More details are emerging over just how long law enforcement took to stop the Uvalde school shooting this week, including horrifying descriptions of how children suffered while police waited outside gathering resources and preparing themselves to intervene. As it becomes apparent that law enforcement delayed up to an hour before storming the building, criticism of their performance and their previous account of the event is growing. On Saturday, Texas’ lieutenant governor Dan Patrick, a conservative who has made attacking those who criticize law enforcement a key part of his political brand, said on Fox & Friends that he and others in the Texas government “were not told the truth” following the Uvdale shooting that killed 19 children and two adults.

Initial reports, provided by law enforcement sources immediately after the shooting, described armed school security and local police officers engaging in a gun battle with the shooter, and then working to quickly rescue surviving children. That narrative changed over subsequent hours and days as details began to emerge of the scene both in and outside the school. Parents, who frantically waited outside the school as the shooting continued, fought with law enforcement who tried to prevent them from entering the building, even as they failed to move into the school themselves and confront the shooter. One mother who wanted to gain access said she was handcuffed by US marshals and threatened with arrest. On Friday, transcripts of 911 calls made by children begging for help from the classrooms for as long as an hour were released. 

Investigators now say that the school district’s police department chief ordered officers to hold back from confronting the shooter because he thought it was a siege situation, in which shooter was isolated and could be approached by law enforcement, and not an active shooter continuing to threaten children’s lives. School shooting experts say that was the wrong choice and goes contrary to training in the decades since the Columbine shooting in 1999.

On Friday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott acknowledged that he was mistaken in his earlier praise for law enforcement’s response. At a press conference on Wednesday, Abbott had claimed, “As horrible as what happened, it could have been worse. The reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do. They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire for the singular purpose of trying to save lives.”

On Friday, Abbott said he was “livid” that he had been given wrong information. 

New York attorney general Letitia James’ civil fraud investigation into Donald Trump’s businesses is one of the few legal cases against the former president that has had real traction. On Friday, a federal judge ruled that the former president’s most serious attempt to stall it has no basis and the case can proceed. James has been investigating Trump’s finances since late 2019 and has recently focused on whether Trump had fraudulently manipulated the value of his business empire in the years before he became president to get favorable terms from banks, insurance agents, and tax assessors. Back in December, Trump sued James, asking New York district court judge Brenda Sannes to stop the AG’s investigation as a “fishing expedition” that amounted to political harassment because James is a Democrat.

But on Friday Sannes rejected Trump’s argument entirely, tossing out the suit, writing that she didn’t have the power to interfere with a state-level case, and that Trump’s claims of political persecution, which might justify her intervention, simply didn’t bear out. In her opinion, Sannes wrote:

“Plaintiffs have not established that Defendant commenced the New York proceeding to otherwise harass them. Such harassment is ‘typically’ done ‘through the unjustified and oppressive use of multiple prosecutions.’ Here, there is a single investigation and state court proceeding. While the New York proceeding has been ongoing since August 2020, Plaintiffs have submitted no evidence that the subpoena enforcement proceeding has been conducted in such a way as to constitute harassment.”

In his lawsuit, Trump’s attorneys listed numerous examples of times when James, who served on the New York City Council before being elected attorney general in 2018, has said critical things about Trump. They noted that in her campaign platform, James had said she would investigate him. As the judge overseeing the investigation has noted, the fact that James has simply said she disagrees politically with the former president doesn’t automatically make the investigation unfair. Sannes wrote that Trump “failed to produce any evidence that the state proceeding has been conducted in bad faith” and wrote that his claims of the investigation being a “baseless fishing expedition” are “wholly unsupported.”

A spokesperson for the Trump Organization did not respond to a request for comment, but James took to Twitter to call Trump’s now-dismissed lawsuit “frivolous.”

Former president Donald Trump spoke at the National Rifle Association’s convention in Houston, Texas, Friday night, giving a speech laden with falsehoods about gun control and school shootings. He ended with a strange dance, more fitting for one of his elaborate campaign events than a policy speech in the wake of this week’s horrific attack at an elementary school in Uvalde—250 miles east of the NRA event—that left 19 children and two adults dead. 

While other major GOP politicians decided not to show up or canceled their appearances at this year’s convention in light of the school shooting—including Texas governor Greg Abbott who recorded a speech and Texas senator John Cornyn who stayed in Washington, DC, to negotiate with Senate Democrats about possible new legislation—Trump and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz were both on stage at the George R. Brown Convention Center Friday night.

Trump opened his speech by reading the names of the children slain in Uvalde, accompanied by the sound of a recorded bell tolling. 

This is just gross. They have Trump trying to pronounce and read the names of the dead children while the NRA rings a bell. Disgusting. pic.twitter.com/AADaVc4o0s

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) May 27, 2022

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

Last December, a young patient was admitted to Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, after several medications had failed to quell the child’s relentless seizures. A hospital pediatrician, Vignesh Doraiswamy, consulted with neurologists and then tried a different drug. The child had fewer seizures, became more interactive, and was ready to go back home, says Doraiswamy. But there was a problem: The patient’s insurance company refused to authorize the new medication for the parents to administer. The family had to remain in the hospital for at least two more days, Doraiswamy recalls, while the decision went through an appeals process.

Doctors have long asserted that prior authorization—the need to get approval from the patient’s insurer before proceeding with treatment—causes delays that can hurt patient care. In an American Medical Association survey conducted in December 2021, one-third of physicians reported that such delays have caused at least one of their patients to experience a serious problem, such as hospitalization, the development of a birth defect, disability, and even death. In that same survey, more than 80 percent of surveyed doctors said patients at least sometimes abandon their recommended treatment because of prior authorization hassles. Just over half of the physicians who treat adult patients in the workforce said prior authorization has interfered with patients’ ability to do their jobs.

Prior authorizations also exact a toll on doctors, who say the paperwork has gotten out of hand. The average physician must now seek approval for dozens of prescriptions and medical services each week, an administrative burden that contributes to burnout and costs physician practices an estimated $26.7 billion in time each year.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, prior authorization is one of several strategies that insurers use to reduce wasteful medical spending. (Other strategies include patient cost-sharing and requiring patients to try low-cost drugs before the insurance company will pay for a more expensive therapy.) These strategies can discourage the use of inappropriate and overpriced medications and promote the use of better options. But, as drug prices rise, insurers are intensifying prior authorization requirements and physician practices have built up a huge infrastructure to fight for the drugs they want to prescribe.

As gun violence ravages communities and the country reels from a string of horrific mass shootings, Americans have been left with an all-too-familiar question: Will our lawmakers finally do something to stop the carnage? We’ve been here before, many times; we’ve watched as Republicans (and some Democrats) bowed to pressure from the National Rifle Association and blocked even the most basic gun control measures.

But as the Trace’s Mike Spies pointed out the day after the Uvalde massacre, there actually has been a seismic shift in the political landscape. The NRA is still a powerful force, but years of scandal and infighting and a failed attempt to declare bankruptcy may have left it substantially weaker than it was in 2013, when pro-gun forces killed a bipartisan background check bill in the wake of the Sandy Hook murders:

2/Its longtime PR firm, which served as the voice of the organization and devised Wayne LaPierre’s persona, is long gone. Its most effective spokespeople are long gone. Its most effective leader, Chris Cox, is long gone. Cox’s team is gone. Oliver North is long gone.

— mike spies (@mikespiesnyc) May 26, 2022

The NRA still spends millions on lobbying, but Chris Cox, its legendary chief lobbyist, stepped down in 2019. The group shelled out more than $29 million on the 2020 elections, according to Open Secrets. But that was barely half of what it spent in 2016.

Once upon a time, Alex Berenson was a New York Times journalist covering major stories, from the Iraq War to Hurricane Katrina to the Bernie Madoff scandal. But over the last several years, he’s increasingly focused on a new pet project: owning the libs. In his Substack newsletter “Unreported Truths” he rails against Joe Biden, derides the pro-choice movement, and complains about inflation to his “tens of thousands of subscribers.”

One of Berenson’s favorite themes has been to downplay the effectiveness of the Covid vaccines—and it’s this work in particular that has made him a star. Before Twitter kicked him off the platform for spreading vaccine disinformation last year, he had hundreds of thousands of followers. Berenson’s Substack newsletters over the last month have mostly been more of the same: He rails against “woke media whoppers about Covid vaccines” and describes Pennsylvania Democratic Senate nominee John Fetterman as a “fat vaccinated cannabis activist.”

But earlier this week, Berenson took aim at a new target: the growing global outbreak of the monkeypox virus. In a post titled “Is It Monkeypox or Crystalpox?” Berenson writes that public health authorities have “almost got another epidemic on the go—the perfect way to distract the shiny-haired robots in the media from the complete failure of the mRNA vaccines.” He then goes on to argue that monkeypox is strictly a disease of gay men. “Are you a gay man who likes sex with lots of other gay men?” he wrote. “Maybe in a bathhouse? Maybe names optional? Maybe with a meth bump on the side? No? Are you sure?… Okay. Don’t worry about the monkeypox thing then.”

With those two points—a supposedly overblown illness plus some homophobia—Berenson did what anti-vaccine activists do best. He managed to build upon his previous talking points and pivot to the current news cycle, neatly weaving the latest headlines into a grand conspiracy theory with necessary villains and egregious profiteering.

There is seemingly no topic too far afield for these zealots to exploit. Recently, I’ve reported on anti-vaccine influencers’ embrace of pro-Kremlin ideology and their promotion of dangerous disinformation about the baby formula shortage. But the monkeypox outbreak offers especially fertile ground because it allows the purveyors of misinformation to recycle many of the same talking points that they developed for Covid. The addition of homophobic rhetoric is particularly toxic, as it’s likely to unite anti-LGBTQ extremists with Covid denialists. As Yale epidemiologist and AIDS activist Gregg Gonsalves put it on Twitter earlier this week, this might be “that moment when homophobia meets far right pandemic politics.”

For many years now, every horrific gun massacre has ricocheted widely with a familiar theme of outrage and surrender. On Wednesday, the day after a heavily armed, suicidal 18-year-old slaughtered 19 children and two adults at a Texas elementary school, Washington Post columnist Brian Broome published one of the more powerful versions of that narrative I’ve ever read. “Nothing happened after innocent children were slaughtered the last time, or the time before that, and nothing is going to be done now,” he wrote, citing Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook and Parkland.

Broome’s column articulated the enduring shame of our nation’s political stalemate and pathetic inaction on gun policy. It was piercing and poignant—and, in my view, wrong.

It’s not just that we shouldn’t resign ourselves in perpetuity to such outrage, rightful as it is. This narrative has become part of the problem itself—in some cases possibly even fueling the escalating cycle of mass shootings. That’s because it validates the recurring violence, framing it as an indefinite feature of our reality.

And mass shooters pay heed. After nearly a decade of studying these attacks and how to prevent them through the work of behavioral threat assessment, I documented extensive case evidence for my book, Trigger Points. The research shows that many perpetrators are keenly aware of media and political narratives about their actions.

They hope the public will focus on sensational coverage of their rage-filled “manifestos,” their sinister photos uploaded to social media, their ghastly livestreams. They want notoriety, and they seek justification and credibility for their acts of violence. And in the message that America will never stop these mass shootings, they find such affirmation.

“We don’t know his motive yet, but authorities believe he acted alone”…“it was a lone gunman”…“the shooter acted alone…”

No, he didn’t.

A motive will probably be assigned to him. We have studied every mass shooting since 1982. And the “motives” are usually some combination of the following: He struggled with bullying. Or self-loathing and depression. Maybe he had an ax to grind with an authority figure. Maybe he hated a certain group of people.

But whatever we learn about the Uvalde shooter, or any future ones—because there will be more—don’t say they “acted alone,” which is largely media code for “this doesn’t appear to be Islamic terrorism.” No matter the particulars, these “lone” gunmen all have scores of accomplices. Here is a wholly incomplete list of those who bear direct responsibility in this slaughter of 19 children and two teachers, and the brutality visited on those still in the hospital, all the families, and the community and country at large:

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott: A relentless cheerleader for gun extremism, last year he gleefully signed seven bills rolling back gun regulations—including abolishing licenses for handguns. In the aftermath of this shooting he blamed mental health issues, a go-to tactic to distract from the gun debate, despite having cut $211 million from the agency that provides state mental health services.

A New York appellate court dealt Donald Trump another blow Thursday when it ruled that the former president and his daughter must sit for sworn depositions in the New York’s civil fraud investigation into the family business. New York State Attorney General Letitia James subpoenaed Donald and Ivanka Trump back in December, but Trumps’ attorneys argued that the they shouldn’t have to because, they said, James’ whole investigation was baseless and politically motivated. Arthur Engoron, the lower court judge handling the case, disagreed, writing in his decision that there was actually “copious evidence” that the Trumps might have committed fraud and no evidence that James’ probe was motivated by an improper political bias. 

In Thursday’s ruling, four appellate judges from the New York Supreme Court’s First Department agreed with Engoron’s assessment, writing that the Trumps presented no evidence of politically motivated persecution or selective prosecution.

During oral arguments back in February, the Trumps’ attorneys seemed far more focused on appealing to public perception than on convincing Engoron. At one point, Alina Habba, Donald Trump’s personal attorney in the case, complained that James refused to go after Trump’s 2016 presidential rival.

“Are you going to go after Hillary Clinton for what she’s doing to my client, that she spied at Trump Tower in your state?” Habba demanded to know. “Are you going to look into her business dealings?”

In his own public statements, Trump has complained that James, who is Black, is one of several “radical, vicious, racist prosecutors” investigating him. In court, Habba claimed the investigation was about “viewpoint discrimination,” but the appellate judges were thoroughly unconvinced. To successfully make the argument that you are being illegally singled out for investigation, you have to show that someone else is not being investigated for a similar offense when they should be, and the judicial panel concluded—arguments about Hillary Clinton aside—that the Trumps “have not identified any similarly implicated corporation that was not investigated or any executives of such a corporation who were not deposed.”

The beats are almost always the same. 

A shooter enters a crowded space with a loaded gun, usually one modified to kill dozens of people in seconds—and usually one that they obtained legally. They open fire and murder innocents. Earlier this month it was 10 patrons at a Buffalo supermarket; this week it was 19 children and two of their teachers in Texas. As the news spreads, well-intentioned people flood Twitter with reminders not to share unverified information about the shooting in its early moments. Some people share it anyway. If the shooter has proclaimed their motivations on paper, more well-intentioned people vociferously demand that others don’t share the document. Some people share it anyway. 

Within a few hours of the shooting, large swaths of the public demand a policy solution—gun control. Others claim to be upset about how the tragedy is being too quickly politicized. If there is footage of the carnage, the videos ping around tech companies’ platforms endlessly, despite their commitments to the contrary.  The location of the tragedy inspires a hashtag: #[place name] strong. The Onion republishes the same article it always publishes, about how this all keeps happening. People vow to handle this at voting booths at the next election. But eventually, they seem to forget, and almost nothing changes. 

In the 15 years that I have been old enough to pay attention to the news, this is the only story arc I have known. With mass shootings, but also, it feels, with almost every other issue that has become a point of political contention, from police brutality to LGBTQ discrimination to whatever the culture war du jour is. The problems differ, but the pattern is the same: public outrage and political will swell, wane, and then little changes. The doomcycle repeats itself. 

When police killed another Black man, George Floyd, in the summer of 2020, protestors flooded the streets. Politicians vowed to enact major policy change. But two years later, those police reform demands have faded. When another lawmaker, this time in Texas, proposed a bill that would criminalize medical care for transgender kids, businesses and advocacy groups criticized the policy—yet it has moved forward unabated. And when school districts in 26 states (and counting) banned books about racial justice and gender identity, parents and students voiced their opposition at school board meetings across the county, only to be drowned out by board members and other parents.

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