The anti-abortion movement has been a major ally of President Donald Trump, applauding him for appointing three U.S. Supreme Court judges who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade after 49 years. But on Sunday night, May 3, the Wall Street Journal published an article detailing tensions between Trump and a top anti-abortion activist: Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America.

Dannenfelser told the Rupert Murdoch-owned WSJ, "Trump is the problem. The president is the problem."

Patrick T. Brown, director of anti-abortion policy for the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center, highlighted Dannenfelser's quote in a Sunday night post on X, formerly Twitter.

According to WSJ reporters Philip Wegmann, Liz Essley Whyte and Jennifer Calfas, "The ubiquity of abortion pills during the second Trump Administration has led anti-abortion advocates to decry the president's appointees, including Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary, and promise cash and political firepower to politicians who oppose the drugs."

When the High Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its 5-4 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling in 2022, Trump applauded the decision as a victory for states' rights. Abortion is now banned or greatly restricted in many Republican-leaning states, while remaining legal in other states.

Some blue states, in fact, have strengthened their abortion-rights protections since the Dobbs decision. But Dannenfelser and other anti-abortion activists are hoping for a national anti-abortion law. And Dannenfelser recently said that the anti-abortion movement "as we know it is finished" without such a national ban or restriction.

"Now, Dannenfelser's group is preparing to spend $160 million in the coming midterms and the 2028 presidential primary. The hurdle for candidates looking to tap in to that support: They must commit, Dannenfelser said, 'to pro-life action at the national level,'" the WSJ journalists report. "Leaders in the anti-abortion movement are quick to credit Trump for nominating the Supreme Court justices who overturned Roe, but their frustration has been building for months. They hoped that the (Trump) administration would roll back (Joe) Biden-era rules allowing the abortion pill, mifepristone, to be prescribed online and shipped through the mail."

Wegmann, Whyte and Calfas add, "The regulations have allowed clinicians in states with liberal abortion laws, such as New York, to prescribe and send pills to women in states with strict abortion bans, such as Mississippi. The Food and Drug Administration has instead left those rules intact."

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council — a major Religious Right group — told the WSJ, "You have Republican states that are challenging a Republican administration over this because their laws are being undermined. Pro-life voters are going to be wondering what’s going on when they head into the polls in November."

President Donald Trump has been able to ram through much of his controversial agenda thanks to the acquiescence of the Supreme Court, where Republican judges outweigh Democratic ones by a 6-3 majority. Yet according to a libertarian editor, Trump may actually have a problem — two of his oldest judges seem unwilling to retire.

“Democratic strategists are probably jumping for joy at the news of Alito and Thomas sticking around on the bench for a bit longer,” Reason senior editor Damon Root wrote on Tuesday. Root was referring to Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, who at ages 76 and 77 respectively are near the average retirement age for Supreme Court judges. Both are staunch conservatives who consistently support Trump’s agenda, yet historically judges who do not retire around that age will pass away in office. If Alito and Thomas died near the end of Trump’s second term — much as Justice Antonin Scalia passed away near the end of President Barack Obama’s second term a decade ago — Trump would need to go to a possibly Democrat-controlled Senate to confirm their replacement… and, like Senate Republicans after Alito’s death, they would likely refuse to confirm anyone.

“If either Alito or Thomas did retire this year, after all, his Trump-picked successor would almost certainly sail through the confirmation process in the Republican-controlled Senate,” Root explained. “But now, if the Democrats manage to take control of the Senate in this year's midterm elections, any future SCOTUS nominee from Trump will stand about zero chance of ever getting confirmed.”

He concluded, “That's a pretty good campaign message if you happen to be a Democrat running for the Senate.”

Indeed, Democrats do not even need to win control of the Senate to hinder Trump’s agenda in the second half of his last term. CNN recently observed that "even if Senate Democrats come up short in November, there could be a big difference between Trump nominating a justice with 53 Republican votes this year and trying to do so with 50 or 51 in the second half of his term."

"But the president may have other reasons, apart from the confirmability factor, to try and usher things in this direction," CNN added.

Writing for AlterNet, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich harshly criticized both Alito and Thomas, although he was clear about which one was worse.

“I’ve long assumed that Samuel Alito was the worst,” Reich wrote. He observed that Alito wrote for the majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), which effectively overturned a woman’s right to choose for millions of Americans by overturning Roe v. Wade (1973), going on an initially-undisclosed 2008 luxury fishing trip to Alaska with hedge fund billionaire and GOP donor Paul Singer and not recusing himself when Singer had business before the court and flying an inverted American flag outside his Virginia home shortly after January 6th.

“But I’ve come to revise my view of the court’s worst Justice,” Reich wrote. “Clarence Thomas is 77 years old. He has now served on the Supreme Court for over 34 years, making him the longest-serving member of the Court. He is a bitter, angry, severe hard-right, intellectually dishonest, ideologue.” Reich reached this conclusion after reading Thomas inaccurately conflating progressive ideas with fascism and authoritarianism generally by tracing it to the administration of a Democratic white supremacist, President Woodrow Wilson.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the conservative majority’s opinions in two of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in recent years: 1) Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization—overruling Roe v. Wade; and 2) Louisiana v. Callais—neutering the Voting Rights Act of 1965. In both cases, Alito recited and relied on asserted “facts” that did not exist.

Alito Rewrote History to Ban Abortion

Ohio State University Prof. Treva Lindsey observed, “From the nation’s founding through the early 1800s, pre-quickening abortions—that is, abortions before a pregnant person feels fetal movement—were fairly common and even advertised.”

But Alito claimed incorrectly in Dobbs that “no common-law case or authority... remotely suggests a positive right to procure an abortion at any stage of pregnancy” and, in the United States specifically, “an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.”

Writing for the three dissenters, Justice Elena Kagan called Alito “embarrassingly” wrong. There was no such “unbroken tradition,” and historical evidence undermined his claim. But the conservative majority got its desired outcome.

Roberts Began the Assault on the Voting Rights Act

In 2013, Chief Justice John Roberts and the conservative majority began undermining the Voting Rights Act in the Shelby County case. Prior to that decision, states and localities with a history of racial discrimination in voting had to obtain federal approval before making changes to election rules—a process known as preclearance. The state or locality had to prove that any changes would not disadvantage racial and ethnic minorities.

Rewrite history; distort reality; make up facts; overturn longstanding precedent. For Justice Alito—with an occasional assist from Chief Justice Roberts—it’s all in a day’s work.

Roberts argued that the elections of 2008 and 2012—when there was no difference in voter participation rates between Black and white voters (i.e., no “turnout gap”)—meant that the Voting Rights Act had done its job and preclearance could be suspended.

Even at the time, Roberts’ reasoning was suspect. The elections of 2008 and 2012 were anomalies—not the end of the turnout gap—because Barack Obama’s candidacy had driven up Black turnout.

In her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted another flaw in Roberts’ logic: “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.”

Justice Ginsburg was correct, and now democracy is getting wet. A 2024 study concluded:

The formerly covered states [subject to preclearance] have large nonwhite populations and large turnout gaps, leading to some of the largest statewide turnout distortions in the nation. Put differently, a decade after Shelby County, the turnout gap continues to have a disproportionate impact in precisely the parts of the country that were once covered due to their histories of racially discriminatory voting practices.

Stated simply, “[S]ince 2013, the racial turnout gap around the nation has exploded.”

Alito Finished the Job

Justice Alito ignored the exploding turnout gap in striking the fatal blow to the Voting Rights Act on April 29, 2026. For decades previously, the court had ruled repeatedly that a state could not undermine minority voters’ power to choose their desired candidates by drawing legislative districts that dispersed such voters across majority-white districts. Instead, states had to create “majority-minority” districts, thereby assuring minority representation in statehouses and Congress.

In its amicus brief to the court in the Callais case, the Department of Justice (DOJ) ignored the trend after 2013 and argued that majority-minority districts were no longer necessary because “the racial gap in voter registration and turnout had largely disappeared, with minorities registering and voting at levels that sometimes surpassed the majority. Shelby County, 570 U.S. at 547-548.” To emphasize the point, the DOJ observed, “Since 2004, black voters have turned out at higher rates than white voters in two of five presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”

Armed with the Callais decision, Republicans are now racing to eliminate majority-Black districts throughout the country.

Alito parroted the DOJ’s sophistry: “Black voters now participate in elections at similar rates as the rest of the electorate, even turning out at higher rates than white voters in two of the five most recent Presidential elections nationwide and in Louisiana.”

As election experts have observed, Alito’s claim that Black and white turnout reached parity in 2 of the 5 most recent presidential elections “represents egregious cherry-picking. [H]e was not referring to recent elections, but to those in 2008 and 2012—the years that Barack Obama ran for president. In the three most recent presidential elections, the trend shows exactly the opposite. The indisputable fact is the racial turnout gap is widening, and the Roberts Court is partially responsible [because of its Shelby County decision].”

Armed with the Callais decision, Republicans are now racing to eliminate majority-Black districts throughout the country.

Rewrite history; distort reality; make up facts; overturn longstanding precedent. For Justice Alito—with an occasional assist from Chief Justice Roberts—it’s all in a day’s work.

I’ve long assumed that Samuel Alito was the worst.

Alito — who authored the majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022), the case that ended constitutional abortion rights by merely asserting that the high court’s prior opinion in Roe v. Wade (1973) was wrongly decided; who accepted a 2008 luxury fishing trip to Alaska, including private jet travel, from hedge fund billionaire and GOP donor Paul Singer yet failed to disclose it on Alito's financial forms and didn’t even recuse himself from decisions involving Singer’s subsequent business before the Supreme Court; who hoisted an inverted American flag outside his Virginia home shortly after the January 6 Capitol riot, a symbol of support for Trump's false claims of a stolen 2020 election — has the moral and intellectual stature of a poisonous toad.

But I’ve come to revise my view of the court’s worst Justice.

Clarence Thomas is 77 years old. He has now served on the Supreme Court for over 34 years, making him the longest-serving member of the Court. He is a bitter, angry, severe hard-right, intellectually dishonest, ideologue. After reading his latest thoughts on America, I’ve concluded Thomas is even worse than Alito.

Last Wednesday, Thomas gave a rare public address at the University of Texas in Austin that began as a banal tribute to the Declaration of Independence before degenerating into a misleading screed against progressivism.

“At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream,” Thomas intoned. “The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.”

Thomas went on to blame progressives for the worst crimes of the 20^th century, insisting that “Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, and Mao” were all “intertwined with the rise of progressivism,” as was “racial segregation,” “eugenics,” and other evils.

This is pure rubbish.

In reality, America’s Progressive era emerged at the start of the 20th century from the corruption and excesses of America’s first Gilded Age (we’re now in the second, if you hadn’t noticed) — its record inequalities of income and wealth, its “robber barons” who monopolized industries and handed out sacks of money to pliant legislators, it’s dangerous factories and unsafe working conditions, its violent attacks on workers who tried to form unions, its corporate control over all facets of government, its widespread poverty and disease, and its corrupt party machines.

In many ways, the Progressive Era — whose most prominent leader was Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, not Woodrow Wilson, by the way — saved capitalism from its own excesses by instituting a progressive income tax, an estate tax, pure food and drug laws, and America’s first laws against corporate influence in politics.

Then, under Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin (Franklin D.), came Social Security, the 40-hour workweek (with time-and-a-half for overtime), the right to form unions, and laws and regulations that limited Wall Street’s ability to gamble with other people’s money.

Clarence Thomas got it exactly backwards. Had we not had the Progressive Era and its reforms extending through the 1930s, America might well have succumbed to fascism — as did Germany under Hitler, and Italy under Mussolini, or to communist fascism, as did Russia under Stalin. Progressive and New Deal reforms acted as bulwarks against the rise of fascism in America.

In fact, it’s been the demise of such reforms since Ronald Reagan that have opened the way to Trumpian neo-fascism.

Over a third of American workers in the private sector were unionized in the 1950s, giving them bargaining leverage to get higher wages and better working conditions. Now, fewer than 6 percent are unionized, which has contributed to the flattening of wages, a contracting middle class, inequalities of income and wealth rivaling the first Gilded Age, and an angry and suspicious working class that’s become easy prey for demagogues.

Wall Street has been deregulated — allowing it to go on gambling sprees such as the one that produced the financial crisis of 2008, which claimed millions of working peoples’ homes, savings, and jobs.

America’s social safety nets have become so frayed that almost a fifth of the nation’s children are now in poverty. Yet Reagan, George W. Bush, and Trump have slashed taxes on the rich and on big corporations and have allowed giant corporations to merge into giant monopolies rivaling the trusts of the first Gilded Age. And Trump has ushered in an era of corruption the likes of which America hasn’t seen since that earlier disgraceful era.

Thomas claims that “The century of progressivism did not go well.” Baloney. It helped America create the largest middle class the world had ever seen, while also extending prosperity to millions of Black and brown people.

The tragedy is that America turned its back on progressivism and on social progress, in part because of the Supreme Court and Justice Clarence Thomas.

Flashback: I was in law school in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided Roe, protecting a pregnant person’s right to privacy under the 14th amendment to the Constitution.

Clarence Thomas was in my law school class at the time, as was Hillary Rodham (later Hillary Clinton) and Bill Clinton.

The professors used the “Socratic method” – asking hard questions about the cases they were discussing and waiting for students to raise their hands in response, and then criticizing the responses. It was a hair-raising but effective way to learn the law.

One of the principles guiding those discussions is called stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided.” It’s the doctrine of judicial precedent. If a court has already ruled on an issue (say, on reproductive rights), future courts should decide similar cases the same way. Supreme Courts can change their minds and rule differently than they did before, but they need good reasons to do so, and it helps if their opinion is unanimous or nearly so. Otherwise, their rulings appear (and are) arbitrary — even, shall we say? — partisan.

In those classroom discussions almost fifty years ago, Hillary’s hand was always first in the air. When she was called upon, she gave perfect answers – whole paragraphs, precisely phrased. She distinguished one case from another, using precedents and stare decisis to guide her thinking. I was awed.

My hand was in the air about half the time, and when called on, my answers were meh.

Clarence’s hand was never in the air. I don’t recall him saying anything, ever.

Bill was never in class.

Only one of us now sits on the Supreme Court. And he has shown no respect for stare decisis.

Nor has he respected judicial ethics.

A federal law — 28 U.S. Code § 455 — requires that “any justice, judge, or magistrate judge of the United States shall disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.”

In the aftermath of the 2020 election, Thomas’s wife, Ginni, actively strategized with White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on overturning the election results. Between Election Day 2020 and the days following the January 6th attack on the Capitol, she exchanged 29 text messages with Meadows, in which she spread false theories about the election, urged Meadows to overturn the election results, and called for specific actions from the White House to help overturn the election. She also served as one of nine board members of a group that helped lead the “Stop the Steal” movement and called for the punishment of House Republicans who participated in the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the January 6th attack.

Yet Clarence Thomas has repeatedly participated in cases that have come to the high court directly or indirectly involving the 2020 election results, refusing to disqualify himself.

In addition, he failed to disclose his wife’s income from her work at the Heritage Foundation, in violation of the Ethics in Government Act.

Finally, there’s his speech last week in Austin. How can Americans be expected to believe in the impartiality of the Supreme Court in general and Clarence Thomas in particular when he condemns an entire philosophy of government — progressivism — and all the people who continue to call themselves progressives, in effect labeling them neo-fascists?

At the start of his speech last week in Austin, Clarence Thomas noted that “My wife Virginia and I have many wonderful friends and acquaintances here, and it is so special to have our dear friends Harlan and Kathy Crow join us today.”

He was, of course, referring to the Republican mega-donor who has spent the last twenty years lavishing Thomas with personal gifts, luxury yacht trips, fancy vacations, and funding for Ginni Thomas’s political organization.

Small wonder that Clarence Thomas prefers the Gilded Age over the Progressive Era. He’s the living embodiment of The Gilded Age’s public-be-damned excesses.

Hence, he’s my nominee for the worst justice in modern Supreme Court history.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

Chief Justice John Roberts, appointed by then-President George W. Bush in 2005, is often described by legal scholars as one the more nuanced conservatives on the post-Anthony Kennedy U.S. Supreme Court. For example, Roberts and three Democratic appointees voted against overturning Roe v. Wade in the 2022 ruling Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization.

But while Roberts isn't as far to the right as Justice Clarence Thomas or Justice Samuel Alito, he isn't nearly as libertarian-leaning as retired Justice Kennedy. And Roberts' critics view him as way too favorable to President Donald Trump.

In an interview published in Q&A form on Halloween 2025, Salon's Chauncey DeVega and legal scholar/author Lisa Graves offer a scathing critique of Roberts — who DeVega considers one of the "most significant" of Trump's "enablers." .

DeVega believes that Roberts has played a "central role in delegitimizing the once-trusted" High Court "in service to Trumpism." And Graves, author of the new book "Without Precedent: How Chief Justice Roberts and His Accomplices Rewrote the Constitution and Dismantled Our Rights," shares that view.

During the interview, Graves was especially critical of Roberts' ruling in Trump v. the United States — which said that U.S. presidents enjoy absolute immunity (as opposed to qualified immunity) from criminal prosecution for "official" acts committed when they're in office.

Graves told DeVega, "One of the most significant moments at John Roberts' nomination hearings to become the chief justice of the United States was his affirmation that no one is above the law… Roberts made that promise to the American people 20 years ago, but then, when it mattered most — when Donald Trump asserted that he is above the law — (Roberts) broke that promise. The (Supreme) Court easily could have let the lower court ruling against Trump (having presidential immunity) stand, but Roberts orchestrated a ruling that effectively pardoned Trump retrospectively and prospectively. That unprecedented and partisan edict paved the way for Trump's return to power."

The legal scholar continued, "The Constitution provides zero immunity for presidents from criminal prosecution. But John Roberts chose to be the kingmaker, giving Trump king-like powers last year, and then this year mowing down well-founded and well-grounded temporary restraining orders (that allowed) an array of unilateral and extreme dictates to proceed — even though doing so will cause irreparable harm (by letting Trump) transgress constitutional provisions, laws passed by Congress and long-standing legal precedents."

Roberts, Graves lamented, "has repeatedly failed to object when compromised justices fail to recuse themselves from cases in which there exists a reasonable — or more than reasonable — perception of impropriety or actual conflicts of interest by other members of his far-right faction."

"The American people understand that this Court is out of control," Graves told DeVega. "Public respect for the Court is at an all-time low…. Roberts is presiding over the most untrusted Supreme Court since polling about the Court began decades ago. The lower courts, which are trying to follow the rules, are acting fairly, but not this arrogant, hyperpartisan MAGA faction dominating the Supreme Court."

Chaucey DeVega's full interview with Lisa Graves for Salon is available at this link.

When President Donald Trump appointed Justice Amy Coney Barrett to a seat on the U.S. Supreme Court in 2020 following the death of liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, criticism of her came from both the left and the libertarian right. Liberals and progressives, along with some right-wing libertarians, saw Barrett — an admirer of the late Justice Antonin Scalia — as too socially conservative and were troubled by her involvement in the severe strict Christian group People of Praise. And in 2022, Barrett was among the five GOP-appointed justices who voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling.

But in recent months, Barrett has been drawing her share of criticism from MAGA Republicans who believe that she isn't MAGA enough.

Far-right MAGA attorney and Trump ally Mike Davis attacked her as a "rattled law professor with her head up her a--." And MAGA conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer called Barrett a "DEI appointee."

But Never Trump conservative and veteran Washington Post columnist George Will, in his September 26 column, argues that if Barrett's style of "originalism" is offending ideologues, that means she's doing her job well.

"Although Barrett is preternaturally nice," Will writes, "she irritates some people. The reason she does makes her an exemplary justice. It is her fastidious acknowledgment that certainty and precision are often elusive when construing, as an originalist, the Constitution's text — 'due' process, 'unreasonable' searches, 'cruel and unusual' punishments, etc. — in modern contexts. Awareness of uncertainties justifies judicious restraint: The duty to construe texts does not empower judges to try to discover — or guess — the purposes or intentions of those who wrote the words."

The conservative columnist and ex-Republican continues, "To put the point less gently than Barrett might: Some people with mind-closing jurisprudential orthodoxies are exasperated by the tentativeness inherent in originalism and textualism. Critics misperceive this as a lack of principled rigor. In judicial reasoning, however, the importance of living with the limited utility of principles is a principle."

Will stresses, however, that "Barrett's originalism is not so tightly tethered to the past that it cannot create rules implied by the Constitution's text, history and structure."

"Often, originalists resurface with differing conclusions," Will explains. "So, arguments continue. Get over it…. (President Abraham) Lincoln exemplified the painful patience sometimes demanded by what Barrett calls 'our constitutional culture.' Courts are secondary in maintaining this legacy of originalism. The public, inattentive and impatient, is primary."

George Will's full Washington Post column is available at this link (subscription required).

For many years, Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) was among the most popular Republicans in New England. First elected to the U.S. Senate in 1996, Collins was reelected by 7 percent in 2002, 23 percent in 2008, and 37 percent in 2014. Conservative-leaning but not far-right, Collins attracted a lot of swing voters, moderates, independents and Democrats.

But her image suffered when she voted to confirm now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 despite warnings that doing so would help to doom Roe v. Wade — which is exactly what happened when the High Court voted to overturn Roe in 2022 and Kavanaugh was among the "yes" votes. Collins was reelected by 8 percent in 2020, which was a lot less than her 37 percent victory six years earlier.

Collins was reminded how much her image has suffered when she was booed during a ribbon-cutting ceremony in Maine on Tuesday, August 26.

READ MORE: Trump's reckoning may be right around the corner — here's why

The New Republic's Malcolm Ferguson, in an article published the following day, reports, "This was Collins' first public, press conference-style event in her home state in nearly a decade. Video shows the room erupting in boos as she approached the front of the room to cut the ribbon for a new Main Street in Seaport, Maine. The boos eventually turned into chants of 'Shame! Shame! Shame!' Collins smiled and cut the ribbon as if her angry constituents weren't even there. The crowd continued to shout her down."

Collins voted "no" on President Donald Trump's "big, beautiful bill," a piece of legislation that some of the attendees were angry about. But other people in the crowd were still angry about her "yes" vote on Kavanaugh.

One of them shouted, "Your votes destroyed our Supreme Court."

"This all comes as progressive populist Democrat Graham Platner announced his bid to unseat Collins last week in a now viral video," Ferguson explains. "His candidacy serves as a foil to Collins on almost every issue, and Maine residents are starting to notice."

READ MORE: 'It’s a real gut punch': Rural voters 'stunned' by Trump’s damage

Collins is running for reelection in 2026 and is seeking a sixth term. 2026 will be her second reelection campaign since voting "yes" on Kavanaugh, but only her first since the High Court overturned Roe in its unpopular Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling.

"Collins' chances of winning have been precarious for some time now," Collins observes. "Her dedication to a spineless centrist conservatism has frustrated Maine voters, especially in a state won by Kamala Harris in the 2024 general election. That, combined with Collins' icy reception at her own event, and Platner's current surge, should make the longtime senator very worried."

READ MORE: 'Not joking': Ex-Trump official warns he privately 'waxes poetic' about dictators he admires

Watch video of the August 26 ceremony below or at this link.

A Georgia woman declared brain-dead and kept on life support for more than three months because she was pregnant was removed from a ventilator in June and died, days after doctors delivered her 1-pound, 13-ounce baby by emergency cesarean section. The baby is in the neonatal intensive care unit.

The case has drawn national attention to Georgia’s six-week abortion ban and its impacts on pregnancy care.

Adriana Smith was put on life support at Emory University Hospital in Atlanta in February. The then-30-year-old Atlanta nurse was more than eight weeks pregnant and suffering dangerous complications.

Her condition deteriorated as doctors tried to save her life, Smith’s mother told Atlanta TV station WXIA.

“They did a CT scan, and she had blood clots all in her head,” April Newkirk said. “So they had asked me if they could do a procedure to relieve them, and I said yes. And then they called me back and they said that they couldn’t do it.”

She said doctors declared Smith brain-dead and put her on life support without consulting her.

“And I’m not saying that we would have chose to terminate her pregnancy,” Newkirk said, “but what I’m saying is, we should have had a choice.”

Emory Healthcare declined to comment on the specifics of Smith’s case. After doctors removed Smith from life support, Emory issued a statement.

“The top priorities at Emory Healthcare continue to be the safety and wellbeing of the patients and families we serve,” the health system said. “Emory Healthcare uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature and legal guidance to support our providers as they make medical recommendations. Emory Healthcare is legally required to maintain the confidentiality of the protected health information of our patients, which is why we are unable to comment on individual matters and circumstances.”

In a previous statement, Emory Healthcare said it complies “with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws.”

Abortion Laws and Fetal Personhood

Georgia’s HB 481 — the Living Infants Fairness and Equality, or LIFE, Act — passed in 2019. It took effect shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade with its ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on June 24, 2022.

The law bans abortion after the point at which an ultrasound can detect cardiac activity in an embryo. Typically, this occurs about six weeks into pregnancy, often before women know they’re pregnant.

The law also gave fetuses the same rights as people.

It says that “unborn children are a class of living, distinct persons” and that the state of Georgia “recognizes the benefits of providing full legal recognition to an unborn child.”

Nineteen states now ban abortion at or before 19 weeks of gestation; 13 of those have a near-total ban on all abortions with very limited exceptions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonpartisan research group that supports abortion rights.

Like Georgia, some of these states built their abortion restrictions around the legal concept of “personhood,” thus conferring legal rights and protections on an embryo or fetus during pregnancy.

Smith’s case has represented a major test of how this type of law will be applied in certain medical situations.

Despite mainly being unified in their opposition to abortion, conservatives and politicians in Georgia do not publicly agree on the scope of the law in cases like Smith’s.

For example, Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, said that the law should not restrict the options for care in a case like Smith’s and that removing life support wouldn’t be equivalent to aborting a fetus.

“There is nothing in the LIFE Act that requires medical professionals to keep a woman on life support after brain death,” Carr said in a statement. “Removing life support is not an action ‘with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy.’”

But Republican state Sen. Ed Setzler, who authored the LIFE Act, disagreed. Emory’s doctors acted appropriately when they put Smith on life support, he told The Associated Press.

“I think it is completely appropriate that the hospital do what they can to save the life of the child,” Setzler said. “I think this is an unusual circumstance, but I think it highlights the value of innocent human life. I think the hospital is acting appropriately.”

Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California-Davis and author of “Personhood: The New Civil War Over Reproduction,” said the problem is that Georgia’s law “isn’t just an abortion ban. It’s a ‘personhood’ law declaring that a fetus or embryo is a person, that an ‘unborn child,’ as the law puts it, is a person.”

The legal concept of “personhood” has implications beyond abortion care, such as with the regulation of fertility treatment, or the potential criminalization of pregnancy complications such as stillbirth and miscarriage.

Under Georgia’s law, extending rights of personhood to a fetus changes how child support is calculated. It also allows an embryo or fetus to be claimed as a dependent on state taxes.

But the idea of personhood is not new, Ziegler said.

“It has been the goal for virtually everyone in the anti-abortion movement since the 1960s,” she said. “That doesn’t mean Republicans like that. It doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s what’s going to happen. But there is no daylight between the anti-abortion movement and the personhood movement. They’re the same.”

The personhood movement has gained more traction since the Dobbs ruling in 2022.

In Alabama, after the state’s Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are people, the state legislature had to step in to allow fertility clinics to continue their work.

“This is sort of the future we’re looking at if we move further in the direction of fetal personhood,” Ziegler said. “Any state Supreme Court, as we just saw in Alabama, can give them new life,” she said referring to personhood laws elsewhere.

Fetal Personhood Laws Can Delay Care

In Georgia, dozens of OB-GYNs have said that the law interferes with patient care — in a state where the maternal mortality rate is one of the worst in the U.S. and where Black women are more than twice as likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than white women.

Members of Georgia’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee — who were later dismissed from the panel — linked the state’s abortion ban to delayed emergency care and the deaths of at least two women in the state, as ProPublica reported.

The personhood provision is having a profound effect on medical care, said Atlanta OB-GYN Zoë Lucier-Julian.

“These laws create an environment of fear and attempt to coerce us as providers to align with the state, as opposed to aligning with our patients that we work so hard to serve,” Lucier-Julian said.

Lucier-Julian said that’s what happened to Emory Healthcare in Smith’s case.

Cole Muzio, president of the Frontline Policy Council, a conservative Christian group, said the state’s abortion law shouldn’t have affected how Emory handled Smith’s care.

“This is a pretty clear-cut case, in terms of how it’s defined in the language of HB 481,” he said. “What this bans is an abortion after a heartbeat is detected. That is the scope of our law.”

“Taking a woman off life support is not an abortion. It just isn’t,” Muzio said.“Now, I am incredibly grateful that this child will be born even in the midst of tragic circumstances. That is a whole human life that will be able to be lived because of this beautiful mother’s sacrifice.”

A suit challenging Georgia’s law and its impact on public health is working its way through the courts. A coalition of physicians, the American Civil Liberties Union of Georgia, Planned Parenthood, the Center for Reproductive Rights, and other groups filed the suit.

Newkirk said her daughter had initially gone to a different Atlanta-area hospital for help with severe headaches, was given some medicine, and was sent home, where her symptoms quickly worsened.

“She was gasping for air in her sleep, gargling,” she told WXIA in May. “More than likely, it was blood.”

Now, Newkirk said, the family is praying for her grandson to make it after the stress from months of life support.

He is fighting, she said.

“My grandson may be blind, may not be able to walk, wheelchair-bound,” she said. “We don’t know if he’ll live.”

She added that the family will love him no matter what.

This article is from a partnership with WABE and NPR.

KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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This article first appeared on KFF Health News and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

When the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, after 49 years, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization in 2022, civil libertarians warned that the Religious Right and Christian nationalists would not stop at abortion rights — everything from contraception to gay rights would also be on the chopping block.

In an article published by The New Republic on June 24, Dr. Katie Kelaidis — a researcher at the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge, England and the author of Holy Russia? Holy War? and author of the 2023 book "Holy Russia? Holy War?: Why the Russian Church is Backing Putin Against Ukraine" — emphasizes that abortion is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to MAGA Republicans' campaign to micromanage "family decisions."

"Because of the rhetoric of the culture wars," Kelaidis explains, "we have grown accustomed to seeing both the opposition to legal abortion and to gender-affirming care for minors as a conservative position — the views of those who advocate for the 'traditional' family…. The authoritarian right is taking aim at the family and advocating for a level of state control over our private lives that would make the most committed Marxist blush."

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The MAGA movement, according to The New Republic, is waging an "all-out war" against families' rights to make their own decision.

Kelaidis notes the "GOP campaign in statehouses around the country to pass laws requiring schools and teachers to out gay and trans students to their parents" — which she describes as "an effort most assuredly aimed at terrorizing queer children with unsupportive families."

"This is not about a parent's right to know but an effort to deputize parents in the state's campaign against their children," Kelaidis warns. "Because when the family stands as a barrier to Republicans' imposing their draconian will, they have proved more than willing to ignore parental authority."

The scholar adds, "For example, what could be more transparent, and frankly silly, an interference with a parent's right to direct her child’s education than banning drag story hours?"

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Dr. Katie Kelaidis' full article for The New Republic is available at this link.