Maybe when she stops getting 30 percent of the Republican primary votes?

This was not a magnanimous candidate looking to mend the intraparty fracture on full display in exit polls from each of the early electoral contests. This was not a competitor looking to pivot to going after President Joe Biden.

This was a former president entering the general election actively exacerbating divisions within the GOP — at a time when some Republicans are openly warning about the risk of alienating even a small segment of the Republican electorate. Trump has every rational incentive to make overtures to Haley and her supporters, who delivered her roughly 40 percent of the vote in New Hampshire and South Carolina and who are the kind of voters Trump will need to turn out in Michigan and Pennsylvania in November. But he refused to do so — or, perhaps, was incapable of it — despite making head feints in that direction.

“In the exit polls in the three early states, roughly 20 percent are saying they’re not going to vote for Trump,” said Christine Matthews, a Republican pollster and president of Bellwether Research and Consulting. “If that’s true, you need to have like 85 to 90 percent of your base. I do think that he’ll have some problems consolidating, particularly your well-educated, suburban Republicans.”

This is interesting, from Reuters: Exclusive: Extremism is US voters’ greatest worry, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.

Worries about political extremism or threats to democracy have emerged as a top concern for U.S. voters and an issue where President Joe Biden has a slight advantage over Donald Trump ahead of the November election, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll showed.

Some 21% of respondents in the three-day poll, which closed on Sunday, said “political extremism or threats to democracy” was the biggest problem facing the U.S., a share that was marginally higher than those who picked the economy – 19% – and immigration – 18%.

Biden’s Democrats considered extremism by far the No. 1 issue while Trump’s Republicans overwhelmingly chose immigration.

Extremism was independents’ top concern, cited by almost a third of independent respondents, followed by immigration, cited by about one in five. The economy ranked third.

During and since his presidency, Trump has kept up a steady drumbeat of criticism of U.S. institutions, claiming the four criminal prosecutions he faces are politically motivated and holding to his false claims that his 2020 election defeat was the result of widespread fraud.

That rhetoric was central to his message to supporters ahead of their Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

Overall, 34% of respondents said Biden had a better approach for handling extremism, compared to 31% who said Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination.

The poll helps show the extent to which Biden’s re-election bid could rely on voters being motivated by their opposition to Trump rather than enthusiasm over Biden’s candidacy.

The fallout from the Alabama IVF ruling is still in the news.

Lisa Neeham at Public Notice: They’re coming for birth control next.

In brief, the reason the Alabama Supreme Court’s opinion implicates and outlaws IVF is that the state has a Wrongful Death of a Minor statute, and the court decided this applies to “all unborn children, without limitation.” But there’s no language in the statute that says this. Rather, it’s just that over the last 15 years, the Alabama Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings saying that the undefined term “minor child” in the statute can be stretched to “unborn children” regardless of what state of development the embryo is at. Once the court created such an expansive definition, the decision that frozen embryos are people was inescapable.

By Utagawa Kuniyoshi

To be fair, though, the Alabama Supreme Court is entirely made up of conservative Republicans, they were a bit hamstrung in their decision. Alabama’s state constitution states that “it is the public policy of this state to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child in all manners and measures lawful and appropriate.” But that doesn’t necessarily mean the court was required to, as it did here, extend that “unborn child” definition to what it calls “extrauterine children” — embryos frozen by people pursuing IVF….

For people not saddled with the misguided anti-choice belief that a tiny clump of cells is the same as a person, this is a non-controversial process. It enhances the chance of pregnancy and allows people to plan for future children without undergoing multiple invasive egg retrieval cycles. But if one subscribes to the notion of fetal personhood — that a fetus is quite literally a person, with all the attendant privileges that confers — then those frozen embryos are the same as babies.

This is, of course, a religious, not scientific belief. Chief Justice Parker, in his concurring opinion, made clear that his vote, at least, stems directly from his religious beliefs rather than being grounded in the law. Citing Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, the Ten Commandments, and the King James Bible, Parker concludes that “even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory.”

Notably, none of those things are legal precedent. Indeed, in a country founded on the separation of church and state, they shouldn’t inform a court holding. However, since religious conservatives dominate the US Supreme Court, that separation has largely collapsed. This has emboldened conservative litigants and conservative state and federal judges to take ever more anti-choice stances.

A bit more:

Reproductive health activists have been sounding the alarm about the anti-choice attacks on IVF for years, particularly in the wake of the Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade. At least two prominent anti-choice groups, Americans United for Life and Students for Life, have railed against IVF. The chief legal officer for Americans United for Life, Steve Aden, called IVF “eugenics” and said that IVF created “embryonic human beings” that were destroyed in the process. Students for Life called IVF “damaging and destructive.”

These same anti-choice groups also hate birth control, and the Dobbs decision paved the way for them to mount a theocratic attack on it too. Christopher Rufo, who ginned up a panic over benign diversity initiatives and helped force out the first Black president of Harvard, Claudine Gay, has already telegraphed that this is his next attack.

Over on Elon Musk’s increasingly Nazi-fied social media site, X, Rufo is spewing rhetoric about how “the family structure disintegrated precisely as access to birth control proliferated” and that recreational sex is bad and leads to single-mother households.

Rufo isn’t alone. The Heritage Foundation, which is also busy with a blueprint for a second Trump presidency that would destroy the administrative state and whose leader is still pushing the big lie that Trump won the 2020 election, has also called for the end of birth control. Also over on X, Heritage’s official account posted last year that “a good place to start would be a feminist movement against the pill and … returning the consequentiality to sex” [….]

And there you have it. Religious conservatives are calling for a return to a world where sex isn’t recreational or for pleasure but is instead fraught with consequences — namely, pregnancies that can’t be terminated even when the pregnant person’s life is in danger. To do this, however, they would need to succeed in getting the Supreme Court to overturn Griswold v. Connecticut, the 1965 case that invalidated restrictions on birth control.

There’s more at the link.

Sarah Lipton-Lubet at Slate: Republicans’ Absurdist Reproductive Policies Are Coming for Us All.

Nearly two years ago, late into the night on a Monday, I had the terrifying realization that I needed to move my embryos. Immediately.

A few hours earlier—just as I was starting to wrap up work for the day—my phone had lit up in what felt like one long, continuous stream of alerts. Politico had just obtained a leaked copy of the Supreme Court’s draft Dobbs opinion overturning Roe v. Wade. As a reproductive rights attorney leading a Supreme Court reform organization, I knew my immediate next steps. Conference call. Media statement. Email to our supporters. I’d been preparing for this moment since Donald Trump was elected.

I am a child, by Gustav Adolph Hennig

But what I had spent less time thinking about was how this would affect me personally. I wasn’t at all prepared for what to do about my embryos. After years of miscarriages and egg retrievals, I did not have a baby. But I had my embryos. Sitting in nitrogen tanks. In a red state—a red state that had recently passed a draconian anti-abortion bill that, among other things, granted “an unborn child at every stage of development, all rights, privileges and immunities available to other persons.”

That legislation was being challenged in federal court, but now Roe would be gone by the end of June. Amid a swirl of unknowns (What would happen with the litigation? How would that law impact IVF? Would I somehow be prohibited from moving my embryos in the future?) I knew one thing with absolute certainty: If I wanted to control what happened to my embryos, I had to get them the heck out of Arizona, and fast.

Unfortunately, the clinics I called in my attempt to find a new home for the embryos didn’t seem to match my urgency. They couldn’t understand why we would move the embryos at all. Their pace and paperwork was business as usual. Even some of my like-minded friends understood my concern, but not my level of panic, and action. I’ll admit, I had momentary doubts about whether my alarm was misplaced.

Needless to say, the recent Alabama Supreme Court decision—effectively outlawing IVF by declaring that embryos are, legally speaking, children—put to rest any lingering questions about whether I was right to be concerned. As Mark Joseph Stern reported, embryo shipping services have already said they will no longer ship to or from Alabama.

And isn’t that the story of reproductive freedom in America in a nutshell? Time and again, advocates sound the alarm only to be told that we are being hysterical. Then we watch in horror as our worst fears materialize.

Read the rest at Slate.

One more on this topic, from Politico: Senate GOP poised to block IVF protection bill.

Senate conservatives are signaling they’ll block Wednesday’s planned Democratic bid to enshrine protections for in-vitro fertilization into federal law – and they’re calling IVF a states-rights issue.

Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) is planning to seek unanimous consent to pass her proposal to federally protect IVF, which means any one senator can easily block its passage. This isn’t the first time she’s brought up her bill — Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-Miss.) objected when Duckworth tried to pass it unanimously in 2022.

But Duckworth’s bill is surging back to the forefront as Republicans face uncomfortable questions about an Alabama Supreme Court ruling restricting IVF.

Hyde-Smith’s office did not respond when asked if she would object again to Duckworth’s bill, and the GOP senator ignored Capitol hallway questions from reporters, as is her usual practice. Other Republicans are already expressing reservations about the bill, though – meaning its chances at slipping through the chamber are slim, at best.

“I don’t see any need to regulate it at the federal level,” said Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), an OB-GYN by trade, who would not say whether he’d block the bill. “I think the Dobbs decision puts this issue back at the state level, and I would encourage your state legislations to protect in-vitro fertilization.”

“It’s idiotic for us to take the bait,” said Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), who clarified he was referring not to Duckworth’s bill on its face but to Democrats’ attempts to use the proposal as an IVF messaging tool. Vance said he’s not yet reviewed the actual bill.

Regardless, Republicans’ hesitation over the IVF protection bill highlights their election-year jam: Democrats will continue trying to tie them to the Alabama ruling, which has shut down IVF facilities in the state.

And GOP statements supporting IVF — as the Senate Republican campaign arm and several candidates put out last week — might fall flat with voters if Democrats can point to specific instances when their opponents failed to protect the procedure. Exhibit A: Speaker Mike Johnson, who recently issued a statement supporting IVF but has previously supported legislation that could restrict access to the fertility tech.

That’s all I have for you today. What do you think? What other stories have captured your interest?