Republican strategist Karl Rove warned members of his party on Monday that President Donald Trump's legal problems are dampening Republican voters' enthusiasm to participate in the midterm elections.
During an interview on Fox News, host Martha MacCallum told Rove that enthusiasm among Democratic voters had spiked in recent weeks.
"We've seen a tightening," Rove agreed. "The question is not where is it today so much as where it's going to be on election day."
"Think about it," he continued. "The last two weeks, have we been talking a lot about Biden and inflation and all the disasters that we've seen from this administration and its low approval ratings? No!"
Rove added: "We've been talking about Donald Trump and 25 boxes of material at Mar-a-Lago. The more we talk about that and the less that we talk about the problems we face as a country here and now the better off the Democrats are. It raises their enthusiasm; dampens the Republican enthusiasm."
The Republican strategist said that his party would be "better off" if President Joe Biden was in the news instead of Trump.
"But that's not where we've been for the last couple of weeks," he concluded.
Rove declined to attribute the increase in Democratic voter enthusiasm to recently-passed climate legislation or a reduction in gas prices.
(Reuters) -A defense attorney on Monday implored a Florida jury to spare the life of Nikolas Cruz, who killed 17 people in a 2018 high school mass shooting in the city of Parkland, citing brain damage linked to fetal drug and alcohol exposure as reason not to impose the death penalty.
Cruz, 23, pleaded guilty last October to committing premeditated murder at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, about 30 miles (50 km) north of Fort Lauderdale, in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. Cruz killed 14 students and three staff members.
Melisa McNeil, Cruz's lead public defender, told the 12 Broward County jurors that he should receive life in prison without parole due to mitigating factors including lifelong developmental delays and mental-health disorders that arose from his biological mother's drug and alcohol abuse during pregnancy.
"Because of that, his brain was irretrievably broken, through no fault of his own," McNeil told the jury.
Among the witnesses McNeil called after making her opening statement was Cruz's half-sister, Danielle Woodard, who tearfully testified that their mother drank heavily and used drugs including cocaine while she was pregnant with Cruz.
Jurors must decide whether to sentence him to death or to life in prison without possibility of parole.
Prosecutor Michael Satz told jurors in July that Cruz, a 19-year-old expelled student at the time of the shootings, should be put to death for "goal-directed, planned, systematic murder - mass murder - of 14 students, an athletic director, a teacher and a coach."
McNeil on Monday acknowledged the horror of Cruz's crime but reminded the jurors that they were under no obligation to vote for death even "in the worst case imaginable. And it is arguable that this is the worst case imaginable."
Under Florida law, a jury must be unanimous in its decision to recommend that a judge sentence Cruz to be executed.
Cruz said when he pleaded guilty that he was "very sorry" and asked to be given a chance to help others.
The start last month of the trial's penalty phase included testimony from students who were at school that day and cellphone videos in which terrified students cried for help or spoke in hushed whispers as they hid.
U.S. gun violence gained renewed attention following recent mass shootings. These include one in July at an Independence Day parade outside Chicago that killed seven people, one in May at a school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead, and one in May at a supermarket in a predominately Black neighborhood of Buffalo, New York, that killed 10 people.
President Joe Biden in June signed the first major federal gun reform legislation in three decades, which he called a rare bipartisan achievement.
(Reporting by Brian Ellsworth and Julia Harte; editing by Will Dunham, Donna Bryson and Jonathan Oatis)
A defense attorney told the State Commission on Judicial Conduct last week that Judge Allen Amos told her the trespassing defendants weren’t “your regular wetbacks,” according to a copy of the complaint obtained by The Texas Tribune.
“They have phones and clothes and all kinds of other things,” Amos reportedly said in July to defense attorney Emily Miller, whose complaint was first reported by The Daily Beast.
Miller is asking the commission to consider whether Amos’ alleged comment violates the Texas Judicial Code of Conduct. On Monday, Amos told the Tribune he would not comment on the complaint but would “have to wait for the judicial ethics people.”
It’s unknown if he will continue serving as a visiting judge for migrant trespassing cases in the meantime.
Aside from being racist, Miller told the commission she interpreted Amos’ comment to mean he believed the migrant defendants weren’t poor, potentially influencing his bond decisions for men held in a state prison on low-level misdemeanor charges.
“I have had several indigent clients of Guatemalan, Honduran, and Mexican descent whose bonds have recently been revoked by Judge Amos, and his presumed bias against my clients by calling them ‘wetbacks’ and mentioning their supposed affluence leads me to question whether he made an unbiased decision in their hearings,” she wrote in her complaint.
Amos has often refused to lower bond amounts for migrant trespassing defendants. In December, he told one man, who had been imprisoned for more than 100 days and could not afford to post bond to be released and sent back to Mexico, that the $2,500 in cash the migrant would have to front was “not that much money.”
A former Concho County judge, 80-year-old Amos was tapped by the Kinney County judge to oversee a large group of the migrant trespassing cases in the county that has most zealously prosecuted them. Kinney County, a rural border county with conservative leadership, has imprisoned thousands of men on trespassing charges under Abbott’s border security initiative, Operation Lone Star.
The county’s leaders are staunchly conservative, labeling the immigration crisis an invasion and often publicly slamming President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. The county’s government website prominently links to a “defend our borders” fundraising site featuring the county judge, sheriff and misdemeanor prosecutor. The previously sleepy region has reported more break-ins with the increase in immigration, and state police often speed through town chasing suspected smugglers.
Last summer, the Republican governor flooded several border counties with state police to arrest and imprison single male migrants for allegedly trespassing on private property in an effort to push back against a sharp rise in illegal immigration. The number of people crossing the border, many of whom are seeking asylum, has continued at record levels.
The arrest practice has been marred by controversy from the start. Continual mistakes by police, prosecutors and judges led to wrongful arrests and hundreds of men being illegally imprisoned, in violation of state due-process laws. The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating the trespassing arrest initiative after complaints of discriminatory arrest practices.
After their arrests in Kinney County, migrants have spent weeks or months in state prisons converted into jails for immigration-related crimes. Those men are unable to post bond to be released — typically to be deported — before they can get before a judge to plead guilty or ask for a reduced bond in the backlogged courts.
Originally, the region’s administrative judge, Stephen Ables, had assigned three visiting judges — two Republicans and a Democrat — to help the county, which has only one misdemeanor judge and prosecutor and is used to handling dozens of cases a year, not thousands. But in December, Kinney County Judge Tully Shahan dismissed the three judges and asked Ables to instead assign five that he selected, including Amos, Ables told the Tribune at the time.
Shahan did not respond to questions Monday from the Tribune on whether he would call for Amos’ removal from his county’s bench. Ables’ office said he could not be reached because he is on vacation.
Shahan has previously argued that the decision to remove and reassign judges was up to Ables.
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Donald Trump Jr. insisted at a campaign event on Monday that Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) was not the person who informed the FBI about documents illegally stored at Mar-a-Lago.
In an attack ad released on Monday, Gaetz's opponent, Mark Lombardo, suggested that the congressman was the "informant" who prompted an FBI raid on the former president's Florida estate.
"I heard that I was coming up here to yell at Matt because, apparently, he was the FBI informant," Trump laughed as he told the story to Gaetz supporters. "I've heard a lot of dumb things, especially since we got into politics and especially since Joe Biden has become president."
"That is truly one of the dumbest things I've ever heard," he added. "There's never been a fighter for the MAGA agenda and for Donald Trump and most importantly for you and everything that you believe in, it is Matt Gaetz."
According to a focus group finding conducted with Florida swing voters, Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R) may have problems attracting voters who aren't rock-sold Republicans if they decide to run for president in 2024 -- but first they have to get through their respective re-election bids in November.
In a report for the Bulwark, campaign analysts Rich Thau and Matt Steffee note that voters who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and then Joe Biden in 2020, are not sold on the two Republicans with national aspirations.
That, the two analysts, assert wouldn't stop them in a GOP primary but a general election victory might be more of a struggle.
"For months, the general consensus has been that in Florida’s two marquee midterm races—for governor and U.S. Senate—the Republican candidates are likely to prevail. But recent polling shows both races tighter than expected for Ron DeSantis and Marco Rubio. On August 9 we conducted focus groups with a dozen Trump-to-Biden voters and these people explained why they were open to replacing both incumbents," the report states.
According to some voters who were asked about the two GOP lawmakers, they have some work to do if they hope to make inroads with voters who vote the candidate and not the party.
In the case of DeSantis, some of the comments about him contained the words, "power-hungry,” “petty,” “an opportunist,” “egotistical,” “anti-abortion,” and a “bull in a china shop.”
According to B.J., 43, from Deland, DeSantis' war on Disney -- among other issues -- was a big turn-off.
“I’m a big Disney fan. That hit pretty close to home. There was just no point to it. It was just pure revenge politics. Also, I don’t agree with how he handled the Covid pandemic, like restricting local municipalities, not allowing them to enforce mask mandates and things like that. I think that was highly inappropriate," B.J. explained.
“I disagree with DeSantis on quite a few things . . . It’s purely just his stance on things. [I’m troubled that he’s] anti-abortion, primarily, anti-transgender—more the social issues," 27-year-old Lance from Orlando added.
As for Rubio, words like “far-right,” “not genuine,” “puppet,” “absent,” “a coward,” and “a sellout,"' popped up when his name was mentioned.
“[Rubio is] standing in the way of progress at every turn. Even if he’s not directly proposing something, he’s denying it a chance to be heard—I’m talking about a bill or an idea just based on party-line vote alone as opposed to actually reading through it and thinking about it. I would say the constant negativity [from Rubio is what’s troubling],” explained Thomas, 27, of Coral Gables.
"There will be environmental factors at play in the midterms, starting with how voters feel about former President Trump and current President Biden. Some of which are predictable and others of which are not. For instance, few people expected the FBI to execute a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on August 8. And come November, this event could drive Republican turnout. But among our dozen persuadable Florida voters, 11 said they believed the search was justified. The same number said that if Trump took classified documents from the White House when he left office, that would constitute a serious crime," they wrote.
Dr. Anthony Fauci announced on Monday that he is stepping down from his role as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases after decades of service.
The New York Times reports that the 81-year-old Fauci, who was the public face of health advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than a million Americans, will "pursue the next chapter" at the end of the year.
Although Fauci often served as a steady voice of expertise during the Trump administration's early response the deadly pandemic in 2020, he quickly became a lightning rod among Trump allies over his promotion of restrictions aimed at slowing the virus's spread.
In an interview with the Times, Fauci said that he wanted to do more public health advocacy outside of the government role where he has worked for nearly 40 years.
“So long as I’m healthy, which I am, and I’m energetic, which I am, and I’m passionate, which I am, I want to do some things outside of the realm of the federal government," he said.
President Joe Biden gave Fauci praise after he announced his coming retirement from government.
"Because of Dr. Fauci’s many contributions to public health, lives here in the United States and around the world have been saved," Biden said.
According to a report from Politico, conservative grassroots groups more interested in impacting policy instead of engaging in the culture wars are finding their messaging being ignored because the Republican Party is focused on Donald Trump's legal travails and impending presidential run in 2024.
Case in point, Politico's Meridith McGraw and Caitlan Oprysko wrote that the passage of the landmark Inflation Reduction Act that provides massive subsidies for climate change and health care initiatives normally would have been met with massive resistance but instead was sent to President Joe Biden with only token resistance.
That has conservative activists worrying that their voices are being sidelined because they can't get the attention of GOP lawmakers.
As the report notes, while the bill was pushed through the Democratically-controlled Senate, all eyes were focused on the FBI search of Mar-a-Lago and the former president's battles with the Justice Department.
According to the report, "Instead of mounting a massive grassroots opposition to tank or tar the Inflation Reduction Act, conservatives and right-wing news outlets spent the past week with their gaze elsewhere: the FBI’s search of Donald Trump’s Palm Beach mansion," adding, "conservative activists did rally against the bill and targeted vulnerable Democrats in ads. But even the main organizers conceded that they had little time to muster the opposition-party gusto of years past."
As Cesar Ybarra of FreedomWorks put it, "Everything was moving so fast, the tax provisions were being debated on the fly, so there was very little time for groups to do that in-depth grassroots pushback like we saw during Obamacare. To create buzz in this town and for it to penetrate across America, you need more time. So yeah, we got rolled.”
Politico reports, "...last week’s split-screen of the Mar-a-Lago search and the passage of the IRA provided a telling portrait of pistons that move modern Republican politics. Whereas conservative activism has, in past cycles, been driven by opposition to Democratic-authored policies or actions — from Obamacare to TARP— the modern version has been fed by culture-war issues and, more often than not, Trump himself."
Merissa Hamilton, an activist with FreedomWorks, lamented the loss of power, telling Politico, "We feel even more detached from our representation than we ever have before because there was no time to get any public input."
"But others in the party conceded that policy fights are no longer driving activism, at least to the degree they once did," Politico reports. "In a Twitter thread, Brian Riedl, an economist with the conservative-leaning Manhattan Institute, said the right’s more recent apathy on economic policy 'is partially a focus on culture & troll wars, partly a post-Trump identity crisis. And a lot of Democrats simply learning to avoid the economic policy prescriptions that most drive conservative rebellions.'"
Human rights advocates around the world this week called on Saudi Arabia to free Salma al-Shehab after she was sentenced to 34 years in prison and a 34-year travel ban for tweets criticizing the kingdom's repression of women.
Liz Throssell, a spokesperson for the United Nations' Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Friday that "we are appalled by the sentencing" of al-Shehab, a 34-year-old mother and graduate student in the United Kingdom.
"We urge the Saudi authorities to quash her conviction and release her immediately and unconditionally," Throssell continued. "She should never have been arrested and charged in the first place for such conduct."
Throssell also put the sentencing into a broader context:
The extraordinarily lengthy sentence adds to the chilling effect among government critics and civil society at large and is yet another example of Saudi authorities weaponizing the country's counterterrorism and anti-cybercrime laws to target, intimidate, and retaliate against human rights defenders and those who voice dissent. Saudi Arabia must not only release al-Shehab so that she can re-join her family, but also review all convictions stemming from free expression against human rights defenders, including women who were jailed after they legitimately demanded reforms of discriminatory policies, as well as religious leaders and journalists. The Saudi government should also establish a robust legislative framework in line with international human rights law to uphold the rights to freedom of expression and association, and the right of peaceful assembly for all.
Diana Semaan, Amnesty International's acting deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, similarly called out the kingdom's authorities Thursday, declaring that "it is outrageous that Salma al-Shehab, a Ph.D. student and mother of two from Saudi Arabia's Shia minority, has been handed down such a cruel and unlawful punishment simply for using Twitter and retweeting activists who support women's rights."
Al-Shehab was arrested in January 2021 while on holiday in Saudi Arabia and initially sentenced to six years behind bars, but the country's Specialized Criminal Court of Appeal increased her sentence last week.
According to Semaan, "Al-Shehab should never have been convicted in the first place, but to have her sentence increased from six to 34 years following an unfair trial shows that the authorities intend to use her to set an example amid their unrelenting crackdown on free speech."
"She must be immediately and unconditionally released," the campaigner asserted. "The Saudi authorities must allow her to reunite to her family and to continue her studies in the U.K."
Like the U.N. spokesperson, Semaan also called for more sweeping action, arguing that "Saudi Arabi must end its relentless crackdown on women's rights activists and any others who dare to speak their mind freely."
"Women like Salma must be recognized and protected, not targeted for expressing their opinions," she said. "The authorities must also stop equating free speech with 'terrorism.' They should repeal or substantially amend Saudi's counterterrorism and anti-cybercrime laws, which criminalize dissent, and enact new laws that are fully compatible with international human rights law and standards."
Some critics of al-Shehab's imprisonment and the monarchy have accused Western leaders—including President Joe Biden, who visited Saudi Arabia earlier this summer—of emboldening the kingdom's leaders, especially Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.
Lina al-Hathloul of the Saudi- and London-based human rights group ALQST—whose sister Loujain al-Hathloul was recently released from prison—said Monday that "Saudi activists warned Western leaders that giving legitimacy to the crown prince would pave the way for more abuses, which is unfortunately what we are witnessing now."
Monica De La Cruz, a firebrand Republican running in a fiercely competitive South Texas race, received thousands of dollars for personal business interests from federal COVID relief programs despite disparaging federal assistance programs as harmful to the U.S. economy.
She’s the latest to join the growing list of Republican candidates and members of Congress who have recently come under fire for touting the benefits of Democratic or bipartisan legislation that they had disparaged and voted against. De La Cruz told The Texas Tribune she has always supported the kinds of assistance programs her businesses benefited from, but she vocally opposed major legislation that would have expanded them, saying they included wasteful spending items.
Two years later during a January candidate forum, De La Cruz blasted President Joe Biden’s pandemic relief package, the American Rescue Plan, as causing “higher prices” and the “destruction of small businesses.” The American Rescue Plan Act appropriated $15 billion toward the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program.
Another of De La Cruz’s businesses, DLC Insurance, was approved for a $38,552 Paycheck Protection Program loan back on April 29, 2020, intended to support five jobs at the firm. But the firm was ultimately shuttered during the pandemic, according to a March report from NBC News. De La Cruz, who listed her title as president of the company on disclosure forms, reported making $44,600 in income from DLC Insurance that year. The PPP loan was forgiven, including interest.
Calls by The Texas Tribune to a number listed with her insurance agency went unanswered.
On her campaign website, De La Cruz runs on a platform of stopping “incentivizing able-bodied adults not to work,” implementing “universal and enforceable work requirements for welfare” and working “with companies to transition people from welfare to work to address our labor shortage.” She also opposes Democratic social spending legislation, citing concerns it drives up inflation.
The PPP was one of the key relief elements of the CARES Act, a behemoth pandemic response package signed by former President Donald Trump in March 2020 as millions of Americans stopped going to work in person. Trump signed another COVID-19 relief package in December of that year, which De La Cruz criticized in a Facebook post and comments as surprising and “very sad.”
“I’m surprised Trump signed this,” she wrote on social media posts, criticizing the aspects of the bill that allocated funding for other countries.
“Monica De La Cruz raged against relief funding for Texas small businesses, but what she didn’t mention was that she and her family happily took nearly $200,000 of that same aid for themselves. Her hypocritical agenda of ‘Help for me, but not for thee’ is politics at its worst and South Texans deserve better,” said Monica Robinson, a spokesperson for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
De La Cruz retorted to the Tribune that such claims are "nothing more than another desperate attempt by the far Left to smear me."
"Like many others, my small business received PPP loans to help us stay open and afloat during the pandemic. I’ve always supported programs like that to help small businesses, while also pointing out that the Democrat’s so-called American Rescue spending bill wasted far too much taxpayer money on unnecessary items and caused higher inflation,” she said.
In the early days of the pandemic, De La Cruz was running against U.S. Rep. Vicente Gonzalez in Congressional District 15, ultimately losing in a close race to the moderate member. This year, she faces progressive newcomer and fellow small businesswoman Michelle Vallejo, who runs on a progressive populist platform and has also encountered her own financial scrutiny after neglecting to declare more than $200,000 in assets on her financial disclosure report, CQ Roll Call reported last month. Vallejo’s campaign submitted an amended disclosure accounting for information “inadvertently left off the original filing,” her campaign spokesperson told CQ Roll Call.
The CD-15 race is the most competitive in Texas, with no incumbent after Gonzalez opted to run in the newly reshaped 34th congressional district, previously held by Rep. Filemon Vela. National Republicans have also been pouring money into South Texas to flip the historically Democratic region, touching on the area’s border proximity and its religious and social conservatism.
Disclosure: The Texas Tribune, as a nonprofit local newsroom and a small business, applied for and received a loan through the Paycheck Protection Program in the amount of $1,116,626.
The full program is now LIVE for the 2022 The Texas Tribune Festival, happening Sept. 22-24 in Austin. Explore the schedule of 100+ mind-expanding conversations coming to TribFest, including the inside track on the 2022 elections and the 2023 legislative session, the state of public and higher ed at this stage in the pandemic, why Texas suburbs are booming, why broadband access matters, the legacy of slavery, what really happened in Uvalde and so much more. See the program.
The Texas Tribune is a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.
Political operative Dick Morris claimed on Newsmax's Saturday Reportthat the Democratic Party is abusing the American legal apparatus to prevent former President Donald Trump from seeking reelection in 2024 because they are upset about him having "incited a revolution" on January 6th, 2021.
Trump was impeached by the United States House of Representatives for inciting the insurrection at the Capitol after he exhausted all of his attempts to overturn the 2020 election that he lost in a landslide to President Joe Biden.
Morris, who worked in the administrations of Trump and ex-President Bill Clinton, believes that the more resistance Trump faces, the stronger he will become.
"Trump derives energy from people who oppose him. And it fuels him. It orients him. He feels righteous. He feels that he's correct and it energizes him. And these raids and this persecution of Donald Trump is something that won't deter him from running. It'll accelerate him to run," said Morris.
He continued:
I think we have to understand the point I make in my book, 'The Return: Trump's Big 2024 Comeback', Democrats have given up on the political process to keep Trump out of office. They've seen after primary, after primary, after primary, week after week, that Trump is winning everything; and they realized that they can't beat him in the Republican primary.
They had tried to get [Republican Florida Governor Ron] DeSantis and others into the race, but they see that they're not going to get in because Trump has a lock on this nomination. So what they're trying to do is to knock him off the ballot through the courts. And the vehicle they've chosen is to indict him for sedition, which is the crime that he allegedly committed when they claim that he incited a revolution against the United States on January 6th. In fact, it would be the only unarmed revolution in history. It's preposterous to say that this out-of-control mob was somehow a revolutionary army.
Morris then contradicted himself by stating that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's execution of a search warrant at Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida on August 8th was akin to prohibiting Southern Confederates from serving in elected office after the Civil War.
"The Democrats are trying to manufacture the idea that January 6th was such a rebellion because — and the timing of this is very significant to the Mar-a-Lago raid — because it came after Trump had a winning streak in primaries, thereby debunking the notion that he could be defeated by the ballot box," Morris proclaimed, adding that the warrant "was executed precisely 90 days before the midterm elections, so it did not run afoul of the FBI rule that you can't do anything to affect the election within 90 days."
Demonstrators from the Planned Parenthood movement joined a march to the US Supreme Court to support abortion. Lenin Nolly/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
First-time moms Melissa and Kimberly Connelly of Cleveland planned for every detail of their daughter’s arrival, from her pink elephant pacifier to the Korean American firefighter whose sperm they used to conceive.
But when the Supreme Court struck down the right to abortion just days after their baby shower in June, the life Melissa had dreamed of for her child suddenly felt threatened.
“I wanted to bring a daughter into the world knowing that she could be anything, and that starts with bodily autonomy,” she said. “To have that right stripped a month before she’s born, and then to know she has more rights as a fetus — it’s absolutely absurd to me.”
Filled with outrage, despair and pregnancy hormones, she posted a missive to her 30,000 followers on Instagram, joining scores of expectant parents across the country who are using maternity shoots, birth announcements and baby registries to stump for abortion rights.
“They say a fetus can hear at 27 weeks. Do I tell our daughter that right now she has the most rights she’ll ever have?” Melissa wrote under a photo of herself beaming at her wife as the pair spread stripes of rainbow paint across her belly. “When is the right time to explain to her that her parents’ marriage could be overturned? ... Must be nice not to worry about these conversations.”
The post received thousands of likes and hundreds of messages of support. But it also brought backlash.
“We’re talking about you being upset that your power to kill a baby like your daughter has been heavily limited now,” one commenter wrote. “She doesn’t possess value just because you happen to want her.”
Like baby feet, pregnant bodies have become a metonym for antiabortion views. Those who oppose reproductive rights paint expectant parents who support them as unfit, baby-hating hypocrites.
Now, with abortion under threat, many of those parents are putting their bellies on the line for reproductive freedom.
“We’ve had [pregnant] people do social media campaigns for us for fundraising, and we have individuals list us in their registries in lieu of gifts,” said Sylvia Ghazarian, executive director of the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project, a national abortion fund. “People do it all the time.”
Indeed, while opponents have long positioned abortion as anathema to motherhood, statistics show the opposite.
“For us, 74% [of patients] are already parents,” Ghazarian said. “I have more and more patients in need.”
Across the country, the majority of abortion patients have children. Many patients go on to give birth in the future. In the wake of the Dobbs decision, which reversed Roe v. Wade, some families want to make that link more explicit. A growing number are using the arrival of a baby or wedding to raise money for abortion rights.
“Couples still want to have a KitchenAid mixer and a Le Creuset Dutch oven, but they also really want to register for cash,” including funds for charity, said Emily Forrest, a spokesperson for the wedding registry website Zola. “We’ve noticed a growing trend over several years of couples wanting to add a charity fund option.”
This year, the number of users registering specifically for funds to be put toward nonprofits that support abortion and other reproductive rights spiked almost 200%, she said.
“That’s a very large jump,” Forrest said. “It was very directly correlated to the timing of the leaked [Supreme Court] draft and then the decision to overturn Roe vs. Wade.”
In May, the leak of a draft of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr.’s majority opinion in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization sent shock waves through the country. Activists who’d long predicted the fall of Roe have nevertheless been stunned by other precedents that seem under threat, from marriage equality to contraception.
Since the leak, requests for donations to the Brigid Alliance and Planned Parenthood increasingly have shown up on baby registry sites alongside Lovevery toy subscriptions, Kanga Care cloth diaper kits and Uppababy stroller systems.
“When you have a baby, people do want to give you things — but she has everything she needs,” said one expectant woman, who asked not to be named for fear she could be targeted by antiabortion extremists. As part of her registry, she’s soliciting donations for the National Network of Abortion Funds.
“Please donate any amount you’re comfortable with!” the D.C.-area woman wrote in her registry. She said a group of family members made a joint donation.
“I’ve always been really pro-reproductive rights, but pregnancy reinforced my commitment to them,” she said.
Others became abortion-rights advocates on their journey to motherhood.
“I grew up in a very Catholic household in rural central Pennsylvania, where the collective view on abortion was that it was the result of being irresponsible or that it was baby killing — I had absolutely no concept of the healthcare element,” said another soon-to-be mom, who asked not to be named out of fear she would be harassed.
She registered for donations for the Brigid Alliance, which offers financial support to people who must travel long distances to obtain abortions, particularly those whose pregnancies are far along.
She had long opposed abortion — until she needed one to treat a miscarriage last year.
“It struck a nerve with me that abortion is 100% healthcare,” she said. “Until you go through the process yourself, you don’t realize the scope of abortion.”
Photographer Chelsea Maras of Huntington Beach was already a supporter of abortion rights when she had an abortion to resolve her miscarriage in 2021. So when the Dobbs ruling was handed down June 24, it seemed only natural to use her new, growing baby bump to direct her Instagram followers to abortion funds.
“Pregnant people have a unique voice right now, because our lived experience that we’re doing in real time is a talking point,” Maras said. “I think it’s very important to show up with a pregnant belly and make that statement.”
So she popped on a T-shirt with “My body my choice” written in rainbow block letters, tucking it up to bare her belly.
“Bringing a child into this particular country that offers no paid parental leave, no healthcare, no postpartum support, no child care, can feel like an impossible choice,” she wrote in the caption. “If you are looking for action steps ... donate to local abortion funds, give to the organizations that are on the ground assisting with care.”
For many, using their own wanted pregnancy to fight the loss of reproductive freedom has been a way to reclaim power in a moment of both physical and political vulnerability.
“It was our way of coping, because we feel so hopeless and powerless,” said Taylor Ecker, a Pennsylvania-based photographer who specializes in maternity and newborn portraits.
She described a recent maternity shoot that transformed into an impromptu photo protest when her client produced a black Crayola washable marker from her purse and asked Ecker to write abortion-rights slogans on her belly.
Motherhood should be a choice. Meanwhile our shelves are empty. In the USA there are 400,000+ kids in foster care.
The client posed in tall grass, wearing her cream, floral robe open to show her belly. In one image, the slogan “Bans off our bodies” is framed to include a tattoo on her thigh of Casper the Friendly Ghost flipping the bird.
“I told her, ‘If we’re going to do this, it’s going to be a faceless shot, because I want to protect you,’” Ecker said. “We literally cried together doing this. For her to think her daughter would be born into a world with less rights on her body than her mom was born into — that was a very heavy burden on her heart.”
Still, many women said they were nervous to protest, even as they felt compelled to speak out.
“Is someone going to attack me in a way that’s also attacking my unborn child?” asked Riley Moos, 28, an attorney in Tacoma, Wash., who in June posted an abortion rights photo of her pregnant body. “Is someone going to say I’m a bad mother or a bad person?”
Moos worried she might offend her own mother, an adoptee from Costa Rica who the family believes was the product of sexual assault.
“But it’s my body right now. Anytime I post a picture, the bump’s going to be in it,” Moos said. “People want you to think that I’m not my own person [being pregnant] right now. That’s exactly why I need to make this post.”
Demonstrators from the Women's March movement take part in a demonstration in front of the White House to demand US President Joe Biden take action to protect abortion rights. Lenin Nolly/ZUMA Press Wire/dpa
By Jonathan Landay WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden's administration will press ahead with talks on releasing billions of dollars in Afghanistan's foreign-held assets despite the late al Qaeda leader's presence in Kabul and foot-dragging by the Taliban and Afghan central bank, according to three sources with knowledge of the situation. The decision to pursue the initiative to help stabilize Afghanistan's collapsed economy underscores growing concern in Washington over a humanitarian crisis as the United Nations warns that nearly half the country's 40 million people face "acute h...
The editorial board for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch urged the newspaper's readers to vote against election deniers who are continuing to push debunked delusions of election fraud.
"With primary elections swirling all over the country, it’s easy to lose track of what’s happening where. But a recent Washington Post analysis clarifies a troubling pattern: In most of the half-dozen battleground states that will matter most in the 2024 presidential election, the GOP has nominated Trumpian election-deniers to posts that have power over election results. This, more than mayhem in the streets, is how American democracy could fall," the editorial board wrote.
The Postreported, "In the 41 states that have held nominating contests this year, more than half the GOP winners so far — about 250 candidates in 469 contests — have embraced Trump’s false claims about his defeat two years ago, according to a Post analysis of every race for federal and statewide office with power over elections."
GOP secretary of state nominee Kristina Karamo in Michigan and Mark Finchem in Arizona along with gubernatorial hopefuls Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania and Kari Lake in Arizona.
"There isn’t and never was any validity to former President Donald Trump’s continuing claim that he won re-election in 2020 but was robbed of that victory by voter fraud. He lost what may well have been the cleanest, most closely monitored and diligently reviewed election in U.S. history, and he lost by a significant margin. But, like the aspiring autocrat he is, Trump attempted to remain in power anyway — an unprecedented violation of oath for an American president," the Post-Dispatch wrote.
"Had this gang of electoral saboteurs been in office in 2020, America might well have been plunged into a constitutional crisis. This election season, there is no more urgent imperative — none — than ensuring that they and other politicians who side with Trump’s lies and against democracy are kept away from the levers of power," the editorial board wrote.
