NEW YORK — Nine months after she stepped into the job of New York governor as a relative unknown, Democrat Kathy Hochul easily locked up her party’s nomination Tuesday, setting her on an expected glide path to win the office in November.

Hochul was serving as an under-the-radar lieutenant governor under the shadow of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo until last year, when he resigned amid sexual harassment allegations, catapulting her into office.

Read more: Kathy Hochul Faced Childcare Struggles and Sexism at Work. Now She’s New York’s First Woman Governor

Hochul beat back primary challenges Tuesday from New York City’s elected public advocate, Jumaane Williams, and U.S. Rep. Tom Suozzi, a moderate from Long Island. She now turns her eyes to becoming the first woman to win election to the New York governor’s office this fall.
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In a nod to the barrier-breaking campaign, Hochul gave an election night speech Tuesday on a stage underneath a glass ceiling at an event space in Manhattan.

“I’m also here because I stand on the shoulders of generations of women, generations of women who constantly had to bang up against that glass ceiling. To the women of New York, this one’s for you,” Hochul said.

Hochul enters the general election campaign with a big advantage, running as the incumbent with a heavy fundraising advantage in a state that has more than twice as many registered Democrats than Republicans and has not had a GOP governor in 16 years.

She faces U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, who won the Republican Party’s nomination Tuesday. Zeldin is a staunch ally of former President Donald Trump and was among the Republicans in Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election results.

“Are we ready to fire Kathy Hochul?” Zeldin said to cheers as he spoke at a victory party on Long Island.

The Long Island congressman will try to become the first Republican elected governor in New York since Gov. George Pataki was reelected in 2002.

“This November, in the state of New York, one-party rule will end,” he said. “Kathy Hochul will get fired. We will restore balance and common sense to Albany again.”

Hochul’s prospects are expected to be even stronger this fall after the U.S. Supreme Court last week overturned the Roe v. Wade decision establishing abortion rights. She has made bolstering abortion rights a key plank of her campaign.

Read more: The Fall of Roe May Save Democrats in the Midterms, at Least in the Suburbs

Hochul repeated that in her Tuesday night speech, proclaiming that the state had “gone on offense to protect abortion rights” and “making the world know that New York State is a safe harbor for America’s women.”

Since taking office in August, Hochul has sought to step out from Cuomo’s shadow, promising a clean break from his administration. She has said she was not close to the former governor, who has denied wrongdoing, and was not around to witness any alleged misbehavior.

Still, Cuomo’s presence loomed over her campaign early on when he began making public appearances this past spring, criticizing Hochul and Democrats in Albany over their approach to crime and suggesting he might run for his old job. Despite suggesting he might run as an independent, the former governor ultimately did not file to run.

Zeldin is an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel who has represented eastern Long Island in Congress since 2015.

He defeated primary challenges from former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, businessman Harry Wilson and Andrew Giuliani, the son of New York City’s former mayor Rudy Giuliani, who frequently campaigned for his son.

He has focused his campaign on rising crime and criticized Hochul for not toughening the state’s bail laws, for imposing COVID-19 mitigation mandates and for rising costs. And despite Hochul seeking to project a fresh start from Cuomo, Zeldin has referred repeatedly to the “Cuomo-Hochul Administration.”

“New Yorkers are hitting their breaking point. They’re deciding whether or not to stay here or head to other places,” he said.

He will have to persuade the state’s independent voters, which outnumber Republicans, along with Democrats in order to win the general election. Democrats are expected to focus on Zeldin’s vocal defense of Trump during both of his impeachments and objection to the election results. Hochul is also likely to focus on Zeldin’s statements praising the U.S. Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe v. Wade and his comment that, as governor, he would appoint an anti-abortion state health commissioner.

“We must answer one question,” she said Tuesday night. “Are we going to move New York forward, or let the far-right extremist drag our state backwards?”

Hochul focused her campaign on steps she took to bolster abortion rights and moves to toughen the state’s gun laws after a racist mass shooting in Buffalo.

Read more: What Abortion Safe Haven States Can Do

Suozzi and Williams criticized her for her endorsement a decade ago from the National Rifle Association and over her plan to spend more than $1.1 billion in state and county funds on building and maintaining a new stadium for her hometown Buffalo Bills.

She also faced questions about her choice for lieutenant governor, Brian Benjamin, who was arrested on federal corruption charges in April related to his campaign funds.

Benjamin pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing. Hochul pointed to the short time frame she had to pick a No. 2 and said she had been assured that any questions previously raised about Benjamin’s campaign fundraising had been resolved.

Hochul replaced Benjamin with Antonio Delgado, who stepped down from his seat in Congress to accept the role. Delgado, also Hochul’s choice for a running mate, won his primary Tuesday. Zeldin’s running mate Alison Esposito is the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor.

Tuesday’s election in New York covered statewide offices and state Assembly races, but primary elections for U.S. House seats and the state Senate will be held Aug. 23. Those elections were delayed because of a redistricting lawsuit that led a court to throw out new political maps.

— Associated Press writer Michael R. Sisak in New York contributed to this report.

In the early 1970s, when lawyers representing the state of Texas argued Roe v. Wade before the U.S. Supreme Court, they argued that a fetus is a person. Because a fetus is a person, they told the Justices, a fetus is entitled to all the protections guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment including a right to “life.”

In 1973, the high court ruled that Texas was wrong. “The word ‘person,’ as used in the Fourteenth Amendment, does not include the unborn,” wrote Justice Harry Blackmun in his landmark opinion. The Supreme Court held that personhood could not be granted to a fetus before “viability”—the point around 24 weeks of pregnancy when a fetus can survive outside the womb—and established a constitutional right to abortion access.
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But nearly 50 years later, Roe was overturned, and Justice Samuel Alito declared in the Supreme Court’s majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization on Friday that Roe was “egregiously wrong from the start.” Now, laws that establish fetal personhood—meaning they extend the legal rights of people to a fetus or embryo before viability—could be the next frontier in the legal battle over reproductive rights in the United States.

Not all abortion bans establish fetal personhood. But all pre-viability fetal personhood laws ban abortion—and could have even broader implications for reproductive healthcare access and the potential criminalization of pregnancy. “Abortion laws regulate a procedure,” says Rebecca Kluchin, a professor at California State University, Sacramento, who recently wrote a piece for the Washington Post criticizing such policies. “Fetal personhood laws allow the state to regulate pregnant women.”

While 13 states had already enacted “trigger laws” designed to ban all or nearly all abortions once Roe was overturned, at least six states have also introduced legislation to ban abortion by establishing fetal personhood, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

Litigation over such laws has already begun. Last year, Arizona’s Republican Governor Doug Ducey enacted an abortion ban that gave “an unborn child at every stage of development all rights, privileges, and immunities available to other persons, citizens, and residents.” Cathi Herrod, the president of the conservative Christian advocacy group Center for Arizona Policy (CAP), says CAP supported Arizona’s law because they “stand for the belief that human life begins at the moment of conception, that life is a human right, and unborn children deserve protection.” The ACLU of Arizona and the Center for Reproductive Rights sued, and on Saturday filed an emergency motion asking a judge to block the implementation of the law in the wake of the fall of Roe, arguing the law’s “vagueness” violates the right to due process and could put abortion providers and pregnant people at risk of criminal prosecution. The judge has yet to rule on the motion and a hearing will be held in July. (The Arizona attorney general’s office did not respond to TIME’s request for comment.)

Read More: The Fight Over Abortion Has Only Just Begun

The Supreme Court declined to weigh in on fetal personhood in Dobbs: “Our opinion is not based on any view about if and when prenatal life is entitled to any of the rights enjoyed after birth,” Alito wrote. It remains to be seen how fetal personhood will hold up in court in Arizona and elsewhere. “I think the challenge for many of us is that we will be living in a legal gray area for a long time,” says Dana Sussman, the deputy executive directive at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which provides legal defense for pregnant people, including women who have had abortions. “Case law will have to be developed, or statutes will have to be clarified, because the scope of [Roe’s fall] is just so monumental, I don’t know that anyone truly has an answer to how this will all play out.”

The implications of fetal personhood on pregnancy

Critics of fetal personhood laws argue the state cannot bestow legal rights onto a fetus or embryo without subjugating the rights of the pregnant person.

In theory, fetal personhood laws could impact the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF), a procedure that uses a combination of medicines and surgical procedures to help sperm fertilize an egg and then implant the embryo into the uterus. A round of IVF can create multiple embryos, which can be frozen indefinitely. Fetal personhood laws could also impact contraception access, given that some members of the anti-abortion movement argue that IUDs and the emergency contraception Plan B can prevent the implantation of a fertilized egg and violate personhood, explains Mary Ziegler, an abortion law historian at the University of California, Davis, School of Law. (The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists say that those forms of contraception work by preventing fertilization in the first place.)

Fetal personhood laws could also have major implications for pregnant people. If a fetus is legally considered a person, then child endangerment laws can apply. A state could potentially say pregnant people can only eat certain foods, or punish a pregnant person who is seen drinking, or compel someone to have a cesarean section they are refusing, says Kluchin. If a pregnant woman must undergo chemotherapy for cancer treatment, adds Ziegler, she could in theory be told to delay care until she gives birth so she does not harm the fetus, as the New Yorker reports has “routinely” occurred with pregnant women in Poland. (Many U.S. abortion laws have narrow exceptions for when the mother’s life is in danger.)

Establishing fetal personhood could put people who self-induce abortions at risk for criminal prosecution, says Jolynn Dellinger, a senior lecturing fellow at Duke Law School. It could also impact people who miscarry. Leslie J. Reagan, a professor of history at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, says prior to Roe, if someone went to the hospital or called a doctor about a miscarriage, they were often questioned on whether they had induced an abortion. Reagan’s research found that beginning in the early 1900s and running up until Roe in the 1970s, doctors and nurses sometimes functioned as the arm of the police, even threatening to deny care to patients if they did not provide information. “They were all suspects,” says Reagan. “[Doctors] couldn’t tell if it was a natural miscarriage or whether they had induced it, and they came to assume that anyone who came in bleeding, miscarrying, had induced it—and began to ask questions.”

Did fetal personhood laws exist before Roe fell?

Roe explicitly banned laws from establishing fetal personhood before the “viability” line. But the logic of fetal personhood has been used for decades in policies and enforcement against women, particularly low-income women of color, in the later stages of pregnancy.

A peer-reviewed study by the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) found 413 cases from 1973 to 2005 of women who were arrested or otherwise deprived of their physical liberty because they were accused of hurting their fetus, often because they were found to have tested positive for drugs. And the numbers are picking up: a similar study by NAPW examining data from 2006 to 2020 found roughly 1,331 examples of such cases. (The majority of cases in the NAPW study resulted in healthy birth outcomes.) Some states have laws specifically extending a viable fetus separate legal protections from those of the pregnant person, while in others prosecutors have extended child endangerment or homicide laws to instances where a fetus was harmed.

With the fall of Roe, anti-abortion activists are calling for broader laws that extend similar legal protections to embryos and fetuses. Some were previously ruled unconstitutional, like Georgia’s HB 481, which includes language that states “natural persons include an unborn child,” allows people to claim a fetus as a dependent on tax forms, and requires state officials to count a fetus toward Georgia’s population for official population count purposes. The law was struck down in 2020, but after the Supreme Court overturned Roe on Friday, Georgia’s attorney general filed a notice requesting the decision be reversed.

Read More: The Failure of the Feminist Industrial Complex

A federal fetal personhood law was also introduced last year in both chambers of Congress. The Life at Conception Act, which would extend fetuses and embryos a constitutional “right to life” beginning at the moment of fertilization, has 164 cosponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Still, many of these new laws will likely face legal challenges. While there is no longer a constitutional right to an abortion, fetal personhood laws could still be challenged for violating state constitutions, or for violating the constitutional right to due process because of vague wording, like the ACLU’s lawsuit in Arizona claims.

“There are a lot of unanswered questions that we’ll have to see laid out,” says Ziegler. “[Fetal personhood laws] are much more likely to be enforceable than would have been the case before, but we still can’t be sure until the litigation is done.”

—With reporting by Abigail Abrams/New York

Former President Donald Trump allegedly physically assaulted a Secret Service officer on Jan. 6 2021, when the president’s security detail refused to drive him to the Capitol to be with his supporters who planned to block the congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election victory, a former top White House aide told the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on Tuesday.

In explosive testimony, Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, told the panel that the former President desperately wanted to go to the Capitol on Jan. 6, despite dire warnings from White House lawyers.
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According to Hutchinson, when Trump got in The Beast—the bullet-proof limousine that carries the president—following his infamous address whipping up his supporters, he demanded the officers take him to the seat of Congress. “I’m the effing president, take me up to the Capitol now,” Trump reportedly told his security detail.

When his lead security detail, Bobby Engel, told him they couldn’t because it was not secure, the “president had a very strong, very angry response,” Hutchinson testified that former Deputy Chief of Staff Tony Ornato told her. After Engel still refused, Trump tried to grab the steering wheel, Hutchinson said. After a Secret Service agent told him, “Sir you need to take your hand off the steering wheel,” he allegedly lunged at him and grabbed the agent’s throat.

The jaw-dropping scene was just one in a vivid portrait Hutchinson provided Tuesday of an unhinged president unwilling to relinquish power—and who had no compunction with his supporters turning violent to keep him in office.

Hutchinson testified that the president was “furious” on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, when the rally space outside the Ellipse was not full. The Secret Service had informed the White House that many of his supporters did not want to enter because of the magnetometers—referred to as “mags”—that would detect weapons, which many of the rioters on that day had in their possession, including AR-15s and other kinds of firearms, knives, and spears.

Trump was unfazed. “I don’t f-cking care that they have weapons,” he told the Secret Service, according to Hutchinson. “They’re not here to hurt me. Take the f-cking mags away. Let my people in. They can march to the Capitol from here.”

When Trump returned to the White House, he was having a tantrum, Hutchinson conveyed. At one point, she walked into the dining room outside the Oval Office and noticed ketchup dripping from the walls and broken plates on the floor.

Hutchinson also shared with the panel the intense discussions inside the West Wing, trying to thwart the president or anyone on staff from going up to the Capitol building on Jan. 6. She testified that White House counsel Pat Cipollone told her, “We’re going to get charged with every crime imaginable,” and told her to try to prevent Trump and her direct superior, Meadows, from traveling to the Capitol.

The criminal charges that concerned him, Hutchinson said, was obstruction of a congressional proceeding and intent to defraud the U.S. Congress.

Before Tuesday, the committee had held five hearings throughout June. They have revealed how a number of White House advisers told the President that his claims of widespread voter fraud were baseless and that his attempts to overturn the election were legally unsound. One hearing highlighted Trump’s pressure campaigns on former Vice President Mike Pence to reject the congressional certification of the Electoral College. Another examined the experiences of state election officials in crucial swing states, who faced intense harassment by Trump supporters. The most recent hearing focused on efforts to pressure the Justice Department to aid in the administration’s efforts to nullify Biden’s election victory.

But since the first hearing on June 9, which garnered nearly 20 million viewers, the committee has amassed more information relevant to its findings, leading the members to plan at least one more hearing than originally planned and to consider scheduling even more to present new evidence to the public. “Every day, new stuff is coming out,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland and a member of the panel, told TIME after the third hearing.

Last week, the panel announced it would take a two-week hiatus from the hearings to determine how to incorporate its newly unveiled information. But then, on Monday, the committee jolted Wasington by announcing a surprise hearing with less than 24 hours notice to “present recently obtained evidence and receive witness testimony.” By Tuesday morning, the panel announced the hearing would focus on testimony from Hutchinson, who had extensive access to Trump and his inner circle in the days and weeks leading up to the assault on the Capitol.

When the committee reconvences in July, it’s expected to pick up on a hearing led by Raskin and Rep. Stephanie Murphy, Democrat of Florida, on the extremist groups such as the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who stormed the Capitol.

Tuesday’s hearing was one of the most incendiary thus far. “We can never let this man-child Trump ever become president again,” Rep. Ruben Gallego, Democrat of Arizona, told reporters outside the hearing.

Hutchinson’s testimony garnered a reaction that no other had received to date. As she exited the hearing room when the committee broke for a short recess, a crowd in the back applauded her.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

About 30 miles west of Grand Junction, Colo., aspiring paleontologists can sidle up next to working professionals and guides from The Museums of Western Colorado. There, they offer half-day, full-day, and multi-day visits to the Mygatt-Moore Quarry, which has been turning out dinosaur bones on the Colorado-Utah border with regularity since the early 1980s. The visits aren’t cheap, can be hellishly hot and dusty, and guests can’t keep what they find—this is protected land, after all—but it’s a great way to get up close to an extinct species like the Allosaurus.
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For those looking to save a few bucks but see a similarly past-its-heyday species, one could also dust off what remains of the Colorado Republican Party. Once a mighty force, it has atrophied in recent years to the point of being unrecognizable. Although it’s not yet extinct, no one would accuse the state party of being a real force. In fact, in Tuesday’s primaries, not a single incumbent is seeking re-nomination to a statewide office and most of the races feature at least one supporter of former President Donald’s Trump Big Lie about the 2020 election. Democrats, perhaps overly confident that the election deniers can’t win in November, are even throwing money at Republican races to help those candidates come out on top on Tuesday.

From the outside, the status of the Colorado party is a cautionary tale about what happens when the Establishment abdicates its protective role. Trumpism subsumed Republican identity in the state, and those who started the Trump era in power found themselves tossed by the time Biden was in the White House. Rep. Scott Tipton, who represented the western Colorado district for five terms, lost the 2020 primary to Lauren Boebert, a gun rights advocate who campaigned with a Glock strapped to the hip. Tipton’s support for Trump through the Access Hollywood tape and two impeachments proved insufficient for the district, and voters tossed one of the original members of Ronald Reagan’s political operations from office in exchange for someone seemingly designed to troll indiscriminately; in other words, the latest MAGA celebrity.

It’s been the same elsewhere. As a Republican senator, Cory Gardner impressed his colleagues enough to run the Senate Republicans’ campaign arm in 2018. He stepped aside in 2020, when it was time to seek a second term. (Generally, senators don’t get to hold the checkbook as they’re fighting their own races back home.) He lost to the state’s Democratic governor, John Hickenlooper, more of a sign of Colorado’s shifting demographics than any weaknesses from Gardner. By the time Election Night 2020 was over, Republicans would also lose control of the board that oversees the state’s third-largest employer, the University of Colorado system, for the first time in 41 years.

Just twice since 2004 have Coloradans sided with the GOP in top-of-the-ticket races. The slow fade of Republicans in the state has been years in the making and hardly came from nowhere. More than a decade ago, demographers began describing a more cosmopolitan region forming. They called it The New West, and Denver was its capital. National Democrats issued a clear warning to Republicans—in Denver and D.C. alike—when they selected the Mile High City as the site for its 2008 nominating convention. In picking a city that hadn’t hosted a political convention in 100 years, Democrats were telegraphing an optimism that they could put in play a state that had last voted for a Democratic nominee in 1992.

The push westward struck some as misguided. But the gamble worked.

Republicans, meanwhile, saw their standing cratere to its lowest level of power since World War II. Democrats now control 20 of the 35 seats in the state senate and 41 of the 65 seats in the state house. In the federal delegation, just two of the nine members are Republican; neither is a member of the Senate.

While it’s embarrassing to the conservatives who previously dominated the Western Slope and the homeschooling hub of Colorado Springs, there are decidedly national implications. The last Republican presidential ticket to carry Colorado was George W. Bush in 2004. The party has been among the hardest pivots in the country toward Trumpism. And, if the fears of the NeverTrumpers are grounded in reality, a whole slate of Big Lie adherents could wind up the Republican nominees for a number of statewide posts. And it appears the most meaningful efforts to save Colorado Republicans from the specter of Trump actually are coming from Democrats.

From the outside, the party chaos may be fodder for plenty of Schadenfreude for Democrats. But it’s actually a dangerous situation,

In the race for Secretary of State, three Republicans are vying in the primary, only one who believes Joe Biden was legitimately elected president. Former Colorado County Clerks Association director Pam Anderson has refused to play along with the party’s fibs and says her former colleagues ran a fair 2020 count. She’s running against Mesa County Auditor Tina Peters, a Trump loyalist who is under indictment for charges related to tampering with election machines. Peters has pleaded not-guilty, but it’s just another reminder of how much reach Trump has—and what a potential 2024 comeback from Trump could bring with it, especially if the top election chiefs are willing to do what none would in 2020. The third candidate, Mike O’Donnell, has also humored Trump’s Big Lie.

And in almost every other major race, the qualifications come down to those who think Trump should be sitting in the White House right now and those who do not. Democrats are playing in many of those races, but they would be wise to remember that a fuse seldom can be extinguished, and they may well have helped elevate ~to live with~ candidates from the fringe into positions of power.

Democrats make up about 28% of active voters, according to the Secretary of State’s office. Republicans count 25% of the state on the active rolls. That leaves the balance of the state unaffiliated, and they can vote in either primary. And while they lean Democratic in general elections, they aren’t above playing in the GOP backyard.

It’s that final note that has Democrats opening their wallets to meddle in GOP primaries. It’s become far more common than when then-Sen. Claire McCaskill and her team studied which Missouri Republican would be easiest to defeat in 2012—and then unapologetically spent $1.7 million to help him win his primary.

Now, looking around the must-win states, Democratic dollars are flooding markets trying to shepherd the weakest Republican to the nomination. In Colorado, a liberal super PAC is spending heavily to help state Rep. Ron Hanks to win the GOP nomination to challenge Sen. Michael Bennet, seen as one of the most vulnerable Democrats on the ballot this year. To outside super PACs’ thinking, the $2 million spent now might save them $20 million down the road against a more mainstream candidate in Joe O’Dea, a businessman who doesn’t subscribe to the Big Like like Hanks.

And in the race for governor, Democrats have dumped trucks of cash into state-based dark money groups to promote former Parker Mayor Greg Lopez—and his easy-to-attack history—over University of Colorado regent Heidi Ganahl, the only statewide Republican official on the ballot.

Back in the Dino Dig part of the state, some Democrats are trying to help the Republican challenger to Boebert, not because they have hope that one of their own could win that district in November but rather to derail what they see as an authoritarian threat from her and some of her other Trumpian comrades. It matches how Utah Democrats are acting in another enclave with few hopes of a win. The same phenomenon may have helped defeat Trump’s candidates in Georgia. In Colorado, as in other states, Democrats just want to purge the Trump element from the system, even if it means a loss this cycle. After all, eventually someone digs up the fossils and restores them.

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Most Americans are in favor of policies that protect people who identify as transgender from discrimination. Most Americans also believe that trans individuals should be allowed to use the bathroom that reflects their gender identity. But a growing majority of Americans believe that whether a person is a man or woman is determined by the sex they were assigned at birth, according to a new survey.

Attitudes towards gender are at a curious crossroads. Essentially, at the same time that most Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center support a range of policies to protect the rights of trans people, a full 60% do not believe that a person’s gender can be different from their sex assigned at birth, according to the May 2022 poll of 10,188 U.S. adults. And that opinion is growing in popularity, up from 56% when the same question was asked in a survey last year.
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The authors of the study at Pew, a non-partisan, non-advocacy polling and social science research firm, say that the increase in the number of people who believe gender is the same as sex given at birth was not led by any particular group. “Certainly Republicans are more likely to say that than Democrats,” says Anna Brown, a research associate at Pew and one of the co-authors of the study. “But it’s increased among both Republicans and Democrats.” The respondents more likely to believe that gender and sex were indivisible included those older than 50, and those with a high school education or less. When broken down by race, Black respondents were also more likely than other races to agree that gender and sex were the same.

However, even among those who hold that view, there’s a diversity of opinion about what rights transgender people should be accorded. “There’s a lot of different nuanced views within that group,” says Brown. “Half of adults in this group say they would favor laws that would protect trans people from discrimination. About one in four say forms and online profiles should include options other than male or female.”

The report suggests that America’s views about policies that affect trans people are also complex. More than half of the respondents support rules that require trans athletes to compete on teams that align with the sex they were assigned at birth. But a majority also believe public elementary schools should be allowed to teach lessons about gender identity. Nearly half of American adults say it’s important to use the new name of a person who has transitioned but only about a third say the same about using their new pronouns.

The study also suggests that public opinion on trans rights may be becoming less progressive—at least for the moment. “The share [of people] saying that society has gone too far in accepting trans people has grown since 2017,” notes Brown. On the other hand, young people are more likely believe gender and sex at birth are not intrinsically linked; half of those under 30 hold this view. “Adults aged 65 and older are the most likely to say that views on these issues are changing too quickly,” says Brown, “while those younger than 30 are the most willing to say they’re actually not changing quickly enough.” Younger Democrats are more accepting of a range of gender identities than older Democrats, but age makes less difference among Republicans.

There was some unity in the opinions, however. Both groups, no matter what they believed about the link between the sex they were assigned at birth and gender, said the most important factor influencing their views was science.

(Washington) — The House panel investigating the Capitol insurrection will hear testimony Tuesday from Cassidy Hutchinson, a top aide in Donald Trump’s White House who is a vital witness in the sweeping investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

Hutchinson, a special assistant and aide to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, has already provided a trove of information to the committee and its investigators and sat for multiple interviews behind closed doors.

In brief excerpts of testimony revealed in court filings, Hutchinson told the committee she was in the room for White House meetings where challenges to the election were debated and discussed, including with Republican lawmakers.
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The House panel has not explained why it abruptly scheduled the 1 p.m. hearing as lawmakers were away from Washington on a two-week recess. The committee had said last week that there would be no more hearings until July.

Hutchinson previously told the committee that Meadows had been advised of intelligence reports showing the potential for violence on Jan. 6 and that several Republican lawmakers who had been involved in efforts to reject the electoral tally or submit “fake electors” had sought pardons to avoid potential criminal prosecution.

Hutchinson also told the committee that Meadows and others working on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election were told by the White House counsel’s office that a plan to use fake slates of electors as part of the president’s desperate effort to cling to power was “not legally sound,” according to court documents.

She has also detailed how Jeffrey Clark — a top Justice Department official who championed Trump’s false claims of election fraud and whom the president contemplated naming as attorney general — was a “frequent presence” at the White House. The plot to remove the then-acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, unraveled during a Jan. 3, 2021 meeting in the Oval Office when other senior Justice Department officials warned Trump that they would resign if he followed through with his plan to replace Rosen with Clark.

The precise subject of Tuesday’s hearing remained unclear, but the panel’s announcement Monday said it would be “to present recently obtained evidence and receive witness testimony.” A spokesman for the panel declined to elaborate and Hutchinson’s lawyer did not immediately respond to emails seeking comment.

The person familiar with the committee’s plans to call Hutchinson could not discuss the matter publicly and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.

The committee’s investigation has been ongoing during the hearings, which started three weeks ago, and the nine-member panel has continued to probe the attack by Trump supporters. Among other investigative evidence, the committee recently obtained new footage of Trump and his inner circle taken both before and after Jan. 6 from British filmmaker Alex Holder.

Holder said last week that he had complied with a congressional subpoena to turn over all the footage he shot in the final weeks of Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, including exclusive interviews with Trump, his children and then-Vice President Mike Pence. The footage includes material from before the insurrection and afterward.

Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the panel’s Democratic chairman, told reporters last week that the committee was in possession of the footage and needed more time to go through the hours of video.

The panel has held five hearings so far, mostly laying out Trump’s pressure campaign on various institutions of power in the weeks leading up to the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress, when hundreds of the Republican’s supporters violently pushed past police, broke into the building and interrupted the certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.

The committee has used the hearings to detail the pressure from Trump and his allies on Pence, on the states that were certifying Biden’s win, and on the Justice Department. The panel has used live interviews, video testimony of its private witness interviews and footage of the attack to detail what it has learned.

Lawmakers said last week that the two July hearings would focus on domestic extremists who breached the Capitol that day and on what Trump was doing as the violence unfolded.

Leaders of the world’s most advanced economies have agreed to start a Climate Club where members agree on joint rules and standards in the fight against global warming with the hope that it will avoid spats over green tariffs.

The Group of Seven nations reached a deal on the issue at a three-day summit in Bavaria, Germany, that ended on Tuesday. It’s a significant achievement for German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who has made better coordination on climate protection measures a key theme of his G-7 presidency.

“We note with concern that currently neither global climate ambition nor implementation are sufficient to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement,” the final G-7 leaders said in a statement. The Climate Club will address that by “accelerating climate action and increasing ambition, with a particular focus on the industry sector.”
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Scholz has argued that the Climate Club would help eliminate a chaotic patchwork of national regulations that could increase the risk of new trade conflicts as countries slap levies or tariffs on imports deemed less sustainable. It will also potentially help mitigate disadvantages faced by companies doing business in regions with more ambitious carbon-reduction goals, and put pressure on non-members to adopt stricter climate protection measures.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank are supportive of the effort. Currently, the members of the club only include the G-7, leaving out major polluters including China, India, Indonesia and South Africa.

The G-7 leaders said the Climate Club will be “inclusive in nature and open to countries that are committed to the full implementation of the Paris Agreement.” They encouraged large emitters, Group of 20 members and other emerging economies to “intensify discussions and consultations with us on this matter.”

Still, questions over how the Climate Club will function in practice need to be ironed out by the end of the year. The IMF has previously advocated setting a minimum price floor for carbon emissions. In theory, this would only require a small number of large emitters to sign up in order to cover around 85% of global carbon pollution. But it runs the risk of clashing with Germany’s goal to create an open and collaborate system that doesn’t exclude developing countries.

There are also concerns about equity, with the European Union’s plans for a carbon border levy set to make it much harder for the poorest nations to export certain carbon-intensive products to the bloc. And there are methodological challenges, such as how to include countries such as the US that currently don’t put a price on carbon. As a start, the Climate Club could focus instead on targeting certain high-emitting sectors, such as steel or cement. Other areas of cooperation, including the production and trade of hydrogen could also be included.

While some experts have praised the concept and its fundamental goal of increasing cooperation, success will depend on how inclusive the group will be and how rules and standards will be negotiated as it grows.

“It is an example of the kind of different forms of global collaboration we need to actually help countries decarbonize their particularly industrial sectors,” said Alex Scott, a program leader at climate think tank E3G. “It could be a potentially really impactful idea, but it needs to be designed beyond just the G-7 countries themselves.”

Three days after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republican-controlled states are moving fast to outlaw abortion, and frustration is growing among Democrats in Congress that the Biden administration isn’t acting boldly enough to meet the moment.

“I want President Biden to do absolutely everything in his power to protect access to abortion in America,” Sen. Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington, tells TIME. “Let’s really push the envelope to protect women in this country, and let’s do it now.”

Biden promised as much on Friday in a White House address shortly after the decision was announced, yet it came with a caveat: He can only do so much. “My administration will use all of its appropriate lawful powers,” he said. “But Congress must act.”
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In the days since, many Democrats have called on the White House to take more sweeping actions to protect abortion rights in a post-Roe America, while the White House has grappled with the limits of executive power to legally address the situation.

Many advocates view that approach as overly cautious. “There are all sorts of things that this government could be doing,” says Stephanie Schmid, a former legal counsel for the Center for Reproductive Rights. “Will they be challenged in court? Absolutely. Does that mean we shouldn’t be throwing everything at the wall to show people the power of the federal government?”

Since the Supreme Court ended a constitutional right to abortion, the White House has moved to increase access to medication abortion by mail and protect doctors and patients from criminal liability in states where the procedure is a crime. Within hours of the ruling, the Department of Justice said that states couldn’t ban the abortion pill Mifepristone. Legal experts argue the statement underscores how state laws are preempted by federal regulations; the Food and Drug Administration has approved use of the medication within 10 weeks of pregnancy.

Many Democrats in Congress say those moves should have already been followed by additional efforts. Weeks before the ruling, Murray, along with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, organized a letter calling on the president to issue an executive order that would direct the federal government to “develop a national plan” to defend women’s reproductive freedom. Twenty five Senators — half the Democratic Caucus — signed it in the wake of a leaked draft of the decision.

The letter ticked off policy ideas such as expanding access to medication abortion, providing resources for women to travel accross state lines to seek abortions, and allowing Medicaid beneficiaries to obtain family planning services from a provider of their choice. It also urged the administration to explore an audacious proposal for the federal government to lease federal land to abortion providers, with the theory being that state laws wouldn’t be applicable there. Since the high court announced its decision, that novel idea has been touted by some of the nation’s most prominent Democrats, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.

White House officials, however, have raised serious concerns about the feasibility of creating federal abortion enclaves in states where the procedure is banned. “While this proposal is well-intentioned, it could put women and providers at risk,” a White House official who declined to be named tells TIME. “And importantly, in states where abortion is now illegal, women and providers who are not federal employees could be potentially be prosecuted.”

Even some of the policy’s advocates recognize that it would put the government in tricky “untested” waters. Rachel Rebouché, the interim dean at Temple University’s law school, says a statute called the Assimilation of Crimes Act means doctors and women might still be at risk of criminal liability.

The statute “says if there is no federal law on point, then the federal jurisdiction will assimilate the state criminal law and that’s what will apply,” she explains to TIME. Other skeptics have pointed to the Hyde Amendment, which general prohibits federal taxpayer funds from going toward abortions.

“The president opposes the Hyde Amendment, but it remains law and generally prohibits funding abortion except in cases of rape, incest, and threats to the life of the mother,” the White House official says. “We are going to continue to look at everything we can do, consistent with Hyde, to protect a woman’s right to choose.”

Vice President Kamala Harris also seemed to dismiss the idea on Monday when asked about it on CNN. “It’s not right now what we are discussing,” she said.

Roughly half of the states are expected to ban abortion after the ruling. Thirteen states have so-called trigger laws on the books that were designed to ban or restrict abortions in the event that the Supreme Court struck down Roe, though some of those are facing court challenges. Ten other states have laws banning abortions from before the landmark 1973 ruling that will now go back into effect. And several other GOP-led states, such as Ohio, are moving to pass abortion restrictions.

Meanwhile, some national Republican leaders, like former Vice President Mike Pence, want to restrict abortion access even further, calling for Republicans to keep pushing for a national ban.

With little Biden can do to change the situation in the immediate future, he’s making it a political issue—arguing to voters that electing more Democrats in November would enable them to enshrine abortion rights into federal law.

“The president is being straight with the American people, taking major actions under executive authority as he fights this extreme decision very hard but being clear and honest that only Congress can fix the situation,” the White House official says.

Murray, for her part, echoed the same sentiment. “There are limits to what the president can do on his own—and as Republicans eye a nationwide abortion ban, the clearest path to protecting a woman’s right to make her own health care decisions, free of interference from extreme politicians, is by electing a pro-choice majority in the Senate and protecting our pro-choice majority in the House,” she says.

Shortly after the draft ruling leaked in May, Democrats pushed through a vote on a bill that had passed the House codifying a national right to an abortion. But in the evenly split Senate, 60 votes are needed to override a filibuster and the Democratic caucus has 50 members. Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona refused to change the Senate rules for the bill, allowing Republicans to block it.

Barring a change of heart from Manchin and Sinema, the only real solution, the White House argues, is to elect more Democrats willing to get rid of or modify the filibuster.

In the coming days, Democrats in Congress will try again to shore up support for those seeking abortions in states where it is banned, by considering a measure to bar states from prohibiting individuals from receiving medication by mail from other states and localities, according to sources familiar with the matter. But with the support of 60 votes needed in the Senate, the effort is essentially doomed to failure, a House Democratic aide tells TIME.

“Federally,” the staffer says, “we’re at a dead end.”

The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on June 24th triggered immediate bans on abortion in several states, which had put in place laws primed to shutter abortion clinics within their borders in anticipation of the ruling.

The new law of the land, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, gives each state the power to deny access to abortion services. An estimated 36 million people were immediately affected, as the so-called “trigger laws” took effect (though a Louisiana judge on Monday put that state’s ban on hold). Other states, however, are expanding access.
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Which states are abortion ‘safe havens’?

At least 16 states and Washington D.C. plan to continue to protect abortion rights on the state level.

Several of those states–California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Washington-have been strengthening abortion protections to help meet a rise in demand by individuals who might travel from out-of-state for care.

What abortion safe haven states can—and can’t do.

State legislatures have the power to bolster abortion access in several ways–directing more funding towards abortion clinics; requiring health insurance plans to cover procedures; or expanding the type of medical professionals who are allowed to provide abortion..

For example, Oregon lawmakers this year allocated $15 million dollars through the Oregon Reproductive Equity Fund to help pay the travel expenses for people coming from states with strict abortion laws. California and Maryland both recently passed laws to ensure that abortion costs will be covered by insurance providers. Four states have expanded the pool of medical professionals who can provide abortion, allowing nurse practitioners and physician assistants to administer abortions.

But while states are working to cover costs and expand access, there is still little legal protection in place for those who cross state lines for an abortion. Connecticut lawmakers passed a bill earlier this year that protects individuals and providers who travel for abortions from being charged under other states more restrictive laws–by modifying the state’s extradition statutes and and preventing an out-of-state patient’s medical records from being disclosed.

What could happen next

Texas’s abortion ban provides a look at what’s to come for safe haven states. In the four months after Texas banned almost all abortions after six weeks, Planned Parenthood said its clinics in neighboring states saw a nearly 800% increase in abortion patients. Though politicians in a state might promise continued abortion access for all who seek it, providing it will depend on the capacity of the abortion centers, which will need more funding and medical professionals to keep up with the rise in demand.

There’s also the question of whether states with abortion bans will move to punish traveling across state lines to receive an abortion. Missouri proposed a law that would that would allow individuals to sue anyone who helps help a patient cross state lines for an abortion, though the law was later blocked.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

For decades, while conservatives were patiently waiting for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, they were busy undermining it. In Congress and in statehouses, they pushed policies to make it harder to secure legal abortions, efforts that helped to widen the gap between the two major parties. And yet during the same time, most Americans settled into a complacent state in which they assumed Roe was settled law, even among those whom Republican Presidents appointed to federal benches.
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Well, on Friday, conservatives finally got their wish. The proverbial dog caught the car—and, at least politically, may come to regret it. Americans are still digesting the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling and its potential far-reaching consequences that could stretch from reproductive rights to personal relationships and marriage equality. But there will be no dodging this topic on the campaign trail.

It’s still early, and Election Day is a relatively distant 19 weeks away. But quick polling conducted in the days since the Supreme Court struck down the 1973 precedent shows political problems for Republicans, who otherwise seemed on a glide path toward November. Historically, the party that holds the White House has a dismal showing in its first test with voters; only the Sept. 11 attacks spared an incumbent President that insult back in 2002. President Joe Biden’s job approval numbers are among the worst since World War II, inflation is a persistent irritant to the electorate, and high gas prices are hitting everyone. Put another way, Republicans would have to really try to mess up their hand.

Yet on abortion rights, Democrats seemingly have an advantage on a topic dominating the news and likely to remain top of mind as almost every state will be forced to revisit its abortion policies. A record number of voters say abortion will be the issue that determines their vote this year, according to Gallup, and recent polls suggest a jump in interest in the midterms that seem to favor Democrats. Yet the threat of apathy and exhaustion is real, and sustaining outrage is hard work.

One group in particular may have outsized sway: college-educated women who determine the outcomes in the swingy suburbs. Many came to regret their support for Trump in 2016, and went back to supporting Democrats in the following two elections. Now they are none-too-happy with the Dobbs ruling. A significant 71% of college-educated white women support abortion rights, a recent NPR poll found, and they are a must-win bloc for Democrats’ longterm prospects.

Even before the Supreme Court issued its ruling, the number of Americans who told Gallup pollsters that they identified as “pro-life” was at its lowest level since 1996. A near-record 55% of those surveyed said they identified as “pro-choice” and, in a first, a majority—52%—said abortion was morally acceptable. Over decades of polls, Gallup has found increasing support for abortion, and even in the last year, support for abortion rights has grown across every single demographic group.

Since Friday’s ruling, voters seem to have doubled down. An NPR-Marist poll over the weekend found 56% of all adults opposed the decision and 53% of independents said the same. And in a reason for Republican alarm, 66% of suburban women said they opposed it, alongside 70% of white women who graduated from college.

The same NPR-Marist survey found, among all registered voters, 48% of Americans said they would vote for the Democrat running for Congress, a slight edge over the 41% who said they’d vote for the Republican. Those numbers track with the same survey’s results a month before the 2018 elections that swept Democrats into power. (Keep in mind, when it comes to which party controls the House, gerrymandering has rendered many of these voters’ opinions unimportant as competitive districts are tough to find in many states.)

In short, if Democrats can sustain the intensity around this topic, they may defy history and a Biden drag and dodge an electoral disaster. They’ve been laying the groundwork for this moment for months, and further stepped up focus groups and polling after a draft of the ruling leaked in early May. EMILY’s List, Planned Parenthood, and NARAL—the big three abortion-rights groups—plan a $150 million blitz on the topic heading into the fall.

Republicans, however, are far from despondent. Their base loved the ruling: it carries 75% support among white Evangelicals, 84% of those who voted for Donald Trump in 2020, and 54% of white working-class men, according to NPR’s polling. GOP strategists have long argued that abortion fires up a small but dedicated part of the electorate, the volunteers who knock on doors and make phone calls. The emerging strategy appears to be to cast Democrats who support abortion rights as extremists; in New Mexico, where Democrats control the legislature, the GOP nominee for governor says he’s pro-life but is pledging only to ban “late-term and partial-birth abortion that the current governor supports.” (New Mexico stands to become a destination for abortion services as many other states in that region ban it altogether.)

Then there’s the economy. Everyone is feeling the pinch. Systematically, Democrats are simply hemorrhaging their voter rolls. An Associated Press analysis finds that more than 1 million voters across 43 states have switched to the Republican Party in the last year, a shift that is especially pronounced in the suburbs. If that trend holds, it could mean tens of thousands of suburban voters who were sour on Trump may have migrated back to the GOP, enough to potentially determine control of Congress.

What’s unknown is if the new abortion landscape might prompt those same voters to swing back into the Democratic fold. To that end, it’s worth listening to what suburban women are saying, especially the white ones with college degrees.

For Republican candidates, there will be little room to hide, especially if Democrats prove successful in painting the GOP as the party of extremism. Democrats will also have to address what comes next in a post-Roe world. Until recently, millions of swing voters had little expectation that Roe could really be struck down after so many years of hard-won durability. The surprise arrived and remade the political landscape. It’s now up to both parties to figure out how to read the new terrain.

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WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday sided with a football coach from Washington state who sought to kneel and pray on the field after games.

The court ruled 6-3 for the coach with the court’s conservative justices in the majority and its liberals in dissent. The justices said the coach’s prayer was protected by the First Amendment.

“The Constitution and the best of our traditions counsel mutual respect and tolerance, not censorship and suppression, for religious and nonreligious views alike,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote for the majority.

The case forced the justices to wrestle with how to balance the religious and free speech rights of teachers and coaches with the rights of students not to feel pressured into participating in religious practices. The outcome could strengthen the acceptability of some religious practices in some other public school settings.
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Read More: The Supreme Court Ruled Taxpayer Dollars Can Go Toward Religious Schools. LGBTQ Advocates Are Worried

The decision is the latest in a line of Supreme Court rulings for religious plaintiffs. In another recent example, the court ruled that Maine can’t exclude religious schools from a program that offers tuition aid for private education, a decision that could ease religious organizations’ access to taxpayer money.

In a dissent in Monday, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the coach decision “sets us further down a perilous path in forcing states to entangle themselves with religion.” She was joined in her dissent by Justice Stephen Breyer and Justice Elena Kagan.

That the court ruled for the coach is perhaps not surprising. In 2019, the court declined to take up the case at an early stage, but four of the court’s conservatives agreed that a lower court decision in favor of the school district was “troubling” for its “understanding of the free speech rights of public school teachers.”

Read More: This Supreme Court Case Could Take a ‘Wrecking Ball’ to Separation of Church and State

The case before the justices involved Joseph Kennedy, a Christian and former football coach at Bremerton High School in Bremerton, Washington. Kennedy started coaching at the school in 2008 and initially prayed alone on the 50-yard line at the end of games. But students started joining him, and over time he began to deliver a short, inspirational talk with religious references. Kennedy did that for years and led students in locker room prayers. The school district learned what he was doing in 2015 and asked him to stop.

Kennedy stopped leading students in prayer in the locker room and on the field but wanted to continue praying on the field himself, with students free to join if they wished. Concerned about being sued for violating students’ religious freedom rights, the school asked him to stop his practice of kneeling and praying while still “on duty” as a coach after the game. The school tried to work out a solution so Kennedy could pray privately before or after the game. When he continued to kneel and pray on the field, the school put him on paid leave.

Three justices on the court attended public high schools themselves while the rest attended Catholic schools.

The case is Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, 21-418.

In overruling Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court held that women no longer have a constitutional right to abortion. In Dobb’s v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Court ruled that the issue of abortion is left entirely to the political process. What will this mean?

At first glance, this restores the law to what it was before 1973 when Roe v. Wade was decided. Each state will determine for itself whether to protect abortion rights or whether to outlaw some or all abortions. It is expected that over half the states will prohibit all or virtually all abortions.
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Before 1973, women desiring abortions who had financial resources would travel to places where abortion was legal or find a friendly doctor to perform a safe, illegal abortion. Poor women and teenagers without resources faced the cruel choice between an unwanted child and an unsafe abortion. Women of color suffered much higher rates of death and illness from illegal abortions.

We are sure to see all of this again. But there are also ways that the situation is much different from 50 years ago. Abortion has become a political issue in a way that it was not before Roe v. Wade. Conservative politicians who have been railing against abortion rights for decades are not going to give up this political issue. There likely will be far more aggressive enforcement of prohibitions of abortions than occurred prior to 1973. Expect to see doctors and women prosecuted for violating state laws prohibiting abortion much more frequently than occurred prior to Roe.

Conservative politicians will look for new forms of restrictions, such as a proposed Missouri law that would prohibit a woman from leaving the state to obtain an abortion. Some states will adopt laws to eliminate forms of birth control that take effect after conception, such as IUDs and the morning after pill. There will be regulation of medical procedures, such as in vitro fertilization, with some states likely to adopt laws requiring all embryos to be implanted. All of this will lead to litigation and the Court will have to decide if there are any constitutional limits on the states or if the matter is truly entirely left to the political process.

Read More: Abortion Access After the End of Roe

At the same time, medically induced abortions now are possible and account for almost half of all abortions. This will make it harder for states to prohibit abortions as pills can be sent across state lines. States that outlaw abortions will make consuming these pills a crime, though enforcement will be difficult. Also, there will be much more organized efforts to raise money to help women in states where abortion is illegal to have access to the procedure.

Abortion will come to dominate our political process like never before. State judicial elections—and 39 states have some form of judicial election—will focus on abortion because state judges can protect rights under state constitutions. Elections for state legislatures and city councils and for members of Congress often will focus on abortion rights more than ever before.

With a Democratic President and a Democratic Congress, there will be renewed efforts at passing a federal law protecting a national right to abortion. But it seems unlikely that Democrats can overcome a certain Republican filibuster in the Senate. And the next time there is a Republican President and a Republican Congress, they are sure to try and pass legislation outlawing all abortions in the United States, with Republicans perhaps more likely to be successful in changing the rules of the filibuster to adopt such a law.

Someday, when there is a liberal Supreme Court, it likely will overrule Dobbs and again recognize a constitutional right to abortion. But in the years and perhaps decades until that happens, abortion will be the defining political issue for the U.S.

It is unclear what that will mean for our political system. Will those who favor abortion rights mobilize in a way that makes a political difference? And if so, where and what difference will it make? For decades, especially out of a desire to overrule Roe, Republicans in elections have emphasized judicial appointments. Now will Democrats do this?

The central question in the abortion debate is who should decide. Roe v. Wade held that it is for each woman to decide for herself whether to terminate a pregnancy. Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization says it is for the legislatures and the political process. The only thing that is certain is that the implications—for women’s lives and for our society—will be enormous and for a long time to come.

There’s always been something a little pathetic with how Eric Greitens publicizes himself. After the Osama bin Laden raid, he went on cable show after cable show, hawking his memoir and explaining how SEALs like himself operate, but always forgetting to mention that he’d never actually served with a SEAL team in combat. Later, when he ran ads for Governor in Missouri, he again highlighted his SEAL background despite pushback from the SEAL community over how they felt he was misrepresenting himself. He succeeded in that campaign, only to lose the governorship amid allegations of blackmail, campaign finance violations, and felony invasion-of-privacy charges. But now that he’s running for Senate, he’s reached a sad nadir with his latest ad, in which he leads a gun-toting, camouflage-wearing team into a suburban house to go “RINO hunting,” in other words, hunting and killing Republicans who aren’t sufficiently hardline. You can even purchase a “RINO hunting permit” on his website for $25. Playing with advocating political violence is clearly an attempt to generate horrified backlash, and perhaps to distract from recent allegations from his ex-wife that Greitens abused her and their children.
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But Greitens has a long history of successfully leveraging American attitudes toward the military in service of his own projects, first in the nonprofit world, and then in politics, and so what’s interesting about his recent campaigning is not what it says about him as a candidate, but about what he thinks his constituency wants from former Navy SEALs. And it isn’t defending American from foreign terrorists.

He’s also not alone. During the Senate campaign in Georgia, Texas House Representative Dan Crenshaw cut a much more expensively produced ad in the style of a Marvel movie where, after jumping from a helicopter, he lands on a car in Georgia filled with two members of Antifa, and proceeds to attack them. The cringe inducing performance shared similar images of militarized politics and a hatred of domestic rivals (though this flirtation with violence didn’t help him when a group of far right protesters, shouting “Eyepatch McCain,” assaulted his campaign staff at Republican Party of Texas).

It’s a common enough thing, in the wake of failed wars, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, for people to look for internal enemies. “We were stabbed in the back” has been the rallying cry of so many disappointed veterans through the centuries. “This feeling pours out into a state of general indictment,” wrote German World War I veteran Ernst Junger in 1932, “into a literature of the blind, who are constantly in search of those responsible.” When things go awry in your country, you either have the fortitude to look in the mirror, or you hunt for scapegoats.

Greitens used to take a different approach. In the first decade of the post-9/11 wars, he spoke of selfless service and a commitment to rebuild American communities. He’d tell a story of visiting amputees and burn victims at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, veterans who had been thanked repeatedly for what they’d done for their country but, in his telling, were energized by four simple words: “We still need you.” He went on to found a nonprofit that “redeployed” veterans to their communities to work on service projects, and he spoke at Harvard about how as a country “we need to connect with people and tell them that they are needed” to serve.

In the second decade of the wars he decided to run for governor as a Republican, and he brought a harder edge to his use of his service. Gone was the sophisticated, service-minded intellection. Instead, he cut ads shooting guns and blowing things up while selling bumper stickers reading “ISIS Hunting Permit” and bragging, “Liberals will go crazy when they see these.” This earlier version of his current RINO hunting permits was crass trolling as well, though at least it directed itself toward genocidal terrorists. But overseas military failures have left little taste for that kind of bluster on the newly isolationist right, and so the fantasy he’s selling now is violence toward fellow Americans.

Greitens and Crenshaw, both former Navy SEALs, are leaning heavily on their backgrounds, though that doesn’t mean they’re representative of veterans as a whole. A recent survey of the civic health of veterans (done in partnership with Greitens’ old nonprofit, The Mission Continues) found that not only do veterans vote and volunteer more than the civilian population, but that they had improved on these metrics in the past half decade, a change driven by younger veterans. That call to service which Greitens used to champion drives many of us more than ever, no matter how far Greitens has fallen away from the values he used to profess.

What Greitens and Crenshaw are doing is less indicative of a military mindset, then, than a kind of playacting for civilians who like the iconography of the military, but without the tricky-to-uphold military values and nonpartisan commitment to the nation. Let’s toy with the thrill of violence, but do it with a smirk that dares you to be enough of a rube to take it seriously.

No, I don’t take it seriously. I take it as an expression of a lack of talent, an inability to genuinely inspire people. After the Second World War, the Ukrainian-born writer Vasily Grossman once argued that “the superman is born of the despair of the weak, not from the triumph of the strong.” A commitment to social equality and the creative force of the people speaks to self-confident strength. It is the vicarious despair of impotence which confuses violence for strength and sees “the man sowing a vast wheat field as inferior to the thug who smashes him over the back of the head with crowbar.”

Is this really what Americans want? Greitens is currently leading in the polls, so his schtick, however embarrassing, clearly has an audience. And even outside of these two egregious examples, contempt has replaced disagreement in far too much of our political discourse.

It’s fun to imagine destroying your enemies, but hard putting in the work to build a better country and better future. Ads like Greitens are made for the weak and humiliated, who want to fantasize about violence without having the guts to admit that’s what they’re doing. I don’t think Americans are a pathetic people. But we are hurting. And it’s in times like this when candidates show us whether they’re capable of moral leadership.

The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade immediately thrust an explosive issue into the foreront of midterm races throughout the country, as Democrats vowed to fight to restore federal abortion rights and many Republicans pressed for banning the procedure in their states and nationwide.

Though the high court’s 5-4 ruling to eliminate a constitutional right to abortion was not unexpected—Politico leaked a draft of the decision in May—it still came as a gut punch to Democrats, who quickly moved to energize their base and court independents to their campaigns ahead of the November elections. Recent polling shows roughly 66% percent of Americans support the abortion rights enshrined in Roe.
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“We must elect more senators and representatives who will codify a women’s right to choose into federal law once again,” President Joe Biden said Friday at the White House. “This fall, Roe is on the ballot. Personal freedoms are on the ballot. The right to privacy, liberty, equality, they’re all on the ballot.”

Former Vice President Mike Pence, who is currently eyeing a 2024 presidential run, echoed other prominent Republicans in celebrating the Supreme Court ruling and vowing to work to advance abortion restrictions even further. “Having been given this second chance for life, we must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law and in every state in the land,” he said in a statement.

In roughly half the country, the effects of overturning Roe will be immediately felt. Thirteen states have so-called trigger laws on the books that were designed to ban or restrict abortions in the event that the Supreme Court struck down Roe. Ten other states have laws banning abortions from before the landmark 1973 ruling that will now go back into effect.

While abortion is now expected to be a core issue for campaigns across the country, it will be particularly salient in a handful of races where the outcome could determine the future of abortion access in those states.

One of those races will be the gubernatorial election in Pennsylvania, where Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, has promised to block any bill the GOP-controlled legislature passes to outlaw or restrict abortion rights. “Our Republican legislature will send a bill to our next Governor’s desk to ban abortions in Pennsylvania,” he tweeted Friday. “Without Roe, the only thing stopping them is the veto pen of our next Governor.”

Shapiro’s opponent, Republican State Senator Doug Mastriano, is promising voters the exact opposite. “Roe v. Wade is rightly relegated to the ash heap of history,” Mastriano said on Friday. “As the abortion debate returns to the states, Pennsylvania must be prepared to lead the nation in being a voice for the voiceless.”

Abortion is also likely to factor into many congressional races, though how widely and how strongly remains unclear. With a Democrat in the White House through at least 2024, Republicans would not be able to advance any measures further restricting abortion. But many Democratic voters are skeptical their party can effectively counteract the effect of Friday’s ruling if given the chance.

After a draft of the ruling leaked in May, many Democrats in Congress issued fiery statements about the need to codify Roe into federal law. But in the evenly divided Senate, where the Democratic caucus has 50 members but 60 votes are needed to bypass a filibuster, the effort went nowhere. Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, of New York, wanted to change the filibuster rules to codify Roe with a simple majority vote. That effort fell short when Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, both moderate Democrats, refused to support the maneuver to overcome Republican opposition.

That dynamic isn’t likely to change anytime soon. It’s why Democratic candidates for the Senate are staking their claim on changing the filibuster rules to pass abortion protections, as well as other progressive priorities.

“I think the Senate needs to reform the filibuster and pass it,” Rep. Tim Ryan, Democrat of Ohio, tells TIME. “We passed it out of the House. It went to the Senate and died. We need to make sure that we can get it through the Senate. It’s imperative for us to get that done—and that would mean reforming the filibuster.”

Ryan is currently running for an open U.S. Senate seat in Ohio to replace outgoing Republican Sen. Tim Portman. It’s one of the few opportunities Democrats have in 2022 to turn a red seat blue. Standing in Ryan’s way, however, is J.D. Vance, the best-selling author of Hillbilly Elegy who became a right-wing firebrand. (Vance secured the GOP nomination after getting Donald Trump’s endorsement.) According to the latest polling, Ryan and Vance are running neck and neck.

Abortion, Ryan says, will help to move the needle in his direction, especially as Mike DeWine, Ohio’s Republican governor, and a GOP-controlled state legislature are moving to ban the procedure, and Vance has been an outspoken opponent of abortion rights.

“Just look at his record,” Ryan says of Vance. “I don’t want to overly politicize today, but like he said, ‘Rape is inconvenient.’ He is for zero exceptions. Zero. If you feel that way in Ohio, you have a candidate you want to vote for. But they should at least know what they’re getting into. He’s the extreme of the extreme.”

Vance, for his part, extolled the Supreme Court’s evisceration of Roe on Friday. “Today is a great day,” he said in a statement. “We now enter a new phase of the pro-life movement.”

“Some of our efforts will be federal, and others local,” Vance added, “but all will be focused on the simple principle that life is worth protecting—from the moment it begins until its natural end.”

The high court’s decision on Friday quickly triggered a passionate reaction from voters. Within minutes after the ruling’s announcement, thousands of Americans gathered outside the high court in downtown Washington, most of them in support of abortion rights.

Pro-choice activists had a long list of grievances. They were furious at a conservative majority of justices who reversed a constitutional right to abortion after nearly 50 years; at a right-wing movement that had strategically mobilized for decades to manufacture such a decision; and at a Democratic Party that had been apparently powerless to stop it.

“Establishment Democrats are the reason for this,” an exasperated Nadine Seiler told TIME steps away from the marble courthouse, “because they are gutless and spineless, and they don’t want to push the issue.”

For Seiler, 57, the issue is deeply personal, and complicated. She was born in Trinidad to a mother who didn’t want her. Because abortion is illegal in most cases in the Caribbean nation, her mother was forced to carry out the unwanted pregnancy. “I was mistreated, neglected, and up to this day, it still affects me,” says Seiler, who now lives in Waldorf, Maryland. As we spoke, demonstrators in the background were screaming “Get your rosaries off my ovaries!”—referring to the fact that four of the five justices who voted to overturn Roe are Catholic.

Others outside the court rejoiced at what they saw as a long-fought victory for the sanctity of life.

Alexa Petre, 19, traveled to Washington, D.C., from Nashville, Tennessee, in anticipation of the controversial decision. “I chose to come here because I have three adopted siblings,” she told TIME. “They’re my everything and I can’t imagine if their birth mother had chosen something different.”

Meanwhile, in many states, Americans are starting to grapple with a new reality. In Wisconsin, clinics immediately canceled abortions scheduled for that day. “We are seeing immediate consequences,” Sarah Godlewski, Wisconsin’s state treasurer and a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, tells TIME. “This is not just a hypothetical. It’s a reality.” Wisconsin is one of the 10 states with a pre-existing law to prohibit abortions; the state never rescinded a 173-year-old statute that criminalizes the procedure.

Godlewski is running in the August primary to vie to unseat Republican Sen. Ron Johnson. She says abortion will be a centerpiece of her campaign. Voters are particularly receptive at this moment to candidates who are committed to safeguarding rights such as abortion, she says.

“Something that I am hearing a lot, especially since the leak, has been how frustrated people are that we haven’t codified this earlier,” says Godlewski. “We’ve had 50 years to get this done. I think we need more pro-choice Democratic women at that U.S. Senate table because they would have prioritized this a long time ago.”

Friday was a day of ecstasy or agony for the many Americans for whom abortion is an important issue. The Supreme Court handed down a decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, the foundational case on which a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy was established. For some people of faith, it was the triumphant end to a long, hard fight against what they considered a key human rights violation upon the most vulnerable. But not for all of them. Plenty of those who practice a religion mourned the rollback of what they consider a vital legal protection for women, especially the most vulnerable.
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According to the Public Religion Research Institute, 43% of Americans who “identify strongly” with their religious identity do not believe Roe v. Wade needed to be overturned. There’s a wide variability within the ranks, however. A majority (56%) of U.S. Catholics believe abortion should be legal, but only 30% of Catholics who attend mass weekly. Similarly, 60% of mainline protestants favor abortion being legal, but only 30% of white evangelical protestants. A slight majority of Muslims and a large majority of Jews also believe abortion should be legal in most cases.

Read More: Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade, Undoing Constitutional Right to Abortion

The bulk of the work overturning Roe has been undertaken by Christian organizations, but not all Christian organizations are opposed to abortion. Both sides of the debate rapidly released statements after the decision. CatholicVote President Brian Burch set the tone for many of those in the anti-abortion camp: “Catholics and pro-life advocates across the country celebrate today’s landmark Supreme Court decision as the ‘dawning of a new day in America’—a long-awaited first step toward the full protection of American women and children,” he wrote. “A dark chapter in our nation’s history has finally been closed.” Burch pointed to technological advances that he said have shown that the “humanity of children in the womb has become plain and undeniable.”

But Jamie L. Manson, president of Catholics for Choice, took aim at the church for its stance. “The unconscionable Supreme Court decision to end the constitutional right to abortion is the culmination of a decades-long religious crusade—spearheaded by the U.S. Catholic bishops—to take away a woman’s most fundamental freedoms, namely her ability to control her own fertility and determine her own destiny,” said Manson in a statement. Many progressive Christians believe abortion has become a recruiting tool to win over churchgoers to the Republican party, and Manson alluded to this infiltration of politics into matters of faith, saying the “ruling gives right-wing leaders unfettered license to codify fringe religious beliefs into civil law.” President Joe Biden, a Catholic, bemoaned the overturning of Roe, “a decision with broad national consensus that most Americans of [most] faiths and backgrounds found acceptable and that had been the law of the land for most of the lifetime of Americans today.”

While the different attitudes among people of the same faith towards abortion are partly aligned with their politics, and partly with how serious a role their faith plays in their life, they also reflect a genuine theological disagreement among scholars as to what their sacred texts say—or can be interpreted to be saying—about when human life begins. Those who are anti-abortion tend to point to Psalm 139:13, which talks about God forming a person when they are being “knit together in the womb.” Those who support abortion rights point to Exodus 21:22, in which the law allows a person who causes a woman to have a miscarriage to be merely fined rather than face the more serious consequences for murder. Muslim scholars have similar arguments about the Quranic view of when life begins.

Read More: The Fight Over Abortion Has Only Just Begun

These divisions are evident in other religious traditions as well. A Palm Beach synagogue filed a lawsuit against the state of Florida in June claiming that the restrictive abortion regulations set to go into effect in July violate the State Constitution’s right to freedom of religion. The suit claims that in Jewish law, “abortion is required if necessary to protect the health, mental or physical well-being of the woman.” Not every synagogue is of the same mind, however. While the National Council of Jewish Women held a virtual vigil on the day of the ruling, to “hold space for pain and consider the road ahead,” more conservative communities were jubilant at the Supreme Court’s move. “Agudath Israel has long been on record as opposing Roe v. Wade’s legalization of abortion on demand,” said the umbrella organization for orthodox Jewish groups. “Informed by the teaching of Jewish law that fetal life is entitled to significant protection, with termination of pregnancy authorized only under certain extraordinary circumstances, we are deeply troubled by the staggering number of pregnancies in the United States that end in abortion.”

Many of those who had been campaigning on this issue on either side used the Supreme Court’s decision as a chance to rally their supporters. “The issue of abortion has now been turned over to the states, many of which have either implemented or are considering some of the most abhorrently permissive pro-abortion proposals ever,” said Brent Leatherwood, the acting president of the Southern Baptists’ Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC), which filed an amicus brief in the Dobbs case. “A consistent, convictional pro-life witness is needed now more than ever in state legislatures and local communities. So let us rejoice that we live in a nation where past injustices can still be corrected, as we also roll our sleeves up to save preborn lives, serve vulnerable mothers, and support families in our communities.”

For Rev. Jennifer Butler, CEO of Faith in Public Life, the ruling was a warning that social and racial inequities were about to be worsened. “Whatever our opinions on abortion, surely we can agree that jailing a woman or a health care provider for exercising their moral judgment in the moment is wrong. These punitive measures will be aimed disproportionately at Black, Brown, Native and Asian women, LGBTQ people, immigrants and low-income people—compounding the injustice,” she said. “In the aftermath of today’s unjust ruling, we must come together and bear one another’s burdens. We must do everything in our power to ensure that pregnant people who face immediate risk to their health and freedom are respected and protected.”

Others took a more fire and brimstone view about the effect of the ruling. “An ominous cloud still hangs threateningly over our nation,” wrote Phil Ginn, the President of the arch-conservative Southern Evangelical Seminary. “Not only did the Dobbs ruling fail to abate this storm cloud, but rather it perhaps has even given rise to the need for a warning of a tornado, the magnitude of which threatens to strike even at the very core of who we are as Americans.” Ginn went on to warn that “the reality of the present may be even more scary than the world of Roe” that “violence will spread like wildfire” and that “if you dare to speak up for the unborn, you will not be safe even in your home.”

But even among the more evangelical branches, Ginn’s views were an outlier. “Laws are critical, but they cannot change the fact that tomorrow there will still be many women who will face an unplanned pregnancy—afraid, unprepared and unsure of what to do and where to turn,” said one of the the ERLC’s chief campaigners for the anti-abortion cause, Elizabeth Graham. “The Church has a significant opportunity to serve and support these women in crisis and their preborn children in their time of need.”

Activists gathered outside the U.S. Supreme Court and rallied around the country on Friday, to either celebrate or mourn the decision by the court to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion.

The scene outside the nation’s highest court on Friday illustrated the country’s deep divisions over the issue of abortion. Abortion-rights opponents celebrated the decision, which marks the culmination of decades of conservative advocacy, and cheered the start of a “post-Roe generation.” In stark contrast, abortion-rights advocates decried the ruling as an unacceptable infringement on women’s rights and pledged to continue advocating for reproductive freedom, holding signs that read, “Abortion Saves Lives,” and, “We Were Never the Land of the Free.”
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“These justices have manufactured a public-health crisis with a stroke of a pen,” Alexis McGill Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood, said during a press call on Friday. “Despite our best collective effort, it will not be enough to account for the massive need that will exist as half the country moves quickly to ban abortion.”

The 6-3 ruling by the court’s conservative majority in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization will reshape access to reproductive health care across the country. There are 22 states with laws that could be used to restrict abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and 13 states already have “trigger laws” in place that will ban all or nearly all abortions in the coming days.

Abortion rights advocates have emphasized that the ruling will disproportionately harm low-income people and women of color, as abortion remains legal in most Democratic-leaning states but will be increasingly difficult to access for those who can’t afford to travel across state lines or take time off work.

“With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent,” the court’s three liberal justices wrote in a dissenting opinion.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called on Congress to pass legislation to protect reproductive rights and emphasized the importance of the upcoming midterm elections. “It’s a slap in the face to women about using their own judgment to make their own decisions about their reproductive freedom,” she said, calling the ruling “outrageous and heart-wrenching.”

Here are some of the most poignant photographs from the public reaction to the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.

Around Washington and across the country, the immediate clang of the fall of Roe v. Wade came roaring on Friday morning with echoes reverberating in ways that no one has yet to fully understand.

A 6-to-3 ruling struck down 50 years of precedent on abortion rights, effectively tossing access to reproductive health to individual states. Without a national standard, the right to an abortion now largely hinges on where one calls home, whether one can travel somewhere that has protections of those rights, and what seesawing state legislators decide is acceptable between elections. As The New York Times editorial board writes: “Constitutional rights are meaningless unless they apply across the entire country.”
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As Washington and state capitals wrangle with the new realities, it’s worth listening to some sage voices who have spent time considering Roe’s impact and, especially in the weeks since the leak of a draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson ruling, what a post-Roe world will look like. (The Senate plans a July 12 hearing for that very question.) Although there is very little unanimity about the wisdom of the ruling, there is agreement on this: Friday’s ruling fundamentally changes America and sets up huge and sprawling consequences, not just for abortion rights but also potentially on contraception, marriage, and privacy.

Here are some insights on this historic day from a variety of women, including the writers featured on TIME’s latest cover:

The Failure of the Feminist Industrial Complex

“The fall of Roe exposes a crack in the foundation of mainstream liberal feminism that has dominated the past decade. This version of feminism—is it the fourth wave?—has been preoccupied with individual achievements, feel-good symbolism, and cultural representation. It has, in turn, paid too little attention to the thorny mechanics of federal courts and state legislative races. Many fourth wavers presumed that reproductive rights were basically secure, and that therefore the remaining obstacles for women were not legal or political but cultural and emotional.”

— Charlotte Alter, TIME correspondent

The Fight Over Abortion Has Only Just Begun

“In all the fury and emotion of this moment, historians are rightly cautioning against any suggestion that the U.S. may be on the precipice of another Civil War. But it is worth noting that a decision that rolls back a major civil right will have the nearly immediate effect of re-creating a starkly bifurcated map of America: about half of the states will ban abortion entirely or severely restrict it, while the other half will likely either strengthen access or preserve the status quo. What’s clear now is that the period that we are entering will look not like 1972. Rather, it will be a futuristic steampunk version of the American past, as warring factions battle over new technologies and clash against new state laws that aim to dictate whose lives have value within their borders.”

— Abigail Abrams, TIME staff writer

It’s The Supreme Court’s America, We Just Live In It

“The hypocrisy and intellectual dishonesty of the court’s right-wing justices lead to the conclusion that they have simply appointed themselves super-legislators free to impose a view of the United States as a White, Christian and male-dominated society despite the values, beliefs and choices of a majority of 330 million modern Americans.

“To understand how radical the court’s decision is, one need only consider Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurrence, where he says the quiet part out loud: He’d sweep away 14th Amendment substantive due process—birth control, gay marriage, all of it. And that is where we are heading, for in a sense Thomas is right. There is no bright line between destroying the expansive view of liberty in the 14th Amendment, when abortion is at issue, and destroying it for all other intimate decisions. The right-wing majority’s willingness to countenance an all-powerful state that interferes with every aspect of our lives is breathtaking.”

— Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post columnist

‘I Prayed and Protested to End Roe. What Comes Next?’

“As a pro-life advocate, I lament with those who feel they have lost a basic human right, as well as moral agency and hope for the future. But for me it is Roe that brought these losses.

“Roe stripped from the prenatal child the right to continue to live and grow, safe and free from intentional harm. If you believe, as I do, that abortion unjustly ends the life of a being that is fully human, a life that exists independently of the will of the mother, is self-organizing and unique, developing yet complete in itself, then you will understand Roe not as a ruling that liberates but as one that dehumanizes, first the fetus, then the rest of us.”

— Karen Swallow Prior, writing for The New York Times

Impact Will Spread Far Beyond Those Seeking Abortions

“The coming devastation will not be limited to those seeking abortion. Overruling Roe will also harm those experiencing pregnancy complications and pregnancy loss. We are about to learn in real time that abortion is reproductive health care because without it, pregnant patients across the spectrum will suffer.”

— Greer Donley and Jill Weiber Lens, writing for TIME

Parsing Clarence Thomas

“‘Demonstrably erroneous.’ There is very little that is vague about those words. With the death of abortion rights in America, Thomas has now come out and said, in no-uncertain terms, that cases that enshrined Americans’ rights to marry whomever they want and to make personal decisions about their intimacy and child-bearing are flat-out wrong. For now, that is just Thomas’ opinion—none of what he’s written is legally enforceable. But the fact that he’s stating this explicitly affirms the fears of advocates that for many conservatives the demise of Roe was never meant to be the end—but rather a bleak beginning.”

— Hannah Levintova, Mother Jones

A Whole Lot of Rights Are On the Table

“In the coming years, the court will face a series of momentous opportunities to perform its constitutional responsibilities. It will be called on to continue re-examining Congress’s authority to dictate state policy by attaching strings to funding measures. And in a series of cases over the past 30 years, the justices have issued rulings restoring some of the proper balance between the federal government and the states by reaffirming that there are limits on Congress’s authority to regulate interstate and foreign commerce. Those limits may now be tested depending on whether Congress decides to refederalize abortion by legislation either requiring or limiting its availability.”

— David B. Rivkin Jr. and Jennifer L. Mascott, writing for The Wall Street Journal

How Much of This Is Susan Collins’ Fault?

“After a career in the U.S. Senate of 25 years, full of big bills passed, coalitions forged and bridges physical and metaphorical built across rivers and party lines, Collins confronts a moment of truth: Was she duped into securing a sturdy majority on the court for an increasingly radical Republican Party? Or did she manage, as she has always tried to do, to find a compromise that serves her ideals, her self-interest and her institution alike?”

— Molly Roberts, Washington Post editorial writer

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On June 24, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, undoing the constitutional right to abortion that has been in place for nearly 50 years. The reversal paves the way for states to ban or limit abortions, and many are expected to do so soon.

Four abortion providers who live in states that severely restrict or are likely to soon criminalize abortion spoke with TIME about what they plan to do now. Some say they’ll shift care across state borders, while others resolve to amp up their activism in a post-Roe America. Yet all four providers say they dread the way new laws will endanger pregnant people seeking abortions. Their interviews have been lightly edited for length and clarity.
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Dr. DeShawn Taylor

Ob-gyn in Phoenix

Taylor founded her Phoenix clinic, Desert Star Family Planning, in 2013. Earlier this year, Arizona enacted a 15-week abortion ban that was going to take effect later this summer, but it’s now possible that the state may pass an even stricter ban. Arizona also has a “pre-Roe” ban on the books—a law enacted before Roe and never removed—but whether or it will be enforced is unclear.

Those moments when I tell somebody that they’re too far along—the wailing and the emotion—are so heart-wrenching. I don’t want people to experience that if I can help it. Having my hands tied is hard.

I made up my mind some time ago that I was going to stay in Arizona and be a resource to the community. My clinic provides general gynecology, well-woman sexual health, gender-affirming care, and miscarriage management. The idea that once abortion is illegal in the state—that abortion providers potentially will leave the state—that doesn’t sit well with me, and it’s not in alignment with my values.

Read More: The Fight Over Abortion Has Only Just Begun

I intend to be a resource for my community, a safe space. A place for the community as they’re mobilizing to help each other get what they need, where they can get accurate information. I also anticipate that the people of Arizona are going to need a safe place to receive miscarriage care, without being interrogated about whether they self-induced or not. People are going to be afraid to help.

Post-Roe does not look the same as pre-Roe. People are safely self-managing their abortions already. What concerns me is people are going to attempt self-managed abortion later in pregnancy. I’m concerned about bleeding complications and incomplete processes not being identified and treated, potentially causing infections. We may see people die.

Right now, I’m just really in a mode of determination. I’m a problem solver. The biggest issue is the criminalization piece. And what my limits are—what level of risk I’m comfortable taking, considering that most people who get criminalized in this country around these things are people of color. The pre-Roe law has an exception for the life of the pregnant person. The biggest question for me is, at what point can you intervene? Does the person have to literally be dying? If someone presents to me with a miscarriage, I’m not going to be interrogating people about how they got to this place. I’m just going to provide the care. And I suspect that those types of instances will be scrutinized closely as well.

I am a very spiritual person, and I consider my practice my ministry. It’s deeply gratifying, and I know I am changing people’s lives for the better. I’m just trying to stay open, to continue to provide as long as possible. Making sure I have staff, and that I’m resourced to provide abortion care all the way up until I can’t.

I believe that the pendulum will swing back, which is why keeping my clinic open is very important. We’ve seen over the course of the years that once independent abortion clinics close, they generally don’t open back up again.

Dr. Colleen McNicholas

Chief medical officer for Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and Southwest Missouri

Until Roe v. Wade was overturned, McNicholas saw abortion patients in both Missouri and Illinois. But a “trigger” ban—a law that will take effect nearly automatically now that Roe is overturned—in Missouri means that abortions in the state will likely soon be outlawed (with an exception for pregnant people whose lives are in danger). McNicholas plans to split her work between Illinois, where the legality of abortion is not directly affected by the recent Supreme Court decision, and Missouri.

Missouri has long been the leader in eliminating abortion access. It’s passed nearly every single restriction and law that other states have, and did so a long time ago. Illinois will serve as an oasis and will be the nearest location for tens of thousands of people who will be seeking care. Now that Roe is repealed, we have two enormous responsibilities: to step up and fill gaps for states that have lost or will lose access, while simultaneously working within Missouri to fight back and build back some access.

We can’t abandon places. We know that over time, it will change, but we need the people here who are committed to that change to stay here and work for it.

Read More: What It’s Like to Be an Abortion Clinic Escort

Abortion is an act of love and an act of humanity for people who are pregnant and their families. It provides some hope and the opportunity to meet their potential, to get out of poverty. I think the elimination of abortion says to people: we don’t care about you. We don’t care that you’re struggling. The real, on-the-ground implication for patients is that life gets harder. But people should know that there are lots of folks out there trying to make a difference, to address this, and to eliminate the barriers.

The reason why I continue this work is that I get to sit with patients every single day and see the impact of a very simple procedure. Sometimes it’s as simple as me handing you a medication. There are very few medical services that, with such little time and education and skill, can make such a profound impact on somebody’s life.

Dr. Carol Wanna

Ob-gyn in Macon, Ga.

Wanna has provided abortions part-time at Planned Parenthood for about two years. The reversal of Roe v. Wade will likely clear the way for Georgia to begin outlawing abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy.

Most of us have accepted what would happen this summer. You pretty much could see what was coming. But the cruelty of the decision still makes me feel sadness and depression.

Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah are the only places in Georgia that abortions are provided, so there’s really nothing around where I live. I commute almost two hours to Atlanta and almost three to Savannah to be able to work with Planned Parenthood. I just so strongly believe in the right for women to choose their destiny. All of my patients are making a very difficult decision, but they’re deciding what’s right for their life at that time. The thought that women cannot have power over their destiny and be forced to continue a pregnancy they don’t want just horrifies me. Medically, abortion is extremely low risk; it’s lower risk than continuing the pregnancy.

Read More: Inside the Small Group of Doctors Who Risked Everything to Provide Abortions in Texas

I’ll definitely stay in Georgia, just because it’s my home. I will probably continue to work at Planned Parenthood, at least doing family planning and other services. I’m not ready to uproot my whole life, but if there are opportunities to go to states where abortions are legal, I would certainly consider traveling to provide services.

We’re going to have to change our services to try to enable women to get into clinic as quickly as possible, so that it can be done early. I worry that women are going to have to jump into having the abortion even though they’re not completely comfortable with their decision. That seems horrible. It might become a situation where even if a woman’s not completely sure, they know it’s now or never.

Tammi Kromenaker

Clinic owner and director of Red River Women’s Clinic in North Dakota

North Dakota has a “trigger” ban in effect that clears the way for the state to outlaw abortion soon after Roe v. Wade is overturned. Kromenaker is in the process of moving the clinic from North Dakota to Minnesota.

We’re very fortunate that we are on a border with Minnesota, which is considered a politically protected state for abortion. After the Supreme Court leak, we looked at what it would take to relocate the clinic over to Minnesota, because it was important for us to not change access. We already have patients who drive four, five, six hours just one way to get to our clinic.

Read More: What to Know About Abortion Pills Post-Roe

We don’t want to have to move. We’ve established amazing community connections, and it’s going to be like starting over. North Dakota law and Minnesota law are also very different. I’m going to have to learn the court system there and learn what judges are favorable and which ones might be hostile—all of those things that in North Dakota, we’ve got down.

We have a huge target on our back; we have for a very long time. We’ve basically been in litigation with the state of North Dakota pretty much continuously for over a decade. They tried everything with us, and we have met the challenge and worked really hard to be able to provide this care. It’s been challenge after challenge after challenge here, whether it’s the legislature or litigation or the protesters. So we’re ready to take on this next challenge.

In his opinion concurring with the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion established in Roe v. Wade, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the high court should revisit all cases built on similar legal footing—including cases that guarantee the right to contraception, same-sex consensual sexual relations, and same-sex marriage.

All three cases—and numerous other landmark decisions—are built upon the right to substantive due process found in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution, which prohibit the government from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

In 1973, the Supreme Court held it was the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that protected a woman’s right to an abortion before fetal viability—the point around 24 weeks of pregnancy where a fetus can survive outside the womb. Since a leaked draft opinion previewed the overturn of Roe in May, progressives have been sounding the alarm that other rights rooted in substantive due process could be similarly under threat.
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Read More: Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade, Undoing Constitutional Right to Abortion

In his majority opinion released Friday, Justice Samuel Alito attempted to assuage those concerns, writing that the Supreme Court “stated unequivocally that ‘[n]othing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion.’” Thomas signed on to the majority opinion, but wrote a separate concurrence in which he argued all other decisions rooted in the Due Process Clause should be reconsidered by the Supreme Court, hinting that he’d like Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to be the first in a wave of cases overturning significant precedents. (A concurrence explains a Justice’s reasoning, but is not legally binding.).

“I write separately to emphasize a second, more fundamental reason why there is no abortion guarantee lurking in the Due Process Clause,” Thomas wrote. “As I have previously explained, ‘substantive due process’ is an oxymoron that ‘lack[s] any basis in the Constitution.’” Thomas argues that the Constitution’s guarantee of due process before someone is denied the right to “life, liberty or property” has no bearing on what those rights actually encompass. The text of the Due Process Clause itself, he says, therefore “does not secure any substantive rights,” including a right to abortion. For that reason, he argues, the Supreme Court should “reconsider all of this Court’s substantive due process precedents.”

The argument—which Thomas has made in previous writings—is a seismic departure from how the Supreme Court has historically approached the right to due process. For a century and a half the court has interpreted the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to protect people’s substantive rights, and has built a growing list of liberties entitled to protection. Those rights include the rights to contraception (Griswold v. Connecticut, 1965), same-sex consensual relations (Lawrence v. Texas, 2003) and same-sex marriage (Obergefell v. Hodges, 2015)—all of which Thomas explicitly named in his opinion as worth revisiting.

Thomas’ concurrence is “an ominous preview of how far the Supreme Court may go to undermine existing constitutionally protected rights,” argues Katherine L. Kraschel, a reproductive justice lecturer at Yale Law School. “There are things that we may take for granted that will no longer be guaranteed.”

But Sarah Parshall Perry, a senior legal fellow at the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, urges caution. She says that since Thomas’ concurring opinion is not binding, and because no other justice joined him on it, it is fair to conclude the majority of Justices are committed to substantive due process and believe that it does protect against certain fundamental rights.

What those rights actually are could still be up for debate, other legal experts say. While Alito wrote in Dobbs that the decision should not necessarily impact other precedent, the opinion still adopts a methodology that implies cases like Griswold and Obergefell were wrongly decided, says Kermit Roosevelt, a professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania. Alito argues the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in U.S. history and tradition, and one could potentially make the same argument about the right to access contraception or to same-sex marriage, he explains.

Read More: The Fight Over Abortion Has Only Just Begun

Dobbs is the first time the Supreme Court has overruled a protection rooted in substantive due process since the 1930s, and in so doing it has opened the door to overturning other rights rooted in similar legal principles, argues Bertrall Ross, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. Prior to Dobbs, the court was responsive to social movements and shifts in public opinion, among other factors, when deciding whether a right was protected by the Due Process Clause, explains Ross. Since the Constitution is open-ended, the argument went, the high court can read rights into the Constitution that are not explicitly stated—such as the right to marry, or the right to privacy.

But the Dobbs decision shows that “the majority of the current court is much more interested in history and what the Constitution and its provisions meant when they were ratified,” says Ross. “Furthermore, the majority of this Court does not appear to see itself as being bound by precedent. As a result, every case that protected substantive rights under the Due Process Clause would appear to be fair game for the Supreme Court to revisit and undo.”

“The court is on a devastating path,” argues Laurence Tribe, Professor of Constitutional Law emeritus at Harvard, “that is likely to jeopardize literally all of the basic bodily integrity rights that people have come to rely on.”

What is women’s empowerment in a world without Roe v. Wade?

Women receive more college degrees than men, young women out-earn young men in some cities, and more women run Fortune 500 companies than ever before. And still, Roe fell.

More women are directing Hollywood’s highest-grossing movies, Ariana DeBose just became the first openly queer woman of color to win an Oscar, and there’s a woman playing Thor. And still, Roe fell.
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More than 60% of American women consider themselves feminists, including 42% of Republican women. More than half of American women say they prefer to work outside the home, the highest Gallup has recorded in three decades of polling. And still, Roe fell.

How could a cornerstone of American women’s rights crumble at a moment of otherwise expansive economic, cultural, and social empowerment?

The fall of Roe exposes a crack in the foundation of mainstream liberal feminism that has dominated the past decade. This version of feminism—is it the fourth wave?—has been preoccupied with individual achievements, feel-good symbolism, and cultural representation. It has, in turn, paid too little attention to the thorny mechanics of federal courts and state legislative races. Many fourth wavers presumed that reproductive rights were basically secure, and that therefore the remaining obstacles for women were not legal or political but cultural and emotional. Every time a woman won an Oscar, or released a hit album, or got a big promotion, the refrain was the same: representation matters!

Of course it matters. Of course it should be cheered. But somewhere along the way, many in the mainstream feminist movement convinced themselves that the soft power of cultural representation seemed as important as the hard power of votes and seats. Empowerment became not a means to an end, but the end in itself. Many feminists—particularly rich, white, well-educated ones—assumed that changing hearts and minds was the difficult part. In a functioning democracy, winning seats and writing laws would inevitably follow.

Read More: Supreme Court Overturns Roe v. Wade, Undoing Constitutional Right to Abortion

But that’s not how our democracy works. Nearly 60% of Americans did not want to see Roe overturned, including more than 30% of Republicans. The number of Americans who identify as “pro-choice” reached a record high in the weeks after a leaked draft opinion showed the Supreme Court was poised to upend a half-century of constitutional precedent. And yet, the course of American history doesn’t always follow public opinion. Just ask the two recent Republican Presidents who lost the popular vote, yet appointed four Supreme Court justices who voted to overturn Roe.

Roe fell in large part because anti-abortion activists and policymakers better understood how power truly works in this country. They didn’t rely on inspiring movies or heartfelt Oscar speeches or Twitter hashtags to advance their cause. Instead, the anti-abortion movement has been extraordinarily successful at getting conservative lawmakers elected at the state level. Mitch McConnell used the hard power of the Senate majority to block a Supreme Court nomination by President Barack Obama, which in turn allowed President Donald Trump to appoint another anti-abortion justice. Conservative judicial activists selected Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health as the vehicle to prompt this right-wing court to overturn Roe.

Read More: The Fight Over Abortion Has Only Just Begun.

None of that was exactly the fault of mainstream feminism, and many feminists did sound alarms about the threat to abortion rights. Local reproductive-rights groups have been organizing to protect abortion access on the state level for decades, while feminist organizations like Planned Parenthood, NARAL and the Center for Reproductive Rights have been litigating to protect abortion rights (although some national organizations have been criticized for focusing more on national politics than state races). EMILY’s List has been working to elect pro-choice women at all levels. And now, in a post-Roe world, Democratic Governors, from Gretchen Whitmer in Michigan to Kathy Hochul in New York, are the last lines of defense for abortion access in their states.

But overall, the fall of Roe signifies that liberal feminists were outmaneuvered. By focusing on empowerment and losing sight of the nuts-and-bolts of political mechanics, they failed to recognize what McConnell and his allies have known all along: only power is power.

I am as guilty of this as anybody. In 2014, I wrote a piece that now strikes me as the apotheosis of mid-aughts feminist myopia. Entitled “This May Have Been the Best Year for Women Since the Dawn of Time,” the essay starts with this cringey hyperbole: “Since the dinosaurs roamed, since the pyramids were built, since the locomotive was invented, there has never been a better year for women than 2014.” I listed reasons that seemed important at the time, but look superficial in retrospect: the success of Frozen, a handful of new women CEOs, Beyonce dancing in front of the word FEMINIST at MTV’s Video Music Awards.

Some call this thinking Girlboss Feminism. Others tie it to White Feminism. I think of it as the Empowerment Industrial Complex. Whatever you call it, it now seems like a cheugy distraction at best.

While the Empowerment Industrial Complex spent the early 2010s debating the ever-changing contours of feminist soft power, anti-abortion Republicans were building hard power, seat by seat, state by state. In 2010, Republicans raised $30 million to gain control of 21 legislative chambers, including in many states that would go on to pass the toughest abortion restrictions.

Read More: These States Are Set to Ban Abortion if Roe v. Wade Is Overturned

While online feminists interrogated celebrities about whether they called themselves “feminists” and what “empowered” them most, conservatives were amassing the raw power to pass trigger laws in 13 states. While progressive nonprofits threw galas celebrating female inspiration, and brands spent millions on body-positive ad campaigns, and celebrities partnered with NGOs to promote “women’s empowerment,” the state and local organizations fighting to protect reproductive rights groups—many of them led by women of color—got too little funding and attention.

While the left tallied the number of women nominated for Oscars and which top-grossing movies passed the Bechdel test, savvy Republican operatives were carefully building a pipeline of conservative judges with immaculate resumes in anticipation of future Supreme Court vacancies. 2014, the year I dubbed the best ever for women, was also the year in which Republicans won the Senate, putting McConnell in position to block Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland to the high court.

“The failure of folks to pick up the shovel and fight this on the state level is why we’re in the position that we’re in right now,” says Nsé Ufot, executive director of the New Georgia Project, a nonpartisan civic engagement organization devoted to building the power of voters of color in Georgia. “I see that as a failure of the large influencers and culture makers and popular feminists to really flank state level activists.”

It’s not that cultural representation is unimportant. It’s just not enough—not even close. “Representation is important but not sufficient,” says Amanda Litman, co-executive director of Run for Something, which recruits and trains young progressives to run for state and local offices. Gender representation doesn’t always align neatly with feminist advancement. Neither the first woman Vice President nor the first woman Speaker of the House has the power to change the makeup of the Supreme Court or save the constitutional right to an abortion. Of the record 147 women in Congress, 41 are Republicans, many of them anti-abortion. All the major national anti-abortion organizations are run by women. For the first time in history, four women serve on the Supreme Court at the same time—and Justice Amy Coney Barrett was key to sealing the demise of Roe. More white women voted for Trump than Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. This too was representation. This too mattered.

The Trump presidency exposed the faulty arithmetic at the heart of the Empowerment Industrial Complex. The rallying cries of empowerment politics convinced many that seeing and being were inextricably linked, as if obstacles like wealth inequality, structural racism, and voter suppression could be overcome by enough feminist inspo.

Read More: Anti-Abortion Pregnancy Centers Are Collecting Troves of Data That Could Be Weaponized Against Women

Now that Roe has fallen, it’s clear that women have bigger problems than representation. In a post-Roe world, many women’s lives will be defined by new laws in their state restricting their bodily autonomy—not by someone’s empowering speech at the Grammys. When you are forced to deliver children you didn’t want to have and can’t afford to raise, you may not care whether you see yourself reflected in the latest superhero blockbuster.

“It was a boiling frog situation,” says Meaghan Winter, author of All Politics is Local. “People didn’t realize how bad it was until it was too late.”

And so, despite everything women have achieved over the last half-century, Roe fell. Now it’s up to the feminist movement to regroup and recalibrate. Inspirational narratives are great, so long as they inspire people towards building real political power. Abortion rights can still be saved, but only if feminists focus their energy on electing allies at the state and local level. In a post-Roe America, that’s the kind of representation that matters most.

With reporting by Mariah Espada and Julia Zorthian