Vox Sentences: Two abortion stories — one that matters, and one that involves Trump

Women seeking abortions get good news from the FDA and bad (? who even knows) news from Donald Trump.

Vox Sentences is written by Dylan Matthews and Dara Lind.

TOP NEWS

The FDA expands abortion access

Phil Walter/Getty Images

• The Food and Drug Administration is updating its labeling guidance for the use of mifepristone, the most commonly used abortion drug in America. The changes are likely to increase access.

  [NYT / Sabrina Tavernise]

• Updating its initial guidance from 2000, the FDA changed the dosage regimen to recommend two (lower) doses, allow women to take some doses of the drug at home, and take the drug up to 70 days after conception.

  [The Guardian / Molly Redden]

• This is the regimen that most doctors have been using for years; in most states, it's okay for doctors to prescribe off-label use of abortion drugs just as it is for any other drug.

  [The Verge / Kwame Opam]

• The new guidance will, however, have an impact in North Dakota, Ohio, and Texas, where state law requires doctors to follow the FDA label. Under the old guidance, this effectively discouraged women from getting medical abortions because of the cost of multiple doctor visits.

  [Politico / Jennifer Haberkorn]

• Of course, for some state lawmakers, the point of such laws is less safety than restricting abortions — which is why Arizona, at least, has already queued up a bill explicitly requiring doctors to follow the old FDA guidelines and ignore the new ones.

  [MSNBC / Irin Carmon]

• This constant escalation arms race on abortion restrictions is the sort of thing the Supreme Court is currently considering in its case about Texas's law restricting abortion providers. Ultimately, it raises the same question: At what point is limiting abortion tantamount to prohibiting it?

  [Reuters / Toni Clarke, Jilian Mincer, and Jon Herskovitz]

Speaking of abortion: Donald Trump

Scott Olson/Getty Images

• Donald Trump (to Chris Matthews), March 30, 2016, approximately 3 pm EDT: "The answer is there has to be some sort of punishment." ("For the woman?") "Yes."

  [Vox / Emily Crockett]

• Donald Trump campaign, March 30, 2016, approximately 5 pm EDT: "The doctor or any other person performing this illegal act upon a woman would be held legally responsible, not the woman. The woman is a victim."

  [Jon Ralston via Twitter]

• Despite the denial, though, it seems like the flip-flop over whether to criminally punish women who get abortions might follow Trump for a while. It appears to confirm one of two things pro-choicers think pro-lifers believe: either that abortion is murder and women should be punished as murderers, or that since women shouldn't be punished abortion must not really be murder after all.

  [Mother Jones / Kevin Drum]

• For the actual pro-life movement as it exists, though, the consensus — that abortion is murder, but the women are not the ones doing the murdering — is both firm and the product of years of careful messaging to find a broadly supported position. So Trump has them in an awkward position.

  [Daily Caller / Matt Lewis]

• Trump's women supporters don't necessarily agree with Trump (at least the 3 pm version) about punishment. But, par for the course with Trump, they're not letting a little thing like the issues get in the way of their support.

  [Huffington Post / Igor Bobic]

• For most women, though, including Republicans, Trump was a uniquely unacceptable candidate even before all this happened. His net favorability with women? -42 points.

  [Huffington Post / Janie Velencia and Ariel Edwards-Levy]

A drop in the commutation bucket

Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images

• President Obama used the presidential pardon power to shorten the sentences of 61 federal prisoners serving time for drug crimes.

  [AP / Josh Lederman]

• The commutations, of which Obama has done about 250 in total, are intended to bring the prison sentences of drug offenders sentenced under now-obsolete federal laws and policies in line with what their sentences would be if handed down today.

  [White House]

• 250 is a lot of people compared with previous presidents. The problem is that in 2014, the Obama administration promised a huge new push on commutations — saying they would shorten thousands of sentences this way before President Obama left office.

  [Vox / Dara Lind]

• It was a big break from the historically stingy pardon office of Obama's first term, led by a man who'd essentially sabotaged applications.

  [ProPublica / Dafna Linzer]

• But the government is still struggling to process the 10,000 applications it asked for and got in 2014. It's extremely unlikely it will be able to even come close to thousands of commutations.

• And the pardon attorney brought in to do it resigned earlier this year because the administration wasn't allowing her to do her job.

  [USA Today / Gregory Korte]

• Meanwhile, of course, the prisoners — even when the president himself shortens their sentences — have a vertiginous, often overwhelming, and frequently dangerous world to return to.

  [New York Times Magazine / Jon Mooallem]

MISCELLANEOUS

The musical Hamilton is, understandably, very anti-Aaron Burr. But Burr was arguably more progressive than Hamilton, a vocal women's rights advocate, friend of immigrants, and advocate for infrastructure spending. [Washington Post / Nancy Isenberg]

• There is no college admissions crisis, for the simple reason that people attending selective colleges are a small fraction of all college students.

  [FiveThirtyEight / Ben Casselman]

• Only 8 percent of high-tech workers in Silicon Valley directly employed by their companies are Hispanic. But 52.9 percent of blue-collar contract workers in Silicon Valley are.

  [Washington Post / Lydia DePillis]

• Want to find the quietest place in the whole country? Go to the Hoh Rainforest in Olympic National Park, in Washington State.

  [Crosscut / Samantha Larson]

• Telemedicine abortions — where women consult with doctors via Skype but still do lab work and get the pills at a clinic — greatly increase access, and encourage earlier terminations. Only two states are on board.

  [The Atlantic / Alana Semuels]

VERBATIM

"By having deep personal connections with people, you copy your mind into theirs, creating at least some form of immortality." [Medium / Kurt Gray]

• "The Associated Press news agency entered a formal cooperation with the Hitler regime in the 1930s, supplying American newspapers with material directly produced and selected by the Nazi propaganda ministry, archive material unearthed by a German historian has revealed."

  [The Guardian / Philip Oltermann]

• "Economics, in fact, is the only social science discipline with anything approaching a rough partisan balance between Democrats and Republicans."

  [Jon Shields and Joshua Dunn via Inside Higher Ed / Colleen Flaherty]

• "I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught."

  [Gary Leon Ridgway via BuzzFeed / Melissa Gira Grant]

• "After a suitable period of time — let’s say by the end of September of 2016 — Judge Garland should simply suit up and take the vacant seat at the court. This would entail walking into the Supreme Court on the first Monday in October, donning an extra black robe, seating himself at the bench, sipping from the mighty silver milkshake cup before him, and looking like he belongs there, in the manner of George Costanza."

  [Slate / Dahlia Lithwick]

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