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Mark Barden, who lost his son in the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, implores the public to “take this horror, and don’t let it go”
Barden would soon find out, of course, about a new tragedy unfolding at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. The massacre, which left 19 students and two teachers dead, would be immediately dubbed “another Sandy Hook” — the very thing Barden had devoted his life to preventing ever since the 2012 shooting claimed his seven-year-old son Daniel and 19 other first graders. On Tuesday night, Barden and his wife, Jackie, got in their car and drove around. “We just had to get out,” Barden says, and the two sat silently for a long while. “Then Jackie turned to me and said, ‘This is their Friday night.’ And I knew exactly what she meant.”
She was referring to Friday, December 14, 2014, the night the Bardens waited in agony at the Newtown firehouse until Gov. Dannel Malloy said, finally, “No more survivors.” The night they had to find the impossible words to tell to their two surviving children that their brother had been murdered at the elementary school they’d all attended. The night Barden could no longer imagine, as he’d done in the hours before, that his auburn-curled little boy had miraculously escaped the horror in his classroom and dashed into the woods, safe and sound.
“We were just in total shock, just trying to wrap our heads around what the fuck had happened,” Barden told me on Wednesday morning. “And that’s what Jackie meant. That’s where these families are right now.”
Barden has been willing to share his personal horror, again and again and again, for a nation reeling from one unthinkable tragedy after another — even though, for Barden, the tragedy is very much thinkable, for he has lived it for nearly a decade. And he feels compelled to do it in the small hope that, maybe, finally, fewer families would have to suffer his agony. “I recognized early on that there was a component of advocacy that I could honor my son Daniel through using my voice, using that platform that I didn’t want to be on, to prevent other families from having to go through this,” Barden says. “And I found it was an appropriate way, and I still do, to honor my little Daniel.”
I’ve been among the journalists who have called Barden in the aftermath of atrocities. Every time, he takes my call, and every time, he answers my nosy questions about what it’s like to live through a cruelty no parent should ever have to endure. He always welcomes my inquiries with a grace, generosity, and honesty that somehow makes his willingness seem all the more heartbreaking. He spares no one his grief, nor should he: The week that followed the 2018 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Barden had been “horrible” for him, though he nonetheless documented his “absolute sorrow, despair, anger, and defeat” to a Hartford Courant reporter who asked.
When I picked up the phone to, yet again, ask Barden to comment on another unspeakable tragedy, I couldn’t help but ask: Do you ever consider…not answering the phone?
Barden paused. “It is very difficult,” he says. “I feel I have a responsibility to talk to you about this because you are the conduit to the American public,” Barden says when I ask about his resolve. “That’s where the activism is. And I’m asking folks to take this moment, take this outrage, and this horror, this sadness that they’re feeling, and don’t let it go.”
David Hogg thinks “probably thousands, or at least several hundred” people have asked him where he was when he learned the news of the Uvalde shooting. “That’s a rough estimate,” Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland shooting, says. “But it sure feels like it.” To be someone who is now sought for comment feels “dystopian,” he admits. “I’ve seen a lot of us survivors break down in the last couple of days. It’s traumatizing, it’s exhausting.”
Fred Guttenberg, who lost his daughter Jaime in the Parkland massacre, has been a frequent cable news guest ever since he became a full-time gun control activist following his daughter’s death. Even so, fielding the media requests feels “horrible” in moments like this, he says over text. “I still suffer the loss of my daughter and the guilt from having been silent before it was her. This will always feel like a nightmare.”
Those who have survived this nightmare know they have little to offer their macabre club’s newest members. “There’s nothing you can say or do that can help somebody through that process, and it’s just gut wrenching,” Barden says. “The idea that there’s any outreach that can mitigate the sense of loss for these parents is kind of ridiculous,” adds Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who became close with the Sandy Hook families as their then-congressman.
In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook tragedy, Newtown residents begged the swarming press to leave the tight-knit hamlet alone, pleading with journalists to stop calling victims and banging on neighbors’ doors, cameras already perched over shoulders. Parkland, too, became a media spectacle after the tragedy, and a sense of doom spread across survivors as that tragedy’s parallels to Uvalde were revealed. “If I show up to school tomorrow & there are news trucks outside [Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School] so we can be the backdrop for their liveshot, I’m going to lose my mind,” a teacher who survived the shooting tweeted Tuesday night.
No one wants to be a prop in a pageant of grief, especially since the agony spares no one as it ripples across a community. “I know from our own experience that our friends and neighbors, people in our neighborhood where Daniel was a presence of light and joy and happiness — those folks were forever changed by this,” Barden says, and are equally in need of support. But to share, for Barden, has been a source of strength. “I understood that, whether we wanted it or not — well, we didn’t want it — that we had a voice now, that folks wanted to hear and hopefully learn from our experience,” Barden says. “And for me, personally, I found there was some healing value in that.”
Before the Uvalde massacre, Hogg had spent three days in Buffalo, New York, where 10 Black residents were shot and killed at a grocery store last week. The devastation had transfixed a horrified nation, only to be eclipsed days later by another senseless mass slaughter. Hogg knows mass shootings are what drive the media’s attention, brief windows that give him a platform to address the pervasiveness of gun violence everywhere.
“I understand there’s a privilege, in terms of you talking to me” he says. “There are millions of people who don’t get these calls.”
Gianna Floyd, daughter of George Floyd, holds a pen during a signing ceremony at the White House on May 25. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
ALSO SEE: "Doubling Down": How Minneapolis Elites Worked
to Stop Police Reform After George Floyd's Murder
Biden’s executive order on policing may apply only to federal agents, but until legislation can be passed, it still matters.
Biden’s order, signed on the second anniversary of George Floyd’s murder, in front of Floyd’s 8-year-old daughter, Gianna, is modeled along the lines of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. That means it started with the template of the demands made by Floyd’s family and the family of so many other victims, which passed the House of Representatives but stalled in the Senate. There are many provisions to the act and, therefore, to the executive order. But here are the provisions that matter most.
It establishes a database on excessive force to which federal law enforcement must contribute data on officer misconduct, including terminations, civil judgments, and more. We don’t have one, and therefore there is little public transparency on how widespread the problem is and where there may be agencies or units requiring more oversight and reform.
It takes some steps to prevent white supremacists from being retained by federal law enforcement, which advocates have long demanded. Communities of color know that there are police officers who hold racist views. In New York City, a police department inspector who was responsible for battling internal harassment and discrimination had posted racist messages on a law enforcement “rant” board. He was caught and finally fired. But it has been all too rare. Well over a decade ago, the FBI raised concerns about white supremacist police officers. Yet there were no accountability mechanisms to identify or weed out racist police officers. And as we learned during the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these concerns were raised anew as some police officers and former police officers participated.
For many progressives who want more dramatic transformation, there is more we must do. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act goes further in key ways. For one thing, we must still address qualified immunity, which too often is a near-impossible bar to civil claims for damages against police officers who harm and kill people. Also, President Biden does not have the power to extend his executive order to local law enforcement agencies. We still need the legislative reforms that the House passed. That fight will continue in Congress, but it can also happen at the state level. This executive order can help put some welcome wind in advocates’ sails.
But within the executive order’s somewhat limited reach, there will be opportunities to engage in its implementation to ensure it has meaningful impact. And the federal government extends the measures laid out in the executive order as requirements through its grant-making authority. That presents a real opportunity to use carrots and not just sticks to get at transformation.
Here is also what we should not miss about the importance of this moment: Gianna Floyd. A year ago, on the first anniversary of her father’s murder at the knee of Derek Chauvin, she was on Capitol Hill, the youngest lobbyist, showing up to push for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. She broke my heart when she said then that her daddy “changed the world.” It was heart-breaking because no Black child should have to endure her father’s brutal killing at the hands of police officers and then be asked to appreciate this crime for the change it would bring. But the change is critical because it would ensure that her father’s death would not be in vain. The act passed the House but stalled in the Senate, caught in a political chokehold that pitted the safety and rights of Black and brown people against police unions and conservatives who believe “tough on crime” requires a free hand, and knee, for police officers.
On Wednesday, as I stood in the room and watched the president look down at Gianna and call her up to the desk, to sit in the chair he just occupied, handing her the one and only pen he used to sign it, he said the words that made me cry as I looked at her face while she looked up at him. He said, “Your Daddy changed the world.” I have also become friends with the uncle of Jacob Blake, paralyzed in his car when an officer shot him in front of his daughter in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in August 2020. He and I had exchanged hugs before the signing. He said, “It matters. We did this.” And it does matter.
We have experienced this month the horror of a white supremacist taking the lives of 10 Black people at their only community-based supermarket. We watched in renewed horror the murders of babies in the Latino community of Uvalde, Texas. In the midst of all our challenges and all the hate, violence, and vitriol, our passion for what is possible is renewed by a recognition of meaningful steps born of our tears and our tenacity. This executive order is a hard-fought victory, and even while there is more to do, we have to celebrate the sacrifices of the families and their tireless fight to ensure that their loved ones’ deaths may prevent others. Black people know that the road to justice is long and broken, and yet we still walk it, arm in arm, until we overcome. And we shall.
A roll of stickers at a voting station at the Metropolitan Library in Atlanta on May 24. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Republicans touted the turnout in last Tuesday's primary election in Georgia. They may want to talk to voters about why they showed up—and the new difficulties they had.
“Am I too late?” she asked. It was 7:08 p.m. on Tuesday’s primary election day. The polls had just closed.
The car mechanic had warned her not to overdo it that day. Bush’s 12-year-old black Dodge Charger was severely overheating from a shot air compressor. But she gunned it anyway. Weighing in on the 2022 Georgia primaries was important for her, she told The Daily Beast, and now she failed to take part in “my responsibility for future children.”
Her all-day job as a waitress at the West Egg Cafe in midtown Atlanta—and that city’s infamously bad afternoon traffic—didn’t let her vote early back home in suburban Decatur during the previous two weeks. Had the state kept the large and unmovable ballot boxes secured outside under video surveillance, like it did in 2020, she could have just dropped off her marked paper ballot. But ever since Georgia passed S.B. 202 and its voter restrictions last year, those boxes were moved indoors and only available during daytime working hours.
“I’m so upset by that… it’s ‘early voting,’ but not for someone like me. That made it harder. It put me in a worse bind, because that option was taken from me,” she said, noting that the previous system “would have given me the option to get in my vote and done my part as a citizen and a taxpayer in DeKalb County.”
The Daily Beast spent Tuesday afternoon speaking to dozens of voters at polling stations in mostly Black neighborhoods across the Atlanta metro area. All of them—without a single exception—railed against the increased restrictions in Georgia’s latest voting law, which has been criticized as a thinly veiled attempt to suppress the more progressive-leaning vote of minorities and the poor. At first glance, their complaints seem at odds with the announcement from an architect of this law, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who touted a record early voting turnout this month.
Yet interviews with aggrieved voters this week revealed something of a boomerang effect, as the law actually hardened their resolve, drawing them to the polls with renewed rage to boot out the very Republican politicians who set up these restrictions.
“I’m annoyed and frustrated,” said Cheryl Hines-Bryant, who noted what she called the utter stupidity of reducing access to polls to working-hours only just as employers dial back COVID-19 public health protections and start demanding workers return to full-time, in-person work.
“The only reason I was able to vote today is because I got laid off from my job,” Hines-Bryant told The Daily Beast.
Georgia also now outlaws anyone from handing out food and water within 150 feet of a voting location. Republican lawmakers who supported it pointed to other states that already limit what people can give voters waiting in line—including the ostensibly progressive New York, where it’s a misdemeanor to provide “any meat, drink, tobacco, refreshment, or provision” worth more than a dollar. The stated reason is to prevent activists from buying someone’s vote with favors. And if it’s hot, voters can bring their own food anyway.
“That's ridiculous. Get your own bottle of water. The narrative from our side is that they're handing out bottles of water to vote Democrat. We're in America man, it's not like we're in the Sahara and Eritrea where the floor is dry and cracked and nothing grows,” said Riquet Caballero, who does minority outreach for Atlanta Young Republicans.
Lack of water wasn’t a problem this past Tuesday. The lines were short, if there were lines at all. This was a primary after all, which historically draws a fraction of the people who turn out for the general election. And while the humidity of the Deep South made your clothes stick, it wasn’t an oppressively hot and sunny day like the ones Georgians could face during a summer run-off or a snap local election.
Voncellina Stanley, an accountant, said long lines during an election could be dangerous for people with health problems who might forget to bring food or water when they race out of work to vote—only to encounter lines that last for hours.
“I’m a diabetic. I’m thirsty now!” she said, making her way to her car.
“What about the elderly?” asked Cynthia Brown, a loan manager at a title company. “What if today was not as nice as it is now? It should be available. What’s the harm in water?”
Brown said her motorcycle club, the Atlanta Bike Set, helped distribute water during the massive turnout at the 2020 general election, which resulted in a stunning defeat in typically conservative Georgia for then-President Donald Trump and delivered key electoral college votes that put Joe Biden in the White House. When asked if she felt that water bottles could influence someone to change their vote, Brown gave this reporter a death stare.
“Of course not,” she said.
Some voters said they were already planning to violate the water-distribution law—or come close to it by engaging in civil disobedience to show just how unjust the prohibition is. That includes Byron D. Amos, a member of Atlanta’s city council who represents a section of the city’s downtown that includes its poorest zip code. The Daily Beast interviewed him minutes after he voted at a newly added polling station: the Friendship Baptist Church, the city’s first African American Baptist congregation founded by former slaves just after the Civil War.
Amos said he looks forward to handing out water just beyond the red line in November.
“Maybe at 151 or 152 feet, and get into some ‘good trouble’,” Amos said, echoing the famous words of Georgia’s former Congressman John Lewis, a civil rights activist who shortly before his death spoke of the need for people to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and redeem the soul of America.”
Georgia’s statewide changes also resulted in some districts getting more early voting ballot boxes—but more densely populated ones actually getting mind-boggling reductions. The gargantuan Fulton County, which includes 1 million people in Atlanta and its suburbs, had its 38 absentee ballot drop boxes cut down to eight.
“It would have been easier,” said Brenda Lewis, a 65-year-old certified nursing assistant who works at a senior home and lives at another. “I work, so I thought about doing early voting but… the timing.”
None of the voters who spoke to The Daily Beast were convinced of the need to house those ballot drop-off boxes indoors, given that they were already under video surveillance. Making them harder to reach during evening hours felt like pandering to election fraud conspiracy theorists who’ve been proven wrong by law enforcement, federal judges, and Georgia’s own Raffensperger.
“Moving them removes all doubt people have about voter fraud, but it could be a deterrent to voting. If we put our mail in outside boxes, why not our ballot?” asked P.J. Booker, a structural drafter who draws engineering plans for parking buildings and decks.
Natasha Browner, a scientist who conducts health research, said her travels to South Africa showed her that the United States needs to vastly improve its handling of elections in a way that increases availability but keeps records free from tampering.
“We have enough security measures in place to make outside ballot boxes possible,” she said.
For all the resentment about added difficulties in overall access, voters still maintained that this week’s primary went smoothly. None of the people we interviewed complained about malfunctions on the state’s computer screen ballot marking system that would prevent them from voting. (Although voters across DeKalb County noticed that several buggy machines erroneously offered “English” as both language options instead of including Spanish.) Then again, The Daily Beast only spoke to those who actually made it to the polls on Tuesday.
When The Daily Beast caught up with Raffensperger at his re-election night party on Tuesday and told him about the overwhelmingly positive response to working machines and lack of lines, he said it was proof that S.B. 202 worked out all right. And he said that any worries about ballot box access were easily countered by the state’s decision to expand the early voting period by adding an extra weekend day, a change that mostly impacts rural counties.
But to some, like Christina Archer who works from home as a Verizon customer service representative and cares for her 6-year-old daughter, the issue with Georgia’s new voting law isn’t about whether it makes voting impossible. It’s about rolling back measures that made it so easy to vote during the height of the pandemic—and just a little harder now to engage in your civic duty.
“It would’ve just been easier,” she said.
Marty and Cindy Daniel of Daniel Defense on the cover of a local magazine in Pooler, Ga. The Uvalde, Tex., gunman used a weapon manufactured by Daniel Defense. (photo: Pooler Magazine)
Weapons made by Georgia-based Daniel Defense have turned up repeatedly in the arsenals of the nation’s mass shooters
And Daniel hasn’t apologized since a Daniel Defense DDM4 rifle was used to kill 19 children and two adults on Tuesday in Uvalde, Tex. The company again offered “our thoughts and our prayers.”
But four years ago, Daniel, 59, admitted he’d gone too far.
In the wake of a different mass shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., where 26 people died, Daniel had backed a federal bill to strengthen the nation’s firearms background check system. The gunman in that tragedy had a record of domestic violence, which should have stopped him from buying his guns, including a Ruger semiautomatic rifle. But the charges hadn’t been logged in the correct database, so Congress passed a bill to fix the problem and then-President Donald Trump signed it into law.
Customers of Daniel Defense were outraged. They saw the bill as a Trojan horse for gun control. So Daniel backed down. In a Facebook post, he wrote that he could “no longer in good conscience put my support behind” the bill. And he vowed not to give an inch in the future.
“I stand with you and I am ready to continue to fight for our rights,” he said.
The U.S. firearms industry has long been buffeted by the nation’s polarizing debate over guns, alternately toasted and reviled, its leaders regarded as titans of industry or social pariahs. But Daniel, who built his family-owned company in Black Creek, Ga., from nothing into at Top 25 firearms manufacturer, is accustomed to being celebrated for the business he created.
Georgia’s governor cut the yellow ribbon when a new Daniel Defense firearms factory opened in 2018. Daniel and his wife regularly hand out checks totaling millions of dollars in donations. His company’s name stands in big, bold letters atop the scoreboard at a new football stadium at the community center in Pooler, Ga., outside Savannah.
Meanwhile, the U.S. gun industry — unique for its massive production of weapons for both military and civilian markets — is coming off its best years in history. Gunmakers sold an estimated 19.9 million firearms in 2021, second only to the 22.8 million sold in 2020, according to the research group Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting.
While some see guns as symbols of an inalienable constitutional right, others blame the gun industry for tens of thousands of violent deaths each year — homicides and suicides, family disputes turned deadly and horrific massacres at schools. The industry “exists right on the edge of morality, especially in the United States,” said Jurgen Brauer, an economist with Small Arms Analytics.
Ryan Busse, a former executive with the gunmaker Kimber, sees parallels with another industry.
“I think there are a lot of similarities with the opioid industry,” said Busse, who wrote a book about his decision to leave what he saw as a radicalized gun industry.
Opioid pharmaceutical manufacturers, once hailed for producing a breakthrough painkiller, are now widely assailed for contributing to what authorities describe as an epidemic of addiction and overdose deaths.
This divide in how Americans view guns can be seen in the actions of other gunmakers, including the nation’s largest firearms manufacturer, Smith & Wesson. The Uvalde gunman bought a Smith & Wesson M&P15, an AR-15-style rifle, in the days before his rampage, along with the Daniel Defense rifle.
Smith & Wesson has been around for 170 years and today is publicly traded, with a market cap of about $690 million. Its stock price rose more than 8 percent in the days after the Uvalde shooting.
The company plans to move by next year from its longtime headquarters in Springfield, Mass. — the heart of “Gun Valley,” named for its historic role in American firearms production — to Maryville, Tenn. Company leaders blamed new gun laws in Massachusetts and credited Tennessee’s “support for the 2nd Amendment.”
The gun industry has been shifting south for years. Brauer said academic studies have found that cheaper labor and tax benefits were often the most important factors in these relocation decisions.
But, he said, he wouldn’t discount the importance of culture. A gunmaker’s employees “might feel a little bit less shunned on Sunday morning” in the South.
In Massachusetts, Smith & Wesson faced local protests outside its headquarters after the 2018 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people. The gunman used a Smith & Wesson M&P15.
In Tennessee, by contrast, Gov. Bill Lee (R) late last year appointed an ammunition industry executive to the state board of education. Jordan Mollenhour owns Lucky Gunner, an online ammo store, which has been sued for supplying bullets to the gunmen in both the 2014 Aurora, Colo., movie theater shooting — 12 dead — and a 2018 school shooting in Santa Fe, Tex., that left 10 dead.
Mollenhour said in a statement about the Uvalde shooting that there are “millions of armed and law-abiding Americans who would have defended those innocent children if given the opportunity" and that he and his company “proudly serve many of those Americans as our customers and we will continue praying for the families of Uvalde.”
In 2012, a mass shooting did cause a company’s owners to reconsider. Just days after 20 children and six adults were shot to death at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management said it wanted to unload what was then the nation’s largest gun company, Remington, and its holding company, Freedom Group.
The gunman in Sandy Hook used a Remington Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle.
Cerberus’s pension fund investors wanted nothing to do with the gunmaker. But the private equity company struggled to find a buyer. In 2018, after several failed attempts at a sale, what was by then known as Remington Outdoor Co. filed for bankruptcy.
But the Bushmaster name lives on. The trademark was snatched up by another firearms manufacturer, Crotalus Holdings of Carson City, Nev., in a bankruptcy sale.
Earlier this month a gunman used a Bushmaster AR-15-style rifle to kill 10 people at a supermarket in Buffalo.
None of this slowed gun sales. But there have been changes.
In the last decade, the nation has shifted from a land of rifles to the home of handguns. Fewer people are hunting. More people are buying firearms for protection. Sales of long guns peaked in December 2012, at the time of the Sandy Hook massacre, according to federal data.
Over the last three years, about 60 percent of the firearms sold were handguns and about 40 percent were long guns, according to Brauer.
At the same time, AR-15-style rifles have grown increasingly popular. U.S. gunmakers produced 1.5 million of them in 2017, twice the number made a decade earlier, according to a 2019 report from the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group that refers to the firearms as modern sporting rifles.
AR-15-style rifles have allowed many gun companies to thrive — especially newer and smaller companies like Daniel Defense. Those AR-15-style weapons also drive the gun control debate. With its menacing appearance and military legacy, the semiautomatic rifle frequently features in mass shootings — from Sandy Hook to Parkland to Uvalde.
“There’s this intimidation factor with it, a prove-your-manhood thing, that is borne around the AR-15,” said Busse, the former gun company executive.
Few companies made this kind of rifle before the mid-2000s. There wasn’t much of a market until the nation’s assault weapons ban expired in 2004. Now, more than 500 firms make AR-15-style rifles. And they all sell basically the same gun, Busse said.
“What do you do to stand out? You market. You give it a name, you use more incendiary actions to draw attention,” Busse said.
“That’s what Daniel Defense did,” he continued. “That’s how the AR-15 drove their business.”
Daniel Defense — like many firearms companies — has leaned into warlike imagery to sell its guns. “Manufacturing freedom” was one of its slogans. “More bite!” reads a 2016 ad for a new rifle called the DD5.
An online ad for Daniel Defense that ran a week before the Uvalde shooting showed a young boy holding an AR-15-like rifle on his lap, along with the caption: “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” That’s a reference to a Bible proverb.
Today, the company is known for making solid, pricey firearms, especially AR-15-style rifles. Some of its guns cost twice what other manufacturers charge. The DDM4 model implicated in the Uvalde attack starts at $1,870. It comes in seven colors.
The rifle is one of 19 designed by Daniel Defense “to protect your family and home,” according to the company’s website. It looks like something a soldier or SWAT team member might carry.
Daniel Defense produced more than 52,000 firearms in 2020, according to the latest data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The company sells to militaries and ordinary people. It has a financing program to help people make purchases on a monthly installment plan.
Busse said he watched with horror as the gun industry chased AR-15-style rifle sales. Companies were no longer emphasizing hunting or skeet shooting. They leaned into intimidation and fear. “Tactical” was popular. People wanted a certain image. “Couch commandos,” Busse calls them.
And the AR-15 captured that image perfectly.
Busse said he felt the pressure to push semiautomatic rifles as vice president of sales at Kimber. The firm is known for its pistols. “I fought it at every turn,” he said.
Daniel Defense did not respond to requests for comment. It did issue a statement about the Uvalde shooting, noting that the firm was “deeply saddened by the tragic events” and pledging to cooperate with authorities.
The origins of Daniel Defense are a story that Marty Daniel seems to enjoy telling. He often brings up in interviews how he struggled to graduate from Georgia Southern University’s engineering school. (Today, he sits on the school’s corporate advisory committee, alongside executives from an airline and a railroad.)
He began his career selling home windows, then moved into overhead doors and fireplaces. He played golf. He was introduced to sport shooting. He loved it. He came up with some ideas to improve the M16 rifle. He made prototypes.
In 2001, he founded Daniel Defense and quickly landed a U.S. military contract to produce a rifle part. He sold off his other businesses to focus on guns.
By 2017, his company was growing so fast that Marty Daniel was looking for a new factory.
It was a heady time. One of his rifles had just been named Gun of the Year by Friends of the NRA. He had signed a deal for Daniel Defense to be featured on the hood of a NASCAR racecar. He was still being applauded for his efforts to get a Daniel Defense TV ad played during the 2014 Super Bowl despite NFL rules that prohibit ads for guns or ammunition.
Daniel sat down with Forbes Magazine for an interview about his success as an entrepreneur, and noted how sales had boomed after the Sandy Hook shooting. He batted away a question about “common-sense” gun control measures such as age limits for purchases and bans on large ammunition magazines.
“Terms like ‘common sense’ come from people whose only goal is to take our guns away,” he said.
At the same time, his business was suffering. The entire industry was mired in the “Trump Slump.” Companies were saddled with huge inventories built up in anticipation of a Democratic president who was expected to seek new gun-control measures. Daniel Defense fired about one-third of its 300 workers that year, according to an industry report.
Still, it opened a new, 300,000-square-foot factory the next year. Then-Gov. Nathan Deal (R) attended the grand opening. The Georgia Manufacturing Alliance showed up for a tour of the state-of-the-art facility.
The factory’s address: 101 War Fighter Way.
Business boomed. And Marty and his wife, Cindy Daniel, shared their wealth.
The couple has donated more than $510,000 to federal political campaigns in the last two years — all of it to Republicans, according to Federal Election Commission data. The Daniels also run Assets for Christ, a foundation intended to help churches renovate or build new facilities.
These days, Cindy Daniel travels across Georgia handing out checks for tens of thousands of dollars to support sport shooting teams at schools.
One week before the Uvalde shooting, Cindy Daniel dropped off a check for $28,148.39 to support the sports shooting team at Benedictine Military School, a Catholic military high school in Savannah, not far from the Daniel Defense factory. She posed for a picture with students and staff.
While some past donations were from the NRA Foundation, this money came from the Double D Foundation — a nonprofit created by Cindy Daniel in 2020. The group seeks to boost the number of people involved in shooting sports.
Cindy Daniel, who also serves as an executive at Daniel Defense, says on her foundation’s website that she thinks “anti-gunners” are misinformed. Most have never seen a gun, she argues, or understand why someone would want one.
“Most know very little about the history of the Second Amendment and wonder why it’s still part of our Constitution,” she wrote.
Busse, who left the gun industry, recalled how gun company executives would react to a mass shooting.
“The first thing you do is hope your gun wasn’t used,” he said. “And if your gun was used, you would try to rationalize it. We did everything legal, right? What else could we have done?”
“But,” he said, “mostly you just hope it wasn’t yours.”
COVID. (photo: Jamie Hodgson/Getty Images/The Atlantic)
Will the danger mount each time, or will it fade away?
“I personally know several individuals who have had COVID in almost every wave,” says Salim Abdool Karim, a clinical infectious-diseases epidemiologist and the director of the Center for the AIDS Program of Research in South Africa, which has experienced five meticulously tracked surges, and where just one-third of the population is vaccinated. Experts doubt that clip of reinfection—several times a year—will continue over the long term, given the continued ratcheting up of immunity and potential slowdown of variant emergence. But a more sluggish rate would still lead to lots of comeback cases. Aubree Gordon, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan, told me that her best guess for the future has the virus infiltrating each of us, on average, every three years or so. “Barring some intervention that really changes the landscape,” she said, “we will all get SARS-CoV-2 multiple times in our life.”
If Gordon is right about this thrice(ish)-per-decade pace, that would be on par with what we experience with flu viruses, which scientists estimate hit us about every two to five years, less often in adulthood. It also matches up well with the documented cadence of the four other coronaviruses that seasonally trouble humans, and cause common colds. Should SARS-CoV-2 joins this mix of microbes that irk us on an intermittent schedule, we might not have to worry much. The fact that colds, flus, and stomach bugs routinely reinfect hasn’t shredded the social fabric. “For large portions of the population, this is an inconvenience,” Paul Thomas, an immunologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, in Tennessee, told me. Perhaps, as several experts have posited since the pandemic’s early days, SARS-CoV-2 will just become the fifth cold-causing coronavirus.
Or maybe not. This virus seems capable of tangling into just about every tissue in the body, affecting organs such as the heart, brain, liver, kidneys, and gut; it has already claimed the lives of millions, while saddling countless others with symptoms that can linger for months or years. Experts think the typical SARS-CoV-2 infection is likely to get less dangerous, as population immunity builds and broadens. But considering our current baseline, “less dangerous” could still be terrible—and it’s not clear exactly where we’re headed. When it comes to reinfection, we “just don’t know enough,” says Emily Landon, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Chicago.
For now, every infection, and every subsequent reinfection, remains a toss of the dice. “Really, it’s a gamble,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist and long-COVID researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. Vaccination and infection-induced immunity may load the dice against landing on severe disease, but that danger will never go away completely, and scientists don’t yet know what happens to people who contract “mild” COVID over and over again. Bouts of illness may well be tempered over time, but multiple exposures could still re-up some of the same risks as before—or even synergize to exact a cumulative toll.
“Will reinfection be really bad, or not a big deal? I think you could fall down on either side,” says Vineet Menachery, a coronavirologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch. “There’s still a lot of gray.”
The majority of infections we witnessed in the pandemic’s early chapters were, of course, first ones. The virus was hitting a brand-new species, which had few defenses to block it. But people have been racking up vaccine doses and infections for years now; immunity is growing on a population scale. Most of us are “no longer starting from scratch,” says Talia Swartz, an infectious-disease physician, virologist, and immunologist at Mount Sinai’s Icahn School of Medicine. Bodies, wised up to the virus’s quirks, can now react more quickly, clobbering it with sharper and speedier strikes.
Future versions of SARS-CoV-2 could continue to shape-shift out of existing antibodies’ reach, as coronaviruses often do. But the body is flush with other fighters that are much tougher to bamboozle—among them, B cells and T cells that can quash a growing infection before it spirals out of control. Those protections tend to build iteratively, as people see pathogens or vaccines more often. People vaccinated three times over, for instance, seem especially well equipped to duke it out with all sorts of SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron and its offshoots.
Gordon, who is tracking large groups of people to study the risk of reinfection, is already starting to document promising patterns: Second infections and post-vaccination infections “are significantly less severe,” she told me, sometimes to the point where people don’t notice them at all. A third or fourth bout might be more muted still; the burden of individual diseases may be headed toward an asymptote of mildness that holds for many years. Gordon and Swartz are both hopeful that the slow accumulation of immunity will also slash people’s chances of developing long COVID. An initial round of vaccine doses seems to at least modestly trim the likelihood of coming down with the condition, and the risk may dwindle further as defenses continue to amass. (“We do need more data on that,” Gordon said.)
Immunity, though, is neither binary nor permanent. Even if SARS-CoV-2’s assaults are blunted over time, there are no guarantees about the degree to which that happens, or how long it lasts. Maybe most future tussles with COVID will feel like nothing more than a shrimpy common cold. Or maybe they’ll end up like brutal flus. Wherever the average COVID case of the future lands, no two people’s experience of reinfection will be the same. Some may end up never getting sick again, at least not noticeably; others might find themselves falling ill much more frequently. A slew of factors could end up weighting the dice toward severe disease—among them, a person’s genetics, age, underlying medical conditions, health-care access, and frequency or magnitude of exposure to the virus. COVID redux could pose an especially big threat to people who are immunocompromised. And for everyone else, no amount of viral dampening can totally eliminate the chance, however small it may be, of getting very sick.
Long COVID, too, might remain a possibility with every discrete bout of illness. Or maybe the effects of a slow-but-steady trickle of minor, fast-resolving infections would sum together, and bring about the condition. Every time the body’s defenses are engaged, it “takes a lot of energy, and causes tissue damage,” Thomas told me. Should that become a near-constant barrage, “that’s probably not great for you.” But Swartz said she worries far more about that happening with viruses that chronically infect people, such as HIV. Bodies are resilient, especially when they’re offered time to rest, and she doubts that reinfection with a typically ephemeral virus such as SARS-CoV-2 would cause mounting damage. “The cumulative effect is more likely to be protective than detrimental,” she said, because of the immunity that’s laid down each time.
Al-Aly sees cause for worry either way. He is now running studies to track the long-term consequences of repeat encounters with the virus, and although the data are still emerging, he thinks that people who have caught the virus twice or thrice may be more likely to become long-haulers than those who have had it just once.
There’s still a lot about SARS-CoV-2, and the body’s response to it, that researchers don’t fully understand. Some other microbes, when they reinvade us, can fire up the immune system in unhelpful ways, driving bad bouts of inflammation that burn through the body, or duping certain defensive molecules into aiding, rather than blocking, the virus’s siege. Researchers don’t think SARS-CoV-2 will do the same. But this pathogen is “much more formidable than even someone working on coronaviruses would have expected,” Menachery told me. It could still reveal some new, insidious qualities down the line.
Studying reinfection isn’t easy: To home in on the phenomenon and its consequences, scientists have to monitor large groups of people over long periods of time, trying to catch as many viral invasions as possible, including asymptomatic ones that might not be picked up without very frequent testing. Seasonal encounters with pathogens other than SARS-CoV-2 don’t often worry us—but perhaps that’s because we’re still working to understand their toll. “Have we been underestimating long-term consequences from other repeat infections?” Thomas said. “The answer is probably, almost certainly, yes.”
Of the experts I spoke with for this story, several told me they hadn’t yet been knowingly infected by SARS-CoV-2; of those who had, none were eager for the sequel. Menachery is in the latter group. He was one of the first people in his community to catch the virus, back in March of 2020, when his entire family fell ill. That November, he discovered that he had lost most of his kidney function, a rapid deterioration that he and his doctors suspect, but cannot prove, was exacerbated by COVID. Menachery received a transplant three months ago, and has been taking immunosuppressive medications since—a major shift to his risk status, and his outlook on reinfection writ large. “So I wear my mask everywhere,” he told me, as do his wife and their three young kids. Should the virus return for him, it’s not totally clear what might happen next. “I’m nervous about reinfection,” he said. “I have reason to be.”
Almost no one can expect to avoid the virus altogether, but that doesn’t mean we can’t limit our exposures. It’s true that the body’s bulwarks against infection tend to erode rather rapidly; it’s true that this virus is very good at splintering into variants and subvariants that can hop over many of the antibodies we make. But the rhythm of reinfection isn’t just about the durability of immunity or the pace of viral evolution. It’s also about our actions and policies, and whether they allow the pathogen to transmit and evolve. Strategies to avoid infection—to make it as infrequent as possible, for as many people as possible—remain options, in the form of vaccination, masking, ventilation, paid sick leave, and more. “There are still very good reasons” to keep exposures few and far between, Landon, of the University of Chicago, told me. Putting off reinfection creates fewer opportunities for harm: The dice are less likely to land on severe disease (or chronic illness) when they’re rolled less often overall. It also buys us time to enhance our understanding of the virus, and improve our tools to fight it. “The more we know about COVID when we get COVID,” the better off we’ll be, she said.
SARS-CoV-2 may yet become another common-cold coronavirus, no more likely to screw with its hosts the fifth time it infects them than the first. But that’s no guarantee. The outlooks of the experts I spoke with spanned the range from optimism to pessimism, though all agreed that uncertainty loomed. Until we know more, none were keen to gamble with the virus—or with their own health. Any reinfection will likely still pose a threat, “even if it’s not the worst-case scenario,” Abdool Karim told me. “I wouldn’t want to put myself in that position.”
In a Warsaw neighborhood, the Ryz sisters spend the better part of an hour placing stickers with the numbers of pro-choice organizations. (photo: Alessandro Rampazzo/Al Jazeera)
“Shall we go to church?” 24-year-old Olympia asks her sister, Melania, grinning and holding up a dozen pink, yellow and grey stickers with the words, “Abortion is OK”, and the hotline numbers and social media profiles of Polish pro-choice organisations.
At the first church they encounter in the residential neighbourhood of Bródno, Olympia, who wears a black woollen cap over her long, blue hair, calmly peels the back off a sticker and sticks it on the gate.
She says they don’t want to anger anyone. “We are just helping Catholic women because they have abortions, too,” she says. “Our goal is to help all the women.”
The sisters are volunteers with the Aborcyjny (Abortion) Dream Team (ADT), a solidarity network supporting Polish women seeking an abortion.
The siblings, both medical students, spend a fair amount of their spare time answering the queries that come to ADT and spreading the numbers of civil society organisations across the Polish capital so that women in the city of about two million know who to contact if they have an unwanted pregnancy.
During the course of an hour, the sisters stroll around, placing stickers on bus stops, walls, streetlamps and a cigarette vending machine.
“A lot of football fans hang out here in Bródno,” says Melania, who is dressed in black like her sister and wears red lipstick and a beanie over her faded, red-dyed hair.
She points to an Ultras sticker on a traffic light pole. In Poland, hardcore football fan groups, or Ultras, often belong to far-right political movements with strong anti-abortion positions, the 25-year-old explains.
Bródno is home to a branch of Ultras supporting the Legia Warszawa football club and Melania, who lives nearby, frequently targets this “very conservative” neighbourhood. Her stickers get torn down, so she puts more up. She covers the Ultras sticker with one of her own. “It’s a fight,” she says.
On October 22, 2020, Poland’s constitutional court ruled abortions for foetal defects were unconstitutional, introducing a near-total ban on terminations.
The ruling de facto barred women from accessing already highly restricted legal abortions. In 2019, 98 percent of the 1,100 legal abortions carried out in Polish hospitals were done so on the grounds of prenatal abnormalities.
The ruling went into effect on January 27, 2021, and abortion is now only permitted when there is a threat to a woman’s life and health, or in cases of rape or incest.
At present, women who have illegal terminations do not face any criminal penalties although a bill has been introduced to consider abortions a homicide.
The court decision came after years of ultra-conservative and ultra-nationalist pressure under the governing Law and Justice party (PiS). Since coming to power in 2015, PiS has repeatedly tried to curb sexual and reproductive rights. In 2016, a proposal supported by elements of the PiS to introduce a total abortion ban was abandoned after mass protests and the party was forced to take a step back.
In recent years, PiS’s grip on society and politics has intensified with the erosion of fundamental rights and unprecedented changes to the country’s judiciary, undermining the rule of law.
Since the near-total abortion ban took hold more than one year ago, terminations have not stopped. Women, unable to rely on the Polish health system, turned to pro-choice groups for help. The number of women contacting these networks seeking abortions has soared, according to activists.
How did this happen?
“More people now know where to get a safe abortion,” says Kinga Jelinska, the executive director of Women Help Women (WHW), an international non-profit providing access to abortion pills, used to terminate an early pregnancy, from abroad via post. While groups like hers know they cannot replace a fully functioning health system, in the absence of one, they have stepped up to help.
"Civil society organisations filled the void left by both the state and Polish medical institutions,” Jelinska says. “It’s the failure of the state, becoming every day more restrictive and repressive, clashing with the story of a grassroots resistance.”
Immediately after the 2020 ruling, Poland’s pro-choice movement mobilised. The women’s rights movement, the All-Poland Women's Strike - the Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet (OSK) - started weeks of demonstrations.
Hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets across the country in numbers not seen since the fall of communism.
“We are present even in very small places in Poland; it's not just a movement about big cities,” says Klementyna Suchanow, a writer and co-organiser of the All-Poland Women's Strike.
Word spread on how to access abortion pills or surgical procedures abroad. There were demonstrations, workshops and online discussions with activists; flyers distributed with the slogan “Abortion is OK”; and the contact details of pro-choice organisations reached new people as activists left stickers in public spaces, supermarkets and transport.
Pan-European initiative Abortion Without Borders (AWB) was in 2021 contacted by nearly 33,000 Polish women seeking abortions, a five-fold increase from the previous year. AWB helped at least 1,500 women access abortions abroad.
WHW in 2021 helped more than 18,000 women access pills from abroad. Since 1997, it has been a punishable offence in Poland to sell abortion pills.
In Melania’s cosy, bright eighth-floor apartment, one cat hops onto the sofa while the second curls up next to the Ryz sisters who drink tea and share a cigarette in the living room. A red-and-white megaphone leans against a table, plants and pro-choice demonstration signs are scattered throughout and an All-Poland Women’s Strike poster hangs at the entrance to the one-bedroom apartment.
The sisters’ phones blink from time to time with messages from women writing to ADT’s Instagram account.
ADT’s volunteers – 13 women and a man all between 23 and 35 years of age – answer questions about how abortion works and how to use pills at home, always referring to World Health Organization guidelines.
ADT connects women requiring pills to Netherlands-based WHW where tablets can be ordered with a donation of 75 euros ($80) or the amount the person can afford. If the person cannot afford a donation, the pills are sent for free. The tablets are mailed directly to the woman’s home in a small, discrete package and arrive within 20 days.
Olympia, who works in a hospital and will become a doctor at the end of this year, wants, like her sister, to specialise in gynaecology. “Why not work and do activism at the same time, I mean as one job?” says Olympia, who considers her activism a “human duty” and access to safe abortion, a basic right. “People need to have access to safe pills and knowledge,” she says.
The women who contact ADT come from different social backgrounds and are of all ages, from teenagers who have just had their first sexual experience to women who already have multiple children. In recent months, some 300 Ukrainian refugees have sought help.
Some of those contacting ADT are survivors of rape. Others have already passed the 12th week of gestation when the pills may not be effective. At this point, they either need to travel abroad for a procedure – ADT connects them to other organisations that can help – or attempt the near-impossible mission of getting an abortion in a Polish public hospital.
Julianna, 19, wrote on the ADT website that she ordered pills after finding out that she was six weeks pregnant. The abortion “hurt (physically) unmercifully. Huge cramps, huge amounts of blood,” she wrote. But after the bleeding stopped, the pain did, too. “I was and am free. I don't regret anything.”
Stories like Julianna’s are increasingly frequent according to ADT volunteers, who also re-direct callers to specialists such as gynaecologists or psychiatrists, and other pro-choice organisations like AWB or Poland’s Federation for Women and Family Planning (FEDERA), which assists with legal and mental health issues.
“We’ll always tell them, ‘You're not alone,’ because this is what they actually need: someone to be with them,” Melania says. “Our mama was a feminist, so that’s how we were brought up with this spirit.” But their activism upsets their much-loved grandmother.
“Our grandmother hates us for what we are doing,” says Olympia with a hint of mischief. “She's praying for us every day because she believes we are killing babies.”
Since abortions have been widely considered taboo in Poland, the subject of surgical abortion has been often poorly taught or ignored in medical school, meaning there is a shortage of doctors trained in terminations, according to Melania who will soon start a five-year specialisation in gynaecology.
Many senior gynaecologists she worked with while rotating departments in a hospital were clueless about how to perform abortions, not having been trained how to operate in the instances when they would be legal.
So the sisters have organised theoretical training with fellow medical students. “Because in universities they won’t teach us how to do it,” says Olympia. The sisters also considering studying in Germany where they believe they’ll receive better gynaecological training.
In Polish hospitals, it’s not just a question of training - many doctors fear performing an abortion.
Anyone found guilty of assisting an illegal abortion faces up to three years in jail and, according to a 1993 law, practitioners can lose their medical licence for up to 10 years.
Activist and ADT co-founder Justyna Wydrzyńska, 47, currently faces a three-year prison term for directly providing abortion pills to a pregnant woman facing domestic abuse.
So far, no doctors have been jailed. Still, hospital personnel, terrified of being accused of assisting an illegal abortion, are scared to navigate the new anti-abortion law because it is not clear when an abortion can be performed.
Immediately after the constitutional court’s 2020 decision, Katarzyna Kotula, an opposition politician, remembers feeling furious and powerless and thinking, “Now women will die …We would only wait for the first name, the first victim, to be all over the media.”
A 30-year-old woman identified as Izabela was first.
In September 2021, in a hospital in the town of Pszczyna in southern Poland, Izabela died of septic shock 22 weeks into her pregnancy. The pregnancy had complications yet doctors refused to perform a life-saving abortion or C-section out of fear of breaking the law as the foetus’ heart was still beating. So, they waited.
“It’s the so-called ‘frozen effect’,” Kotula says. “This creates monsters.”
Then on January 25, Agnieszka T died.
She was admitted to a hospital in the city of Czestochowa on December 21 with abdominal pain, carrying first trimester twins in her womb. Two days later, one twin died. Agnieszka’s health quickly started deteriorating, but doctors waited another week to remove the foetus from the mother’s womb. They only did so when the second twin’s heartbeat stopped. Her family claim she died of septic shock. The hospital has refused to share Agnieszka T’s medical tests on the grounds of confidentiality.
The frozen effect among practitioners is widespread. “The problem is systemic,” says Kotula.
But there are exceptions.
Anna Parzińska, a gynaecologist in her early 40s, works at Warsaw’s Bielański Hospital. It is known nationwide for performing more abortions than the average facility, around 150 to 200 per year, Dr Parzińska says.
The hospital has come under fire from anti-abortion politicians and movements many times. In late December, the hospital was inspected by a government-appointed specialist and asked to provide documents related to approved terminations, among other pregnancy-related data.
“I guess it's because we still perform the abortions,” Dr Parzińska says, referring to the inspection. “But of course, we perform them according to the law and according to medical ethics.”
Dr Parzińska is among the few gynaecologists at Bielanksi willing to perform abortions since the ruling came into effect. “I would say there’s just four of us,” she says, referring to the hospital’s nine specialists. Moreover, she has spoken out about the atmosphere of fear the law creates.
In an interview at her home while she is on maternity leave, Dr Parzińska, whose clear blue eyes held a steady gaze, chose her words carefully.
“I can terminate pregnancies only if they are life-threatening,” she says, sitting on a couch in her living room, her baby girl on her knees.
She is aware that she could end up in jail. “There’s a really fine line between the procedures that are done according to the law and which are not. That’s why no one wants to get involved,” she says.
Most of the women who come to her for an abortion are usually in an advanced state of pregnancy when their prenatal testing has revealed severe foetal abnormalities, she explains.
“[More than] a year ago, in such cases, I could give the woman an opportunity to decide whether she wants to continue her pregnancy or not. Right now, neither she nor I have any options,” Dr Parzińska says. "Because according to a new law we have to continue the pregnancy no matter how bad the foetus’s malformation is.”
Parzińska, who believes a woman should have the right to an abortion, asks her patient how they feel about continuing the pregnancy. If they mention mental health issues or suicidal thoughts, “then I tell her to go to the psychiatrist and come back with a letter.”
Psychiatrist Maja Herman, tall and elegantly dressed, works in a private clinic in the neighbourhood of Mirów.
Dr Herman believes women have the right to an abortion and, with that right taken away, says it’s her duty as a doctor to help women facing psychological distress due to an unwanted baby access an abortion.
“We medical doctors have to speak loud because, in the crowd, they [the government] will struggle to come after us,” says Dr Herman, who refuses to give in to the fear affecting many medical professionals.
Women wanting to terminate their pregnancy on psychiatric grounds must present the hospital with two documents signed by two different psychiatrists attesting to their life or mental health being at risk. Dr Herman usually signs this document if after an evaluation she deems a pregnancy to threaten her patient’s mental health.
“The most dangerous part of mental health is stress because it can bring to alcoholism, psychosis, and attempts of suicide,” she says, and an unwanted baby is “a continuous and enormous amount of stress”.
Since the ban came into effect, Dr Herman gets at least five more patients a month coming to consult her on abortions.
The more devastated ones, Dr Herman reports, are women who have tried hard to have a baby – many using IVF – and because of severe malformations want to abort since their baby is likely to die soon after being born – in one case, a woman was carrying a foetus without a properly formed brain – or would be seriously physically compromised.
Often, these women are in an advanced stage of pregnancy. Sometimes, they arrive too late and must travel abroad for surgery, or give birth.
Some patients who continued their pregnancies later developed postpartum depression and even more serious mental disorders. Among them was a death by suicide, Dr Herman recalls with pain.
It is inhumane to force a woman to deliver a child that will die upon birth, Dr Herman says, citing what some of her patients have endured.
Even in the worst clinical cases, however, each step to obtain a legal abortion in a Polish public hospital is difficult and tiring. If a woman manages to find two psychiatrists who agree to write a letter, she then needs to find a hospital and doctors willing to perform the abortion.
Sometimes the procedure, which to secure is already a heroic feat, is split between two different hospitals. “It’s a trick doctors do to avoid direct responsibilities,” Dr Herman says.
Some doctors may not even tell their patients when a termination is possible.
The pressure on doctors, and the bureaucratic difficulties women face, are just the tip of the iceberg.
The sigma of abortion is deeply rooted in society, with the public narrative around it highly influenced by the Polish Catholic Church, which is strongly embedded in Polish culture and politics, due to the historical role it played in shaping the nation.
The Church lent important political and organisational support to Solidarnosc, the Polish trade union, led by Lech Wałęsa, a fervent Catholic and staunch opponent of abortion, who guided the country’s peaceful transition to the modern Polish state after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1989.
“Every life is holy, and for this reason, it must be protected. No one has the right to end a life artificially,” says Leszek Gesiak, spokesperson of the Polish Episcopal Conference, the Church’s central organisational body.
“The foetus is even invested with the right of inheritance,” says Gesiak, who in an interview at the Conference headquarters in Warsaw does not refer to mothers’ rights until explicitly asked.
“Of course,” he answers. “Mothers have rights, too; the same as the foetuses.”
On the other side of the city, Ola, 24, an independent sex worker, pro-choice activist and podcast host, sits cross-legged on the floor of her bedroom.
“Abortion is [used as a] a tool of control on women by men,” she says. “This is the root of patriarchy, and we need to fight this … having an abortion is an act of revolution and emancipation.”
In October 2020, in the same week as the constitutional tribunal’s ruling and as the streets erupted in protest, Ola took abortion pills. She took a bath – something she later learned she should not have done – and they did not work.
She had been in a new relationship with a man from her hometown near the Poland-Belarus border when she got pregnant. Neither wanted a baby and soon after moving to Warsaw, they broke up. She found a new home and asked some friends and activists to help her find abortion pills a second time and assist her with the process. This time they worked. “I don’t know what I would have done without them,” she says.
Olympia, who sits on the other side of the room, became friends with Ola after they met two years ago in a workshop called Abortion Without Stigma.
“In those weeks,” Olympia says, “anti-abortion posters and billboards haunted Warsaw”. Some depicted baby Jesus, and others newborns saying, “I am dependent on you and I trust you”, she says, recalling the text in her own words.
Ola shakes her ginger-coloured hair. She says she still needs to “de-construct the sense of guilt” Polish society imposed on her. For a long time, she was consumed by shame: “I felt terrible. I kept asking myself whether I had done something wrong … I thought I had become a bad person.”
Still, Ola, who has advocated publicly for sexual reproductive rights, is unequivocal about what needs to change. “We need a de-medicalisation, de-criminalisation and a de-stigmatisation of abortion, and we’ll keep fighting until we reach our goal,” she says.
But it’s not easy to talk about abortion rights in Poland. For those who do, threats are commonplace.
The FEDERA office is weekly proof of this.
“On today's vandalising menu, we've got pissed upon and smeared in dog poop,” says Antonina Lewandowska, a bright 25-year-old who volunteers at FEDERA.
She points at the door to the organisation’s headquarters. Someone has stuck gum inside one of the locks to make it harder to get into the office, and wrote "to gas", which Lewandoska explains is “a common hate slur, basically means go to the gas chamber, Auschwitz-like vibes”.
FEDERA has been working on a civic draft bill to liberalise access to abortion in Poland to put it on par with Western European standards, which allow terminations until the 12th week of gestation.
FEDERA’s members often receive mail with statements such as, “Abortion is a crime” and “You’ll burn in hell”.
“This is our daily bread,” says Lewandoska wryly.
But they also have received death threats. “I got an email with my picture edited like I'm held at gunpoint, saying I had five days left,” says Lewandowska. Her colleagues received the same message. “Everyone is still alive,” says Lewandowska in a joking way. “But it’s scary.”
Suchanow of the All-Poland Women's Strike has also faced repeated threats.
She has been a key target of anti-abortion groups and the authorities. Suchanow told Al Jazeera that on Christmas eve in 2020, Polish police knocked on her door and entered without a warrant or explanation. It was intimidation, she says.
In her 2020 book, This is War. Women, Fundamentalists, and the New Middle Ages, Suchanow described how religious bodies and ultra-conservative civil movements have, in recent years, become important power structures in the Polish political arena.
Among them, Suchanow says, the think-tank Ordo Iuris is one of the most influential. Established in 2013, Ordo luris was inspired by Tradition, Family, Property, a global ultra-Catholic movement that has been accused of being a cult. Increasingly, conservative parties like PiS rely on Ordo luris for their policies, specifically those that are anti-abortion, anti-contraception, and that have to do with banning sex education in schools and the “preservation” of heterosexual marriage.
Ordo Iuris’ members currently hold key positions in Polish state institutions. For example, Aleksander Stępkowski, one of Ordo Iuris’ founders and its former president, is now the spokesperson of the Polish supreme court. Previously, he was the deputy minister of foreign affairs and in 2019, the government nominated him to be a judge at the European Court of Human Rights.
In 2016, Ordo luris, with the support of elements of the Polish Catholic Church and PiS, proposed a total abortion ban and imprisonment for any woman who had an abortion. Pro-choice demonstrations filled Warsaw’s streets, and the law did not pass.
However, another proposal pushed by Ordo Iuris in 2017 passed: up to three years’ imprisonment for carrying out or assisting an illegal abortion.
In December 2021, on the wave of the same initiative, the Sejm - the lower house of parliament - voted again on criminalising women, including with life imprisonment. The law did not pass.
But pro-choice organisations fear that this draft bill will be making its way back. Especially because the Polish health ministry in November 2021 published a proposal to introduce an official registry of all pregnant women in the country that would also force doctors to report all their patients’ pregnancies and miscarriages.
On the eighth floor of Warsaw’s historic PAST-a building, the skyscraper symbol of the city’s 1944 uprising against Nazi occupation, a glass door displaying a giant golden lion welcomes visitors to the Ordo Iuris headquarters.
Nikodem Bernaciac, 27, a trainee attorney, described the institute’s vision: “You can't sacrifice an innocent child for some ‘bad mood’, that may last for weeks or months.”
That is why, he explained, “We would like to give Polish judges this possibility to punish women committing abortion,” because, “Now there is some kind of automatism according to which every woman who committed abortion is automatically innocent.”
There are some women, he says, who might need to abort. “Of course, they can decide to kill their babies to save their own life, they have the choice,” but there are also other “types of women”, he states, who should be punished. “The women that make political declarations about their abortion.”
In her apartment in eastern Warsaw, Hania Zagulska, 30, an activist who works as a cleaner, prepares some coffee. She still remembers the stigma she experienced when she had an abortion eight years ago.
“I had lived my whole life in a small town,” Hania recalls of her upbringing in Szamotuły in western Poland. “I had no information about abortion at that time.”
At 22, she became pregnant. The man who got her pregnant left and she could not tell her conservative family. She was on her own. “Abortion was the only option to save my life,” she says. “Being a mother at 22 wasn’t the future I wanted for myself.”
Having never received sex education, she did not know what to do, so she searched online. On a forum called Women on Web, she found information on how to buy and take abortion pills. She asked five of her closest friends from school to help collect money and buy the tablets. The first time, the pills went missing. Hania thinks they were intercepted by the police. She tried again with a new address and succeeded.
The day she took the pills, she went to her best friend’s place to watch a movie and tried to relax. “I was really nervous, but nothing bad happened that day.” But a week later, she had heavy bleeding, which scared her, so she went to the doctor, prepared to say what many others say when they take abortion pills: “I’ve lost the baby.”
At the clinic, the doctor kept pushing her to confess she had taken pills. “He tried to scare me,” she says. “The doctor then told me I was pregnant anyways and called an ambulance to take me to the hospital against my will,” remembers Hania. “I was very afraid the pills didn't work.”
But other women heard the conversation, and when Hania went into the waiting room while the ambulance was on its way, they gave her courage, saying, “Child, you are so young, you have your whole life before you."
Hania was forced to stay in the hospital for four days. She recalls the medical personnel telling her she was pregnant, probably to punish her, Hania thinks, even if she wasn’t as she realised later the pills had worked. The only way to leave the hospital was to call her father who, when he saw Hania lying in her hospital bed, was angry and disdainful.
For a long time, Hania told no one about her abortion. Then one day she and two friends got talking and discovered they’d all had an abortion. Hania was relieved to know other women had similar experiences and she felt less lonely. It got her thinking: This stigma had to end. It affected her and her friends – it must affect so many other women. Watching a TED Talk with a feminist talking about creating safe spaces for women to share their lived experiences was the push she needed. If she shared her story, maybe others would start speaking about their own and start a bigger discussion for change.
Hania spoke about her abortion in December 2020 on Stonewall TV, a sex education YouTube channel with an LGBT+ perspective, in an episode titled, Aborcja jest ok! (Abortion is OK).
She did not think that the reaction would be so intense. The video of her interview on Stonewall TV went viral. Pro-government journalists dug into her past to undermine her reputation and she was harassed online. She was called names, misinterpreted, and faced online abuse on Twitter, as well as threats of rape and acid attacks. In January, after consulting a psychologist, she deleted her account.
“It was hard, and it is still hard,” Hania says. But she knows that speaking publicly is a step toward lifting the stigma of abortion and moving towards its legalisation. “So I keep going.”
It is around lunchtime back in Melania’s apartment, and the Ryz sisters sit on the couch drinking black tea, the faint sounds of the motorway audible in the background.
The abortion ban was devastating for women, Olympia says, but she feels attitudes have changed for the better in the past year. “People started to talk about abortion,” she says.
University students have started voicing their support for abortion, Melania says, and they ask her for stickers to put around campus and the city.
Both sisters believe this change in conversation will help spread more knowledge within society, and that this will be essential to fight new restrictions, which they are bracing for. By arming themselves with knowledge, women can take control of their bodies, Olympia says. “They can be free from any government.”
Crews in northern New Mexico have cut and cleared containment lines around nearly half of the perimeter of the nation's largest active wildfire, on 23 May. (photo: Eddie Moore/AP)
Predicted wind gusts could cause fire to jump containment lines as crews in New Mexico try to stop growth of US’s biggest wildfire
Two fires that merged to create the largest wildfire in New Mexico history have both been traced to planned burns set by federal forest managers as preventative measures, federal investigators have announced.
The seven-week-old fire has burned 491 sq miles of forest in rugged terrain east of Santa Fe since being started in April by two intentional blazes set by the authorities.
Crews were patrolling partially burned areas and clearing and cutting containment lines, including primary ones near the fire this weekend as bulldozers scraped backup lines farther away.
The National Weather Service issued red flag warnings of critical fire conditions for parts of Arizona, Colorado, Kansas, Nevada, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas and Utah. Those conditions are combination of strong wind, low relative humidity and dry vegetation.
The return of drier and warmer weather with stronger winds posed a threat of increased fire activity into the Memorial Day holiday on Monday, prompting officials to urge the public to secure tow chains on the backs of their vehicles, which can send up sparks if they drag on the road, and be extra careful with any other possible fire sources.
“The last thing we need right now is another ignition,” said Jayson Coil, an operations section chief.
Forecasts predict wind gusts up to 50mph, with critical fire conditions continuing into Monday, followed by more favorable weather later in the coming week, said Bruno Rodriguez, the fire management team’s meteorologist.
The strong winds could fan flames and cause the fire to jump containment lines and race forward, said John Chest, a fire operations manager.
“Imagine traveling in your car and the fire can outpace you. That’s the kind of extreme fire behavior that we’re talking about,” Chest said.
Nearly 3,000 firefighters and other personnel were assigned to the fire, which was contained around 48% of its perimeter.
Initial estimates say the fire has destroyed at least 330 homes but New Mexico state officials expect the number of homes and other structures that have burned to rise to more than 1,000 as more assessments are done.
The US Forest Service has not yet released detailed planning documents for the original planned burns that might indicate whether fire protocols were followed.
Scientist and forest managers are racing to develop new tools to forecast the behavior of planned fires amid climate change and an enduring drought in the American west.
The intentionally set blazes, known as prescribed burns, are aimed at limiting the accumulation of timber and underbrush that, if left unattended, can fuel extremely hot and destructive wildfires.
Elsewhere, firefighters battled a wind-driven bushfire about 14 miles south-west of Parker, Arizona. A California blaze jumped the Colorado River into Arizona on Saturday.
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