Missiles intercepted

Missiles intercepted over Tel Aviv, CNN reporter says

CNN’s Jim Sciutto is in a shelter in Tel Aviv.

Speaking to CNN, he said that the US believed two air bases and Mossad headquarters would be targeted by Iran this evening. But, he reported seeing impacts in Tel Aviv.

“I did see impacts. I saw two impacts close to the hotel here and I saw another one further north of here, I might guess a couple of miles where I did see some fire and explosion,” Sciutto said.

He added that he saw multiple intercepts over him in Tel Aviv and an impact on the Tel Aviv shoreline. Sciutto said that it’s unclear whether the impacts were the missiles themselves striking, fragments of missiles that have been intercepted or perhaps some of the interceptor missiles themselves coming down. He went on to say the speed and trajectory were forceful.

We’ll bring you more details as we get them.

Devastating Hurricane fallout

What’s going on in Asheville? The devastating fallout from Hurricane Helene, explained.

Seven questions about the “biblical devastation” from Helene’s fallout, answered.

by Benji Jones and Umair Irfan

The scenes from North Carolina are shocking: roads and bridges washed away. Houses ripped from their foundations. Entire towns reduced to mud and debris.

On Thursday night, Hurricane Helene slammed Florida as a Category 4 storm with winds reaching 140 miles per hour. Along the coast, Helene knocked down trees and power lines, and caused record storm surge.

Yet some of its most devastating impacts were farther inland as the storm moved across the Southeast. Even before the bulk of the storm arrived in North Carolina, Helene started dumping rain in southern Appalachia — and loads of it. Over the last several days some regions in western North Carolina, near the city of Asheville, recorded more than 2.5 feet.

“We have biblical devastation through the county,” Ryan Cole, the assistant director of Buncombe County Emergency Services, said in a press briefing Saturday afternoon. “We’ve had biblical flooding here.”

So far at least 130 deaths are linked to Helene across six states, including Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. That number is almost certain to rise. Hundreds of people are still unaccounted for, in part because millions of households have lost power and there are still widespread cell outages. Many roads are also inaccessible, making rescue operations challenging.

Stunned by the devastation, some residents have compared flooding in parts of North Carolina to the impacts from Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in Louisiana in 2005. Katrina claimed more than 1,800 lives. In the weeks to come, Helene may become one of the deadliest US hurricanes in recent history.

The eighth named storm of the Atlantic hurricane season, Helene is yet another reminder that climate change — which can intensify hurricanes and flooding — costs human lives. Record-warm water in the Gulf of Mexico supercharged the storm and loaded it with moisture. Generally speaking, hot air also holds more water. Together these dynamics helped turn Helene into a deadly, super-wet storm.

And as these last few days have revealed, it’s not just coastal communities that are vulnerable. Asheville has been dubbed a climate haven — a refuge from the impacts of warming and its consequences. But in reality, few places are completely safe.

1) How bad is the damage?

Helene’s path of destruction began in the eastern Caribbean, where the storm formed early last week. Helene brushed Cancun as a tropical storm, flooding the streets and downing trees, before churning across the warm Gulf of Mexico and intensifying into a major hurricane. On Thursday evening, it slammed into the Big Bend of Florida — the region where the panhandle meets the peninsula — as a Category 4 storm.

Landfall caused record-breaking storm surge, a rise in sea level, along parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast, including in Tampa Bay and the small island of Cedar Key. Some areas saw water levels rise 15 feet above ground level, according to preliminary modeling by the National Hurricane Center.

The storm left Florida homes in ruins. Officials estimate that Helene destroyed around a quarter of all homes on Cedar Key, which lies about 130 miles north of Tampa, according to the Palm Beach Post.

Much of the worst damage, however, was in regions less familiar with the threat of tropical storms: the mountains of Georgia, Tennessee, and especially North Carolina. The main problem in the southeastern US was abundant, unceasing rain, which began falling before Helene made landfall in Florida. It caused rivers to swell in populated areas like Atlanta and Asheville. Asheville is the largest city in western North Carolina, with roughly 95,000 residents.

Videos and images over the weekend showed much of Asheville’s River Arts District — which hugs the French Broad River, southwest of downtown — utterly inundated with water, which nearly submerged buildings. Many of the shops and businesses, which are a lifeblood of the region, are unsalvageable, Will Hofmann, of the Asheville Citizen Times, reports. In Buncombe County, which envelops Asheville, 40 people have died due to the storm and its impacts.

State officials said all roads in western North Carolina, including parts of Interstate 40, were closed and should only be used by emergency vehicles. In nearby Tennessee, meanwhile, more than a dozen bridges are closed and five of them “are completely gone,” the state’s Department of Transportation said Sunday. Many roads and areas in Great Smoky Mountains National Park are also closed.

Power outages and water shortages are also rampant across the Southeast. As of late Tuesday morning, more than 1.5 million people were without electricity across South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia, according to PowerOutage.us. Parts of western North Carolina are under a boil water advisory, due to a disruption in the public water supply. Repairs to Asheville’s water system could take weeks, officials said.

2) How much will the storm cost?

Similarly, it will take weeks to get a full tally of all the damage, though initial estimates suggest it will be in the billions of dollars. CoreLogic, an analytics firm, put its initial tally between $3 billion and $5 billion in insured losses. Moody’s Analytics expects a toll from $20 billion to $34 billion. AccuWeather, meanwhile, is setting the price tag between $145 billion and $160 billion.

These are all coarse initial estimates, but they indicate the magnitude of the devastation. The higher projections would put Helene in the top tier of costliest storms in the US. Hurricane Katrina, currently the most expensive weather disaster in US history, extracted about $170 billion from the economy. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 cost about $125.

The dollar value, however, doesn’t tell the whole story. Damage estimates are typically based on insurance claims, but with rising premiums across the country, more homes and businesses are not seeking financial protection. The insured value of a property doesn’t directly translate into suffering, either. A multimillion-dollar coastal vacation home getting swept down a hillside will register as a higher loss on an insurance company’s balance sheet than a destroyed mobile home that’s the sole residence and store of wealth for a family.

3) Why was flooding in North Carolina so extreme?

The simplest reason is that Helene was huge, stretching more than more than 400 miles wide, so its impacts — the wind and rain — reached well beyond the eye. Most hurricanes are around 300 miles in diameter.

What’s more is that the storm crossed an exceptionally warm ocean before reaching the mainland. The evaporation of that warm ocean water, which sends columns of moisture into the atmosphere, is what fuels hurricanes, and loads them up with moisture that later falls as rain.

Even before Helene made landfall in Florida, bands of moisture from the hurricane were pulled into Appalachia. Satellite imagery showed almost the entire East Coast shrouded in cloud cover. That means that some regions were already starting to flood even before the bulk of Helene arrived.

“Recent rainfall in these areas, especially the southern Appalachians, have left the grounds saturated and the river tributaries running high,” the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warned last Wednesday. “Additional rainfall from Helene will exacerbate the existing flood risk.”

It’s also worth noting that this is a wet region of the country. The areas surrounding Asheville are temperate rainforests, full of streams and rivers that run alongside human communities. This underscores another point: The impacts of a storm are not simply a function of wind speed and rain totals. They’re also influenced by the amount of people and property in harm’s way and how ready they are to face a disaster.

4) How does Helene compare to storms like Katrina and Harvey?

We know that Helene is already on course to join the ranks of the costliest storms in US history. What all those storms have in common is that they made landfall in the continental US at high intensities in populated areas: Harvey struck the Texas coast at Category 4 strength, Katrina rammed into Louisiana and Mississippi as a Category 3 storm, while Helene was a Category 4 when it hammered Florida’s Big Bend region.

But the hurricane category ranking system is mainly based on wind speed, while the most dangerous element of these storms is the sheer quantity of water in the form of rainfall and storm surge. All three of these storms caused extensive flooding.

Their destruction also compounded on top of local vulnerabilities. Houston suffered intense flooding after Harvey because of the inordinate amount of rain it received, but also because the city is densely populated, relatively flat, and close to sea level. Sections of New Orleans sit below sea level and when Katrina struck, the city’s flood control infrastructure catastrophically failed. Helene landed in Florida’s Big Bend region, which is still recovering from the last major hurricane, before moving further inland and dumping rain on regions that have much less experience and infrastructure to cope with extraordinary volumes of water.

A growing number of people are also living in areas most likely to get hammered by hurricanes, and these states are building more property and infrastructure to accommodate them. That means that when a storm does make landfall, it puts more people in danger and damages more homes, offices, roads, and power lines.

5) What is the government doing to help?

Before Helene made landfall, forecasters at NOAA put out a rare news release and blunt warning about the storm’s impending damage. The agency said that the hurricane would cause “catastrophic, life-threatening inland flooding.”

The governors of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina heeded these alerts and submitted emergency declaration requests to the White House. Evacuation orders were issued for parts of North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, but some residents didn’t obey them.

Disaster declarations allow the Federal Emergency Management Agency to get involved in the response with emergency shelters, medical aid, and grants for helping people recover. More than 1,270 rescuers were sent to the afflicted areas. States also mobilized National Guard units to assist with rescue and relief efforts. During a press conference on Monday, President Joe Biden said he may have to call Congress back into session to get more funding to help with the response. Both former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris altered their presidential campaign schedules in response to the hurricane.

Trump criticized Biden for not being in Washington, DC, during the storm, but Biden said he’s been following the situation and will visit areas hit hard by the disaster once rescue operations wind down. Trump is also planning to visit Georgia to get an update on the storm.

Ad hoc networks of local volunteers have also sprung up to provide assistance and relief, even deploying private airplanes and helicopters to bring supplies to areas now isolated by floods and destroyed roads.

6) What did climate change have to do with it?

It’s uncommon — though not unheard of — for tropical storms to travel through southern Appalachia. As shown in the graphic below, several systems (or their remnants) have reached this region in the last few centuries.

Yet it’s now well known that rising global temperatures can make the impacts of these storms much worse. Hotter air and water make the strongest hurricanes stronger and fuel rapid intensification, where a storm’s winds pick up by 35 miles per hour or more in less than 24 hours.

Warmer air holds onto more moisture, which means that hurricanes dish out more rain. A rapid assessment of Helene by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory suggests that climate change caused “over 50 percent more rainfall during Hurricane Helene in some parts of Georgia and the Carolinas.”

“We estimate that the observed rainfall was made up to 20 times more likely in these areas because of global warming,” the scientists wrote.

A hotter climate also causes sea levels to rise — because warm water expands and also melts polar ice — which worsens the impact of storm surge. That tends to create more flooding in the wake of a hurricane.

Helene appeared in one of the hottest years on record, with ocean temperatures near record highs and atmospheric conditions that scientists say are suited for hurricane formation. NOAA predicted that this year’s hurricane season would be above average.

Risks are only mounting for communities in the Southeast. According to the most recent National Climate Assessment, a US government report, growing populations in regions hit by Helene, particularly in cities, has created new vulnerabilities to warming. “Over the last few decades, economic growth in the Southeast has been concentrated in and around urban centers that depend on climate-sensitive infrastructure and regional connections to thrive,” the report states.

7) How can I help?

For one, check out local news outlets, which have the most current information about what’s happening on the ground in places like Asheville.

Blue Ridge Public Radio has compiled a list of ways to help victims in western North Carolina. The Knoxville News Sentinel has a similar list for eastern Tennessee. FEMA also has links to state volunteer groups assisting with the recovery.

Some state emergency responders have websites set up to collect donations for hurricane relief. Civic groups and food banks in affected communities are also collecting goods and money to help people who were hurt by the storm.

Local emergency managers are also providing guidance for what resources they do and don’t need. Please take this to heart. The Tennessee Emergency Management Agency, for instance, specifically asks people not to self-deploy to disaster areas and to only donate things requested by local emergency coordinators. FEMA is also encouraging people in the region to coordinate with text messages instead of phone calls to leave phone lines open and to donate cash instead of goods.

Let criminals get guns..........

The Supreme Court will decide whether to let criminals get guns without a background check

The Court considers legalizing “ghost guns,” untraceable weapons that evade laws intended to keep guns away from criminals.

by Ian Millhiser

On Tuesday, October 8, one day after the justices convene for a new Supreme Court term, the Court will hear a case that could open up a massive loophole in US gun laws. The plaintiffs in Garland v. VanDerStok ask the Court to effectively neutralize a federal law requiring gun buyers to submit to a background check, as well as a separate law requiring guns to have a serial number to allow law enforcement to track firearms.

The case involves “ghost guns,” weapons that are sold dismantled and in ready-to-assemble kits. Three Trump appointees on the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit previously concluded that guns sold in these kits are exempt from the laws requiring background checks and serial numbers, thus making it easy for people with violent felony convictions to obtain guns simply by buying them in a disassembled state.

By law, the background check and serial number requirements apply to “any weapon ... which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive.” They also apply to “the frame or receiver of any such weapon,” the skeletal part of a gun that houses other components, such as the barrel or firing mechanism. Thus, if someone purchases a series of firearm parts intending to build a gun at home, they still must face a background check when they purchase the gun’s frame or receiver.

Ghost gun makers seek to evade these requirements by selling a kit with an incomplete frame or receiver — although, according to the Justice Department, it’s often trivially easy to convert the kit’s incomplete part into a fully functional frame or receiver. Some kits can be turned into a working firearm after the buyer drills a single hole in the kit’s frame. Others require the user to sand off a small plastic rail.

The Fifth Circuit backed these attempts to evade the law. It claimed that frames missing a single hole are “not yet frames or receivers.” The three Trump judges also argued that ghost gun kits may not “readily be converted” into a working gun because this phrase “cannot be read to include any objects that could, if manufacture is completed, become functional at some ill-defined point in the future” — even if only a negligible amount of work is required to make the gun function.

So the question now is whether a majority of this Supreme Court, which often takes an expansive view of gun rights, will sign onto this attempt to neutralize the background check and serial number laws.

The good news for supporters of gun regulations is that the Court has already signaled that it will not do so. The Court first heard this case, albeit in an expedited process, in August 2023, and it voted to temporarily leave the background check and serial number requirements in full effect while the case made its way through the lower courts. The bad news is that the vote in that August 2023 decision was 5-4, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett joining the Court’s three Democrats. So if just one justice flips, the VanDerStok plaintiffs could prevail.

At what point does a gun become a gun?

VanDerStok turns on the question of when a partially manufactured gun becomes sufficiently gun-like that it should be regulated as if it were a fully operational firearm. Congress, by applying the relevant laws to operational guns, frames, receivers, and items that “may readily be converted” into an operational gun, clearly intended that a gun need not be fully complete to be regulated.

At the same time, it’s also clear that there is a point when an incomplete gun is not yet subject to the background check and serial number laws. For example, if someone buys a bucket full of raw steel and wood that a skilled gunsmith, after many hours of work using the proper tools, could turn into a firearm, that bucket does not need to come with a background check.

Up until very recently, this question of “at what point does a gun become sufficiently complete to trigger certain federal laws?” would have been resolved by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF). In Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984), the Supreme Court held that, when an agency is given the power to issue regulations interpreting a federal law (and ATF has that power over the gun laws at issue in VanDerStok), courts should typically defer to how the agency decides to resolve any ambiguities in that law.

Thus, in a less imperious Supreme Court, VanDerStok would be an easy case. ATF issued a regulation in 2022 that clarifies that the background check and serial number laws do apply to ghost guns. Under Chevron, that should be enough to resolve this case.

Last June, however, the six Republican justices voted to overrule Chevron. Their decision in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo (2024) establishes that henceforth, whoever controls a majority of the Supreme Court will have the final word on thousands of policy questions that, under Chevron, used to be resolved by federal agencies. So VanDerStok will give us an early window into how these justices intend to use their new, self-given policymaking authority.

If these justices concern themselves with the text of federal gun law, however, it’s still difficult to see how they could affirm the Fifth Circuit’s decision to exempt ghost guns from the background check and serial number requirements.

The reason why is that federal gun law does not simply announce a vague standard — that incomplete guns that “may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive” are still subject to federal regulation. It also provides an example of a particular kind of not-yet-ready-to-fire gun that is subject to the background check and serial number laws.

The relevant federal law explicitly states that a “starter gun” — that is, a gun with a plugged barrel that is designed to fire blanks, and that is typically used to begin track or swim races — does count as a gun that is subject to federal regulation. So if someone buys a starter gun, they must submit to a background check, even though starter guns cannot be used to shoot anyone without significant alterations.

In its brief, the Justice Department suggests that this reference to starter guns was inserted into the statute because of a “do-it-yourself gunsmith” who “distributed firearms to gang members by buying starter pistols in bulk.” He would then disassemble these starter guns and “using an electric hand drill mounted in a drill press stand, bore[d] out the plugged barrel and enlarge[d] the cylinder chambers to accommodate .22-caliber cartridges.”

That’s significantly more work than is required to assemble many ghost guns. The fact that Congress intended to regulate devices that need to be disassembled and “bored out” using reasonably specialized equipment before they could be used as weapons suggests that Congress also intended for an already-disassembled gun that is missing a single hole in its frame or receiver to be subject to regulation. A ghost gun is much closer to being a fully operational firearm than a starter gun.

Still, while VanDerStok should not be a difficult case, the fact that four justices previously voted to exempt ghost guns from background checks and serial numbers suggests that this Court will make this case more difficult than it needs to be.

In overruling Chevron, the Court declared that it should have far more control over US policy than it has had in recent decades. Now we’re going to get a taste of how this GOP-dominated Court intends to use that power.

Noncitizens Voting is NOT A THING!!!!!!!!!!!

Let’s Break Down All the Lies in Elon Musk’s False Tweet About Noncitizens Voting

The tech billionaire said the true threat to democracy is if Trump loses.

Alex Nguyen

On Sunday, Elon Musk posted a lengthy diatribe about Democrats being the real “threat to democracy.”

In his tweet, Musk claimed that Democrats are flying “asylum seekers” to swing states (this is not happening), fast-tracking them for citizenship (asylum seekers are not fast-tracked), and ensuring said noncitizens can vote (noncitizens cannot vote in federal or state elections). (In the tweet, Musk also lists Ohio as an example of a swing state; it is not.)

In short: Almost every claim in Musk’s rant is factually incorrect.

As we previously stated, Republicans’ “Big Lie” this time has been that Democrats are stealing the election by pushing noncitizens to the ballot box. Trump backed the claim in the presidential debate earlier this month when asked about whether he acknowledges that he lost in 2020. “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” the former president said. “And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” 

But, as my colleague Isabela Dias reported, this is not accurate. There are not masses of noncitizens registered to vote. In fact, as she wrote, “a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of ‘suspected noncitizen voting’ for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes.”

Musk’s logic, though, goes beyond the idea of noncitizens voting. He claims 1 in 20 “illegals” will become citizens per year, resulting in two million new legal voters for Democrats in four years. “America then becomes a one-party state and Democracy is over,” the billionaire wrote. “The only ‘elections’ will be the Democratic Party primaries.”

But this is far from the truth. Last year, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, only 29,000 asylees became naturalized citizens. They all entered the US before Joe Biden’s presidency and were engaged in the five-year process of demonstrating legal permanent residence to apply for citizenship. 

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) also weighed in, replying to Musk’s post, with another theory. “It’s a two prong strategy,” he explained. “When they bring illegals to blue states, the blue states get extra electoral votes in the presidential election and extra congressional districts, even though the illegals can’t vote. This is because we count them in the census and for apportionment.”

As our reporter Ari Berman wrote in 2020, this has been a long-term complaint from the right. Political representation in the 14th Amendment includes “all persons”—not only those eligible to vote. And elected officials, in turn, represent the total population, including those who cannot vote (kids, for example). Republicans want to exclude noncitizens from the census and change the paradigm to reinforce Republican voting power. 

Massie’s communications director, John Kennedy, did not respond to a request for comment. 

Musk has been driving his claims of noncitizens voting for months. The Washington Post reported earlier in September that the false claims had election officials worried. Many told the newspaper that the posts coincided with a rise in requests to toss voter rolls and made them fearful over the possibility of violent threats in the lead-up to November. 

The owner of X also targeted a story from the Los Angeles Times that found that immigration authorities were approving citizenship applications “at the fastest speed in years.” The Times highlighted that right-wing figures were making “baseless claims” and included a statement from Naree Ketudat, a spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security. 

She said that the agency has processed naturalization petitions within a six-month period for decades and that the department “does not take actions based on electoral politics or upcoming elections. Period.” 

So, all of it was wrong. But Musk has not let facts get in the way of posting through it.

Southeast Is Reeling

The Southeast Is Reeling in the Wake of Hurricane Helene

The intense storm, which has left more than 60 people dead, is a product of climate change, the FEMA administrator said Sunday.

Julianne McShane

Hurricane Helene wreaked havoc across the Southeast over the past several days, leaving more than 60 people dead and providing a chilling example of how climate change is worsening storms.

Since the hurricane made landfall in northern Florida on Thursday, it killed at least 64 people, including 1-month-old twins and their 27-year-old mother in Georgia, and a couple in their 70s and a 6-year-old relative who drowned in North Carolina, the Associated Press reported Sunday. North Carolina was particularly hard hit, with western parts of the state receiving more than two feet of rainfall, leading to the closure of about 300 roads, according to federal authorities.

The storm also brought more than a foot of rain to parts of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina, as well as massive power outages, including, at one point, in 40 percent of South Carolina, the AP reports. As of Sunday afternoon, there were more than 2.2 million power outages across the Southeast, with more than 870,000 in South Carolina and more than 600,000 in Georgia, according to PowerOutage.us.

In a statement Saturday, President Joe Biden said he was “deeply saddened by the loss of life and devastation” that Helene wrought, adding, “As we turn toward recovery efforts, we will make certain that no resource is spared to ensure that families, businesses, schools, hospitals, and entire communities can quickly begin their road to rebuilding.”

Before the storm made landfall, Biden approved emergency aid requests from the governors of Alabama, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, and sent 1,500 federal personnel to the region, according to information the White House released Friday. On Sunday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency announced that Biden had approved major disaster declarations for North Carolina and Florida, unlocking more aid for both states.

Emergency personnel watched as floodwaters rose in Asheville, North Carolina. Erik Verduzco/AP

“Doug and I are thinking of those who tragically lost their lives and we are keeping all those who loved them in our prayers during the difficult days ahead,” Vice President Kamala Harris said in a statement Saturday, adding that she had been briefed on the situation by FEMA officials and would continue receiving regular updates.

On CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday, FEMA Administrator Deanne Criswell blamed climate change for the storm’s rapid intensification—and warned that the devastation was a harbinger of what’s to come in our increasingly warming planet. “In the past, when we would look at damage from hurricanes, it was primarily wind damage, with some water damage, but now we’re seeing so much more water damage, and I think that is a result of the warm waters, which is a result of climate change,” Criswell said.

Good.........

California Sues Catholic Hospital for Denying Emergency Abortion Care

“We have a hospital implementing a policy that’s reminiscent of heartbeat laws in extremist red states.”

Nina Martin

Many Californians are proud of their state’s strong protections for abortion and reproductive rights—safeguards that have become even more important in the post–Roe v. Wade era. But a new lawsuit filed Monday by Attorney General Rob Bonta’s office highlights the risks that blue states face from a vital sector of the health care system that has long considered itself exempt from laws protecting abortion access: Catholic hospitals.

Bonta’s office announced that it was suing the owners of Providence St. Joseph Hospital in Eureka, a small coastal city in the north of the state, for violating various state laws in its treatment of Anna Nusslock, a 36-year-old chiropractor pregnant with twins. This past February, Nusslock’s water broke at 15 weeks—far too early for the fetuses to survive—leaving her in excruciating pain and at high risk of developing a severe infection if treatment was delayed. According to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the standard of care in such cases is to remove the fetuses in a procedure akin to an emergency abortion. One of the twins had already died. But medical staff at the Catholic hospital allegedly told Nusslock that because the other twin still had a detectable heartbeat, Catholic ethical rules prevented them from ending the pregnancy until Nusslock’s life was in danger. 

After several hours of waiting, Nusslock’s husband drove her 20 minutes away to the nearest hospital in the even smaller city of Arcata, “where she arrived hemorrhaging and passing a blood clot the size of an apple,” according to an account in the New York Times. “She expelled one fetus and was rushed into the operating room so the other fetus could be removed.” The Arcata doctor who treated Nusslock wrote that she had treated other patients denied abortions by Providence St. Joseph in similar circumstances, the Times reported.

Nusslock told the Times that, six months later, she has recovered physically but still feels the emotional toll. “This experience deeply traumatized me,” she said, “and I have been dealing with tremendous anxiety, grief, and depression ever since.”

“The next person in Anna’s situation will face an agonizing choice of risking a multi-hour drive to another hospital or waiting until they are close enough to death for Providence to intervene.” 

This is exactly the kind of scenario that many pregnant patients with life-threatening complications have been facing in states that imposed onerous abortion restrictions and bans in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022. Despite the federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act (EMTALA), which requires hospitals to provide stabilizing emergency care to anyone who needs it for any reason, doctors and hospitals in abortion-ban states have been unwilling to provide abortion care for fear of losing their licenses, facing punishing fines, or even being prosecuted and thrown in jail.

After lawsuits in Idaho and Texas, the Supreme Court essentially punted on the EMTALA issue last June, although litigation continues. Meanwhile, the death of Georgia mother Amber Thurman from a catastrophic infection in 2022 shows just how dangerous the medical landscape has become as doctors and hospitals have delayed treating emergencies that require abortion care.

But as I wrote for Mother Jones earlier this year, the same kinds of scenarios have long been common in Catholic healthcare systems. And this reality presents an especially thorny challenge in the post-Roe era, even in blue states that have tried to strengthen their abortion protections.

[Catholic] hospitals—as well as their clinics, pharmacies, and physician practices—follow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, issued by the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, which ban or limit abortion, contraception, sterilization, fertility treatments, trans care, and physician-assisted suicide. Under the ERDs, Catholic hospitals—even in liberal parts of the country—have long treated pregnancy emergencies in ways that have become chillingly familiar in abortion-ban states. For decades, Catholic hospitals have been “doing as a norm what has now become the post-Dobbs landscape,” Georgetown Law professor and reproductive justice scholar Michele Bratcher Goodwin told my Mother Jones colleague Pema Levy. […]

Under the ERDs, Catholic providers are not allowed to terminate the pregnancy as long as the fetus is alive—even if it has no possibility of surviving—until the woman’s life is in danger, says Lori Freedman, a professor and researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, whose 2023 book, Bishops and Bodies: Reproductive Care in American Catholic Hospitals, is based on interviews with dozens of medical practitioners and patients. “They cannot treat her [with medications or procedures that will terminate the pregnancy], but watch her and wait for signs of infection to develop,” she says. “They have this requirement—if there is a fetal heartbeat, wait till there’s a threat to the mother’s life. Then they have to save her life. That is a low standard of care.”

Making the picture even more complex, Catholic hospitals comprise a huge part of the American healthcare infrastructure—they’re the largest group of nonprofit providers in the country. According to the watchdog group Community Catalyst, about 16 percent of acute-care hospitals around the US are Catholic, caring for one in seven hospital patients every day and accounting for 17.5 million emergency room visits a year. In California, they have about the same percentage of the market. But in some states, Catholic providers account for a much bigger share, including in such reproductive safe havens as Washington (almost 50 percent), Colorado (around 40 percent), and Oregon and Illinois (about 30 percent each). As I wrote, those hospitals have been able to skirt reproductive protections:

Religious providers are protected by what are known as “conscience” clauses sprinkled throughout numerous state and federal laws. The ACLU has sued Catholic hospitals at least three times in the past decade over their treatment of pregnant patients under the ERDs—and lost.

Bonta—whose job is the one Kamala Harris held before she became a senator in 2016, then vice president—told the Times he was filing the case partly because of uncertainty about the fate of EMTALA after the Supreme Court’s landmark (not in a good way) 2023–2024 session. “There were some written opinions by the conservative wing of the court that were very disturbing about whether abortion care, which is health care, will be provided under EMTALA in emergency situations,” Bonta said, “so unfortunately, EMTALA is not reliable right now, in our view, because of the limbo that [it] is in.” As a result, he said, “states are on their own and need to rely on our own laws.” 

The Nusslock suit alleges that the Eureka hospital, owned by St. Joseph Health Northern California, which also operates a second hospital in the area, violated three state statutes: the Emergency Services Law, the Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the Unfair Competition Law. According to the Times, the case is believed to be the first filed by California officials against a hospital under the Emergency Services Law, which says hospitals have to provide care “necessary to relieve or eliminate the emergency medical condition.”

In addition to filing the complaint, the attorney general’s office is moving immediately for a preliminary injunction to force Providence to provide timely emergency care, including abortions. “California is the beacon of hope for so many Americans across this country trying to access abortion services since the Dobbs decision,” Bonta’s office said in a statement. “It is damning that here in California, where abortion care is a constitutional right, we have a hospital implementing a policy that’s reminiscent of heartbeat laws in extremist red states.” 

Bonta’s office said the suit was especially urgent because Mad River Community Hospital, where Nusslock eventually received treatment, is scheduled to close its labor and delivery unit in October due to a steep decline in the number of pregnant patients in recent years. “In a month, Providence will be left as the only hospital with an L&D unit in all of Humboldt County,” the AG’s press release said. “The next person in Anna’s situation will face an agonizing choice of risking a multi-hour drive to another hospital or waiting until they are close enough to death for Providence to intervene.”   

Fucking Flor-i-daaaaaaaaaaaaa...... Again.

“They Stole an Election”: Former Florida Senator Found Guilty in “Ghost Candidates” Scandal

Frank Artiles’ legal saga helped expose a utility conglomerate’s political meddling.

Mario Alejandro Ariza

Former Florida state Sen. Frank Artiles was convicted by a Miami-Dade Circuit Court jury Monday evening, the latest fallout from the state’s 2020 “ghost candidates” scandal.

Artiles was convicted on three felony counts related to $44,000 in payments he made to Alex Rodriguez, a no-party candidate whose role was to siphon votes from Sen. Jose Javier Rodriguez, the Democratic incumbent. The six-member jury deliberated for seven hours before reaching its verdict. Artiles was acquitted on a fourth count of aiding and abetting a false voter registration. Artiles sat stone-faced as the guilty verdicts were read.

“They won. They were successful. They beat JJR,” public corruption prosecutor Tim VanderGiesen said in his opening argument. “They beat the incumbent named Rodriguez.” 

“They stole an election,” he said. 

Artiles’ defense attorney Frank Quintero had reminded jurors that ghost candidates are legal “so long as Florida election law is not violated.”

But that’s precisely what the jury found.

The term “ghost candidate” is used to describe a candidate who has no chance of winning, but runs to harm an actual contender’s chances. Ghost candidate Rodriguez was part of an opaquely funded 501(c)(4)—or “dark money”—effort enabled by consultants working for Florida Power & Light, a subsidiary of the NextEra utility conglomerate.

Florida Power & Light CEO Eric Silagy, who was never charged with wrongdoing, had ordered his underlings to “make [Sen. Rodriguez’s] life a living hell.” Silagy retired abruptly in January 2023 in the wake of reporting by Floodlight and its media partners about FPL’s involvement in the ghost candidate scandal.

Artiles was charged with conspiracy, making campaign contributions above the $1,000 limit, and “false swearing” for instructing Alex Rodriguez—who actually lived outside District 37—on how to fill out paperwork to get on the ballot. 

Artiles, who faced up to five years in prison per count, sat quietly throughout the two-week trial. He was flanked by his attorneys, Quintero and Frank Quiñon. Behind him in the Miami courtroom was a revolving cast of friends and family.

The charges stem from efforts to achieve a Republican supermajority in the Florida Senate by running three ghost candidates to take votes away from Democratic candidates in key 2020 races. The spoiler candidates were backed, in part, by a series of nonprofits controlled by Jeff Pitts, then-CEO of Matrix LLC, a consulting company that was working for Florida Power & Light, according to reporting by Floodlight and other news outlets

The nonprofits in question were 501(c)(4)s, which are not required to disclose their donors’ identities, and the prosecution stopped short of tracing the money back to its original source. On September 27, Florida federal judge Aileen Cannon dismissed a shareholder lawsuit accusing FPL’s parent company, NextEra Energy, of issuing misleading statements about its political activities.

From the utility’s perspective, as noted in our earlier, in-depth story on the scandal, expanding GOP dominance—by whatever means—would help fulfill the utility’s legislative priorities:

Those priorities included escaping liability for damages related to power outages in the wake of Hurricane Irma; ousting J.R. Kelly, the state’s long-serving (unsympathetic) consumer utility watchdog; and winning approval from the Senate-confirmed Public Service Commission for Florida’s largest-ever hike in electricity rates. 

The defeat of Sen. Rodriguez had the added benefit of kneecapping one of the state’s most prominent backers of rooftop solar, which reduces carbon emissions and lowers utility bills—and against which FPL had waged a decade-long counterinsurgency campaign.

He was defeated by 32 votes by Ileana Garcia, founder of Latinas for Trump.

Prosecutors said consultants implicated in the scandal had withheld records that had been subpoenaed. Key evidence in the form of hundreds of text messages between Artiles and Rodriguez also went missing, they said.

Much of the trial revolved around the credibility of the state’s star witness, ghost candidate Alex Rodriguez, who admitted under cross examination that he had a difficult relationship with the truth. To buttress his credibility, prosecutors laid out the broader effort to influence the 2020 election. 

Their first witness was a reticent Pat Bainter, a north Florida peanut farmer and powerful operative for the state Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. 

In a pretrial deposition, Bainter, whose company, Data Targeting, did work for GOP candidates, had acknowledged he paid Artiles $15,000 a month for six months for on-the-ground research in the District 37 race, including running a spoiler candidate. Bainter also acknowledged he sent a $100,000 no-strings-attached payment to a 501(c)(4) nonprofit controlled by Artiles. 

Testimony and evidence presented at trial revealed that Bainter held meetings with Artiles and Garcia campaign consultants who had a business relationship with Pitts, then-CEO of Matrix.

Garcia’s campaign manager testified that Bainter held the purse strings for that campaign. Bainter, too, testified that his company worked for Garcia’s campaign.

Rodriguez took the stand late on the fourth day of the trial. Prosecutor VanderGiesen showed him totals from the 2020 race, in which he got 6,000 votes.

“Did you come about getting those votes honestly?”

“No,” Rodriguez responded. 

Rodriguez, who had pleaded guilty to election-related charges and served six months of home detention and three years of probation, also testified that Artiles offered him $50,000 to run as a spoiler: $25,000 before the election and $25,000 after.

But he was afraid Artiles would never come through on his promise to pay, so he “fabricated” a series of business deals involving construction equipment, diesel engines and COVID masks to extract money from Artiles. He also asked Artiles to help cover his rent and his daughter’s private school tuition, Rodriguez testified. 

At one point, he admitted, he invented a story about a Range Rover he was going to buy at auction for Artiles, asking the former state senator for a $10,900 payment.

His reason for all the scams? “I was concerned I wasn’t going to get the $50,000.”

The defense grilled Rodriguez, working to establish reasonable doubt about the nature of his transactions with Artiles. They portrayed the former senator as the victim in a series of fraudulent business deals and requests for financial help from Rodriguez. “The evidence is going to show that Rodriguez is a con artist, a professional con artist, a pathological liar,” Quintero told the jurors.

On the stand, Rodriguez didn’t defend himself, replying to Quintero’s increasingly forceful questions in a quiet monotone. 

The key question posed by the defense was: Could the state prove—incontrovertibly—that the payments at the heart of the case were illegal campaign contributions? 

“There is no other explanation,” VanderGiesen posited, “for why the defendant is giving tens of thousands of dollars to Alex Rodriguez.”

When approached by a reporter from Floodlight, Rodriguez declined to speak on the record until the end of the trial. He took the reporter’s phone number and said he would call. As he walked down the escalator, he shot the reporter a wink. 

The reporter also spoke to Artiles shortly before the verdict was handed down. Artiles called the trial “a colossal waste of time.”

“The press won’t report what’s really happening,” he said. 

The reporter replied that he’d be happy to write the whole story—if he could ever find out precisely what it was. 

VP Face-Off

The Wildest Facts to Know About JD Vance Before the VP Face-Off

Watching Tuesday’s debate? CBS won’t be fact-checking—so read this first.

Julianne McShane

Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) has said a lot of wild things since former President Trump announced him as his running mate back in July.

Since it may all seem like a chaotic blur in retrospect, we took it upon ourselves to highlight some of his past falsehoods, stances, and general absurdities before his Tuesday night debate against Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.)—especially since the CBS moderators will not be fact-checking the candidates in real time.

If you have been living under a rock for the past few months, a) smart move, and b) here are some of Vance’s greatest (worst?) hits to know before he and Walz face off:

• Vance helped spread the racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, even after local officials told his office there was no truth to the rumors, according to reporting by the Wall Street Journal. Please keep your pets away from this man.
• He seems to harbor an obsession with childfree women (who are, contrary to his assertions, quite happy), whom he has alleged should have less voting power than parents…
• …yet despite his apparent obsession with organizing society around the nuclear family, he also has not ruled out resuming family separations under Trump’s promised “mass deportation” plan. Hypocrisy, thy name is Vance.
• Like Trump, Vance has strong ties to some of the authors of Project 2025—the extremist guidebook for a second Trump term—despite their campaign’s attempts to distance themselves from it. Vance wrote the introduction to a 2017 report published by the Heritage Foundation—the group behind the publication of Project 2025—that promoted banning abortion nationwide and criticized IVF.
• Vance also wrote the introduction to a forthcoming book by Kevin Roberts, president of Heritage and architect of Project 2025, that promises to be a roadmap for conservatives to “take back” the country.
• Speaking of books he’s endorsed: Vance also praised a book that called progressives “unhumans” (my eighth-grade English teacher would like a word), praised insurrectionists, and, as my colleague Noah Lanard wrote, “celebrates right-wing political violence and dictators who committed some of the most notorious atrocities of the 20th century.” I would truly love to know what else is on his bookshelf.
• He is staunchly anti-abortion, and has said he would support a national abortion ban; argued against rape and incest exceptions; compared abortion to slavery; and said the Department of Justice should use the 19th-century Comstock Act to criminalize “mail-order abortions,” as Project 2025 recommends.
• Like the rest of the GOP, Vance has more recently been trying to be seen as having “softened” on abortion, claiming he supports access to mifepristone and leaving abortion laws to the states. Trump, however, proved otherwise—at his first debate against Harris, he twice refused to clarify whether he would veto a national abortion ban if Congress passed it…despite the fact that Vance previously affirmed Trump would.
• Vance used to strongly dislike Trump, having once called him “America’s Hitler” and lambasted some of his supporters as racist (fact-check: true)…

…but he’s come a long way: Now, Vance is helping Trump spread the false claim that Democrats are responsible for the two recent attempted assassinations of the former president, which threat assessment experts told my colleague Mark Follman could give rise to even more political violence.

You may, of course, also hear some half-truths or even straight-up falsehoods from Walz during the debate. Vance is likely to repeat the claims he has already been making that Walz lied about his military record (the truth is more complicated) and about his family’s use of IVF (Walz has clarified his family used intrauterine insemination, another type of fertility treatment). As one of my former editors used to say, “everybody lies”—particularly, I would add, politicians.

The thing to keep in mind, though, is that the two campaigns facing off in November do not lie at anywhere near the same rate or with the same level of significance. Trump, of course, has continued falsely claiming that he won the 2020 election—a lie that Vance has also amplified, despite the fact that more than 60 court cases have found otherwise. After Vance helped spread the racist lie about Springfield, Trump repeated it during his first debate to the more than 67 million viewers who watched; Springfield subsequently received bomb threats and had to evacuate schools and its city hall, while the local Haitian population was left reeling and in fear.

And the lie about Springfield was not the only one Trump told during his first face off with Harris: According to CNN, he lied 30 times in total; Harris, on the other hand, once.

Just Threw Out.

A Court Just Threw Out Georgia’s Six-Week Abortion Ban

“Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property,” Judge Robert McBurney wrote.

Nina Martin

Two weeks after the deaths of two Georgia women highlighted the very real risks to maternal health posed by the state’s six-week abortion ban, a judge has thrown out that draconian law, declaring it unconstitutional in a remarkable ruling that drips with sarcasm and rage. It’s a resounding legal victory in a key swing state that is likely to reverberate throughout the South—at least temporarily.

“A review of our higher courts’ interpretations of ‘liberty’ demonstrates that liberty in Georgia includes…the power of a woman to control her own body, to decide what happens to it and in it, and to reject state interference with her health care choices,” Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney wrote in a 26-page order issued Monday. “When a fetus growing inside a woman reaches viability, when society can assume care and responsibility for that separate life, then—and only then—may society intervene,” he added.

“Women are not some piece of collectively owned community property the disposition of which is decided by majority vote,” McBurney writes. “Forcing a woman to carry an unwanted, not-yet-viable fetus to term violates her constitutional rights to liberty and privacy, even taking into consideration whatever bundle of rights the not-yet-viable fetus may have.”

Before Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortion was legal in Georgia until the fetus was viable—around 22 weeks. Lawmakers first passed the six-week ban, known as the LIFE Act, in 2019, but courts blocked it until the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision in 2022. The six-week ban has been the subject of litigation ever since, even as the Georgia Supreme Court upheld it in 2023. Now, according to McBurney’s ruling, “the law of Georgia reverts to what was (and remains) constitutional in this State” before 2019.

McBurney called the ban’s exception for rape and incest, which requires victims to file a police report, “a peculiarly cynical proviso.”

He was just as scornful of the ban’s insistence that medical exceptions should only be granted for life-threatening physical health issues. “There is no basis—rational, compelling, or sensical—to distinguish between diagnosed medical emergencies involving the brain (an essential human organ if ever there was one) versus the heart or the lungs or the liver,” McBurney wrote. “A law that saves a mother from a potentially fatal pregnancy when the risk is purely physical but which fates her to death or serious injury or disability if the risk is ‘mental or emotional’ is patently unconstitutional.”

And he threw in a few more zingers, just for good measure.

[Women] alone should choose whether they serve as human incubators for the five months leading up to viability. It is not for a legislator, a judge, or a Commander from The Handmaid’s Tale to tell these women what to do with their bodies during this period when the fetus cannot survive outside the womb any more so than society could—or should—force them to serve as a human tissue bank or to give up a kidney for the benefit of another.

The ruling comes as the deaths of Amber Thurman and Candi Miller, first reported in ProPublica, has thrust Georgia to the center of the national conversation about the impact of abortion restrictions and bans in the post–Roe era. Days after the ProPublica stories, Vice President Kamala Harris visited Atlanta to highlight the threat that Donald Trump poses to reproductive freedom, and Thurman’s mother and sisters appeared with Harris in an emotional town hall hosted by Oprah Winfrey. 

Nearly three-quarters of Georgians—including 62 percent of Republicans and 83 percent of Democrats—want abortion to be legal before the point of fetal viability, according to a University of Maryland poll in early September. But Georgia, like many of its neighbors in the South, does not allow residents to weigh in on the issue via the type of voter initiatives that are on the ballot in 10 states this November, including Nevada and Arizona.

“This afternoon’s court ruling marks a critical milestone for Georgians and supporters of reproductive justice who have remained steadfast in their vision of a Georgia free from abortion bans,” said Shanté Wolfe, Southeastern field director for the advocacy group URGE. “The court’s move is a testament to the power of collective action, driven by activists, organizers, legislators, and most importantly, everyday people.” 

“We have known that Georgians overwhelmingly support abortion, and today we see that it is indeed possible for our state’s laws to reflect the majority,” Wolfe said.

Even so, no one expects McBurney—who was first appointed to the bench by former GOP governor Nathan Deal in 2012—to have the last say. “We believe Georgia’s LIFE Act is fully constitutional,” Kara Murray, communications director for Republican Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, said in a statement Monday that promised an immediate appeal.

“Once again, the will of Georgians and their representatives has been overruled by the personal beliefs of one judge,” Governor Brian Kemp echoed in his own press release. “Georgia will continue to be a place where we fight for the lives of the unborn.” 

Lifesaving Care?

JD Vance Says His “Mamaw” Had Eight Miscarriages. His Policies Deny Women Like Her Lifesaving Care.

His position is curious for someone whose story begins with the pregnancy of a 13-year-old girl.

Stephanie Mencimer

One in every 10 pregnancies in the US ends in a miscarriage, a common medical event for which there are safe and effective treatments should there be complications. But over the past two years, having a miscarriage in many states has become far more dangerous, thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision overturning Roe v Wade.

Thirteen states have passed total abortion bans. Three others ban abortion after six weeks—a de facto ban. These laws have resulted in a rash of horror stories—not about the anticipated illegal backroom abortion deaths, but about ordinary women having ordinary but occasionally life-threatening pregnancy complications, while hospitals and doctors refuse to treat them for fear of being prosecuted.

Reporters and lawyers have chronicled stories of miscarrying women nearly dying from blood loss and infection, suffering debilitating injuries, and future infertility because of delayed care. One Texas hospital, the AP reported, even left a woman to miscarry in the ER restroom because the staff refused to treat her. Her husband had to call 911 from the ER for help.

Among the legion of GOP anti-abortion politicians in the US who’ve helped create this carnage, there is one you might expect to have some sympathy for the suffering of these women: Vice presidential candidate and Ohio Sen. JD Vance. On the surface, the politician who denigrated Democrats as the party of “childless cat ladies” and suggested that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,” was to take care of children, would not be an obvious softie for the victims of policies that have left women bleeding out in hospital restrooms. And yet, he might understand the situation better than many of his Republican colleagues.

Vance owes much of his fame and political career to his bestselling 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, a coming-of-age story about his triumph over family dysfunction, addiction, absent fathers, and cycles of abuse.

The memoir’s beating heart is Bonnie Blanton Vance, or “Mamaw,” the maternal grandmother Vance called his “guardian angel” in his July acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. Blanton helped raise the future Yale Law School grad when his drug-addicted mother could not, saving him from becoming just another entry in a long family history of shiftless angry men.

In Hillbilly Elegy, Vance holds Blanton up as the force of nature behind his successes. But the book also suggests she may be an unintended case study of something quite different: the importance of reproductive health care for everyone. In his memoir, Vance says that his beloved grandmother suffered eight miscarriages over 10 years, plus four pregnancies that came to term. Today, many of the women suffering from denied miscarriages and abortion care “have similar life stories to his grandmother,” says Debra Stulberg, a professor of family medicine at the University of Chicago who studies miscarriage care.

The word “abortion” never appears in Hillbilly Elegy, and Vance doesn’t seem to have ever spoken publicly about the particular chapter of his grandmother’s difficult life. (A spokesman for Vance did not respond to questions for this story.) But his grandmother’s story, which helped make him famous, seems to underly Vance’s intense opposition to abortion—one that’s even more extreme than the man he shares the GOP ticket with.

In 2023, Vance signed on to a letter to the secretary of the US Department of Health and Human Services, along with 29 other Republican lawmakers, urging the agency to reverse a new rule that bars law enforcement officers from accessing patients’ reproductive healthcare records, particularly those trying to prosecute women for crossing state lines for abortion care. “Abortion is not health care,” the letter said. “It is a brutal act that destroys the life of an unborn child and hurts women.”

Vance supports a national abortion ban, and he doesn’t believe in exceptions for rape and incest. “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said in an interview during his 2022 Ohio Senate campaign. “It’s not whether a woman should be forced to bring a child to term, it’s whether a child should be allowed to live, even though the circumstances of that child’s birth are somehow inconvenient or a problem to the society.”

Vance’s position is a curious one for someone whose origin story begins with the pregnancy of a 13-year-old girl.

In his memoir, Vance writes that his grandfather, Jim Vance, and his grandmother’s best friend, Bonnie Smith, were lovers. At some point, he writes, 16-year-old Jim cheated on Bonnie Smith with 13-year-old Bonnie Blanton. The “affair” resulted in a pregnancy that prompted the couple to flee Appalachian Kentucky for Dayton, Ohio, to escape Blanton’s murderously protective brothers.

Today, Blanton’s first pregnancy would be considered the result of statutory rape in many states, and a felony carrying prison time. The pregnancy was also exceedingly dangerous. “Teen pregnancies, especially 15 and under, are by definition high risk,” says Stulberg. Perhaps no surprise, then, that Blanton’s baby died a week after she was born.

It seems clear from Hillbilly Elegy that Blanton’s unplanned pregnancy at 13 was a singular catastrophic event that trapped her in a violent marriage for decades. “Mamaw never spent a day in high school,” Vance writes. “She’d given birth to and buried a child before she could legally drive a car.” Her husband was an abusive alcoholic; Blanton famously once tried to set him on fire when he had passed out drunk on the couch.

Yet Vance seems to view Mamaw’s adolescent pregnancy not as a catastrophe but as the catalyst that launched his family out of Hatfield and McCoy territory and into suburban Ohio, where there were more opportunities. “Mamaw’s entire life—and the trajectory of our family—may have changed for a baby who lived only six days,” he writes. Blanton died in 2005, at the age of 72, when Vance was only 20 and still in the Marines. As a result, “We don’t get to hear her take on this story,” Stulberg says. “That could be very different from his.”

Having a baby at 13 may have set in motion Vance’s path to the vice president’s office. But it also may have set up Blanton for the years of fertility issues Vance describes in his memoir. According to him, she had eight miscarriages in the decade between the live birth of an uncle in 1951 and the birth of his mother in 1961. But in his book, Vance displays a striking lack of curiosity about the details of those miscarriages, other than to speculate that they may have been triggered by the stress of being married to an abusive alcoholic.  

Without Blanton around to fill in the details, such as how far along in her pregnancies she was when she miscarried, we can only speculate. But experts I spoke with found it highly unlikely that a woman who’d had eight miscarriages, plus four pregnancies, the first at 13, would not at some point have needed either a therapeutic abortion or the sort of miscarriage treatment that Vance’s preferred reproductive health policies now make difficult to obtain in many states.

Having a history of multiple pregnancies itself is a risk factor, Stulberg notes. “The risks of preterm labor and postpartum hemorrhage are higher,” she says. Preterm labor is a common reason for miscarriage management, including what is essentially the abortion of a nonviable fetus.

“Politicians may say very easily that there’s no reason why miscarriage should be affected by these [abortion bans],” says Daniel Grossman, an OB-GYN at the University of California, San Francisco, and head of a research program that has been tracking the state of reproductive health care since the overturning of Roe. “But in fact, the treatments that are done for miscarriage are almost identical to the treatments for abortion, including the abortion pill.”

Grossman recently co-authored a study that compiled accounts from dozens of clinicians who had observed the horrific treatment of pregnant women in need of medical care that they were either denied or forced to obtain at great expense because of strict state abortion bans, often with great trauma.

Consider this account from a clinician in a state with an abortion ban, describing what happened to a woman who was 19 to 20 weeks pregnant. When she arrived at the ER, doctors found that the amniotic sac was protruding through her cervix—evidence of a doomed pregnancy. But they sent her home. The next day, she showed up at the ER in the immense pain of advanced labor.

Anesthesiologists refused to provide her an epidural for pain because they believed it “could be considered [a crime] under the new law,” the clinician reported. Instead, they gave her some IV morphine as she labored for several more hours to deliver a dead fetus. “I overheard the primary provider say to a nurse that so much as offering a helping hand to a patient getting onto the gurney while in the throes of a miscarriage could be construed as ‘aiding and abetting an abortion,’” the horrified clinician reported. “Best not to so much as touch the patient who is miscarrying.”

Even before Roe v. Wade, doctors didn’t treat pregnant patients like this, says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California Davis who studies the history of abortion care in the United States. Back then, doctors were given more deference to decide when a woman’s life was in danger. She says even in 1946, when Blanton first got pregnant, a family doctor would likely have been able to quietly perform an abortion on a 13-year-old without running afoul of the authorities. Indeed, it was exactly these sorts of child pregnancies that led to legal reforms that created exceptions to anti-abortion laws in the first place, she says.

Today, however, 10 states now have abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest, and six have no exceptions for the health of patients, even if they’re children. Politicians like Vance “don’t see exceptions [to abortion bans] as being necessary to address tragedies,” Ziegler says. “They see them as loopholes.”

For Stulberg, Vance may be misreading his grandmother’s story. She says research shows that women who want abortions but can’t get them fare much more poorly than women who do. But they also manage to survive, as Vance’s grandmother did. “It’s almost like women’s resilience protects society from seeing the harm,” she says. “To be that educated,” Stulberg says of Vance, and to have his life experience, and “then choose to support these policies is not caring that women are going to die.”

Women just like his grandmother.

Election Calendar

This Is Why You Don’t Mess With the Election Calendar

Early voting was supposed to start in North Carolina near the start of September. Then came RFK Jr. and Hurricane Helene.

Tim Murphy

By the time he endorsed former President Donald Trump in late August, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s independent presidential bid had long ceased to be a functioning campaign. He had collapsed in the polls, failed to qualify for the ballot in many states, and basically stopped doing events.

Yet, in death, his campaign found new life—as a way to game the democratic process for his favored candidate.

After dropping out, Kennedy sued to be removed from the ballot in deep red states, and swing states such as Michigan and Wisconsin, where his presence might take votes away from Trump. But he fought to stay on the ballot in blue states. He continued to encourage people in those places to vote for him for a time, even though he was endorsing Trump. In New York, Kennedy sued to be put back on the ballot. When his effort there was unsuccessful, he appealed to the US Supreme Court—which ruled against him.

One state was happy to accommodate RFK Jr.’s bit of gamesmanship. In North Carolina, a lower court removed Kennedy from the ballot in early September, only for the notoriously partisan North Carolina Supreme Court to step in to “protect voters’ fundamental right to vote their conscience and have that vote count.” The high court ordered the State Board of Elections to restore Kennedy to the ballot. But ballots were already printed. There was also the matter of state law: Early voting by absentee ballot was scheduled to begin on September 6. 

As Mark Joseph Stern explained at Slate, Kennedy had announced that he was suspending his campaign a day after the state’s deadline for removing a candidate from the ballot and only submitted a request to get off the ballot five days after the Trump endorsement. He acted with all the tact and urgency of a man with a dead bear cub in his trunk.

In other words, North Carolina chose to ignore its own law in order to ensure that a guy who was only ever running as a gimmick could pull one last stunt. It lost two full weeks of early voting because the state supreme court found a special Kennedy Clause in its constitution. 

Finally, after a fairly heroic effort by state and county workers, ballots were set to start being mailed out to in-state voters on September 24. Then, just as the window opened again, Hurricane Helene slammed it shut again.

The storm, which smashed through Florida and southern Appalachia this weekend, caused catastrophic destruction which affected communities are only beginning to take stock of. It washed out roads, knocked out power, killed at least 130 people, and flooded scores of communities. And with that immediate hit, came a number of logistical ripple effects.

Importantly, the US Postal Service announced that it was suspending operations in a number of North Carolina zip codes, and temporarily shuttering post offices in 39 Western North Carolina communities. In the immediate term, that means that people in those areas will have difficulty sending and receiving mail, and the USPS will have difficulty processing it. It is hard enough to simply move around.

As Gerry Cohen, a member of the elections board in Wake County (which includes the capital, Raleigh) explained on X, any long-term complications with the delivery and mailing of absentee ballots because of Helene could have an impact well outside the storm’s footprint. Residents who have temporarily relocated, or been displaced, or are simply attending college in a different part of the state, for instance, might be counting on a home county in the affected area to mail them an absentee ballot.

It is not a good idea, while people are struggling to access water and other basic supplies, to try to game out what something actually means for the election. (It is mostly a pointless exercise even when they aren’t.) Although absentee voting surged during the pandemic election of 2020, it fell off in 2022 and residents do not rely on mail ballots the way people in, say, Arizona do. But it goes without saying that weeks of delays in violation of state statutes, followed by a once-in-a-century storm, will have simply made things logistically harder for people than they otherwise would have been or should have. 

Residents will have a far shorter window for early voting than they were supposed to have—and that the law says they should have—because of RFK and the state supreme court. That window will now get even shorter because of the storm. Acts of God may be unavoidable, but shameless acts of partisanship are perhaps not.