17 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

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 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

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

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 The US supreme court just undermined gender equality | Moira Donegan

The Skrmetti decision upholding Tennessee’s ban on transition-related healthcare for minors deprives children and batters the 14th amendmentBy now, it is a ritual: every June, Americans endure several weeks of agonizing suspense, as we wait to hear how the supreme court will erode our freedoms, attack our dignity, undermine self-government and empower those who enrich themselves at our expense. The court, controlled by career politicians in robes who were hand-selected for their loyalty to the rightwing and their willingness to be wildly intellectually dishonest in pursuit of Republican policy objectives, has ended the right to abortion, desiccated the Voting Rights Act, made state gun regulations nearly impossible and declared the president functionally immune to criminal law. Many of us waited, with a mixture and terror and disgust, to see what cruelties the court would deliver for us in 2025.The justices decided to start by attacking vulnerable children. In a 6-3 split, the court...

Events

3 w. ago Trump’s parade isn’t what he was hoping for. It was a disappointing, sad affair | Moira Donegan

The uniformed soldiers marched irregularly, slightly off beat; the turnout was small and the crowd seemed defeated, low-energy and wiltedIn one version of the story, you can blame the French. Evidently it was in France, watching the 2017 Bastille Day military parade alongside Emmanuel Macron at the outset of his first term, that Trump initially got the idea to stage an armed spectacle in Washington DC in honor of himself. Back then, the military said no. In a now-famous anecdote, Gen Paul Selva, who grew up in Portugal under its integralist regime, told Trump that such parades are “what dictators do”. James Mattis, his then-secretary of defense, reportedly revolted against the idea, saying he would “rather swallow acid”. Trump never got his parade.Until now. Restored to power after an interregnum in which all American institutions failed to hold him accountable for his crimes and abuses, Trump has now set about a second term in which he is pursuing vengeance against his perceived en...

Politics

3 w. ago How would recent events in America appear if they happened elsewhere? | Moira Donegan

Imagining how the media would cover the troops in Los Angeles or the detention of a sitting senator is a useful exerciseAt times the gesture can seem like a cliche, but I like to imagine, for the sake of perspective, how political developments in the United States would be covered by the media if they were happening in any other country. I imagine that Thursday’s events in Los Angeles might be spoken of like this:A prominent opposition leader was attacked by regime security forces on Thursday in the presence of the national security tsar, as he voiced opposition to the federal military occupation of the US’s second-largest city following street demonstrations against the regime’s mass deportation efforts. Continue reading...

Politics