Innehållsförteckning för July 10/17, 2023 från The Nation

THE CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHT TO AN ABORTION OFFICIALLY ENDED ONE YEAR ago, on June 24, 2022, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. But for many in the United States, the promises supposedly offered by Roe had never been kept. In 1970, three years before the Roe decision, the first nationwide abortion restriction took effect, preventing organizations that received federal grants under the newly created Title X family planning program, which provides affordable contraception and reproductive health care to people with low incomes, from using those funds for abortion services. And every year since 1976, Congress has attached the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of Medicaid funds for abortion, to the federal budget. State legislators, often backed by the Supreme Court, imposed so many obstacles on abortion care during…

BY THE CLOSE OF JUNE, THE SUPREME COURT WILL AL-most certainly end affirmative action in college admissions. For Edward Blum, who spearheaded the lawsuits against the University of North Carolina and Harvard—claiming the schools’ race-conscious policies admit unqualified Black and Hispanic students, while “intentionally discriminating” against deserving Asian American applicants—the verdict would fulfill a decades-long quest. In 1992, Blum, who is white, lost his only political run, failing to unseat the Black Democratic incumbent in a majority-Black Houston congressional district that had never elected a Republican. Blum sued Texas, citing racial gerrymandering, and eventually won the case in the US Supreme Court in 1996. By the late 1990s, he had quit his day job as a stockbroker to focus on overturning racial equality legislation. Since then, Blum has made a…

ONE DAY EACH WEEK, THE REV. ERIKA FERGUSON PUTS ON LEGGINGS and a sweatshirt, pulls her hair back under a baseball cap, and heads to a North Texas airport to meet a group of people who need abortions. She shepherds the strangers through security and onto a short flight to Albuquerque, N.M. There, the group spends the day at an abortion clinic, and later they watch rom-coms in an office packed with cots, tea, and homemade cookies. The women Ferguson has accompanied represent a cross section of Texans—Black, Latina, Asian, and white. There have been rape victims and teenagers. There have been moms with teenage children at home. “I’ve taken women from all walks of life, from all ages,” Ferguson told me. Ferguson greets the group by explaining why she…

Warsaw ON MARCH 14, JUSTYNA WYDRZYŃSKA ARRIVED FOR HER FINAL DAY OF court dressed in a magenta pantsuit, an orange blouse, and a gold necklace that read “Mife/Miso,” a reference to the two drugs used for medication abortion. As she got out of the car and began walking down the sidewalk, a cheer went up from the crowd of demonstrators who had turned out to support her. Wydrzyńska was flanked by Kinga Jelińska and Natalia Broniarczyk, two of her fellow founders of the Polish activist group Abortion Dream Team, or ADT, who were wearing matching black track jackets that read “Choose Life/Have an Abortion.” The trio hummed with conviction and swagger as they strode past a swarm of news cameras and the dozens of police officers who lined the barricades…

ON JUNE 24, 2022, THE US SUPREME COURT TURNED one of the most intimate choices a person can make into a decision that will be imposed on millions of people by politicians. In some ways, the Dobbs ruling marked the culmination of a multi-decade campaign to overturn Roe v. Wade, but in other ways, it was just one more battle in a larger war, one that aims to take decisions about our bodies and our lives out of our hands. As The Nation looks back on the first year of the post-Roe era, we’ve asked our contributors and correspondents to reflect on the impact of Dobbs. To read the full article, please visit TheNation.com/dobbsforum. Elie Mystal, Nation justice correspondent: In most disaster movies, there is a scientist or a professor…

WHEN BRANDON JOHNSON, A UNION ORGANIZER, joined Karen Bass, a community organizer, as the second progressive elected as mayor of a big city in the past two years, it signaled that the Fox News fixation on crime and disorder in urban America didn’t translate to majority support for local law-and-order candidates. A decade of organizing—including high-profile contract negotiations and strikes—by revitalized teachers’ unions in Chicago and Los Angeles has educated the electorate about the true causes of each city’s challenges: privatization and tax breaks to corporations, real estate developers, and the rich, which have been steadily draining resources from public education, affordable housing, and key social services. How “crime and disorder”—a Trojan horse for racist messaging and divisive fearmongering—will play in the presidential election is yet to be seen. But…

IN NOVEMBER 2022, ANNE ANGUS AND HER HUSBAND PACKED THEIR TWO Australian shepherds in their car and drove about 10 hours from Montana to Colorado for an abortion. Not two months had passed since Angus had quit her job to be a stay-at-home mom. But her 20-week anatomy scan showed some concerning results, and she was referred to Children’s Hospital Colorado, in Denver, for follow-up testing. She had to wait three weeks for that appointment. After giving her a battery of tests, the care team at Children’s Hospital Colorado told her that the baby would have prune belly syndrome, a rare condition that is sometimes rapidly fatal, sometimes not, but always medically complex. She would need to move to Denver a month before her due date and stay there for…

“Yes, we want a Fair Employment Practices Act, but what good will it do if profit-generated automation destroys the jobs of millions of workers, Black and white? We want integrated public schools, but that means we also want federal aid to education—all forms of education.” —A. Philip Randolph,at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963 MY LAST COLUMN TRACED AN ALMOST FOR-gotten history: It emphasized that Black and other advocates of racial justice, through the first two decades or so after World War II, commonly assumed that winning and securing advances for Black Americans depended on the pursuit of universal social wage policies. Between the 1960s and the 1990s, the character of what we understand as Black politics changed, to the extent that by the early…

How to Get Help Find an abortion clinic or a US-based telemedicine provider at AbortionFinder.org or INeedanA.com. If you live in a state where abortion is illegal and you can’t travel, your options include international telemedicine services, ordering pills yourself, or using mail forwarding. PlanCPills.org has options by state and vetted websites to buy pills. For questions about the legal risks of self-managing an abortion, call the Repro Legal Helpline at 844-868-2812. If you’re self-managing an abortion and have medical questions, call or text the M+A Hotline at 833-246-2632. Their website, mahotline.org, explains how to safely self-manage an abortion. If you need emotional support, call All-Options at 888-493-0092 or, for post-abortion support, text Exhale Pro-Voice at 617-749-2948. How to Help With abortion in crisis, you might automatically think of donating…

ARIGHT-WING INQUISITION IS SINGLING OUT YOUNG TRANSGENDER Americans, their parents, their teachers, and their doctors as targets in the battle over what kind of nation we are and want to be. Since 2021, roughly half the states have passed at least one law designed to eliminate medical or educational policies that recognize trans youth and protect them from abuse. According to the ACLU, 20 states enacted 72 new anti-trans laws in the first six months of 2023; more than 200 are in the pipeline. Anti-trans campaigners seek to create a blanket of repression. Because the recent wave of anti-trans laws was not triggered by a landmark event like the rush of anti-abortion laws enacted in the wake of the Dobbs decision, this new reality has crept up on the country.…

AS LONG AS SOMEONE PLACES MICHAL KALISZAN’S HANDS ON A keyboard and a mouse, he has enough strength and dexterity to use a computer. Once his hands are there, the 40-year-old software developer at Blackberry can start his workday. But for anything else—“personal care, activities, and daily living”—he needs someone’s help. “I need people to be my arms and legs, to help me with physical tasks,” he says. Kaliszan has spinal muscular atrophy, which has caused his muscles to weaken over time. With the help of physical support, he lives alone in the house he grew up in, in Cambridge, Ontario, west of Toronto. In October of last year, Kaliszan’s mother died, upending his life, as she was his primary caregiver. When we first spoke, on March 1, Kaliszan was…