Overturning Roe v. Wade has been a foundational purpose of Republican politics for nearly half a century. The quest to end constitutional protections for abortion rights has determined who runs for office, how they run, and what they do when they win. It’s channeled massive sums of money into remaking all three branches of government at the state and federal level and ways that reverberate far beyond the immediate issue at hand. The anti-abortion movement gave us, in different ways, George W. Bush and Donald Trump, and the world-changing chaos that entailed. But in the days since Politico published a leaked opinion from Justice Samuel Alito that would finally scrap the 1973 ruling, the response from the party has been distinctly subdued.

In the aftermath, many Republicans, such as Sen. Mitch McConnell preferred to focus on the mechanics of the story, publicly deriding the leak as a historic breach of norms. (Which it is—thank God.)

Others downplayed the significance of the ruling itself, citing the wide variance in how abortion is regulated at the state level. The conservative commentator Erick Erickson tweeted that, “Nothing is actually going to change.”

There weren’t the kind of vocal affirmations that you might expect upon achieving a goal that has galvanized and defined the conservative movement for generations. And that cautious, changing-the-subject response brought to mind the radio silence from the right last year, when the Supreme Court gave Texas permission to temporarily nullify Roe through a shadow-docket decision.

Some of this is just reflexive, for sure, but this shift in tone is also deliberate. This week Axios snagged a polling memo from the National Republican Senatorial Committee advising candidates to say that “Abortion should be avoided as much as possible” (as opposed to outlawed and criminalized) and encouraging them to “be the compassionate consensus builder on abortion policy.” 

The people who worked the hardest to overturn the 2020 presidential election have faced few professional consequences. I don’t mean the jet-setting realtors and ex-NYPD officers and children of conservative commentators and so on who stormed the Capitol on January 6th—they’re pretty well accounted for in court filings. I mean the people in positions of power who used that power for ill: Josh Hawley is still in the Senate; Donald Trump is a 19th-century party boss; Mark Meadows is now a man of letters.

But Ken Paxton, at least, isn’t out of the woods just yet. In December of 2020, the Texas Attorney General, who I profiled for a recent issue of the magazine, sued Pennsylvania and three other states Joe Biden won, and pushed to have their electoral-college votes thrown out. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case and unanimously rejected Paxton’s argument, but the matter didn’t end there. In the aftermath, dozens of constituents—including four former presidents of the State Bar of Texas—filed formal complaints, charging that the frivolous, disingenuous, and incredibly sloppy lawsuit had violated ethics guidelines. The state bar investigated. And on Friday, it took action: the bar’s Commission for Lawyer Discipline sued Paxton’s top deputy, Brent Webster, accusing him of “professional misconduct” for his handling of the case. According to the Austin American-Statesman, Paxton himself “expects to be named in a similar lawsuit.”

I can’t speak for the commission’s case against Webster or Paxton, but the electoral-college lawsuit was about as bad of a brief as you’ll ever see from a state AG office—actually, 18 state AG offices—in the Supreme Court. It talks about Dominion voting machines. It misstates the number of electoral votes in play. It repeats this random claim from a guy in California that “the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four States collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.” I would have loved to hear the Texas solicitor general walk the justices through the math on that one at oral arguments, but it didn’t go to oral arguments, and the Texas solicitor general wisely sat out this case. 

The lawsuit had little purpose beyond inflaming the Big Lie and insulating Paxton from the consequences of his various other scandals. And in that respect, even if the bar does bring suit against him, it will have been a success. He spoke before Trump on the Mall on January 6th—and he’s on pace for a third term.

There will be no deus ex machina from the federal government when the Supreme Court strikes down Roe v. Wade, as it is now virtually guaranteed to do since Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion in a Mississippi abortion case was leaked on Monday. President Joe Biden won’t be able to stop the 22 states that are certain to ban abortion immediately—many of them using laws still on the books from before Roe was decided in 1973. Four more states will likely move fast to pass their own bans, according to the Guttmacher Institute. In total, about half of Americans are expected to live in places without legal access to the extremely common, life–saving, liberty-ensuring medical procedure.

Congress, too, looks like a dead end for attempts to undo the Supreme Court decision. Passing a federal law guaranteeing the right to abortion would require overcoming a Senate filibuster (Democrats don’t have the votes) or eliminating the filibuster entirely (Democrats don’t have the votes—thanks, Senators Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin). 

But that doesn’t mean the White House can do nothing. This week, Biden directed his team to protect abortion rights “at every aspect, in every creative way, every aspect of federal law, to try to do all that’s possible,” an anonymous senior administration official told the New York Times. So what are their options? I called up reproductive rights legal experts and advocates to brainstorm.

Use FDA powers to ease abortion pill access

The Food and Drug Administration allows the use of two medications, taken in combination, to end pregnancies in the first 10 weeks. One, misoprostol, is a common anti-ulcer drug. The other, mifepristone, has been approved for use in the United States for 22 years and has an excellent safety record. Yet “the FDA has over-regulated mifepristone from day one,” says Elisa Wells, a veteran public health expert and the co-director of Plan C, an online information clearinghouse about abortion pills. “When they did approve it, they attached special restrictions only used for a handful of drugs thought to be dangerous.”

Bucha was known as Ukraine’s Switzerland. Now it is synonymous with unimaginable horror.

I first traveled to the town five years ago to film a documentary about the country’s struggle to build a democracy enshrined in human rights after the 2013–2014 Maidan revolution swept a Russian proxy from the presidency. My protagonist had fled war in the embattled east to rebuild her life in Bucha, a comfortable commuter exurb on the northwest perimeter of the capital, Kyiv. With its coffeehouses, organic cheese stores, and villas adjoining leafy parks, Bucha reminded me of the neighborhood where I grew up in Sydney, Australia. 

When I returned recently, it was torn to pieces, the contents of plush homes splayed on sidewalks. There were survivors on nearly every corner, waiting to tell me something that would haunt me for weeks.

Bucha is normally less than an hour from Kyiv. Now, my journey took nearly three, past checkpoints, wrecked tanks, and shot-up civilian cars, some with signs on them reading “children” and bullet holes where a driver once sat. In town, body parts still littered the streets a week after the Ukrainian army liberated its remaining residents, as I joined a macabre, government-organized tour of atrocities for mobs of reporters; I watched as several journalists took selfies with a boot containing a severed foot, rumored to be booby-trapped. “In Bucha,” an American journalist said into his mobile phone’s camera, “life is cheap.”

Destroyed tanks piled up in a main street of Bucha.

This article is adapted from the forthcoming book No Choice: The Past, Present, and Perilous Future of Abortion in America, published by Hachette Book Group.

In Justice Alito’s leaked draft opinion that, if made official as a decision this summer would overturn Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, he refers repeatedly to “this Nation’s history and tradition” as being at odds with abortion rights.

It begs the question: Whose history, precisely, is Alito considering here?

Too often, when “this Nation’s history and tradition” is boiled down into such a broad generalization, it’s the “history and tradition” of the white Christian men who have held power in the United States since its inception. But make no mistake, this country does not belong to them alone, and our history encompasses so much beyond their experiences and beyond the white supremacist ideals our nation was founded upon.

Before this land was stolen by colonizers who called it America, it belonged to Native peoples who had inhabited it for centuries. And, as it turns out, people indigenous to America have a long, intimate “history and tradition” related to abortion and reproductive care. For one, they shared knowledge of which herbs can help a woman control her body. Stoneseed and dogbane, which have natural contraceptive properties, were used by the Shoshone peoples and the Bodéwadmi to prevent pregnancy. Studies of indigenous cultures also turn up evidence of commonplace abortion practices—a South American matrilocal native tribe known as the Wichí reportedly abort the first pregnancy of any tribal member; it’s a matter of routine, to make the childbirths that follow easier. North American native tribes, too, have documented abortion practices that prioritize the health and well-being of the person carrying the fetus and their quality of life.

More than two years after the start of the pandemic, the United States has reached a staggering milestone: 1 million Americans dead from Covid-19.

Since March 2020, the coronavirus has radically reshaped life. We live in a limbo of individualized choices. Each state, workplace, and person has adopted different norms of masking, distancing, and communing. The pandemic has been different for each of us.

Research varies, but estimates show that a majority of Americans know someone who has been hospitalized from or died of Covid. That toll is higher for Black and Hispanic Americans. (As my colleague Jackie Flynn Mogensen has reported, knowledge of racial disparities doesn’t necessarily get white people to care.)

The virus began in an era of ignorance. It spread amid the political inadequacy of the administration of President Donald Trump, who lied about Covid continually. Mass death became normalized amid the political complacency of the Biden administration.

The death toll has far outpaced scientists’ worst fear. When the pandemic began, Dr. Anthony Fauci warned that estimates could change, but that getting up to 1 million or 2 million deaths would be “almost certainly off the chart.” It was “not impossible, but very, very unlikely,” he said.

On a humid morning in early October, Brittney Poolaw sat in an Oklahoma courtroom waiting on a verdict. Instead of the jail uniform she’d donned over the past 18 months, she wore a yellow and white blouse. After less than three hours of deliberation, the jury returned with their decision: Poolaw was guilty of first-degree manslaughter. She was sentenced to four years behind bars.

But Poolaw, a 20-year-old and a member of the Wichita Tribe, had not driven recklessly or shot a gun. She’d had a miscarriage.

Poolaw will not be the last woman sent to prison for accidentally losing a pregnancy. Indeed, if the leaked Supreme Court decision overturning Roe vs. Wade is in fact its final opinion on the matter, cases like Poolaw’s will likely become more common.

That’s because, as Dana Sussman, deputy executive director of the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, says: “Not only did Roe vs. Wade establish that there’s a constitutional right to abortion, it also rejected the idea that fetuses are people under the Constitution.” The draft opinion, written by Justice Samuel Alito, is steeped in language that paints fetuses—no matter what stage of development—as people. And when we lend credence to the idea of fetal personhood, it creates “a situation in which, when there is perceived harm to a fetus, it can be a victim of a crime. You can’t add fetuses to the community of individuals who are entitled to constitutional rights without diminishing the rights of the person carrying that fetus,” Sussman says.

The connection between fetal personhood and prosecutions of pregnant people is well-established. While Oklahoma’s manslaughter and murder laws have a provision preventing pregnant people from being prosecuted “for causing the death of the unborn child,” there’s an exception for cases where “the mother has committed a crime that caused the death.” NAPW has identified more than 70 pregnancy-related prosecutions in Oklahoma since 2007, when it started counting cases in the state. Most have been related to illegal drug use, including the first conviction under the law: a 31-year-old woman charged with murder in 2007 after using meth and having a stillbirth.

In 2011, Peter Thiel paid $27 million for a home in Maui. In 2022, the billionaire entrepreneur and investor is on track to get a US Senate seat for his friend and former employee, J.D. Vance, for roughly half that. It might be the best deal he’s gotten since acquiring a sizable chunk of Facebook for $500,000 in 2004.

Vance is now the favorite to become Ohio’s next senator after winning Tuesday’s competitive Republican primary. He’d been trailing in the polls but shot to the top after a late endorsement from Donald Trump. Thiel was with him every step of the way.

The PayPal co-founder announced that he was putting $10 million into a super-PAC backing Vance’s Ohio Senate bid before Vance even got into the race. He went on to give another $5 million to the super-PAC. The group functioned as a shadow campaign for Vance by conducting polling, funneling people to his events, and hiring staff that later joined Vance’s official campaign, the New York Times reported.

But money was not Thiel’s most important contribution to Vance’s campaign. He was instrumental in getting Trump to forgive Vance’s vocal Never Trumpism during the 2016 election. Last year, Thiel and Donald Trump Jr. joined Vance for a meeting with the former president at Mar-a-Lago, Politico reported. With Thiel’s help, Vance was able to convince Trump that he’d be one of the Senate’s strongest supporters of the MAGA agenda.

Like any good venture capitalist, Thiel has pull with Trump not because he spent big but because he invested early. During the 2016 campaign, he was Trump’s biggest backer in Silicon Valley and spoke in a key slot at the Republican National Convention. He went on to donate $1.25 million to support Trump while others were fleeing in the wake of the Access Hollywood tape.

This article is a collaboration between Mother Jones and Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, which is a nonprofit investigative newsroom. Sign up to get their investigations emailed to you directly.

For two decades, Kelly Flynn barely noticed the protesters who gathered almost daily along University Boulevard, the main public drag to the office park that houses her clinic, A Woman’s Choice of Jacksonville. The signs, the chants, the occasional blocked sidewalk—they all went with the territory of running an abortion clinic in Florida, one of the last states in the South where abortion remains widely accessible. Most mornings, Flynn would take a back route to avoid them. As soon as she turned left onto University Center Drive, the quiet road fronting the clinic’s two buildings, she almost forgot the protesters existed. The only people permitted to use the private road and parking lots were the medical staff who worked in the surrounding offices, their patients, and approved visitors. Anyone else was trespassing.

All that changed on the morning of Dec. 1, 2020. The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office logged a call from the clinic shortly after 9 a.m.: Three protesters had infiltrated the clinic’s defenses, staking out a spot on the private road. They parked in the lot next door, anti-abortion banners hanging from their cars. According to a sheriff’s report, when officers arrived to remove them, “THEY PRETEND TO BE RENTERS.” An hour later, the officers appended a correction: “PEOPLE HAVE AUTORIZATION (sic) BY PROPERTY OWNER TO BE ON PROPERTY.” The police drove away; the protesters stayed.

That’s when Flynn discovered she had a new neighbor: Gertrude Perez-Poveda, a former accountant in her early 70s who is a leader of Family for LIFE, a local anti-abortion group. Trudy, as everyone calls her, was known for picketing the nearby Planned Parenthood. Now she’d moved into a drab one-story building a couple of hundred feet from Flynn’s clinic that had sat vacant while its owner, a doctor, faced prosecution for allegedly exposing himself to a patient. (He was convicted last year.) For $1,000 a month, Perez-Poveda suddenly had 24/7 access to a room, a bathroom, and—most importantly—the private road. 

Kelly Flynn stands outside her clinic, A Woman’s Choice of Jacksonville, Fla.

In the little more than two months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the United States has committed $14 billion in money and weapons to the Ukrainians. That’s an extraordinary sum, more than three times the amount of US aid Ukraine has received since 2014, the year Russia annexed Crimea. 

But last week President Joe Biden blew past that figure. He asked lawmakers for $33 billion of aid, consisting of defensive weapons and economic assistance. If Congress approves Biden’s request, the US government will have sent Ukraine $47 billion in less than a year, more money than all but a handful of countries have ever received, in total, from the United States. 

“It is almost unprecedented to shovel that much aid to one country in such a short amount of time,” William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. Only four countries have received more than $30 billion in lifetime aid from the United States, and two of them—Iraq and Afghanistan—were the site of lengthy US conflicts. 

Biden is requesting $33 billion in aid to Ukraine, which is more money than the US has sent all but four countries *in total* since 1946 https://t.co/ALx5dlIqyd

— Dan Spinelli (@danspinelli902) April 28, 2022

Nearly two years after George Floyd’s murder sparked nationwide protests, Democratic mayors who once seemed sympathetic to reducing police brutality are now, more and more, pointing to law enforcement as a solution to the rising community gun violence around the country. New York’s Eric Adams, San Francisco’s London Breed, and Chicago’s Lori Lightfoot are among those who increasingly seem to be leaning on cops to stop shootings. “It’s time that the reign of criminals who are destroying our city…come to an end,” Breed said in a news conference in December, vowing more aggressive policing.

But a major new study—highlighted this weekend by the Chicago Sun-Times—provides some of the best evidence yet that these mayors should not turn their backs on other, non-policing solutions to gun violence. University of Chicago researchers looked at a mentoring program that serves men with extensive rap sheets who are at a high risk of shooting someone or being shot. During the 18-month READI Chicago program, the men, many of whom have been shot in the past, are paid $15 an hour to join daily job training and counseling sessions, activities that can get them off the streets and help them support their families without throwing them in jail.

The results have been impressive. The researchers followed 2,500 men who participated in the intensive program. This group was two-thirds less likely to be arrested for a shooting or homicide than a similar group of men who didn’t participate. The results were even more astonishing for guys who’d been recruited to the program by outreach workers: Their arrests dropped nearly 80 percent. And they were half as likely to be shot and killed themselves. That’s a lot of impact for a program that costs about 1 percent of what the city of Chicago typically spends on policing.

The study is particularly exciting because of the rigor with which it was conducted. It was a randomized trial, which means it was the first one of its kind to examine a large group of men from an anti-violence program with the same degree of statistical precision that you’d see in a study to evaluate medical treatments. “These are significant results,” Roseanna Ander, executive director of the University of Chicago Crime Lab, which conducted the study and helped develop the READI curriculum, told the Sun-Times. And perhaps the Biden administration is paying attention: It recently invited Eddie Bocanegra, who helps lead READI, to serve as a special advisor on gun violence.

When I saw the Chicago study, I couldn’t help but think of a similar mentoring program in Oakland, California, that I examined in 2020. I followed Andre Reed, a thirtysomething man with a lengthy criminal record who had been referred to the Community & Youth Outreach program after he was shot eight times. The program paired him up with a life coach, Leonard Haywood, who helped him turn his life around and became a close friend.

Are you at an interregnum point in your high-profile career? Did you recently come out of a very stressful situation? And are you trying to stay relevant but semi-retired and/or just have your hands in a lot of different things but still want to do a little more? 

Might I suggest that you consider becoming a disinformation guy? Since 2017, it’s been the move for at least a few people who maybe don’t have a lot going on, but soon will, or have a bit going on and want to add a bit more to it. After dipping his toes into it for the past year, President Barack Obama notably became the latest and most prominent disinformation guy in a speech yesterday on the subject at Stanford, but he is not the first.

The former Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign manager Robby Mook and former Mitt Romney 2012 presidential campaign manager Matt Rhoades were the earliest examples of disinformation guys I personally came across. In 2017, Harvard’s Belfer Center launched the D3P, which stands not for the next exceptionally talented dual-threat quarterback or the latest hot new point guard, but for Defending Digital Democracy. Shortly after its inception, it announced that Mook and Rhoades would be brought on as “co-leaders of the initiative.” The project said its mission was to “identify and recommend strategies, tools, and technology to protect democratic processes and systems from cyber and information attacks.” 

More recently, after his very public break with the British monarchy, Prince Harry (now just Harry?) came out swinging hard as a disinformation guy. Last March, he was appointed to the Aspen Institute’s Commission on Information Disorder to help with a six-month study on American misinformation and disinformation. At the end of the sixth months, he found that things were not good, calling misinformation a “global humanitarian crisis.”

And of course, by the very nature of being the most clouted human being alive, after his speech at Stanford yesterday and accompanying preview of it in the paper of record, Obama is now the preeminent disinformation guy.

For roughly the last six years, Republican politicians have essentially been acting like the adults in that one Twilight Zone episode with the kid with godlike powers, putting on a big show about how everything Donald Trump does is “good” out of fear that he’ll cast them into the otherworldly cornfield from which there is no return. But according to New York Times reporters Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns, there was at least one brief window where top GOP officials seemed ready to stiffen their spines and prevent their leader from ever holding office again: the days following the January 6 Capitol riot. 

On Thursday, the Times published an edited excerpt from Martin and Burns’s new book This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden and the Battle for America’s Future, which claimed that Republican Party leaders Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) contemplated a series of drastic measures to remove Trump from office: including invoking the 25th Amendment, pressuring him to resign, and even impeachment. 

In public, McCarthy stayed true to his lily-livered persona, objecting to the election results and saying that the Democrats’ attempt to impeach Trump would “put more fuel on the fire.” He has since adopted a characteristically esoteric defense of Trump’s actions on January 6, saying that the real fault lies with Nancy Pelosi, who he (ridiculously) claims to have allowed a “security lapse” at the Capitol. 

However, in private conversations, McCarthy was irate and fully willing to lay the blame squarely on Trump’s shoulders. On Jan. 8, 2021, he reportedly told House Republicans that Trump’s conduct had been “atrocious and totally wrong” and blamed him outright for inciting the mob to storm the Capitol. During a Jan. 10 meeting, he claimed that he’d ask Trump to resign from office and allegedly said that he wished that the Big Tech companies would strip some far-right lawmakers of their social media accounts. 

“I’ve had it with this guy,” he reportedly ranted to a group of Republican leaders. “What he did is unacceptable. Nobody can defend that, and nobody should defend it.” 

If you happen to be a pregnant person with questions—say, about the foods you should avoid, how big your developing fetus is, or when your morning sickness might finally abate—your online research may lead you to the cheerful and informative website of the American Pregnancy Association. In addition to providing answers to expectant parents, the site offers a wealth of other resources: advice about how to improve fertility, a due-date calculator, and even a hotline for pregnancy questions. For those seeking medical expertise about all things gestation-related, the American Pregnancy Association seems to be a one-stop shop. The group describes itself as “a national health organization committed to promoting reproductive and pregnancy wellness through education, support, advocacy, and community awareness.”

Better yet, it seems to be committed to science. “The Association believes that research is the foundation to significant reproductive discoveries,” the site says. Indeed, the group is cited as a source by many respected medical institutions, including the Cleveland Clinic, Los Angeles’ Cedars-Sinai, Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and Maryland’s Johns Hopkins HealthCare. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN have included its advice in articles. The official website about women’s health at the US Government’s Department of Health and Human Services links to the American Pregnancy Association as a resource for those seeking information about pregnancy tests. The Office of Child Welfare recommends that parents considering adoption peruse its list of potential questions to ask adoptive parents.

So comprehensive and widely known are the organization’s offerings that it’s easy to overlook the section about unplanned pregnancies, where the tone is decidedly different—fewer facts, more feelings. “If you’re researching your options, you probably need to talk,” the page says, offering a hotline number. “There will be no judgment, no guilt, only a friendly caring person ready to listen and talk.” Actual information about abortion is hard to find, and what the site does provide is sandwiched between warnings. “Consider the impact the procedure may have on your future,” the site advises.

Here’s another thing it doesn’t mention: The American Pregnancy Association isn’t the dispassionate medical authority it might appear to be. Rather, it’s the brainchild of a Texas-based pro-life activist named Brad Imler, and it’s rife with medically inaccurate information—on both abortion and other reproductive health topics. The site hawks unproven blood tests, infertility treatments, and products purported to support the pregnant person and developing fetus. The American Pregnancy Association presents all of its information and products as evidence-based and medically accurate—but nowhere can one find its activist foundations or learn that it doesn’t have a single medical professional listed on its staff of a handful of people.

This veneer of medical expertise isn’t a new phenomenon in the anti-abortion movement. Over the last few decades, pro-life groups have built a robust network of crisis pregnancy centers designed to look like doctors’ offices, complete with ultrasound equipment and available nurses. The purpose of these offices is to dissuade people from getting abortions, yet the staff and marketing materials rarely mention this—crisis pregnancy centers’ misleading messaging has been the focus of several recent court cases. The American Pregnancy Association is set up like a virtual version of these crisis pregnancy centers, attracting expectant parents with its promises of need-to-know information—then gently leading them through an experience subtly laid out to discourage abortion at all costs. It’s a highly successful design: Even the pro-choice think tank the Guttmacher Institute lists the American Pregnancy Association among its sources for information about fetal development.

With Roe v. Wade at risk of being overturned by the Supreme Court, 2022 is shaping up to be a historically bad year for reproductive rights. And while anti-choice lawmakers have been working toward this for decades, they’ve only gotten bolder with their moves in the past few years. 

If the court does away with Roe, 26 states will put in place bans or severe abortion restrictions, according to data from the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive rights think tank. Meanwhile, emboldened by the passing of other abortion bans in previous years, Republicans politicians have passed abortion bans left and right this year, setting reproductive rights back nearly half a century: In the first four months of this year alone, lawmakers across 42 states introduced a grand total of 536 bills restricting access to abortions—86 of which effectively banned abortion outright.

So far, six states have successfully passed versions of these bans, and most of them look eerily familiar. It appears as those legislators are taking a page straight out of either Texas or Mississippi’s playbook: In 2021, Texas passed a law that prohibited abortions only after six weeks of pregnancy, while three years prior, Mississippi passed a law preventing abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy.

The aftermath of these laws has been devastating. People seeking abortions in Texas have been forced to flee to other states—and sometimes other countries—to receive the procedure. Currently, there are eight states that have either banned or are attempting to ban abortions a maximum of 15 weeks after a pregnancy. Here’s a look at where they stand:

Arizona

On March 30, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey signed a bill that mirrors Mississippi’s, forbidding abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The law also makes no exceptions for cases of rape or incest. “In Arizona, we know there is immeasurable value in every life—including preborn life,” Ducey said. “I believe it is each state’s responsibility to protect them.” The law will go into effect in late June.

She hadn’t even reached the border when she felt her teeth crack. Diana Kyrychyk had just finished getting a root canal in Ukraine the previous day, but she still had four temporary fillings that needed to be replaced and now they were disintegrating. She pulled two bits of broken teeth from her mouth, carefully tucked them into her front jeans pocket, and kept moving. On a crowded road in northwest Ukraine, she was fleeing Russian missiles by foot with two suitcases, her husband, her sister, her three young children, and her 6-month-old niece.

At around five in the morning three days earlier, on Thursday, February 24, Diana was asleep in her apartment in Kyiv when she was awakened by the sound of explosions. She realized that, as unbelievable as it had seemed only days before, the Russian army was dropping deadly mortar shells on the country’s capital.

Diana and her husband, Dima Kyrychyk, packed up their essentials—laptops, documents, winter boots, medication, sandwiches, some toys for the kids. They loaded up the gray Citroën sedan they’d bought in 2013, soon after their wedding. They asked their children—Evangeline, 7, Oskar, 5, and Oliver, 3—to be obedient and attentive because anything could happen, even to their parents, and it was extremely important to listen and follow instructions. 

They drove toward her parents’ house in Volhynia, about 100 kilometers from Lviv and only 20 kilometers from the border with Belarus. A drive through the Rivne region that normally takes six or seven hours took 15. Along the road, they saw tanks and Ukrainian soldiers. They managed to make only two pit stops so the kids could use the bathroom. Their trusty Citroën was fuel-efficient, so they didn’t need to wait in the long lines for gas. 

Diana alternately cried and prayed for God to save them from explosions. “Every minute we were afraid of missiles,” she says. On February 26, two days after the Kyrychyks crossed over it, the bridge they took to leave the region was blown up by Ukrainian troops to prevent the Russian army from getting any closer to Kyiv.  

Sarah Palin made me laugh this morning. 

I was looking at my inbox and spotted a fundraising email from her. The subject heading was, “Did you see my interview?” Had I missed something important? Then again, how important could a Palin interview be? Yes, she’s running for Congress to replace Republican stalwart Rep. Don Young, who died in office last month, having served 49 years in the House as Alaska’s at-large congressional representative. But she is just one of 48 candidates competing for his seat. 

Regarding the question she posed, the email had a link to a segment she did with Fox News host Jesse Watters. I wondered what she might have said, so I clicked on it. But instead of being forwarded to a clip of the interview, in a classic bait-and-switch, I landed on a fundraising page for “Sarah for Alaska,” which notes she was endorsed by Donald Trump. 

I returned to the email—which addressed me as “Patriot”—to see how Palin is pitching herself these days. This is what she said:

A lot of people are asking me why I decided to run. The simple answer is: I’m in it for the right reasons. I’ve got a public servant’s heart, and I’m willing to serve the American people.

Editor’s note: This column by David Corn first appeared in his newsletter, Our Land. But we wanted to make sure as many readers as possible have a chance to see it. Our Land is written by David twice a week and provides behind-the-scenes stories about politics and media; his unvarnished take on the events of the day; film, book, television, podcast, and music recommendations; interactive audience features; and more. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial of Our Land here. Please check it out.

In July 1980, President Jimmy Carter got some bad news. The Justice Department had filed a complaint against his younger brother, Billy, for failing to register as a lobbyist for Libya. Billy had taken two all-expenses-paid trips to Tripoli pursuing business deals there, and he had accepted $220,000 from the Libyans to develop what he called a “propaganda campaign” to promote the foreign policy objectives of dictator Moammar Qaddafi. In response to the Justice Department action, Billy belatedly registered as a foreign agent.

But the scandal persisted, and Carter handled the controversy well. Everyone knew he had little control over the irrepressible Billy, who had long struggled with alcoholism and only that summer sobered up. The president released a statement saying, “I do not believe it is appropriate for a close relative of the president to undertake any assignment on behalf of a foreign government.” The Senate Judiciary Committee, controlled by Democrats, initiated an investigation into what became known as Billygate, and Carter announced the White House would cooperate fully and waive any claims to executive privilege. Carter held a press conference and spent an hour taking questions about the matter, and he went further. He issued an executive order prohibiting relatives of the president from lobbying or interacting with US government officials, and he released a 92-page report that criticized Billy but refuted allegations of wrongdoing. The report even included excerpts of the president’s diary. His reaction was widely regarded as transparent and honest.

Billygate is a good point of reference when assessing what could be called Jaredgate. On April 10, the New York Times revealed that Jared Kushner, son-in-law and adviser of the 45th president, secured a $2 billion investment for his new private equity firm, Affinity Partners, from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince—even after advisers to the Saudi fund raised serious objections to the investment. The screening panel for the Saudi fund had cited “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”; an “unsatisfactory in all aspects” due diligence report; a proposed asset management fee that seemed “excessive”; and “public relations risks.” Yet the panel was overruled by the fund’s board, which is headed by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s autocratic de facto leader, who, according to US intelligence, green-lit the operation that resulted in the assassination of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

It’s damn hard to not see the $2 billion investment as either a payoff for past services rendered or a preemptive bribe should Trump manage to regain the White House. And it could be both. It’s a wonder that the disclosure of this deal hasn’t created more of a fuss and prompted congressional investigations. (Imagine what Republicans and Fox News would be doing if Hunter Biden received $2 billion from a Ukrainian government leader who was responsible for the gruesome murder of an American resident.) A 10-figure payment to a relative of a former president who is essentially the current (though undeclared) GOP frontrunner in the 2024 contest and possibly the next inhabitant of the White House is a major scandal.

Nurses at Stanford Health Care and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital are ready to exchange thermometers and scrubs for picket signs in a planned strike starting on April 25. To avoid burnout and to continue to offer care during the chaos of the pandemic, the nurses say they need more staff, better mental health resources, better pay, and more paid time-off. More than ninety percent of the 5,000 nurses who belong to the Committee for Recognition of Nursing Achievement (CRONA) union at the two hospitals voted for the strike. 

Rather than cave to their demands, Stanford had another message for them: Be prepared to lose your health care. On April 15, right before the Easter weekend and amid Passover and Ramadan, Stanford Health Care announced that in addition to withholding pay, it would also be suspending health insurance benefits for striking nurses and their families beginning on May 1.

Stanford isn’t outside of its rights to withdraw health care from picketing nurses, but it hasn’t been a common practice during recent hospital strikes. Workers at another one of California’s largest medical providers, Cedars-Sinai, are planning an upcoming strike, and the provider has not threatened to revoke their health care. The workers striking at Cedars-Sinai include nursing assistants, transportation workers, surgical technicians, and others. Workers at 15 Sutter Health locations in California also participated in a one day strike on Monday. 

Stripping nurses of their health care is a “bullying” intimidation tactic that targets some of the most vulnerable nurses, says Kathy Stormberg, vice president of CRONA. Without pay and health benefits, strikers are left to pay for care completely out of pocket through the federal COBRA program. “Targeting those among us with cancer or who are single moms is a really horrible look for a hospital,” she adds, though she said she didn’t think the intimidation tactic will have a significant effect on the number of nurses who plan to strike.

In an online petition urging Stanford Health Care not to cut benefits for the strike, CRONA members expressed their disappointment at the hospitals’ tactics, writing: “Instead of trying to address why 93% of eligible nurses voted to go on strike, the hospitals responded with this cruel move that’s clearly designed to punish nurses and break their resolve.” More than 25,000 people have signed the petition in just two days. 

The Democratic Party has taken steps to ban consultants from participating in anti-union activity, amid reports that a Democratic polling firm created anti-union videos and attended presentations designed to thwart a union drive at an Amazon warehouse, Politico reported today. 

The party plans to add an addendum to contracts between its political committees and their consultants. According to Politico, the provision would bar consultants from helping clients “persuade employees or workers to not form or join a union or otherwise discourage employees or workers from unionizing.” It would also prevent consultants from helping clients pass “legislation, ballot measures or other public policies” opposed by the labor movement or from working to defeat legislation that the labor movement supports. 

Last month, CNBC reported that Amazon had hired Global Strategy Group, an influential Democratic firm, to help fight unionization efforts at the JFK8 warehouse on Staten Island and at three other facilities. The firm reportedly created anti-union materials that were used as part of the company’s aggressive anti-union push. In a stunning win, workers at the JFK8 warehouse voted to unionize by a wide margin. 

After the CNBC report emerged, several large unions, including the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union, said that they would not work with GSG going forward. AFT President Randi Weingarten tweeted that GSG’s actions were “really really disgusting.” 

GSG later apologized for the role it played in the union drive, telling CNBC that “while there have been factual inaccuracies in recent reports about our work for Amazon, being involved in any way was a mistake, we have resigned that work, and we are deeply sorry.”