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The next front is rapidly emerging in the struggle between supporters and opponents of legal abortion, and that escalating conflict is increasing the chances that the issue will shape the 2024 election as it did last Novembers midterm contest.

President Joe Biden triggered the new confrontation with a flurry of recent moves to expand access to the drugs used in medication abortions, which now account for more than half of all abortions performed in the United States. Medication abortion involves two drugs: mifepristone followed by misoprostol (which is also used to prevent stomach ulcers). Although abortion opponents question the drugs safety, multiple scientific studies have found few serious adverse effects beyond headache or cramping.

Federal regulation of the use and distribution of these drugs by agencies including the FDA and the United States Postal Service has long been overshadowed in the abortion debate by the battles over Supreme Court nominations and federal legislation to ban or authorize abortion nationwide. But with a conservative majority now entrenched in the Court, and little chance that Congress will pass national legislation in either direction any time soon, abortion supporters and opponents are focusing more attention on executive-branch actions that influence the availability of the pills.

Read: The abortion backup plan no one is talking about

The reality of abortion care has been changing very, very rapidly, and now the politics are catching up with it, Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster who served as one of Bidens advisers in 2020, told me.

Tens of thousands of anti-abortion activists will descend on Washington today for their annual March for Lifethe first since the Supreme Court last summer overturned Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that established a nationwide right to abortion. The activists will cheer the swift moves by some two dozen Republican-controlled states to ban or severely restrict abortion since the Court struck down Roe.

But even as abortion opponents celebrate, they are growing more frustrated about the increased reliance on the drugs, which are now used in 54 percent of U.S. abortionsup dramatically from less than one-third less than a decade ago, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights. With the overturning of Roe, [with] COVID, and with President Bidens loosening of the restrictions on these [drugs] there is a new frontier that everyone is pivoting to, Rebecca Parma, the legislative director for Texas Right to Life, a prominent anti-abortion group, told me.

George W. Bush and Donald Trump, the two Republicans who have held the presidency since the drugs were first approved under Democratic President Bill Clinton, in 2000, took virtually no steps to limit their availability. But conservative activists are already signaling that they will press the Republican presidential candidates in 2024 for more forceful action.

Our job is to make sure this becomes an issue that any GOP candidate will have to answer and address, Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life of America, told me. No one can be ambivalent again; it will simply not be an option.

The challenge for Republicans is that the 2022 midterm elections sent an unmistakable signal of resistance to further abortion restrictions in almost all of the key swing states that tipped the 2020 presidential election and are likely to decide the 2024 contest. Would you really want to be Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump running in a close election saying, Im going to ban all abortion pills in Michigan or Pennsylvania right now? says Mary Ziegler, a law professor at UC Davis, who has written extensively on the history of the abortion debate.

Sunday is the 50th anniversary of the original Roe decision, and the Biden administration will mark the occasion with a defiant pro-abortion-rights speech from Vice President Kamala Harris in Florida, where GOP Governor DeSantis, a likely 2024 presidential contender, signed a 15-week abortion ban last April.

White House officials see access to abortion medication as the next battlefront in the larger struggle over the procedure, Jennifer Klein, the director of the White House Gender Policy Council, told me. She said she expects Republicans to mount more sweeping efforts to restrict access to the drugs than they did during the Bush or Trump presidencies. The reason youve seen both Democratic and Republican administrations ensure access to medication abortions is because this is the FDA following their evidence-based scientific judgment, she said. So what I think is different now is you are seeing some pretty extreme actions as the next way to double down on taking away reproductive health and reproductive rights.

Federal regulation of the abortion drugs has followed a consistent pattern, with Democratic presidents moving to expand access and Republican presidents mostly accepting those actions.

Read: The other abortion pill

During the 2000 presidential campaign, for instance, George W. Bush called the Clinton administrations initial approval of mifepristone wrong and said he worried it would lead to more abortions. But over Bushs two terms, his three FDA commissioners ignored a citizen petition from conservative groups to revoke approval for the drug. Under Barack Obama, the FDA formalized relatively onerous rules for the use of mifepristone. Physicians had to obtain a special certification to prescribe the drug, women had to meet with their doctor once before receiving it and twice after, and it could be used only within the first seven weeks of pregnancy.

The FDA loosened these restrictions during Obamas final year in office. It reduced the number of physician visits required to obtain the drugs from three to one and increased to 10 the number of weeks into a pregnancy the drugs could be used. The revisions also permitted other medical professionals, such as nurses, to prescribe the drugs if they received certification, and eliminated a requirement for providers to report adverse effects other than death. Trump didnt reverse any of the Obama decisions. He did side with conservatives by fighting a lawsuit from abortion-rights advocates to lift the requirement for an in-person doctors visit to obtain the drugs during the COVID pandemic. But by the time the Supreme Court ruled for the Trump administration in January 2021, Biden was days away from taking office. Within months, women seeking an abortion could consult with a doctor via telehealth and then receive the pills via mail.

On January 3 of this year, the FDA took another major step by allowing pharmacies to dispense the drugs. In late December, the Justice Department issued a legal opinion that the Postal Service could deliver the drugs without violating the 19th-century Comstock Act, which bars use of the mail to corrupt the public morals.

The paradox is that the impact of these rules, for now, will be felt almost entirely in the states where abortion remains legal. Obtaining abortion pills there will be much more comparable to filling any other prescription. But 19 red states have passed laws that still require medical professionals to be present when the drugs are administered, which prevents pharmacies from offering them despite the FDA authorization. And although the FDA has approved use of mifepristone for the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, medical professionals cannot prescribe the drugs in violation of state time limits (or absolute bans) on abortion. In terms of anti-abortion states, the Biden administrations actions have had basically no impact, Greer Donley, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies abortion law, told me in an email.

Although the red states have largely walled themselves off from Bidens efforts on medication abortion, conservatives have launched a multifront attempt to roll back access to the pills nationwide. Students for Life has filed another citizen petition with the FDA, arguing that doctors who prescribe the drugs must dispose of any fetal remains as meical waste. In a joint letter released last week, 22 Republican attorneys general hinted that they may sue to overturn the new FDA rules permitting pharmacies to dispense the drugs. In November, another coalition of conservative groups filed a lawsuit before a Trump-appointed judge in Texas seeking to overturn the original certification and ban mifepristone. Jenny Ma, the senior counsel at the Center for Reproductive Rights, says that decision could ultimately have a broader effect than even the Supreme Court ruling overturning Roe: This case, she told me, could effectively ban medication abortion nationwide. It means people in every state may not be able to get abortion pills.

Republicans will also ramp up legislative action against the pills, although their proposals have no chance of becoming law while Democrats control the Senate and Biden holds the veto pen. Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith of Mississippi is planning to reintroduce her SAVE Moms and Babies Act, which would restore the prohibition against dispensing abortion drugs through the mail or at pharmacies.

From the May 2022 issue: The future of abortion in a post-Roe America

However these legal and legislative challenges are resolved, its already apparent that the 2024 GOP presidential field will face more pressure than before to propose executive-branch actions against the drugs. Thats going to be our clarion call in 2024, says Kristi Hamrick, a long-term social-conservative activist, who now serves as the chief strategist for media and policy at Students for Life.

Katie Glenn, the state-policy director at Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told me that, at the least, the group wants 2024 Republican presidential candidates to press for restoring the requirement to report adverse consequences from the drugs. Former Vice President Mike Pence, a likely candidate, has already suggested that he will support a ban on dispensing the pills through the mail. But the anti-abortion movements long-term goal remains the same: ban mifepristone altogether. Hawkins shows the growing fervor GOP candidates will face when she says, This pill is a cancer that has now metastasized throughout our country.

Simultaneously, abortion-rights advocates are pushing the Biden administration to loosen restrictions even further. Medication abortion has been overregulated for far too long, Ma told me. Many advocates want the FDA to extend permitted use of mifepristone from 10 to 12 weeks, eliminate the requirement that the professionals prescribing the drugs receive a special certification, and begin the process toward eventually making the drug available over the counter.

The immediate question is whether the Biden administration will challenge the red-state laws that have stymied its efforts to expand access. Advocates have argued that a legal case can be made for national FDA regulations to trump state restrictions, such as the requirement for physicians to dispense the drugs. But Biden is likely to proceed cautiously.

We dont have a lot of answers because, frankly, states have not tried to do this stuff in hundreds of years, Ziegler, the author of the upcoming book Roe: The History of a National Obsession, told me. Even so, she added, its a reasonable assumption that this conservative-dominated Supreme Court would resist allowing the federal government to preempt state rules on how the drugs are dispensed.

These mirror-image pressures in each party increase the odds of a clear distinction between Biden (or another Democrat) and the 2024 GOP nominee over access to the drugs. Democrats are generally confident they will benefit from almost any contrast that keeps abortion prominent in the 2024 race. Some, like Lake, see access to the pills as a powerful lever to do that. The issue, she argues, is relevant to younger voters, who are much more familiar than older people with the growing use of medication abortion and are especially dubious that pharmacies can offer certain drugs in some states but not in others.

The impact of abortion on the 2022 election was more complex than is often discussed. As Ive written, in the red states that have banned or restricted the practice, such as Florida, Ohio, and Texas, there was no discernible backlash against the Republican governors or state legislators who passed those laws. But the story was different in the blue and purple states where abortion remains legal. In pivotal states including Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, a clear majority of voters said they supported abortion rights, and, according to media exit polls, crushing majorities of them voted against Republican gubernatorial candidates who pledged to restrict abortion. Those Democratic victories in the states likely to prove decisive again in 2024 have left many Republican strategists leery of pursuing any further constraints on abortion.

Whats clear now is that even as abortion opponents gather to celebrate their long-sought toppling of Roe, many of them wont be satisfied until they have banned the procedure nationwide. It is totally unacceptable for a presidential candidate to say, Its just up to the states now, Marilyn Musgrave, the vice president for government affairs at the Susan B. Anthony group, told me. We need a federal role clearly laid out by these presidential candidates. Equally clear is that abortion opponents now view federal regulatory actions to restrict, and eventually ban, abortion drugs as a crucial interim step on that path. The U.S. may seem in some ways to be settling into an uneasy new equilibrium, with abortion banned in some states and permitted in others. But, as the escalating battle over abortion medication makes clear, access to abortion in every state will remain on the ballot in 2024.

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Mariann Edgar Budde: Who is the bishop Donald Trump called ‘nasty’?

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Mariann Edgar Budde: Who is the bishop Donald Trump called 'nasty'?

Donald Trump has hit out at the bishop of Washington after she lectured him on respecting immigrants and LGBT+ citizens during a televised church service.

The president remained straight-faced alongside his vice president JD Vance as bishop Mariann Edgar Budde addressed him at Tuesday’s interfaith prayer service at Washington National Cathedral, telling him to “have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now”.

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The direct appeal to Mr Trump, which went on for around two minutes, has gone viral on social media and drawn criticism from Republicans, including a congressman who urged the president to deport the bishop.

But what exactly did Bishop Budde say and what has the president’s response been?

What did Bishop Budde say?

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Watch the moment Bishop Budde confronts Trump

She began: “Let me make one final plea, Mr President. Millions have put their trust in you.

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“In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.

“There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in democratic, republican and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”

The bishop then highlighted the contributions of asylum seekers – a group Mr Trump has wasted no time in cracking down on.

She listed groups including “the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings” and those “who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals”.

“They may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals,” she said. Mr Trump then looked down at the floor.

She continued: “I ask you to have mercy, Mr President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away.

“And that you help those who are fleeing war and persecution in their own lands, to find compassion and welcome here.

“Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all once strangers in this land.”

Her comments came after Mr Trump promised to carry out the biggest deportation in US history and his executive order stating the government will recognise only two sexes.

How did Donald Trump and other Republicans react?

Donald Trump speaks with U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance.
Pic: Reuters
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Trump speaks to Vance during sermon. Pic: Reuters

The president remained stony-faced during the remarks, during which he sat alongside wife Melania in the front row, and next to Mr Vance and his wife Usha Vance.

He did at one point turn away and look over his shoulder before examining the booklet he was holding.

At another point in the sermon, Mr Trump turned towards his VP and the pair shared a wordless exchange of looks.

JD and Usha Vance
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JD Vance furrowed his brow as the bishop mentioned the LBGT+ community

Mr Vance raised his eyebrows at one stage and turned to share a look with his wife, whose gaze remained firmly forward.

He repeated the move after the bishop spoke about immigrants, and followed it up by whispering to Mrs Vance.

When Bishop Budde finished her sermon, Mr Trump leaned over to say something to Mr Vance, who shook his head in response.

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Asked what he thought of the sermon as he returned to the Oval Office, the president told reporters: “They could have done better.”

In a late-night post on his social media platform Truth Social, he called Bishop Budde a “radical left hardline Trump hater” and said she was “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart”.

“She brought her church into the world of politics in a very ungracious way,” he said.

“Apart from her inappropriate statements, the service was a very boring and uninspiring one. She is not very good at her job. She and her church owe the public an apology.”

Republican congressman Mike Collins shared a video of the sermon on X and wrote: “The person giving this sermon should be added to the deportation list.”

Who is Mariann Edgar Budde?

She was elected as the ninth bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington (EDW) in 2011, having served as rector of St John’s Episcopal Church in Minneapolis for 18 years.

She has had her sermons published in several books and journals, and has authored three of her own books about faith – most recently in 2023.

Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde.
Pic: Reuters
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The bishop during the service. Pic: Reuters

She has also been openly critical of Mr Trump before, having written an opinion piece for The New York Times in 2020, in which she condemned him for clearing Lafayette Square, near the White House, amid the George Floyd protests and then posing for photos on the grounds of nearby St John’s Church while holding a Bible.

She said she was “outraged” by the move and claimed he was using the Bible and the backdrop of the church, which belongs to her diocese, “for his political purposes”.

The EDW’s website describes her as “an advocate and organiser in support of justice concerns, including racial equity, gun violence prevention, immigration reform, the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ persons, and the care of creation”.

The bishop is married and has two children and grandchildren, the website adds.

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Hotel fire at ski resort in Turkey kills at least 76 people – four arrested

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Hotel fire at ski resort in Turkey kills at least 76 people - four arrested

A fire at a hotel in a popular ski resort in Turkey has killed at least 76 people, the country’s interior minister has said.

Ali Yerlikaya added that at least 51 other people were injured in the fire at the Grand Kartal hotel in Kartalkaya in Bolu province’s Koroglu mountains in northwest Turkey, about 185 miles (300km) east of Istanbul.

Four people, including the business owner, have been arrested by Turkish authorities, the justice secretary said.

A drone view shows firefighters working to extinguish a fire at a hotel in the ski resort of Kartalkaya in Bolu province, Turkey.
Pic: Ihlas News Agency/Reuters
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Pic: Ihlas News Agency/Reuters

A drone view shows a fire at a hotel in the ski resort of Kartalkaya in Bolu province, Turkey.
Pic: Reuters
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Pic: Reuters

Firefighters work to extinguish a fire at a hotel in the ski resort of Kartalkaya in Bolu, Turkey.
Pic: Reuters
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Pic: Reuters

The fire broke out at about 3.30am in the hotel’s restaurant, with pictures showing several fire engines surrounding the charred building, and white bed sheets tied together could be seen hanging from one upper-floor window.

At least two of the victims died after jumping from the building in panic, the governor of Bolu told the state-run Anadolu media agency, adding that 234 guests were staying at the 12-storey, 161-room hotel.

Other reports said some people tried to climb down from their rooms using sheets and blankets. The health minister said at least one of the injured was in serious condition and 17 others had been discharged from hospital after being treated.

Third-floor guest Atakan Yelkovan told the IHA news agency his wife smelled burning but “the alarm did not go off”.

“We tried to go upstairs but couldn’t, there were flames. We went downstairs and came here [outside],” he said.

Firefighters work at the scene after a fire broke out at a hotel in the ski resort of Kartalkaya, located in Bolu province, northwest Turkey, on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. (Mert Gokhan Koc/DIA Photo via AP)
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Firefighters at the scene. Pic: Mert Gokhan Koc/DIA Photo via AP

Mr Yelkovan said it took about an hour for the firefighting teams to arrive.

“People on the upper floors were screaming. They hung down sheets… some tried to jump,” he said.

Ski instructor Necmi Kepcetutan said he was asleep when the fire began and, after rushing outside, he helped some 20 guests escape.

He said the hotel was engulfed in smoke and admitted he couldn’t get to some of his students.

“I hope they are OK,” he said.

Firefighters work to extinguish a fire at a hotel in the ski resort of Kartalkaya in Bolu province, Turkey, January 21, 2025. REUTERS/Mert Ozkan
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Pic: Reuters


Firefighters work at the scene after a fire broke out at a hotel in the ski resort of Kartalkaya, located in Bolu province, northwest Turkey, on Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. (Mert Gokhan Koc/DIA Photo via AP)
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Pic: Mert Gokhan Koc/DIA Photo via AP

Mr Aydin’s office said 30 fire trucks and 28 ambulances were sent to the site. Other hotels at the resort were evacuated as a precaution and guests were placed in hotels around Bolu.

A team of six government-appointed prosecutors is investigating how the fire started.

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German TV station NTV suggested the wooden cladding on the outside of the hotel may have accelerated the spread of the fire and that efforts to put it out were hampered by the fact it is built on the side of a cliff.

The Grand Kartal hotel passed a fire inspection last year, tourism minister Mehmet Nuri Ersoy told reporters.

Turkey President Recep Tayyip Erdogan promised to take “all necessary steps” to find out what happened and “hold those responsible accountable”.

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Boy, two, and man, 41, killed as two others injured in Germany knife attack

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Boy, two, and man, 41, killed as two others injured in Germany knife attack

A two-year-old boy and 41-year-old man have been killed while two others were injured in a stabbing incident in the southern German state of Bavaria.

A man, described by police as a 28-year-old Afghan national, has been arrested following the knife attack in a park in Aschaffenburg on Wednesday.

Police said the two seriously injured people were receiving hospital treatment and that a cordon remained in place in the area around the scene.

Officers have said the motive for the attack is currently unclear.

Rescue vehicles are seen near a crime scene in Aschaffenburg, Germany.
Pic: DPA/AP
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Near the crime scene in Aschaffenburg.
Pic: DPA/AP

The suspect, who had followed a day care group of five small children, was detained at the scene in Schoental park, an English-style garden in the Bavarian city, where the attack occurred at around 11.45am local time.

Train services in the town were temporarily interrupted as the suspect tried to flee along the tracks, German news agency dpa reported.

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Rescue and security worker are seen near a crime scene in Aschaffenburg, Germany.
Pic: DPA/AP
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Pic: DPA/AP

However, he was quickly detained, police said.

A witness is being questioned, police added. They said there was no indication of further suspects and no danger to the public.

Police said they did not know the nationality of the two people who were killed and they did not release any details about those injured.

Germany has been hit by a string of violent attacks, including a car ramming into a crowd at a Christmas market in the city of Magdeburg in December, killing six people and injuring about 200.

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