1). “Economic Update: The US Capitalist Class and the Election”, Nov 25, 2024, Richard Wolff interviews Professors Michael Hillard and Richard McIntyre about their upcoming book Burning Down Your House: Confronting America's Exceptional Capitalist Class, Democracy at Work, Interview runs from 15:40 – 30:47, at < https://www.youtube.com/watch?
2). “Economic Overlords Are Destroying Democracy — and Our Lives”, Aug 11, 2024, David Moscrop interviews Peter Phillips, Jacobin, at < https://jacobin.com/2024/08/
3). “Trump Won Less Than 50 Percent. Why Is Everyone Calling It a Landslide?: Right and left have bought the narrative of a crushing triumph. They’re wrong”, Nov 22, 2024, Michael Schaffer, Politico, at < https://www.politico.com/news/
4). “Presidents often claim mandates − especially when they want to expand their power or are on the defensive”, Nov 22, 2024, Julia R. Azari, The Conversation, at < https://theconversation.com/
5). “Conservatives Want to End 'Exceptions' for Women’s Lives: And they think no one will notice”, Nov 25, 2024, Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day, at < https://jessica.substack.com/
~~ recommended by dmorista ~~
Introduction by dmorista: Leftist analysts have long noted that Finance Capital is the most dangerous and destructive variant of capitalism. In the U.S. the Finance Capitalists oversaw, and immensely profited from, the deindustrialization of the U.S. (and later of Canada, Japan, and parts of Europe). The most rapacious and vicious elements of Finance Capital are now overseeing the potential large scale dismantling of the U.S. State apparatus. With crackpots nominated to become directors of agencies like the CDC and FDA we could easily see an end to the school attendance mandates for vaccinations ended. Measles and polio and whooping cough will surely become scourges again and other diseases, that are largely under control now, could become more common.
Item 1)., “Economic Update: ….”, shows an interview with 2 Marxist economists who discuss the basic difference between U.S. Capitalism and the variants of Capitalism found in European and some Asian countries. They say that many of the problems in U.S. society are due to American Capitalism itself and that hardly anybody notices this in the U.S. And Item 2)., “Economic Overlords ….”, provides an interview with Peter Phillips, about his new book, Titans of Capital: How Concentrated Wealth Threatens Humanity. Phllips chose 10 large Finance Capital companies and examined the actions of the 117 executives who run those companies, and who control 50 Trillion Dollars in assets. He, not surprisingly, found that these executives now exercise significant political and economic power in the U.S. and elsewhere. They see themselves as enemies of working class and middle class people.
Item 3)., “Trump Won Less ….”, and Item 4). “Presidents often claim mandates ….”, both argue that the so-called mandate that Trump's minions are claiming is completely bogus. However many opponents of the far-right have been taken in by the Trump Mandate Disinformation Campaign. But these articles present sound arguments and ideas for opposing the bleat of the right to streamline all confirmation procedures for Trump's nominees for the cabinet and for other high offices.
Item 5)., “Conservatives Want to End ….” discusses how the ever aggressive forced-pregnancy / forced-birth movement continues to work on their ultimate agenda to prohibit all abortions and end access to birth control of any type. Their particular vicious crackpot agenda is moving on and the U.S. continues to sink to become one of the most dangerous places on Earth for a pregnant woman to live. American Women are talking about a South Korean 4 Bs type of response; with women refusing to have sexual relations with men and a plummeting fertility rate. South Korea, was tied with Taiwan for the lowest female fertility rate (1 child / woman / lifetime). Now S. Korea has a fertility rate of 0.71, and the U.S. could see similar developments. Other women are suggesting that any American woman of reproductive age, who can afford to do so, should leave the country immediately and live elsewhere.
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Economic Overlords Are Destroying Democracy — and Our Lives
Economic power is political power. We spoke with Peter Phillips, author of Titans of Capital, about how the capitalist class is subverting democracy and controlling the lives of billions through massive investments in everything from food to war.
Titans of Capital: How Concentrated Wealth Threatens Humanity, the upcoming book from Peter Phillips, professor of sociology at Sonoma State University, explores the influence of the “titans” — the board members of the top ten investment management firms who control nearly $50 trillion in assets. In conversation with Jacobin’s David Moscrop, Phillips explains how these 117 corporate overlords wield unparalleled economic and political power, shaping global policies and deepening economic inequalities. They exploit crises like global warming and rising food prices, using institutions like the World Economic Forum (WEF) to promote their interests.
Despite their immense power, they remain wary of mass politics and social movements, recognizing the potential for resistance from below.
The titans are a kind of working sociological category, representing the board of directors of the top ten investment management companies in the world: BlackRock, Vanguard, UBS, Fidelity, State Street, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Amundi in France, Allianz SE in Germany, and Capital Group.
I chose ten companies to create a manageable sample size, resulting in 117 people whom I call “titans.” These are the most powerful people in the world — they decide where almost $50 trillion worth of capital is going to be invested.
That wealth controlled by these 117 people is unprecedented. When I wrote my book Giants five years ago, it was already staggering, but it has since more than doubled. So it’s quite a transformation.
Economic power is political power. Political power can be used to reinforce and grow economic power, and vice versa. How do the titans manage this process of using their political power to boost their economic power and their economic power to boost their political power?
It’s not that they have direct political power. The US government, military, and intelligence agencies are designed to protect the vital interests of the United States and global capital. While they do accommodate the needs of the Titans and may have direct communication with them, it’s not like they stake direct marching orders. It is more a matter of influence.
The titans participate in a number of policy groups, the Atlantic Council being one of the most powerful. At least half of them go to Davos every year, further extending their reach into corridors of power. Ultimately, capitalist governments are structured to protect capital, which is why the wealth of the titans continues to increase.
Investing in Misery
These people exist to accumulate capital. They pressure the state to set rules that facilitate accumulation of capital. You write that the titans profit from the climate crisis, from war, and from addictions. What’s the strategy here? Is it simply that they’re nihilists — they don’t care where they get their money? If there’s an opportunity, they’re going to seize on and exploit it?
Well, one of their biggest problems is finding sufficient safe investment opportunities. They have more capital than there are secure places to invest, which pushes them into speculative investments. They must continually find new opportunities or push political agendas that open up different areas for new investment. They would love to see the authoritarian patronalism of Putin’s Russian Federation replaced by a pro-capitalist government to crack open the country’s vast natural resources.
Their need to grow and achieve returns in the 6, 7, 8 percent range or higher means they constantly need new investment opportunities. This relentless pursuit often leads to speculative investments, which can sometimes go wrong, or investments into areas that have negative consequences, such as fossil fuels contributing to global warming. They have $400 billion invested into the world’s top gas- and oil-producing companies, a commitment they can’t easily reverse. That’s one of the biggest reasons that global warming continues — because of that capital investment. There’s no effort to undo that. There would be no way to take that $400 billion and put it somewhere else that would continue to provide similar growth.
The titans won’t waste a crisis if they can exploit it. You argue that the affordability crisis has been good business for them. How have, for instance, rising food prices boosted their bottom line?
Well, they’re widely invested in the biggest food companies. They have $85 billion in Archer-Daniels-Midland. They have $165 billion invested in Cargill. The consequence of inequality and rising food prices is dire: several hundred million people in the world live on just $2.15 a day, and 80 percent of people in the world live on less than $10 a day. This vast inequality continues to grow, leading to twenty-five thousand deaths daily from malnutrition alone.
Davos: Shield for the Rich
Big finance is very good at creating and using institutions to support their ends or to whitewash their records or to run PR for them. You write about Davos and the World Economic Forum specifically as examples. How do the titans use Davos and the WEF as a PR machine?
They’ve embraced the World Economic Forum because it provides a platform to promote the idea of good governance and universal security. But it’s largely propaganda aimed at defending capitalism. The titans recognize the growing inequalities and resulting resistance that top-down capital accumulation can provoke among global populations. So they’re trying to mitigate that. By participating in forums like Davos, they attempt to portray capitalism and their activities as beneficial and equitable. Nothing could be further from the truth.
They claim that extreme poverty has been declining, and it had been until the pandemic hit, causing it to rise back up by a couple hundred million people. However, even before the pandemic, the decline in extreme poverty was primarily due to progress in one country: China. China deliberately eliminated extreme poverty, defined as living on $2.15 cents a day. While China still has several hundred million people living on $5 a day, it has successfully eliminated extreme poverty according to the UN’s definition. In contrast, extreme poverty has not been eliminated anywhere else in the world and has actually increased in several capitalist countries.
Do the titans have a weakness? They seem so tremendously powerful that the long-term project of undoing the plutocratic order and struggling for economic democracy and justice seems extraordinarily difficult. Do you see any points at which they’re vulnerable?
They’re vulnerable to mass politics and social movements of any kind: civil rights movements, anti-poverty movements, and urban unrest, even though such unrest can be violently repressed by governments worldwide. This vulnerability is one of the reasons Davos meets annually — to accommodate or make changes that can preempt any potential social movement developments that might threaten them.
They’re afraid of revolution from below because they’re just a small minority of people with extreme wealth trying to maintain this inequality — and it’s growing ever greater. Following [Karl] Marx’s understanding, it does seem inevitable that these underclasses will eventually resist, saying, “we’re not going to play anymore.” The titans are constantly aware of this and trying to mitigate it as best they can.
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Trump Won Less Than 50 Percent. Why Is Everyone Calling It a Landslide?
Right and left have bought the narrative of a crushing triumph. They’re wrong.
Illustration by Jade Cuevas/POLITICO (source images via Getty Images and iStock)
Michael Schaffer is a senior editor and columnist at POLITICO Magazine. He has covered national and local politics for over 20 years and spent seven years as editor-in-chief of the Washingtonian. His Capital City column chronicles the inside conversations and big trends shaping Washington politics.
Is it newsworthy that Donald Trump’s share of the 2024 presidential vote has fallen below 50 percent?
You wouldn’t think it’s a big deal based on the relatively few headlines triggered by the milestone, which passed quietly last weekend as California and other states continued their glacially slow vote counts.
And maybe that’s as it should be. After all, Trump’s 49.9 percent (for now) is still more than Kamala Harris’ 48.3 percent. When the counting is done, the margin will probably have shrunk even further. No matter: It still earns him 312 electoral votes from a population that also gave his Republican Party control of the House and Senate. He won.
All the same, the numbers might seem a wee bit jarring to anyone who has been listening to Washington’s triumphal Republicans and self-flagellating Democrats — all of whom seem to have internalized a version of the story that involves a romping, stomping Trump triumph.
It’s hard to blame them: Even as the counting progressed, Trump’s victory was described as “resounding” by news organizations ranging from the Associated Press to the The Washington Post to the The New York Times to POLITICO. Others offered “commanding win,” “runaway win” and “dominant victory.”
Say what?
To coin a phrase, we’ve defined dominance down. After years as a 50-50 country, it seems, even a small win gets talked about like a shellacking. Wriggling into office with a puny plurality and less than half the vote in an essentially two-way race used to be considered pretty weak sauce. A squeaker. Why do we now treat a JV-caliber success like some sort of Olympian feat? Following the traumas of 2020, maybe “dominant victory” has come to simply mean a win that doesn’t lead to endless recounts or domestic insurrection.
Washington, please stop this consensus!
This is not to praise the anemic Democratic performance — or question the fact of Trump’s victory. He swept the battleground states, improved his nationwide numbers in places where Republicans usually get wiped out and helped his party narrowly hold the House while taking the Senate. Under our system, that means Trump gets to move into the White House and sign the laws he and his allies push through the legislature. For better or worse, the United States Constitution doesn’t care about margins of victory.
The only thing is, what Trump did this month is a lot like what Joe Biden did four years ago — but with less of the general public on his side. Biden won the vote by about four-and-a-half points, making inroads with GOP demographics and capturing the swing states while his party held the House and retook the Senate by the narrowest possible margin. There was no talk back then of a Biden blowout.
And appropriately so: Biden may have had a popular majority, but it too was a squeaker.
The two winners’ legislative coattails were similarly unimpressive: Biden’s 2020 Democrats retained the House while losing seats, and won the Senate only after a weird Georgia runoff where Trump’s post-election ranting helped the Democrats. Trump’s 2024 Republicans, likewise, have yet to expand their paltry House majority and lost Senate races in at least four states carried by Trump.
In Washington, this kind of comparison can lead to an intense, irritating, unwinnable argument about just whose victory was more impressive — as if “impressiveness” earned the winner any extra powers after inauguration day.
The more interesting question is what this big-win fable is likely to do to our political calculus going forward.
Look on social media and you’ll find folks chalking the blowout narrative up to media gullibility, or worse. Trump, the old real estate salesman, inevitably calls any house a castle and any win a landslide. Once again, they say, people who ought to know better have bought into the hucksterism.
In fact, I’d add some different explanations. Part of it is myopia: The people who watch politics most closely spent the campaign season hyper-focused on a few swing states and a few bellwether demographics. Trump exceeded expectations on all of them. The close attention to officially important races created a perception that dims when you pull back the camera to look at the whole country.
A bigger part of it may be psychology. After 18 months of covering the endless campaign, it’s only human to justify the emotional investment by finding a sweeping verdict in the results — even if it’s not there. Merely assigning control of the United States government for the next four years feels insufficient.
The irony of it all, though, is that the false sense of clarity about the results may actually be a good thing for the Democrats.
Instead of wondering whether some discrete tactic or specific demographic could have put them over the top, the shell-shocked party appears destined to do a deep dive on its long-festering problems: How did the historic party of the little guy come to lose the working class? What’s the cost of placating “the groups,” as Democrats call their often identity-based activist organizations? Is it time to rethink their generation-long embrace of neoliberalism?
Truth be told, these are conversations Democrats needed to have even before they stunk it up on Election Day. But insiders might be less bent on self-examination if the smart set had spent the last two weeks describing an electoral close call instead of a Trumpian walk-over.
On the GOP side, I think the landslide narrative is going to be a more mixed bag.
Yes, Republicans get to feel like winners, which is fun. On the other hand, even in this moment of triumph, they’re really not that popular. A narrative of 2024 that depicted them wheezing into office with an unimpressive vote count might trigger some conversations they need to have, too: Why is a party that promises lower taxes alienating so many of the successful folks who benefit from lower taxes? How are they going to avoid bungling the next national emergency when they’re perpetually hostile to experts? Are extremely online staff bros the GOP version of annoying post-collegiate Democratic aides, a cohort that will soon damage their bosses’ brand?
If Trump — and the slim legislative majorities who take office with him — wants to see the downside of learning the wrong lesson, they need only to look at the folks they’re about to replace.
Biden and the Democrats may not have claimed a landslide, but the message they took was that the administration needed to satisfy the social-justice activists who marched in 2020, avoid looking like squishy centrists and dismiss questions about inflation or age as feckless media parroting of GOP talking points. A lot of those decisions are now being blamed for the 46th president’s unpopularity.
By actually describing the election in all of its unsatisfying shades of gray, the chattering class would be doing the GOP a favor. Far more popular presidents than Trump have been done in by hubris about election results.
And that’s why the wrongheaded Beltway certitude is also damaging to the general public.
Trump is already using the idea of his being the era’s dominant political figure to exert more control over his Republican legislative allies. Demanding that the Senate allow recess appointments is the move of a big-time winner, not a guy who couldn’t even win half of American voters. For a chief executive, it’s always empowering when people buy the idea that you’re a juggernaut. And for this chief executive, with his disregard for old-line norms and his campaign talk of retribution against enemies — and an array of less authoritarian ideas for radical change — it’s especially dangerous.
Sure enough, here’s an op-ed this week from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy outlining their hope to fire public servants by cutting the budget without congressional sign-off, something that’s currently illegal: “On Nov. 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it.”
For analysts reveling in clear election results — or Democratic reformers embracing the need for a wholesale rethink — it’s pretty hard to push back on these bogus claims of a sweeping mandate if you’re busy echoing those claims.
The presidency comes with enough legal authority by itself. Why assign any small-margin winner the moral authority that comes with a popular mandate? For people in the business of reporting results and analyzing outcomes, it may feel satisfying to claim clarity after months of watching the battle. The only problem is it’s not true.
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Presidents often claim mandates − especially when they want to expand their power or are on the defensive
Shortly after the 2024 election was called in Donald Trump’s favor, he declared that voters had given him “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
As the popular vote margin shrinks, however, this claim seems less plausible. But it puts Trump squarely within the historical tradition of how presidents – and those around them – have claimed electoral mandates.
These claims don’t necessarily tell anything meaningful about the election results. More often, they reflect dynamics of presidential power and other political forces.
Scholars of American politics have expressed skepticism about mandates. Does a mandate mean that the election carried a special message? How do we know what voters were thinking as they cast ballots? Are some elections mandates and others not? If so, how do we know? What’s the popular vote cutoff – is it a majority or more? Who decides? One scholar has flatly declared, “There’s no such thing as a mandate.”
The possible objections to the entire idea of an electoral mandate are endless. But the idea remains attractive to politicians and commentators. It was with this in mind that I conducted research into how this language is actually used and has changed over time.
For my 2014 book “Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate,” I looked at how presidents, their communications teams and the news media have talked about election results and linked them to presidential decisions. I read through about 1,500 presidential communications from 1929 through 2009, including news media interactions, speeches and some written documents, and I drew on archival research from the Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Reagan libraries. The history of how presidents have claimed mandates actually sheds a lot of light on today’s mandate claims.
I found that recent mandate narratives are sometimes successful. But often, they are not. They’ve been increasingly employed by politicians in weak positions, in response to polarized politics and flagging legitimacy.
But they have also historically been connected to unprecedented expansions of presidential power. This could be a recipe for overreach, as it often has been for modern presidents. Or it could be a way to give an unchecked executive the veneer of following the popular will.
Here are some specifics from my research:
1. Mandate claims accompany expansions of presidential power
Early uses of presidential mandate claims date back to Andrew Jackson, who often pushed at the boundaries of what presidents were supposed to do.
His decision to destroy the Second Bank of the United States was justified through his insistence that the 1832 election was a mandate for his position on the issue. Jackson ordered his treasury secretary to remove deposits from the Bank, and dismissed him when he refused, rationalizing his actions by claiming the president enjoys a special popular endorsement – a mandate.
Not quite a century later, Woodrow Wilson articulated the idea that the president was specifically given power to act by virtue of his election and spoke for the “whole people.” This formed the basis for the idea that the president should play a greater role in policy leadership than presidents had up to that point.
This conception of the president as a popular leader and main spokesperson for his party’s agenda – a common view now – came after decades of presidents pushing at the boundaries of the office and expanding its authority.
As I note in my book, Wilson’s vision of himself as a “prime ministerial” party leader anticipated the modern, legislatively active presidency.
That paved the way for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the significant expansion of presidential power during his lengthy tenure in office, including expansion of the administrative state through the New Deal.
The most recent turning point I identified in my research came after Watergate and Vietnam, in which the presidency went through a period of overreach and public backlash.
What I found was that in response to the public skepticism about executive power that emerged in the wake of these developments, presidents began to emphasize elections and campaign promises as a way of highlighting transparency and accountability to the public. Emphasis on the presidential mandate came at a time when presidents sought popular legitimacy to support expanding executive power.
Trump is testing the checks and balances of the Cabinet confirmation process – and thereby attempting to assert unilateral power, unchecked by the Senate – by asking the Senate for recess appointments. Yielding to Trump’s wish, I believe, would dramatically transform the governing landscape, shifting even more power from Congress to the president.
2. Presidents use mandate claims when on the defensive
In addition to the rise of mandate claims in the post-Watergate period, presidents have been more apt to highlight the differences between their ideas and those of their opponents.
Obama repeatedly referred to the 2008 election as a rejection of Republican ideas. When meeting with Republican congressional leaders in 2001, George W. Bush – after losing the popular vote – noted: “I also want to remind members of both parties that I am able to stand before you as the President because of an agenda that I ran on. I believe the fact that I took specific stands on important issues is the reason I was able to win.”
The period after 1980 also saw an increase in presidents talking about “the reason I was elected.” A few days after his 1993 inauguration, Bill Clinton was asked by a journalist whether the “controversy” over the proposal to lift the ban on gay and lesbian military personnel had “given the American people the wrong idea of what your priorities are.”
Clinton responded: “I have not, frankly, spent very much time on it compared to the time I’m spending on the economy, which is what I was elected to do.”
The Trump team is riding high on a presumptive popular vote victory. But as the administration pursues a controversial policy agenda, including possible mass deportations and tariffs, we might expect the election, and its implied mandate, to come into play as a justification for these choices.
3. Conservative and Democratic mandate claims diverge in focus
Since the 1970s, both Democratic and Republican presidents have referred to election results and campaign promises more often than in the past. But the way each party has done it has been different.
Democrats tend to connect mandate claims to a wide variety of policies and ideas – the environment, the economy, good governance – often focusing on fairly small agenda items.
Republicans, in contrast, have zeroed in on a few policies or ideas: Reagan insisted that the 1980 election was a mandate for a conservative turn, while George W. Bush stressed that low taxes and Social Security reform powered his election, although his efforts to change Social Security didn’t convince even his own party.
It’s not hard to imagine Trump following the conservative playbook, repeatedly framing the election as a mandate for Trumpism: severe anti-immigration measures and consolidation of presidential power.
But others may advance competing narratives: Trump appointee Vivek Ramaswamy has said that Trump has a “mandate for unifying the country,” an idea which sounds counter to Trump’s divisive proposals.
Still others might see Trump’s election as an opportunity to push their own pet agenda items, such as attacking diversity, equity and inclusion measures or pulling back federal support for vaccines, muddling the focus of Trump’s narrative.
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Conservatives Want to End 'Exceptions' for Women’s Lives
Most of the time, I enjoy making political predictions. This one, however, makes my stomach turn: Conservatives want to do away with ‘exceptions’ for women’s lives. In fact, they’ve been laying the groundwork to eradicate the exception since Roe was overturned—though I didn’t fully piece together the move until recently, when I saw a leading anti-abortion activist refer to life-saving abortions as ‘elective.’
The short version is that they’ve been strategically redefining ‘abortion’ across law, culture and medicine, while pushing the false claim that abortion is never necessary to save a person’s life. The end game is legislation that bans abortion in all cases, mandating that doctors only end life-threatening pregnancies using c-sections or induced vaginal birth, no matter the risk to the pregnant person.
I’ll explain in detail, but please know that like most anti-abortion strategies, this one is being rolled out quietly and incrementally. In the same way that Republicans won’t pass an outright ban on contraception—instead chipping away at access until birth control is impossible to get—the plan is to methodically eradicate the exception right under our noses.
Because the idea of eliminating life-saving abortions is so radical—who would suggest such a thing?—there’s a real risk that Americans won’t notice until it’s too late. The unthinkable-ness of their extremism is protecting them.
This is exactly why I publish Abortion, Every Day: The work I’ve done over the last year—tracking seemingly unrelated moves from anti-abortion organizations, lawmakers and lobbyists—makes what they’re doing clear. You just need to connect the dots. So let’s take a look back at some of the tactics I’ve told you about this year, and piece it all together.
Redefining ‘abortion’
Abortion is a medical intervention to end a pregnancy, for any reason. But since Roe was overturned, conservatives have been trying to redefine abortion as an intention. For instance, they claim that treatment for miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies aren’t really abortions—even if the medication or procedure is identical—because these pregnancies are presumably wanted.
In addition to dividing women into those who ‘deserve’ care and those who don’t, the goal is to divorce abortion from healthcare.
Even though this definition has no basis in medicine or reality, Republicans have embedded it in state laws and policies anyway—often after being lobbied by anti-abortion groups.
North Carolina’s abortion ban, for example, states that “an act is not an abortion” if doctors “remove an ectopic pregnancy” or “remove a dead, unborn child.” And earlier this year in South Dakota, the state’s Secretary of Health Melissa Magstadt released an ‘informational’ video where she said treatment for ectopic pregnancies and miscarriages “is not considered abortion” and that “intent plays a crucial role” in defining true abortions.
Please understand that they’re not codifying this lie for kicks. The more frequently these redefinitions appear in state laws, the easier it becomes for conservatives to argue in court that the false definition is rooted in the country’s history and tradition. All they need is a patchwork of state policies to point to and say, See? Abortion is defined as an intention!
Replacing ‘abortion’
Republicans aren’t just redefining abortion, they’re replacing it with the made-up medical term ‘maternal fetal separation.’ As absurd as it sounds, here’s Kristan Hawkins, president of the extremist group Students for Life, explaining:
“When you’re looking at a case where a woman’s life is at risk, where the physician believes that she can no longer safely carry her child in her womb, or she may lose her life—we wouldn’t consider that an abortion [but a] ‘maternal-fetal separation’.”
Some might ask, What does it matter what they call the procedure, so long as women get the care they need? Well, it matters because when Republicans started citing ‘separation procedures,’ they also began outlining the type of procedures they’d consider acceptable means of ‘separation.’ Namely, induction of vaginal birth and c-sections.
To be crystal clear: Republicans want women with life-threatening pregnancies—even when they’re very early on—to be forced into major abdominal surgery, or unnecessary and traumatic vaginal delivery, rather than get a ten-minute abortion.
Why promote this horror? I wrote about this at length in my book and you can read background here as well, but the short version is that this is yet another way to divorce abortion from healthcare. Conservatives want to be able to claim that abortion is never necessary to save someone’s health or life; they think they can make that lie true by forcing women into c-sections and calling it ‘maternal fetal separation.’
That leads us to the next section, where it all comes together.
Claiming abortion is never medically necessary
The effort to redefine and replace “abortion” in legislation has always been about laying the groundwork for one central—and false—argument: that abortion is never medically necessary.
After all, if abortion is just the intentional ending of a pregnancy, and if women with life-threatening pregnancies can just be treated with ‘maternal fetal separations,’ then all abortions can be labeled elective. That’s the goal.
Sometimes, they say this outright. This summer, for example, I reported on a paper published by anti-abortion activists Ingrid Skop and James Studnicki. They argued that “there is no disease, illness or condition for which an induced abortion has been determined to be a standard of care” and claimed there is “no justification” for health- or life-saving abortions. Instead, they suggested women can simply be given ‘separation’ procedures—in other words, c-sections.
Just a few weeks ago, well-known anti-abortion activist Dr. John Bruchalski echoed that sentiment, calling life-saving abortions ‘elective.’ He said, “There are no advantages for a mother to end her pregnancy by an elective abortion, even in the most life-threatening circumstances.’” Again, the idea is that a standard abortion procedure isn’t necessary because women can be induced or forced into surgery.
This isn’t a fringe belief of random activists. Some of the country’s most prominent anti-abortion groups are on board. When the first post-Dobbs deaths were reported, for example, I noticed that major anti-abortion leaders responded by saying abortion bans allowed for life-saving care—but wouldn’t say the law allowed for life-saving abortions. Instead, they said bans allow doctors to “treat” patients or “intervene” to save lives, carefully sidestepping the word ‘abortion.’
That’s deliberate—and not just because they don’t believe abortion is medically necessary. The nation’s leading anti-abortion organizations will never say doctors can legally provide life-saving abortions because their ultimate goal is to eliminate that exception entirely.
If you’re skeptical, consider this: It wasn’t so long ago that Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America (SBA-PLA) lobbied against an exception for women’s lives in Tennessee. When the state first passed its trigger ban, there was no exception for life-threatening pregnancies—just an affirmative defense mandate. That meant doctors had to break the law to provide a life-saving abortion and then defend it after the fact.
After facing political backlash, Republicans considered adding an exception for women’s lives, but SBA-PLA fought to keep it out. (There’s even audio of that lobbying effort.)
Meanwhile, we’re also in a moment when Republicans are fighting for the right to deny women life-saving abortions in hospital emergency rooms, and disbanding maternal mortality committees in order to hide the deaths of women killed by bans.
So are you really surprised?
How they’ll do it
You won’t see states passing laws explicitly banning life-saving abortions anytime soon. Republicans are too strategic for that. Instead, they’ll use the same incremental approach they’ve employed elsewhere—chipping away bit by bit. Most egregiously, I feel certain they’ll exploit women’s suffering and deaths to do it.
In fact, that tactic has already started: You might remember how anti-abortion legislators first started codifying their false definition of abortion after stories emerged of women being denied care. They claimed they were simply “clarifying” bans to address any confusion and ensure doctors knew they could treat women with ectopic pregnancies, miscarriages, or life-threatening conditions. Republicans framed these legislative tweaks as protections for women.
But let’s be clear: these people have no interest in protecting women. Their “clarifications” are a cover for the real end goal.
In the coming months, I expect we’ll see even more language about ‘maternal-fetal separation’ and legislative changes framed as efforts to ‘clarify’ abortion bans—especially as more stories of women dying come to light. I suspect they might even use a specific woman’s death as justification for tweaking a state ban.
At the same time, anti-abortion organizations will continue to normalize treating life-threatening pregnancies with c-sections and vaginal labor rather than traditional abortion procedures. Groups like the Charlotte Lozier Institute already explicitly recommend that emergency abortions “be done by labor induction or c-section,” falsely calling it “medically standard.” (It most certainly is not.)1
Meanwhile, Republican leaders in anti-abortion states will offer “guidance” to doctors about how to legally treat women with life-threatening pregnancies, stressing ‘separation’ procedures. All of these same groups and legislators will also spread propaganda claiming that abortion procedures like D&Cs or abortion medications are far more dangerous than c-sections or vaginal labor.
Eventually, we’ll see a test case: a state where legislators pass a total abortion ban without exceptions. Because, they’ll say, abortion isn’t medically necessary anyway. As I noted earlier, when that case reaches the courts, conservative legal groups will point to years of legislation from multiple states as evidence that it’s “widely accepted” that abortion is simply an intention.
And while it’s true that this strategy is a slow and quiet one, it’s important to know that it’s already unfolding. Reports show that doctors are increasingly performing c-sections on women—even when it’s too early for a fetus to survive—out of fear of breaking the law.
In Louisiana, for example, doctors are performing more c-sections to avoid even the appearance of performing an abortion. And just today, ProPublica published yet another story of a woman killed by Texas’ abortion ban. Why? Because doctors were too afraid to perform a D&C.
They might not have explicitly banned life-saving abortions yet, but doctors are already too scared to perform them.
I know this is a lot—difficult to read and harder to process. I appreciate you sticking with me this far. I wish I had a better prediction, and I wish I didn’t feel so confident that this is their plan for the country. But I truly believe that the more we understand what they’re trying to do, the better prepared we’ll be to stop them.
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