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.

Colorado voters on Tuesday brought to victory a ballot measure that will provide millions of critical dollars to organizations supporting victims of domestic and sexual violence through the creation of a new tax on firearms and ammunition.

With nearly three-quarters of the votes counted as of this morning, the measure, known as Proposition KK, passed with 54 percent of votes. When it takes effect in April, it will impose a 6.5 percent excise tax on firearms and ammunition, which will provide an estimated $39 million in annual revenue. The bulk of those funds, roughly $30 million, will go toward organizations that support victims of crimes, mostly domestic and sexual violence. The rest of the funds will support mental health services for veterans and young people, as well as increased security in Colorado public schools.

The money is especially crucial in light of the yearslong decline in federal funding from the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA), which has forced organizations that support survivors of domestic abuse to cut staff and scale back services, as I recently investigated for Mother Jones. In Colorado, the state went from receiving $31.3 million in VOCA funds in fiscal year 2017 to about $13.6 million in the most recent fiscal year, when the money was used to support more than 125,000 survivors, mostly women who were victims of domestic violence or sexual assault, according to Department of Justice data.

When we spoke last month, Roshan Kalantar, executive director of Violence Free Colorado, the statewide domestic violence coalition, told me that at least two programs in the state were on the verge of closing because of funding cuts. Now, thanks to the passage of Prop KK, they have a lifeline that may help keep them open, she said. But the earliest the funds would be disbursed to eligible programs would be January 2026, according to a spokesperson at the Colorado Division of Criminal Justice. In the meantime, “there will be a gap and it will be difficult,” Kalantar said, adding that more federal funding cuts are expected. “We are hopeful that programs can weather this year with minimal impact.”

Democratic state Rep. Monica Duran, who introduced the bill that would become the ballot measure in the legislature earlier this year and who is a survivor of domestic violence herself, said in a statement late Tuesday: “Tonight really is a full circle moment for me; without the support from crime victim services as a young single mother trapped in an abusive relationship, there is no way I’d be here today celebrating the passage of Prop KK.”

“As federal dollars dwindle, Coloradans made the right choice this evening to step up and help fill the funding gaps in crime victim services,” Duran continued. “From navigating the challenging judicial system to helping secure child care, crime victim services play a major role in uplifting survivors by providing them the resources they need to start anew.”

Domestic violence advocates I spoke to said they see the new tax as particularly appropriate, considering the role firearms play in domestic violence homicides. Last year, there were 58 domestic violence fatalities in Colorado, more than three-quarters of which were caused by guns, according to state data. As Kalantar put it when we last spoke: “It feels very appropriate that people making money off the sale of guns in Colorado should participate in the healing” of survivors.

The ballot measure faced strenuous opposition from the gun lobby, which alleged the tax—which will not apply to firearms vendors that make less than $20,000 annually, law enforcement agencies, or active-duty military personnel—is unconstitutional. It could also face legal challenges, like the one California faces after the state enacted a similar measure earlier this year.

This week, the Guardian published a pre-election bombshell alleging that Donald Trump sexually assaulted a model in 1993—the latest in a string of dozens of similar accusations dating back decades. Stacey Williams, now 56, claims that Trump groped her during a visit to Trump Tower, in an encounter she said was orchestrated by Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased financier and convicted sexual predator, whom she had been dating. Williams told the Guardian that Trump felt up her breasts, waist, and buttocks. “I just had this really sickening feeling that it was coordinated,” she later told CNN. “I was rolled in there like a piece of meat in some kind of weird twisted game.” Williams also told her story during a public “Survivors for Kamala” Zoom call on Monday night. The Trump campaign denied the accusations.

With the election less than two weeks away, Trump’s treatment of women is now back in the spotlight, at the same time as his harsh disparagement of immigrants has taken on an increasingly dark and vitriolic air. “This election cycle,” wrote my colleague Isabela Dias, “former President Donald Trump has made mass deportation his foremost campaign promise.” It is a long-standing promise, Isabela reported, as she recapped Trump’s 2016 pledge to deport 11 million undocumented immigrants; his sweeping worksite raids; his Muslim-ban; and brutal family separations. As Isabela showed, Trump’s plans for a second term would escalate these policies significantly: He has pledged “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.”

These two big themes of Trump’s presidency—his treatment of women and his far-right immigration policies—first fused for me in reporting I did during Trump’s 2016 campaign. At the time, my investigation revealed that models working for his prized firm, Trump Model Management, were brought into the United States on tourist visas that did not allow them to work. Former Trump models told me they were encouraged to mislead federal officials and instructed to lie on customs forms. Once here, they were housed in a cramped, basement apartment, charged sky-high rent, and levied with dizzying fees and expenses, leaving many in debt and in legal precarity. “It is like modern-day slavery,” one model told me. Another said in a lawsuit she “felt like a slave.”

Here’s a video recap of the media storm that ensued after publication:

As Trump ramps up “zero tolerance”, don’t forget the foreigners Trump’s own company had zero issues with letting into the US to work without authorization: models at his NYC agency @TrumpModels. Here’s a video reminder my 2016 @MotherJones campaign exposé https://t.co/R5bvuhBdkF pic.twitter.com/KfVl6sFn6i

— James West (@jameswest2010) July 7, 2018

My investigation—eight articles over eight months in all—became a potent example of Trump’s duplicity. And it foreshadowed his double standards, as Trump mixed his business practices with the presidency. The story created an instant shockwave through the campaign, albeit briefly during what was a scandal-plagued race to the White House. Models began fleeing Trump Model Management, with insiders attributing the firm’s rapid decline to Trump’s increasingly controversial public persona. The once-celebrated Trump brand, they said, had become tainted.

Ultimately, after my reporting, Trump Models joined the list of defunct Trump ventures, alongside Trump Steaks, Trump University, Trump Airlines, and Trump Magazine—yet another shuttered firm run by the man who continues to tout himself as an expert businessman who, alone, can fix everything.

Read my original investigation here.

Paris Alexander had been in a destructive relationship for over a decade, learning to tolerate the intolerable even as the abuse progressed—first mental and emotional torment, then physical and sexual torture. Like many survivors, Alexander, who is nonbinary, stayed in the relationship hoping that it would improve. “We stick it out,” they said, “because we think that they’re going to change and come to their senses.” 

Then, one day in September 2020, Alexander’s male partner beat them up and dragged them outside their Providence, Rhode Island, home by their hair. Wandering their neighborhood, covered in blood and desperate to flee, Alexander felt haunted by the years of forced isolation: “I had nowhere to go, no one to turn to,” they recall. A Google search on their phone led them to Sojourner House, which runs the state’s only shelter specifically for LGBTQ victims of intimate partner violence. Almost miraculously, there was some space. Finally, Alexander had caught a break. 

At the shelter, known as RISE, Alexander focused on taking “baby steps” toward independence. They got a library card. They started individual therapy. They joined a weekly virtual LGBTQ support group, where they heard terms like “nonbinary,” “gender-queer,” and “gender fluid” for the first time. Back then, Alexander identified as a transgender woman and felt pressured to “look female as much as possible.” The support group taught them, “You don’t have to be [male or female]—you can just simply be who you are, and that’s okay.” 

RISE is one of three shelters operated by Sojourner House, named for the 19th-century slave-turned-abolitionist Sojourner Truth, who was also an ardent advocate for women’s rights. Since its founding in 1976, the organization has served more than 60,000 people—1,800 last year alone. A small but critical part of this past year’s $7.4 million budget comes from the federal Crime Victims Fund, a pot of money created by the 1984 Victims of Crime Act, also known as VOCA. Across the country, VOCA helps pay for the hotlines survivors call in crisis, the shelters they flee to, and the advocates who accompany them to court and help them heal.

VOCA-supported programs helped almost 8 million people in fiscal year 2022–2023, funding nearly 3 million shelter beds and 2.3 million crisis-hotline calls, according to the Department of Justice. Those services have become more critical since the pandemic, as rates of intimate partner violence have soared, a housing crisis has made it even harder for survivors to flee, and the overturning of Roe v. Wade has given abusers another way to threaten pregnant survivors. But even as the need is growing, VOCA funding has been plummeting—and Congress has failed to act on what many advocates say may be the best hope for a legislative fix.

The current funding crisis is rooted in changes in DOJ policy that date back years. The Crime Victims Fund gets most of its money from financial penalties levied in corporate criminal cases, according to the department. Those fees and fines have been falling as federal prosecutors have pursued more deferred and non-prosecution agreements, which allow defendants more time to pay up or avoid charges entirely if they cooperate with the government. As a result, deposits into the pot shrank from a high of $6.6 billion in 2017 to $1.39 billion in fiscal year 2023. (Because of congressional caps, the actual amount of money disbursed is even lower.) These declines have trickled down to state agencies—which receive VOCA funds based on their state’s population size—and then to eligible programs. Rhode Island, which has one of the smallest populations, has seen a 54 percent drop in VOCA funds since 2017, to $2.9 million in the last fiscal year. California, the most populous state, went from receiving $218.9 million in VOCA funds in 2017 to $87 million over the same period.

Most states, including California, have managed to come up with some funding to offset the federal cuts, but the money is mostly temporary—lasting a year or two max. Fourteen states, including Rhode Island, did not appropriate any money in their most recent budgets to offset the VOCA cuts, I found in my reporting. This past spring, Rhode Island lawmakers proposed $2 million in supplemental funding, but the bill died in committee.

I’ve spent four months trying to understand how these extreme VOCA cuts are affecting domestic violence programs across the United States, doing more than two dozen interviews and tracking down budget data from every state. The picture that has emerged is deeply troubling: Lifesaving services for survivors are struggling to stay afloat, and experts fear what might happen if a long-term funding solution isn’t found.

Law enforcement groups are equally worried. “Without Congressional action, victim service providers will be forced to cut critical services, and many will be forced to close,” more than 700 prosecutors wrote in an open letter to lawmakers in February. “Millions of victims, including abused children and battered women, will be left without access to safety, justice and healing.” But with the November elections looming, Congress’ attention has been focused elsewhere.

The VOCA Fix Act, which President Biden signed into law in 2021, diverted revenue from deferred and non-prosecution agreements to the Crime Victims Fund—but this turned out to be inadequate. This term, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) have proposed a bill to supplement VOCA with funds collected through the False Claims Act, which penalizes defrauding of the government. The legislation has attracted 170 bipartisan co-sponsors in the House but languished in the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Durbin chairs. A spokesperson for Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the committee’s highest-ranking Republican, did not respond to questions about whether the bill will get a hearing. Congress has also punted on Biden’s proposal for a $7.3 billion infusion into the Crime Victims Fund for next year. (The White House did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

“Victims of crime, and specifically, victims of domestic and sexual violence, just are not priorities.”

At a virtual event this week commemorating the 40th anniversary of VOCA, the mood was less than celebratory. “I’m hearing about programs shutting down, positions being cut, victim services being impacted,” Claire Ponder Selib, executive director of the National Organization for Victim Advocacy, told more than 250 attendees. To Vanessa Volz, Sojourner House’s president and CEO, the funding crisis illuminates a harsh reality: “Victims of crime, and specifically, victims of domestic and sexual violence, just are not priorities.” 

Domestic violence hotlines like the one that led Paris Alexander to Sojourner House are among the most critical services that VOCA funds. Because hotlines are the point of entry to a support system that can mean the difference between life and death, slashed budgets can be especially disastrous. Rhode Island’s statewide 24/7 helpline has historically relied almost entirely on VOCA funding—about $118,000 last year, less than half what it received in 2019. More cuts would likely hit the helpline’s overnight shifts hardest. For people who are abused in the dead of night, or who have a small window to seek help while their abusers are sleeping or working, this could be catastrophic.

The Rhode Island helpline routinely gets calls from people in Massachusetts and Connecticut who can’t access services in their own areas—even though both of those states, unlike Rhode Island, have appropriated supplemental funds to offset VOCA cuts. Connecticut’s additional money came from the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act, which disappears at the end of this year. Without a new infusion of money, the statewide domestic violence hotline, Safe Connect—which is 100 percent funded by VOCA—will have to drastically cut services, lay off advocates, or even shut down, says Meghan Scanlon, president and CEO of the Connecticut Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which staffs the hotline. “The reality is, as much as we are advocates who don’t want to say ‘no,’ at some point, we’re gonna have to,” she laments. “And that doesn’t feel great.” 

Some of the greatest effects are likely to be felt in programs that serve transgender clients and undocumented immigrants, such as Sojourner House’s RISE shelter and THEIA Project, which supports victims of human trafficking. Hot-button politics around LGBTQ+ and immigrant clienteles make such programs especially difficult to fundraise for, Volz says.

Yet as Alexander’s story shows, immigrant survivors are particularly vulnerable to abuse from partners who exploit their status as another form of control. Despite their strong New England accent that makes them sound as if they had been born and raised in Boston, Alexander originally hails from São Miguel, a lush island in the Azores archipelago of Portugal. When they were 5 years old, they arrived in New Bedford, Massachusetts, with their parents—but without documentation. Their mother secured US citizenship when Alexander was a teenager—a process that automatically made them a citizen, too. But after getting kicked out of the house at 16, and no parental contact over the years, Alexander lacked both identification and proof of their citizenship status. “I became like a ghost,” they recall. In their 20s, they told me, essentially undocumented, they dropped out of cosmetology school and the regular labor force and drifted into sex work.

Sojourner House didn’t just get Alexander out of an abusive relationship. Its VOCA-funded team of immigration advocates helped Alexander secure identification, represented them in immigration proceedings, and prepped them for their citizenship test—a process that took over a year; in March 2022, Alexander was officially sworn in as a US citizen. “We’re really at risk of not being able to continue providing these services at the same level,” Volz notes.

In some places, cuts affecting VOCA-funded legal advocacy services have already been devastating. Judge Shelley Santry, a family court judge in Louisville, Kentucky, used to have advocates in her courtroom every Tuesday, the day she hears domestic violence cases involving people seeking emergency protective orders against their abusers. The advocates—employed by the statewide Center for Women and Families—would bring survivors into a private room after their hearing and explain a new set of risks: “Once the order is entered, it’s really the most dangerous time,” Santry told me. “The perpetrator is losing that control, and that’s when the lethality red flags are elevated.” Recently in Hardin County, 60 miles from Louisville, a man fatally shot his ex-girlfriend and her mother near the courthouse where they had a hearing about an emergency protective order against him. (He also killed himself.)

In Santry’s courtroom, the advocates would help survivors come up with practical strategies to safeguard themselves and their families: keep gas in their cars, charge up their phones, pack emergency bags in case they had to flee. Their in-person presence was essential, says Elizabeth Martin, the center’s president and CEO: “If you aren’t where people are, they’re not necessarily going to reach out to you.”

But over time, the number of advocates in Santry’s courtroom dwindled, and since August 2021, they’ve been completely gone. With VOCA funding for the center plummeting more than 60 percent since 2019, to just over $437,000 last year, Martin was forced to cut her domestic violence staff in half and remove advocates from courtrooms. Now, a court staffer hands out pamphlets and business cards to survivors bearing the center’s name, website, and phone number. Martin only sends an advocate if a survivor asks for one. “They don’t know what they don’t know,” Martin says. “The contact, that personal touch, that involvement has been watered down significantly.”

Lawmakers “need to understand this isn’t a personal problem, this isn’t a family problem—this is all of our problems, and we’ve got to work to eradicate it.” 

Domestic violence groups were grateful when Kentucky legislators allocated $7.1 million in their latest budget to offset VOCA cuts, but say the one-time grant isn’t enough. Without advocates to provide support, “the consequence may be death,” Santry says. In 2020, Kentucky ranked 10th in the nation for domestic violence homicides, according to the Violence Policy Center, with men murdering 46 women across the state. Lawmakers “need to understand this isn’t a personal problem,” Martin says, “this isn’t a family problem—this is all of our problems, and we’ve got to work to eradicate it.” 

California is another state where advocates say lawmakers haven’t done enough to address a steep decline in VOCA funds—down 60 percent since fiscal year 2017. Now domestic violence organizations there are facing a new crisis as they grapple with the repercussions of this summer’s decision in Grants Pass v. Johnson, in which the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority essentially greenlit the criminalization of homelessness.

After a months-long advocacy campaign that drew the support of actress Angelina Jolie, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office scrounged up $103 million in June to supplement the $87 million in federal VOCA funds. That one-year reprieve helped to avert what could have been a catastrophe for VOCA-funded organizations. But then in July, Newsom ordered state agencies to clear out homeless encampments following the Grants Pass ruling. Advocates warned that the decision could be devastating for survivors of intimate partner violence, who struggle to access shelter and housing nationwide—and especially in California, which has the largest population of unhoused people in the United States.

“The reality before [Newsom’s] executive order was that there were not enough DV-specific shelter beds, and just in general, there’s not enough emergency shelter beds,” says Jennifer Willover, housing policy analyst at the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence. Since Newsom’s mandate, Willover adds, domestic violence programs across the state have reported increased calls to their hotlines requesting shelter. In some parts of the state, advocates report that they are spending more time visiting encampments and informing unhoused people of domestic violence-specific services they offer, Willover says. (Newsom’s Office of Emergency Services did not respond to requests for comment.)

Experts see the situation there as a harbinger of what’s to come nationwide: As the National Network to End Domestic Violence and other advocacy groups said after the Grants Pass ruling, “Gender-based violence is a cause and consequence of homelessness, and this ruling will further trap people who are homeless, including survivors, in cycles of poverty and housing insecurity.”

In a report about homelessness in the state published in January by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, nearly one-fifth of cisgender women surveyed said they had experienced intimate partner violence in the six months prior to homelessness, and 40 percent said violence was a reason for leaving their last housing. Many were homeless because of the far-reaching effects of domestic abuse: living in isolation from family and friends and unable to work, their financial resources controlled by their abusers, resulted in intractable poor credit and records of eviction. “There’s a lack of awareness, still, of the fact that there is that intersection of domestic violence and homelessness,” says Leticia Campos, chief programs officer at the Marjaree Mason Center, which serves victims of domestic violence in Fresno County, where the population tops 1 million and the poverty rate is well over the national average. 

Marjaree Mason—established in 1979 and named after a 36-year-old woman murdered by her ex-boyfriend, a sheriff’s deputy with the county—offers a case study of the problems facing VOCA-funded organizations in California post–Grants Pass. Fresno County has the highest number of calls to law enforcement for domestic violence per capita in California, and Marjaree Mason is the county’s only 24/7 domestic violence shelter and service provider. The Fresno City Council allocated $300,000 earlier this year to help the organization fend off the impacts of the years-long decline in VOCA funds, but staff members say they still struggle to meet the needs of survivors.

In June, I visited the VOCA-funded emergency shelter, which can accommodate 140 people. The rooms have bunk beds with colorful, patterned bedspreads, and televisions mounted on the walls, and outside there’s a playground shaded by palm trees. But even before the Supreme Court ruling, getting a bed there wasn’t easy. Empty beds are often filled within hours, Campos says; when I visited, the shelter had been at capacity for three weeks. Survivors who are turned away often have no choice but to return to their abusers. A spokesperson told me that last year, 80 percent of the organization’s clients had no income of their own, and of the ones who did, two-thirds made under $15,000. 

After Newsom issued his executive order, the Fresno County Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an ordinance making “unlawful camping” a misdemeanor punishable by a $500 fine and up to six months in jail. The city of Fresno passed a ban that was even more aggressive: a $1,000 fine and a year behind bars, which took effect in late September. The mayor has said that arrests will be limited to “habitual offenders” and that people will first be offered supportive services, though it’s unclear whether those include referrals for domestic violence treatment.

Staff at Marjaree Mason saw an impact within days of Newsom’s executive order, when the sheriff’s office dropped off an unhoused woman and two children at the drop-in center in the middle of the night after clearing an encampment, according to Joseph Hickman, the center’s interim crisis response manager. “It was very eye-opening to see that it happened that quickly,” Hickman says. “It definitely kind of lit a fire under us.”

The problem, as Campos says, is this: “What should we do when we’re at capacity? Where should we send victims of domestic violence?” Laura Moreno, program manager at the Fresno County Department of Social Services, says those questions point to a broader, county-wide issue. “We don’t have enough shelter beds, period, for the number of people we have on the streets,” she told me. A federally mandated one-day census in Fresno and neighboring Madera counties in January 2023 found nearly 4,500 unhoused people, up 7 percent from the year before. A county spokesperson said outreach teams provide homeless people with relevant resources, including information about Marjaree Mason’s services.

Helping survivors find assistance elsewhere when the shelter is full is a task left to Diana Hernandez, a former 911 dispatcher who joined Marjaree Mason’s staff in September 2021. In her previous job, she told me, she hated having to hang up on callers who were clearly in need but not in the throes of an emergency. Now, as a client navigator, she can talk to survivors who call the hotline for as long as they want, providing them with emotional support and resources. But she can’t always give them what they need most, which is usually a bed.

While we were chatting in her cubicle in June, she received a hotline call from a woman who said she’d been physically assaulted by her boyfriend. She had been living in a car, and needed a safe place to stay. Marjaree Mason’s shelter was full, so Hernandez offered to call homeless shelters in the area to see if they had room. But she also cautioned that those shelters wouldn’t offer advocacy support and legal services specifically for domestic violence victims. Nor would their locations be confidential, like domestic violence shelters’ are. Add to that, most likely they would require residents to leave during the day; Marjaree Mason lets them stay. 

Hernandez gave the woman phone numbers for other local organizations that could provide services, and suggested that she change her passwords on her email and social media accounts, make sure her phone’s location-sharing feature was turned off, and call back on the hotline at any time if she wanted to talk. In such instances, “I try to exhaust my resources,” Hernandez told me after the call ended, “so I know I did everything I could.”

After seven months at RISE, Sojourner House’s LGBTQ shelter, Paris Alexander might have ended up like so many other survivors of intimate partner violence: homeless and back on the street. But because Alexander had been a victim of sex trafficking, they were eligible for assistance through another Sojourner House program offering transitional housing for survivors of human trafficking. The program paid the rent and utilities on a third-floor apartment where Alexander lived while they were sorting through their citizenship problems and unable to work. Without a Social Security number, they couldn’t apply for food stamps or government assistance. Every few weeks, Alexander recalls, a Sojourner House advocate showed up with some food—bread, peanut butter, canned beans. “And that was pretty much what I had to live off of.” 

Alexander finally secured their citizenship in March 2022 and was able to begin searching for permanent housing. Once more, Sojourner House provided vital support. Robin Greene, an advocate who had once been unhoused, also works with trafficking survivors through the organization’s THEIA Project, which includes a VOCA-funded shelter. Greene helped Alexander find an apartment and even convinced the landlord to renovate the space by replacing the floors and covering up cracks and holes in the walls. 

For Greene, ensuring her clients live in comfort is key to helping them stay on the road to recovery. Greene recalls spending time in homeless shelters that were “gross,” “vermin-ridden,” “humiliating,” and “degrading.” At the shelter for trafficking victims, she painted the walls and floors with pops of green, yellow, and purple and adorned the office space with house plants. She mows the front lawn herself. “I want it to look not like a shelter,” she told me when I visited. “I want it to look like a home.” 

Two years after Alexander moved in, their apartment—the same one that Greene helped secure—has become their “sanctuary,” where they live with their two cats, Bast and Isis. They painted the walls yellow, green, and blue; hung up their own artwork; and put some of the house plants Greene brought to life in front of the bay windows in their living room, a daily reminder of someone who helped transform their life.

According to Greene, Alexander represents “the epitome” of what Sojourner House and domestic violence organizations like it can do, if they have the vision, the people—and the funding to support survivors. “Paris was determined to just sit in their little apartment and never come out with their cats,” Greene told me, “but not now.” 

Today, Alexander volunteers with Sojourner House and spreads word of its services within the community. They also volunteer with a trans youth mentorship program, through which they meet weekly with a younger trans mentee, and they host events—including a recent makeup workshop, drawing on their cosmetology background—for trans and nonbinary young people. In November, they’ll host a virtual Friendsgiving hangout—meant to be “a safe and loving space during Thanksgiving,” they said, adding, “the holidays can be a tough time of the year for queer folks.”

Alexander knows firsthand the negative thoughts that can run rampant through survivors’ minds: “We feel like we’re not worthy. We feel like no one cares. We feel like no one understands. You don’t trust that there’s genuine empathy out there.” Empathy, though, tends to be abundant among people who support survivors of domestic violence; what’s in short supply is cash. This is partly why Alexander was eager to tell their story: They want lawmakers to know that VOCA funds have “the power and the ability” to save lives. “I wouldn’t be here today,” they told me, “if it weren’t for the Sojourner House program.”

If you or someone you care about is experiencing or at risk of domestic violence, contact the National Domestic Violence Hotline by texting “start” to 88788 or calling 800-799-SAFE (7233) or going to thehotline.org. The Department of Health and Human Services has also compiled a list of organizations by state.

This article was produced with the support of the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism’s 2024 Domestic Violence Impact Reporting Fund.

For some chronically ill and disabled people, the revolution will start from their rooms—or even from bed.

Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, the fight to protect abortion access has become even more urgent, with 13 states having banned procedural abortion outright. Maternal deaths rose by 56 percent in Texas after an abortion ban was enacted, and an August report by House Democrats on the Energy and Commerce Committee found that, since the Dobbs decision, more pregnant people have delayed seeking care for complications. And more people are being forced to carry pregnancies to term who don’t want to—which isn’t exactly harmless to a person’s body. Every year, at least 40 million people worldwide (out of around 140 million who give birth annually) develop a long-term health problem linked to childbirth.

Yet the end of Roe has had a unique impact on disabled people. Research has shown that disabled people die from pregnancy and birth complications at rates 11 times higher than non-disabled people. Women with disabilities, especially those with intellectual and developmental disabilities, are more likely to be sexually assaulted than non-disabled women, leading to more unwanted pregnancies.

“You don’t have to be a full-time activist in front of a camera at a rally in order to make a huge difference for someone.”

But the spate of bans has also led to new waves of abortion rights activism, including by disabled people. For those who experience chronic illnesses or a range of other disabilities, in-person activism isn’t always an option, especially with an ongoing pandemic—but there’s a powerful precedent for reproductive rights activism by disabled people.

Laurie Bertram Roberts, the executive director of the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund, cares deeply about accessibility in part because they are disabled; from bed, they write grants and follow up with people who need assistance in abortion care to make sure their needs are met.

Former Mother Jones reporter Becca Andrews profiled Roberts and their fund’s work in 2019, when they faced down seemingly endless challenges even before the fall of Roe: “I don’t think [outsiders] understand that the structural barriers are at every turn of care,” Roberts said at the time. Now, as then, Roberts “spends much of her time bedbound due to painful fibromyalgia, but her phone and laptop are never far, basically operating as digital appendages.”

Roberts also hires workers who have their own experiences with chronic illnesses and disabilities—and encourages them to work in a way that is best for them, like taking flexible hours.

“A lot of us can get a whole lot done if people would just give us the opportunity to do it,” Roberts said.

The upside of taking reproductive rights activism online is that many people seeking abortions already turn to the internet for help. New York–based Ariella Messing, who lives with chronic migraines, saw how valuable that could be when she co-founded Online Abortion Resource Squad, which offers peer-based support. Messing and volunteers now run Reddit’s r/Abortion, where they answer questions for people seeking abortions around the world.

While running OARS is her full-time job as its executive director—and then some, with migraines interrupting some shifts—Messing has made volunteering for OARS accessible in multiple ways.

Helping someone learn how to safely get an abortion in their area can take just five minutes; as with OARS, it can be as simple as writing a comment on Reddit. “You don’t have to be a full-time activist in front of a camera at a rally in order to make a huge difference for someone,” Messing said.

But even among organizations that do put on events like rallies, there is still space for remote involvement, which Olivia Neal, a chronically ill communications staffer, does to help people have the information they need to get an abortion as part of her job at the ACLU of North Carolina.

Sustainable, accessible activism “takes a little extra people power.”

And the same challenges non-disabled activists face show up in force—like exhaustion and financial insecurity. Many people involved in the fight for reproductive rights don’t make a lot of money: Messing can’t afford good health insurance, and needs expensive medications. Lack of employer benefits, Messing said, was “the one thing holding me back at first from doing this full time—and that still is causing me trouble every single day.”

Avoiding overwork can be very hard when people need support, as Messing, who is usually logged into r/Abortion seven days a week, also knows. “It’s also really tiring to never be on autopilot,” she said. And despite accommodations to work remotely, Neal said, “I do feel that sense of guilt about not being able to always show up in physical spaces.”

Neal sees her main contribution as making information available and easily understandable: she created an abortion guide for those seeking one in North Carolina, including guidance on transportation and financial assistance. “We all bring different skills to the movement,” she said.

Ableism can mean even seasoned advocates aren’t not taken seriously; Roberts was previously pushed to step aside due to her disabilities. “Aside from the obvious ableism, I think that they missed the point that we are an important bloc of supporters.” 

While the fight for abortion access is an important part of the battle for reproductive rights, it’s far from the only one. Even before the fall of Roe v. Wade, disabled people struggled to get accessible gynecological care: A 2018 study suggests that many gynecologists lack the training to give disabled people the equal treatment they need. 

Mary Fashik, who has advocated for reproductive rights online as part of #UpgradeAccessibility, a movement she founded, experienced that firsthand. Fashik had an ovarian cyst burst, and when she finally had an appointment some days later, Fashik said she “could not get on the exam table because the exam table was not accessible.” Then and in general, Fashik felt that her white doctor was not taking her concerns seriously due to her race and disability. (Soon, fewer disabled people will experience this kind of inaccessible care: In August, the Justice Department finalized a rule mandating that medical diagnostic equipment, including examination tables, be accessible for people with disabilities.)

Fashik’s troubles helped lead her to organize online panels and events after Roe was overturned—“Online advocacy is real advocacy,” Fashik said—where she talked about birth control access and the forced sterilization of disabled people.

Sustainable, accessible activism “takes a little extra people power and or money,” Roberts notes. But it’s absolutely necessary for work like theirs, and the benefits outweighs the costs. “When we talk about access to care,” Roberts says, “we definitely have to talk about access to care for the disabled community.”

In late August, on the fringes of a press conference outside New York City Hall, a man wearing a “Kill your local pedophile” T-shirt and a “Babies Lives Matter” pin screamed at a transgender woman who had shown up to protest the speeches. “Is it a boy or a girl?” the man yelled at the protester, gripping a rainbow Trump flag in his fists. “She shaves her armpits, so it must be a man,” he spat, cursing and hurling epithets. 

On the podium, the transphobic messaging was less vile but no less overt. Speakers were urging the small crowd to vote against Proposal 1, a measure on the November ballot that would strengthen protections for abortion in New York state—and much more. Prop 1 is a statewide version of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the 101-year-old feminist effort to guarantee equal rights for women in the US Constitution. While the federal ERA has been largely stalled since the 1970s, many states have adopted their own versions. New York’s constitution, however, currently bans discrimination based only on race and religion, not sex. That could change if voters accept Prop 1’s expansive vision of equality, which includes protections for segments of the population that historically have been marginalized and demonized, including LGBTQ people.

In a year in which support for abortion rights could determine control of statehouses, Congress, and the presidency, Prop 1 seemed like a shoo-in, especially in the blue state of New York. Yet with a little over a month before the election, the effort to pass the New York ERA has been stumbling. An opposition campaign, calling itself the Coalition to Protect Kids, has fixated on the amendment’s protections for trans people, exaggerating its impact on women’s sports and pushing misleading claims about its effects on parental rights. “By solidifying new constitutional rights based on gender identity, Prop 1 is sacrificing the rights of girls,” Amaya Perez, the New York chapter leader of Gays Against Groomers, a right-wing group known for pushing extremist anti-LBGTQ narratives, said at the press conference. 

Those tactics appear to be working. Leaked polling from the pro-Prop 1 campaign shows that voters find the opposition’s messages extremely persuasive. Months ago, Democrats saw the amendment as a means of motivating liberal turnout in November. Now, state Democratic politics are in a precarious state following the indictment of New York Mayor Eric Adams, and Republican candidates are turning the tables, using opposition to Prop 1 as a rallying cry for their own voters.

“They’re trying to use [trans rights] as a wedge issue,” says Faris Ilyas, policy counsel at the New Pride Agenda, an LGBTQ rights group supporting Prop 1. “Even in New York, it’s a working strategy. We’re a little bit scared of what might happen in November.”

It’s an old trick in conservative politics to argue that equal rights are bad for women. The federal ERA, which says equal rights cannot be denied “on account of sex,” was first drafted by leaders of the women’s suffrage movement in 1923 and introduced in every session of Congress for the next five decades. After it finally passed both the House and Senate in 1972, the next step was to go to the states: An amendment must be ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures before it can be added to the US Constitution. But conservative lawyer Phyllis Schlafly mounted a successful guerrilla campaign claiming the amendment would erase all differences between men and women in the law, thus forcing women into military combat, permitting same-sex marriage, and allowing men to use women’s restrooms. The ERA failed to reach the ratification threshold within the seven-year deadline, though efforts to revive and certify it continue.

Even without the ERA, Schlafly’s predictions have more or less come true: The culture already was shifting toward the kinds of gender equality the amendment attempted to codify. Yet her arguments still hold power. Warnings about mixed-gender bathrooms were used to defeat Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance in 2015—around the same time conservative legal and political organizations, including the Schlafly-founded Eagle Forum, began whipping up the contemporary anti-trans panic, starting with bills restricting trans students’ bathroom access.

The version of the ERA that will appear on New York ballots doesn’t include the word “abortion,” but it was designed first and foremost to protect the right to choose. The effort started in 2019, when Democrats took control of the state Senate for the first time in a decade. They swiftly passed the Reproductive Health Act, removing abortion from New York’s criminal code—where it had been largely forgotten during the Roe v. Wade era—and protecting access to the procedure through 24 weeks’ gestation. (The new law also allowed abortion later in pregnancy if the fetus was not viable or if the pregnant person’s life or health was in danger.) But soon after, state Sen. Liz Krueger of Manhattan, who had spent a decade shepherding the new law, decided the work wasn’t done. “I realized, nope, not good enough,” Krueger says. “We’ve got to actually start to open up our constitution and modernize it.”

With the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court in 2018, anti-abortion strategists finally had the far-right majority they needed to overturn Roe. “We were basically a pro-choice blue state with people not really understanding how at risk we were from bad law,” Krueger says. If New York enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution, she figured, those protections would be harder to repeal if the political winds eventually shifted.

So Krueger and Assembly Member Rebecca Seawright, also from Manhattan, convened scholars and reproductive law experts to craft an amendment. Rather than simply writing protections for abortion seekers into the constitution, they decided to swing for the fences: a measure modeled on the federal ERA but even broader. In addition to existing protections for race, color, and religion, Prop 1 would ban government discrimination based on disability, age, ethnicity, national origin, and sex—including sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. The resulting amendment, now known as Prop 1, would make New York’s anti-discrimination protections the “most extensive” in the nation, says Ting Ting Cheng, director of the ERA Project at Columbia Law School, who consulted with the drafters. 

“We were basically a pro-choice blue state with people not really understanding how at risk we were from bad law.”

There are nine other abortion rights ballot initiatives across the country this year, but when it comes to reproductive rights, New York’s ERA is unique. While most of the other measures essentially restore Roe, New York’s approaches abortion “as a matter of gender equality,” says Katharine Bodde, policy co-director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, one of the amendment’s chief backers. To accomplish this, it explicitly says discrimination based on pregnancy status, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care and autonomy count as “sex discrimination” and are forbidden. The idea is to leave little room for judges to interpret the ERA in ways that wouldn’t protect abortion rights or pregnant people in the future. After all, courts have wide latitude to interpret ambiguous language, and they sometimes reconsider their old interpretations—as the US Supreme Court did when it reversed Roe. This past spring, Florida’s Supreme Court overturned a prior decision that said the state constitution protected abortion—after being stacked with judges appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. And the Iowa Supreme Court has upheld a six-week abortion ban despite the state’s ERA, which broadly enshrines gender equality but doesn’t get into specifics. “We’re taking no chances in New York with courts interpreting ‘sex discrimination’ narrowly,” Bodde says. 

That scares abortion opponents. New York’s Catholic bishops told their 35,000 mailing list subscribers in September that Prop 1 would “permanently legalize abortion without restriction” and “render impossible any change to the law if the hearts and minds of New Yorkers were ever to shift toward protecting the child in the womb.”

Prop 1 follows an ERA in Nevada two years ago, which passed with 58 percent of the vote after being pitched to the state’s fiercely independent residents as a means of protecting individual liberty. The Nevada ERA overcame opposition from anti-abortion forces—including the religious-right legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom—which predicted that the measure would void Nevada’s ban on Medicaid coverage for abortion. (It was right.) Next up: An expansive ERA is slated for the 2026 ballot in Minnesota, and another is on the table in Oregon. “It’s incremental,” Cheng says. “Every state that does something new, it creates a new bar or a new precedent for other states to go beyond that.”

These amendments work in two ways. First, they harden the state’s existing constellation of anti-discrimination laws by adding them to the state constitution. And second, they give individuals strong constitutional grounds to challenge discrimination by the government. In New York, Prop 1’s  protections for different “pregnancy outcomes” might be used to defend women from criminal prosecution after self-managed abortions or losing a pregnancy in a car accident—both of which have happened in New York, says Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, a nonprofit legal advocacy group. And it might be used to challenge state hospitals that drug test pregnant women, sometimes without their knowledge or consent—policies that can lead to child protection cases and family separation.

Other activists hope the ERA could be used to overturn the state’s 24-week gestational limit, which forces some New Yorkers to travel out of state if—for one of the many reasons women can face delays in accessing care—they need a later abortion. Randi Gregory, vice president of political and legislative affairs at the National Institute for Reproductive Health Action Fund, believes Prop 1 would protect abortion rights “at all trimesters.” “We hope that it will be a framework for other states,” Gregory adds. “We’re really excited to be running an expansive and proactive amendment.”

But that’s only if they can get it passed—a task that looks increasingly daunting.

The coalition behind Prop 1 made big promises in June 2023, after New York Democrats’ embarrassing showing in the 2022 election. Their losses had helped flip control of the US House of Representatives back to the GOP, while former US Rep. Lee Zeldin, an anti-abortion Republican, came within 6 points of winning the governorship.

State Democrats evidently had an excitement problem—one they hoped the ERA could solve. Gov. Kathy Hochul and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand told the New York Times that they wanted to use the amendment to motivate 2024 turnout. Progressive groups formed New Yorkers for Equal Rights, a committee that pledged to spend $20 million ginning up enthusiasm.

Yet in early September, Politico reported that the committee had raised less than $3 million to counter an opposition that had proven surprisingly well-organized and effective. Suddenly, Democrats were afraid of how Prop 1 might affect their candidates in tight races. In the ensuing scramble, Hochul announced $1 million for TV ads and direct mail and issued a statement: “It’s critical voters know that an abortion amendment is on the ballot in New York this year,” she said. “New Yorkers deserve the freedom to control their own lives and health care decisions, including the right to abortion regardless of who’s in office.”

The opposition campaign, the Coalition to Protect Kids, is largely funded by an upstate anti-abortion activist, Carol Crossed, who is vice president of Feminists Choosing Life of New York. Yet it has leaned heavily on anti-trans rhetoric, arguing the amendment would increase trans people’s access to girls’ sports, women’s bathrooms, and gender-affirming medical care—and that these things would be dangerous. “Anti-abortion extremists are pushing a harmful and cruel agenda,” says Sasha Ahuja, campaign director for New Yorkers for Equal Rights. “They’re lying about a small handful of innocent kids to divide New Yorkers and distract us from what this amendment is actually about: protecting the right to abortion, guaranteeing our personal freedoms, and protecting all of us against government discrimination.”

“They’re lying . . . [to] distract us from what this amendment is actually about: protecting the right to abortion, guaranteeing our personal freedoms, and protecting all of us against government discrimination.”

According to New York politics magazine City & State, internal polling shared with ERA proponents in late August found that 64 percent of voters would definitely, likely, or lean toward voting yes on the amendment when presented with its ballot language. But support plummeted by 24 percentage points after voters heard an attack message focused on girls’ sports, transgender protections, and immigration. (Another blatant lie spread by opponents is that Prop 1 would allow undocumented immigrants to vote.)

Ilyas believes the anti-trans messaging gains credence because many voters don’t have personal experience or relationships with trans people. “When you don’t know a trans person, you have this well-funded messaging at you, and people that you trust are saying the same exact thing and reiterating it, it makes sense for even the average New Yorker who’s middle of the road to believe it,” Ilyas says.

Anti-trans attacks have become a go-to strategy for conservative groups fighting abortion rights ballot initiatives. Opponents to Ohio’s abortion rights measure last year claimed it would permit minors to undergo gender-affirming surgery “without parents’ knowledge or consent” and dubbed it an “anti-parent amendment.” (Such surgeries for minors are very rare, and consent from parents or guardians is required.) In Missouri, a last-ditch lawsuit in September tried to block an abortion rights measure from this fall’s ballot by arguing that it might affect laws around single-sex bathrooms and that the voter petition should have disclosed that. (The state Supreme Court didn’t buy it.)

In New York, Prop 1 supporters have repeatedly pointed out that the amendment says nothing directly about trans participation in sports. In fact, trans inclusion in sports is already New York’s status quo, thanks to existing anti-discrimination laws and a state policy allowing trans students to participate on sports teams matching their gender identity. But like Phyllis Schlafly, Prop 1’s opponents love a dire warning: Lawn signs saying, “Save Girls Sports, Vote No Prop 1,” have become a regular sight in some areas. Republican politicians have been picking up on the theme, including Zeldin, the former congressman, and Gina Arena, a GOP candidate for the state Senate from the lower Hudson Valley.

On Long Island, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman and the Republican-dominated county legislature passed a law this past summer blocking permits for women’s sports teams that include trans women, preventing them from using more than 100 county-run parks and athletics facilities. In response, the New York Civil Liberties Union sued the county on behalf of a women’s roller derby league, citing existing New York civil and human rights laws that forbid discrimination based on gender identity, sex, and disability. If the ERA was in the state constitution, lawyers for the league would doubtless argue that Nassau County had violated it as well. “Transgender athletes have been competing and allowed to compete in the state for a really long time now,” Cheng says. “That’s not going to change because of the ERA.”

“Transgender athletes have been competing and allowed to compete in the state for a really long time now. That’s not going to change because of the ERA.”

Still, uncertainty around which laws the ERA might challenge has been a boon to opponents. On its website, the Coalition to Protect Kids claims that banning age discrimination, for instance, would gut laws governing the drinking age, statutory rape, and parental consent for minors to receive medical treatments—especially gender-affirming care. Bodde dismisses these arguments as “misinformation” meant to “stir fear.” Courts have been clear that constitutional rights apply differently to minors and adults, she says, even despite laws forbidding age discrimination. “The state has long been able to create different rules when it comes to young people, whether that’s ensuring a certain age before people can learn how to drive or vote or purchase alcohol.”

But fear and confusion are powerful tools. Prop 1’s opponents have dubbed the ERA the “Parent Replacement Act.” On social media, the Coalition to Protect Kids has repeatedly cited the American College of Pediatricians, a misleadingly named fringe group of anti-LGBTQ doctors whose frequent declarations against gender-affirming care run counter to the conclusions of dozens of major medical associations. Sometimes the claims slip into self-parody: “If Prop One passes…children will mutilate themselves without the benefit of parental guidance,” reads a mailer sent to voters by the New York Republican State Committee. 

For Ilyas, who is transmasculine, the extremist rhetoric feels very personal—and deeply worrisome. “People don’t think that it could happen in New York, just because it’s New York,” Ilyas says. “These people do exist in New York, and they just maybe haven’t had an outlet.”

In late August, on the fringes of a press conference outside New York City Hall, a man wearing a “Kill your local pedophile” T-shirt and a “Babies Lives Matter” pin screamed at a transgender woman who had shown up to protest the speeches. “Is it a boy or a girl?” the man yelled at the protester, gripping a rainbow Trump flag in his fists. “She shaves her armpits, so it must be a man,” he spat, cursing and hurling epithets. 

On the podium, the transphobic messaging was less vile but no less overt. Speakers were urging the small crowd to vote against Proposal 1, a measure on the November ballot that would strengthen protections for abortion in New York state—and much more. Prop 1 is a statewide version of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the 101-year-old feminist effort to guarantee equal rights for women in the US Constitution. While the federal ERA has been largely stalled since the 1970s, many states have adopted their own versions. New York’s constitution, however, currently bans discrimination based only on race and religion, not sex. That could change if voters accept Prop 1’s expansive vision of equality, which includes protections for segments of the population that historically have been marginalized and demonized, including LGBTQ people.

In a year in which support for abortion rights could determine control of statehouses, Congress, and the presidency, Prop 1 seemed like a shoo-in, especially in the blue state of New York. Yet with a little over a month before the election, the effort to pass the New York ERA has been stumbling. An opposition campaign, calling itself the Coalition to Protect Kids, has fixated on the amendment’s protections for trans people, exaggerating its impact on women’s sports and pushing misleading claims about its effects on parental rights. “By solidifying new constitutional rights based on gender identity, Prop 1 is sacrificing the rights of girls,” Amaya Perez, the New York chapter leader of Gays Against Groomers, a right-wing group known for pushing extremist anti-LBGTQ narratives, said at the press conference. 

Those tactics appear to be working. Leaked polling from the pro-Prop 1 campaign shows that voters find the opposition’s messages extremely persuasive. Months ago, Democrats saw the amendment as a means of motivating liberal turnout in November. Now, state Democratic politics are in a precarious state following the indictment of New York Mayor Eric Adams, and Republican candidates are turning the tables, using opposition to Prop 1 as a rallying cry for their own voters.

“They’re trying to use [trans rights] as a wedge issue,” says Faris Ilyas, policy counsel at the New Pride Agenda, an LGBTQ rights group supporting Prop 1. “Even in New York, it’s a working strategy. We’re a little bit scared of what might happen in November.”

It’s an old trick in conservative politics to argue that equal rights are bad for women. The federal ERA, which says equal rights cannot be denied “on account of sex,” was first drafted by leaders of the women’s suffrage movement in 1923 and introduced in every session of Congress for the next five decades. After it finally passed both the House and Senate in 1972, the next step was to go to the states: An amendment must be ratified by three-quarters of state legislatures before it can be added to the US Constitution. But conservative lawyer Phyllis Schlafly mounted a successful guerrilla campaign claiming the amendment would erase all differences between men and women in the law, thus forcing women into military combat, permitting same-sex marriage, and allowing men to use women’s restrooms. The ERA failed to reach the ratification threshold within the seven-year deadline, though efforts to revive and certify it continue.

Even without the ERA, Schlafly’s predictions have more or less come true: The culture already was shifting toward the kinds of gender equality the amendment attempted to codify. Yet her arguments still hold power. Warnings about mixed-gender bathrooms were used to defeat Houston’s Equal Rights Ordinance in 2015—around the same time conservative legal and political organizations, including the Schlafly-founded Eagle Forum, began whipping up the contemporary anti-trans panic, starting with bills restricting trans students’ bathroom access.

The version of the ERA that will appear on New York ballots doesn’t include the word “abortion,” but it was designed first and foremost to protect the right to choose. The effort started in 2019, when Democrats took control of the state Senate for the first time in a decade. They swiftly passed the Reproductive Health Act, removing abortion from New York’s criminal code—where it had been largely forgotten during the Roe v. Wade era—and protecting access to the procedure through 24 weeks’ gestation. (The new law also allowed abortion later in pregnancy if the fetus was not viable or if the pregnant person’s life or health was in danger.) But soon after, state Sen. Liz Krueger of Manhattan, who had spent a decade shepherding the new law, decided the work wasn’t done. “I realized, nope, not good enough,” Krueger says. “We’ve got to actually start to open up our constitution and modernize it.”

With the confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court in 2018, anti-abortion strategists finally had the far-right majority they needed to overturn Roe. “We were basically a pro-choice blue state with people not really understanding how at risk we were from bad law,” Krueger says. If New York enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution, she figured, those protections would be harder to repeal if the political winds eventually shifted.

So Krueger and Assembly Member Rebecca Seawright, also from Manhattan, convened scholars and reproductive law experts to craft an amendment. Rather than simply writing protections for abortion seekers into the constitution, they decided to swing for the fences: a measure modeled on the federal ERA but even broader. In addition to existing protections for race, color, and religion, Prop 1 would ban government discrimination based on disability, age, ethnicity, national origin, and sex—including sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression. The resulting amendment, now known as Prop 1, would make New York’s anti-discrimination protections the “most extensive” in the nation, says Ting Ting Cheng, director of the ERA Project at Columbia Law School, who consulted with the drafters. 

“We were basically a pro-choice blue state with people not really understanding how at risk we were from bad law.”

There are nine other abortion rights ballot initiatives across the country this year, but when it comes to reproductive rights, New York’s ERA is unique. While most of the other measures essentially restore Roe, New York’s approaches abortion “as a matter of gender equality,” says Katharine Bodde, policy co-director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, one of the amendment’s chief backers. To accomplish this, it explicitly says discrimination based on pregnancy status, pregnancy outcomes, and reproductive health care and autonomy count as “sex discrimination” and are forbidden. The idea is to leave little room for judges to interpret the ERA in ways that wouldn’t protect abortion rights or pregnant people in the future. After all, courts have wide latitude to interpret ambiguous language, and they sometimes reconsider their old interpretations—as the US Supreme Court did when it reversed Roe. This past spring, Florida’s Supreme Court overturned a prior decision that said the state constitution protected abortion—after being stacked with judges appointed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis. And the Iowa Supreme Court has upheld a six-week abortion ban despite the state’s ERA, which broadly enshrines gender equality but doesn’t get into specifics. “We’re taking no chances in New York with courts interpreting ‘sex discrimination’ narrowly,” Bodde says. 

That scares abortion opponents. New York’s Catholic bishops told their 35,000 mailing list subscribers in September that Prop 1 would “permanently legalize abortion without restriction” and “render impossible any change to the law if the hearts and minds of New Yorkers were ever to shift toward protecting the child in the womb.”

Prop 1 follows an ERA in Nevada two years ago, which passed with 58 percent of the vote after being pitched to the state’s fiercely independent residents as a means of protecting individual liberty. The Nevada ERA overcame opposition from anti-abortion forces—including the religious-right legal firm Alliance Defending Freedom—which predicted that the measure would void Nevada’s ban on Medicaid coverage for abortion. (It was right.) Next up: An expansive ERA is slated for the 2026 ballot in Minnesota, and another is on the table in Oregon. “It’s incremental,” Cheng says. “Every state that does something new, it creates a new bar or a new precedent for other states to go beyond that.”

These amendments work in two ways. First, they harden the state’s existing constellation of anti-discrimination laws by adding them to the state constitution. And second, they give individuals strong constitutional grounds to challenge discrimination by the government. In New York, Prop 1’s  protections for different “pregnancy outcomes” might be used to defend women from criminal prosecution after self-managed abortions or losing a pregnancy in a car accident—both of which have happened in New York, says Dana Sussman, senior vice president of Pregnancy Justice, a nonprofit legal advocacy group. And it might be used to challenge state hospitals that drug test pregnant women, sometimes without their knowledge or consent—policies that can lead to child protection cases and family separation.

Other activists hope the ERA could be used to overturn the state’s 24-week gestational limit, which forces some New Yorkers to travel out of state if—for one of the many reasons women can face delays in accessing care—they need a later abortion. Randi Gregory, vice president of political and legislative affairs at the National Institute for Reproductive Health Action Fund, believes Prop 1 would protect abortion rights “at all trimesters.” “We hope that it will be a framework for other states,” Gregory adds. “We’re really excited to be running an expansive and proactive amendment.”

But that’s only if they can get it passed—a task that looks increasingly daunting.

The coalition behind Prop 1 made big promises in June 2023, after New York Democrats’ embarrassing showing in the 2022 election. Their losses had helped flip control of the US House of Representatives back to the GOP, while former US Rep. Lee Zeldin, an anti-abortion Republican, came within 6 points of winning the governorship.

State Democrats evidently had an excitement problem—one they hoped the ERA could solve. Gov. Kathy Hochul and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand told the New York Times that they wanted to use the amendment to motivate 2024 turnout. Progressive groups formed New Yorkers for Equal Rights, a committee that pledged to spend $20 million ginning up enthusiasm.

Yet in early September, Politico reported that the committee had raised less than $3 million to counter an opposition that had proven surprisingly well-organized and effective. Suddenly, Democrats were afraid of how Prop 1 might affect their candidates in tight races. In the ensuing scramble, Hochul announced $1 million for TV ads and direct mail and issued a statement: “It’s critical voters know that an abortion amendment is on the ballot in New York this year,” she said. “New Yorkers deserve the freedom to control their own lives and health care decisions, including the right to abortion regardless of who’s in office.”

The opposition campaign, the Coalition to Protect Kids, is largely funded by an upstate anti-abortion activist, Carol Crossed, who is vice president of Feminists Choosing Life of New York. Yet it has leaned heavily on anti-trans rhetoric, arguing the amendment would increase trans people’s access to girls’ sports, women’s bathrooms, and gender-affirming medical care—and that these things would be dangerous. “Anti-abortion extremists are pushing a harmful and cruel agenda,” says Sasha Ahuja, campaign director for New Yorkers for Equal Rights. “They’re lying about a small handful of innocent kids to divide New Yorkers and distract us from what this amendment is actually about: protecting the right to abortion, guaranteeing our personal freedoms, and protecting all of us against government discrimination.”

“They’re lying . . . [to] distract us from what this amendment is actually about: protecting the right to abortion, guaranteeing our personal freedoms, and protecting all of us against government discrimination.”

According to New York politics magazine City & State, internal polling shared with ERA proponents in late August found that 64 percent of voters would definitely, likely, or lean toward voting yes on the amendment when presented with its ballot language. But support plummeted by 24 percentage points after voters heard an attack message focused on girls’ sports, transgender protections, and immigration. (Another blatant lie spread by opponents is that Prop 1 would allow undocumented immigrants to vote.)

Ilyas believes the anti-trans messaging gains credence because many voters don’t have personal experience or relationships with trans people. “When you don’t know a trans person, you have this well-funded messaging at you, and people that you trust are saying the same exact thing and reiterating it, it makes sense for even the average New Yorker who’s middle of the road to believe it,” Ilyas says.

Anti-trans attacks have become a go-to strategy for conservative groups fighting abortion rights ballot initiatives. Opponents to Ohio’s abortion rights measure last year claimed it would permit minors to undergo gender-affirming surgery “without parents’ knowledge or consent” and dubbed it an “anti-parent amendment.” (Such surgeries for minors are very rare, and consent from parents or guardians is required.) In Missouri, a last-ditch lawsuit in September tried to block an abortion rights measure from this fall’s ballot by arguing that it might affect laws around single-sex bathrooms and that the voter petition should have disclosed that. (The state Supreme Court didn’t buy it.)

In New York, Prop 1 supporters have repeatedly pointed out that the amendment says nothing directly about trans participation in sports. In fact, trans inclusion in sports is already New York’s status quo, thanks to existing anti-discrimination laws and a state policy allowing trans students to participate on sports teams matching their gender identity. But like Phyllis Schlafly, Prop 1’s opponents love a dire warning: Lawn signs saying, “Save Girls Sports, Vote No Prop 1,” have become a regular sight in some areas. Republican politicians have been picking up on the theme, including Zeldin, the former congressman, and Gina Arena, a GOP candidate for the state Senate from the lower Hudson Valley.

On Long Island, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman and the Republican-dominated county legislature passed a law this past summer blocking permits for women’s sports teams that include trans women, preventing them from using more than 100 county-run parks and athletics facilities. In response, the New York Civil Liberties Union sued the county on behalf of a women’s roller derby league, citing existing New York civil and human rights laws that forbid discrimination based on gender identity, sex, and disability. If the ERA was in the state constitution, lawyers for the league would doubtless argue that Nassau County had violated it as well. “Transgender athletes have been competing and allowed to compete in the state for a really long time now,” Cheng says. “That’s not going to change because of the ERA.”

“Transgender athletes have been competing and allowed to compete in the state for a really long time now. That’s not going to change because of the ERA.”

Still, uncertainty around which laws the ERA might challenge has been a boon to opponents. On its website, the Coalition to Protect Kids claims that banning age discrimination, for instance, would gut laws governing the drinking age, statutory rape, and parental consent for minors to receive medical treatments—especially gender-affirming care. Bodde dismisses these arguments as “misinformation” meant to “stir fear.” Courts have been clear that constitutional rights apply differently to minors and adults, she says, even despite laws forbidding age discrimination. “The state has long been able to create different rules when it comes to young people, whether that’s ensuring a certain age before people can learn how to drive or vote or purchase alcohol.”

But fear and confusion are powerful tools. Prop 1’s opponents have dubbed the ERA the “Parent Replacement Act.” On social media, the Coalition to Protect Kids has repeatedly cited the American College of Pediatricians, a misleadingly named fringe group of anti-LGBTQ doctors whose frequent declarations against gender-affirming care run counter to the conclusions of dozens of major medical associations. Sometimes the claims slip into self-parody: “If Prop One passes…children will mutilate themselves without the benefit of parental guidance,” reads a mailer sent to voters by the New York Republican State Committee. 

For Ilyas, who is transmasculine, the extremist rhetoric feels very personal—and deeply worrisome. “People don’t think that it could happen in New York, just because it’s New York,” Ilyas says. “These people do exist in New York, and they just maybe haven’t had an outlet.”

If Project 2025 becomes a reality under a second Trump term, there are several ways it plans to further restrict and surveil abortion access nationwide, including criminalizing the mailing of abortion pills and forcing states to turn over abortion data to the federal government.

Many of these proposals have received wide media coverage thanks in part to Democrats’ aggressive campaigning on Project 2025. But there has been far less attention on how major technology companies—which have increasingly helped people access abortions across state lines in light of bans nationwide—could play a role. In fact, some warn that tech would be key to implementing Project 2025’s anti-abortion goals.

Advocates are now working to preemptively thwart such cooperation. Last week, 15 civil liberties groups sent a letter to the CEOs of eight of the biggest tech companies—including Meta, Apple, TikTok, and Google, among others—demanding they explain how they would protect users’ data and privacy, as well as combat abortion-related misinformation on their platforms if Project 2025’s anti-abortion recommendations were set in motion. “As written, Project 2025 would rely heavily on your companies to further its extreme agenda,” states the letter, which Mother Jones is the first to report. The signatories—which include Accountable Tech, GLAAD, and The Tech Oversight Project—warn that Project 2025’s anti-abortion policies would lead to “heightened surveillance and an increase in the trend of law enforcement using criminal subpoenas to weaponize the consumer data your companies collect and store.” 

Many of these concerns have already been realized. Last year, a Nebraska woman was sentenced to two years in prison after Meta gave law enforcement the Facebook messages in which she and her pregnant teenage daughter—who was reportedly past the state’s then-20-week gestational limit (that has since been further restricted to 12 weeks)—discussed obtaining abortion pills and disposing of “the evidence.” Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) office in February accused a data broker of allegedly tracking visits to almost 600 Planned Parenthood locations nationwide and then selling that information to anti-abortion advertisers. Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates say tech platforms have censored their initiatives.

All this, advocates say, makes it critical that tech companies prepare for how they could be deputized to criminalize abortion-seekers if Trump is reelected in November. “These companies are already mechanized to be the stewards of a nightmarish plan like Project 2025,” Daly Barnett, a staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group focused on digital rights, told me. 

I spoke with Barnett over Zoom this week to discuss how abortion rights advocates can better protect themselves and their privacy online and how tech platforms could protect users in another Trump era. 

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited. 

What kind of failures or inadequacies have you seen from some of these tech platforms in terms of protecting users’ privacy and data relating to abortion? 

There are a lot of passive surveillance technologies, like ad tracking technologies that collect browsing data on people that can be combined with other personally identifiable information and used against people. We have examples of commercial platforms like Google Search and Facebook Messenger used to actually criminalize women in different cases, either for their own pregnancy outcomes or, in the case of Facebook Messenger logs, a woman helping her daughter navigate self-managed abortion.

So these communication platforms or these messaging features on social media apps that aren’t employing good privacy and security practices are suddenly dangerous to people, and I think the tech industry at large has yet to realize how culpable they are.

We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday. 

Can you say more about what sort of digital threats or barriers abortion seekers are facing now, even without Project 2025 being in place?

I tend to break it down into three distinct threat models that people need to be aware of: people navigating healthcare and trying to seek abortion; their allies and advocates; and healthcare workers.

There’s digital evidence being used in abortion-related cases, so these [social media companies] that don’t think of themselves as culpable in abortion access can still be used against people when they have bad privacy. I also think of doxxing. Healthcare workers, especially, those whose information is subject to public records requests and FOIA, information could be used against them if they’re in reproductive healthcare. There are data brokers—which is an unregulated, vampiric nightmare industry that needs to be curtailed yesterday—that are constantly being weaponized against people. It contributes so much to the amount of data that can be collated and collected and used against people to create these vastly sophisticated portraits of who you are, what you’re doing online. 

One example I think of with data brokers is [Sen. Wyden’s investigation]. That’s just an example of what happens when you have this unregulated industry that every tech company contributes to because it generates profit for them.

If there were a federal ban on abortion and abortion medications were suddenly outlawed, the surveillance of the mail service or of services that distribute medications like that would be under a newly focused threat of surveillance. Basically every aspect of our lives could potentially be used against us, depending on where we are in the abortion access struggle.

Tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants it—including law enforcement. 

If Project 2025 were implemented under another Trump term, what would it actually look like in practice for some of these platforms to be involved with carrying out some of its anti-abortion aims?

As long as these tech companies have piss poor privacy and security policies—specifically privacy policies—around user data, ad tracking and collection, behavioral tracking of users’ data, they are already mechanized for some really dystopic consequences—Project 2025 or not. We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday. 

In the meantime, users have to fight for themselves to keep their information and their dignity and safety intact.

As long as communication platforms and messaging features on social media apps— as long as the status quo is not to have good data retention or to not have end-to-end encryption—all of those records are subject to law enforcement requests to enter subpoena, and that will impact users’ safety. We already have examples of this, quite literally, in criminal evidence, so it will only increase in that potential landscape.

What are some of the concrete ways that tech companies can and should bolster privacy and data protection for abortion seekers now and under another potential Trump administration?

I’m glad you asked this; this is the most important thing. I think tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants it, including law enforcement. 

Everyone needs to take their position seriously in the tech industry. That can start with better data retention policies. You need to have solid encryption at rest so that when law enforcement comes knocking, if you do have anything to hand over, you can be compliant without actually handing over anything that’s useful to the criminal investigations. But also, you can just delete old data. Having good encryption is great, but if you have really good deleting policies, deleting anything that isn’t absolutely essential to operations, that keeps you safe from both law enforcement requests and subpoena, but also data breaches—that’s huge. 

Another big thing: stop tracking users on web and mobile platforms. The ad industry is corrupt, and users are wisening up to it. People are already more likely to choose platforms that respect their privacy now, because the overall understanding of privacy is normalized, thankfully, and now that we have a better understanding of how dangerous the data broker industry is, it’s imperative that tech companies do better for people.

Lastly, I would say all of these policies—data retention, not ad tracking, users, etc.—[companies have to] make these things transparent. You need to make it known that you’re a privacy-first alternative to the otherwise dangerous status quo,

How can abortion seekers protect their data and privacy online now, particularly if they are living in states with abortion bans?

Step one is definitely threat modeling. You have to take a serious point of view about what activities you’re up to, who you are in the space, and the risky behaviors or communications or aspects of your life that need to be compartmentalized away from other things. From there, you can begin to take some more meaningful approaches—like compartmentalizing that data, so maybe having multiple browsers and saving a privacy-forward browser like Tor, or maybe Brave, or Firefox with some settings turned up on it, as opposed to a more privacy-invasive one like Chrome. 

Knowing when to compartmentalize sensitive communications to a more privacy focused platform [is also important]—so moving off of social media chat applications and onto end-to-end encrypted ones. Knowing how to attend protests safely; knowing what to look for if you’re on the ground and you’re escorting people to and from clinics; getting to know automatic license plate readers; getting to know how your device might be tracked. There’s a litany of measures people can take to protect themselves. Go learn more at Surveillance Self-Defense, where we have a bunch of different educational resources for people to look at.

If Project 2025 becomes a reality under a second Trump term, there are several ways it plans to further restrict and surveil abortion access nationwide, including criminalizing the mailing of abortion pills and forcing states to turn over abortion data to the federal government.

Many of these proposals have received wide media coverage thanks in part to Democrats’ aggressive campaigning on Project 2025. But there has been far less attention on how major technology companies—which have increasingly helped people access abortions across state lines in light of bans nationwide—could play a role. In fact, some warn that tech would be key to implementing Project 2025’s anti-abortion goals.

Advocates are now working to preemptively thwart such cooperation. Last week, 15 civil liberties groups sent a letter to the CEOs of eight of the biggest tech companies—including Meta, Apple, TikTok, and Google, among others—demanding they explain how they would protect users’ data and privacy, as well as combat abortion-related misinformation on their platforms if Project 2025’s anti-abortion recommendations were set in motion. “As written, Project 2025 would rely heavily on your companies to further its extreme agenda,” states the letter, which Mother Jones is the first to report. The signatories—which include Accountable Tech, GLAAD, and The Tech Oversight Project—warn that Project 2025’s anti-abortion policies would lead to “heightened surveillance and an increase in the trend of law enforcement using criminal subpoenas to weaponize the consumer data your companies collect and store.” 

Many of these concerns have already been realized. Last year, a Nebraska woman was sentenced to two years in prison after Meta gave law enforcement the Facebook messages in which she and her pregnant teenage daughter—who was reportedly past the state’s then-20-week gestational limit (that has since been further restricted to 12 weeks)—discussed obtaining abortion pills and disposing of “the evidence.” Sen. Ron Wyden’s (D-Ore.) office in February accused a data broker of allegedly tracking visits to almost 600 Planned Parenthood locations nationwide and then selling that information to anti-abortion advertisers. Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates say tech platforms have censored their initiatives.

All this, advocates say, makes it critical that tech companies prepare for how they could be deputized to criminalize abortion-seekers if Trump is reelected in November. “These companies are already mechanized to be the stewards of a nightmarish plan like Project 2025,” Daly Barnett, a staff technologist at Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group focused on digital rights, told me. 

I spoke with Barnett over Zoom this week to discuss how abortion rights advocates can better protect themselves and their privacy online and how tech platforms could protect users in another Trump era. 

This interview has been lightly condensed and edited. 

What kind of failures or inadequacies have you seen from some of these tech platforms in terms of protecting users’ privacy and data relating to abortion? 

There are a lot of passive surveillance technologies, like ad tracking technologies that collect browsing data on people that can be combined with other personally identifiable information and used against people. We have examples of commercial platforms like Google Search and Facebook Messenger used to actually criminalize women in different cases, either for their own pregnancy outcomes or, in the case of Facebook Messenger logs, a woman helping her daughter navigate self-managed abortion.

So these communication platforms or these messaging features on social media apps that aren’t employing good privacy and security practices are suddenly dangerous to people, and I think the tech industry at large has yet to realize how culpable they are.

We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday. 

Can you say more about what sort of digital threats or barriers abortion seekers are facing now, even without Project 2025 being in place?

I tend to break it down into three distinct threat models that people need to be aware of: people navigating healthcare and trying to seek abortion; their allies and advocates; and healthcare workers.

There’s digital evidence being used in abortion-related cases, so these [social media companies] that don’t think of themselves as culpable in abortion access can still be used against people when they have bad privacy. I also think of doxxing. Healthcare workers, especially, those whose information is subject to public records requests and FOIA, information could be used against them if they’re in reproductive healthcare. There are data brokers—which is an unregulated, vampiric nightmare industry that needs to be curtailed yesterday—that are constantly being weaponized against people. It contributes so much to the amount of data that can be collated and collected and used against people to create these vastly sophisticated portraits of who you are, what you’re doing online. 

One example I think of with data brokers is [Sen. Wyden’s investigation]. That’s just an example of what happens when you have this unregulated industry that every tech company contributes to because it generates profit for them.

If there were a federal ban on abortion and abortion medications were suddenly outlawed, the surveillance of the mail service or of services that distribute medications like that would be under a newly focused threat of surveillance. Basically every aspect of our lives could potentially be used against us, depending on where we are in the abortion access struggle.

Tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants it—including law enforcement. 

If Project 2025 were implemented under another Trump term, what would it actually look like in practice for some of these platforms to be involved with carrying out some of its anti-abortion aims?

As long as these tech companies have piss poor privacy and security policies—specifically privacy policies—around user data, ad tracking and collection, behavioral tracking of users’ data, they are already mechanized for some really dystopic consequences—Project 2025 or not. We need comprehensive federal data privacy legislation yesterday. 

In the meantime, users have to fight for themselves to keep their information and their dignity and safety intact.

As long as communication platforms and messaging features on social media apps— as long as the status quo is not to have good data retention or to not have end-to-end encryption—all of those records are subject to law enforcement requests to enter subpoena, and that will impact users’ safety. We already have examples of this, quite literally, in criminal evidence, so it will only increase in that potential landscape.

What are some of the concrete ways that tech companies can and should bolster privacy and data protection for abortion seekers now and under another potential Trump administration?

I’m glad you asked this; this is the most important thing. I think tech companies need to realize that they are culpable because our lives are connected online, and the industry at large is already mechanized to connect everything about us into one profile and to sell that data to anyone who wants it, including law enforcement. 

Everyone needs to take their position seriously in the tech industry. That can start with better data retention policies. You need to have solid encryption at rest so that when law enforcement comes knocking, if you do have anything to hand over, you can be compliant without actually handing over anything that’s useful to the criminal investigations. But also, you can just delete old data. Having good encryption is great, but if you have really good deleting policies, deleting anything that isn’t absolutely essential to operations, that keeps you safe from both law enforcement requests and subpoena, but also data breaches—that’s huge. 

Another big thing: stop tracking users on web and mobile platforms. The ad industry is corrupt, and users are wisening up to it. People are already more likely to choose platforms that respect their privacy now, because the overall understanding of privacy is normalized, thankfully, and now that we have a better understanding of how dangerous the data broker industry is, it’s imperative that tech companies do better for people.

Lastly, I would say all of these policies—data retention, not ad tracking, users, etc.—[companies have to] make these things transparent. You need to make it known that you’re a privacy-first alternative to the otherwise dangerous status quo,

How can abortion seekers protect their data and privacy online now, particularly if they are living in states with abortion bans?

Step one is definitely threat modeling. You have to take a serious point of view about what activities you’re up to, who you are in the space, and the risky behaviors or communications or aspects of your life that need to be compartmentalized away from other things. From there, you can begin to take some more meaningful approaches—like compartmentalizing that data, so maybe having multiple browsers and saving a privacy-forward browser like Tor, or maybe Brave, or Firefox with some settings turned up on it, as opposed to a more privacy-invasive one like Chrome. 

Knowing when to compartmentalize sensitive communications to a more privacy focused platform [is also important]—so moving off of social media chat applications and onto end-to-end encrypted ones. Knowing how to attend protests safely; knowing what to look for if you’re on the ground and you’re escorting people to and from clinics; getting to know automatic license plate readers; getting to know how your device might be tracked. There’s a litany of measures people can take to protect themselves. Go learn more at Surveillance Self-Defense, where we have a bunch of different educational resources for people to look at.

Two women who died in Georgia as a result of the state’s post-Dobbs abortion ban are, apparently, not enough to make Republicans agree that all Americans should have access to abortion in emergencies.

On Tuesday, Senate Republicans blocked a resolution that Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) introduced to guarantee abortion access to protect a pregnant person’s life, including in the nearly two dozen states that have implemented bans or restrictions since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. The move followed a pair of reports from ProPublica, published last week, that documented the 2022 deaths of two Georgia mothers, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, who were unable to obtain a routine procedure—a dilation and curettage—to clear unexpelled fetal tissue from their uteruses after taking abortion pills and experiencing rare complications. While Miller died at home, having been scared to go to the hospital after taking abortion pills, ProPublica reported that Thurman died in a hospital after doctors waited 20 hours to perform the necessary procedure, which state law had made a felony with few exceptions. The stories led to widespread condemnation, including from Vice President Kamala Harris, as my colleague Pema Levy covered.

“I’m not going to let any of my Republican colleagues off the hook just for saying they care about the life the mother—not if they won’t lift the finger to actually protect women and to actually make clear that emergency care can include abortion,” Murray said on the Senate floor.

The essence of the resolution—which states “that every person has the basic right to emergency health care, including abortion care,” and which 40 Democrats co-sponsored—was essentially the argument at issue in the Supreme Court case Moyle v. United States. In that case, decided in June, the justices ultimately allowed emergency abortions to continue in Idaho, where a near-total abortion ban is in effect, but did not rule on whether other state abortion bans conflict with the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which mandates hospitals provide stabilizing treatment to anyone who needs it.

As Murray noted, Thurman’s and Miller’s deaths are likely not the only ones attributable to abortion bans: Maternal deaths in Texas, where a total abortion ban is in place, rose 56 percent—compared to 11 percent nationwide—after its six-week ban was implemented in 2021, NBC News reported last week. “The data in Texas paints a clear, brutal picture of the reality these abortion bans are killing women,” Murray said.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who objected to Murray’s resolution on behalf of Republicans, responded in the way the right often has to such attacks: by insisting that Democrats are the problem, and by falsely claiming that abortion pills are dangerous—despite the fact that more than 100 scientific studies have affirmed their safety and efficacy, including one published earlier this year that showed them to be just as safe when prescribed virtually and mailed as when prescribed and administered in person. (Several anti-abortion activists on the right have similarly alleged that abortion pills caused Thurman’s and Miller’s deaths, even though—as the ProPublica stories note—complications from the pills are exceptionally rare, and a routine procedure could have likely changed the tragic outcomes.)

In insisting that the resolution was unnecessary, Lankford made several other false claims, including that “no state criminalizes miscarriage” (in fact, that’s provably false, and women have been charged with homicide after miscarriages) and that it’s “political rhetoric” from abortion rights advocates like Harris that is to blame for scaring doctors about the repercussions they could face under abortion bans (in fact, it’s Republican legislation—like the Georgia law—that explicitly threatens doctors with fines and jail time if they perform abortions).

The truth is, in fact, much simpler than Lankford suggested. As Murray said in response to Lankford’s opposition: “Here in America, in the 21st century, pregnant women are suffering and dying—not because doctors don’t know how to save them, but because doctors don’t know if Republicans will let them.”

Senate Republicans on Tuesday also blocked a bill introduced by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) that would have appropriated $350 million annually through 2028 to help with travel costs for people who have to travel out of state to access abortion; in his objection, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) derided it as an “elective abortion travel slush fund” for “radical abortion groups.” Lest you forget, Senate Republicans also twice blocked a vote on a bill that would have guaranteed IVF access nationwide from coming up for a vote, and in June blocked another bill to guarantee federal access to contraception.

All this, keep in mind, is coming from the party whose presidential nominee pledges he’ll make women great again.

Two women who died in Georgia as a result of the state’s post-Dobbs abortion ban are, apparently, not enough to make Republicans agree that all Americans should have access to abortion in emergencies.

On Tuesday, Senate Republicans blocked a resolution that Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) introduced to guarantee abortion access to protect a pregnant person’s life, including in the nearly two dozen states that have implemented bans or restrictions since the Supreme Court overruled Roe v. Wade. The move followed a pair of reports from ProPublica, published last week, that documented the 2022 deaths of two Georgia mothers, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, who were unable to obtain a routine procedure—a dilation and curettage—to clear unexpelled fetal tissue from their uteruses after taking abortion pills and experiencing rare complications. While Miller died at home, having been scared to go to the hospital after taking abortion pills, ProPublica reported that Thurman died in a hospital after doctors waited 20 hours to perform the necessary procedure, which state law had made a felony with few exceptions. The stories led to widespread condemnation, including from Vice President Kamala Harris, as my colleague Pema Levy covered.

“I’m not going to let any of my Republican colleagues off the hook just for saying they care about the life the mother—not if they won’t lift the finger to actually protect women and to actually make clear that emergency care can include abortion,” Murray said on the Senate floor.

The essence of the resolution—which states “that every person has the basic right to emergency health care, including abortion care,” and which 40 Democrats co-sponsored—was essentially the argument at issue in the Supreme Court case Moyle v. United States. In that case, decided in June, the justices ultimately allowed emergency abortions to continue in Idaho, where a near-total abortion ban is in effect, but did not rule on whether other state abortion bans conflict with the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, which mandates hospitals provide stabilizing treatment to anyone who needs it.

As Murray noted, Thurman’s and Miller’s deaths are likely not the only ones attributable to abortion bans: Maternal deaths in Texas, where a total abortion ban is in place, rose 56 percent—compared to 11 percent nationwide—after its six-week ban was implemented in 2021, NBC News reported last week. “The data in Texas paints a clear, brutal picture of the reality these abortion bans are killing women,” Murray said.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.), who objected to Murray’s resolution on behalf of Republicans, responded in the way the right often has to such attacks: by insisting that Democrats are the problem, and by falsely claiming that abortion pills are dangerous—despite the fact that more than 100 scientific studies have affirmed their safety and efficacy, including one published earlier this year that showed them to be just as safe when prescribed virtually and mailed as when prescribed and administered in person. (Several anti-abortion activists on the right have similarly alleged that abortion pills caused Thurman’s and Miller’s deaths, even though—as the ProPublica stories note—complications from the pills are exceptionally rare, and a routine procedure could have likely changed the tragic outcomes.)

In insisting that the resolution was unnecessary, Lankford made several other false claims, including that “no state criminalizes miscarriage” (in fact, that’s provably false, and women have been charged with homicide after miscarriages) and that it’s “political rhetoric” from abortion rights advocates like Harris that is to blame for scaring doctors about the repercussions they could face under abortion bans (in fact, it’s Republican legislation—like the Georgia law—that explicitly threatens doctors with fines and jail time if they perform abortions).

The truth is, in fact, much simpler than Lankford suggested. As Murray said in response to Lankford’s opposition: “Here in America, in the 21st century, pregnant women are suffering and dying—not because doctors don’t know how to save them, but because doctors don’t know if Republicans will let them.”

Senate Republicans on Tuesday also blocked a bill introduced by Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.) that would have appropriated $350 million annually through 2028 to help with travel costs for people who have to travel out of state to access abortion; in his objection, Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) derided it as an “elective abortion travel slush fund” for “radical abortion groups.” Lest you forget, Senate Republicans also twice blocked a vote on a bill that would have guaranteed IVF access nationwide from coming up for a vote, and in June blocked another bill to guarantee federal access to contraception.

All this, keep in mind, is coming from the party whose presidential nominee pledges he’ll make women great again.

At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.

One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling. 

Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.

In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.

Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.

It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority. 

Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention: 

America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.

Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)

“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”

Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.

Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will. 

At the center of the two biggest controversies of JD Vance’s short political career have been cats. The first came from his attacks against the “childless cat ladies” on the left. More recently, the Republican vice presidential candidate has been spreading lies about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, eating pets.

One possible conclusion to draw from these missives is that he is an angry man who spends too much time on the internet. Another is that he is a liar. But there is much more to what Vance is doing than mere trolling. 

Vance’s cat rhetoric is a purposeful attempt to simplify Great Replacement hysteria—hoping to convince voters that their fears of a migrant invasion and childless women are an existential threat. The controversies derive from two fixations: the number of children American women are having and the rate at which foreigners are coming to the United States. Vance wants a United States where the birth rate is high and the immigration rate is low.

In championing low immigration, mass deportation, and an increase in fertility, Vance is aligning himself with white nationalists who were once shunned by the Republican establishment. These days, he is spending less time openly espousing his ideas than he used to on podcasts. Instead, Vance—as he has explained is part of his project—is finding uncomplicated ways to get his points across (whether they are factual or not). “I do think that political rhetoric is fundamentally [about] dealing with people at their particular level,” he said earlier this year. “I think you get too deep into the theory, you actually miss a lot of the truth.” On Sunday, he went further, telling CNN’s Dana Bash during an exchange about Springfield, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

Lying about Haitian immigrants eating cats and attacking childless cat ladies is a perfect example of this plan. Vance thinks he can sell what critics have called “blood and soil nationalism”—invoking the Nazi slogan—with dumb memes.

Vance has not hidden his influences for this theory of change. “I read this book when I was maybe 15 years old, called the Death of the West by Patrick Buchanan,” Vance said during a 2021 podcast appearance. “And that was a really influential book for me.” Buchanan, a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon and Republican presidential candidate, was not subtle about his white nationalism in the Death of the West. When it came to immigration, he accused Mexican Americans of waging a “reconquista” of land they’d lost to the United States. He spoke of declining birth rates in extreme terms—claiming that “Western women” were committing an “autogenocide for peoples of European ancestry” by having too many abortions.

It is not hard to trace the line between Buchanan’s fears and Vance’s anxieties about “childless cat ladies.” The subtitle of Buchanan’s book cuts to the heart of Vance’s current preoccupations: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization.

Buchanan’s worldview was rooted in a paleoconservatism that rejected the view that America is an idea and instead saw America as a people. In doing so, he embraced a framework that justified exclusion and a permanent white majority. 

Vance has been emphasizing the claim that Americans are a “people” for much of this year. During a speech to the hard-right group American Moment earlier this year, Vance made a point of bringing up “this thing that increasingly bothers me, which is the concept that American is an idea.” Vance made the same point about Americans as a people in July at the National Conservatism Conference in which he railed about the influx of Haitian migrants in Springfield. But the clearest explanation of this obsession, as my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, came during the Republican National Convention: 

America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.

Now, it is part of that tradition, of course, that we welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.

Vance went on to talk about the cemetery plot in Kentucky that he hopes that he; his wife, Usha, the child of Indian immigrants; and, eventually, their kids will be buried in. (Her family came on “our terms” in this formulation.)

“There will be seven generations just in that small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky,” Vance said. “Seven generations of people who have fought for this country. Who have built this country. Who have made things in this country. And who would fight and die to protect this country if they were asked to.”

Vance was born in Ohio. It was his grandparents who came to the state in search of economic opportunity in the 1940s. His kids would likely be buried in the family plot in Kentucky sometime around 2100—roughly 160 years after any of their paternal ancestors lived there. But for Vance, it doesn’t seem to matter. He believes his blood is connected to that soil. That is what it means for him for America to be a people.

Behind the silly memes of Donald Trump running with cats is a much darker story. Vance sees a rapid demographic shift that is being forced upon the American “people” through immigration and childless women. Vance is determined to stop it. If he has to talk about cats along the way, he will. 

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system, Reveal, and USA Today. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletters, and follow them on Instagram,  TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook.

Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now—pregnant with her fifth child—she felt a hard-won confidence in herself as a mother.

Then she ate a salad from Costco. 

It was her final meal before going to Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa, in Northern California, to give birth in August 2022. It had been an exhausting pregnancy. Her family had just moved houses, and Horton was still breastfeeding her toddler. Because of her teenage son’s heart condition, she remained wary of Covid-19 and avoided crowded places, even doctor’s offices. Now, already experiencing the clawing pangs of contractions, she pulled out a frozen pizza and a salad with creamy everything dressing, savoring the hush that fell over the house, the satisfying crunch of the poppy seeds as she ate. 

Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug-tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs. Many common foods and medications—from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines—can prompt erroneous results.

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The morning after Horton delivered her daughter, a nurse told her she had tested positive for opiates. Horton was shocked. She hadn’t requested an epidural or any narcotic pain medication during labor—she didn’t even like taking Advil. “You’re sure it was mine?” she asked the nurse.

If Horton had been tested under different circumstances—for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job—she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result. 

But as a mother giving birth, Horton had no such protections. The hospital quickly reported her to child welfare, and the next day, a social worker arrived to take baby Halle into protective custody.  

Kaiser Permanente declined to comment on Horton’s care. A spokesperson said the Santa Rosa hospital typically gets consent to drug-test patients for medical reasons, and as a mandated reporter under state law, it refers potential exposures of newborns to illicit drugs to child welfare authorities. 

The Sonoma County Human Services Department said, in a statement, that it evaluates all referrals using “evidence- and research-based” methods, and if a report is deemed valid, it has a duty under state law to investigate.

Horton said the experience made her feel powerless and terrified.

“They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something,” she said, “and it was wrong.” 

For decades, state and federal laws have required hospitals across the country to identify newborns affected by drugs in the womb and to refer such cases to child protective services for possible investigation. To comply, hospitals often use urine drug screens that are inexpensive (as little as $10 per test), simple to administer (the patient pees in a cup), and provide results within minutes. 

But urine drug screens are easily misinterpreted and often wrong, with false positive rates as high as 50 percent, according to some studies. Without confirmation testing and additional review, false positive results can lead hospitals to wrongly accuse parents of illicit drug use and report babies to child welfare agencies—which may separate newborns from their families, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.

It’s unclear how many of the nation’s 3.6 million births every year involve drug testing, but health care experts said urine screening is ubiquitous. Tens of thousands of infants are reported annually to authorities for in utero drug exposure, with no guarantee that the underlying tests are accurate, our analysis of federal data shows.

“They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something, and it was wrong.”

To report this story, The Marshall Project interviewed dozens of patients, medical providers, toxicologists, and other experts, and collected information on more than 50 mothers in 22 states who faced reports and investigations over positive drug tests that were likely wrong. We also pored over thousands of pages of policy documents from every state child welfare agency in the country. 

Problems with drug screens are well known, especially in workplace testing. But there’s been little investigation of how easily false positives can occur inside labor and delivery units, and how quickly families can get trapped inside a system of surveillance and punishment.

Hospitals reported women for positive drug tests after they ate everything bagels and lemon poppy seed muffins, or used medications including the acid reducer Zantac, the antidepressant Zoloft, and labetalol, one of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure treatments for pregnant women. 

After a California mother had a false positive for meth and PCP, authorities took her newborn, then dispatched two sheriff’s deputies to also remove her toddler from her custody, court records show. In New York, hospital administrators refused to retract a child welfare report based on a false positive result, and instead offered the mother counseling for her trauma, according to a recording of the conversation. And when a Pennsylvania woman tested positive for opioids after eating pasta salad, the hearing officer in her case yelled at her to “buck up, get a backbone, and stop crying,” court records show. It took three months to get her newborn back from foster care. 

Federal officials have known for decades that urine screens are not reliable. Poppy seeds—which come from the same plant used to make heroin—are so notorious for causing positives for opiates that last year the Department of Defense directed service members to stop eating them. At hospitals, test results often come with warnings about false positives and direct clinicians to confirm the findings with more definitive tests. 

Yet state policies and many hospitals tend to treat drug screens as unassailable evidence of illicit use, The Marshall Project found. Hospitals across the country routinely report cases to authorities without ordering confirmation tests or waiting to receive the results. 

At least 27 states explicitly require hospitals to alert child welfare agencies after a positive screen or potential exposure, according to a review of state laws and policies by The Marshall Project. But, not a single state requires hospitals to confirm test results before reporting them. At least 25 states do not require child welfare workers to confirm positive test results, either. 

While parents often lack protections, most of the caseworkers who investigate them are entitled to confirmation testing and a review if they test positive for drugs on the job, our analysis found. 

Health care providers say there are medical reasons to test labor and delivery patients for drugs, including alerting doctors to watch a newborn for withdrawal symptoms. They also cite concerns about criminal and legal liability if they fail to report positive test results. 

Even when a doctor refutes a positive result and vouches for their patient, hospitals may report the incorrect data anyway to child welfare agencies.

“It’s almost like a gut punch. You come to the hospital and you see a social work note on your patient’s chart,” said Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB/GYN in Huntsville, Alabama, who has tried and failed several times to halt child welfare reports and investigations of patients with false positive results. “Once that ball is rolling, it’s hard to stop it,” Robinson said.

No government agency collects comprehensive data on false positive results or on how many pregnant patients are tested. And confidentiality laws that shield medical and child welfare records make it difficult for the public to understand how many families are affected. 

In 2016, Congress mandated states to submit the number of “substance-affected” infants to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Not all states track every case, but from fiscal years 2018 through 2022, medical professionals reported at least 170,000 infants to child welfare agencies for exposure to substances, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project. In 2022 alone, more than 35,000 such cases were reported, and authorities removed more than 6,000 infants from their families, our analysis found. 

The harms of drug testing fall disproportionately on low-income, Black, Hispanic, and Native American women, who studies have found are more likely to be tested when they give birth, more likely to be investigated, and less likely to reunite with their children after they’ve been removed. 

But the false positive cases The Marshall Project identified include parents of all socioeconomic classes and occupations—from a lawyer to a school librarian to a nurse who drug-tests other people for a living. 

“People should be concerned,” said Dr. Stephen Patrick, a leading neonatal researcher who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. “This could happen to any one of us.”

“People should be concerned. This could happen to any one of us.”

Drug screens are more guesswork than exact science. Chemicals in the tests quickly cross-react with urine, flagging anything that looks like it could be an illicit substance. The tests are like fishing nets that are cast wide and pick up anything and everything that fits, said Dr. Gwen McMillin, a professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine and medical director of a drug-testing lab. The problem is that nets also ensnare fish that aren’t being targeted: compounds that are closely related to illicit substances or merely look similar. 

“Drug testing results need to be confirmed before they go to CPS,” McMillin said. “Actions should not be taken based on a single drug testing result. Period.” 

But sometimes, even confirmation tests can be misinterpreted, as Susan Horton found. At first, Horton was puzzled by her positive test result. She wondered if her urine might have been mixed up with another patient’s. Then—“ding ding ding!”—her last meal popped into her head. She told a nurse about the poppy seeds in her salad, sure that this would resolve her doctors’ concerns. 

Horton’s records show Kaiser ran her urine sample through a second test, and this time it came back positive for one opiate in particular: codeine. That shouldn’t have been surprising—poppy seeds, like the ones in Horton’s salad, are derived from the opium poppy plant and contain codeine. 

To differentiate between salad dressing or bagels and illicit drugs, toxicologists have long recommended testing urine for the presence of a compound called thebaine, which is found in poppy seeds but not in heroin. There’s no indication that the hospital performed or even knew about the thebaine test, leaving providers with no way to prove or disprove Horton’s claims.

“Mom and dad insistent that a Costco salad with poppyseed dressing is responsible,” a doctor wrote in her notes. Another doctor wrote: “We are unable to verify whether this could result in a positive test.”

Soon, multiple doctors and nurses filed into Horton’s room. They said hospital policy dictated that Halle remain there for five days to be monitored for possible drug withdrawal symptoms—“for baby’s safety,” a doctor told Horton.

Unlike most other states that require hospitals to report positive drug tests, California law says a positive test alone “is not in and of itself a sufficient basis for reporting child abuse or neglect.” But because of Covid-19 and her son’s heart condition, Horton had also missed some prenatal appointments, which many providers see as a red flag for drug use. A hospital social worker noted the missed appointments and decided to file a report.

In a statement about its practices in general, Kaiser said it always conducts a “multi-faceted assessment” prior to filing a report to CPS, which is responsible for reviewing the information and investigating. 

Horton insisted that keeping her baby at the hospital was unnecessary. “I’m not a drug addict,” she said she pleaded. Desperate for help, her husband called the police, who declined to oppose hospital directives, records show. 

When the caseworker arrived, the couple refused to sign a safety plan or allow the person to interview their children and inspect their home. So the caseworker immediately obtained a judge’s order and placed baby Halle into temporary custody in the hospital, before discharging her to her grandparents, who were ordered to supervise Horton with her child. 

A few days later, Horton stood silently in court, dressed in pants that clung uncomfortably to her still-healing body, feeling as if her motherhood was on trial. A caseworker told the judge it would be dangerous to release Halle to her parents, and Horton agreed to another drug test. A worker followed her to the bathroom and watched her urinate in a cup.

By then, caseworkers and doctors had privately acknowledged that poppy seeds could have caused Horton’s positive test result. But in court the caseworker didn’t mention that. Instead, she argued that Horton’s purported drug use had “caused serious physical harm” to her child. 

The agency said under state law it can’t comment on individual cases. Speaking generally, it said a single positive drug test, false or otherwise, doesn’t warrant an investigation, and that there needs to be “a reported observation of impact to the child.”

When workplace drug testing was introduced in the 1980s, unions and civil rights groups decried the error rates of drug screens and how companies were firing workers over false positive results. In response, federal authorities mandated safeguards for employees, including requiring confirmation tests and a review from a specially trained doctor to determine whether a food or medication could have caused a positive result. 

A federal medical advisory committee in 1993 urged health care providers who drug-test pregnant patients to adopt the same rigorous standards. But amid the “crack baby” panic, the idea of protecting mothers did not catch on. 

Hospital drug testing policies vary widely. Many facilities, such as Kaiser in Santa Rosa, test every labor-and-delivery patient. Other hospitals flag only certain people, such as those with limited prenatal care, high blood pressure, even bad teeth, experts say. At many hospitals, the decision is up to doctors and nurses, who may view a mother’s tattoos, disheveled clothing, or stressed demeanor with suspicion. Studies have found that the decision to test is rife with class and race bias.

“Those who look like they have less resources, people might say, ‘Well, they look more likely to use drugs,’” said Dr. Cresta Jones, an associate professor and maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Hospitals often have full discretion over whether to screen for drugs, but once a positive result is in hand, the decision to report becomes more complicated. Laws and policies in at least 12 states explicitly require hospitals to send screen results to child welfare agencies, even if they are not confirmed, according to The Marshall Project’s review. 

For hospitals, cost is also an issue. While urine screens are cheap, the equipment needed to run a confirmation test costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, in addition to the cost of expert personnel and lab certification. Some hospitals contract out confirmation testing—a lower-cost alternative—but getting results can take days, long after many families are ready to go home.

Doctors, nurses, and hospital social workers face an uncomfortable predicament: Do they send the baby home to what they believe could be an unsafe environment, or do they call authorities?

“God forbid the baby goes home, withdraws and dies, we’re going to be held liable for that,” said Dr. Adi Davidov, an obstetrician at Staten Island University Hospital, which drug-tests every birthing patient.

State mandatory reporting laws add to the pressure on doctors and nurses. These laws impose criminal liability on providers who fail to report, while also protecting physicians who report “in good faith”—insulating hospitals from lawsuits if test results are wrong. 

Even when doctors have the ability to order a confirmation test, they don’t always do so. Many misinterpret positive screens as definitive evidence of drug use.

“We were guilty until proven innocent.”

When Grace Smith had her fourth child in 2021 at St. Luke’s University Hospital, an hour north of Philadelphia, she was taking prescribed marijuana and Vyvanse, a medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The medicine contains amphetamine, but the hospital’s drug screen results did not differentiate between meth and amphetamine, according to medical records. The day after Smith delivered her son, a doctor told her that she and her baby had tested positive for meth and that the hospital had notified child protective services.

Smith’s husband, Michael, asked the doctor to review his wife’s medical records to confirm her prescription, according to the doctor’s notes. The doctor argued that wasn’t her role. “I explained that our responsibility as healthcare workers was to report the case” to child welfare authorities, she wrote, adding that the agency “would conduct any investigation that was necessary.”

When Michael Smith told the doctor they were leaving with their baby, the hospital called the police. An officer escorted the parents out, without their newborn, a police report shows. The Smiths said the police told them they would be arrested if they returned.

A spokesperson for St. Luke’s University Health Network declined to answer questions from The Marshall Project, saying in an email that the hospital “complies with all rules and regulations regarding drug testing and reporting” and that the newborn’s welfare “is always our primary concern.”

Four days after the Smiths’ son was born, Monroe County Children and Youth Services told the hospital it was okay to release the baby to his parents. But the investigation remained open. It wasn’t until the Smiths paid more than $3,500 for a lawyer—and nearly $300 for a confirmation drug test that came back negative—that the agency closed their case. The agency declined to comment.

The Smiths filed a lawsuit in 2022 against St. Luke’s. In its response, the hospital acknowledged that it had not given Grace a confirmation test, but denied violating the Smiths’ privacy or civil rights. A judge dismissed the suit in 2023, saying in part that the Smiths did not sufficiently argue their claims.

Many providers erroneously assume that child welfare agencies verify a parent’s drug use. But government caseworkers typically lack the expertise to accurately interpret drug test results. State policy manuals seldom mention the possibility of false positives. It often falls on parents to prove their own innocence.

As a nurse in South Carolina, Ashley Riley said she regularly drug-tested patients in an addiction treatment program, flagged faulty tests, and sent out positive screens for confirmation. But when she herself screened positive for opiates after delivering her son in 2023, Riley said the hospital declined to order a confirmation test, then reported her to authorities.

Riley and her husband, Jeffrey, insisted the positive result was from lemon poppy seed muffins that she had eaten throughout her pregnancy. As proof, Jeffrey Riley texted the investigator a receipt for the muffins, studies on false positives caused by poppy seeds, and the 2023 memo from the Department of Defense urging service members to avoid poppy seeds.

“At no point in time was there anybody in there that was even trying to advocate for my wife, except for me,” he recalled.

At first, he thought his efforts were working. The caseworker acknowledged in his notes having seen the poppy seeds and noted that the report “could be falsified.” 

But the caseworker still insisted the couple sign a safety plan, advising them that their two children would be placed in foster care unless they assigned a “protector”—a responsible adult who would supervise them with their children at all times. This continued for 45 days before the case was closed as unfounded. 

“We were guilty until proven innocent,” Ashley Riley said. 

The hospital even charged $424 for the problematic urine test. Hospital officials did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Will Batchelor, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Social Services, wrote in a statement that the agency has a duty to investigate once a hospital has filed a report and that it “exercised appropriate restraint” by not removing the child from the home.

“Because the safety of a child is at stake, DSS has to continue its investigation beyond seeing a receipt for poppy seed muffins,” Batchelor wrote.

Even when a parent has a confirmation test and her own doctor’s word attesting to a false positive result, authorities may keep investigating.

When Melissa Robinson, an elementary school librarian in Huntsville, Alabama, screened pos​​itive for cocaine in early 2024, the news shocked her and her doctors. Robinson had avoided anything during her pregnancy that could be risky, even cold cuts—which may carry bacteria—and had no history of drug use. Because of the positive test, staff told Robinson she was not allowed to breastfeed her daughter, hospital records show, and they reported her to Alabama’s child welfare agency, the Department of Human Resources. Robinson said a caseworker told her that she probably wouldn’t be allowed to be alone with her baby—her husband would have to supervise.

A few days later, a confirmation test came back negative for any substances. With proof that she had not used cocaine, Robinson assumed the case would be closed. Instead, the agency continued to investigate, inspecting her home and even requiring her husband to take a drug test, she said.

A spokesperson for Alabama’s child welfare agency said they are required to respond immediately to a hospital report and “make safety decisions relying on current and most accessible information.”

When the baby was two weeks old, the agency closed the case, citing insufficient evidence. But the allegations will remain on Robinson’s record for at least five years.

“To have such a beautiful experience tainted by something like that, it’s difficult,” Robinson recalled. “Truthfully, it’s turned me into somebody different.” 

“To have such a beautiful experience tainted by something like that, it’s difficult. Truthfully, it’s turned me into somebody different.” 

Some medical groups and providers have taken steps to reduce unnecessary child welfare reports. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises hospitals to use a screening questionnaire rather than drug tests to identify people who may have substance abuse problems. The organization also recommends that hospitals obtain consent from patients, explaining the potential consequences of a positive result—including if the hospital is required to report it to authorities. A number of large hospitals have adopted some version of those recommendations. 

After a study at Staten Island University Hospital in New York found a high rate of false positives, administrators brought the confirmation testing in-house. They said results come back within a day or two, rather than the week that is typical for outside tests, which allows providers to wait before contacting child welfare.

“Any time you act on a test that’s not 100 percent, you run the risk of causing more harm than good,” said the hospital’s Dr. Davidov. “If you are going to get CPS involved with a mother who did nothing wrong and is a good citizen, that’s harming her. It’s harming her experience, it’s harming her ability to take care of her newborn.”

In recent years, advocacy groups have filed lawsuits against hospitals for testing without explicit consent, which has led some state officials and lawmakers to speak out against the testing. But in most of the United States, it remains common practice to report families based on unconfirmed positive screens. Most of the women interviewed by The Marshall Project signed general consent forms at the hospital but said they were never informed explicitly they would be drug-tested, nor that a positive result could be reported to authorities.

For Susan Horton, her family’s ordeal has created an undercurrent of fear that courses through her daily life. 

After the court hearing in August 2022, child welfare workers took the baby to Horton’s elderly in-laws and barred Horton and her husband from being alone with their newborn while the agency investigated. Finally, almost two weeks after their daughter was born, the agency withdrew its petition and a judge dismissed the case, allowing the Hortons to bring baby Halle home.

One afternoon last spring, Horton took her daughter, now a toddler, outside. Halle giggled as her mother chased her around the front yard, her little feet splashing in a small mud hole. This was the life Horton had envisioned years ago—a quiet place in the California countryside where her children could delight in the world around them. And yet, Horton couldn’t help but remember the investigation that destroyed her family’s peace of mind—and her self-esteem.

“I had a lot of confidence in how I mother and how I parent,” she said. “Now in my head, I’m always questioning my choices.” She wondered aloud what neighbors would say if they saw her daughter playing in the mud, if someone might accuse her of being a bad parent.

“I just always have that looming feeling that at any moment CPS could come knocking and take my children away.” 

Marshall Project reporters Weihua Li, Andrew Rodriguez Calderón, Nakylah Carter, and Catherine Odom contributed to this story.

This article was published in partnership with The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization covering the US criminal justice system, Reveal, and USA Today. Sign up for The Marshall Project’s newsletters, and follow them on Instagram,  TikTok, Reddit, and Facebook.

Susan Horton had been a stay-at-home mom for almost 20 years, and now—pregnant with her fifth child—she felt a hard-won confidence in herself as a mother.

Then she ate a salad from Costco. 

It was her final meal before going to Kaiser Permanente hospital in Santa Rosa, in Northern California, to give birth in August 2022. It had been an exhausting pregnancy. Her family had just moved houses, and Horton was still breastfeeding her toddler. Because of her teenage son’s heart condition, she remained wary of Covid-19 and avoided crowded places, even doctor’s offices. Now, already experiencing the clawing pangs of contractions, she pulled out a frozen pizza and a salad with creamy everything dressing, savoring the hush that fell over the house, the satisfying crunch of the poppy seeds as she ate. 

Horton didn’t realize that she would be drug-tested before her child’s birth. Or that the poppy seeds in her salad could trigger a positive result on a urine drug screen, the quick test that hospitals often use to check pregnant patients for illicit drugs. Many common foods and medications—from antacids to blood pressure and cold medicines—can prompt erroneous results.

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The morning after Horton delivered her daughter, a nurse told her she had tested positive for opiates. Horton was shocked. She hadn’t requested an epidural or any narcotic pain medication during labor—she didn’t even like taking Advil. “You’re sure it was mine?” she asked the nurse.

If Horton had been tested under different circumstances—for example, if she was a government employee and required to be tested as part of her job—she would have been entitled to a more advanced test and to a review from a specially trained doctor to confirm the initial result. 

But as a mother giving birth, Horton had no such protections. The hospital quickly reported her to child welfare, and the next day, a social worker arrived to take baby Halle into protective custody.  

Kaiser Permanente declined to comment on Horton’s care. A spokesperson said the Santa Rosa hospital typically gets consent to drug-test patients for medical reasons, and as a mandated reporter under state law, it refers potential exposures of newborns to illicit drugs to child welfare authorities. 

The Sonoma County Human Services Department said, in a statement, that it evaluates all referrals using “evidence- and research-based” methods, and if a report is deemed valid, it has a duty under state law to investigate.

Horton said the experience made her feel powerless and terrified.

“They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something,” she said, “and it was wrong.” 

For decades, state and federal laws have required hospitals across the country to identify newborns affected by drugs in the womb and to refer such cases to child protective services for possible investigation. To comply, hospitals often use urine drug screens that are inexpensive (as little as $10 per test), simple to administer (the patient pees in a cup), and provide results within minutes. 

But urine drug screens are easily misinterpreted and often wrong, with false positive rates as high as 50 percent, according to some studies. Without confirmation testing and additional review, false positive results can lead hospitals to wrongly accuse parents of illicit drug use and report babies to child welfare agencies—which may separate newborns from their families, an investigation by The Marshall Project and Reveal has found.

It’s unclear how many of the nation’s 3.6 million births every year involve drug testing, but health care experts said urine screening is ubiquitous. Tens of thousands of infants are reported annually to authorities for in utero drug exposure, with no guarantee that the underlying tests are accurate, our analysis of federal data shows.

“They had a singular piece of evidence that I had taken something, and it was wrong.”

To report this story, The Marshall Project interviewed dozens of patients, medical providers, toxicologists, and other experts, and collected information on more than 50 mothers in 22 states who faced reports and investigations over positive drug tests that were likely wrong. We also pored over thousands of pages of policy documents from every state child welfare agency in the country. 

Problems with drug screens are well known, especially in workplace testing. But there’s been little investigation of how easily false positives can occur inside labor and delivery units, and how quickly families can get trapped inside a system of surveillance and punishment.

Hospitals reported women for positive drug tests after they ate everything bagels and lemon poppy seed muffins, or used medications including the acid reducer Zantac, the antidepressant Zoloft, and labetalol, one of the most commonly prescribed blood pressure treatments for pregnant women. 

After a California mother had a false positive for meth and PCP, authorities took her newborn, then dispatched two sheriff’s deputies to also remove her toddler from her custody, court records show. In New York, hospital administrators refused to retract a child welfare report based on a false positive result, and instead offered the mother counseling for her trauma, according to a recording of the conversation. And when a Pennsylvania woman tested positive for opioids after eating pasta salad, the hearing officer in her case yelled at her to “buck up, get a backbone, and stop crying,” court records show. It took three months to get her newborn back from foster care. 

Federal officials have known for decades that urine screens are not reliable. Poppy seeds—which come from the same plant used to make heroin—are so notorious for causing positives for opiates that last year the Department of Defense directed service members to stop eating them. At hospitals, test results often come with warnings about false positives and direct clinicians to confirm the findings with more definitive tests. 

Yet state policies and many hospitals tend to treat drug screens as unassailable evidence of illicit use, The Marshall Project found. Hospitals across the country routinely report cases to authorities without ordering confirmation tests or waiting to receive the results. 

At least 27 states explicitly require hospitals to alert child welfare agencies after a positive screen or potential exposure, according to a review of state laws and policies by The Marshall Project. But, not a single state requires hospitals to confirm test results before reporting them. At least 25 states do not require child welfare workers to confirm positive test results, either. 

While parents often lack protections, most of the caseworkers who investigate them are entitled to confirmation testing and a review if they test positive for drugs on the job, our analysis found. 

Health care providers say there are medical reasons to test labor and delivery patients for drugs, including alerting doctors to watch a newborn for withdrawal symptoms. They also cite concerns about criminal and legal liability if they fail to report positive test results. 

Even when a doctor refutes a positive result and vouches for their patient, hospitals may report the incorrect data anyway to child welfare agencies.

“It’s almost like a gut punch. You come to the hospital and you see a social work note on your patient’s chart,” said Dr. Yashica Robinson, an OB/GYN in Huntsville, Alabama, who has tried and failed several times to halt child welfare reports and investigations of patients with false positive results. “Once that ball is rolling, it’s hard to stop it,” Robinson said.

No government agency collects comprehensive data on false positive results or on how many pregnant patients are tested. And confidentiality laws that shield medical and child welfare records make it difficult for the public to understand how many families are affected. 

In 2016, Congress mandated states to submit the number of “substance-affected” infants to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Not all states track every case, but from fiscal years 2018 through 2022, medical professionals reported at least 170,000 infants to child welfare agencies for exposure to substances, according to an analysis by The Marshall Project. In 2022 alone, more than 35,000 such cases were reported, and authorities removed more than 6,000 infants from their families, our analysis found. 

The harms of drug testing fall disproportionately on low-income, Black, Hispanic, and Native American women, who studies have found are more likely to be tested when they give birth, more likely to be investigated, and less likely to reunite with their children after they’ve been removed. 

But the false positive cases The Marshall Project identified include parents of all socioeconomic classes and occupations—from a lawyer to a school librarian to a nurse who drug-tests other people for a living. 

“People should be concerned,” said Dr. Stephen Patrick, a leading neonatal researcher who chairs the Department of Health Policy and Management at the Rollins School of Public Health in Atlanta. “This could happen to any one of us.”

“People should be concerned. This could happen to any one of us.”

Drug screens are more guesswork than exact science. Chemicals in the tests quickly cross-react with urine, flagging anything that looks like it could be an illicit substance. The tests are like fishing nets that are cast wide and pick up anything and everything that fits, said Dr. Gwen McMillin, a professor at the University of Utah School of Medicine and medical director of a drug-testing lab. The problem is that nets also ensnare fish that aren’t being targeted: compounds that are closely related to illicit substances or merely look similar. 

“Drug testing results need to be confirmed before they go to CPS,” McMillin said. “Actions should not be taken based on a single drug testing result. Period.” 

But sometimes, even confirmation tests can be misinterpreted, as Susan Horton found. At first, Horton was puzzled by her positive test result. She wondered if her urine might have been mixed up with another patient’s. Then—“ding ding ding!”—her last meal popped into her head. She told a nurse about the poppy seeds in her salad, sure that this would resolve her doctors’ concerns. 

Horton’s records show Kaiser ran her urine sample through a second test, and this time it came back positive for one opiate in particular: codeine. That shouldn’t have been surprising—poppy seeds, like the ones in Horton’s salad, are derived from the opium poppy plant and contain codeine. 

To differentiate between salad dressing or bagels and illicit drugs, toxicologists have long recommended testing urine for the presence of a compound called thebaine, which is found in poppy seeds but not in heroin. There’s no indication that the hospital performed or even knew about the thebaine test, leaving providers with no way to prove or disprove Horton’s claims.

“Mom and dad insistent that a Costco salad with poppyseed dressing is responsible,” a doctor wrote in her notes. Another doctor wrote: “We are unable to verify whether this could result in a positive test.”

Soon, multiple doctors and nurses filed into Horton’s room. They said hospital policy dictated that Halle remain there for five days to be monitored for possible drug withdrawal symptoms—“for baby’s safety,” a doctor told Horton.

Unlike most other states that require hospitals to report positive drug tests, California law says a positive test alone “is not in and of itself a sufficient basis for reporting child abuse or neglect.” But because of Covid-19 and her son’s heart condition, Horton had also missed some prenatal appointments, which many providers see as a red flag for drug use. A hospital social worker noted the missed appointments and decided to file a report.

In a statement about its practices in general, Kaiser said it always conducts a “multi-faceted assessment” prior to filing a report to CPS, which is responsible for reviewing the information and investigating. 

Horton insisted that keeping her baby at the hospital was unnecessary. “I’m not a drug addict,” she said she pleaded. Desperate for help, her husband called the police, who declined to oppose hospital directives, records show. 

When the caseworker arrived, the couple refused to sign a safety plan or allow the person to interview their children and inspect their home. So the caseworker immediately obtained a judge’s order and placed baby Halle into temporary custody in the hospital, before discharging her to her grandparents, who were ordered to supervise Horton with her child. 

A few days later, Horton stood silently in court, dressed in pants that clung uncomfortably to her still-healing body, feeling as if her motherhood was on trial. A caseworker told the judge it would be dangerous to release Halle to her parents, and Horton agreed to another drug test. A worker followed her to the bathroom and watched her urinate in a cup.

By then, caseworkers and doctors had privately acknowledged that poppy seeds could have caused Horton’s positive test result. But in court the caseworker didn’t mention that. Instead, she argued that Horton’s purported drug use had “caused serious physical harm” to her child. 

The agency said under state law it can’t comment on individual cases. Speaking generally, it said a single positive drug test, false or otherwise, doesn’t warrant an investigation, and that there needs to be “a reported observation of impact to the child.”

When workplace drug testing was introduced in the 1980s, unions and civil rights groups decried the error rates of drug screens and how companies were firing workers over false positive results. In response, federal authorities mandated safeguards for employees, including requiring confirmation tests and a review from a specially trained doctor to determine whether a food or medication could have caused a positive result. 

A federal medical advisory committee in 1993 urged health care providers who drug-test pregnant patients to adopt the same rigorous standards. But amid the “crack baby” panic, the idea of protecting mothers did not catch on. 

Hospital drug testing policies vary widely. Many facilities, such as Kaiser in Santa Rosa, test every labor-and-delivery patient. Other hospitals flag only certain people, such as those with limited prenatal care, high blood pressure, even bad teeth, experts say. At many hospitals, the decision is up to doctors and nurses, who may view a mother’s tattoos, disheveled clothing, or stressed demeanor with suspicion. Studies have found that the decision to test is rife with class and race bias.

“Those who look like they have less resources, people might say, ‘Well, they look more likely to use drugs,’” said Dr. Cresta Jones, an associate professor and maternal-fetal medicine specialist at the University of Minnesota Medical School.

Hospitals often have full discretion over whether to screen for drugs, but once a positive result is in hand, the decision to report becomes more complicated. Laws and policies in at least 12 states explicitly require hospitals to send screen results to child welfare agencies, even if they are not confirmed, according to The Marshall Project’s review. 

For hospitals, cost is also an issue. While urine screens are cheap, the equipment needed to run a confirmation test costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, in addition to the cost of expert personnel and lab certification. Some hospitals contract out confirmation testing—a lower-cost alternative—but getting results can take days, long after many families are ready to go home.

Doctors, nurses, and hospital social workers face an uncomfortable predicament: Do they send the baby home to what they believe could be an unsafe environment, or do they call authorities?

“God forbid the baby goes home, withdraws and dies, we’re going to be held liable for that,” said Dr. Adi Davidov, an obstetrician at Staten Island University Hospital, which drug-tests every birthing patient.

State mandatory reporting laws add to the pressure on doctors and nurses. These laws impose criminal liability on providers who fail to report, while also protecting physicians who report “in good faith”—insulating hospitals from lawsuits if test results are wrong. 

Even when doctors have the ability to order a confirmation test, they don’t always do so. Many misinterpret positive screens as definitive evidence of drug use.

“We were guilty until proven innocent.”

When Grace Smith had her fourth child in 2021 at St. Luke’s University Hospital, an hour north of Philadelphia, she was taking prescribed marijuana and Vyvanse, a medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The medicine contains amphetamine, but the hospital’s drug screen results did not differentiate between meth and amphetamine, according to medical records. The day after Smith delivered her son, a doctor told her that she and her baby had tested positive for meth and that the hospital had notified child protective services.

Smith’s husband, Michael, asked the doctor to review his wife’s medical records to confirm her prescription, according to the doctor’s notes. The doctor argued that wasn’t her role. “I explained that our responsibility as healthcare workers was to report the case” to child welfare authorities, she wrote, adding that the agency “would conduct any investigation that was necessary.”

When Michael Smith told the doctor they were leaving with their baby, the hospital called the police. An officer escorted the parents out, without their newborn, a police report shows. The Smiths said the police told them they would be arrested if they returned.

A spokesperson for St. Luke’s University Health Network declined to answer questions from The Marshall Project, saying in an email that the hospital “complies with all rules and regulations regarding drug testing and reporting” and that the newborn’s welfare “is always our primary concern.”

Four days after the Smiths’ son was born, Monroe County Children and Youth Services told the hospital it was okay to release the baby to his parents. But the investigation remained open. It wasn’t until the Smiths paid more than $3,500 for a lawyer—and nearly $300 for a confirmation drug test that came back negative—that the agency closed their case. The agency declined to comment.

The Smiths filed a lawsuit in 2022 against St. Luke’s. In its response, the hospital acknowledged that it had not given Grace a confirmation test, but denied violating the Smiths’ privacy or civil rights. A judge dismissed the suit in 2023, saying in part that the Smiths did not sufficiently argue their claims.

Many providers erroneously assume that child welfare agencies verify a parent’s drug use. But government caseworkers typically lack the expertise to accurately interpret drug test results. State policy manuals seldom mention the possibility of false positives. It often falls on parents to prove their own innocence.

As a nurse in South Carolina, Ashley Riley said she regularly drug-tested patients in an addiction treatment program, flagged faulty tests, and sent out positive screens for confirmation. But when she herself screened positive for opiates after delivering her son in 2023, Riley said the hospital declined to order a confirmation test, then reported her to authorities.

Riley and her husband, Jeffrey, insisted the positive result was from lemon poppy seed muffins that she had eaten throughout her pregnancy. As proof, Jeffrey Riley texted the investigator a receipt for the muffins, studies on false positives caused by poppy seeds, and the 2023 memo from the Department of Defense urging service members to avoid poppy seeds.

“At no point in time was there anybody in there that was even trying to advocate for my wife, except for me,” he recalled.

At first, he thought his efforts were working. The caseworker acknowledged in his notes having seen the poppy seeds and noted that the report “could be falsified.” 

But the caseworker still insisted the couple sign a safety plan, advising them that their two children would be placed in foster care unless they assigned a “protector”—a responsible adult who would supervise them with their children at all times. This continued for 45 days before the case was closed as unfounded. 

“We were guilty until proven innocent,” Ashley Riley said. 

The hospital even charged $424 for the problematic urine test. Hospital officials did not respond to multiple interview requests.

Will Batchelor, a spokesperson for the South Carolina Department of Social Services, wrote in a statement that the agency has a duty to investigate once a hospital has filed a report and that it “exercised appropriate restraint” by not removing the child from the home.

“Because the safety of a child is at stake, DSS has to continue its investigation beyond seeing a receipt for poppy seed muffins,” Batchelor wrote.

Even when a parent has a confirmation test and her own doctor’s word attesting to a false positive result, authorities may keep investigating.

When Melissa Robinson, an elementary school librarian in Huntsville, Alabama, screened pos​​itive for cocaine in early 2024, the news shocked her and her doctors. Robinson had avoided anything during her pregnancy that could be risky, even cold cuts—which may carry bacteria—and had no history of drug use. Because of the positive test, staff told Robinson she was not allowed to breastfeed her daughter, hospital records show, and they reported her to Alabama’s child welfare agency, the Department of Human Resources. Robinson said a caseworker told her that she probably wouldn’t be allowed to be alone with her baby—her husband would have to supervise.

A few days later, a confirmation test came back negative for any substances. With proof that she had not used cocaine, Robinson assumed the case would be closed. Instead, the agency continued to investigate, inspecting her home and even requiring her husband to take a drug test, she said.

A spokesperson for Alabama’s child welfare agency said they are required to respond immediately to a hospital report and “make safety decisions relying on current and most accessible information.”

When the baby was two weeks old, the agency closed the case, citing insufficient evidence. But the allegations will remain on Robinson’s record for at least five years.

“To have such a beautiful experience tainted by something like that, it’s difficult,” Robinson recalled. “Truthfully, it’s turned me into somebody different.” 

“To have such a beautiful experience tainted by something like that, it’s difficult. Truthfully, it’s turned me into somebody different.” 

Some medical groups and providers have taken steps to reduce unnecessary child welfare reports. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists advises hospitals to use a screening questionnaire rather than drug tests to identify people who may have substance abuse problems. The organization also recommends that hospitals obtain consent from patients, explaining the potential consequences of a positive result—including if the hospital is required to report it to authorities. A number of large hospitals have adopted some version of those recommendations. 

After a study at Staten Island University Hospital in New York found a high rate of false positives, administrators brought the confirmation testing in-house. They said results come back within a day or two, rather than the week that is typical for outside tests, which allows providers to wait before contacting child welfare.

“Any time you act on a test that’s not 100 percent, you run the risk of causing more harm than good,” said the hospital’s Dr. Davidov. “If you are going to get CPS involved with a mother who did nothing wrong and is a good citizen, that’s harming her. It’s harming her experience, it’s harming her ability to take care of her newborn.”

In recent years, advocacy groups have filed lawsuits against hospitals for testing without explicit consent, which has led some state officials and lawmakers to speak out against the testing. But in most of the United States, it remains common practice to report families based on unconfirmed positive screens. Most of the women interviewed by The Marshall Project signed general consent forms at the hospital but said they were never informed explicitly they would be drug-tested, nor that a positive result could be reported to authorities.

For Susan Horton, her family’s ordeal has created an undercurrent of fear that courses through her daily life. 

After the court hearing in August 2022, child welfare workers took the baby to Horton’s elderly in-laws and barred Horton and her husband from being alone with their newborn while the agency investigated. Finally, almost two weeks after their daughter was born, the agency withdrew its petition and a judge dismissed the case, allowing the Hortons to bring baby Halle home.

One afternoon last spring, Horton took her daughter, now a toddler, outside. Halle giggled as her mother chased her around the front yard, her little feet splashing in a small mud hole. This was the life Horton had envisioned years ago—a quiet place in the California countryside where her children could delight in the world around them. And yet, Horton couldn’t help but remember the investigation that destroyed her family’s peace of mind—and her self-esteem.

“I had a lot of confidence in how I mother and how I parent,” she said. “Now in my head, I’m always questioning my choices.” She wondered aloud what neighbors would say if they saw her daughter playing in the mud, if someone might accuse her of being a bad parent.

“I just always have that looming feeling that at any moment CPS could come knocking and take my children away.” 

Marshall Project reporters Weihua Li, Andrew Rodriguez Calderón, Nakylah Carter, and Catherine Odom contributed to this story.

When Barack Obama takes the stage in Chicago tonight to support the candidacy of his old friend Kamala Harris, many Americans will see it as another torch-passing moment in a Democratic National Convention that’s already been replete with them. This one is extra emotional because of the sheer improbable nature of what the former president and current vice president have achieved. What many people won’t realize is that without Harris’s early and enthusiastic support, Obama’s career might have taken a different trajectory. Maybe he would have ended up in the White House anyway in 2008, maybe later, but Harris gave him a critical boost at a time when he was still largely unknown. And she did it at enormous risk to her own standing with the Democratic Party’s donor class.

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed.

Back in 2007, Harris was a rising star in Bay Area politics, a “progressive prosecutor” before that became a thing, with a catchphrase that was already being borrowed by legislators and law enforcers across the country. Instead of claiming to be tough on crime, she insisted she was “smart on crime.” She was a shoo-in to win reelection as San Francisco district attorney after coming from way, way behind in her first race against a well-known incumbent—a victory that was made possible thanks to the support of rich socialites and other deep-pocketed San Franciscans who also happened to be extremely active in national politics. 

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to publicly endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed. It wasn’t that they didn’t like Obama—they thought he was amazing. But this was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s moment. 

The New York Times covered some of this territory in a story about the longstanding Obama-Harris friendship and alliance. But it didn’t quite get at the audacity of what Harris was doing when she sided with the junior senator from Illinois over the former first lady and feminist icon whose supporters believed the nomination should be hers for the asking. 

Harris told me in 2007 that she met Obama when he was running for the Senate three years before. “We had a lot of common friends, and he and his wife and I—we know a lot of the same people. The world”—by which she meant the universe of Black and brown politicians with grand ambitions as it existed two decades ago, which of course was pre-Obama—“is very small.” Not only did they share similar cultural backgrounds, “We shared a lot of values, so it’s been easy to develop a friendship around shared experiences and values,” she told me. They also shared a gift for communication and a charisma that people found thrilling. “It has been phenomenal to watch how he is exciting to the incredibly large number of people who have never been involved [in politics] or who have walked away from it because they’ve been turned off,” she told me. They did fundraising events for each other, but the bond went beyond the mere transactional: “We just have forged a great friendship.”

Because of that friendship, Harris never faltered when Obama asked for her support, people around her told me back then. They had something else important in common: Harris knew what it was like to be told that now wasn’t the right time, that this was someone else’s moment, that people “weren’t ready.” “It was the same as the [first] DA’s race many years ago,” she told me in an interview a few years later.

Harris expounded on the theme in a commencement speech to San Francisco State University students in 2007 that was picked up by the New York Times. “I remember the day I got my first poll results back [in the DA’s race],” she told the crowd. “I was sitting in a small conference room, a little nervous, but very hopeful. Then I read them. I was at 6 percent. And that wasn’t good. So I was told what you all have probably heard in your life, and that you will certainly hear in your future. I was told that I should wait my turn. I was told that I should give up. I was told that I had no chance.

“Well, I didn’t listen. And I’m telling you, don’t you listen, either. Don’t listen when they tell you that you can’t do it…. And surround yourself with people who will support you and will encourage your ambition.”

When Barack Obama takes the stage in Chicago tonight to support the candidacy of his old friend Kamala Harris, many Americans will see it as another torch-passing moment in a Democratic National Convention that’s already been replete with them. This one is extra emotional because of the sheer improbable nature of what the former president and current vice president have achieved. What many people won’t realize is that without Harris’s early and enthusiastic support, Obama’s career might have taken a different trajectory. Maybe he would have ended up in the White House anyway in 2008, maybe later, but Harris gave him a critical boost at a time when he was still largely unknown. And she did it at enormous risk to her own standing with the Democratic Party’s donor class.

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed.

Back in 2007, Harris was a rising star in Bay Area politics, a “progressive prosecutor” before that became a thing, with a catchphrase that was already being borrowed by legislators and law enforcers across the country. Instead of claiming to be tough on crime, she insisted she was “smart on crime.” She was a shoo-in to win reelection as San Francisco district attorney after coming from way, way behind in her first race against a well-known incumbent—a victory that was made possible thanks to the support of rich socialites and other deep-pocketed San Franciscans who also happened to be extremely active in national politics. 

In 2007, the vast majority of those donors were Team Hillary. Harris became one of the first elected California politicians to publicly endorse Obama. Many of her Democrat-elite pals were miffed. It wasn’t that they did like Obama—they thought he was amazing. But this was supposed to be Hillary Clinton’s moment. 

The New York Times covered some of this territory in a story about the longstanding Obama-Harris friendship and alliance. But it didn’t quite get at the audacity of what Harris was doing when she sided with the junior senator from Illinois over the former first lady and feminist icon whose supporters believed the nomination should be hers for the asking. 

Harris told me in 2007 that she met Obama when he was running for the Senate three years before. “We had a lot of common friends, and he and his wife and I—we know a lot of the same people. The world”—by which she meant the universe of Black and brown politicians with grand ambitions as it existed two decades ago, which of course was pre-Obama—“is very small.” Not only did they share similar cultural backgrounds, “We shared a lot of values, so it’s been easy to develop a friendship around shared experiences and values,” she told me. They also shared a gift for communication and a charisma that people found thrilling. “It has been phenomenal to watch how he is exciting to the incredibly large number of people who have never been involved [in politics] or who have walked away from it because they’ve been turned off,” she told me. They did fundraising events for each other, but the bond went beyond the mere transactional: “We just have forged a great friendship.”

Because of that friendship, Harris never faltered when Obama asked for her support, people around her told me back then. They had something else important in common: Harris knew what it was like to be told that now wasn’t the right time, that this was someone else’s moment, that people “weren’t ready.” “It was the same as the [first] DA’s race many years ago,” she told me in an interview a few years later.

Harris expounded on the theme in a commencement speech to San Francisco State University students in 2007 that was picked up by the New York Times. “I remember the day I got my first poll results back [in the DA’s race],” she told the crowd. “I was sitting in a small conference room, a little nervous, but very hopeful. Then I read them. I was at 6 percent. And that wasn’t good. So I was told what you all have probably heard in your life, and that you will certainly hear in your future. I was told that I should wait my turn. I was told that I should give up. I was told that I had no chance.

“Well, I didn’t listen. And I’m telling you, don’t you listen, either. Don’t listen when they tell you that you can’t do it…. And surround yourself with people who will support you and will encourage your ambition.”