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Warning: This story contains details of a miscarriage which some people may find distressing.

“We broke Roe vs Wade,” president-elect Donald Trump said earlier this year, referring to the Supreme Court ruling in 2022 which stripped millions of American women of the legal right to abortion.

Some 36 days later, Ryan Hamilton, a radio host from Texas, found his wife passed out “in a huge pool of blood” on their toilet floor, their dead baby still inside her after she was denied abortion care.

“What I want is for people to understand that this is really happening and that abortion bans affect incomplete miscarriages, women like my wife,” Mr Hamilton told Sky News.

“Women have literally died and the thing I want the most is to make sure that my daughter’s future doesn’t include her bleeding out on a bathroom floor like her mum almost did.”

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Trump called out over ‘abortion lies’

‘She was tortured for four days by the state of Texas’

In 2021 Texas introduced stringent laws on abortion, banning it after five weeks of pregnancy.

But after Roe vs Wade was overturned the next year, it went a step further and banned abortion in any circumstance except to save a woman’s life or prevent “substantial impairment of a major bodily function”.

Although Texas allows this exception, doctors and women argued in court last year that the state’s law is so restrictive and vaguely worded that physicians are afraid of providing abortions for fear they could face potential criminal charges.

Mr Hamilton claims the law’s vagueness is what caused his wife to almost die from her miscarriage.

“There’s no clarification as to how close to dead a woman has to be for them to legally perform the abortion care that she needs,” he said.

With his first daughter, a one-year-old, cooing in the background, Mr Hamilton described how his wife, 37, was 13 weeks pregnant when she miscarried while carrying their second child.

When they first realised something was wrong, the couple went to a medical centre near their home in a rural area of Texas, where the baby was found to have no heartbeat.

Mr Hamilton’s wife, who has asked to remain anonymous, was prescribed the drug misoprostol, more commonly known as an abortion pill.

That was a Thursday, Mr Hamilton recalls, but as it was too late in the day to get hold of the pill, his wife had to spend a “torturous” night with their dead baby still in her womb.

When morning came, Mr Hamilton went to the pharmacy and got the pill. But after his wife took the first dose, the couple called the medical centre to report something was “really wrong” as she was bleeding a lot.

They asked for an alternative to the pill but the medic on the phone said they should try again with the second dose and monitor the colour of the blood.

Mr Hamilton said: “They asked me what colour the blood was, they said it needs to be brown blood… I said ‘it’s bright red’ and they said ‘that’s not right’.

“So in the middle of losing our baby… We are being instructed on focusing on the colour of the blood in the toilet.”

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Why could abortion pill be pulled in US?

After a night when Mr Hamilton’s wife experienced something akin to early labour, the situation hadn’t changed, so the couple went back to the centre in the hope of getting more support.

The doctor on shift, however, told them that “considering the current stance” he wouldn’t prescribe any more misoprostol – and also had no alternative to offer.

“We stood in the parking lot with our then nine-month-old daughter in the truck, trying to figure out what we were going to do because the risk of sepsis could have killed my wife… if we left our dead baby in there,” Mr Hamilton said.

They then decided to go to another hospital about an hour away. His wife was subjected to “more probing and prodding only to discover what we already knew, that our baby didn’t have a heartbeat”.

He said she was “bleeding profusely at this point… bleeding non-stop, bleeding through post-birth pads”.

Mr Hamilton said the doctors “disappeared for hours” only to come back and refuse to carry out dilation and curettage (D&C), a surgical procedure to remove the baby. The couple were sent home with a third dose of misoprostol instead.

Mr Hamilton said they were essentially saying “she’s not close enough to dead to perform this procedure as she has to reach the life of the mother exception under Texas law”.

“It’s nightmare stuff and my poor wife was tortured for four days by the state of Texas,” he said.

Sky News has approached Texas state authorities for comment.

According to online abortion service Women on Web, medical abortion is “effective and safe” up to 12 weeks of pregnancy. After that, the medicine will still be effective but the risk of complications increases, as does the chance of having to see a medical professional afterwards.

‘I thought she was going to die’

Mr Hamilton described how after taking the third dose of the abortion pill, his wife woke up on Sunday to even more bleeding.

“I wrapped her in the heating blanket, and she was cold, clammy cold. I propped her head up on the pillow and it was the first time I thought she was going to die.”

While checking on their daughter, he got a missed call from his wife, so he ran over and found she had “fallen off the toilet” and was lying in a “huge pool of blood”.

He picked her up and “put her unconscious body in the truck”, strapped their daughter in and drove to a third hospital in the hope of getting help.

As “she was close enough to dead”, she got life-saving care, regained consciousness and her body gradually recovered.

According to analysis shared with NBC, the number of women who died while pregnant, during labour or soon after giving birth skyrocketed following Texas’s five-week ban in 2021.

From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis of federal public health data by the Gender Equity Policy Institute.

“We will carry that torturous experience with us for the rest of our lives,” Mr Hamilton said.

What could happen to abortion rights under second Trump administration?

It is hard to say what Trump’s second administration, due to start once he is inaugurated on 20 January, could mean for the future of abortion rights in the US as the president-elect has flip-flopped on the issue.

As president, he backed a House bill which would’ve banned abortion in the whole country after 20 weeks.

In March, he suggested he would support a nationwide ban on abortions after 15 weeks’ gestation.

But in the final stages of his latest campaign, which saw his Republican Party take control of both Houses, the 78-year-old said he would not sign a federal ban on abortion and would leave it to the states to decide what policies to adopt.

At the end of August, Mr Trump, whose wife Melania recently published a memoir where she came out in support of abortion rights, told Sky News’ US partner network NBC he believed the six-week abortion ban adopted by his home state of Florida was “too short”.

But as he faced fierce backlash from anti-abortion advocates, Mr Trump came out a day later to say he would be voting “no” on an unsuccessful ballot measure which would have expanded abortion access until foetal viability, around the 24th week of pregnancy.

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US Supreme Court preserves women’s access to abortion pill

Nancy Northup, CEO of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said his re-election is a “deadly threat” to reproductive health.

She said that as a result of Roe vs Wade being overturned, abortion is nearly or completely banned in 17 of the 50 US states.

As the results of the presidential election became clear, there were reports of Americans stockpiling abortion pills, while Plan C, which promotes access to abortion medication online, said searches to its homepage following the landslide vote for Mr Trump surged from 500 to 80,000 in a day.

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Ms Northup said: “The unnecessary and cruel harm caused by the first Trump administration includes a reproductive healthcare crisis in vast swathes of the United States that has led to the deaths of numerous women who are likely the tip of the iceberg.

“A second Trump administration will compound these harms with new, potentially far worse ones.

“It will seek to stop the availability of medication abortion by mail, which has been a lifeline in post-Roe America,” she said.

There are also fears it will try to gag organisations based both in and outside of the US from advocating for abortion rights and providing care abroad, even with their non-US funds.

“Without Trump overturning Roe vs Wade then none of this starts to happen,” Mr Hamilton said, referring to the women who died or, like his wife, narrowly escaped death as a result of complications from being denied the care they needed.

“The priority is not my wife’s health, the priority becomes the legality of the procedure.”

At the heart of anti-abortionists’ campaigning is the belief in the sanctity of human life.

“In opposing abortion, we acknowledge the humanity of the child in the womb which fuels our effort to protect the pre-born child’s life,” Americans United for Life says.

Mr Trump’s campaign team has been approached for comment.

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Financial markets were always going to respond to Trump tariffs but they’re also battling with another problem

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Financial markets were always going to respond to Trump tariffs but they're also battling with another problem

Global financial markets gave a clear vote of no-confidence in President Trump’s economic policy.

The damage it will do is obvious: costs for companies will rise, hitting their earnings.

The consequences will ripple throughout the global economy, with economists now raising their expectations for a recession, not only in the US, but across the world.

Tariffs latest: FTSE 100 suffers biggest daily drop since COVID

Financial investors had been gradually re-calibrating their expectations of Donald Trump over the past few months.

Hopes that his actions may not match his rhetoric were dashed on Wednesday as he imposed sweeping tariffs on the US’ trading partners, ratcheting up protectionism to a level not seen in more than a century.

Markets were always going to respond to that but they are also battling with another problem: the lack of certainty when it comes to Trump.

More on Donald Trump

He is a capricious figure and we can only guess his next move. Will he row back? How far is he willing to negotiate and offer concessions?

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These are massive unknowns, which are piled on to uncertainty about how countries will respond.

China has already retaliated and Europe has indicated it will go further.

That will compound the problems for the global economy and undoubtedly send shivers through the markets.

Much is yet to be determined, but if there’s one thing markets hate, it’s uncertainty.

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Stock markets suffer sharp drops after Donald Trump announces sweeping tariffs

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Stock markets suffer sharp drops after Donald Trump announces sweeping tariffs

Stock markets around the world fell on Thursday after Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs – with some economists now fearing a recession.

The US president announced tariffs for almost every country – including 10% rates on imports from the UK – on Wednesday evening, sending financial markets reeling.

While the UK’s FTSE 100 closed down 1.55% and the continent’s STOXX Europe 600 index was down 2.67% as of 5.30pm, it was American traders who were hit the most.

Trump tariffs latest: US stock markets tumble

All three of the US’s major markets opened to sharp losses on Thursday morning.

A person works on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York, Monday, March 31, 2025. Pic: AP
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The S&P 500 is set for its worst day of trading since the COVID-19 pandemic. File pic: AP

By 8.30pm UK time (3.30pm EST), The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 3.7%, the S&P 500 opened with a drop of 4.4%, and the Nasdaq composite was down 5.6%.

Compared to their values when Donald Trump was inaugurated, the three markets were down around 5.6%, 8.7% and 14.4%, respectively, according to LSEG.

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Worst one-day losses since COVID

As Wall Street trading ended at 9pm in the UK, two indexes had suffered their worst one-day losses since the COVID-19 pandemic.

The S&P 500 fell 4.85%, the Nasdaq dropped 6%, and the Dow Jones fell 4%.

It marks Nasdaq’s biggest daily percentage drop since March 2020 at the start of COVID, and the largest drop for the Dow Jones since June 2020.

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The latest numbers on tariffs

‘Trust in President Trump’

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told CNN earlier in the day that Mr Trump was “doubling down on his proven economic formula from his first term”.

“To anyone on Wall Street this morning, I would say trust in President Trump,” she told the broadcaster, adding: “This is indeed a national emergency… and it’s about time we have a president who actually does something about it.”

Later, the US president told reporters as he left the White House that “I think it’s going very well,” adding: “The markets are going to boom, the stock is going to boom, the country is going to boom.”

He later said on Air Force One that the UK is “happy” with its tariff – the lowest possible levy of 10% – and added he would be open to negotiations if other countries “offer something phenomenal”.

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How is the world reacting to Trump’s tariffs?

Economist warns of ‘spiral of doom’

The turbulence in the markets from Mr Trump’s tariffs “just left everybody in shock”, Garrett Melson, portfolio strategist at Natixis Investment Managers Solutions in Boston, told Reuters.

He added that the economy could go into recession as a result, saying that “a lot of the pain, will probably most acutely be felt in the US and that certainly would weigh on broader global growth as well”.

Meanwhile, chief investment officer at St James’s Place Justin Onuekwusi said that international retaliation is likely, even as “it’s clear countries will think about how to retaliate in a politically astute way”.

He warned: “Significant retaliation could lead to a tariff ‘spiral of doom’ that could be the growth shock that drags us into recession.”

Read more:
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Tariffs about something more than economics: power

It comes as the UK government published a long list of US products that could be subject to reciprocal tariffs – including golf clubs and golf balls.

Running to more than 400 pages, the list is part of a four-week-long consultation with British businesses and suggests whiskey, jeans, livestock, and chemical components.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer said on Thursday that the US president had launched a “new era” for global trade and that the UK will respond with “cool and calm heads”.

It also comes as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced a 25% tariff on all American-imported vehicles that are not compliant with the US-Mexico-Canada trade deal.

He added: “The 80-year period when the United States embraced the mantle of global economic leadership, when it forged alliances rooted in trust and mutual respect and championed the free and open exchange of goods and services, is over. This is a tragedy.”

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Trump’s tariffs are about something more than economics: power

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Trump's tariffs are about something more than economics: power

Tanking stock markets, collapsing world orders, devastating trade wars; economists with their hair ablaze are scrambling to keep up.

But as we try to make sense of Donald Trumps’s tariff tsunami, economic theory only goes so far. In the end this surely is about something more primal.

Power.

Understanding that may be crucial to how the world responds.

Yes, economics helps explain the impact. The world’s economy has after all shifted on its axis, the way it’s been run for decades turned on its head.

Instead of driving world trade, America is creating a trade war. We will all feel the impact.

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PM will ‘fight’ for deal with US

Donald Trump says he is settling scores, righting wrongs. America has been raped, looted and pillaged by the world trading system.

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But don’t be distracted by the hyperbole – and if you think this is about economics alone, you may be missing the point.

Above all, tariffs give Donald Trump power. They strike fear into allies and enemies, from governments to corporations.

This is a president who runs his presidency like a medieval emperor or mafia don.

It is one reason why since his election we have seen what one statesman called a conga line of sycophants make their way to the White House, from world leaders to titans of industry.

The conga line will grow longer as they now redouble their efforts hoping to special treatment from Trump’s tariffs. Sir Keir Starmer among them.

President Trump’s using similar tactics at home, deploying presidential power to extract concessions and deter dissent in corporate America, academia and the US media. Those who offer favours are spared punishment.

His critics say he seeks a form power for the executive or presidential branch of government that the founding fathers deliberately sought to prevent.

Whether or not that is true, the same playbook of divide and rule through intimidation can now be applied internationally. Thanks to tariffs

Each country will seek exceptions but on Trump’s terms. Those who retaliate may meet escalation.

This is the unforgiving calculus for governments including our own plotting their next moves.

The temptation will be to give Trump whatever he wants to spare their economies, but there is a jeopardy that compounds the longer this goes on.

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Trump hits island home only to penguins with 10% tariffs

Chinese Vice President Han Zheng gestures to Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves following a photo session at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, Saturday, Jan. 11, 2025. (Florence Lo/Pool Photo via AP)
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Could America’s traditional allies turn to China? Pic: AP

Malcolm Turnbull, the former Australian prime minister who coined the conga line comparison, put it this way: “Pretty much all the international leaders I have seen that have sucked up to Trump have been run over. The reality is if you suck up to bullies, whether it’s global affairs or in the playground, you just get more bullying.”

Trading partners may be able to mitigate the impact of these tariffs through negotiation, but that may only encourage this unorthodox president to demand ever more?

Ultimately the world will need a more reliable superpower than that.

In the hands of such a president, America cannot be counted on.

When it comes to security, stability and prosperity, allies will need to fend for themselves.

And they will need new friends. If Washington can’t be relied on, Beijing beckons.

America First will, more and more, mean America on its own.

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