Trump is considering Texas Gov. Greg Abbott as a potential running mate, he told Fox News host Sean Hannity on Thursday—even though Abbott has said that he doesn’t want the job. 

When Hannity asked Trump if Abbott was on his short list during a joint interview with the two politicians in Eagle Pass, Texas—the epicenter of the fight between Texas and the feds over control of the border—the former president said yes.

“He’s a spectacular man,” Trump said of Abbott, praising him for endorsing his reelection campaign. 

“Certainly he would be somebody that I would very much consider,” Trump added later. 

Abbott, meanwhile, sat there nodding and smiling and presumably feeling awkward given that just last week he told CNN that “there’s so many people other than myself who are best situated” to the role. 

Trans teen Nex Benedict died after an altercation in the girl’s bathroom of his public high school in Owasso, Oklahoma a bathroom he was required to use because of the state’s 2023 legislation forcing students at public and charter schools to use bathroom and changing facilities that match their biological, sex rather than their identity.

The exact cause of Benedict’s death—which occurred less than 24 hours after he was “jumped” by three other students who, in Benedict’s words, were “beating the shit out of me”—remains under investigation. The latest update from police confirmed that the fight has not been ruled out as Benedict’s cause of death. 

Benedict’s grandmother and guardian told the Independent that Benedict had been bullied over the past year for being transgender. Since Benedict’s death, calls to LGBTQ crisis centers from Oklahoma youth have increased by 300 percent. Eighty-five percent of those callers said they had faced bullying and 79 percent feared for their physical safety.

Benedict’s death also highlights the unique struggles that trans youth face under anti-trans policies and laws. In 2023, in addition to the bathroom ban, the Oklahoma legislature stopped trans kids from playing on sports teams that align with their gender and banned gender-affirming care for minors. The Oklahoma education department appointed far-right TikToker Chaya Raichik—of “Libs of TikTok”—to sit on the statewide library advisory board. Raichick promotes the “eradication of transgenderism.”

Many of these same politicians have used Benedict’s death as an opportunity to double down on their anti-trans rhetoric. During a public forum last week, state Sen. Tom Woods (R) said, “I represent a constituency that doesn’t want that filth in Oklahoma. We are going to fight to keep that filth out of the state of Oklahoma, because we’re a Christian state.” When pressed on if he was referring to the LGBTQ community when he said “filth” he said “no comment.”

Lawyers for E. Jean Carroll are urging the judge in her defamation case against Donald Trump to reject the former president’s last-minute request to avoid paying the $83.3 million Carroll had been awarded as he appeals the ruling.

In a new filing on Thursday, Carroll’s lawyers blasted the request, arguing that it amounted to little more than a “trust me” written on a “paper napkin” by a cash-poor man with a long record of stiffing legal bills, incurring enormous debts, flouting financial deadlines, and inflating his wealth. They also pointed to the other legal battles Trump is mired in—including the civil fraud case in which Trump has been ordered to pay a $454 million penalty—as reason to deeply question his cash position.

“Trump does not even mention, much less address, these developments, which are obviously highly relevant to his ability to satisfy the judgment here,” Carroll’s lawyers wrote in their filing. “Nor does Trump mention the four criminal cases he is currently facing, including one set to go to trial on March 25, 2024.”

Since winning her defamation case against Trump, Carroll has since publicly vowed to use the $83.3 million award for “something good,” hinting that she may dedicate the money to assisting other women who have accused Trump of sexual assault. “If it’ll cause him pain for me to give money to certain things, that’s my intent,” Carroll told George Stephanopoulos in January.

So what happens next? If the judge denies Trump’s request to delay payment, the former president is hoping that he’ll be allowed to post a bond to only partially cover the $83.3 million award. But as the New York Times reports, posting a bond poses its own challenges as that option would require the company providing one to pay up if Trump ends up dodging responsibility. It’s unclear what would happen if Trump simply refuses to pay. But in the situation of his civil fraud case, New York Attorney General Letitia James has already signaled that she is coming for his properties. 

This story was reported by Floodlight, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates the powerful interests stalling climate action.

At a press conference last month, flanked by sheriffs and attorneys, Ohio Attorney General David Yost announced the indictments of two utility executives who allegedly tried to “hijack” state electricity policy for their own corrupt ends by paying $4.3 million in bribes to Sam Randazzo, then chair of the state Public Utilities Commission. The two men stand accused of trying to bilk taxpayers out of $1.2 billion on behalf of their former employer, FirstEnergy.

This was just the latest in an ongoing criminal probe of utility corruption that reached deep into the Ohio statehouse. Randazzo had been indicted previously by the Department of Justice, accused of working secretly with executives for more than a decade to secure favorable regulations for FirstEnergy—which pleaded guilty to federal fraud charges in 2021 for its role in the scandal. Last year, three lobbyists, along with former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder, pleaded guilty to or were convicted of federal racketeering charges. (Faced with the prospect of years in prison, one of the lobbyists took his own life.) Another utility operating in Ohio, American Electric Power, is under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Power is inherently seductive and corrosive,” noted a somber Yost, after laying out the latest alleged plot.

The Ohio scandals are no fluke. They are part of a generational resurgence of fraud and corruption in the utility sector, according to a Floodlight analysis of 30 years of corporate prosecutions and federal lawsuits. And they come at a time when trillions of dollars and the health of the planet are at stake as some power companies embrace—while others seek to block—the transition from fossil fuels to wind, solar, and battery storage.

Over the past five years, at least seven power companies have been accused of fraud or corruption. Seven industry executives have pleaded guilty or been federally indicted, along with a handful of appointed and elected officials. And a growing number of industry shareholders have sued the companies, claiming executives lied about their alleged misdeeds.

Washington state’s largest private-sector labor union has followed Michigan voters‘ lead, urging its 50,000 members to vote “uncommitted” rather than for Joe Biden in the state’s March 12 primary.

The news, first reported by NBC today, comes as Biden faces growing protests from voters on the left about his support for Israel in its war in Gaza, and concerns about his ability to defeat Trump, the GOP’s all-but-certain nominee, in November.

The executive board for the Washington chapter of the United Food and Commercial Workers—which represents more than 50,000 of the union’s more than one million workers, including some in parts of Oregon and Idaho—unanimously voted for the endorsement Wednesday night, just one day after more than 100,000 voters in Michigan, or 13 percent overall, opted to vote “uncommitted” as a protest vote, as my colleague Noah Lanard reported. Enough uncommitted votes can mean some state delegates at the party’s national convention are uncommitted, and can vote for the nominee of their choosing. 

“While Biden has been an ally to workers over the last four years, low-wage workers cannot afford setbacks when it comes to the right to organize and the protections we’ve won during Biden’s time in office,” UFCW 3000’s statement said. 

The Washington union also said it’s “in solidarity with our partners in Michigan who sent a clear message in their primary that Biden must do more to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Biden must push for a lasting ceasefire and ending US funding toward this reckless war.” As I wrote on Tuesday about the effort in Michigan, a state with large Arab and Muslim populations: 

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Ariana Tibon was in college at the University of Hawaiʻi in 2017 when she saw the photo online: a black-and-white picture of a man holding a baby. The caption said: “Nelson Anjain getting his baby monitored on March 2, 1954, by an AEC RadSafe team member on Rongelap two days after ʻBravo.’” 

Tibon had never seen the man before. But she recognized the name as her great-grandfather’s. At the time, he was living on Rongelap in the Marshall Islands when the US conducted Castle Bravo, the largest of 67 nuclear weapon tests there during the Cold War. The tests displaced and sickened Indigenous people, poisoned fish, upended traditional food practices, and caused cancers and other negative health repercussions that continue to reverberate today. 

A federal report by the Government Accountability Office published last month examines what’s left of that nuclear contamination, not only in the Pacific but also in Greenland and Spain. The authors conclude that climate change could disturb nuclear waste left in Greenland and the Marshall Islands. “Rising sea levels could spread contamination in RMI, and conflicting risk assessments cause residents to distrust radiological information from the US Department of Energy,” the report says. 

In Greenland, chemical pollution and radioactive liquid are frozen in ice sheets, left over from a nuclear power plant on a US military research base where scientists studied the potential to install nuclear missiles. The report didn’t specify how or where nuclear contamination could migrate in the Pacific or Greenland, or what if any health risks that might pose to people living nearby. However, the authors did note that in Greenland, frozen waste could be exposed by 2100. 

Telehealth abortions continue to grow in popularity, even in states where anti-abortion activists try to ban them, according to new data published today.

Abortions obtained through virtual providers accounted for 15 to 16 percent of all abortions conducted between July and September of last year—amounting to about 14,000 abortions each month—up from 11 percent of abortions, or about 8,500, in December of 2022, according to the report, prepared by researchers from Ohio State University, the University of California, San Francisco, and the Society of Family Planning. The increase is partly thanks to the rise of shield laws, which protect providers who virtually prescribe and mail abortion pills to people in states with abortion bans, according to one of the report’s co-authors, Ushma Upadhyay, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. 

Five states—Massachusetts, Colorado, Washington, New York, and Vermont—passed laws last year that protect telehealth providers who help people elsewhere in the country get abortions, according to Upadhyay. California enacted its shield law last month. As the New York Times reported last week, while these laws have not yet faced legal challenges, many expect them to. But in the meantime, they’re serving as the key to abortion access for people across the country: The Times reports that Aid Access, one of three main organizations providing telehealth abortions, serves about 7,000 patients a month, about 90 percent of whom are in states with abortion bans or severe restrictions. Advocates say telehealth abortion can also be particularly significant for low-income people and those in rural areas who may otherwise have difficulty accessing abortion clinics. 

The new data from Upadhyay and her colleagues—part of a recurring study known as #WeCount, aimed at providing quarterly updates on abortion access post-Dobbs—comes just weeks before the Supreme Court is slated to hear oral arguments in a case brought by anti-abortion activists arguing against the FDA approval of mifepristone, one of two pills taken in a medication abortion. That case—billed as the biggest abortion case since Dobbs, since medication abortions account for more than half of all abortions nationwide, according to the Guttmacher Institute—will go before the high court despite the fact that more than 100 studies have shown that medication abortion is safe and effective. One of those studies was also conducted by Upadhyay, and was published in the journal Nature Medicine this month; it showed the pills are just as safe when prescribed virtually and mailed as when they’re prescribed and obtained in-person, as I previously reported. As I wrote then: 

If the court restricts the accessibility of mifepristone through telehealth, it could have a significant effect. With abortion restrictions on the rise, obtaining abortion pills from virtual clinics has continued to grow in popularity. After the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision in June 2022, abortions obtained through telehealth increased drastically—from 3,610 in April 2022 to 8,540 by December of that year, according to research published last year by the Society of Family Planning. And as I reported last month, a study published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine shows that more Americans are using telehealth to stockpile abortion pills in case they need them in the future. 

This week’s episode of Reveal features WNYC’s Kai Wright and the Nation‘s Lizzy Ratner, hosts of New York Public Radio and the History Channel’s Blindspot: The Plague in the Shadows. Wright and Ratner take on the history and politics of the early AIDS crisis, surveying contemporary media coverage, community responses, and the enduring waves of activism that followed the dawn of HIV.

Wright’s look at some of the first reporting on HIV and AIDS brings him into conversation with Lawrence Altman, physician and author of a groundbreaking 1981 New York Times article that brought the little then known about HIV to wider attention; veteran AIDS activist Phil Wilson, and Anthony Fauci, then head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infections Diseases and a leading HIV researcher. Then, through interviews and archival recordings, Ratner sketches the life of Katrina Haslip, whose activism and educational work around AIDS began in the 1980s at New York’s Bedford Hills women’s prison and continued, in conjunction with ACT UP, until her death in 1992 at the age of 33. 

Special thanks to Blindspot, all three seasons of which can be heard at WNYC.

A Democratic candidate for the Ohio Senate is a transgender man who has long gone by the name Ari Faber, but a 1995 law will require the state’s upcoming March primary ballots to use the name he was given at birth: Iva Faber.

Title 35, Section 3513.271 of Ohio Revised Code requires that “[i]f any person desiring to become a candidate for public office has had a change of name within five years immediately preceding the filing of his statement of candidacy, both his statement of candidacy and nominating petition must contain, immediately following the person’s present name, the person’s former names.”

Additionally, the statute says, people who are “elected under the person’s changed name, without submission of the person’s former name, shall be immediately suspended from the office and the office declared vacated.”

According to the New York Times, which published a feature story on Faber and the Ohio law on Saturday morning, the law originated to prevent candidates from deceiving voters. There is an exception to the law for candidates who changed their names through marriage.

Faber, who is running for a state senate seat in southeast Ohio and has not legally changed his name, told the Times he is “concerned that supporters might be confused when they see my deadname on the ballot.”

Who among us has not handed $50,000 cash in a shoebox to a purported undercover CIA agent in an SUV with tinted windows because a fake FTC investigator told us to?

Well, I haven’t. Nor do I have a stray $50,000 to give. Still, a February 9 report from the real Federal Trade Commission reveals that the saga Charlotte Cowles describes with painstaking detail in her recent viral essay isn’t entirely unique. 

In fact, consumers reported losing more than $10 billion to fraud last year, the FTC said. It’s the first time fraud losses have reached the double digit billions, and marks a 14 percent hike over losses in 2022.

Investment scams made the top category of fraud, with people reporting losses exceeding $4.6 billion. Imposter scams, such as the one Cowles fell victim to, was the second-highest money loser with reported losses nearing $2.7 billion.

To summarize Cowles’ experience—which you really should read for yourself—the financial-advice columnist lost $50,000 to an elaborate con in which a phony Amazon customer service imposter called her about fraudulent charges for iPads on her non-existent business account. After clearing up that she didn’t purchase tech products, the faux-Amazon employee offered to connect Cowles to a supposed FTC investigator, who informed her that her identity was connected to bank accounts that had wired more than $3 million overseas, and that a car rented under her name was found with blood and drugs inside. He said there were warrants out for her arrest. Cowles would need to immediately give a CIA officer $50,000 cash from her compromised bank account, which the government would kindly convert into a Treasury check that her family could live on for up to a year until all of this identity fraud nonsense was sorted out.

At a televised White House press conference Friday, President Joe Biden rebuked the Kremlin for insisting that leading Russian dissident Aleksei Navalny simply lost consciousness and died after taking a stroll in prison.

“Make no mistake: [Russian President Vladimir] Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death,” Biden said. “Putin is responsible. What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality. No one should be fooled, not in Russia, not at home, not anywhere in the world.”

Navalny had been incarcerated in a high-security prison at an Arctic penal colony known as Polar Wolf on extremism charges widely believed to be politically contrived. Known as the country’s most outspoken critic of Putin and his United Russia party, Navalny had returned to Russia from Germany after receiving treatment there in 2020 for poisoning by a nerve agent called Novichok, which was developed by the Soviet Union. Upon re-arriving in Russia in 2021, Navalny was immediately arrested and subsequently sentenced to 19 years in prison.

“We don’t know exactly what happened,” Biden added, “but there is no doubt that the death of Navalny was a consequence of something that Putin and his thugs did.”

Speaking to reporters, Biden said Navalny’s mysterious death reinforces the need for Congress to put together an aid package to help Ukraine continue fighting Russia’s invasion. 

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Raw sewage and runoff in the Tijuana River is exposing communities at the US-Mexico border to an unusual and noxious brew of pathogens and toxic chemicals, according to a report released this week.

Billions of gallons of sewage flow through the river, which winds north from Mexico through California and empties into the Pacific Ocean, containing a mix of carcinogenic chemicals including arsenic, as well as viruses, bacteria and parasites, according to public health researchers at San Diego State University, who published the report.

The researchers have called the situation “a pressing public health crisis.”

Wastewater flowing into the ocean has resulted in more than 700 consecutive days of beach closures in San Diego county, but the contamination isn’t limited to the water. Pollutants and pathogens contained in sewage have also been detected in the local air and soil—exposing even those who live miles away from the water.

Earlier this week, Meta decided to create the grandest of Gordian knots for itself when Adam Mosseri, its executive in charge of Instagram and Threads, announced that the company doesn’t want Threads to “proactively amplify political content from accounts you don’t follow”—in effect, announcing the company hopes to limit how “political” content is spread and shared. 

Given the boundless and ill-defined nature of politics, his plan seems nearly impossible to implement. Mosseri did not say the plan was to tone down “content involving electoral politics,” or even something as vague as “turning the volume down on toxic politics.” He referred only to leashing the vast but vague category of  “political content.”

Billionaire Mark Cuban did ask Mosseri on threads what Meta means when it says “political content.” But Mosseri never replied. When CNN’s Oliver Darcy pressed the company, he received a written reply: “Informed by research, our definition of political content is content likely to be about topics related to government or elections; for example, posts about laws, elections, or social topics,” with the caveat that “global issues are complex and dynamic, which means this definition will evolve.” 

In effect, Mosseri was asking users of Threads to stick to dumb posts—nothing that would, actually, have to be moderated. It reminded me of the edict at the old Deadspin to “stick to sports.” Jim Spanfeller, the CEO of the blog’s new parent company, demanded that of staff, telling them to not write about politics. Apart from bad business, it quickly didn’t make any sense. Sure, you can write a story about Tiger Woods without contextualizing what it means for a Black man to dominate the whitest sport, but it would be stupid. And the only way to avoid politics in writing about the scandal that ensued when the then-Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted in support of the Hong Kong protests would be not to write about it at all.

The cynical read is that politics being ill-defined is the point. Anything annoying for them to deal with, that could even tenuously be described as “political,” can be contained by limiting its algorithmic boost.

This story first appeared on Meduza, an independent, reader-supported Russian newsroom based in Latvia.

Officials in the Kremlin’s political bloc see Alexey Navalny’s death as “a very negative development” — for Vladimir Putin’s reelection campaign. At the same time, members of the Putin administration do not expect the opposition politician’s demise to seriously affect the results of next month’s tightly controlled presidential vote. 

This is according to two sources close to the Putin administration, one source close to the leadership of the ruling United Russia party, and a Kremlin political strategist, all of whom spoke to Meduza on condition of anonymity. (It should be noted that these are typical remarks regarding any events that may affect the course of Putin’s reelection.) 

Asked to comment on Navalny’s death, two of the aforementioned sources gave extremely cynical responses, saying that the opposition politician “knew what he was getting into when he returned to Russia” in 2021 and that he was “punished for working against the country.”

At the same time, both sources believed that Navalny wasn’t “purposefully” killed, instead attributing his death to poor prison conditions. “Did you expect anything else? It was bound to happen sooner or later,” one said. 

A New York judge ruled on Friday that former President Donald Trump must pay $355 million and cease doing any business in New York for three years after being found liable for years of deceiving banks and insurance companies about his net worth. While Trump has said he will appeal the decision, if the ruling stands, it would potentially obliterate his financial resources. What’s more, it comes on top of an earlier decision by the same judge to revoke Trump’s license to operate businesses in New York. Between the payments and the license revocation, Trump’s business career would likely be in serious jeopardy, at least in the state of New York. But, with an appeals process that is expected to last several years, his fate is far from settled. 

The decision, issued by New York Superior Court judge Arthur Engoron, is the result of a civil fraud case brought by New York Attorney General Letitia James. James accused Trump of telling banks and insurance companies that his assets were worth far more than they really were in an effort to get better deals on loans and insurance policies. Among other falsehoods, Trump told banks was that condos in New York were worth tens of millions on the open market, when in actuality they were rent-controlled and unavailable to sold, and that his Mar-a-Lago resort was worth hundreds of millions or even as much as $1.5 billion, when in reality, because of deed restrictions, it would likely be worth just a fraction of that. 

Over the course of several months this past fall, Trump’s attorneys wrangled with James’ legal team, and just as often with Engoron, bitterly denying Trump had done anything wrong. But the fact that Trump was liable for the fraud was never really in question throughout the trial—after Trump’s team largely failed to address any of James’ accusations directly, Engoron ruled before the trial even began that Trump had indeed acted fraudulently. The trial essentially was to determine exactly how much Trump would owe for his fraudulent behavior. James’ called a string of witnesses, including former Deutsche Bank employees, to testify that they would never have given Trump such good terms for loans and insurance policies. Trump and his attorneys continually maintained that Trump had paid his creditors back and had paid his insurance policy bills, so there was no effective harm done. 

The trial was especially notable for the clashes between Trump and Engoron. After Trump repeatedly used his social media account to complain about Engoron’s clerk, the judge issued a limited gag order prohibiting the former president from denigrating courtroom staff. When Trump violated the order—twice—Engoron fined him and eventually forced Trump to testify. Engoron ruled Trump’s testimony on the subject was “not credible.” Trump later lashed out against Engoron when he returned to the stand to testify in the trial, and at one point he stomped out of court, Engoron refused to dismiss the case. None of the theatrics seemed to help the former president. The case also named Trump’s adult children and a number of his top employees at the Trump Organization.

In the past, former President Donald Trump has promised a consensus on abortion, criticizing Republicans for being too stringent but without getting more specific. 

According to a report published in the New York Times this morning, Trump has landed on a limit that he thinks will do the job: a 16-week abortion ban. 

Citing “two people with direct knowledge” of Trump’s thinking, the Times reports that the former president “privately favors” a 16-week ban with exceptions for rape, incest, and to save the life of the mother. (It is unclear whether that means only cases of rape or incest reported to law enforcement.)

Abortion is already banned before 16 weeks in 20 states, so the national ban Trump is reportedly considering would, if enacted, likely further restrict it in another 30 states that currently lack such a limit. (Though the majority of abortions—nearly 94 percent—take place before the 13-week mark, according to the most recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.)

The paper reports that Trump sees that limit as one that can appeal to both social conservatives who want harsh abortion bans as well as voters who want more modest rules. 

On Saturday, a far-right convoy calling itself “God’s army” is set to host rallies at different border towns along the US-Mexico border to decry what they call a migrant “invasion.” Throughout the week, the group’s organizers made their way from Virginia Beach to Jacksonville, Florida, before splitting into three groups heading to rallies in Yuma, Arizona, San Ysidro, California, and near Eagle Pass, Texas. On a “Take Our Border Back” website, they called on “all active & retired law enforcement and military, veterans, mama bears, elected officials, business owners, ranchers, truckers, bikers, media and LAW ABIDING, freedom-loving Americans.” 

HAPPENING NOW: In San Ysidro, California, the stage is set and dozens of people have started gathering for the third leg of the Take Our Border Back Convoy. The group will have a rally and then caravan to Yuma, Arizona. Follow our live blog for updates: https://t.co/KmiUpgdBNt pic.twitter.com/37G3NzAe9q

— Border Report (@BorderReportcom) February 3, 2024

The convoy, whose organizers have been known to disseminate anti-vaccine and election denial messages, as well as QAnon conspiracy theories, emerged in reaction to growing tensions around an ongoing border standoff between Gov. Greg Abbott and the federal government in Eagle Pass, Texas. The Lone Star State’s National Guard has taken control of a park there, sealing it off with concertina wire and denying US Border Patrol access to the migrant crossing area where a woman and two children recently drowned in the Rio Grande. 

Abbott’s defiance has earned support from Donald Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and 25 Republican governors. “My thoughts are that the feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground,” Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) posted on X.

This story was originally published by Slate and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Rebecca Helm despises the phrase “Great Pacific Garbage Patch.”

This moniker is used to describe the vast stretch of ocean from the West Coast of North America to Japan that is crammed with an estimated 1.8 trillion pieces of trash, most of which are plastic.

“I think it’s a really awful practice to name a part of the world after something bad that’s happened to it,” says Helm, a marine biologist at Georgetown University’s Earth Commons Institute.

Moreover, she thinks that this term misleadingly implies that this area is a barren wasteland, when in fact there is a trove of marine life living alongside the floating plastic bottles, dirty fishing nets, and discarded Styrofoam cups. Along with the occasional shark or sea turtle passerby, this region—which is actually called “the North Pacific High”—hosts a unique array of tiny species that live at the sea surface, from electric-blue seadragons to minuscule snails that ride bubbles like rafts across the open ocean.

More than 150 Democratic members of Congress have written to President Biden, Attorney General Merrick Garland, and Health and Human Services Secretary Xavier Becerra with a demand: Do more to prevent the criminalization of pregnant people post-Dobbs and to support those who are unfairly targeted by law enforcement. 

The letter, dated Thursday, highlights the case of Brittany Watts, the 34-year-old Black woman from Ohio who was charged with a felony in October over her handling of an at-home miscarriage; when she later sought care at a hospital, a nurse reported her to police. While a grand jury ultimately declined to indict Watts earlier this month, the letter notes that “the fact that Ms. Watts faced degrading law enforcement interrogation and that such a case was even brought forward at all is alarming and cruel.” It also emphasized that—as I reported earlier this week—Watts’ experience is indicative of broader inequities related to the criminalization of pregnant people, with women of color far more likely to face “punitive responses” from healthcare professionals. That includes the criminalization of adverse pregnancy outcomes, including miscarriages—which, as in Watts’ case, can be mistaken for self-managed abortions.

Spearheaded by members of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, the letter urges federal officials to provide “educational, financial, and legal services support to any person who experiences or is threatened with pregnancy criminalization,” and to reduce the likelihood of criminalization in the first place through three specific measures: investigating prosecutions of pregnant people as forms of sex-based discrimination; reminding hospital and medical staff of patients’ rights to privacy under HIPAA; and enforcing the section of the Affordable Care Act that prohibits discrimination based on sex when federally-funded healthcare personnel “improperly report to law enforcement when patients miscarry, terminate a pregnancy, or seek other pregnancy-related care.” 

The letter also notes that—as my colleague Katie Herchenroeder and I reported in November—the fallout from the Dobbs decision “has only escalated efforts to charge people with crimes related to their pregnancies.” As Katie and I wrote a few months ago: 

On top of abortion clinics closing, obstetrics programs and maternity wards—from Alabama to Idaho—have also shuttered, putting providers out of work and leaving 1.7 million women living in counties without abortion or maternity care access, according to an analysis conducted by ABC News and Boston Children’s Hospital. Providers who are still working risk losing their license or going to jail if they miscalculate what thin exceptions to abortion bans mean for the care they can give. And with some bans incentivizing people to report those having abortions to law enforcement, criminalization is poised to get worse.  

Yesterday, I wrote about the “Take Our Border Back” convoy headed to three southwestern cities and the grab bag of conspiracies its participants embrace. But, wait, there’s more! Moms for America—not to be confused with that other right-wing moms’ group, Moms for Liberty—has joined the convoy, and here is what their leader, Kimberly Fletcher, has to say about why they’re going:

Here’s why Moms for America is going to the border.
Join us and follow us along the way
https://t.co/Nd0gHJP6uH#Texas #Texasborder #texasbordercrisis #BorderCrisis

As Kimberly makes her way to the Texas border please join us after at our Summit and Gala.
Grab tickets now… pic.twitter.com/tLdD84v2Ba

— Moms for America (@momsforamerica) February 1, 2024

Fletcher, who was subpoenaed for her involvement in the rally that preceded the January 6 Capitol insurrection, has spoken up about the border before. In 2018, Fletcher told the conservative outlet The Blaze about how, on a recent trip to the border, she had learned about a six-year-old migrant girl who “had been raped by 30 men!” But when FactCheck.org tried to verify the story with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, they learned that there was no evidence that the supposed rape ever happened. When the fact checkers called Fletcher for comment, she told them that she had heard the story from someone else. Politifact didn’t find any evidence to support Fletcher’s story, either.