We start today with Jerusalem Demsas of The Atlantic looking at past and present public polling regarding abortion and learn that, on the whole, polling has not changed very much over time.
Most people want abortion to be legal, and they want restrictions on its availability. Beyond that basic position, however, voters’ views can appear contradictory. That’s in part because, although Americans tell pollsters that the details of an abortion policy are important in determining whether or not they will support it, survey respondents display very little knowledge of the relevant details.
One study indicates that myths about abortion are pervasive enough to skew voters’ understanding of the issue. Women correctly answered 18 percent of questions about abortion regulations in their state, and correctly identified only 23 percent of true statements about abortion. For instance, many incorrectly believe that “childbirth is safer than abortion” and that “abortion causes depression and anxiety.”[...}
I found writing this essay difficult. While scrolling through poll after poll, I resented that I had to care about public opinion on something as private as a medical decision. The doctor’s office is crowded enough without inviting in the opinions of 300 million Americans. I can’t imagine weighing in on someone’s decision to donate an organ, or to stop treatment for a difficult disease. My irritation only compounded as the survey data revealed a public that feels a sense of ownership over my choices. I imagine the median voter staring disapprovingly at me with a clipboard, trying to determine if I deserve full decision-making authority over my body. Nobody should get to volunteer my body, my time, and my life to the state, no matter how unpopular my choices.
Jessica Winter of The New Yorker takes a look at what “the life of the mother” may mean in a post-Roe America.
Roughly ten to twenty percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. Yet none of the state bans overtly differentiate between the management of miscarriage and abortion, which share the same objective: to empty the uterus. The two procedures also employ the same tools and techniques, depending on the stage of the pregnancy and the health of the pregnant person: medication or dilation and curettage (D. & C.) for early abortions; and dilation and evacuation (D. & E.) or induced labor for later abortions. (In his draft opinion reversing Roe, Justice Samuel Alito refers to D. & E. as “a barbaric practice.”) Although the two sets of care are near-identical in their mechanics, “when someone is starting to bleed, their cervix is open, their water breaks—that’s not an induced abortion,” Ghazaleh Moayedi, an ob-gyn and complex family-planning specialist in Dallas, said. “This is not a person who comes to you and says, ‘I want to end this pregnancy.’ This is a person who is saying, ‘I am having a pregnancy complication, and I need you to help me.’ ”
That cry for help often goes unheeded in the presence of a fetal heartbeat, even if the demise of the pregnancy is inevitable. In 2015, the A.C.L.U. filed suit on behalf of a Michigan woman, Tamesha Means, against the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the body that writes the religious and ethical directives that must be followed by Catholic hospitals, which, as of 2016, accounted for about fifteen per cent of acute-care hospitals nationwide. The directives state that abortion is “never permitted,” barring “a proportionately serious pathological condition of a pregnant woman.” Means’s water broke at eighteen weeks, but she was sent home from a Catholic hospital, Mercy Health Partners, mid-miscarriage—twice—despite excruciating pain and possible infection. (The suit was dismissed on appeal, in 2016, partly for reasons of jurisdiction, although the court acknowledged that Means “suffered physical and mental pain, emotional injuries, a riskier delivery, [and] shock and emotional trauma.”) A report found that Means was one of five women in a seventeen-month period who suffered prolonged, dangerous miscarriages while under the care of doctors at Mercy Health Partners.
Several physicians told me that hesitation to provide emergency-miscarriage care is not peculiar to Catholic or other religious institutions. Even in states where abortion rights are broadly intact, many hospital systems do not permit terminations for any reason; patients in need must be transferred elsewhere. Heuser, who serves as a consultant for general ob-gyns across her hospital system in Salt Lake City, told me, “I have got calls from the E.R., saying, ‘This patient is bleeding, but there’s still a heartbeat—I don’t know what to do.’ And I have had to say, ‘You are allowed to treat the patient. You need to save the patient. This is a medical emergency.’ If you hem and haw because you aren’t sure about the law or the rules—that’s dangerous for patients.”
The mass murders in a Buffalo supermarket Saturday fit a disturbing pattern.
Julian Zelizer of CNN reports that win or lose, the surge of Kathy Barnette in the GOP primary race for the U.S. Senate might be an indicator that the Republican Party is getting more and more extreme.
Barnette, who has delved into the Trumpian political world view with relish, has made numerous anti-gay and anti-Muslim comments. In 2015, she said it was OK to discriminate against Muslims and compared rejecting Islam to “rejecting Hitler’s or Stalin’s worldviews.” She has also said, “Two men sleeping together, two men holding hands, two men caressing, that is not normal.”
Barnette has won the support of major conservative organizations such as the Club for Growth, an anti-tax group that sees in the Black conservative Republican a bright star for the party. When Barnette lost the race to represent Pennsylvania’s 4th district by 19 percentage points in 2020, she refused to concede, and still hasn’t. She used that loss to stoke baseless claims of voter fraud, gaining enough steam to attract figures on the right like MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.
“The reason she has struck a chord is she NEVER conceded her House race loss,” former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told Axios, “Pennsylvania is MAGA v. ULTRA MAGA.” It’s clear here, Barnette is ultra.
In other words, at least in Pennsylvania, a new generation of radical Republicans has emerged to take on the former president and his allies. While Barnette could very well lose to Oz or McCormick, her unexpected rise shows the direction the Republican Party is moving in.
Paul Kane of The Washington Post reports that the anti-Ukraine/pro-Putin caucus among Republicans in Congress keeps growing and growing and growing.
Once belittled by then-President Trump as a “third-rate grandstander,” Rep. Thomas Massie is used to tilting at political windmills.
In early March, the Kentucky Republican was one of just three lawmakers to oppose the first piece of legislation designed to show U.S. support for Ukraine in its war against an invading Russian army, a familiar lonely spot for the libertarian-leaning lawmaker frequently at odds with his party’s leaders.
But on Monday, Massie spoke to Trump for the first time in more than two years — and received the former president’s endorsement in the May 17 Kentucky primary. And on Tuesday, 56 Republicans joined Massie in opposing the latest push to send arms to the Ukrainian forces.
A six-reporter team for Der Spiegel writes about the difficulties of a rapid EU accession for Ukraine.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the EU has been remarkably united against the aggressor Russia. On the question of EU accession, however, it is striking how different the messages sent from Europe to Kyiv this week have been.
"We feel in our heart that Ukraine, through its fight and its courage, is already today a member of our Europe, of our family and of our union," French President Emmanuel Macron told members of the European Parliament in Strasbourg on Monday. But then he made it clear that there is a long way to go from being an emotional favorite to being an actual member. "We all know perfectly well that the process which would allow them to join, would in reality take several years, and most likely several decades."
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen has a completely different time horizon in mind. On the same days of Macron’s speech in Strasbourg, she had herself photographed during a video call with Zelenskyy . She announced that the Commission would decide on Ukraine’s candidate status as early as June. That would be the first step on the road to full membership in the EU.
Von der Leyen’s words suggest that Ukraine's potential candidate status is still up for consideration in Brussels. In reality, though, the decision has already been made. The Commission president has been determined for some time to open up a path to succession for Kyiv.
David Brennan of Newsweek reports that according to the Danish foreign minister, Turkey will likely not follow through with attempts to block Sweden and Finland from joining NATO.
NATO politicians, officials and commanders have broadly welcomed Finland's decision earlier this week to seek full alliance membership. Sweden is expected to follow suit, with both nations likely joining the transatlantic bloc during or shortly before the NATO summit in Madrid at the end of June.
But Turkey, long involved in fierce internal NATO disputes, has expressed reservations. "We are currently following developments regarding Sweden and Finland, but we don't feel positively about this," President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told reporters on Friday.
"We don't want to commit a mistake," the president added. "Scandinavian countries are like guesthouses for terrorist organisations. To go even further, they have seats in their parliaments, too."
Erdogan's remarks referred to members of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and Syrian Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG), which Turkey considers terrorist organizations. The president also appeared to be referring to followers of the U.S.-based Muslim scholar Fethullah Gulen, who Ankara blames for the failed 2016 coup attempt.
Choe Sang-Hun of The New York Times reports on the possible catastrophic future of a COVID-19 outbreak in North Korea.
State media said an additional 174,400 people had symptoms, like fever, that could be due to Covid-19, nearly a tenfold jump from the 18,000 such cases reported on Friday. It also said 21 more people had died in connection with the outbreak, bringing the country’s total to 27. But the reports did not say how many of the new infections or deaths had been definitively linked to Covid-19 through testing.
“North Korea is reporting only ‘people with fever’ because it does not have enough test kits,” said Cheong Seong-chang, the director of the Center for North Korean Studies of the Sejong Institute in South Korea. “Some of the people with fever may not be actual patients, but there could be far more cases among asymptomatic people without any fever. So the actual number of infected people will likely be more than the North has announced.”
Most of the newly reported deaths were caused by overdoses of medication and other negligence caused by a lack of medical expertise, North Korean health officials were quoted as saying during a high-level meeting on Saturday. At the meeting, Mr. Kim criticized health officials in the North’s ruling Workers’ Party for “incompetence” and “irresponsibility,” the state-run Korean Central News Agency said.
More on the North Korean COVID-19 outbreak from Kim Tong-Hyung and Hyung Jin-Kim of The Diplomat.
The North last year shunned millions of shots offered by the U.N.-backed COVAX distribution program, including doses of AstraZeneca and China’s Sinovac vaccines, possibly because of questions about their effectiveness and unwillingness to accept monitoring requirements. The country lacks the extreme-cold storage systems that are required for mRNA vaccines like Pfizer and Moderna, which have shown higher rates of preventing infection, serious illness, and death even against newer variants like Omicron.
The office of South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol, who took office Tuesday, said his government is willing to provide medical supplies and hopes to talk to the North about specific plans. It said the North hasn’t yet asked for its help.
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian said Beijing was ready to offer North Korea help but said he had no information about any such request being made. Asked whether China would be evacuating its nationals from North Korea, Zhao said Beijing will closely monitor the situation and maintain communication with the North to ensure the health and safety of Chinese citizens there.
North Korea’s claim of a perfect record in keeping out the virus for 2 1/2 years was widely doubted. But its extremely strict border closure, large-scale quarantines, and propaganda that stressed anti-virus controls as a matter of “national existence” may have staved off a huge outbreak until now.
Finally today, your 2022 Eurovision Winner: Ukraine featuring the Kalush Orchestra with their song “Stefania”.
Is that a flute that he’s playing? That turns a good but rather ordinary tune into a bit of a bop.
Which means that next year, Eurovision will be … may be … hosted in Ukraine?
Everyone have a good day!