Audio of JD Vance Calling Rape an "Inconvenience"

8.2.24

Click to skip ahead: In All About Utah, the state Supreme Court has ruled that the block on a total abortion ban can stay, but Republicans are already planning their next move. In the States, news from North Carolina, Iowa, and Nebraska. Language Watch looks at: weird, ban and will of the people. In Ballot Measure Updates, a cool conversation about the Equal Rights Amendment heading to New York voters. In the Nation, some quick hits. Finally, in 2024 news, new audio of JD Vance talking about rape and incest exceptions.

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All About Utah

Let’s start with some good news today: Utah’s Supreme Court has ruled that the block on a total abortion ban can remain in place while a challenge over the law’s constitutionality makes its way through the courts.

That means abortion is still legal in Utah up until 18 weeks. From Kathryn Boyd, president of Planned Parenthood Association if Utah:

“Today’s decision means that our patients can continue to come to us, their trusted health care providers, to access abortion and other essential reproductive services right here in Utah. While we celebrate this win, we know the fight is not over.”

The courts still have to rule on the merits of the legal challenge. The suit will now go back to a district court, and likely make its way back up to the Utah Supreme Court. Planned Parenthood’s challenge argues that the ban violates the state constitution in several ways, including protections from sex discrimination.

If enacted, the Utah ban would only allow abortions when the pregnant person’s life is at risk and when there’s a fatal fetal abnormality. As is the case with so many ‘exceptions’ for nonviable pregnancies, the ban was written in order to be deliberately vague as to what constitutes a ‘fatal’ condition. In this case, two maternal fetal medicine specialists would have to report in writing that the fetus has a “uniformly diagnosable and uniformly lethal” condition.

As I’ve pointed out many times before, “uniformly diagnosable” only applies to a small number of conditions because there’s so much gray area in medicine and diagnoses.

Utah Republicans were obviously disappointed by the state Supreme Court’s decision, and are moving quickly to find a workaround. Remember, Republicans have long been trying to restrict abortion despite the block on the state’s ban: for example, they passed a (now blocked) law banning abortion clinics and sent threatening letters to abortion providers.

Now, the lawmaker who wrote the total abortion ban is asking the legislative leadership for a special session to “look at our own abortion law.” Axios SLC reports that state Sen. Dan McCay is going to push a 6-week abortion ban—the hope obviously being that the new ban would hold up in court if the total ban is ruled unconstitutional.

I’ll keep you updated as the case progresses.

In the States

This is one of the most politically craven, grossest things I’ve ever seen. North Carolina’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Mark Robinson has put out a campaign ad where he shares his wife’s abortion story. Yes, this is the same Mark Robinson who chastised women who have abortions to “keep your skirt down,” who said that once a woman gets pregnant, “it’s not your body anymore,” and who claimed the founders of Planned Parenthood were “witches.”

But now that it’s clear voters are pro-choice and oppose abortion bans, Robinson is cynically using his wife’s story to undo some of the damage that his anti-abortion extremism has done to his campaign.

Robinson’s ad claims he supports North Carolina’s 12-week abortion ban because it has “common-sense exceptions.” But remember, it wasn’t so long ago that Robinson was caught on a hot mic admitting, “We’ve got [abortion] down to 12 weeks…the next goal is to get it down to 6, and then just keep moving from there.”

Watching this ad made me so mad—we’re in the car right now on our way to a wedding and I definitely alarmed my husband with how loudly I yelled. It’s infuriating, and I feel horrified for his wife, who is having her personal health information splashed across the internet for her husband’s political career.

I suspect, unfortunately, that we’ll see more of this sort of thing. It’s like I’ve been saying for months now: Republicans can see that Democrats have done well featuring women’s personal abortion stories, and they think they can replicate that success.

In the wake of Iowa’s 6-week abortion ban going into effect, The Des Moines Register tells readers about the options they have to get abortion care—like traveling to neighboring pro-choice states and going to abortion funds for help.

I’m curious, however, why the article didn’t include any information about how to get abortion medication—which people can have shipped to them in all 50 states. Yes, abortion medication is illegal in Iowa, but people can still have the pills shipped to them from outside of the state. I’m not sure what the legal ramifications are for publications to make readers aware of that truth, but I have to imagine that there’s some free speech leeway?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for all the information in this piece. But in a moment like this one, we also need publications to be willing to take some risks.

Safe websites to buy abortion medication: Aid Access, Plan C Pills, Abortion Finder, I Need An A

Two years out from the end of Roe, and Republicans aren’t just hurting women with abortion bans—they’re funneling millions of dollars to anti-abortion crisis pregnancy centers. These religious groups lie to women about abortion, birth control and their own health. (If you missed this piece from ProPublica and CBS News about the $140 million program in Texas, make sure to read it ASAP.)

This week, the Flatwater Free Press looks at the millions of dollars going to Nebraska anti-abortion centers—funding earmarked for low-income people. Diane Amdor, from Nebraska Appleseed’s economic justice program, told the publication the program isn’t a good way to combat poverty:

“They have a very targeted, and in my mind, manipulative operating value of trying to convince people not to seek out one particular type of health care that may be an option to them. And I think that they do that in a coercive way.”

And as tends to be the case with anti-abortion programs across the country, the state doesn’t track how those millions of dollars are spent. While centers will often tout how they offer support to new mothers like diapers and formula, we know that tangible support is often a minuscule part of a center’s budget. Most of the money is spent on salaries and ‘marketing’ programs.

Republicans are using crisis pregnancy centers as a way to feign caring about women; in reality, they’re just giving unregulated religious groups taxpayer dollars. It’s obscene. And remember, these groups do more than lie to women—they play fast and loose with their personal health data. This Spring, Abortion, Every Day found that the country’s largest network of crisis pregnancy centers, Heartbeat International, gives corporate, non-medical employees access to client records—and has made that data available to tens of thousands of volunteers with access to their online training program:

EXCLUSIVE: Health Data Breach at America’s Largest Crisis Pregnancy Org

Quick hits:

• Rollcall profiles Allie Phillips, the Tennessee woman who is running for office after being denied an abortion;

• KCCI has a list of all the Iowa legislators who voted in support of the state’s 6-week abortion ban;

• And in more good Utah news this week, singer Olivia Rodrigo raised money this week for the Utah Abortion Fund and Wild West Access Fund of Nevada.

Language Watch

We saw some interesting messaging on both sides of the aisle around the Utah Supreme Court decision this week. Democrats have been ramping up their talking point about Republicans being “weird”—which I think is just brilliant.

Caroline Gleich, the Utah Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, says that the “culture of disrespect and control” from Utah Republicans is coming from national leadership, namely Donald Trump and his running mate JD Vance.

"Their obsession with regulating private decisions is weird and misguided, especially given the lack of women involved in making these decisions,” Gleich said.

On the anti-abortion side, Katie Daniel of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America repeated Republican messaging that’s been growing exponentially over the last few months. She said that she was hopeful Utah’s ban would be enacted eventually because “this law is the will of the people.”

As you know, anti-abortion activists and politicians—including Donald Trump—have been using the phrase “the will of the people” all over the place. The idea is to make voters believe that Republicans are the ones giving Americans the abortion laws they want. (The truth, of course, is that Americans don’t want abortion legislated at all.)

Let’s talk about some other messaging we can expect more of as we speed towards November: Battles over the word ‘ban.’ If you’ve been reading Abortion, Every Day for a while, you know my obsession with anti-abortion language largely started with ‘ban.’

Anti-abortion groups—keenly aware of how unpopular abortion bans are—have been trying to do away with ‘ban,’ replacing it with terms like ‘standard’ or ‘consensus.’ They’ve even been pressuring journalists (with varying degrees of success) to stop using the term, claiming that it’s a sign of pro-choice bias.

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America president Marjorie Dannenfelser, for example, told The New York Times last year that ‘ban’ isn’t accurate because “ban means everything.” So long as an abortion ban has an exception for a woman’s life, she argues, it’s not actually a ‘ban,’ but a restriction.

As I pointed out at the time, that’s an incredibly important and wildly dangerous claim: The anti-abortion movement is redefining ‘ban’ so it won’t apply to any abortion legislation. Under their definition, there are no abortion bans in the United States.

Republicans have been glomming onto that skewed redefinition in an attempt to win back voters who are pissed off about the end of Roe. We saw them try it in Virginia, for example, where the strategy failed miserably. Still, the tactic is only going to ramp up the closer we get to November.

For example, the definition of ‘ban’ took center stage in the Washington gubernatorial race this week: Democratic candidate Bob Ferguson ran an ad attacking Republican opponent Dave Reichert, who voted multiple times for national abortion bans while he in Congress. In response, Reichert slammed Ferguson for misrepresenting his voting record—saying he never voted for an abortion ban:

“This is not a federal ban on abortion that Congress was considering, it is a regulation of abortion, just as Washington regulates abortion.” (Emphasis mine)

Reichert campaign attorney Drew Stokesbary made the same argument, telling a local news outlet that if those bills had passed they wouldn’t be national bans, but “restrictions.” He also repeated the message that “abortions are already regulated in a substantially similar manner in Washington.”

There’s a few things to note here. First, that it’s clear Republicans aren’t going to let go of their ‘ban’ redefinition. That’s not surprising to me, because they don’t have much else: the GOP knows that abortion bans are incredibly unpopular and that they have to distance themselves in some way, but they’re also unwilling to actually change their policies. Pretending their legislation is something other than ‘bans’ helps them do both.

But this fight in Washington reminds us of something else: the danger of any abortion restrictions. Washington’s law, for example, allows abortions until ‘viability.’ Reichert’s claim was that the national ban he supported is just a stricter restriction. We can only defang that talking point if we’re pushing for an end to government interference in pregnancy entirely.

Ballot Measure Updates

This is cool: the NYCLU dedicated a podcast episode to the pro-choice ballot measure headed to New York voters this November. “Rights This Way” spoke to Sasha Ahuja, campaign director of New Yorkers for Equal Rights, and NYCLU Executive Director, Donna Lieberman, about Proposal 1.

Quick hits: More on the poll showing that nearly 70% of Florida voters support Amendment 4, which would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution. And how Montana Republicans are trying to pass restrictions on abortion head of a vote on a pro-choice ballot measure.

In the Nation

• KFF Health News has more on the study showing an increase in self-managed abortions since Dobbs;

• Carrie N. Baker at Ms. magazine writes that support for Kamala Harris is surging in part because of her abortion rights leadership;

• The Department of Justice reports that TikTok collected political views of U.S. voters on issues like abortion;

• Finally, the Associated Press has a big piece on the post-Roe rise of maternity homes that I really wished would have dug deeper on how the groups control and hurt women. Remember this home profiled by NPR where women have a curfew, are forced to hand over their phones, and must “earn” the privilege to leave for the night? I do!

2024

Let’s not mince words: We all know that JD Vance is an asshole. Republicans don’t even like him! We also know that Vance is an anti-abortion extremist: The Republican vice presidential candidate supports a national abortion ban, opposes abortion ban ‘exceptions,’ wants to keep women from traveling out of their states for abortion, and lobbied for law enforcement to have access to women’s out-of-state abortion records.

Despite knowing all of this about Vance, hearing audio of him talking about rape and incest as “inconveniences” for women still managed to shock me somehow:

I said this on TikTok earlier today, but there’s something just gutting about listening to Vance. It feels sneering. I think a lot of American women know that tone of voice and have had the distinct displeasure of talking to someone like Vance. Someone who doesn’t really see them as a full human being.

The conventional political wisdom is that Donald Trump wanted a running mate who could at least appear moderate on abortion rights—but that definitely isn’t Vance. For Abortion, Every Day’s coverage of JD Vance and his abortion extremism, click here.

Quick hits:

• I’m sorry, but this columnist accusing Kamala Harris supporters of being “cult-like” is just too funny to me—has she seen Trump supporters??

• The New Republic has more audio of Vance comparing abortion to slavery;

• Finally, the KFF Health News podcast, “What the Health,” dedicated its latest episode to how abortion rights is playing out in the presidential election: