobson oversees a coalition that comprises several reproductive health advocacy organizations that plan to ask the Biden administration to issue the blanket preemptive pardon. “This is a no-brainer—there is no reason not to do this,” she says, adding that it would “take off the table the immediate criminalization of folks who have been trying to save lives.”

Trump’s Food and Drug Administration, though, could still revoke its approval of abortion pills, as Project 2025 recommends—but the preemptive pardon would protect providers who could otherwise face prosecution. Experts concede that while there would likely be legal challenges, “pardon power is pretty plenary to the president,” Cohen says. President Gerald Ford preemptively pardoned his predecessor, President Richard Nixon, for instance, which allowed Nixon to avoid Watergate-related charges (but ignited a national outcry). The Department of Justice did not respond to questions about the proposal from Mother Jones.

Push to Fill Vacancies in the Federal Judiciary

Biden cannot shift the balance of the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority before he leaves office, but the president and Senate Democrats do have the power to attempt to fill the 47 vacancies for open seats in the federal judiciary, mostly in federal district courts.

“We know the federal courts will continue to be central in the fight for reproductive freedom; the administration and Congress must be vigilant now in safeguarding our rights as much as possible,” Karen Stone, vice president of public policy and government relations at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones.

“We know the federal courts will continue to be central in the fight for reproductive freedom; the administration and Congress must be vigilant now in safeguarding our rights as much as possible.”

The significance of these lifetime appointments for the future of reproductive rights becomes apparent when you consider Matthew Kacsmaryk. He’s a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas who issued an anti-science ruling last year that paved the way for anti-abortion activists to bring a case to the Supreme Court challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion. (The justices ultimately struck down the case, ruling that the anti-abortion plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the suit, as my colleague Nina Martin reported.)

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court sent the case on emergency abortion care back to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals—a federal court in California with 10 Trump-appointed judges and jurisdiction over more than a dozen district courts in nine states. “The power of lower court federal judges is immense,” Cohen says, “because the Supreme Court only deals with such a limited number of cases.”

Once Biden makes a nomination, the Senate Judiciary Committee, currently chaired by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), recommends whether to send nominees to a full floor vote, which is required for their confirmation. A spokesperson for Durbin’s office said that, as of Wednesday morning, there were 16 nominees ready for a floor vote, and eight more who have had committee hearings and are waiting for a committee vote. The spokesperson added that Durbin “aims to confirm every possible nominee before the end of this Congress.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said in a statement, “We are going to get as many done as we can.”

But that won’t necessarily be easy. Trump said in a social media post this weekend that “no Judges should be approved during this period of time because the Democrats are looking to ram through their Judges as the Republicans fight over Leadership.” Indeed, for Senate Democrats, time is of the essence. The next session of Congress begins January 3, just over two weeks before Trump takes office—so Biden’s nominees would need to be approved by after the New Year to make it onto the bench. Sen. Joe Manchin (I-W.Va.), whose vote is crucial in the tight Senate, may once again undermine Democrats’ plans. He told Politico in March he would not support any Biden-nominated judge unless they have at least one Republican supporter.

Still, several advocates say they hope Senate Democrats make the necessary effort to get as many Biden-nominated judges approved as possible, considering the influence they’ll likely have on the future of reproductive rights. “If [getting judges approved] means working over Thanksgiving, working over Christmas, working over New Year’s—do it,” Cohen says. “This is not something that should be gifted to Trump.” One way they could speed circumvent Republican opposition is by dispensing with a tradition known as “blue slips,” in which senators weigh in on whether or not they support the federal court nominees for their state. There is precedent for this: Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), former chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, abandoned the tradition—to the ire of Democrats—to get two Trump-nominated judges confirmed despite opposition from their home states’ Democratic senators. With only two months until the next Congress, Senate Democrats may not want to buck this tradition, though; they may want to keep “blue slips” as a weapon in their own arsenal as they anticipate Trump’s nominees to the federal judiciary.

Finalize Pending Reproductive Health-Related Rules for Federal Agencies

The Biden administration made headlines last month when it announced a proposed rule to allow 52 million women with private health insurance to obtain over-the-counter contraception for free under the Affordable Care Act. (Trump, on the other hand, has said he wants to “replace” Obamacare. And while he claims he would not restrict contraception access, it will face myriad threats in his administration, as my colleague Madison Pauly recently reported.)

But the contraception rule has yet to be finalized, and its pathway to becoming a reality is less straightforward than the optimistic White House press release suggests. After the public comment period—which has, so far, only attracted 2 people—ends on December 27, officials will analyze the comments and then write the final rule, which could then not even take effect for another 30 days.

Unlike executive orders, which can be wiped out with the stroke of a pen, rules approved for federal agencies are typically harder to undo. That’s thanks to the Administrative Procedure Act, which outlines the process of how a proposed rule becomes a finalized regulation, and requires that federal agencies do not act in a way that is “arbitrary, capricious, [or] an abuse of discretion.” Rebouché, from Temple Law School, says the administration needs to aim to get the contraception rule—and any other similar ones—finalized as soon as possible. “Any rule that’s already in process, push forward,” she says.

Katie O’Connor, senior director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center, would like to see the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s promise to launch a rule focused on ensuring “modern-day digital data brokers are not misusing or abusing our sensitive data” come to pass. An investigation by the office of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) earlier this year found that a data broker tracked visits by individuals to 600 Planned Parenthood locations across the country and then sold the data for an anti-abortion ad campaign. Even though the rule was promised last year, a CFPB spokesperson says they did not have any update.

Even if the agency tried to ram it through, though, any rules that get finalized at this late stage of the administration are at risk of being overturned in the next session of the GOP-controlled Congress, thanks to the Congressional Review Act, notes Steven Balla, associate professor of political science at George Washington University and co-director of the school’s Regulatory Studies Center. During Trump’s first term, Congress used the legislation to overturn 16 rules issued at the end of the preceding Obama administration—the most of any administration, ever, Balla explains.

Complete Investigations Into Hospitals Accused of Violating Federal Law on Emergency Abortion Care

Earlier this year, the Supreme Court heard a case on whether hospitals must provide abortions to people whose lives or health are at risk, even in states with abortion bans, under the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, known as EMTALA. In a 6–3 decision—with Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch dissenting—the court sent the case back to a lower court, refusing to rule on the merits of the Biden administration’s argument that EMTALA requires hospitals to provide emergency abortion care in states with post-Dobbs abortion bans that lack exceptions for a patient’s health. Project 2025 proposes an alternative approach: The guidebook says that “EMTALA requires no abortions” and that HHS should stop investigating hospitals that have failed to comply with its interpretation of the law.

Abortion rights advocates say Biden’s HHS should complete as many investigations as possible into hospitals that may have violated their interpretation of EMTALA by not providing stabilizing abortion care when needed. Otherwise, the Trump administration would inherit them, a spokesperson for the Center for Reproductive Rights points out.

That spokesperson added that the organization has also submitted three recent complaints to HHS, focused on hospitals in Texas and Arizona that allegedly violated EMTALA by failing to provide medically necessary abortions to women in need. A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services at HHS said the agency does not comment on ongoing investigations.

But even if these investigations were undertaken and completed before the transition, reports suggest they would be unlikely to face penalties from the Biden administration. Investigations recently published by the Associated Press found that more than 100 pregnant women were turned away from emergency rooms while they were in medical distress over the past two years, and that none of those hospitals were fined. Last year, HHS announced it was investigating two unnamed hospitals for allegedly violating the law by failing to offer a woman with a nonviable pregnancy the abortion care she needed. The National Women’s Law Center said it filed the complaint on behalf of Mylissa Farmer and identified the hospitals as Freeman Hospital West in Joplin, Missouri, and the University of Kansas Health System in Kansas City, Kansas. A spokesperson for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services told Mother Jones Wednesday, “Both hospitals are back in compliance,” but did not clarify whether they had faced monetary penalties.

One thing that both advocates and officials agree on? Elections have consequences, and there’s a limit to what Biden administration can actually do to mitigate the decades-long damage the Trump administration could do to reproductive rights once he takes office. “The electorate was confused or didn’t really care about abortion,” Cohen says, “and we’re reaping the reality of it.”

The city of Amarillo, in the Texas Panhandle, has emerged as one of the strongholds of the anti-abortion movement in that state and around the country, not least because its sole federal judge, a far-right Trump appointee, has been so willing to rubber-stamp conservative challenges to reproductive health options like the abortion pill and birth control for minors. So when far-right activists hatched a plan to put a local measure on the ballot that would have essentially prohibited anyone from using Amarillo roadways to travel for abortion, supporters assumed it would easily pass.

But on Tuesday, Amarillo voters surprised the prognosticators by resoundingly defeating the measure, Proposition A, 60 percent to 40 percent. It was a rare abortion-rights victory in one of the most abortion-restrictive states in the country—even as the overall results of the national elections were a disaster for the future of reproductive rights across the US, with Republicans now in control of the White House and Senate. The House of Representatives remains up for grabs. 

The outcome in Amarillo is especially surprising considering the city’s staunchly conservative record: In the two counties that Amarillo encompasses, more than 70 percent of voters cast ballots for Donald Trump in Tuesday’s election.

But apparently the ban was too expansive even for some of those voters. It would have applied to any person who drives an abortion patient to an appointment using the city’s roads, or who provides financial assistance to anyone passing through the city to access out-of-state abortion care. Even someone simply offering directions to the nearest out-of-state clinic could be held accountable.

“This vote proves that when you actually sit down with people across the aisle, even those who are pro-life, and explain what these bans actually do in practice, they realize how harmful they are.”

“We are so unbelievably thrilled—and relieved,” Courtney Brown, co-founder of the Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance, told me shortly after the vote totals came in. “This proves that when you actually sit down with people across the aisle, even those who are pro-life, and explain what these bans actually do in practice, they realize how harmful they are.”

The travel ban was the brainchild of two influential anti-abortion strategists: East Texas activist and pastor Mark Lee Dickson and former Texas solicitor general Jonathan Mitchell. Dickson is the leader of the so-called “sanctuary for the unborn” movement, which so far has persuaded about 80 local governments in seven states to pass ordinances prohibiting abortions within their jurisdictions. Mitchell is the architect of the state’s 2021 Senate Bill 8, also known as the Heartbeat Act, which prohibited abortions after six weeks of pregnancy and included a “bounty hunter” provision putting enforcement in the hands of private citizens rather than governments. SB8 played a critical role in helping overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, after which Texas imposed a total abortion ban. The current law makes it a crime to provide abortions, with penalties up to life in prison and no exceptions for rape, incest, or life-ending fetal abnormalities.

But even with those draconian laws, Texans have continued to obtain abortions, either by purchasing abortion pills from online providers—illegal in the state but difficult to enforce—or by traveling out of state. According to the Guttmacher Institute, since 2023 some 35,000 Texas patients have been forced to trek elsewhere for the procedure—mostly to New Mexico and Colorado, where abortion remains legal throughout pregnancy, or to Kansas, where it’s legal until 22 weeks. 

So Mitchell and Dickson mounted new attacks on several related fronts. They began pushing for local “abortion trafficking bans,” based on Dickson’s argument that “the unborn child is always taken against their will.” And they began looking for ways to revive the Comstock Act, an 1873 anti-vice statute that bars the “sending or receiving” of all abortion-related materials, including pills. The so-called “zombie law” couldn’t be enforced while Roe was in effect, but it was never repealed by Congress; resurrecting it would be tantamount to a national abortion ban. 

Amarillo, located in the mostly rural Panhandle area of Texas, was seen as a “trophy” for anti-abortion advocates due to its prime location on Interstate 40—an hour’s drive to New Mexico, where more than 14,000 Texans sought abortion care last year, and a throughway to Colorado. With its proximity to abortion-legal states, Dickson told me in August he considers Amarillo to be the “abortion trafficking hub” of Texas. 

Amarillo also happens to be the home of a federal court where Trump-appointed anti-abortion extremist Matthew J. Kacsmaryk is the sole judge—meaning that he decides any legal federal lawsuit filed there. Formerly an attorney for a Christian-right law firm, Kacsmaryk has a history of ruling against reproductive rights—helping propel a lawsuit against the FDA’s regulation of the abortion drug mifepristone to the Supreme Court; ruling that teenagers must have parental consent for prescription birth control; and calling the Victorian-era Comstock Act “important public policy” that should be interpreted “plainly.” Far-right litigants seeking to block Biden administration policies have come under fire for “judge shopping” in Kacsmaryk’s courtroom, knowing they can count on him to be on their side. 

The measure was stunningly broad, banning not just the transport of abortion-seekers , but any conduct that knowingly “aids or abets an elective abortion” on any Amarillo resident, no matter where the procedure takes place.

The 18-page measure crafted by Dickson and Mitchell was stunningly broad, banning not just the transport of abortion-seekers in or through the city, but any conduct that knowingly “aids or abets an elective abortion” on any Amarillo resident, no matter where the procedure takes place. Borrowing from SB 8’s “bounty hunter” provision, the ordinance allows almost anyone to file a civil lawsuit to enforce the ban, with a potential payout of $10,000 in damages per violation, encouraging Texans to turn on each other. 

Also tucked into the ordinance is a prohibition against the “possession or distribution” of abortion pills under the Comstock Act. Mitchell—the brains behind numerous anti-abortion lawsuits and intimidation tactics against abortion supporters—hoped that the ordinance could provide standing for the city to sue the FDA over its regulation of mifepristone after the Supreme Court threw out a case brought by anti-abortion doctors this past June. 

First, Dickson and his allies tried to persuade Amarillo’s self-proclaimed “pro-life” City Council to pass the ordinance but failed by a 4-1 vote in June, with local leaders citing their lack of authority to regulate interstate travel. Anti-abortion activists then successfully moved to petition to add the ordinance to the November ballot, forcing the decision upon voters. 

When Brown and five friends learned the abortion travel ban would be coming to their community, they immediately sprung into action, creating the grassroots Amarillo Reproductive Freedom Alliance in 2023. They spent the next year organizing in the community to convince conservative voters that the ban would not only infringe on bodily rights—but many other constitutional rights as well.

Dickson blames a “misinformation campaign” led by the group—and even the city’s conservative mayor—for the ban’s defeat and vowed not to give up. “Amarillo truly is the new Alamo for the pro-life movement in Texas,” he said in a statement. “The fight is far from over in the city of Amarillo.”

Meanwhile, Brown suspects Dickson and Mitchell will continue to push travel bans in towns near Amarillo and possibly elsewhere. “We are staying vigilant to protect the rights of other citizens around us, too,” she says. “We continue to be prepared to fight.”

The first state to ban abortion after the fall of Roe v. Wade just became the first state to have a near-total abortion ban reversed by popular vote.

The people of Missouri voted on Tuesday to create a constitutional right to “reproductive freedom”—defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about abortion, birth control, and health care during pregnancy—approving Amendment 3 by almost 54 percent of the vote as of 11:30 p.m. Central Time, according to the Associated Press.

Amendment 3 was part of a nationwide effort by reproductive rights groups to use ballot initiatives to restore abortion rights state by state after the Supreme Court wiped out the national right to abortion. On Election Day this year, 10 states voted on abortion rights ballot measures.

In deep-red Missouri, where the state government is controlled by avowed abortion foes, even getting this initiative before voters was a feat. Republican state officials repeatedly threw up barriers to the process of certifying the ballot language and gathering signatures, leading to a series of bitter legal battles that all, ultimately, were decided in favor of abortion rights advocates. As Mother Jones reported last week:

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.

The new constitutional amendment now sets up a legal challenge to Missouri’s abortion ban as well as to the constellation of restrictions that made getting an abortion almost impossible in the state even before the fall of Roe. As I wrote last year:

The reality is that, even before Dobbs, abortion access in Missouri was close to nil. The legislature had passed too many burdensome and medically unnecessary rules designed to be impossible for abortion clinics to comply with. In the years prior to Dobbs, the only clinic still offering abortions was a Planned Parenthood location in St. Louis, which performed about 100 abortions annually. “Many, many Missourians for years now have gone to Kansas or Illinois to access care, because the states had fewer restrictions,” explains Emily Wales, CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which stopped offering abortions at its Missouri locations in 2018. 

In this environment, the success of the initiative shows the enduring power of abortion rights as a motivation for voters—and their enduring anger against deadly laws that curb pregnant people’s power to control their bodies and their futures.

The first state to ban abortion after the fall of Roe v. Wade just became the first state to have a near-total abortion ban reversed by popular vote.

The people of Missouri voted on Tuesday to create a constitutional right to “reproductive freedom”—defined as the ability to make and carry out one’s own decisions about abortion, birth control, and health care during pregnancy—approving Amendment 3 by almost 54 percent of the vote as of 11:30 p.m. Central Time, according to the Associated Press.

Amendment 3 was part of a nationwide effort by reproductive rights groups to use ballot initiatives to restore abortion rights state by state after the Supreme Court wiped out the national right to abortion. On Election Day this year, 10 states voted on abortion rights ballot measures.

In deep-red Missouri, where the state government is controlled by avowed abortion foes, even getting this initiative before voters was a feat. Republican state officials repeatedly threw up barriers to the process of certifying the ballot language and gathering signatures, leading to a series of bitter legal battles that all, ultimately, were decided in favor of abortion rights advocates. As Mother Jones reported last week:

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.

The new constitutional amendment now sets up a legal challenge to Missouri’s abortion ban as well as to the constellation of restrictions that made getting an abortion almost impossible in the state even before the fall of Roe. As I wrote last year:

The reality is that, even before Dobbs, abortion access in Missouri was close to nil. The legislature had passed too many burdensome and medically unnecessary rules designed to be impossible for abortion clinics to comply with. In the years prior to Dobbs, the only clinic still offering abortions was a Planned Parenthood location in St. Louis, which performed about 100 abortions annually. “Many, many Missourians for years now have gone to Kansas or Illinois to access care, because the states had fewer restrictions,” explains Emily Wales, CEO of Planned Parenthood Great Plains, which stopped offering abortions at its Missouri locations in 2018. 

In this environment, the success of the initiative shows the enduring power of abortion rights as a motivation for voters—and their enduring anger against deadly laws that curb pregnant people’s power to control their bodies and their futures.

In a victory for abortion rights advocates, New Yorkers just voted to enshrine extensive anti-discrimination protections into their state constitution—permanently insulating the rights of pregnant people, abortion seekers, and the LGBTQ community, among others, from changing political winds.

Proposal 1 is one of 10 ballot initiatives to protect abortion rights that went before voters on Tuesday. Going into Election Day, supporters of abortion rights had won every single ballot initiative to go before voters since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022.

With 33 percent of votes counted as of 9:50 p.m., Proposal 1 was winning with 72 percent of the vote Tuesday night, according to the Associated Press. But the ballot measure encountered and overcame steeper-than-expected opposition in the safe blue state. Opponents had mounted an openly transphobic campaign to block it, spreading misleading claims about the proposal’s effects on a range of Republican culture war issues, including trans youth health care, women’s sports, and noncitizen voting. In the final days of the race, conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein dropped $6.5 million into efforts to defeat the measure.

From the outset, Proposal 1 was designed to protect abortion rights. As Mother Jones reported last week:

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.

The Yes on Prop. 1 campaign declared victory on Twitter on Tuesday night. “While the world waits for the national election results, tonight,” the campaign posted. “New York State lived up to our motto, ‘ever upward,’ and took an extraordinary step forward in our enduring work to build freedom for all.”

Florida’s six-week abortion ban will remain the law of the land, as an abortion rights constitutional amendment failed Tuesday night.

With 91 percent of the vote tallied as of 9:20 p.m., support for Florida’s Amendment 4 hovered around 57 percent, according to Associated Press projections—shy of the 60 percent threshold required to pass. The amendment would have protected the right to an abortion until fetal viability, or until about 24 weeks’ gestation, and after viability if a medical provider determined that the procedure is necessary to preserve a patient’s health.

The amendment’s failure isn’t just a loss to the political momentum following the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision in 2022; it’s a major win for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, who wielded the power of his office to defeat the measure. “A bipartisan group of voters today sent a clear message to the Florida legislature,” a representative from Floridians Protecting Freedom, the campaign behind the amendment, said in a Tuesday night livestream. That message to lawmakers? “End the ban.”

DeSantis proclaimed victory within minutes of the final polls closing at 8 p.m. “Amendment 4 has failed,” he wrote in a post on X. More than a million more Floridians voted for Amendment 4 than voted for DeSantis in 2022.

Abortion rights supporters spent more in Florida—over $75 million—than in any other state with similar measures on the ballot. Despite popular support for abortion rights in the state, the ballot measure faced an uphill battle to victory, in more ways than one.

Most obviously, it needed to garner 60 percent support—more than the simple majorities that were needed to pass abortion protections in red states like Ohio, Kansas, and Kentucky. But DeSantis’ administration also challenged the measure in unprecedented ways, including by threatening television stations that ran pro-amendment advertisements, releasing a massive report weeks before the election accusing Floridians Protecting Freedom of “widespread election fraud,” and using a state agency website as a virtual billboard to oppose the amendment.

Since coming into effect in May, Florida’s six-week abortion ban has upended access to the procedure across the South. Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Kentucky all have near-total abortion bans, and Georgia and South Carolina have six-week bans. The number of abortions in Florida plummeted by 30 percent in the first two months of the ban, according to the Guttmacher Institute.

Amendment 4’s defeat marks the first failure of a state abortion rights amendment since Dobbs. Voters in seven states have passed abortion protections, and voters in nine other states have similar measures on their ballots.

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.

This story was produced in partnership with the National Catholic Reporter.

Millions of dollars in last-minute money is pouring into the battle over a pair of abortion-related ballot measures in Nebraska, and it is coming through an unusual and circuitous route.

Much of that cash is being spent by a new group called Common Sense Nebraska, which has shelled out a remarkable $4.9 million in the three weeks since it was formed—largely on ads opposing an initiative that would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and supporting a separate initiative that would ban abortion.

As of the most recent campaign finance filings, the organization still had another $500,000 in the bank.

Nebraska is one of 10 states with abortion-related measures on the ballot. Last week, the National Catholic Reporter and Mother Jones reported that Catholic organizations around the country had contributed more than $1.9 million to the fight, with millions more flowing in from wealthy individuals with close ties to the church.

But what’s especially notable about the Common Sense Nebraska spending is the labyrinthine path that the money has taken. Most of the funds appear to have originated with the conservative, billionaire Ricketts family and with the conservative group CatholicVote, both of which have made the bulk of their donations since mid-October, according to state campaign finance records.

Common Sense Nebraska then routed the Ricketts and CatholicVote money to the campaigns of three local political candidates, including two incumbents running for reelection to the University of Nebraska’s board of regents. 

These local candidates, in turn, purchased massive amounts of television air time, which they then donated to the anti-abortion-rights PAC Protect Women & Children for ads about the ballot initiatives.

Elements of this arrangement were first reported last week by local news outlets, including the Lincoln Journal Star. Gavin Geis, the executive director of Common Cause Nebraska—a watchdog group unrelated to Common Sense Nebraska—told the Journal Star that shuffling money this way is not illegal but obscures the true source of donations and provides significant benefits for the political committees involved.

“By contributing airtime to ballot initiatives, candidates can shield donors from disclosing their support for the proposal and give them a financial advantage over their opponents due to federal rules that give candidates discounted airtime,” Geis said.

None of the candidates participating in this funding arrangement—University of Nebraska Regents Jim Scheer and Robert Schafer, and state legislative candidate Tanya Storer—responded to requests for comment for this story.

The sudden spending by Common Sense Nebraska has greatly increased the amount of money available to abortion rights opponents in the state. Through early October, Protect Women & Children, the PAC leading the anti-abortion ballot push, had raised and spent just over $4 million on the two initiatives. Almost all that money came from the Ricketts and another wealthy family, the Peeds; both families are well-known donors to Nebraska’s Catholic dioceses. But since Common Sense Nebraska was established on Oct. 14, it has raised an additional $5.4 million, almost all of which ended up going to Protect Women & Children in one form or another.

Of that $5.4 million, Common Sense Nebraska has donated $3.2 million to Scheer. Scheer, in turn, purchased $3.2 million worth of commercial airtime, which he then donated to Protect Women & Children for anti-abortion ads.

Another $687,000 of Common Sense Nebraska funds went to Schafer, who donated $667,000 worth of advertising time to Protect Women & Children. And Common Sense Nebraska contributed $283,000 to Storer’s campaign, which has made $231,000 worth of in-kind advertising donations to the Protect Women & Children.

Common Sense Nebraska has also donated $781,000 directly to Protect Women & Children, including donations as recently as Nov. 1. More donations may have occurred that have yet to be filed with the state campaign finance system. 

The majority of the money moving through Common Sense Nebraska’s coffers—$3.9 million—was donated by Marlene Ricketts, the wife of TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts. Another $830,000 was donated by the group CatholicVote on Oct. 21 and 23.

The Ricketts family are prominent Catholics, and Joe Ricketts has given millions to the Catholic Church in Nebraska, including an estimated $34 million on the creation of a Catholic religious retreat center. The Ricketts family is also well known for their ownership of the Chicago Cubs baseball team and their involvement in Nebraska state politics. Joe Ricketts’ eldest son, Pete Ricketts, a Republican, previously served as the governor and is currently Nebraska’s junior senator.  

Under the leadership of its president, Brian Burch, CatholicVote has become a major player in conservative Catholic political circles. Like much of the MAGA-aligned right, the Wisconsin-based organization was initially reluctant to embrace Donald Trump. In 2016, it refused to endorse him, saying he was “problematic in too many ways.”

More recently, CatholicVote has touted Trump’s praise for the organization. In 2020, the group drew national media attention for using geofencing to capture Catholics’ cell phone data while they were attending Mass. The $10 million project then sent targeted political ads to Catholics in battleground states. In this cycle’s Republican primary, CatholicVote hosted a rally for Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis but eventually endorsed Trump.

Initially a project of the Catholic branch of the Christian Coalition, CatholicVote later became part of the Fidelis Center for Law and Policy, founded by Burch in 2005. Fidelis’ most recent tax documents, from 2022, indicate revenue of $9.4 million—up from $4.8 million the previous year.

J. Ann Selzer has earned several nicknames throughout her 37-year-long stint leading the Des Moines Register’s Iowa Poll. She’s called the “Outlier Queen” when she breaks from what appears to be the consensus of political polls. And when her final pre-election polls paint a complicated picture for otherwise favored candidates, political insiders refer to her as the “Harbinger of Doom.”

Now, as the Election Day countdown timer inches toward zero, Selzer’s latest polling may be the specter that has worried some Republicans—the rageful spirit of Iowa women who lost abortion access this past summer. Contrary to every other poll, this poll of 808 likely Iowa voters shows that Kamala Harris has a 3-point lead over Donald Trump in one of the reddest red states. It’s within the poll’s margin of error but a far cry from Selzer’s previous tallies: In September, Trump enjoyed a 4-point lead over Harris, and in June, he was 18 points ahead of President Joe Biden.

“Nobody in their right mind would predict it,” Selzer said on the self-described “Never Trump” podcast The Bulwark. “Our methodology is to make no assumptions, and we made no assumptions.”

“Nobody in their right mind would predict it. Our methodology is to make no assumptions, and we made no assumptions.”

Selzer has gone against the polling consensus before—and has been proven right. She was one of the few pollsters who predicted Trump’s significant lead over Hillary Clinton in 2016, and she broke from the crowd in 2008 when her poll predicted Barack Obama’s 2008 win in the Iowa Democratic caucuses. The driving force behind the latest shift? Selzer says it’s women—particularly older and independent women—incensed by the Iowa Supreme Court’s decision to allow a six-week abortion ban to go into effect. 

The state Supreme Court’s June decision overruling a lower court’s block on the six-week ban may have come as a surprise, considering previous court decisions. In 2018, four years before the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision overturned Roe v. Wade, the Iowa court upheld the fundamental right to abortion, striking down a 72-hour waiting period and dooming the six-week ban, which was then the most restrictive abortion law in the United States. 

But this past summer’s opinion wasn’t a fluke; as I reported in July, it was the desired result of a yearslong scheme to rig Iowa’s courts against abortion. The GOP, which holds every statewide office and controls both legislative chambers, used its unencumbered power to overhaul the judicial selection process, giving Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds majority control over the committee that nominates justices. Her conservative appointees changed the makeup of the court. When lawmakers passed another six-week ban last year, the justices delivered on the Republican promise to restrict abortion—despite Iowans repeatedly signaling their support for abortion rights. The shift of a significant number of Iowa voters toward supporting Harris represents more than just anguish at the fall of abortion rights; it’s a strong rebuke to the GOP for its manipulation of the court.

The court’s opinion has likely produced what Selzer called a “jaw-dropping” result: Women age 65 and older, a typically Republican group, favor Harris over Trump 63 percent to 28 percent. Women overall favor Harris by 20 points, while Trump has a 4-point lead among men. “You need to win with women more than you lose with men,” Selzer said, “and we’re seeing that in these data.”

For his part, Trump dismissed the poll as “heavily skewed.” But Iowa House Democratic Leader Jennifer Konfrst says the results reflect what Democrats have been seeing on the ground. “They are sick and tired of politicians interfering in their doctor’s offices and are looking for people up and down the ballot who are going to actually fight for their freedoms,” Konfrst told the Des Moines Register. “And this issue is salient and real, and the fact that Vice President Harris all the way down to candidates for the Iowa House are talking about the same rights and freedoms shows that this is what Iowans are looking for.”

In overturning Roe v. Wade, the US Supreme Court gave state-level judges enormous new power to decide the reproductive fates of tens of millions of people of childbearing age. With the national right to abortion wiped out, states were forced to decide if abortions were legal for their residents as pre-Roe “zombie” laws, trigger bans, and state constitutional protections whipsawed pregnant people trying to receive care. And now, in ten states, abortion-rights ballot measures are going before voters.

It has been up to state courts to sort out this increasingly convoluted mess. Could a 150-year-old law criminalizing abortion be used to prosecute modern-day doctors? The Arizona Supreme Court decided it could. Do frozen embryos count as “children”? The Alabama Supreme Court said so in February. And does a state constitution’s guarantee of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” protect a woman’s right to end her own pregnancy? Last month, a North Dakota state judge decided yes. Meanwhile, over the last year, state supreme courts in Iowa, Florida, and Georgia have all allowed six-week bans on abortion to take effect.

Yet unlike their federal counterparts, these black-robed figures don’t enjoy lifetime appointments. Two years after Dobbs, state supreme courts have become among the most critical battlegrounds of the 2024 elections. Twenty-two states allow voters to elect their state supreme court justices, and several more let voters decide whether to retain justices appointed by the governor. Anti-abortion forces have long understood that controlling who sits on state high courts is critical to cementing and expanding their far-right agenda. Indeed, it was only after the GOP governors of Iowa and Florida packed their supreme courts with conservative justices did those courts overturn prior state precedents and uphold draconian abortion bans.

“State courts have been an under-resourced and overlooked tool for reproductive and gender equity.”

Abortion rights supporters are finally seeing the light. “State courts have been an under-resourced and overlooked tool for reproductive and gender equity,” says Christina Uribe, director of the Gender Equity Action Fund, which channels money to local progressive and reproductive-rights advocacy groups that educate voters about state-level judicial races. “There’s a lot of opportunity here, and a lot of work left to do to make sure people understand the power that state courts have over their daily lives and the power they have to decide who sits on the bench.”

Progressives made the most of that opportunity in last year’s Wisconsin Supreme Court special election, which shattered turnout and spending records in a battle for ideological control of the highest court in a crucial swing state. The victory of an openly pro-choice justice, Janet Protasiewicz, swung control of the court leftward for the first time in 15 years, with consequences for both abortion access and voter rights. The court has the final say over Wisconsin’s congressional maps, for instance, which have been heavily gerrymandered to favor the GOP.

Advocates like Uribe are hoping that concerns over reproductive rights will have the same impact this November. “Abortion turns out to be really highly mobilizing,” she says. (It’s true.) “I do believe voters subconsciously associate the US Supreme Court with ‘they created this mess.’ They don’t want the state court creating more of a mess.”

So which states have supreme court elections to watch? Here are seven states where the outcome on November 5 could influence the future of abortion rights for tens of millions of people.

Ohio

A trio of partisan Supreme Court races are expected to shape how Ohio implements an abortion-rights amendment that passed with broad support last year.

In November 2023, Ohioans voted overwhelmingly to create a state constitutional right to “make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.” But what does that mean for the state’s six-week abortion ban, which is still on the books? What about the many other incremental restrictions on abortion that lawmakers have passed over the decades? As long as the Republican-dominated state legislature doesn’t repeal these laws—and they haven’t—it’s up to the courts to decide.

So far, in response to lawsuits by abortion-rights advocates, lower-court Ohio judges have permanently blocked the six-week ban and have temporarily blocked a 24-hour waiting period and a rule against physician assistants and nurse practitioners providing abortion pills. But those fights aren’t over—and they will almost certainly be appealed all the way up to the state’s high court, which is now controlled 4-3 by Republican justices.

Ohio Supreme Court terms last six years, and races were nonpartisan until 2021, when GOP state lawmakers voted to add candidates’ party affiliations to the ballot, claiming it was needed to better inform voters (they had just lost three seats to liberal candidates.) This year’s races are uphill battles for Democrats, who need to win all three state seats to gain a majority and potentially determine the outcome of the abortion rights cases. If Republicans win all three, they’ll hold a 6-1 supermajority, with a clear advantage for abortion opponents. 

Michigan

As in Ohio, Michigan’s Supreme Court has the final word on whether old anti-abortion laws will be overturned after voters passed a constitutional amendment enshrining abortion rights in 2022. Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has already signed a package of bills repealing some laws that conflicted with the new amendment. But other restrictions persist, including a ban on Medicaid-funded abortions and a parental consent requirement for minors.

Michigan justices serve eight-year terms, with two seats up for election at a time, and no term limits. Democratic-backed justices currently hold a 4-3 majority on the court, and Republican-backed candidates will need to win both races on the November ballot to flip control. (While Michigan Supreme Court races are ostensibly nonpartisan, candidates are selected at party nominating conventions.) Justice Kyra Harris Bolden, an incumbent appointed by Whitmer, is running against Judge Patrick O’Grady, who was nominated after a Trump ally charged with election tampering dropped out. Meanwhile, law professor Kimberly Thomas is the Democrat vying for an open seat against Republican state representative Andrew Fink. In 2021, Fink supported a city ordinance making it a crime to “aid or abet” abortion in the Ohio city of Hillsdale, the home of an influential conservative Christian college.

Montana

In a red state where voters put a premium on keeping the government out of people’s daily lives, the Montana Supreme Court has often taken a remarkably permissive approach to abortion rights. In a 1999 case, Armstrong v. State, it ruled that the state constitution’s strong language around privacy implies a right to “procreative autonomy.” Based on this precedent, even before Dobbs, state courts struck down a parade of anti-abortion laws:: a 20-week ban, waiting periods, mandatory ultrasounds, parental notification requirements, and prohibition of telemedicine abortion, among others.

But with two of the seven state Supreme Court seats up for grabs this November, reproductive rights advocates are worried the tide could shift, especially with the state attorney general firing shots at Armstrong. Justices serve eight-year terms, and the court is officially nonpartisan, but both retiring justices are seen as left-leaning. Two candidates to replace them, Jerry Lynch and Katherine Bidegaray, have both said they agreed with Armstrong’s reasoning (responding to a Montana ACLU questionnaire). Two others, Cory Swanson and Dan Wilson, have been dubbed part of a “pro-life team for Montana” by the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America—and neither answered the ACLU question.

One additional factor: If Montana voters pass a constitutional amendment known as CI-128 that’s also on the November ballot, they’ll enshrine an explicit right to abortion until the point of fetal viability, around 24 weeks. As in Ohio and Michigan, it will be up to the state Supreme Court to interpret the amendment, if it passes.

North Carolina

Over the past few years, conservatives have gradually flipped control of North Carolina’s supreme court, and Republican justices now hold a 5-2 majority. They could extend that margin to 6-1 this year if state Court of Appeals Judge Jefferson Griffin beats incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, who was appointed by Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper to fill a vacancy.

Griffin is seen as a threat to abortion rights. Last year, he was part of a three-judge panel that ruled that a mother’s parental rights could be terminated if her child was in utero at the time she committed a crime—because “life begins at conception.” The ruling was so error-ridden, and the outcry so loud, that it was withdrawn three weeks later.

Now, Griffin could ascend to the state’s highest court for an eight-year term. But even if Riggs keeps her seat, Democrats would need to win Supreme Court races again in 2026 and 2028 to recover the majority. It’s a long game in a state that once served as an abortion-access lifeline to pregnant people in the South— until a single state representative switched parties and gave Republicans the supermajority they needed to enact a 12-week abortion ban over Cooper’s veto last year.

Retention elections in Arizona and Indiana

In Arizona and Indiana, supreme court justices are appointed by governors but must run for a retention election after two years, and then every six or ten years thereafter. (In Arizona, for instance, an initial 2-year term would be followed followed by 6-year terms. Indiana’s initial 2-year term is then followed by a 10- year term.) Usually, these up-or-down votes in the retention election are perfunctory: Only six judges in Arizona’s 112-year history have not been retained, according to the Tucson Sentinel, and it’s never happened at the supreme court level.

Voters this year could buck that trend, as progressive and abortion-rights advocates try to mobilize a “No” vote on retention elections for Justices Clint Bolick and Kathryn King in Arizona; and Justices Mark Massa, Derek Molter, and Loretta Rush in Indiana.

All these justices have signed on to opinions that blocked access to abortion in their states. In Arizona, Bolick and King joined a ruling in April that said the state could enforce its 1864 “zombie” abortion ban—triggering so much public outcry, the legislature soon repealed the old law. In Indiana, the three justices upheld a near-total abortion ban, interpreting the state constitution to only protect abortion when the procedure was “necessary to protect [the pregnant person’s] life or to protect her from a serious health risk.”

While retention elections have been sleepy in the past, the campaigns against these justices have made some sit up and take notice. Supporters of the Arizona judges are trying to stop the judicial elections altogether, by filing their own ballot initiative. Proposition 137 would eliminate the state’s retention election system, and instead allow appointed judges to keep their seats indefinitely unless they are convicted of a crime or a commission finds their performance lacking. If it passes, it would nullify “No” votes against King or Bolick. 

Texas

The Texas Supreme Court has been uniformly Republican since 1998. So it seemed like a safe bet that the three incumbent Republican justices—Jimmy Blacklock, John Devine, and Jane Bland—would easily swat away their trio of Democratic challengers this November. That was until the emergence of Find Out PAC—a committee formed this spring by former US Air Force undersecretary Gina Ortiz Jones to go after the Texas justices who “f*cked around with our reproductive freedoms, and now they’re going to find out,” as the group’s website puts it.

Find Out PAC’s ads draw attention to the justices’ recent rulings against women who were denied abortions amid dangerous pregnancies. Last December, the court ruled against Kate Cox, a pregnant woman who found out her fetus had no chance of survival. Her doctor said carrying the pregnancy to term would put her at high risk for serious medical complications and require her to undergo a C-section, so Cox sought to temporarily block the state’s ban so she could get an abortion. A lower court initially agreed, but the Texas Supreme Court stepped in to block the order. Then, in May, the court unanimously decided that the state abortion ban’s medical exceptions were sufficiently clear, even though a group of women said they were denied abortions despite experiencing serious pregnancy complications. One of the plaintiffs, Amanda Zurawski, had been forced to wait until she was diagnosed with a life-threatening case of sepsis and a fallopian tube infection that affected her future fertility.

The odds are still long in all three races, but the seat considered most likely to flip is currently held by Justice John Devine, who has bragged about being arrested outside abortion clinics; he also missed more than half of oral arguments between last September and February because he was too busy campaigning. “These folks are elected; they can be unelected,” Jones told the Austin-American Statesman. “Republicans understand that the bench is a stepping stone for higher office, while we’re not even fighting for those seats.”

The contrast between the intentions of former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris on reproductive rights could not be clearer—no matter how much Trump tries to suggest otherwise.

Trump appointed three of the five Supreme Court justices who overruled Roe v. Wade and has famously flip-flopped on his stances on abortion. Back in 2016, for example, he briefly floated the idea of punishing women who get abortions, but then, following public outcry even from some anti-abortion groups, his campaign walked that back. At his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris last month, he twice refused to say whether or not he would veto a federal abortion ban if Congress passed one—and then claimed earlier this month that he would. And in August, Trump appeared to suggest he would vote to expand abortion rights on the ballot measure in Florida, where he maintains his Mar-a-Lago estate and where abortion is currently banned at six weeks’ gestation; just a day later, he reversed course following backlash from the anti-abortion crowd.

Harris, on the other hand, has consistently campaigned as a vocal supporter of abortion rights. She has highlighted the fallout of the overruling of Roe for women in need of abortion care, and warned about the likelihood of Republicans’ passing a national abortion ban if Trump is reelected. In her presidential campaign, she has promised voters her administration would pass a law that would “restore reproductive freedom.”

But there’s a problem, even should she win. Any hope for such a law depends on Democrats winning control of Congress, which looks unlikely. (When confronted about this, Harris has called for ending the filibuster to make it easier for such legislation to pass.) For some advocates, the promises Harris makes also lack any details of what protections she would support and how her policies would move beyond Roe—if at all.

Roe was “the ultimate floor, and not the ceiling, of what we need for making abortion affordable and accessible for all who need it,” Nourbese Flint, president of the advocacy group All* Above All, told me. Under Roe, states were still permitted to restrict abortion access after the point of so-called fetal viability, and it did not protect women from criminalization over their pregnancy outcomes, including when they used abortion pills to end their pregnancies without supervision from a doctor.

Even if Republicans do win Congress, as president, Harris would still have options to protect and expand abortion access—options that appear on a reproductive freedom wish list supported by hundreds of advocates. Several told me that they are still waiting to see more specific details on abortion access and justice policies Harris would support—and they are hoping those details would go beyond restoring Roe. “That is not a useful campaign slogan, to say we’re going to restore the bare minimum,” said Renee Bracey Sherman, author of the new book Liberating Abortion.

(A spokesperson for the Harris campaign did not respond to questions from Mother Jones for this story.)

Despite President Joe Biden’s reluctance as a devout Catholic to express full-throated support for abortion rights, legal experts say his administration has gotten behind measures that have prevented some of the most extreme Republican efforts to further criminalize abortion. Biden’s Department of Justice, for example, issued guidance in December 2022 saying that the Comstock Act—a 19th-century anti-obscenity law—cannot be marshaled to ban the mailing of abortion pills, as Project 2025 and anti-abortion Republicans argue it can.

Rachel Rebouché, Dean of Temple University’s law school and an expert in reproductive rights laws, notes that if right-wing judges—including those on the Supreme Court—ruled that Comstock should be applied to criminalize the mailing of medication abortion, a Harris-run DOJ could simply refuse to prosecute such cases. This is a place, she says, where Harris potentially “has the most power.” Meanwhile, Project 2025 explicitly recommends that the DOJ prosecute those who provide and distribute the pills under a Trump presidency.

Her administration could also continue, and even strengthen, Biden’s Department of Health and Human Services attempts to require hospitals—even in states with bans—to provide emergency abortion care when necessary to save the parent’s life or protect their health. Legal challenges took that case to the Supreme Court earlier this year, where the justices ultimately punted on interpreting the federal law’s applicability to abortion care in emergency situations. Project 2025, on the other hand, claims that “EMTALA requires no abortions” and says HHS should stop investigating hospitals that have failed to comply with its interpretation of the law.

Under Biden, the Food and Drug Administration made the two pills used in medication abortion—mifepristone and misoprostol—easier to access by repealing restrictions that required them to be picked up in person. They now can be ordered online and delivered by mail. (As I have reported, this method now accounts for about 1 in 5 abortions nationwide). Under Harris, the FDA could remove even more restrictions that remain on medication abortion—including limits on who can prescribe them—according to Elisa Wells, co-founder of Plan C, a resource that provides information on how to access abortion pills. “All of them need to go,” Wells told me.

While anti-abortion Republicans have baselessly alleged the pills are dangerous, more than 100 scientific studies have confirmed they are overwhelmingly safe and effective—including when they are prescribed virtually and mailed. The FDA, Wells said, should “update the approval to reflect science and not politics.” Project 2025 recommends the exact opposite: It says the FDA should immediately re-instate the in-person requirement to access the pills and in the longer term should revoke approval of the drugs entirely. But the FDA and HHS would likely face continued legal challenges if they did try to enact these protections—and the Supreme Court’s decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo earlier this year, in which the justices vastly limited the power of federal agencies, could make it harder for those agencies to enact regulations protecting abortion rights, as my colleague Nina Martin has reported.

Perhaps the biggest challenge facing abortion access is the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits federal funding for abortion with minimal exceptions, leaving millions of low-income people on Medicaid without insurance coverage for abortion. (Paying for an abortion out of pocket can cost upwards of $500, or far more in the second trimester, according to KFF.) This year and since 2016, the Democratic Party platform has called for the repeal of Hyde, and it was one of the campaign promises Harris made the first time she ran for the presidency in 2020. Biden, too, has repeatedly excluded Hyde from his proposed federal budgets over the last few years, but it has always reappeared in the finalized budget passed by Congress. Still, Rebouché says, Harris “could refuse to sign the budget until Hyde is gone.” Conversely, Project 2025 calls for strengthening Hyde and codifying it into law.

Flint, from All* Above All, which has campaigned to overturn Hyde, said the policy shows the ways that abortion can be inaccessible even if it’s technically legalized, as it was under Roe. “If we do not figure out how to get government funding,” she told me, “we are on the precipice of another crisis, where there’s going to be a lot of folks not being able to get abortions, regardless of whether it’s legal or not.”

“We are on the precipice of another crisis, where there’s going to be a lot of folks not being able to get abortions, regardless of whether it’s legal.”

Perhaps one of the most significant ways in which a Harris presidency could alter the reproductive rights landscape is one of the most obvious. “She could shape a Supreme Court that is not the Dobbs court,” Rebouché notes. Three of the current justices—including two conservatives, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito—are in their 70s, and could potentially retire during the next president’s term. As Rebouché sees it, it’s likely that a future liberal-leaning court shaped by Harris could one day undo Dobbs. “We should continue to talk about Dobbs just the way Alito described Roe: ‘Egregiously wrong’ and ‘erroneously’ decided.” The significance of Harris’ ability to pave the way for undoing Dobbs becomes all the more clear when one, again, looks at Project 2025’s plans: “The Dobbs decision,” it says, “is just the beginning.”

This summer, more than 380 reproductive rights and justice organizations and activists—including Flint’s All* Above All—signed onto a 17-page memo called “Abortion Justice, Now: Protecting Abortion At the Federal Level.” The brief primarily calls for passing federal legislation that abolishes the so-called viability line established in Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “We know that viability is directly connected to fetal personhood, which is directly connected to the criminalization of pregnancy,” Jenni Villavicencio, a practicing OB-GYN and one of the primary authors of the brief, told me. “We really want to call attention to anybody making policy, including a possible future Harris administration, that is unacceptable to enshrine any sort of limit” for abortion access.

Two pieces of legislation—both introduced last year—are highlighted as model policies that could help expand access. The first is the Abortion Justice Act, sponsored by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), which would establish a federal right to abortion without limits, provide $350 million in annual grant funding to support abortion access, and increase the number of abortion-providing facilities. The EACH Act, introduced by Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) would effectively repeal Hyde. Spokespeople for both politicians said that they, or their colleagues, plan to re-introduce some version of the legislation in the next session of Congress.

Major medical groups also support abolishing gestational limits from abortion policy, and in August, more than 400 physicians also signed onto a letter, spearheaded by the group Physicians for Reproductive Rights, asking Biden and Harris to support “moving beyond the legal framework created by Roe,” in part by supporting abortion access later in pregnancy. But the issue of gestational limits has long divided the reproductive rights movement, which has struggled to balance where to compromise in its quest for broad abortion rights, as my colleague Madison Pauly has reported. Notably absent from the signatories of the memo, for example, are some of the largest abortion rights groups, including Planned Parenthood Action Fund and Reproductive Freedom For All. (Spokespeople for those groups did not respond to requests for comment.)

For Democrats, this has long been a tough needle to thread. The anti-abortion right has argued that Democrats support abortions later in pregnancy or, as Trump has insisted without basis, “even after birth.” But more than 90 percent of abortions nationwide take place within the first trimester, according to CDC data, and many Democrats, including Harris, have said they support the viability limit that existed under Roe, with later-term exceptions for emergency complications. Harris reiterated that at her debate with Trump, when he repeated his lies about Democrats supporting infanticide.

As Bracey Sherman, author of Liberating Abortion, points out, many of the tragic cases the Harris campaign has highlighted—in which people with wanted pregnancies had miscarriages, nonviable pregnancies, or other health emergencies requiring abortion—may not have had different outcomes under Roe. “There is no evidence that those people would be helped because they would still be stuck with the same viability line and the exception line,” she said. “We need to be pushing for abortion access at any time, for any reason, for anyone, anywhere in this country.”

Villavicencio, for her part, says she recognizes the necessity of compromise in policymaking. “What we patently reject,” she adds, “is compromise when it is for people who are the most marginalized”—specifically the young, low-income people, and people of color, many of whom struggled to access abortion care under Roe. Under Harris, she and other advocates see a possibility for a fresh start. As Flint, of All* Above All, says, “We have an incredible opportunity in the ashes of Roe v. Wade to build the thing that our community needs.”

But that all depends on who wins on Tuesday.

Update, Nov. 1: This story has been updated to clarify the Biden administration’s interpretation that EMTALA requires hospitals to provide abortion care to protect patients’ health—not just their lives.

Earlier this month, Louisiana became the first state in the country to classify the two most common drugs used in medication abortions, mifepristone and misoprostol, as Schedule IV controlled substances, creating stiff penalties for their unauthorized use. Medical providers sounded alarms when the GOP-controlled legislature passed the law: Abortion is already banned in the state in nearly all cases, and the new classification would delay lifesaving care for people experiencing miscarriages and health conditions unrelated to pregnancy. 

Now, in a just-filed lawsuit, doulas, medical providers, and women denied care under the state’s abortion law argue that the new classification of mifepristone and misoprostol runs afoul of Louisiana’s constitution. By separating the drugs from others with similar risk profiles, the suit contends, the new law discriminates against people on the basis of their physical conditions, ones that are treated with mifepristone and misoprostol.

In Louisiana, controlled substances fall into five categories depending on their medical indications and risk for abuse—Schedule I being the highest risk, and Schedule V the lowest risk. The current list of Schedule IV drugs includes opioids, barbiturates, and benzodiazepines, all drugs with high potential for addiction. The classification of mifepristone and misoprostol as dangerous drugs subjects them to tight regulations. But they’re not dangerous drugs, nor do they have abuse potential like their Schedule IV counterparts; more than 100 studies have shown them to be safe and effective in ending pregnancy. Contrary to their current classification in Louisiana as having addictive potential, the Food and Drug Administration—which approved the drugs decades ago—has never found the medications to lead to physical or psychological dependence. 

Misoprostol and mifepristone have proven to be effective in a variety of contexts. Both are used in miscarriage care, mifepristone is used to treat ovarian cancer, and misoprostol is crucial to managing postpartum hemorrhages. Under Louisiana’s law, anyone in possession of either drug—except for pregnant women—is subject to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. 

The classification, the lawsuit argues, subjects the drugs to a “highly regulated legal scheme” that delays care. Previously, misoprostol was commonly stored in obstetric hemorrhage carts or in staff’s pockets. But under its new status, only a provider licensed to administer controlled substances can retrieve the drug from locked cabinets where other scheduled substances, like narcotics, are stored. As a New Orleans OB-GYN told my colleague Julianne McShane, in a medical emergency, time is of the essence, and even a delay of several minutes can have disastrous consequences.

Pregnant women were already being denied care before the medications were reclassified. One of the plaintiffs, Kaitlyn Joshua, was denied miscarriage care by two hospitals because of the state’s abortion ban. “Now lawmakers have passed yet another law making it harder to get care during a miscarriage, and they did it without following the requirements of the State’s constitution,” Joshua said in a news release.

Earlier this month, Louisiana became the first state in the country to classify the two most common drugs used in medication abortions, mifepristone and misoprostol, as Schedule IV controlled substances, creating stiff penalties for their unauthorized use. Medical providers sounded alarms when the GOP-controlled legislature passed the law: Abortion is already banned in the state in nearly all cases, and the new classification would delay lifesaving care for people experiencing miscarriages and health conditions unrelated to pregnancy. 

Now, in a just-filed lawsuit, doulas, medical providers, and women denied care under the state’s abortion law argue that the new classification of mifepristone and misoprostol runs afoul of Louisiana’s constitution. By separating the drugs from others with similar risk profiles, the suit contends, the new law discriminates against people on the basis of their physical conditions, ones that are treated with mifepristone and misoprostol.

In Louisiana, controlled substances fall into five categories depending on their medical indications and risk for abuse—Schedule I being the highest risk, and Schedule V the lowest risk. The current list of Schedule IV drugs includes opioids, barbiturates, and benzodiazepines, all drugs with high potential for addiction. The classification of mifepristone and misoprostol as dangerous drugs subjects them to tight regulations. But they’re not dangerous drugs, nor do they have abuse potential like their Schedule IV counterparts; more than 100 studies have shown them to be safe and effective in ending pregnancy. Contrary to their current classification in Louisiana as having addictive potential, the Food and Drug Administration—which approved the drugs decades ago—has never found the medications to lead to physical or psychological dependence. 

Misoprostol and mifepristone have proven to be effective in a variety of contexts. Both are used in miscarriage care, mifepristone is used to treat ovarian cancer, and misoprostol is crucial to managing postpartum hemorrhages. Under Louisiana’s law, anyone in possession of either drug—except for pregnant women—is subject to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine. 

The classification, the lawsuit argues, subjects the drugs to a “highly regulated legal scheme” that delays care. Previously, misoprostol was commonly stored in obstetric hemorrhage carts or in staff’s pockets. But under its new status, only a provider licensed to administer controlled substances can retrieve the drug from locked cabinets where other scheduled substances, like narcotics, are stored. As a New Orleans OB-GYN told my colleague Julianne McShane, in a medical emergency, time is of the essence, and even a delay of several minutes can have disastrous consequences.

Pregnant women were already being denied care before the medications were reclassified. One of the plaintiffs, Kaitlyn Joshua, was denied miscarriage care by two hospitals because of the state’s abortion ban. “Now lawmakers have passed yet another law making it harder to get care during a miscarriage, and they did it without following the requirements of the State’s constitution,” Joshua said in a news release.

Earlier this month, the Lincoln Project rolled out an ad centered on abortion rights featuring a chilling line uttered by the narrator, a young woman, in a monologue addressed to her Trump-voting father: “You knew his politics would end my freedom, my rights, my life,” she says. “You chose hate over me.”

The ad, which depicts a woman dying in agony as she suffers complications while giving birth, was produced by the Lincoln Project to swing a demographic group they’ve dubbed “Dobbs Dads”—a group of men open to voting to protect or restore their daughters’ access to abortion—who just might be the downfall of Trump. 

There’s evidence of such a shift in a recent Marist poll that showed Vice President Kamala Harris leading former President Donald Trump by 20 points among college educated white men—a 5 point improvement over Biden’s 2020 margin with the same demographic. 

“We call them Dobbs Dads,” tweeted Joe Trippi, a veteran Democrat strategist who works with the Lincoln Project. “And they are breaking to Harris. One [of] our most important target groups.” 

The Dobbs Dads moniker, of course, comes from the 2022 Supreme Court Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization ruling where the justices, led by three Trump appointees, effectively ended the federal right to access abortion. In the wake of that decision, 13 states have outright banned abortion, mothers have died due to lack of abortion access, maternal deaths in Texas doubled, infant deaths rose nationally, and Idaho’s legislature disbanded committees designed to investigate causes of maternal deaths, obscuring public understanding of how that state’s abortion ban has impacted mothers. With nearly two thirds of the U.S. public believing abortion should be legal, including 61% of men according to Pew research, the fast changing legal regime has made abortion rights one of the election’s top issues. 

Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in swing states.

According to Stuart Stevens, another Lincoln Project advisor, pregnancy related medical trauma has left more men open to voting against Trump, who has refused to rule out signing a federal abortion ban, and for Harris, who would work to restore abortion rights. Those men include, as Stevens recently told MSNBC, “voters who are more conservative than not, many of whom would check a box to say they are anti-abortion. But they are appalled by the specter of these tragedies.”  

“These are men who really have prided themselves as being the defenders of their daughter,” explains Trippi, “They suddenly are looking at what that means in terms of the Dobbs decision as they think about their daughter’s future and the world she’d live in.”

The Lincoln Project says its Dobbs Dads strategy is based on research conducted by a sister organization, the Lincoln Democracy Institute. An April 2023 LDI survey of over 17,000 voters helped their team zero in on two voting groups they considered ripe for persuasion: Dobbs Dads, and another they dubbed Red Dawn Republicans—older GOP voters who prioritize traditional international alliances, particularly in opposition to Russia.

Alex Shashlo, who helps run the Lincoln Project’s digital campaigns, said their “super targeted talking to dads approach on abortion” led them to choose female narrators for “Daisy”—the nightmarish ad set in a delivery room—and another similar spot, “This Year.” The strategy was partially inspired by a viral video clip of Taylor Swift speaking with her father about taking a political stand ahead of the 2018 elections. “If Taylor Swift said, ‘Hey, talk to your dad’, to all her followers, that would be a pretty powerful thing,” Trippi said. LDI’s research confirmed that the concept of daughters having conversations about abortion with their fathers could be effective in reaching men.

In a close election, the targeted campaign could make all the difference. The Lincoln Project says it has identified roughly 680,000 Dobbs Dads in the swing states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In a recent podcast, Trippi also mused on the demographic’s potential to “surprise people in these Senate races like in Florida, in Texas, maybe Montana.”

“There is an opportunity here,” he said.