‘Everybody’s daughter’: The rape victim behind Kentucky’s viral abortion ad

Hadley Duvall helped Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear win reelection -- and she’s ready to campaign again in 2024

By Caroline Kitchener
December 4, 2023

MIDWAY, Ky. — One month before the governor thanked her for his victory, Hadley Duvall had already won.

Standing in the middle of a football field in mid-October, she looked out at the students of her small Christian university, stunned to be the one wearing the rhinestone tiara. Her classmates could have chosen to honor the student body president or a leading member of the local Bible study. Instead, they’d picked Hadley, the face of a viral ad about abortion and sexual abuse that had begun airing a month earlier, and would soon help Democrats hold the governor’s mansion in one of the most conservative states in the country.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/12/04/kentucky-abortion-ad/

04.12.2023

Jennifer Adkins Miller

Jeremy Whitledge

Republican National Committee

USA – Lying About Abortion Is the GOP’s Election Strategy

Despite voters making their choice for safe and accessible abortion resoundingly clear at the polls, Republicans are doubling down on their life-threatening bans.

Kylie Cheung
Nov 20, 2023

The weekend after Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved a ballot measure to enshrine a right to abortion in the state Constitution, Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel went on NBC’s Meet the Press and CNN’s State of the Union to pitch her master plan for Republican candidates on abortion moving forward: lie. Candidates in her party, McDaniel argued to CNN, should follow the lead of a newly elected Republican state senator in Virginia who falsely claimed that he doesn’t support abortion bans; he instead supports “common sense limitations.” On NBC, McDaniel offered an example of how Republican candidates should answer questions about the matter, saying, “It’s confusing right now. But in a time of consensus, can’t we agree on reasonable limitations [on abortion]?”

This was precisely the playbook on which anti-abortion candidates across Virginia ran—and lost—last week. They lost their narrow majority in the State House, giving Democrats control of both chambers of the state legislature and barring Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin from being able to sign an abortion ban into law. The governor, together with Virginia state Republicans, vowed to enact a 15-week ban. Yet Youngkin’s PAC stated that “there is no ban” and referred to the proposed 15-week ban as an ostensibly moderate, reasonable “limit.”

Continued: https://www.damemagazine.com/2023/11/20/republicans-abortion-position/

USA – Tuesday’s Election Results Show Women Will Fight for Abortion Rights

Women don't want men making laws getting between us, our families, and our doctors.

NANCY BRAUS, Common Dreams
Nov 12, 2023

It is clear that the Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court caught the Republicans completely off guard, even though they have been working to take away the rights of women since before they killed the Equal Rights Amendment.

The right must have thought that stealing the basic rights to bodily autonomy and to determining the size of one's own family would be upsetting at first, but then we would all get over it. The pundits always say that Americans have a short span of attention, especially when it comes to politics, so it appears that the forced birthers didn't have a clue about the buzz saw they were about to confront.

Continued: https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/tuesday-election-abortion-rights

How Republican Courts Could Sabotage the Ohio Abortion Vote and Future Ballot Measures

BY MARY ZIEGLER
NOV 09, 2023

After Ohio voted to enshrine reproductive care access in the state’s constitution on Tuesday, abortion rights supporters are now a perfect 7-for-7 in ballot initiative fights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year. Ohio has Republicans in control of all three branches of government, but the state’s voters still managed to approve a ballot initiative on reproductive rights. Meanwhile, abortion helped propel state lawmakers in Virginia to control of both chambers of the state Legislature—and fueled the reelection of Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear in Kentucky. Memes and tweets have circulated saying that if abortion were on the ballot in 2024 instead of Joe Biden, the race would be a done deal.

Continued: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/11/republican-ohio-abortion-vote-florida-desantis.html

Next for the GOP on Abortion: Minority Rule

Republicans keep losing elections because they want to restrict reproductive freedom. That doesn’t mean they will stop.

David Corn, Mother Jones
Nov 8, 2023

Once again, American voters in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson decision that last year nullified a woman’s constitutional right to an abortion have told the Republican Party what they think of its crusade to restrict reproductive freedom: Get lost.

On Tuesday, abortion won. In Ohio, 57 percent of the Buckeyes who went to the polls, in an election that saw supercharged turnout, supported a measure to amend the state constitution to guarantee individuals the “right to make and carry out one’s own reproductive decisions.”

Continued: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/11/minority-rule-gop-republicans-abortion-rick-santorum/

08.11.2023

Abortion Rights Fuel Big Democratic Wins, and Hopes for 2024

Election results from Tuesday showed that Democrats, independents and even some moderate Republicans can coalesce around the issue.

By Lisa Lerer and Shane Goldmacher
Nov. 8, 2023

Democrats won decisive victories in major races across the country on Tuesday evening, overcoming the downward pull of an unpopular president, lingering inflation and growing global unrest by relying on abortion, the issue that has emerged as their fail-safe since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade last year.

In races in parts of the South and the Rust Belt, Democrats put abortion rights at the center of their campaigns, spending tens of millions of dollars on ads highlighting Republican support for abortion bans.

Continued: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/us/politics/election-results-democrats-abortion.html

08.11.2023

News

Andy Beshear

Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee

Will Abortion Dominate the 2024 Elections? Tuesday Will Offer Clues.

Lisa Lerer and Shane Goldmacher
(New York Times)
Sat, November 4, 2023

Abortion has emerged as a defining fault line of this year’s elections, with consequential contests in several states Tuesday offering fresh tests of the issue’s political potency nearly 18 months after the Supreme Court ended a federal right to an abortion.

The decision overturning Roe v. Wade scrambled American politics in 2022, transforming a long-standing social conflict into an electoral battering ram that helped drive Democrats to critical victories in the midterm races. Now, as abortion restrictions and bans in red states have become reality, the issue is again on the ballot, both explicitly and implicitly, in races across the country.

Continued: https://news.yahoo.com/abortion-dominate-2024-elections-tuesday-151158875.html

Abortion is the common thread in 2023 elections. That’s bad news for Republicans.

The GOP still hopes that the only voters who care about abortion rights are women.

Oct. 28, 2023
By Andrea Grimes, MSNBC

Americans haven’t forgotten that the ability to decide if and when to become a parent is one of the most essential, personal and life-changing decisions we’ll ever make. And we especially haven’t forgotten that the GOP is primarily responsible for wresting that decision away from many millions of us.

Because we remember both of these things, the issue of abortion remains a common thread in upcoming elections around the country — much to the consternation of Republicans. A year after the issue boosted Democrats in the midterms, the GOP is struggling to convince voters that the abortion bans the party has pushed for decades are some sort of collective fever dream. They want us to think abortion bans are a mass hysterical event that has caused us to hallucinate traveling far from home for abortion care, to invent the state-mandated traumas of forced birth, or to imagine that the pregnant people we’ve lost to poor maternal care were always ghosts, irrelevant and expendable, and never our living, loved ones.

Continued: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/election-2023-abortion-republicans-rcna122327

28.10.2023

Andy Beshear

Daniel Cameron

Glenn Youngkin

public support for abortion

USA – Abortion is on the ballot in November. The outcome will shape 2024.

Republicans hope to prove the legitimacy of “consensus” bans.

by Rachel M. Cohen
Oct 22, 2023

Few states have major elections coming up in November. But in those that do, abortion rights are playing a pivotal role.

The outcome of those contests — an abortion rights ballot measure in Ohio, a competitive gubernatorial election in Kentucky, and a fight over whether Republicans in Virginia will gain full control of state government — will shape reproductive health care in those states. The results also have big ramifications for political strategy and investments into 2024, as leaders wait to see if abortion rights yield the same kinds of electoral wins for Democrats as they did in 2022.

Continued: https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/23910990/abortion-midterms-elections-dobbs-roe

22.10.2023

Commentary

Andy Beshear

ballot initiatives on abortion

Why the Republican offensive on abortion is escalating

Ronald Brownstein
Tue April 19, 2022

(CNN) When three red states finalized severe restrictions on abortion over consecutive days last week, they highlighted the GOP's rising militancy on the issue -- and the political and legal calculations underpinning it.

Separate actions last week in Oklahoma, Florida and Kentucky made clear the red state drive to retrench, or eliminate, access to abortion is escalating as the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority nears a decision, expected in late June, in which it is widely anticipated to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that established a nationwide right to abortion.

Continued: https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/19/politics/abortion-laws-red-states-republicans/index.html