5 h. ago A baby born to a brain dead mother: this is the horror of abortion bans | Moira Donegan

Adriana Smith was legally dead for months, but kept on life support in Atlanta because she was pregnantOn Friday 13 June, a baby was born in an Atlanta hospital to a woman who had been dead for four months. Adriana Smith, a 30-year-old Black nurse and mother, was declared brain dead in February after blood clots formed in her brain. Legally, and by all meaningful measures, she was dead then: the woman who loved her family, laughed with her friends, comforted her son, helped her colleagues and cared for her patients was gone then, and was never coming back. But the state of Georgia, and the administrators of the hospital where she was declared dead, kept her corpse in a state of artificial animation for months. That’s because when Smith went to the hospital in February complaining of a headache, and later became unresponsive, she was about eight weeks pregnant. According to her family, doctors at Emory hospital, in Georgia, told the family that the state’s abortion ban required them ...

Events

3 d. ago Mother and daughter, six, are killed after horror crash involving car and a van

They have been named locally as Natalie McLaughlin and daughter, Ella. Ella died in the collision, which occurred on the R240 at Glentogher, Carndonagh, on Wednesday evening.

Events

4 d. ago No one wanted Trump’s devastating budget bill. Of course it passed | Moira Donegan

The bill steals from the sick, elderly and hungry, and gives to billionaires and jackboots. But Republicans will follow their leader anywhereThe budget reconciliation bill that passed the US House of Representatives on Thursday and was promptly to be signed into law by Donald Trump represents the particular perversity of national politics in America: seemingly no one wants it, everyone hates it, and it is widely agreed to be devastating for staggering numbers of Americans. And yet, the bill felt inevitable: it was a foregone conclusion that this massive, malignant measure was something that everyone dreaded and no one had the capacity to stop.They didn’t really even try. In the Senate, a few conservative Republicans made noise about the bill’s dramatic costs: the congressional budget office estimates that the bill will add $3.3 tn to the deficit over the coming decade, and the senator Rand Paul, a budget hawk from Kentucky, declined to vote for it for this reason. But other Republic...

Politics

7 d. ago Expert says Adriana Smith’s case goes beyond abortion politics

Lindsey Breitwieser says a more nuanced ethical approach that does not frame a mother and child as adversaries is needed

Politics

7 d. ago Planned Parenthood may not survive the Trump administration | Moira Donegan

The Trump administration has made repeated cuts targeting the organization’s clinics. Now the US supreme court has struck another blowPlanned Parenthood, the massive, 108-year-old network of women’s and reproductive health clinics that operates almost 600 health centers across the United States, may not survive the Trump administration. Long a hated symbol on the right, and unable to summon enthusiastic support from the left, the medical network has nevertheless remained a symbolic and material cornerstone of women’s equality, serving millions of patients – many of them indigent or low-income – each year, and housing one of the biggest feminist and pro-choice lobbying and litigation shops in America, in addition to being one of the nation’s largest healthcare providers.Since returning to power in January, the Trump administration has made repeated cuts targeting Planned Parenthood’s clinics, excluding the group from the vast Title X family planning program, on the pretext of scurril...

Politics

9 d. ago Midwife, 28, who was born without a womb reveals she is going to deliver her own baby from her surrogate best friend

Georgia Barrington, 28, from Maidstone, Kent, was diagnosed with Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome aged 15 - meaning she was born without a uterus and unable to carry a baby.

Politics

9 d. ago How do we resist and rise? We have to believe the impossible is possible | V (Formerly Eve Ensler)

Every action matters now. Every effort small or large counts. And moving, movement is the essential key to dispelling despairIn this authoritarian and suffocating climate where being an American feels like a curse, where just breathing here feels like complicity with genocide, psychotic imperialism, misogyny and endless racism, it is hard to move, let alone imagine what one can do to transform this horror to good.Every day people are kidnapped by masked men in unmarked cars, taken to hidden sites and left in deplorable conditions; starving people in Gaza are slaughtered as they clamor for a bag of flour; public officials and leaders humiliated and murdered; the T erased from LGBT; brain-dead women forced to give birth; the glib language of hate and cruelty and easy thoughtless threats of world war, assassination, and dehumanization circling like invisible poison. What feels most perilous is the steady evaporation of the boundaries of what seemed impossible only a few weeks ago. Mora...

Politics

9 d. ago Funeral held for Georgia woman kept on life support until baby could be delivered: ‘Adriana’s voice will be heard’

Adriana Smith was declared brain-dead but her family had no choice but to keep her on life support under the state’s anti-abortion law

Politics

1 week ago The US supreme court has dramatically expanded the powers of the president | Moira Donegan

Donald Trump, personally, will now have the presumptive power to persecute you, and nullify your rights in defiance of the constitution, at his discretionThose of us who cover the US supreme court are faced, every June, with a peculiar challenge: whether to describe what the supreme court is doing, or what is claims that it is doing.What the supreme court says it was doing in Friday’s 6-3 decision in Trump v Casa, Inc, the birthright citizenship case, is narrowing the power of federal district judges to issue nationwide injunctions, in deference to presidential authority. The case effectively ends the ability of federal judges on lower courts to issue nationwide stays of executive actions that violate the constitution, federal law, and the rights of citizens. And so what the court has actually done is dramatically expand the rights of the president – this president – to nullify constitutional provisions at will.Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist Continue reading...

Events

1 week ago Zohran Mamdani has struck a blow to the Democratic party's passivity | Moira Donegan

Democrats’ actions have not matched the passions of its energized voters. You can only antagonize your base for so longWe’re told that the Democratic party is at a crossroads, that leaders have lost their identity and their way. We’re told that they must spend millions discovering their own “Joe Rogan”, or espouse deregulation, or surrender the fight for the rights of targeted minorities. The Democrats, we’re told, are in a moment of soul searching, of trying to find out how they lost young men and the white working class. They’re still thinking, half a decade on, of how to undo the supposed damage of the 2020 summer, when protesters opposed to the extrajudicial killings of Black civilians shouted: “Defund the police.” The subtext of this handwringing, which has been incessant in the media and among party insiders since the November election, is that the party must move, yet again, to the right. It is presumed that they can’t attract voters otherwise.The apparent victory (still unof...

Politics

1 week ago Mother's horror as teachers say her severely autistic son failed to arrive

Severely autistic teenager Jimmy Hudson, 13, from Westcliff, Essex, sparked a frantic search after he failed to turn up at school - only for him to be found slumped on the bus meant to transport him there.

Events

1 week ago Supreme court paves way for South Carolina and other states to defund Planned Parenthood

Decision could embolden red states in US to block clinics that provide abortions from receiving Medicaid fundsUS politics live – latest updatesThe US supreme court has paved the way for South Carolina to kick Planned Parenthood out of its Medicaid program over its status as an abortion provider, a decision that could embolden red states across the country to effectively “defund” the reproductive healthcare organization.The case, Medina v Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, centers around a 2018 executive order from South Carolina’s governor, Henry McMaster, that blocked clinics that provide abortions from receiving Medicaid reimbursements. “Payment of taxpayer funds to abortion clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of the right to life,” McMaster said at the time, even though the reimbursements could not be used for abortions. Abortions are also now banned in South Carolina after six weeks of pregnancy.More details soon Continue reading...

Events

1 week ago Brain dead pregnant woman's family issue update after baby cut from her body

Adriana Smith, 30, was a nurse who died in February this year after suffering from severe headaches.

Events

1 week ago Brain dead pregnant woman's family issue tragic update after baby cut out of her lifeless body

The case of Adriana Smith sparked controversy around the world after the pregnant Black woman was kept on life support machines for months after her death, in order for her unborn baby to survive

Events

1 week ago Mother who lost arm and leg in horror Tube fall launches £25m High Court claim against TfL

Sarah de Lagarde seeks compensation after being run over by Northern line trains after falling down gap between train and platform

Economics

1 week ago Mother who lost arm and leg in horror Tube fall brings High Court compensation claim against TfL

Sarah de Lagarde was run over by two Northern line trains after falling down gap between train and platform

Events

2 w. ago With Andrew Cuomo, Democrats are doing a disastrous imitation of Trump | Moira Donegan

The former governor, now a New York City mayoral candidate, marks the party’s drift into boorishness and crueltyAs the far right has gained ascendancy, and the 2024 election is historicized as a blowout victory for Donald Trump rather than the relatively close contest that it actually was, members of the Democratic establishment and party leadership seem to be settling on the lesson that they will take into the second decade of the Trump era: if you can’t beat him, imitate him.It’s long been the impulse of the party to move right, chasing Republican victories by replicating Republican policy positions, and since their loss last November many Democrats have followed in this decades-old tradition, shifting their rhetoric still further rightward on border policy, crypto, foreign policy, trans rights and DEI. They respond to polling and to a vague sense of the cultural zeitgeist, aiming less to persuade than to imitate. Often, Democrats seem as if they are not offering a different polic...

Politics

2 w. ago Abortions in the US are on the rise three years after Roe v Wade was overturned

A growing number of abortions happen through telehealth – including for women in states with strict bansThree years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, erasing the national right to abortion and paving the way for more than a dozen states to ban the procedure, the number of abortions performed in the US is still on the rise – including in some states that ban the procedure.US abortion providers performed 1.14m abortions in 2024, according to new data released on Monday by #WeCount, a Society of Family Planning project that has tracked abortion provision since 2022. That’s the highest number on record in recent years. Continue reading...

Politics

2 w. ago Republican lawmaker with ectopic pregnancy nearly died amid new Florida abortion laws – but blames the left

Kat Cammack recounts emergency room ordeal but claims ‘fearmongering’ by Democrats and pro-choice activists sowing confusion among medical professionals

Politics

2 w. ago Kelsey Parker announces death of baby son who was 'born sleeping' in heartbreaking Instagram post

Podcast host Kelsey Parker revealed her son Phoenix Parker-Lindsay has died in an Instagram post on Sunday

Events