Grace Panetta, The 19th

Mom describes 'gut-wrenching' torture forced on brain-dead daughter

This story was originally reported by Grace Panetta and Barbara Rodriguez of The 19th. Meet Grace and Barbara and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Reproductive health advocates are sounding the alarm over the case of a pregnant woman in Georgia who was declared brain dead months ago but must now stay on life support, according to her family, because of the state’s strict abortion ban law.

Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old nurse from the metro Atlanta area, experienced a medical emergency in February that involved blood clots in her brain. Smith, who was about nine weeks pregnant at the time, was declared legally dead, her mother, April Newkirk, told Atlanta TV station 11Alive Action News.

Newkirk said that staff at Emory University’s network of hospitals told her they cannot remove the devices that are helping Smith to breathe because of the state’s six-week abortion ban. The staff said they are legally required to keep Smith breathing until the fetus reaches viability, Newkirk added.

“She’s been breathing through machines for more than 90 days,” Newkirk told the television station of Smith, who also has a 5-year-old son. “It’s torture for me. I see my daughter breathing, but she’s not there. And her son—I bring him to see her.”

The case puts a spotlight on the consequences of restrictive abortion bans following the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade, which had guaranteed a federal constitutional right to an abortion. Georgia’s abortion ban has an exception for a pregnancy that threatens the life of the pregnant person. But Smith’s case doesn’t fall under those exceptions, her family said. Since Smith is brain-dead, the pregnancy no longer poses a risk to her life. And because Smith’s fetus still has a heartbeat, the family said that she must still be kept on life support to comply with Georgia’s abortion ban.

Rep. Nikema Williams, an Atlanta-area Democrat, said in a statement Friday that Smith and her family “deserve better.”

“Everyone deserves the freedom to decide what’s best for their families, futures, and lives. Instead, anti-abortion politicians like Donald Trump and Governor Brian Kemp are forcing people through unimaginable pain,” Williams said. “Adriana’s story is gut-wrenching. It’s also a painful reminder of the consequences when politicians refuse to trust us to make our own medical decisions.”

Smith initially sought medical treatment in February for intense headaches, according to her mother. She went to Northside Hospital, where she was given medication and sent home. The following day, at her home, her boyfriend found her gasping for air. Representatives for Northside Hospital did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Smith was then seen by and sent to different doctors throughout the Emory University hospital system, including Emory University Hospital, where she worked as a nurse. A CT scan showed blood clots in her brain. She was subsequently declared brain-dead, which means she is considered legally dead.

Smith is now 21 weeks pregnant. Newkirk said the hospital staff told her they plan to keep her daughter breathing until she is at least 32 weeks pregnant.

Representatives for Emory told the Associated Press that the hospital network could not comment on an individual case because of privacy rules but said in a statement: “Emory Healthcare uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws. Our top priorities continue to be the safety and wellbeing of the patients we serve.”

Alicia Stallworth, director of Georgia campaigns for the reproductive rights advocacy group Reproductive Freedom for All, called Smith’s condition “a devastating tragedy.”

“But what makes it even more unconscionable is that her family has been denied the space and dignity to grieve,” said Stallworth. “Instead of being allowed to say goodbye, they are being forced to endure an agonizing limbo because of the state’s extreme abortion ban. This is not care. This is not justice. It is a cruelty rooted in a system that refuses to see Black women as fully human, even in death.”

Newkirk told 11Alive Action News, Georgia’s NBC affiliate, that the state’s strict abortion laws have robbed her family of the choice about whether to continue Smith’s pregnancy and the ability to make decisions on their own terms. They’re now left in limbo and facing the prospect of paying for several more weeks of expensive medical care.

“I think every woman should have the right to make their own decision,” Newkirk told the station. “And if not, then their partner or their parents.”

Smith’s fetus also has fluid on his brain, Newkirk said, carrying unknown implications for his health and future.

“She’s pregnant with my grandson. But he may be blind, may not be able to walk, may not survive once he’s born,” she said.

“This decision should’ve been left to us. Now we’re left wondering what kind of life he’ll have — and we’re going to be the ones raising him," she said.

Members of the House Reproductive Freedom Caucus, co-chaired by Democratic Reps. Diana DeGette of Colorado and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, said in a Friday statement that “there is no desensitizing to the horror of this moment.”

“Adriana’s mother spent Mother’s Day watching her daughter undergo unconscionable medical torture by orders of the state,” they said. “Her young son spent Mother’s Day thinking his mom was just asleep and will soon wake up to hold him again. There are no words that can provide clarity or comfort. There is only the promise that we will say her name until her family sees peace and justice.”

Black women face higher maternal mortality rates in the United States and in Georgia, a public health crisis that has been underscored by the loss of federal abortion rights.

Smith’s case is the latest instance in which Georgia’s six-week abortion ban and its impacts on Black women have made national news. In 2024, the investigative newsroom ProPublica reported on the cases of two other Black women, Amber Nicole Thurman and Candi Miller, who died of infections after seeking to end their pregnancies in the state. The state’s maternal mortality review committee determined that both deaths were preventable, the outlet reported.

Monica Simpson, the executive director of SisterSong, an Atlanta-based reproductive justice organization focused on women of color, is also the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the state’s six-week abortion ban. In a statement Wednesday, she noted that Smith, a registered nurse, knew how to advocate for herself and navigate the medical system. Still, she didn’t get the treatment she needed until it was too late. Black women, she said, “must be trusted when it comes to our health care decisions.”

“We’ve sounded the alarm for years,” Simpson said. “Yet, after the devastating and preventable deaths of multiple Black women, the message still rings clear: our lives are on the line, and our human right to bodily autonomy has been violated. Our bodies are not battlegrounds for political power plays.”

Harris holds a slight edge over Trump — and it’s driven by women: poll

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Vice President Kamala Harris holds a three-point lead over former President Donald Trump, boosted by a wider advantage with women voters than he holds with men, according to a new 19th News/SurveyMonkey poll.

Ahead of their first and so far only scheduled presidential debate, the poll revealed that 44% of registered voters back Harris, the Democratic nominee, and 41% say they back Trump, the Republican. Meanwhile, 10% say they are undecided.

Harris currently leads among women voters by 13 points (48% to 35%) and Trump leads men by eight points (47% to 39%). Nonbinary voters support Harris by a margin of 76 points (83% to 7%).

Half of voters approve of Harris, putting her net positive favorability rating within the poll’s margin of error. Among women registered voters, she holds a 12-point net positive favorability rating; among men, she is 10 points underwater. Harris holds a 72-point net positive favorability rating among nonbinary voters.

Harris has been a candidate since President Joe Biden dropped out on July 21, making hers the shortest general election campaign in modern history. With just eight weeks until Election Day, Harris and Trump are taking different approaches to make their case to voters. She has largely spurned major media interviews in favor of speeches and campaign events focused on rolling out specific policies. He has conducted more interviews and news conferences but maintained a comparatively lighter campaign schedule, relying on his running mate, Sen. JD Vance, for much of the retail politicking.

The poll also reveals that Democrats lead on the generic ballot for the U.S. House by three points, 42 to 39%, among registered voters. Women prefer the Democrat running for the House seat in their district by a 14-point margin, while the Republican contender has a seven-point edge with men. Nonbinary voters would vote for the Democrat by a margin of 72 points, 80 to 8%.

SurveyMonkey conducted this poll online from August 26 through September 4 among a national sample of 20,762 adults, including 18,123 registered voters, with a modeled error estimate of plus or minus 1.0 percentage points.

One of the poll’s key takeaways is that women favor Harris more than men across every racial and ethnic subgroup. If elected, Harris, who is Black and Indian American, would be the first woman president of the United States.

Trump enjoys his highest support among White men, whom he leads by 14 points; White women back Harris by six points. Black women support Harris by a margin of 59 points, while Black men support her by 30 points.

Latinx and Asian American-Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters make up sizable portions of the electorate in critical battleground states, including Arizona and Nevada. Harris leads among Latinas by a margin of 16 points, while Latinos back Trump by seven points. AAPI women support Harris by 11 points. Trump, for his part, leads AAPI men by just two points.

When broken down by age, the poll shows that Harris holds higher support than Trump among older and younger voters. She is backed by 53% of those who are 65 and older; 39% of them support Trump. Trump has a narrow lead among 35- to 64-year-old voters, while Harris has an edge among voters 18 to 34.

Independent voters who don’t lean toward either major political party are still largely up for grabs, the poll shows. Thirty-seven percent of them are undecided, 23% support Trump, 20% support Harris and 19% favor another candidate.

Nearly half of independent voters, or those who aren’t registered to a political party, named inflation or the cost of living as their top voting issue.

Inflation is a leading concern going into the election, with 38% of all registered voters and 39% of women naming it the issue that matters most to them. After inflation, men were most likely to name immigration (12%) or jobs, unemployment and wages (10%) as their top issues. Women were more likely to name health care or abortion (11% each).

While Harris hasn’t explicitly centered the historic nature of her candidacy in her campaign, it still mobilizes her supporters — especially those represented in her Black and South Asian heritage. The poll reveals that enthusiasm to vote for her rose by five points among Black women and five points among AAPI women when they were asked how excited they were to vote for a candidate who could become the first woman president.

Overall, Harris also holds a slight edge in voter enthusiasm over Trump — 92% of Harris supporters say they are very or somewhat excited to vote for her, while 87% of Trump’s supporters say the same.

The marriage gap has increasingly come to define American politics in the past several decades as married Americans have moved toward the Republican Party while voters who have never been married, especially women voters, have swerved left. Trump’s running mate selection of Vance, who has repeatedly singled out women without children in his rhetoric, illuminates this growing divide.

Married men back Trump by 12 points, 51% to 39%, while men who have never been married back Harris by three points, 41 to 38, the poll finds.

Meanwhile, married women, who have leaned Republican in other data, narrowly back Harris, 46 to 41 %. Women who have never been married support her by a much larger margin of 29 points, 52 to 23%.

Republicans, including Trump, have increasingly targeted LGBTQ+ people with legislation and incendiary rhetoric leading up to the 2024 election. Sixty-seven percent of LGBTQ+ voters support Harris.

Parents, as a group, support Trump over Harris by 13 points, 47 to 34. Trump has a large advantage among fathers, who back him by 26 points, 55 to 29%, while the candidates are statistically tied among mothers. Parents of children under 2 supported Trump by the largest margin, 49 to 28.

Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are centering family policy in their messaging, but coming at it from different approaches. Both have rolled out policies aimed at courting parents, including permanently expanding the child tax credit.

When asked about the four candidates seeking the White House, 42% of poll respondents said Harris cares about the problems facing people like them and 40% said the same of Trump. The difference was larger between the Democratic vice presidential nominee and Vance: 35% of voters said Walz cared about their problems while 26% said so about Vance.

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The GOP had already mostly lost unmarried women — then came J.D. Vance

A Republican Party that has for decades alienated single women seems to have found its champion in JD Vance. A potentially bigger problem? Donald Trump’s pick of Vance as his running mate could cement the chasm between the GOP and unmarried women while also driving away married women, and even some married men, who lean Republican.

Since Trump put the Ohio senator on his presidential ticket, Vance’s past statements about “childless cat ladies” who are “miserable,” his opposition to no-fault divorce, his hostility to reproductive rights and his agreement with the belief that the “whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” is to raise their grandchildren are getting renewed attention.

Vance’s resurfaced comments draw on long-standing tropes about unmarried women and women without children. They have sparked mockery, but also ire. Experts say Vance’s rhetoric and policy proposals could exacerbate a gender gap that started to develop between the two major parties in the 1980s. And it’s a gap that already had the potential to become a gulf in the first White House contest after the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned nearly 50 years of federal abortion rights in the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

“The reason Vance is turning out to be a disaster is all of his statements about cat ladies, that people who have children should have more votes than people who don’t have children … you’ve got the makings of a real, you know, revolt among women,” said Elaine Kamarck, a scholar with the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution.

“The gender gap has persisted but Dobbs, I think, is going to just drive a truck through it — the Dobbs decision is obviously bigger than anything we’ve ever seen,” she added.

Since rising to the top of the Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris has doubled down on running to restore reproductive rights and personal freedoms — and the message resonates with the never-married women who make up a key part of the Democratic base. It’s been reinforced by her pick of running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who has used his post as the state’s top executive to protect abortion access.

Trump, meanwhile, has taken credit for ending federal abortion rights with his Supreme Court nominations and has already alienated women by objectifying and insulting them based on their gender, along with being credibly accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women. His selection of Vance appears to be amplifying that alienation; Vance’s derisive comments about women have negatively defined how many voters viewed him as a VP pick out of the gate.

“JD Vance’s views on women and positions on the issues that affect women…the most acutely are off-putting to the entire electorate because they’re just not reflective of broadly held values,” Evan Roth Smith, lead pollster for the Democratic survey research initiative Blueprint, said on a Thursday call with reporters. “They’re reflective of an ideology that is incompatible with the electorate.”

Pew Research Center data from 2023 shows that women who have never been married identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party by a margin of 48 points — 72 to 24 percent. Meanwhile, married women identify or lean Republican by a margin of five points, or 50 to 45 percent.

Never-married women are 11 points more likely than never-married men to identify or lean Democratic.

Never-married voters of both genders turn out at lower rates than their married or divorced counterparts, a trend likely also associated with the never-married voting bloc skewing young. However, inflammatory statements such as those made by Vance and GOP policies that could curtail widely popular reproductive health care such as IVF could prompt them to vote, experts said.

Mallory Newall with the IPSOS polling firm said that the marriage gap is not a new phenomenon, but what “is happening is that there’s more of a spotlight being shown on this gap that does exist.” Part of the reason, she said, is the Dobbs decision and also “a vice presidential nominee using rhetoric to disparage single women.”

“Can this burgeoning enthusiasm among Democrats pull some unmarried women off the bench and up to the polls in November, whether that’s in response to Vance’s rhetoric, or whether that’s in response to actual policy change?” Newall asked.

The Harris-Walz campaign has had to do little to draw connections between Vance’s sentiments and the policies he has advocated for, which would disproportionately impact women. Vance has made clear on his own that he believes a person’s value to society — particularly when they are a woman — is linked to marriage and childrearing.

During his 2022 Senate campaign, Vance asserted that the Democratic Party was led by too many politicians who did not have biological children and because of that, had no stake in the future of the country. He repeatedly called them “childless cat ladies” — a term he has applied to men, women and sometimes also to people in parenting and other caregiving roles. Those on the receiving end of his criticism included Harris, who has two stepchildren.

In a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson, then of Fox News, Vance said: “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”

Vance stood by the comments once Trump put him on the Republican ticket, saying he was being “sarcastic.” Then, he made an effort at clarifying his words — “I have nothing against cats,” he said. He criticized Democrats as “anti-family,” telling Megyn Kelly on her Sirius radio show, “Look, people are focusing so much on the sarcasm and not on the substance of what I actually said …And the substance of what I actually said is true.”

The National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, which advocates for family and caregiving policies, recently conducted a poll with Morning Consult that broke out women who do not have children but who have cats or dogs as subgroups.

The poll, which surveyed 1,766 registered voters from August 1-2, found that women without children as a group and the smaller subset of women without children who had cats were equally or more likely than parents to support policies including comprehensive investments in education, guaranteeing access to child care, expanding the child tax credit and passing paid medical and family leave.

“As a childless cat lady myself, I’m not surprised by these results, which directly refute JD Vance’s insulting claim that women without children don’t have a stake in the success of our nation’s children and families,” said Sandra Markowitz, the National Women’s Law Center Action Fund’s director of research.

The share of 40-year-olds who have never been married shot up from just 6 percent in 1990 to 25 percent as of 2021, according to the Pew Research Center. And the gap in marriage rates between Democrats and Republicans “cracked open in the 1980s and has widened in the past quarter century,” according to the leading research firm Gallup.

Gallup attributes the trend not primarily to economic or demographic differences, but to cultural ones regarding the value of marriage. Between 1988 and 2012, the share of adults under 50 who said they believed married people are generally happier fell by 33 percentage points among Democrats, but just 13 points among Republicans.

Gaps in voting behavior between divorced men and women are also widening. Data from the Survey Center on American Life at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI) showed 56 percent of divorced men support Trump, but just 42 percent of divorced women do.

“More than any time in the recent past, American politics is pushing men and women apart rather than bringing them together,” wrote Daniel Cox, the center’s director and a senior fellow at AEI who has written extensively on the marriage gap.

The trend has not gone unnoticed by Republican commentators. Fox News personality Jesse Watters was quick to place Republican losses in the 2022 midterm elections at the feet of single women, saying, “We need these ladies to get married. It’s time to fall in love and just settle down. Guys, go out and put a ring on it.”

Some research indicates that Vance’s views, in particular, may also be unappealing to men.

Blueprint, a center-left polling initiative backed by Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman, conducted surveys on Vance’s favorability and testing messages against him in July, when he became Trump’s running mate, and again in August.

Their research found that as more voters became aware of Vance and his stances, his favorability ratings fell from -7 in the July survey to -11 in August. The survey also asked voters if they had heard of 11 of Vance’s past statements. The highest share of voters — 50 percent — had heard of the “childless cat ladies” comment. Of those, 56 percent said it bothered them, including 45 percent who said it bothered them a lot. Over 60 percent of respondents also said they were bothered by Vance’s past stances defending a lack of exceptions in abortion bans; he has since expressed support for exceptions.

Smith said that Vance received meager support from women to begin with, and men contributed much of the drop in his favorability between the two surveys.

“There are those erosions beyond just the people and the women who would be affected by his policies,” he said. “A lot of men don’t like hearing how he talks about women.”

The most effective messages opposing Vance tested in the August poll were rooted in Vance’s past comments about women and his anti-abortion stances.

“Republicans had already priced in the impact of their reproductive policies when it comes to single women of childbearing age and younger women,” he added. “But they had not priced in the thinking that voters outside of that group could be turned off by how the Republican Party nominee vice president would talk about women … that they would suffer electoral losses outside of that cohort.”

Blue state governors are pushing Congress on child care as federal subsidies dry up

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Democratic governors are pushing Congress to make significant investments in child care as the last pandemic-era federal child care subsidies are set to lapse this fall, pushing providers and parents into uncertain territory.

Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper of North Carolina led a June 13 letter, signed by nine other Democratic governors, asking top congressional leaders to maintain the current funding levels and increase recurring funds for child care as they draft their fiscal 2024 budget bills.

“Of the many funding priorities before you, few are as critical to America’s working families as ensuring access to child care,” the letter said, warning that “the American child care system is now strained to its breaking point.” The governors of Colorado, Hawaii, Kansas, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, Rhode Island, Washington and Wisconsin also signed the letter.

Despite a lack of action in Congress on the issue so far, the ongoing child care crisis has received bipartisan attention in the states. A total of 22 of the 36 governors who gave 2023 State of the State addresses, including nine Republicans, highlighted child care, pre-K and/or early childhood education in their remarks, according to an analysis from the center-left Center for American Progress.

Cooper describes investing in child care and early childhood education as a “triple play” that benefits child development and early learning, allows parents to remain in the workforce, and helps businesses in the state hire and retain workers. He’s asked the Republican-controlled legislature for $1.5 billion in the state’s upcoming budget process and has spent the spring visiting child care centers around the state, but wants the federal government to also pitch in on a more permanent basis.

“This is something that I think should unite all of us, but it's somewhat frustrating that we don't see significant help coming after these child care stabilization grants,” Cooper told The 19th. “It gave rise to the letter and my conversations with members of Congress and our state legislature to step up, because I'm worried that with these grants that we're going to fall off a cliff here — and we're going to make the problem that’s there already even worse.”

The United States has historically treated child care as a private market instead of an essential government service, like K-12 public education, and so it has not received consistent government funding and investment.

The COVID-19 pandemic drove thousands of workers out of the industry, another severe blow to the sector. As of April 2023, the child care industry nationwide had lost 54,000 jobs since February 2020, according to the Center for the Study of Child Care Employment at the University of California-Berkeley, representing a 5.1 percent decrease in the sector's size.

Experts say that the business's economics are contributing to fewer options and longer wait lists for parents and lower wages for child care providers, many of whom have struggled to keep their doors open.

The American Rescue Plan, signed into law by President Joe Biden in March 2021, put $39 billion into child care stabilization grants, the largest federal government investment in the industry in U.S. history. But the last of those grants are set to expire on September 30, leaving many states in a lurch.

Cooper said North Carolina has used the nearly $875 million it’s received in federal child care stabilization grants primarily toward increasing teacher pay and teacher bonuses to retain child care providers. But the expiring federal cash, Cooper said, means the state will have to “pare back.” Working to retain workers is especially crucial in North Carolina’s rural areas, which face even more dire child care shortages.

“If we can have support to help more slots get created, this will help rural North Carolina,” he said. “Because right now, about 70 percent of child care funding comes from parent tuition, and that is really not sustainable.”

According to the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, the last of the ARP’s child care stabilization grants to North Carolina will expire in December.

In many states, investing in child care doesn’t fall along neat partisan lines. Especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, legislators from both parties have pursued policy reforms to make it more available.

Democratic governors with new legislative trifectas, including the governors of Massachusetts, Maryland, Michigan and Minnesota, have achieved or proposed major investments in child care and early childhood education funds, including expanding state-level tax credits to families. Republican-controlled states including Missouri, Montana and South Carolina have also invested in expanding child care, pre-kindergarten and early childhood education in the past several years, and other Republican governors have called for more investment and expanded tax credits in 2023.

In some states the issue is partisan: Democratic Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin proposed allocating $340 million to the state’s Child Care Counts program, which distributed federal COVID-era aid, but the GOP legislature slashed funding for the program altogether in a late-night budget hearing, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.

In North Carolina, Republicans gained a veto-proof supermajority in the North Carolina General Assembly in April thanks to a House lawmaker’s party switch. GOP leaders then unveiled SB 20, a bill to ban most abortions after 12 weeks and impose additional restrictions on the procedure. They fast-tracked it in an unusually expedited process and overrode Cooper’s veto to pass it.

Republicans, who touted the legislation as “pro-woman” and “pro-family,” included $160 million of funding toward social programs primarily benefiting women and families. That sum includes $75 million to increase state child care subsidies over the next two fiscal years.

But Cooper said the child care funding in the bill made up only a fraction of what he would consider an adequate investment in the industry — and that it shouldn’t have taken doubling down on restricting abortion to further fund child care.

“I've asked for $1.5 billion to help with early childhood and continuing the childhood care stabilization grants, and neither the Senate nor the House budget has any significant help for that,” Cooper said. “That little bit certainly helps — it certainly should not be paired with taking away women’s reproductive freedoms, and introducing abortion bans that the people of North Carolina don't want.”

The 19th is an independent, nonprofit newsroom reporting on gender, politics and policy.

‘There’s nowhere to hide’: Abortion rights advocates want drug ruling to define the GOP in 2024

Originally published by The 19th

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Abortion rights advocates reacted to a new ruling severely curtailing access to medication abortion with anger and disappointment — but also a resolve to make it a “defining issue” in 2024.

Anti-abortion advocates won a major victory with Friday’s decision from Texas federal Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk. His ruling stays the initial approval of mifepristone, a common abortion drug used in a two-step regimen to terminate pregnancies and manage miscarriages, that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued in 2000.

Medication abortions will remain accessible at least in the short term. Kacsmaryk’s ruling intentionally gave the federal government seven days to appeal to a higher court. Also on Friday, a federal judge in Washington state issued a contradicting opinion in a separate case ordering the FDA not to reverse its approval of mifepristone, creating a legal conflict that experts say is likely to escalate up to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Cecile Richards, co-chair of Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century and the former CEO of Planned Parenthood, said in a Friday statement that Kascmaryk’s decision showed that conservatives are “trying to strip Americans of our basic rights to control our bodies and our futures.”

“The Republican party,” she said, “is playing with fire.”

“This is a moment not only for the abortion rights movement to be tough and tougher, but frankly for everyday Americans who are concerned about their futures and the futures of their families and their communities to stand up,” Richards said in an interview in March, before Kacsmaryk’s ruling.

“I appreciate what the abortion rights movement is doing to fight back, but this is something where it's going to take a lot more than that,” she added. “It's going to take all of us.”

Many Republicans cast the overturn of Roe vs. Wade in June as simply returning the question of abortion to the states. But the ruling from Kacsmaryk, a conservative Christian jurist appointed by former President Donald Trump and confirmed along party lines in 2019, could have sweeping implications for abortion providers and patients across the country, in red and blue states. Of the 38 Republican senators still in office who voted to confirm Kacsmaryk in 2019, only Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi, had posted a public statement celebrating the decision on Twitter or their website as of 8 a.m. ET on Monday morning.

“It is going to lay bare what the Republican Party agenda is, and that is not to make this a state's issue, as they tried to say, but to take away the right of every single person in this country to make their own decisions about pregnancy,” Richards said of the decision.

In a January 2022 op-ed published in The New York Times, Richards wrote that her “one regret” from her time leading Planned Parenthood from 2006 to 2018 was that she “underestimated the callousness” of the Republican Party in pushing for abortion bans aimed at overturning Roe. She wrote that abortion rights advocates couldn’t have worked harder, “but maybe we could have been tougher.”

Now in her role as co-chair of American Bridge, Richards is taking anti-abortion groups like the Alliance Defending Freedom, which argued the Texas mifepristone case on behalf of a consortium of doctors, at their word that they want nothing less than a national ban — and wants to hammer GOP candidates on it going into 2024.

“Every single Republican in office is going to have to take a position on what just happened. There’s nowhere to hide,” Richards said. “Republican leadership is going to be absolutely on the defense now for the next 18 months.”

GOP Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina, who has pushed her party to moderate on the issue of abortion, told CNN on Monday that she thought Kacsmaryk’s ruling should be “thrown out” and the Biden administration should ignore it.

“This is an FDA-approved drug. I support the usage of FDA-approved drugs, even if we might disagree,” she said. “This is not up to us to decide legislators, or even as a court system, whether this is the right drug to use or not. I agree with ignoring it at this point.”

Kascmaryk’s decision marks the first time a federal court has ordered the FDA to overturn the approval of a medication against the wishes of the agency and the drug’s manufacturer, also a party in the case. The legal battles over medication abortion have already resulted in uneven access to the drugs for some and will continue to fuel existing confusion and uncertainty around the drugs. And a high-profile fight over unpopular restrictions on abortion pills in the high courts will continue to keep the issue in the spotlight in the 2024 election cycle.

“This decision is wildly opposed to begin with,” said Celinda Lake, a leading Democratic pollster and president of Lake Research Partners. “And then when you spell out the repercussions, you really have a fight on your hands — people are very upset.”

Lake Research surveys conducted in September 2022 and January 2023 found that 62 percent of likely voters, including 64 percent of independents and nearly half of Republicans, opposed blocking access to medication abortion. Over 60 percent of voters also opposed restricting telemedicine abortion care, an increasingly popular way of accessing medication abortion, and 68 percent said they would support a federal law guaranteeing access to abortion pills.

“Taking away people's rights is not a theoretical issue,” Richards said. “The harm and injury and fear that is facing women, families, parents and potential grandparents is so widespread now, that it isn’t just isolated to one group of people.”

Richards also wants to inform and mobilize women voters, particularly less politically engaged women, starting now. “We are not going to wait until 2024 to educate them about what the stakes are in the election,” Richards said.

“A lot of the issues we're discussing, they don't think of as political,” Richards added. “And they can't figure out why in the world the Republican Party has taken aim at them.”

Democrats and abortion rights advocates won another major electoral victory in Wisconsin on Tuesday. Judge Janet Protasiewicz, who explicitly ran on her personal support for abortion rights, defeated her conservative opponent to give liberals a majority on the state Supreme Court, which is likely to hear a case challenging the state’s 1849 abortion ban.

Kacsmaryk’s ruling also comes as Republican lawmakers in Florida are preparing to pass a six-week abortion ban, which would severely curtail abortion access throughout the entire South. Lake said that both the ongoing rollbacks of abortion rights in Republican-controlled states and the mifepristone ruling will “keep the abortion issue front and center” for voters.

“I think it'll make a big difference in a lot of races in 2024,” she said.

How abortion and investment propelled Democrats to turn the tide in state legislatures

Originally published by The 19th

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Democrats defied significant headwinds on Tuesday to win races up and down the ballot, campaigning on abortion and reproductive freedom. But their gains were perhaps most significant — and surprising — in the state legislatures where they’ve been on defense for a decade.

Democrats are on track to win back dozens of seats nationwide and flip control of up to four legislative chambers in key Midwestern battleground states, results with significant implications for abortion access.

“We're thrilled by these results,” Jessica Post, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, told The 19th. “We think we'll see a lot of progress in states like Michigan in terms of expansion and protection of abortion rights, collective bargaining, and progress overall.”

Here’s where things stand as of Thursday evening:

Michigan: Democrats flipped control of both the state House and state Senate, creating a Democratic trifecta in the state government for the first time in 40 years come January. Michigan also passed a constitutional amendment enshrining the right to abortion in the state constitution.
Minnesota: Democrats flipped control of the state Senate, establishing a Democratic trifecta in the state for the first time since 2014.
Pennsylvania: Democrats have claimed victory, saying they flipped control of the state House, but several close races have not yet been called by the Associated Press. Pennsylvania also elected Democrat Josh Shapiro to the governor’s office.
Democrats maintained their majorities in Colorado, Maine and New Mexico and won a supermajority in Vermont.
Democrats also prevented Republicans from gaining veto-proof supermajorities in the state legislatures of North Carolina and Wisconsin, which have Democratic governors, reducing the chances of those states passing anti-abortion legislation.

“Make no mistake, this was a huge night for Democrats at the state legislative level,” Adam Pritzker, a founding partner of the States Project, which spent $60 million supporting Democrats in 2022 state legislative races, told reporters Thursday.

Democrats have been playing catch-up in state legislative chambers since the brutal “shellacking” of the 2010 midterms, as it was dubbed by then-President Barack Obama, and the partisan gerrymandering in statehouses that followed. In 2020, for example, Republicans flipped control of more than 80 state legislative seats nationwide despite President Joe Biden winning at the top of the ticket.

And 2022, a midterm year with an unpopular Democratic president in office and high inflation, initially looked like it would further Democratic erosion down-ballot. Research from Sister District, an organization dedicated to electing Democrats to state legislatures, finds the party in power has lost 8 to 26 percent of its battleground state legislative seats in midterms since 2004.

But 2022 also came on the heels of a highly unpopular Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade in June and the efforts by former President Donald Trump to overturn the 2020 election, which played out in state capitols around the country.

“I think some of the extremism in the Republican Party came home to roost,” Post said. She argued that in addition to being “really willing to embrace abortion,” state-level Democrats had a “much better story to tell” on economic and pocketbook issues, while Republicans were “out of focus.”

“They spent a lot of time in the legislatures attacking rights, promoting the Big Lie, and then picking on trans kids,” Post said of Republican lawmakers. “And so I think many of the voters said, ‘You're not doing anything to address our day-to-day concerns.’”

Votes are still being counted, and the results of key statewide and state legislative races in states including Arizona and Nevada are still yet to be determined. But voters in key battleground states have penalized many candidates up and down the ballot who embraced unpopular positions on abortion and denied the outcome of the 2020 election.

“The results were delightful at the state level, but not shocking,” said Sister District co-founder Gaby Goldstein. “And I think that they really opened up an opportunity for Democrats and progressives to right the wrongs of generations past in underinvesting in state power — there's a generational opportunity here.”

Carolyn Fiddler, a longtime state politics watcher and author of the newsletter This Week in Statehouse Action, argued that Republicans weren’t complacent either in spending or ground game, but failed to anticipate and properly message for the backlash coming their way on abortion.

“I think the Republican dog caught the car, and they weren't prepared for the fallout,” she said. “They were not ready for the reality of a post-Roe electorate. Republicans at every level tried to convince everyone that this was not a big deal.”

The Republican State Leadership Committee, the main committee dedicated to electing Republicans to state offices, downplayed the significance of the fall of Roe. In a June polling memo, the committee argued that “while abortion is an issue people care about, the data makes clear that it is not among the top issues” motivating voters and charged that a “Democrat-corporate media joint campaign” was trying to make abortion a decisive issue.

That message “was obviously either a ginormous lie or mistake,” Fiddler said.

A confluence of several other factors, including redrawn maps in some states that were less likely to give Republicans an outsized number of seats based on their vote totals and a strong ground game, fed Democrats’ gains.

A new citizen-led commission in Michigan and commission-drawn maps in Pennsylvania gave Democrats a fighting chance in chambers once heavily gerrymandered to favor Republicans. Tens of millions in spending from groups including the DLCC, Forward Majority and the States Project, went toward supporting Democratic candidates.

“State legislative politics is not the minor leagues, it’s a different game entirely. And when we invest in these races in a real way and make these chambers the significant priority they are, we can win,” said Pritzker of the States Project.

Democrats also supercharged their field operations after the pandemic limited in-person canvassing in 2020.

“Democrats did a much, much better job this year of running actual credible field programs in these chambers that we were able to maintain and flip,” Goldstein said. “And I think in close races, that matters.”

Democrats now fully control 18 state governments, compared with 23 by Republicans, after flipping legislative chambers in Minnesota and Michigan and governorships in Massachusetts and Maryland.

Republicans this year did secure supermajorities in the Wisconsin and North Carolina state Senates and in the Florida legislature. But the loss of GOP-held chambers in Michigan and Minnesota are undeniable setbacks — especially considering the RSLC’s millions of dollars in investments in flipping Democratic-held chambers in states including Colorado, Maine, Oregon, New Mexico and Washington.

“While chamber battles are still playing out across the country, state Republicans defied the odds last night by facing down an onslaught of more than $130 million in national liberal spending and an incredibly challenging political environment,” Andrew Romeo, spokesman for the Republican State Leadership Committee, said in a statement.

“With minimal gains at the federal level, the Republican power we held and gained last night in the states will be all the more important for stopping Joe Biden’s disastrous agenda,” he added.

Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, said that Democrats’ victories in state legislatures weren’t a fluke, but came on the heels of years of organizing and investment led by groups like the DLCC. Abortion rights groups including Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice, and Emily’s List, also invested in 2022 state-level and state legislative races.

“So many organizations have been working to get to this moment,” McGill Johnson said on a Wednesday call with reporters. “And we are now at a place where voters recognize the threat at the state level, and they are seeing how their states are taking action — and how their states are completely inconsistent with where the majority of their constituents are.”

Democrats reached a breakthrough in statehouses thanks to a successful strategy and fairer maps in some places. But they don’t have much time to rest on their laurels — the end of the 2022 midterms marks the beginning of even more contentious battles for statehouses and other key state offices in 2023 and 2024.

“Democrats did really well, and it highlights the artificial majorities Republicans have built for themselves in state legislatures,” Fiddler said. “It actually means if anything, it’s a little scarier for Democrats — this is going to scare Republicans and motivate Republicans even more.”

Beyond winning more seats, Goldstein says progressives should use their new power to pass progressive legislation and build lasting, durable political infrastructure rivaling the successful party-building in the states by conservatives.

“Otherwise, it’s just sandcastles. And that’s electoral politics, it’s just sandcastles unless you’re actually building something underneath that has a solid foundation, structurally and rhetorically,” she said. “This is the moment. The question is, will progressives who now care about state politics and state legislatures be able to harness this moment and bring it forward into sustained success?”

How — and where — Kamala Harris is talking about abortion ahead of the midterms

Originally published by The 19th

On Friday, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared with frontline Democratic Rep. Mary Gay Scanlon and the “One Tree Hill” actor Sophia Bush at Bryn Mawr College in the Philadelphia suburbs. They were discussing reproductive rights, one of dozens of similar events Harris has held in the weeks leading up to the November 8 midterms.

She was fired up — especially about politicians pushing abortion bans without exceptions.

“These extremist so-called leaders would dare to say and suggest that that individual, furthermore, will not have the right to make decisions about what comes next as it relates to their body,” Harris said. “This is immoral. It's unconscionable.”

Nearly two years into her vice presidency, Harris has eagerly embraced a role as the face of the Biden administration’s efforts on abortion access and reproductive health. She sprang into immediate action as the point person on the issue after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade this summer and has gone all-in, with dozens of official events and campaign stops focused on abortion ever since.

Harris and President Joe Biden’s approval ratings remain underwater with Americans overall, and Harris hasn’t appeared alongside many of the candidates running in the most competitive races of the 2022 midterms. Her role, rather, has been to use the power of her office to support state lawmakers and abortion advocates on the ground, and to speak to the voters who are key to the Democratic base, advocates and officials say.

It began before Roe was overturned: After Texas passed a six-week abortion ban in September 2021, Harris convened what is believed to be the first-ever official event featuring abortion providers and patients hosted by any presidential administration. Since the draft of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade leaked in early May, Harris has held over 35 official events focused on reproductive health access in 14 states and Washington, D.C., according to her office.

“She's very well-versed in the topic, and it's something she feels very passionately about,” said Brian Brokaw, a California-based political consultant who previously served as Harris’ campaign manager during her run for attorney general. “In an election season where abortion rights are front and center, it’s a particularly good issue for her.”

Women of color have long played a leading role in reproductive justice movements. And the Supreme Court ending almost 50 years of federal abortion protections coincided with Harris serving as the highest-ranking woman and woman of color in American history.

“When access to critical reproductive health care is banned, including abortion, Black and Indigenous women disproportionately shoulder most of the burden due to systemic racism. It’s evident in the country’s abysmal maternal mortality rate,” said Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, who participated in an October discussion on reproductive rights with Harris and Rep. Jahana Hayes in Connecticut. “And, in a moment like this, the response must center the voices of the people impacted most.”

Harris’ remarks at these events often follow a similar flow: She starts by talking about her mother, Shyamala, a cancer researcher whose two goals in life were to raise her daughters and cure breast cancer. Harris recalls how words like “mammary glands” and discussions of reproductive health care were common at the dinner table during her childhood. She also invokes her work prosecuting sex crimes and gender-based violence in California.

“This issue — it really does relate to a lot of work that I've done in the past,” Harris said in Bryn Mawr. “And I feel a great sense of commitment, as do we all, to stand up and speak out about it.”

Since May, Harris has convened doctors and abortion providers, attorneys general, civil rights and faith leaders, constitutional law experts, college presidents, and student activists at roundtables and meetings around the country.

She’s also met with dozens of state lawmakers representing 15 states, from deep-blue California and New Jersey to the swing states of Pennsylvania, Nevada and North Carolina and the traditionally Republican strongholds of Indiana, South Dakota and Utah, including one event specifically focused on Latina legislators.

“As a Black woman working in government or in elected life, she is someone that we all look to and someone that we're very proud of,” said Virginia Del. Candi Mundon King, who attended Harris’ July roundtable with Virginia lawmakers. “But to be in the room with her was just really a humbling experience. And she also made it clear that she was there to listen.”

Democratic Rep. Angela Romero of Utah, a vocally pro-abortion rights lawmaker in a deep red and religiously conservative state, said it was “an honor and a privilege” to both be in conversation with Harris and share her broader concerns about health care access.

“She was there as a mentor to us. She said she wanted to make sure that we had a place at the table just like she does, and so that was her commitment to us being in a mentoring role,” said Romero, who is also the president-elect of the National Hispanic Caucus of State Legislators. “That was really significant to me.”

In October, Harris held six official fireside-chat-style events focused on reproductive rights in six states, that featured a Democratic official or candidates; reproductive health advocates, including the presidents of Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America; and celebrities like Bush.

Three days before the Pennsylvania event, the vice president was on stage in Albuquerque with New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham — who is up for reelection this year — and Dr. Eve Espey, an OBGYN. The week before, Harris was in the Twin Cities and Los Angeles for similar reproductive-rights-focused official events featuring Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and Los Angeles mayoral candidate Karen Bass, both of whom are on the ballot in November.

“These events are being done in a really smart way, leveraging the muscle behind her name, her office and the White House, and pairing that with local elected officials who people know and are familiar with,” McGill Johnson said. “The vice president brilliantly reinforces the fact that we need an all-of-government approach in response to this fundamental right being taken away – and this message should continue well after the election.”

Harris’ visits to Florida and North Carolina did not include appearances with Democratic U.S. Senate candidates Val Demings and Cheri Beasley, who are running to be the first Black women in the Senate since Harris became vice president. Biden, however, headlined a recent rally supporting Demings and gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist.

The vice presidency is a loosely defined role that can be difficult to navigate. The first year of Harris’ tenure was marked by numerous headlines detailing low morale and high staff turnover in her office. Harris has also reportedly struggled to make clear-cut, tangible progress on the major elements of her assigned policy portfolio, which includes Democrats’ still-unsuccessful effort to pass a major voting rights bill through Congress, and U.S. relations in the politically tumultuous Northern Triangle region of Latin America.

Harris has become the administration’s main voice on abortion, an issue that Biden, whose views on abortion have substantially evolved over his five decades in office and came under scrutiny in the 2020 primary, has historically been less eager to embrace.

“Without a doubt, she has had to take on some very challenging issues. As vice president, your job is to support the president and take on the tough challenges,” Brokaw said. “I think this too, falls into that category of difficult challenges, but it's one where the public sentiment is largely with her, and she is somebody who can be a very compelling messenger.”

Leaning into abortion and reproductive rights has enabled Harris to champion an issue that mobilizes voters far more than voting or immigration policy. Abortion isn’t the top voting issue for most Americans. Still, the overturning of Roe v. Wade is energizing Democrats — especially the women and women of color who make up the party's base — to turn out.

“The role that abortion plays for women, for women of color, is much broader,” said Aimee Allison, founder and executive director of She The People, which supports women of color for office. “It's about Black maternal health and whether you can afford health care in the first place. It's about the cost of rent and food, the cost of child care, whether you're getting fair pay for your work. All those issues are tied up with abortion.”

Harris and Biden are walking a difficult political tightrope of utilizing their platforms to boost Democrats' prospects in the midterms while not hurting down-ballot candidates in states where both leaders are unpopular. Nationally, Americans disapprove of Harris’ job performance by 12 percentage points on net, 38 percent to 50 percent, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling average.

The federal government also has limited tools at its disposal when it comes to bolstering abortion access. But the administration has taken various actions to shore up patient privacy, expand reproductive health grants under Title X, reinforce nondiscrimination protections, and defend the rights of patients to travel across state lines for abortion care.

And instead of headlining lots of big political rallies, Biden and Harris have mostly held smaller events with candidates and lawmakers focused on specific topics. Harris, in particular, has been out on the road touting new programs funded by the Biden administration’s economic agenda and its efforts on reproductive health.

“I think the White House has been very strategic about how both the president and vice president are used,” Brokaw said.

Reproductive rights and abortion aren’t going away as campaign issues, especially for Democrats. Allison said the new era in politics “is led first and foremost by women of color” — and Harris is one of the figures pioneering if and how Democrats should connect reproductive rights to economic security and other essential freedoms.

Allison said that what Democratic leaders do in 2022 “is also a lesson for going forward, because the battle for 2024 is being formed now.”

Romero said she’s “nervous” looking toward the midterms — and for the future of reproductive rights and health for her constituents and women of color.

“For me as a woman of color, to be able to have a seat at the table with the vice president of the United States, who's also a woman of color, just shows me that we've come a long way,” Romero said. “But we can't go back in time. We still need to keep on pushing forward.”