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It doesn’t matter if Alito preemptively revealed the outcome in Hobby Lobby. Consider the rest of the story.
That’s about the sum of the public defense mounted against the blockbuster New York Times report that came out on Saturday. The story dropped a bit of a bombshell: It alleges that in 2014, Justice Samuel Alito told donors to a religiously motivated Supreme Court lobby organization that he would be authoring the opinion in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, and that the religious objectors would be on the winning side of the case. This revelation can really only be compared to another leak—that of the full draft of the Dobbs opinion this May—but it passed through the media and legal worlds with much less fanfare. Who among us doesn’t like a good dinner and some hot gossip? Court critics, yet again, were told to get over themselves.
As Jodi Kantor and Jo Becker describe it, a then-anti-abortion crusader, the Rev. Rob Schenck, knew the outcome of the 2014 case challenging the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act weeks before it was announced. Whether Schenck heard this from the Wrights, the wealthy Ohio donors who dined with the Alitos in early June of that year, as he alleges, or merely from someone else, the fact is that there is ample contemporaneous reporting by Kantor and Becker to show that Schenck knew what was coming and acted accordingly.
Schenck is, to be sure, an unreliable whistleblower, and particularly so based on his own prior activities. And to the extent the problem here is framed as the leak from Alito, it bears keeping in mind that the leak is actually the least problematic aspect of the undisputed relationships between sitting Supreme Court justices and wealthy donors who pay to gain access to them, which the story also recounts in great detail. As the Times notes, the Wrights publicized the fact that they got involved with Schenck’s organization, Faith and Action, “to have a major impact on the attitudes and actions of those in a position to shape and interpret our laws,” as they wrote in a 2001 newsletter. Undisputed is the fact that between 2000 to 2018, when he left Faith and Action, Schenck raised more than $30 million to do just that.
Also undisputed is the fact that Alito and his wife, Martha-Ann, were dining in June with wealthy donors who had a vested interest in the outcome of Hobby Lobby. Alito, in his statement this week from the court, acknowledges this fact. Undisputed is that one of the wealthy donors, Gayle Wright, contacted Schenck immediately after the dinner with an email saying, “Rob, if you want some interesting news please call. No emails.” (The Times, having seen that email, asked Wright what else this secret unprintable “interesting” news was. She said that she was telling him she had recovered from a stomach ailment. M’kay.) Undisputed as well is the fact that the Wrights had been cultivated by Schenck among other wealthy fans of religious liberty to donate big sums of cash to the Supreme Court Historical Society so they could garner access to the justices, and that while some justices rebuffed these efforts, Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia did not. Instead, those three justices rewarded donors with access and highly sought-after seats at oral arguments in the marquee religious freedom case of the year.
“We were invited to use seats from Nino and Sam,” Gayle Wright wrote Schenck before arguments in the Hobby Lobby case at hand. “Wow!”
Wright explained that Scalia gave her and her (now deceased) husband seats for arguments “all the time” because “Nino and my husband were very good friends.” In his statement to the New York Times denying improper conduct, Alito insisted that he and his wife shared a “casual and purely social relationship” with the Wrights.
The casual and social relationships cultivated by the Wrights included, among other things: hunting with Scalia; socializing with the Alitos, Scalias, and Thomases; and hosting the Alitos at their vacation home near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. As one does. Gayle Wright was extremely busy with all of these casual and social friendships. A 2016 email noted that her schedule included: “Lunch with CT on Monday, Sam on Wednesday, dinner at court on Monday, Dinner with Maureen [Scalia’s wife] on Wednesday.”
It is also undisputed that donations to the Supreme Court Historical Society purchased access to the justices. Indeed, it is undisputed that it allowed interested donors access to Supreme Court events, which is how the society’s executive director, David T. Pride, came to bring the CEO of Hobby Lobby, David Green, to a November 2011 Christmas party hosted by the chief justice at the high court itself. After, Schenck described Green’s parents as potential big givers to the society: “Family is worth about $3b.” And shortly thereafter, Green got on board with a challenge to the Affordable Care Act that would become the Hobby Lobby litigation.
Also undisputed is that Alito knew enough about Wright’s casual and social religious views (she was interested, she has explained, in “all cases related to biblical issues”) to suggest that she attend a lecture at the court by Kelly Shackelford, the president of First Liberty Institute, which also litigates religious liberty cases before the high court. Also undisputed are earlier reports about Faith and Action in Politico and Rolling Stone. Reports that include claims of praying with the justices in chambers and financing expensive dinners with Thomas, Alito, Scalia, and their wives. And yet, financial disclosures from the justices rarely include expensive meals and “personal hospitality.”
Alito’s statement to the New York Times seems to be more focused on asserting that the Wrights (who are not bound by any ethics or disclosure rules) did nothing wrong: “I never detected any effort on the part of the Wrights to obtain confidential information or to influence anything that I did in either an official or private capacity, and I would have strongly objected if they had done so.” First, whether the Wrights acted improperly by receiving confidential information is far less worrisome than whether he—a Supreme Court justice—acted improperly by somehow revealing information. But even then, what are we to make of the fact that wealthy religious zealots paid money to pray with and socialize with and extract priceless personal favors from Supreme Court justices? Religious zealots are free to do any and all of those things. The real issue is that the justices allowed this to happen, encouraged and rewarded it, and now pretend that the real offense here is a policing of their casual social lives. As Rolling Stone reported this spring, Faith and Action, which claims to have been regularly praying with some of the justices over a span of many years, also filed amicus briefs before the court.
In other words, the leak is actually the very least of it—in part because nobody actually believes the court intends to police its leakers or even to investigate them. The New York Times piece about a massive influence network is the real travesty, without even a mention of the leak, and the fact that the wealthy donors didn’t secure special favors because the justices were already in the tank for their religious ideology doesn’t make this smell any better.
And that is the crux of it. The fact that some of the justices believe that “casual” and “social” relationships with lobbyists, activists, and interested parties who have business before the court are appropriate and acceptable is the problem, because it means they cannot be trusted to avoid such contacts. The problem is that the same justices who keep blaming their colleagues and the press and the American public for broad declining trust in the institution seem to have no comprehension of what kinds of behaviors appear to be inappropriate because they actually are inappropriate. Traffic court judges in towns with four stoplights know better than to drink and vacation and shoot with interested parties before them, much less set aside choice seats for big ticket cases. Evidently it’s different when the interested parties are rich.
What the Wrights and the other donors purchased when they bought access to Supreme Court events and parlayed that access into lavish vacation homes and dinners was not unlawful. But it was, and is, within the power of the justices who benefited from all of these efforts to have avoided them. They did not because they seem to have believed that they were engaged in acts of casual friendship. That is frankly just sad, at a personal level. But it also tells you all you need to know about why this court will keep burning its own legitimacy candle at both ends. They don’t even recognize it as a problem. The unfettered and lucrative sucking up, lobbying, and currying of favor—and the attendant rewards—are all recast as harmless socializing.
These very same Supreme Court justices who continue to claim that they will let us know who is to blame for plummeting approval numbers may well believe that their own judgment on this issue is unimpaired. Their judgment is profoundly impaired, and the New York Times reporting reveals why they cannot be counted on to fix the problem. They cannot even be counted on to name it.
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Mourners at a memorial outside of Club Q on Tuesday in Colorado Springs. (photo: Chet Strange/Getty Images)
Brandon Wolf was at the Orlando club when a gunman opened fire. His community knew another tragedy was coming
The news started to filter through: five dead, many more injured. I called friends in the area to make sure they were OK. Immediately, my heart was broken, and I was transported back to the worst night of my life.
I often refer to 11 June 2016, as my “last normal day”. I was a totally different person then. I worked at Starbucks. I was content to enjoy the sliver of happiness I found in the world. My best friends Juan and Drew were also my chosen family. I lost them that night. Nothing will ever be the same for me. It’s a weight I will carry for the rest of my life.
When I was young, I didn’t know the term “safe space”. But I knew how gay bars made me feel. There was a bar where I grew up in Portland called the Escape where I felt like I could be myself for the first time. But I was living at home back then, and going to a gay bar still felt like a dirty secret that I had to hide.
Then I moved to Orlando. Pulse was the first place I can remember holding hands with someone I liked without looking over my shoulder first. I dared to wear a real pair of skinny jeans in public without having to worry about what people would say. I came of age in that bar. It was a place where you can exhale and dare to imagine a better future for yourself.
I dabbled in music production for a time and Pulse was the first place I heard one of my songs play. I ran from one corner to another saying: “That’s me!”
It’s impossible to think about Pulse without remembering the horrible events of 12 June 2016. But Pulse was also a home. Obviously the night that the tragedy happened is emblazoned in my memory for ever, but it’s the beautiful, joyful times that stick with me.
Just over six years later, I’m filled with rage. My community has been under assault. We’re angry because we’ve been worried this type of thing was coming. We’ve spent months listening to hateful, vile, disgusting rhetoric spewed by rightwing figures like my own governor, Ron DeSantis.
DeSantis and Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, have been caught in a pissing match over who can treat the LGBTQ+ community worse. They are supported in the media by a slew of rightwing talking heads who make money when they say shocking things: Christopher Rufo, Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro. Their hate trickles up to Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson, Jeanine Pirro and Sean Hannity, through conferences like CPAC and to wealthy figures like Stephen Miller, who spent millions running anti-trans ads through the midterms.
My community knew a tragedy like what happened at Club Q was coming. We kept sounding the alarm when armed protesters showed up at drag shows, when white supremacists were arrested outside of Pride festival after threatening violence, when a donut shop was firebombed because they dared to host an art show featuring drag queens. We begged those on the right to turn the temperature down, to stop assaulting an already marginalized community. They wouldn’t listen.
A recent Trevor Project poll found that 66% of LGBTQ+ young people said the current political climate had an impact on their physical and mental health. It breaks my heart that a place like Club Q, and especially the trans people who were there, had to pay the ultimate price of the hateful rhetoric of politicians trying to win votes.
I’ve seen a lot of people in my circle on social media saying: we’re all we’ve got. And that feels so relevant right now. I know that in this hostile political environment, it’s my community that has my back. It’s the drag performers, who have their reputations shattered by politicians every day but still show up on Saturday to entertain us with their artistry. It’s the Black trans women, who have been under assault not just for the past months, but decades. And as we saw with the trans woman who helped take down the Club Q shooter with her high heel, they’re willing to put their bodies on the line to defend us. The challenge for the rest of us is simple: are we willing to do the same for them?
When you’ve been touched by hate violence, you become part of this unfortunate club. There’s a look in someone’s eyes when they’ve seen the same things I’ve seen. There’s a dim to their shine, as if the innocence and naivety has been ripped from them. I remember seeing this very vividly when I first met the Parkland kids. I feel it with every survivor I meet. I would tell the survivors in Colorado to please lean on the rest of us. The cameras will go away when the next crisis breaks out, but we know what you’re going through. Most of all: be good to each other. Do what you need to do to feel well and whole and don’t feel guilty about waking up tomorrow. You belong here.
I’m hosting Thanksgiving this year. Drew and Juan should be there. If they were, they’d cook, because I sure don’t. After we lost them, some of their friends, from all different points in their lives, came together. We’re bonded by trauma, and a fierce love for our friends. We’ll spend the day drinking lots of wine, playing video games and looking through old photos. We honor our friends with the joy of being together. And when we go home, we’ll take our rage and try to use it to change the world.
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Rescuers work at the site of a maternity ward of a hospital destroyed by a Russian missile attack, as their attack on Ukraine continues, in Vilniansk, Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, November 23, 2022. (photo: Stringer/Reuters)
The baby's mother was the only patient there, according to BBC News. Ukraine's First lady Olena Zelenska wrote on Twitter that the baby was just two days old.
"We will never forget and never forgive," she wrote. "My sincere condolences to the loved ones of the baby."
Russia was accused of attacking a maternity hospital in Mariupol earlier this year, where at least 17 people were wounded. "People, children are under the wreckage," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky tweeted at the time, calling it an "atrocity."
Zaporizhzhia, where the recent strike took place, was taken over by Russia when the Kremlin annexed four regions in September. It is home to Europe's larges nuclear plant.
Multiple regions were attacked on Wednesday, and the emergency services said they responded to 159 incidents, detecting and removing 1,453 explosive objects. Since the beginning of the Russia's invasion of the country, officials said 288,508 explosive objects and more than 6,272 pounds of explosives have been neutralized in Ukraine, including 2,154 aerial bombs.
In the Kharkiv region, two people in an apartment building were killed in during shelling, according to BBC.
In the capital city of Kyiv, there were several explosions, but it was wasn't immediately clear if they were were caused by the air defense systems Russian projectiles, according to the Associated Press. One of the capital's infrastructure facilities has been hit, Mayor Vitali Klitschko said. He also said water supplies were knocked out in the city.
The country also experienced widespread power outages in parts of Kyiv, Lviv and in the Odesa region.
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Biden is the nation's first octogenarian president and the oldest man ever to hold the office. (photo: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)
The extension comes as the Biden administration’s student loan forgiveness program is tied up in the courts. Officials had told borrowers the forgiveness program, which is worth up to $20,000 in debt relief per borrower, would be implemented before loan payments were set to resume in January.
The payment pause will last until 60 days after the litigation is resolved. If the program has not been implemented and the litigation has not been resolved by June 30, payments will resume 60 days after that, according to the Department of Education.
“I’m completely confident my plan is legal,” said President Joe Biden in a video posted to Twitter Tuesday, referencing his student loan forgiveness program.
“But it isn’t fair to ask tens of millions of borrowers eligible for relief to resume their student debt payments while the courts consider the lawsuit,” he added.
Last week, the Department of Justice asked the Supreme Court to step in and reinstate the student loan forgiveness program while the legal challenges play out. The program was struck down by a lower court judge in Texas on November 10.
The payment pause extension gives the Supreme Court time to hear the case in its current term, Biden said.
The administration had previously said the most recent extension until the end of December would be the last.
Tuesday’s announcement marks the eighth time the payment restart date has been rescheduled since March 2020.
Borrower balances have effectively been frozen since then, with no payments required on most federal student loans. During this time, interest has stopped adding up and collections on defaulted debt have also been on hold.
The yearslong freeze on payments and interest is expected to cost the government $155 billion though the end of 2022, according to an estimate from the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. The new extension will add to that total.
If Biden’s student loan forgiveness program is allowed to move forward, individual borrowers who earned less than $125,000 in either 2020 or 2021 and married couples or heads of households who made less than $250,000 annually in those years could see up to $10,000 of their federal student loan debt forgiven.
If a qualifying borrower also received a federal Pell grant while enrolled in college, the individual is eligible for up to $20,000 of debt forgiveness.
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Canadian Dr. Henry Morgentaler told biographer Catherine Dunphy why he decided to perform abortions in defiance of bans. (photo: Michael Stuparyk/Toronto Star/Getty Images)
News reports and court affidavits have documented how health care workers sometimes deny women abortion procedures in emergency situations – including NPR's story of a woman who was initially not treated for her miscarriage at an Ohio ER, though she'd been bleeding profusely for hours.
In Missouri, hospital doctors told a woman whose water broke at 18 weeks that "current Missouri law supersedes our medical judgment" and so she could not receive an abortion procedure even though she was at risk of infection, according to a report in the Springfield News-Leader.
That hospital is now under investigation for violating a federal law that requires doctors to treat and stabilize patients during a medical emergency.
And a survey by the Texas Policy Evaluation Project found clinicians sometimes avoided standard abortion procedures, opting instead for "hysterotomy, a surgical incision into the uterus, because it might not be construed as an abortion."
"That's just nuts," Dr. Matthew Wynia says. He's a physician who directs the Center for Bioethics and Humanities at the University of Colorado. "[A hysterotomy is] much more dangerous, much more risky – the woman may never have another pregnancy now because you're trying to avoid being accused of having conducted an abortion."
Reports like these prompted Wynia to publish an editorial in the New England Journal of Medicine in September, calling for physicians and leading medical institutions to take a stand against these laws through "professional civil disobedience." The way he sees it, no doctor should opt to do a procedure that may harm their patient – or delay or deny care – because of the fear of prosecution.
"I have seen some very disturbing quotes from health professionals essentially saying, 'Look, it's the law. We have to live within the law,'" he says. "If the law is wrong and causing you to be involved in harming patients, you do not have to live [within] that law."
These issues have raised a growing debate in medicine about what to do in the face of laws that many doctors feel force them into ethical quandaries.
Medical organizations raise the issue
At the American Medical Association's November meeting, president Dr. Jack Resneck gave an address to the organization's legislative body, and recounted how doctors around the country have run into difficulty practicing medicine in states that ban abortion.
"I never imagined colleagues would find themselves tracking down hospital attorneys before performing urgent abortions, when minutes count, [or] asking if a 30% chance of maternal death or impending renal failure meet the criteria for the state's exemptions, or whether they must wait a while longer until their pregnant patient gets even sicker," he said.
The AMA passed resolutions at the meeting to direct a task force to create a legal defense fund and legal strategy for physicians who are prosecuted for providing abortions when that is the medical standard of care.
Not all doctors agree that the abortion restrictions are responsible for harming patients. Dr. Christine Francis of the American Association of Pro-Life Ob-Gyns, has written that the suggestion that these laws interfere with the treatment of miscarriages, ectopic pregnancies and other life-threatening conditions is "absurd."
She told a congressional subcommittee this summer that Ob-Gyns' "medical expertise and years of training make it very possible for us to discern when we need to intervene to save a woman's life."
But Wynia says it's striking how united nearly all medical professional groups have been in repudiating the Supreme Court's decision to overturn Roe v. Wade; they've argued essentially that it's thrown the medical field into chaos and threatens the integrity of the profession. He's now calling for those groups to back those statements up with substantive support for doctors who get in trouble for defying laws.
A history of civil disobedience
Physician civil disobedience played a role in legalizing abortion decades ago. Before the early 20th century, there was "almost a 'don't ask, don't tell' kind of silence" around physicians providing abortions, says Mary Ziegler, a legal historian at U.C. Davis who specializes in the history of abortion.
"By the 1940s, you get more of a crackdown on abortion, and it's framed as a vice or a racket — the same language you'd be using against organized crime," says Zielger. "In the 1950s, hospitals begin forming therapeutic abortion committees in part to protect themselves from prosecution or lawsuits," she says, so abortions could be allowed in certain circumstances, like emergencies.
But some doctors felt that wasn't enough. Allowing abortions when someone's death is imminent may be straightforward, but what about when someone has a heart condition and pregnancy makes that condition worse? Or if a patient tells their doctor, 'If I can't get an abortion, I'm going to harm myself'? Ziegler says some doctors wanted more leeway to follow their conscience and provide abortions in more situations.
Then, in the 1960s, in the period leading up to Roe v. Wade, "some people then begin not just getting arrested because they happen to get caught, but trying to get arrested," she says, as a way to draw attention to what they saw as vague or unworkable abortion laws.
In Washington, D.C., Dr. Milan Vuitch was arrested 16 times for providing illegal abortions. In California, Dr. Leon Belous was convicted for referring a woman for an abortion in 1967. He appealed his case all the way to the state supreme court and won.
And in Canada, Dr. Henry Morgentaler was imprisoned for openly violating abortion laws. His notoriety came with risks — he received death threats and his Toronto clinic was firebombed twice. But ultimately the cases brought against him helped to progressively legalize abortion across that country.
The picture is very different today, at least so far. In the five months since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, leading medical associations tell NPR they aren't aware of any health care workers who have actually been charged with providing an abortion in violation of these new state laws.
One reason that there's highly unlikely to be another Morgentaler now, says Ziegler, is because, "in the pre-Roe era often if you violated an abortion law, most people didn't really face much real prison time." Now, many of these state laws were written explicitly to criminalize doctors, with penalties that include felony charges, prison time, fines, and the loss of their medical license and livelihoods. The maximum penalty for doctors who violate Texas's abortion ban is life in prison.
The country has settled into an "uneasy reality," she says, where doctors aren't providing abortions in places where it's illegal — including in some emergency situations where abortion is technically allowed under the new restrictive legislation — and prosecutors aren't bringing charges. But she says that this won't last forever, whether because prosecutors get more aggressive, or because doctors begin to push the limits of these laws more.
Freedom and livelihood at risk
Medical care is very different than it was in midcentury America. It's not a "lone wolf" enterprise anymore: Doctors are often employed in corporate systems where every little item is tagged and multiple people are involved in every decision. Even if they want to defy the law or boldly skirt the edge of it, their employers may not let them — or a colleague could turn them in.
And doctors who are public about providing abortions say they already face a huge amount of risk.
"Just going to work in the morning risks my life," says Dr. Katie McHugh, an Ob-Gyn based in Indiana who provides abortions — Indiana has a law banning abortion, but it's currently blocked by the courts. NPR has reported on increased threats to abortion clinics and providers in recent years.
"There is no way that I would risk my personal freedom and jail time for providing medical care," McHugh says. "I would love to show my children that I am brave in the world, but our society will not allow me to be a civil-disobedient citizen in the way that some of these articles suggest, because I would be imprisoned, I would be fined, I would lose my license and I very well could be assassinated for doing that work."
And in today's environment, getting arrested for defying abortion laws on purpose might not actually be effective in getting laws changed, points out Dr. Louise King, director of reproductive bioethics for the Center for Bioethics at Harvard Medical School and an Ob-Gyn surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital.
King — who herself provides abortion care in Massachusetts, where it is legal up to 24 weeks — lays out what would happen if she were to get arrested intentionally in Texas, for example, where she went to medical school and did her residency.
"It's probable in Texas I'd lose the case," she says. "And then am I going to win it in the Supreme Court? No."
For these reasons, she's skeptical of calls to openly defy abortion laws and invite arrest. "I don't even see the point," King says. She adds that another consideration is how few providers there are who do abortion care — any doctor who's sitting in jail or waiting for a legal fight to resolve is one fewer person who's able to take care of patients.
Practicing up to the limit of the law
Still, there may be some middle ground for doctors, between going to jail and failing to provide the care they feel is needed, argues Katie Watson, a bioethicist and professor of law and humanities at Northwestern University's medical school. In many of the reported cases in which patients were endangered because doctors denied or delayed necessary care, she says civil disobedience wasn't called for. Instead, doctors need to become more comfortable working up to the limits of the law.
"My perspective is that interpreting life and health exceptions to be consistent with standard medical practice is not lawbreaking," she says. Those laws are generally intended to block elective abortions, and most have exceptions for medical emergencies. Plus, the federal government requires hospitals to stabilize patients, including when they need abortion procedures.
She acknowledges the legal risks and stiff penalties clinicians face, but says they need to better understand the legal protections they do have.
"Legislatures have put clinicians in a very terrible place, and it needs to change," she asserts. "And at the same time, clinicians need to step up in this moment and learn what the laws really do and do not prohibit and practice to the full scope that they can."
For doctors who do want to more directly defy abortion laws, and provide abortions when there's no medical emergency, Watson draws a distinction between doing it publicly to make a point — civil disobedience — and "covert disobedience," which is privately resisting the law.
"That is when you believe a law is unjust and you do not believe disobeying it in public will change it, but there is an identified other in danger in front of you that you have the resources to help," she explains. "So that's the Underground Railroad, that's hiding Jews from the Nazis — there's a long tradition of that as well."
Some abortion providers are taking that kind of approach. "They've got all these referral systems and they're sending patients around to different places to get care," King says. "They're mobilizing and [doctors] are moving and practicing in different states."
In these ways, she says, abortion providers are making sure their patients can still get care without risking their livelihoods and personal freedom — a stepped-up version of what they have been doing for years.
Support for doctors who take risks
Ultimately, health care workers need more institutional support in the face of laws they may feel are pushing them to violate their ethical obligations, says Wynia.
"This is a leadership issue," he argues. He worked for 18 years at the AMA, running the Institute for Ethics and the Center for Patient Safety. "There will be individual doctors who presumably will end up in court. And then the question will arise: Were they supported? Can they be supported?"
He wants organized medicine, accrediting organizations, and medical facilities like hospitals to unite in saying clearly that they will support clinicians who decide to follow the standard of care for a patient, even when that may violate state abortion laws.
Strong leadership at the institutional level could embolden doctors to follow their medical judgment and cause fewer instances of doctors delaying care to consult legal experts, Wynia says. In the face of tough cases, he hopes doctors will think, "If we do the right thing, we may end up in court, but we know we're not alone in this — we know we've got the whole medical establishment behind us."
AMA's resolutions earlier this month to support the doctors who do get charged in the future for providing abortions in keeping with medical ethics and standards of care are a good first step, he says. Those policies give direction to a task force to provide policies, legal strategies and financial resources, but there is no timeline for more details on what shape that will take.
In the long term, King, the bioethicist and surgeon at Harvard, says no amount of institutional support for doctors or calls for disobedience will fix how these abortion restrictions hamstring doctors, which can harm patients. "If we want to make change, we've got to change the laws," she says, and that means voting and political organizing and otherwise using the democratic process.
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In this photo taken from video footage and released by Hangpai Xingyang, people with suitcases and bags are seen leaving from a Foxconn compound in Zhengzhou in central China's Henan Province on Oct. 29, 2022. Employees at the world's biggest Apple iPhone factory have been beaten and detained in protests over contract disputes amid anti-virus controls, according to employees and videos posted on social media Wednesday, Nov. 23, 2022. (photo: Hangpai Xingyang/AP)
Police beat workers protesting over a pay dispute at the biggest factory for Apple’s iPhone, whose new model is delayed by controls imposed as China tries to contain a surge in COVID-19 cases
Foxconn, the biggest contract assembler of smartphones and other electronics, is struggling to fill orders for the iPhone 14 after thousands of employees walked away from the factory in the central city of Zhengzhou last month following complaints about unsafe working conditions.
China’s status as an export powerhouse is based on factories such as Foxconn's that assemble the world’s consumer electronics, toys and other goods.
The ruling Communist Party is trying to contain the latest wave of outbreaks without shutting down factories and the rest of its economy as it did in early 2020. Its tactics include “closed-loop management,” under which workers live in their factories with no outside contact.
Foxconn offered higher pay to attract more workers to the Zhengzhou factory to assemble the iPhone 14, which sells starting at $799 in the United States.
On Tuesday, a protest erupted after employees who had traveled long distances to take jobs at the factory complained that the company changed terms of their pay, according to an employee, Li Sanshan.
Li said he quit a catering job when he saw an advertisement promising 25,000 yuan ($3,500) for two months of work. That would be a significant hike over average pay for this type of work in the area.
After employees arrived, the company said they had to work two additional months at lower pay to receive the 25,000 yuan, according to Li.
“Foxconn released very tempting recruiting offers, and workers from all parts of the country came, only to find they were being made fools of,” he said.
Videos online showed thousands of people in masks facing rows of police in white protective suits with plastic riot shields. Police kicked and hit a protester with clubs after he grabbed a metal pole that had been used to strike him. People who shot the footage said it was filmed at the site.
The protests in Zhengzhou come as the ruling Communist Party faces rising frustration about restrictions in areas across China that have closed shops and offices and confined millions of people to their homes.
That has boiled over into protests in some cities. Videos on social media show residents tearing down barricades set up to enforce neighborhood closures.
The ruling party promised this month to try to reduce disruptions by shortening quarantines and making other changes. But the party is sticking to a “zero-COVID” strategy that aims to isolate every case while other governments relax controls and try to live with the virus.
The protest in Zhengzhou lasted through Wednesday morning as thousands of workers gathered outside dormitories and confronted factory security workers, according to Li.
Apple Inc. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The company earlier warned iPhone 14 deliveries would be delayed after access to an industrial zone around the Zhengzhou factory, which Foxconn says employs 200,000 people, was suspended following outbreaks.
Other videos showed protesters spraying fire extinguishers toward police.
A man who identified himself as the Communist Party secretary in charge of community services was shown in a video posted on the Sina Weibo social media platform urging protesters to withdraw. He assured them their demands would be met.
Foxconn, whose headquarters are in New Taipei City, Taiwan, said that its contractual obligation about payments “has always been fulfilled.”
The company denied what it said were comments online that employees with the virus lived in dormitories at the Zhengzhou factory. It said facilities were disinfected and passed government checks before employees moved in.
“Regarding any violence, the company will continue to communicate with employees and the government to prevent similar incidents from happening again,” a company statement said.
Protests have flared as the number and severity of outbreaks has risen across China, prompting authorities in areas including Beijing, the capital, to close neighborhoods and impose other restrictions that residents say go beyond what the national government allows.
More than 253,000 cases have been found in the past three weeks and the daily average is increasing, the government reported Tuesday. This week, authorities reported China’s first COVID-19 deaths in six months.
On Wednesday, the government reported 28,883 cases found over the past 24 hours, including 26,242 with no symptoms. Henan province and Zhengzhou, the provincial capital, reported 851.
The government will enforce its anti-COVID policy while "resolutely overcoming the mindset of paralysis and laxity,” said a spokesman for the National Health Commission, Mi Feng.
The city government of Guangzhou, the site of the biggest outbreaks, announced that it opened 19 temporary hospitals with a total of almost 70,000 beds for coronavirus patients. The city announced plans last week to build hospital and quarantine facilities for 250,000 people.
Also Wednesday, Beijing opened a hospital in an exhibition center and suspended access to Beijing International Studies University after a virus case was found there. The capital earlier closed shopping malls and office buildings and suspended access to some apartment compounds.
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A group of manatees in a canal where discharge from a nearby Florida Power & Light plant warms the water in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in Dec. 2010. (photo: Lynn Sladky/AP)
Pollution is triggering algae blooms that have killed much of the seagrass on which manatees depend, conservations groups said.
The petition filed with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service contends it was an error to take manatees off the endangered list in 2017, leaving the slow-moving marine mammals listed only as threatened. They had been listed as endangered since 1973.
“The Fish and Wildlife Service now has the opportunity to correct its mistake and protect these desperately imperiled animals,” said Ragan Whitlock, attorney for the Florida-based Center for Biological Diversity.
Under the Endangered Species Act, a species is considered endangered if it is “in danger of extinction throughout all or a significant portion of its range.” A threatened species is one that may become endangered in the foreseeable future.
The petition, also sponsored by the Save the Manatee Club, Miami Waterkeeper and others, contends that pollution from fertilizer runoff, leaking septic tanks, wastewater discharges and increased development is triggering algae blooms that have killed much of the seagrass on which manatees depend, especially on Florida’s east coast.
That resulted in the deaths mainly from starvation of a record 1,100 manatees in 2021 and is continuing this year, with at least 736 manatee deaths reported as of Nov. 11, according to the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. The 2021 deaths represented 13% of all manatees estimated to live in Florida waters.
Placing the manatee back on the endangered list would enhance federal scrutiny of projects and issues that involve manatees and bring more resources and expertise to tackle the problem, said Patrick Rose, executive director of the Save the Manatee Club.
“Re-designating manatees as endangered will be a critical first step in righting a terrible wrong,” Rose said.
The Fish and Wildlife Service has 90 days to determine whether restoring the manatee to endangered status is warranted and, if so, 12 months from the date of the petition to complete a review of the manatee’s status.
The Fish and Wildlife Service said in an email that officials are “aware of the petition. Service staff will review the petition through our normal petition processes.”
Meanwhile, state wildlife officials say they will launch a second year of experimental feeding of lettuce to manatees that gather by the hundreds during winter in the warm-water discharge an electric power plant near Cape Canaveral.
Last year, about 202,000 pounds (91,600 kilograms) of mostly donated lettuce was fed to manatees under the program. But wildlife experts caution that starvation is a chronic problem that will continue to harm the manatee population without greater attention to reducing pollution.
“With astounding losses of seagrasses around the state, we need to address water-quality issues to give the manatee a fighting chance to thrive and survive,” said Rachel Silverstein, Miami Waterkeeper executive director.
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