1). “Stop Turning Women’s Bodies Into Crime Scenes”, Dec 4, 2025, Jessica Valenti & Kylie Cheung, Abortion, Every Day, at < https://jessica.substack.com/
2). “The Most Unpopular Laws in America: Nobody wants abortion bans—not even deep red states”, Dec 3, 2025, Jessica Valenti, Abortion, Every Day, at < https://jessica.substack.com/
3). “ ‘Never seen anything like this’: alarm at memo from top US vaccine official: Vinay Prasad memo said at least 10 children had died from Covid vaccination – but offered scant evidence for claim”, Dec 4, 2025, Melody Schreiber, The Guardian, at < https://www.theguardian.com/
4). “Pediatricians fill vaccine messaging void left by CDC amid bad flu season: Doctors step up after US health department suspended its flu vaccine campaign following Trump’s election”, Nov 11, 2025, Melody Schreiber, The Guardian, at < https://www.theguardian.com/
5). “Rightwingers are trying to destroy women’s right to vote: Calls for disenfranchisement rest on a single assumption: that women’s citizenship is partial and conditional”, Dec 4, 2025, Moira Donegan, The Guardian, at < https://www.theguardian.com/
~~ recommended by desmond morista ~~
Introduction by desmond morista: One of the biggest businesses in the U.S. is our complicated and almost collapsing health care system. Protecting this dangerous industry and keeping taxes low for the rich is a major reason for stripping the working class of their access to health care, a long-term goal of the ruling class. It fits in with the general attempt totally finish off the programs and concessions, that soften the harsh life of working-class people in the U.S., won over more than a century of socioeconomic and political struggles. In Item 1)., “Stop Turning Women’s Bodies ….”; and Item 2)., “The Most Unpopular Laws ….”, Jessica and Kylie review some of the worst outrages that are ongoing or that are developing; e.g. the constant machinations of the Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth Zealots in places like Missouri, Louisiana, Idaho, and South Carolina, in South Carolina a Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth Zealots named Mark Baumgartner shot a pro-abortion demonstrator and I believe he was also a Planned Parenthood escort. Baumgartner was arrested and processed but he was quickly released and immediately began attending Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth Zealot demonstrations at the same Planned Parenthood clinic; Idaho has now lost 35% of its ObGyns and about 70% of its “difficult and complicated pregnancy practitioners”. The hospitals and clinics are unable to recruit the needed number of replacements and therefore several maternity departments have closed. Even though the fascist Attorney General of Idaho, Raul Labrador, denied the reality; in fact about 1 woman a week has to be flown out to a nearby Blue State where abortion care is still available. The medical helicopter flights cost about $75,000 a fee many pregnant women and their families cannot afford, fortunately there is a movement of volunteer pilots who fly women with distressed pregnancies out to civilized areas like Washington, Oregon, or California. They provide that service for free.
Jessica and Kylie also look at the positive developments that include a judicial ruling in Missouri, in which a circuit court judge wrote an accurate description of the fraudulent new “Amendment 3” that Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth Zealots are trying to pass to annul the Amendment 3 abortion rights results from the 2024 election. The Missouri Independent noted that:
“A Missouri appeals court rewrote the language for a proposed abortion ban set to appear on the November 2026 ballot after the judges concluded Thursday the previous wording drafted by Republican Secretary of State Denny Hoskins was riddled with errors.
“The judges found both the ballot language and the summary statement that will be posted at polling places “fail to sufficiently advise voters” that the proposed amendment would repeal and replace the reproductive rights amendment voters passed in November 2024 to legalize abortion.
"The new ballot language certified by the Missouri Court of Appeals reads:
'Shall the Missouri Constitution be amended to:
Repeal the 2024 voter-approved Amendment providing reproductive healthcare rights, including abortion through fetal viability;
Allow abortions for rape and incest (under twelve-weeks’ gestation), emergencies, and fetal anomalies;
Allow legislation regulating abortion;
Ensure parental consent for minors’ abortions;
Prohibit gender transition procedures for minors?' (Emphasis added)
“Western District Court of Appeals Presiding Judge W. Douglas Thomson and judges Thomas Chapman and Janet Sutton filed the opinion less than 24 hours after hearing arguments in their courtroom Wednesday afternoon.” (See, “Missouri appeals court rewrites ballot proposal to clarify a ‘yes’ would end right to abortion: Missouri’s Western District Court of Appeals agreed the ballot language set to go on the November 2026 ballot failed to sufficiently inform voters that a ‘yes’ vote would repeal abortion rights passed in 2024”, Dec 4. 2025, Anna Spoerre, The Missouri Independent, at < https://missouriindependent.
Another positive development that Valenti and Cheung noted was the successful fundraising for the attempt to pass a State Law guaranateeing abortion rights using the general election, rather than the typical harsh Forced-Pregnancy / Forced-Birth Zealotry that emanates from the far-right controlled Idaho State Legislature.
In more general healthcare news, Item 3)., “ ‘Never seen anything like this’: ….”; and Item 4)., “Pediatricians fill vaccine messaging void ….”; discuss some specific issues around healthcare arising from the policies of extremist fascist regime that took power again, after yet another fraudulent low-turnout election. It is shocking to see that the Capitalists are so vicious in their machinations to lower their taxes that they are pushing us towards a society where Measles, the Flu, Covid, will not even be vaccinated against and even Polio could make a comeback in the U.S. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should be charged with about 100 counts of 2nd degree murder for his intervention in a measles outbreak in Samoa a few years ago.
Of course the electoral position of the Trump Regime isn't looking too good (assuming the votes of registered voters are made and counted, an unlikely proposition in places like Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Ohio). But as Item 5)., “Rightwingers are trying to destroy ….”, points out, a major tactic for the Right is to keep as many women as possible from voting. Not specifically discussed in Item 5). is the SAVES act, while it did not pass through the congress, was promulgated as an Executive Order (Stephen Miller and Russel Vought standing behind the throne guiding Trump's palsied hand as he signed, figuratively anyways). That Executive Order tries to prohibit married women from voting if they did not put through an official name change through their respective County Clerks. This is true for well over half of all married women btw.
And more ominously, just as the overseas schemes and operations of the CIA after WW 2, came home in the long wave of assassinations, imprisonments of activists, and other police state tactics that arose in the U.S. during the 1960s and 1970s. We all know that the demented creep Pete Hegseth even had his ghost writer put in the book American Crusade that: “ 'leftists' have: 'surrounded traditional American patriots on all sides, ready to close in for the kill: killing our founders, killing our flag, and killing capitalism'. Hegseth says he believes there are 'irreconcilable differences between the Left and the Right in America leading to perpetual conflict that cannot be resolved through the political process' ”. (Emphasis added) {See, American Crusade, n.d., Anon, Wikipedia, at < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
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Stop Turning Women’s Bodies Into Crime Scenes
CLICK TO SKIP AHEAD: ABORTION RIGHTS LEADERSHIP FTWhighlights a new Wisconsin bill that would decriminalize pregnancy loss. IN THE STATES, news from Arizona, Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, Indiana, and more. CARE CRISIS has some sad but not unexpected news about Adriana Smith’s baby, Chance. IN THE NATION, House Speaker Mike Johnson is trying to prevent active duty service members from getting IVF coverage. ANTI-ABORTION STRATEGY flags that extremists are targeting abortion storytellers. CRIMINALIZING CARE on a new bill that would repeal Washington DC’s shield law.
ABORTION RIGHTS LEADERSHIP FTW
Want to know what abortion rights leadership looks like? Check out Wisconsin Sen. Kelda Roys, who is introducing legislation to protect women from pregnancy-related prosecutions.
To our knowledge, the Pregnancy Loss Protection Actis the first-ever pregnancy decriminalization bill.1 It would bar law enforcement from investigating or prosecuting abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth, or any pregnancy outcome that doesn’t result in a live birth. It would also ensure women can’t be held civilly liable or discriminated against because of how a pregnancy ends.
Roys—who is running for governor—told Abortion, Every Day that she’s bringing the bill to stop our bodies from being “turned into crime scenes.” When you’re having the worst day of your life, she said, police shouldn’t be “figuring out a way to arrest you instead of taking you to a hospital.”
Since the end of Roe, hundreds of women have been arrested over their pregnancy outcomes—like Brittany Watts in Ohio, charged with ‘abuse of a corpse’ for flushing her miscarriage. Or the young Georgia woman charged with ‘concealing a death’ after placing her fetal remains in the trash. A woman in Texas was jailed for five months after miscarrying in a public restroom; and in South Carolina, cops arrested a woman they claimed threw her “newborn” in a dumpster. The truth? She miscarried.
It’s clear that Roys has been paying attention to these arrests and how, exactly, they happen: some of the most common pregnancy-related charges are crimes like ‘abuse of a corpse’ or ‘abandoning a dead body’—so the Pregnancy Loss Protection Act explicitly states that a “‘corpse’ does not include fetal tissue.” That one definition can have enormous impact.
The timing for the bill also couldn’t be better. Because while Republicans insist they have no interest in prosecuting or punishing women, their legislative trends tell a very different story:
Just weeks ago, Wisconsin Republicans introduced a bill that would force miscarriage and abortion patients to use ‘catch kits’ to bag their pregnancy tissue and turn it in as medical waste. Roys has been one of the Democrats taking the GOP to the mat over the proposal—calling it out for exactly what it is: grotesque.
That’s how you lead on abortion: with proactive legislation that reflects what’s actually happening on the ground, and by keeping Republicans on their fucking heels. As I wrote back in June: decriminalization bills are a win-win. Even if they don’t pass, they force Republicans to admit on the record that they want the option to arrest women for miscarriages and stillbirths.
So thank you, Sen. Roys.
WHILE YOU’RE HERE: AED is collecting pregnancy loss stories for a future campaign. Click here to share yours (you can submit anonymously.)
IN THE STATES
Remember the Arizona lawmaker who thought women could be bribed into childbirth with a measly $4,000 tax credit? Well, Republican Rep. Nick Kupper is back—this time with the “Investing in Life Act,” a bill that would offer tax breaks to Arizonans who adopt frozen embryos. (I’m so tired.)
Arizona’s tax code already gives tax breaks to adoptive parents, but Kupper’s HB 2011 would rewrite the language to include “human embryo adoptions”—a way to encourage people to claim leftover IVF embryos as dependents.
“Why discard these fetuses, or let’s at least discard fewer of them,” Kupper said. He also claims the legislation is no different from bipartisan measures like subsidized childcare. Except, of course, that subsidized childcare doesn’t codify fetal personhood into the state tax code. This bill would.
Meanwhile, Michigan Republicans are pushing a bill that would force doctors to ask abortion patients invasive questions—and then report their answers to the state. The good news is that there’s little chance the legislation goes anywhere. Still, we like to dig into bills like this because they give us a sense of how anti-abortion activists and lawmakers are thinking, and what kinds of attacks they’re lining up next.
After all, Abortion, Every Dayhas been warning about the rise in ‘abortion reporting’ legislation for just about two years—from Indiana Republicans who want to make abortion reports public records like birth and death certificates, to Ohio Republicans pushing for a publicly-available online dashboard of the state’s abortion data. Some anti-abortion activists are even pushing for a national abortion reporting law.
Anti-abortion legislators are hoping to 1) scare women out of getting care by making it clear the state is tracking their abortions, and 2) set a shitty precedent for what kinds of questions are deemed reasonable to ask patients. The Michigan legislation, for example, would require doctors to ask women why they’re ending their pregnancies.
That they’re being asked anything at all is outrageous—states don’t collect data on appendectomy patients—or anyone else. So why abortion?
And don’t forget: Michigan voters passed a constitutional amendment protecting the right to abortion. So this is just the GOP trying to create an end-run around the state’s constitution.
We’ve seen Republicans try to override the will of voters in just about every state that’s passed abortion protections. Like in Ohio—where Republicans are still fighting to preserve waiting periods and pushing legislation that could ban telehealth abortion pills. Now, the state’s health board appears to be slow-rolling clinic licenses. The ACLU of Ohio and the Reproductive Rights Law Initiative are suing to find out why it took the Ohio Department of Health seven months to approve one clinic’s application to provide procedural abortions—an inexplicable delay that looks a lot like intentional obstruction.
We have some semi-good news over in Missouri: after a months-long fight over ballot measure language, an appeals court has made it just a little bit harder for Republicans to trick voters into supporting an abortion ban.
A refresher: Missouri voters passed Amendment 3 last year, which protects abortion rights until ‘viability’. Republicans are furious, so they decided to put an abortion ban on the 2026 ballot—a move to repeal Amendment 3 and outlaw nearly any abortions. Because they know how unpopular abortion bans are, GOP leaders crafted their ballot summary to sound as pro-choice as possible—hoping to trick voters into supporting a near-total ban. They even named the measure Amendment 3.
Republicans’ original ballot summary, for example, said the proposed amendment would “guarantee women’s medical care for emergencies, ectopic pregnancies, and miscarriage” and “ensure women’s safety during abortions.”
Given how obviously-biased the language is, abortion rights groups have been fighting it in court. And even though a judge forced Secretary of State Denny Hoskins to rewrite the summary a few times, that misleading language remained. Until now!
Earlier today, a Missouri appeals court rewrote the summary themselves—making it clear that Republicans’ measure would repeal (the real) Amendment 3:
And no, you’re not misreading—Republicans are also attaching a ban on gender-affirming care for minors. Nightmare.
In our last bit of state news, an Indiana court heard final arguments this week in a religious freedom challenge to the state’s abortion ban. Abortion is almost entirely banned in Indiana with limited ‘exceptions’. The ACLU of Indiana sued in 2022, arguing the ban violated the state’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act—which is sort of delightful, given Mike Pence signed it into law.
A judge issued a preliminary injunction that allowed a narrow exception for those with religious objections. Now, abortion rights advocates are asking the court to make that injunction permanent. (Again, it wouldn’t block the ban for everyone—just that narrow group of people who have sincere religious beliefs that they need abortion.)
A decision isn’t expected for a few months, but I’ll keep you updated as we learn more.
Quick hits:
CARE CRISIS
I know we all remember Adriana Smith, the Georgia woman whose body was forcibly kept alive after being declared brain-dead because she was pregnant. Her family provided an update this week through their GoFundMe, telling supporters that Smith’s son, Chance, is still in the NICU and likely will be for some time. He’s already been there for six months.
Adriana’s mother, April Newkirk, explained that Chance “will not be coming home soon” and that he’s being moved to a different hospital. “I’m very down,” she wrote.
Smith’s story sparked national outrage earlier this year, drawing attention to the state’s nightmare abortion ban. “This decision should’ve been left to us,” Newkirk said at the time. “Now we’re left wondering what kind of life he’ll have—and we’re going to be the ones raising him.”
How many times do we have to say it? The cruelty is the point.
IN THE NATION
It shouldn’t be surprising, but it’s still enraging: MS NOW (formerly MSNBC) reports that House Speaker Mike Johnson is working behind the scenes to block IVF coverage for active-duty service members.
Right now, TRICARE—the insurance plan for service members—only covers IVF when infertility is caused by a “serious or severe illness or injury while on active duty.” But a new provision in the National Defense Authorization Act would change that, requiring IVF coverage for all service members.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, a veteran and mom through IVF, told MS NOW that Johnson is quietly lobbying to strip the provision. And his office offered a denial so weak it basically confirms the story:
“The Speaker has clearly and repeatedly stated he is supportive of access to IVF when sufficient pro-life protections are in place, and he will continue to be supportive when it is done responsibly and ethically.” (Emphasis ours.)
As we’ve reported before, conservatives are desperate to dodge backlash by claiming they don’t oppose IVF—they just want it regulated. That fear of voter ire is also why the Trump administration is rolling out the idea of restorative reproductive medicine: the idea that women don’t really need IVF, but to fix the “root causes” of their infertility.
Fertility treatments have become a real point of contention between the White House and top anti-abortion groups—some of whom openly refer to IVF as murder, or argue IVF “kills” more “babies” than abortion.
Last year, as Republicans scrambled to look less extreme, Trump campaigned on the promise to make IVF free for everyone. Instead, he rolled out a watered-down plan to reduce some IVF costs; we later found out anti-abortion groups had aggressively lobbied him to weaken his position.
Now, it seems Speaker Johnson is firmly on board with the anti-abortion movement’s anti-IVF agenda—even if it means punishing the military families Republicans claim to care about.
ANTI-ABORTION STRATEGY
One of the country’s most radical anti-abortion groups is targeting a Wisconsin woman who shared her abortion story—accusing her of “killing” her “preborn child.”
There’s no overstating how dangerous this is, and there’s no mistaking what the tactic is here: they want to terrify women out of sharing their stories.
Last month, Gracie Ladd spoke out about being forced to leave Wisconsin for care after her pregnancy was diagnosed with a fatal fetal abnormality at 20 weeks. She says, “Doing this advocacy work makes me feel that even though Connor didn’t ‘live a life,’ his spirit lives on in my activism, so I will keep speaking out.”
Ladd and other abortion storytellers relive their most painful and vulnerable moments in the hopes that it might prevent someone else from going through the same nightmare—they are heroes. They’re also the pro-choice movement’s most powerful weapon: they shine a light on the cruelty of abortion bans, remind Americans that these laws have real life consequences, and move voters as a result.
So how do conservatives respond? By terrorizing them. Live Action—again, one of the country’s most radical organizations—has blasted Ladd’s name out to their extremist followers in an ultra-graphic article, claiming she’s “advocat[ing] for more death.” This is harassment, plain and simple. And given the rise of anti-abortion violence, it’s a threat.
CRIMINALIZING CARE
Anti-abortion activists aren’t the only ones desperate to dole out punishment: U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde is introducing legislation to repeal Washington, DC’s shield law in order to “hold providers accountable for their crimes.”
“We cannot allow the Left’s woke ideology, under the guise of ‘bodily autonomy,’ to infiltrate our states through the shipping of [abortion] drugs with zero legal repercussions. Congress must use its constitutional authority over our nation’s capital to hold D.C. providers liable for undermining state laws and to protect women, children, and the unborn.”
What Clyde fails to mention, of course, is that DC’s shield law doesn’t just prohibit state agencies from participating in investigations against providers—but against patients.
Though they don’t like to say it publicly, anti-abortion activists and legislators are making increasingly explicit moves against women who end their pregnancies. (That’s why we need more bills like Sen. Roys’!)
Clyde’s legislation is supported by all the usual assholes—like Alliance Defending Freedom and Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America. We’ll keep you updated as we learn more.
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Abortion Bans Are the Most Unpopular Laws in America
In just the last few weeks, I’ve written about the death of a woman in Texas, the arrest of a South Carolina 20-year-old, and a bill in Wisconsin that would mandate women use a ‘catch kit’ when they have a miscarriage or abortion. Clinics are closing, maternal mortality is spiking, and the government is burning tens of millions of dollars in birth control.
As these horrors unfold day after day, there are three words that replay through my mind: nobody wants this. Nothing we’ve seen in the three plus years since Roe fell is what Americans want for themselves or their country—not the women dying, not the rise in pregnancy-related arrests, not the patients forced to carry dead and dying fetuses, not the cancer patients or abused children denied care.
Nobody wants this.
Conservatives want us to believe, against all evidence, that the country is irrevocably divided on abortion rights—with voters split down the middle. I don’t know whether it’s standard misogyny or a deep disinterest in interrogating issues that impact women, but somehow that easily disproven lie has become political gospel. The myth has flourished even among those who should know better, allowing Republicans to pretend they’re speaking for half the nation.
Here’s the truth: Abortion bans aren’t just unpopular; they may be the most unpopular laws in America.
We’re stuck in a sort of mass political psychosis: with pundits and strategists advising Democrats to compromise on their most powerful and popular issue and Democrats acquiescing—forever hedging their language and refusing to go on offense.
As a result, we’ve been left with an astonishing disconnect between what Americans actually believe about abortion and what those in power think they believe. That gap isn’t just losing us elections, but killing people and destroying families—so let’s put an end to the fiction right now.
We can start with one of the country’s most anti-abortion states: North Dakota—where the state Supreme Court just revived a total abortion ban. According to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the state has one of the largest shares of voters who think abortion should be completely illegal—coming in just behind Mississippi, South Dakota, and Nebraska.
That means voters should be happy with a total ban back on the books—right? Nope, not even close.
Because that supposedly “large” share of voters who want abortion entirely outlawed—the percentage that makes North Dakota one of the country’s most anti-abortion states? It’s just 12%.
If one of the most anti-abortion states in America can muster only a sliver of support for total bans, what does that tell you about how popular abortion rights really are? Just as important: if deep red states don’t want abortion banned, who does?
I’m not just talking about total abortion bans, either: all abortion restrictions are unpopular. Multiple polls show that over 80% of Americans don’t want the government regulating abortion at all, and that voters are increasingly supportive of abortion throughout pregnancy. These aren’t just national trends; we’re seeing them everywhere.
Consider Kansas—a GOP stronghold where a Democrat hasn’t won the presidency since the 1960s, and where registered Republican voters outnumber Democrats by a nearly two-to-one margin. Those numbers are presumably why you have people like Ezra Klein advising the party to embrace ‘pro-life’ candidates in order to win over the state’s voters.
You can probably guess where I’m going with this: Kansas is unequivocally pro-choice. And not just because voters there overwhelmingly rejected an anti-abortion ballot measure in 2022 (though it certainly helps).
Every year, Fort Hays State University releases one of the state’s best-known public opinion polls: Kansas Speaks. This year, that poll reported that 60% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that the government “should not place any regulationson the circumstance under which women can get abortions.”
I’m going to repeat that, because it’s important: the majority of Kansas voters don’t want any laws restricting abortion. We’re talking about a state that hasn’t elected a Democratic U.S. Senator since 1932—and where Donald Trump won by double digits twice. And still, a clear majority wants the government completely out of abortion.
What’s more, Kansas voters’ support for abortion without restrictions is increasing: last year, 55% of voters supported the same sentiment; in 2023, it was 51%.
And while last year’s poll reported that 65% of voters agreed or strongly agreed that “women are in a better position than politicians to make their own choices about whether to get an abortion,” 72% of respondents said the same thing this year.
And it’s not just Kansas.
Let’s go back to North Dakota: when voters were asked about a 6-week abortion ban in 2023, only 44% supported the law. By the following year, that already-minority support dropped to just 38%.
Even more interesting? While 71% of Republicans supported a 6-week ban in 2023, that number shrunk to just 54% by 2024.
Again, this is a state with some of the most anti-abortion voters in the country, and Republicans can barely eke out majority support for a 6-week ban within their own party.
I could go on: In Tennessee—a state where the abortion ban didn’t even have an exception for women’s lives—a majority of voters now identify as pro-choice. And in Mississippi, 45% of Republican primary voters—people who should be part of the hardcore anti-abortion electorate—wanted to repeal the state’s ban just a year after it took effect.
The longer these laws are on the books, the more unpopular they get.
We know why: voters are watching maternity wards shutter, OBGYNs flee, and yes—women suffer and die. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it as many times as is necessary: it won’t be long before every single person in the country is touched by an abortion ban.
I’m reminded of an older gentleman who approached me after a recent speech: he told me that his daughter had moved to Florida not realizing she was pregnant—when she miscarried, the hospital refused to treat her. She spent five days getting sicker and sicker, begging for help. Finally, her terrified boyfriend put her—bleeding and in pain—on a plane back home. The doctor who finally treated her was shocked she survived.
It’s not unusual for people to share stories like this with me; what is unusual is that this father hadn’t come to my speech because he was interested in abortion rights. He was there running the lights.
These bans are destroying people’s lives. The longer they exist, the more people—the more voters—they harm. And the more powerful the issue becomes for Democrats.
Conservatives know this. There’s a reason they’re putting such extraordinary effort into hiding maternal mortality data—disbanding state committees and stacking them with anti-abortion activists. (Just today, the Charlotte Lozier Institute published a policy paper about why Americans shouldn’t trust maternal death data.) In case that doesn’t work, anti-abortion groups are running messaging campaigns to blame pro-choicers for women’s deaths and suffering—saying we’ve scared doctors out of providing care.
In fact, everything conservatives are doing right now on abortion is a direct reaction to the reality of pro-choice America.
It’s why they’re trying to ban mifepristone by focusing on women’s ‘health’,‘coercion’—even water safety. Anything but abortion itself. It’s why Republicans won’t use the word ‘ban’ anymore, and why anti-abortion candidates are starting to sound downright prochoice—even claiming the label. You know how crisis pregnancy centers will set up shop next to a real clinic and use a near-identical name to trick women? Republicans have adopted that strategyfor their anti-abortion ballot measures, knowing they can’t pass the amendments with the truth.
Donald Trump can certainly see the writing on the wall; he hasn’t uttered a word on abortion in months. That’s about as big of a tell as it gets.
All of which is to say: Republicans know Americans overwhelmingly support abortion, and are acting accordingly. Why aren’t we?
Sure, Democrats ran on the issue in 2022 and 2023—but they campaigned as pro-choice, not pro-abortion. There’s a difference.
It’s not enough to remind voters that the country supports abortion; we need to hammer home that nobody wants this. The GOP clings to words like ‘consensus’ and insists the country is evenly divided because they know that public perception shapes elections. Americans care what their friends and neighbors believe: the more people understand that abortion is popular, the more likely they are to embrace it—publicly and at the ballot box.
It’s not enough to simply get off the defensive: Democrats need to articulate a proactive abortion-rights message—one that rejects the trap of debating when the government should intervene in pregnancy, and instead asserts the simple truth most voters already believe: the government shouldn’t be involved at all.
This needs to happen now. Republicans are already gaslighting Americans about ever-more radical policies: they’re attacking birth control, the right to travel, and women’s ability to work outside of the home. Over a dozen states have introduced bills to punish abortion patients with murder charges.
How long do you think it will take before they claim voters are torn on those issues, too?
If Democrats really want to meet voters ‘in the middle’ on abortion, they’d get a lot more pro-abortion a lot faster. Instead of watering down their rhetoric—which only makes them look weak and reinforces the myth that the country is divided—politicians should remind Americans that the GOP is passing laws even the reddest states have no interest in.
Whenever another horror story comes out, whenever another ban is passed—remind your friends, families, communities, and legislators: nobody wants this.
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‘Never seen anything like this’: alarm at memo from top US vaccine official
America’s top vaccines official promised, in a long and argumentative memo to staff on Friday, to revamp vaccine regulation after claiming that at least 10 children died from Covid vaccination – but he offered no evidence for that allegation and scant details on the new approach.
The top-down changes, without input from outside advisers or publication of data, worry experts who fear vaccines such as the flu shot may quickly disappear and that public trust will take a major hit.
“The ultimate outcome will be fewer vaccines and more vaccine-preventable illness,” said Dan Jernigan, former director of the National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases until this year.
The 10 child deaths were among children aged seven to 16 in 2021 to 2024 and reported in the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS), a crowdsourced database to which anyone may submit reports, according to Vinay Prasad, director of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research (CBER) and the chief medical and scientific officer at the US Food and Drug Administration.
Prasad offered no other details about the children’s cases, including which conditions led to their deaths, how those deaths were linked to vaccination, or why initial investigations ruled the deaths unrelated and why subsequent investigations disagreed.
“For the first time, the US FDA will acknowledge that Covid vaccines have killed American children,” Prasad wrote in the memo, reviewed by the Guardian, calling into question whether Covid vaccines killed “more healthy kids than it saved”.
Paul Offit, an infectious diseases physician at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said of the memo: “When you make that kind of sensational claim, I think it’s incumbent upon you to provide evidence that supports that claim. He didn’t supply any evidence.”
The Covid vaccines have been given to millions of people around the world and are safe and effective. The statements and the approach diverge sharply from the regulatory agency’s history.
“I just have never seen anything like this,” said Jernigan, who worked at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) for 31 years, frequently in close collaboration with the FDA.
It’s highly unusual for the top vaccines regulator to share information in an email to all staff without first convening the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee (VRBPAC), or publishing the data in a public presentation or study, Jernigan said.
While there are no causes for mortality mentioned in the memo, Prasad highlights myocarditis, or heart inflammation, a very rare side-effect that appeared after initial vaccination. Myocarditis is much more common and severe with Covid infection, and vaccination reduces the risk of infection and of severe illness. If myocarditis were behind some or all of the children’s deaths, an autopsy would reveal such damage – and autopsies are standard for children who die unexpectedly, Offit said.
It would also be necessary to prove that myocarditis was caused by vaccination, not by infection with Covid or any other viruses that may cause heart damage, Offit added.
Tracy Beth Høeg, a sports medicine physician who is now senior adviser for clinical sciences at FDA, began leading the investigation over the summer, Prasad said. Elsewhere in his memo, Prasad credited the FDA commissioner, Marty Makary, for finding these cases, vowing that the new regulatory changes would prevent such future searches.
“Never again will the US FDA commissioner have to himself find deaths in children for staff to identify it,” Prasad wrote.
The deaths were “certainly an underestimate” and “[t]he real number is higher”, Prasad wrote, without offering any evidence for the claim.
The health department and Prasad did not respond by press time to the Guardian’s questions about evidence for attributing the children’s deaths to Covid vaccination or details of how regulations for vaccine approvals would change.
The development of Covid vaccines under the first Trump administration was “one of the greatest scientific and medical advances in our lifetime”, said Offit, a member of VRBPAC until he was removed earlier this year. “Now you have the head of CBER saying that your vaccine killed at least 10 children?”
The White House did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about claims that the Covid vaccines resulted in child deaths.
With the deployment of Covid vaccines, officials stepped up communication about how to report any adverse events that happen after vaccination.
“As Covid emerged, with it being a new vaccine and with the rollout to so many people, CDC increased its advertising and its requests for people to submit reports, essentially mandating physicians to report anything that they might see and then making sure that people knew that they could report them,” Jernigan said.
The CDC even established a new system called V-safe, where recently vaccinated people received text messages asking about side-effects and encouraging them to report all symptoms to VAERS, resulting in an influx of reports.
Another database, called Vaccine Safety Datalink (VSD), draws on the medical records of about 10% of the US population, including 500,000 children. The VSD is a “robust” way to study whether the signals caught in VAERS are appearing in confirmed medical records, Jernigan said. That was how myocarditis was first detected after vaccination, and it was how very rare blood clots from the Johnson and Johnson Covid vaccine were quickly detected.
While the Prasad memo focused largely on Covid vaccines, it made two apparent nods to other concerns common among anti-vaccine activists.
Officials at the FDA “have not been focused on understanding the benefits and harms of giving multiple vaccines at the same time”, Prasad said, without listing such potential harms, for which there is no available evidence.
The benefits, on the other hand, include greater access to and uptake of vaccines, since families have to make fewer trips to doctors’ offices, experts said. Yet Prasad said the FDA guidelines on offering multiple vaccines would be changed, without specifying how.
“Concomitant vaccines have been used with the existing system for a long time with no evidence of harm,” said Dorit Reiss, professor of law at UC Hastings College of Law. Changing that “without evidence of harm will make it harder to put vaccines on the market”.
The memo also briefly addressed measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccines. They provide benefits to those around them “when administered to high enough fractions of society”, Prasad wrote, but it is not clear if he believes the MMR shots would still be beneficial if uptake falls.
Because of these determinations, the FDA will change how it regulates vaccines, including requiring randomized trials showing clinical outcomes – like the reduction of illness – instead of demonstrating immune responses for most new products, Prasad wrote. The FDA will “revise the annual flu vaccine framework”, including the surrogate assays – tests to understand how well the vaccines work, he wrote.
For vaccines like the flu, conducting new trials each year instead of checking for immune responses is “not possible”, Offit said. Such studies would need to be conducted during flu season, which would mean the vaccines would be outdated and available far too late.
While the new rules present challenges for all respiratory vaccines, updated flu and Covid shots especially “cannot be delayed”, Reiss said. “I don’t know if we will have influenza vaccines next year in the US.”
Making the shots less accessible in the US would lead to preventable deaths, and it follows the second-worst influenza season on record, she said, noting: “It’s not a great time to take away influenza vaccines.”
Undermining confidence in vaccines was “so dangerous and irresponsible”, Offit said. And the stakes were high, he said. “Children are getting hospitalized and children are still dying from this virus.”
The confusion makes it harder for the public and physicians to understand what the evidence says and to trust the health agencies offering guidelines, Jernigan said.
“It’s getting harder for them to know which recommendations to follow and who they can trust,” he said.
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Pediatricians fill vaccine messaging void left by CDC amid bad flu season
As flu season begins in the US, following the deadliest flu outbreak in children outside of a pandemic since record-keeping began in 2004, pediatricians are taking the lead on vaccine messaging.
The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) does not plan to resume its “wild to mild” flu vaccination campaign, which was halted in the midst of the record-breaking flu season.
Even as places such as Australia and Japan report severe flu seasons, there has also been a drop in global virus samples shared with the US, which help scientists understand which viruses and variants are circulating and how they are mutating.
In the 2024-25 flu season, 280 children died from influenza – making it the second-deadliest pediatric flu season on record in the US, second only to the 2009-10 swine flu pandemic. The CDC classified it as a “high severity season”.
A total of 109 children were diagnosed with encephalopathy, or brain swelling, related to flu infection, with one-third of those patients suffering acute necrotizing encephalopathy. Three-quarters of the patients with brain swelling needed to be admitted to the intensive care unit, and one in five died from the condition.
Among the children who were eligible for the vaccine, 89% had not been fully vaccinated.
The CDC is launching a new national campaign to “raise awareness and empower Americans with the tools they need to stay healthy during the respiratory virus season”, said Emily Hilliard, press secretary for the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
Hilliard did not mention the role of vaccines or respond to a request for more information about the campaign.
Pediatricians and other trusted figures are stepping into the communications gaps.
“We saw a really bad season last year, and I worry that this season could be even worse,” said Jonathan Miller, associate chief of primary care at Nemours Children’s Health and president of the Delaware chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).
Caitlin Rivers, director of the Center for Outbreak Response Innovation at the Johns Hopkins University, said: “Pediatricians, family doctors, pharmacies are all really important sources of information.”
Pediatricians are the most trusted source of information on vaccines, according to a recent survey by the nonpartisan group KFF. Some 85% of parents said they trust their pediatrician a “great deal” or “fair amount” when it comes to information on vaccines. Only a third of parents said the same of Robert F Kennedy Jr, the HHS secretary.
“I feel optimistic that parents will listen to pediatricians and to primary care providers when we encourage them to do this,” Miller said. He works with primary care providers at his facility to recommend the flu vaccine “at every opportunity”, when patients come in for routine visits, follow-ups, or even some sick visits, if they are well enough.
Every child benefits from getting vaccinated, Miller said, adding: “If you are high-risk as a child for flu, you are more likely to have bad outcomes, but a lot of kids who are otherwise healthy also have bad outcomes.”
Nearly half (44%) of the children who died last winter had no underlying conditions and common conditions such as asthma are among the underlying conditions adding to risk, Rivers said.
“People don’t always perceive themselves or their kids as being at higher risk, but, in fact, they may be,” she said.
Although the flu vaccine doesn’t stop onward transmission entirely, it does lessen it. “It reduces the risk of you passing on the virus to other people,” Rivers said.
Last season, the hardest-hit group was infants under the age of six months, who cannot yet get the vaccine.
The CDC’s “wild to mild” campaign, which focused on how flu vaccines protect against severe illness and death, first began in 2023 and was “very, very well received” among the public, said Demetre Daskalakis, former director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, at a recent press conference.
The health department suspended it soon after Trump took office.
At the CDC, “they’re not allowed to talk about that campaign, despite the fact that it had very clear messaging”, Daskalakis said.
“Even before the shutdown, there has been really a concerted effort to limit communication around vaccines, specifically influenza,” he said, noting that he expected “that we’re not going to see a brisk uptake of flu vaccine” since “there’s already a lot of confusion around vaccines because of what’s happened with RFK Jr”.
In the absence of clear guidance, health providers may hesitate to offer vaccines against respiratory illnesses such as flu, Covid and RSV, Daskalakis said.
But medical groups, such as the AAP, are making vaccination recommendations, and the American Lung Association announced a new campaign in October to educate people on vaccines for the respiratory season.
Providers and health systems are also stepping up local vaccine messages, giving the shots greater prominence than in years past, Miller said. For families skeptical of the shot, providers can offer the nasal-spray vaccines, he said. They are very safe and effective, and they can be given to children two years and older without medical contraindications.
“I think that’s helping some families feel more comfortable getting vaccinated than they otherwise would have been,” Miller said.
Making it easy to remember and schedule the shots also helps, Rivers said. “People respond really well to convenience and reminders.”
The CDC’s Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics expects this year’s respiratory virus season to be similar to last year’s. Yet severe outbreaks in Australia and Japan, the latter of which has declared a flu epidemic, has experts concerned.
“It’s not a direct lesson for what we can expect, but it’s a clue,” Rivers said. “And that does give me pause that maybe we’ll be in for something a little bit bigger.”
Respiratory viruses are “unpredictable” and can mutate and change, Miller pointed out. The best way to stay protected is to get updated vaccines each year, he said. During the US government shutdown, the CDC did not publish data on national flu trends as it normally does.
“It’s very laborious and difficult, I think, for the average person to access high-quality data right now compared to when CDC is participating in reporting,” Rivers said.
While states report some of the data publicly, “it’s just data”, Rivers said. “If you’re not accustomed to looking at the data and understanding what it means, it might not give you enough information to really make choices.”
And the lack of guidance signals a worrying trend, Rivers said: “There are very severe possible consequences for allowing our public health system to degrade.”
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Rightwingers are trying to destroy women’s right to vote
Sexism can be very modern and tech savvy. Misogyny is an ever-evolving idiom, and men and women alike have found particularly of-the-moment ways to operate within the genre. Think of the apps that take images of women and remove their clothes, or the AI bots that men and boys can use to generate pornography or depictions of graphic violence against women and girls for the crime of going to the same school as they do or running for office. Think of the influencers of the so-called “womanosphere” who tell their female audiences that women who seek out friendship or equality with men are morons or cows, all through the gleam of a TikTok filter. Sexism may be the world’s oldest prejudice and its first unjust hierarchy, but it is continually innovating, adapting to new technologies and the most recent rhetorical needs of male supremacy.
But some of the forms of misogyny that have been bubbling up in American political discourse lately can seem a bit retro. I don’t just mean the tradwives, who dress alternately like June Cleaver or like Ma Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie – evoking bygone eras, or at least the ways those eras are depicted on television. And I don’t just mean the pro-natalists, either, who don weird bonnets and propose national breeding medals for prolific mothers. Since last month’s massive election victories for Democrats, some on the right have looked to revive a form of sexism that has been out of fashion for more than one hundred years: the idea that women should not have a right to vote.
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More and more, influential voices in the Maga movement and the far-right Republican party are calling to strip women of the franchise. It’s not that this is strictly a new development. Opposition to women’s voting rights has long been a fringe, but persistent, feature of the American right. It’s been a favorite hobby horse of extremist preachers; it trended among Trump supporters on social media in the lead-up to the 2016 election, when polls showed that Trump would win if only men voted. (As it happened, he won anyway.) In the century that followed the passage of the 19th amendment – which barred the United States or any state from restricting the vote on the basis of sex, and enfranchised hundreds of thousands of women when it was ratified in 1920 – opposition to women’s right to vote has simmered at the extreme edges of political opinion.
It was kept alive in large part in ultra-conservative Christian communities, which tend to cast women as something between children and property. Claiming women to be intellectually and morally unfit for citizenship, these sects declared that women should withdraw from the public sphere, including from political participation, and submit to the rule of their husbands.
Joel Webbon, a pastor and YouTube personality, has been at the forefront of this brand of misogynist Christian reaction. (Webbon claims not to be a misogynist but is rather a self-identified “sexist”; what he imagines the difference to be is not entirely clear.) In 2022, just before the nation’s first post-Dobbs midterm elections, he tweeted: “The 19th Amendment was a bad idea.” He is broadly opposed to women’s participation in the political realm, saying in an interview last year that “God has not designed women for warfare, and that’s part of what politics is – it’s really all that politics is, it’s war without the blood”. (That war is not politics would be news, I think, to those who have waged it, women among them.)
Dale Partridge, also a pastor, justified his own opposition to women’s suffrage using a term of art that has become popular on the fringe right: “I think we should repeal the 19th Amendment because I love America and American women,” he said, “and want to protect our nation from their suicidal empathy.”(Emphasis mine.) Here, women are cast as supposedly naturally, inherently more empathetic than men are – and this, in turn, is undesirable, indeed suicidal. It is something of a back-handed compliment.
Like the racist “great replacement” theory and other strains of white nationalism, the opposition to women’s suffrage has entered the mainstream as the Republican party has radicalized. In August, defense secretary Pete Hegseth, who has been accused of sexual assault, reposted a video in which pastors explain their opposition to women’s right to vote, with the caption “All of Christ for All of Life” – a Christian nationalist slogan. (Hegseth, who denied the allegation, reached a settlement with the alleged victim.)
But in recent decades, a more secular brand of anti-suffrage feeling has also challenged women’s voting rights, this one emerging from the strains of the right invested in biological determinism – a set of commitments ranging from evolutionary psychology to eugenics. This worldview tends to cast women as inferior not due to divine mandate, but due to nature, which, it is claimed, has made them either too stupid or too irresponsible for the vote.
Helen Andrews, a rightwing magazine editor whose recent piece The Great Feminization suggests women’s presence in public life may pose “a threat to civilization”, claims women have “evolved” toward several various and seemingly contradictory habits – too empathetic and consensus-based, on the one hand, and too gossipy, conniving and passive-aggressive, on the other. The logical conclusion to Andrews’s argument is that women should be immediately excluded from political life and from all major institutions; perhaps lacking the courage of her convictions, she does not argue women should be deprived of citizenship, instead proposing a shift of public life towards further male dominance – claiming, for instance, that “the rule of law will not survive the legal profession becoming majority female”. In describing women as an obstacle to conservative priorities, she echoes Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist, rightwing mega-donor and longtime mentor to JD Vance, who wrote in 2009 that his ideal libertarian world had been rendered politically unfeasible by “the extension of the franchise to women”. (He later seemed to contradict this, saying he did not “think any class should be disenfranchised”.)
These two assertions – that women are ordained by God to be men’s inferiors, or that they have been designed by nature to be men’s inferiors – use pseudoscience, lies and heresy to conceal their plain sexist bigotry behind a thin veneer of patronizing condescension. They claim, implausibly – with the sneering tone of a cartoon villain baring his rotting teeth at a child hero – to be looking to strip women of their rights, freedoms and dignity for their own good.
But they are now joined by a third strain of anti-suffrage sentiment: that of undisguised misogynist contempt. A growing number of rightwing influencers simply state that they feel that women should not vote because they hate women, and want women to be subjected to male domination. Andrew Tate, the men’s rights influencer and alleged human trafficker, posted in September to his X account: “Stop letting women vote, stop giving women position as judges, stop giving women political appointments … WOMEN: giving you political and social power is how we ended up here.”
The opponents of women’s suffrage have, for now, no way of enacting their ambition: there is no path to repealing the 19th amendment. But they are part of a growing movement to blame women’s advancement – and their increased access, participation and visibility in education, the workforce, politics and public life – for a slew of social problems, from political polarization to economic stagnation to a vague sense of spiritual anomie. As Jessica Winter recently pointed out in the New Yorker, in a piece on the centrist pundits who have declared a crisis of men, this sentiment – that women’s citizenship and status should be lower, and that recognizing it has hurt the country – is peddled by thinkers and writers far more respectable than the likes of Webbon or Tate. “The [New York] Times pundit Ezra Klein has lately suggested that Democrats consider running anti-abortion candidates in red states, even though more than three-quarters of Gen Z women support abortion rights,” Winter writes. “Rights, like jobs, can be gender-coded, and these rights are valued accordingly.”
This range of sexisms that have attained mainstream credibility in politics and the press rest on one assumption: that women’s citizenship is partial and conditional compared with men’s, that we have less of a claim on rights, dignity and public participation than our brothers do. That this assumption is even held is an insult to women’s dignity; that it is now so blithely accepted is a sign of how far women’s status has already sunk.
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