Abortion

Liz Wolfe | 4.1.2024 9:30 AM

Texas woman charged with murder: Near the border, a Texas woman, Lizelle Gonzalez, faced a murder charge (and two nights in jail) for self-inducing an abortion in 2022. The charges were dropped. Now Gonzalez is suing the prosecutors in federal court, seeking $1 million in damages due to the harm she suffered from both the initial arrest and the media coverage of the matter.

"Under the abortion restrictions in Texas and other states, women who seek abortion are exempt from criminal charges," reports the Associated Press. The State Bar of Texas already disciplined the Starr County district attorney, Gocha Ramirez, who brought the charges in 2022, but "the fallout from Defendants' illegal and unconstitutional actions has forever changed the Plaintiff's life," argues the suit.

IVF restrictions? Conservative groups, including the Heritage Foundation, are reportedly not advocating an in vitro fertilization ban "but want new restrictions that would significantly curtail access to the procedure, such as imposing more regulations on fertility clinics, limiting the number of embryos that can be created or transferred to the uterus at one time, and banning pre-implantation genetic testing, which they argue allows parents to discriminate against their embryos on the basis of sex, disabilities like Down Syndrome or other factors."

Politico describes this as "re-run[ning] the Roe playbook" but notes that "IVF is broadly popular, according to public polling, in a way abortion never was."

It's the Roman Catholic church that has historically taken a strong anti-IVF stance—so not exactly staunch GOP voters per se, or particularly large in number and political power in the United States. Evangelicals tend to be less concerned about IVF. Among pro-lifers, roughly 80 percent support IVF (higher if you look at evangelical pro-lifers on their own). Polling in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court's decision to extend greater legal protections to frozen embryos found that 86 percent of respondents were in favor of keeping IVF legal.

Between the Alabama Supreme Court decision and high-profile incidents like the Gonzalez case—plus the fact that abortion protections keep getting enshrined in law when they're put to a vote (remember Kansas? Ohio? Michigan?)—it's not clear that pro-lifers have a great plan to create a post-Dobbs framework that's broadly acceptable to voters.

Scenes from New York: A group of activists thought Easter Vigil Mass would be a good time to make their "free Palestine" plea and display their banner in front of the St. Patrick's Cathedral altar in Midtown.

"At least some of the protesters were with Extinction Rebellion NYC's Palestinian Solidarity group and carried a flag with an olive tree and the words 'SILENCE = DEATH' written across it," reports The New York Post.

Extinction Rebellion is the group that carries out climate-related stunts at major art museums and blocks traffic frequently.

One of the activists "was arrested in September after disrupting the U.S. Open women's semifinal with activists who used glue to prevent security from ejecting them from Arthur Ashe Stadium after they held up a sign decrying fossil fuels," reports The New York Post. "Their stunt stalled the match for nearly 50 minutes."

Caltrain deputy director built himself an apartment (with kitchen & shower) inside the Burlingame train station with $42k of public funds (each invoice