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For Immediate Release
June, 29 2020, 12:00am EDT
Contact:
Email: media@reproductivefreedomforall.org
NARAL Pro-Choice America Responds to Supreme Court Decision in June Medical Services LLC v. Russo
Following ruling in abortion case, NARAL calls out Maine Senator Susan Collins for casting deciding vote for Brett Kavanaugh and rubber-stamping Donald Trump's other extremist judicial nominees
WASHINGTON
The U.S. Supreme Court's decision today in June Medical Services LLC v. Russo struck down a medically unnecessary clinic shutdown law in Louisiana. The law threatened to decimate abortion access in Louisiana, where access is already extremely restricted.
In response, NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue released the following statement:
"Today's decision is a win for women in Louisiana who will continue to have access to the time-sensitive abortion care they need. It's a win for truth and fact-based decision making, as even a Court tilted so far right couldn't ignore the concrete arguments and data showing that public health is compromised by these burdensome restrictions on abortion. Finally, today's decision shows that advocates can make a difference. Support for Roe v. Wade is at an all-time high in this country and so many made their voices heard through this process. The Court's legitimacy in the eyes of the public will be threatened if they follow through on Trump's promise to end legal abortion.
This win, however, doesn't change the simple fact that reproductive freedom in the United States remains on the line thanks to anti-choice extremists who have shown time and again that they will stop at nothing to advance their dangerous ideological agenda and a Court still looking for ways to accommodate them.
Susan Collins, who has long masqueraded as a supporter of reproductive freedom in the Senate, cast the deciding vote for Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court. Throughout Kavanaugh's nomination process, Susan Collins falsely claimed that he posed no threat to abortion rights and would respect precedent. Today's decision makes crystal-clear just how deep her betrayal of women and families in Maine really was, with Kavanaugh siding with the minority to uphold this restrictive anti-choice law. Following Kavanaugh's vote today and come November, she'll have to answer for throwing our rights, our lives, and our well-being under the bus. Unlike Susan Collins, Mainers are clear about their values - they support reproductive freedom and want to see a champion for women and families represent their values in the Senate. That champion is Sara Gideon, who will never stop fighting for our rights."
Senator Susan Collins (R-ME) cast the deciding vote for Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation to the Supreme Court, claiming repeatedly that he would respect precedent, but in today's decision he made clear his willingness to overturn precedent to advance his anti-choice, anti-freedom agenda. NARAL Pro-Choice America today released a video outlining Sen. Collins' betrayal of her constituents when she voted to confirm Kavanaugh.
June Medical Services LLC v. Russo challenged a dangerous Louisiana law that would have gutted abortion access in the state by requiring doctors to have medically unnecessary admitting privileges at a local hospital.
The clinic shutdown law at issue in the case was identical to one blocked in a previous case, Whole Woman's Health v. Hellerstedt, decided by the Supreme Court in 2016 before Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch joined the Court. These restrictions are based on disinformation pushed by the anti-choice, anti-freedom movement that falsely claims restrictions like this help women, though there is no medical benefit to mandating admitting privileges and they do nothing to make women safer. In truth, the evidence overwhelmingly shows that abortion care is extremely safe and leading medical experts oppose these restrictions because they block "access to quality, evidence-based medicine."
This case puts an intense spotlight on Senator Susan Collins, who voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, tipping the balance of the Court to anti-choice control. Collins has rubber-stamped Donald Trump's extremist agenda by helping him to stack the federal judiciary with judges hostile to Roe v. Wade and determined to gut or overturn the constitutional right to abortion.
In Maine, almost a quarter (24%) of Maine women live in counties with no abortion clinics, but Mainers have more access to abortion than in many other states thanks to their pro-choice governor and state legislature.
In 2019, House Speaker Sara Gideon and Gov. Janet Mills delivered on their promise to protect access to reproductive healthcare by passing and signing into law a bill (LD 1261) that removed unnecessary barriers to allow qualified and trusted providers to provide abortion care.
The anti-choice movement has spent decades working overtime to decimate access to abortion, state by state, law by law. This Louisiana law was just one part of a coordinated effort by the anti-choice radical right to gut Roe v. Wade and advance their agenda of power and control. Since 2011, anti-choice politicians have pushed nearly 450 laws restricting reproductive freedom through state legislatures.
For over 50 years, Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL Pro-Choice America) has fought to protect and advance reproductive freedom at the federal and state levels—including access to abortion care, birth control, pregnancy and post-partum care, and paid family leave—for everybody. Reproductive Freedom for All is powered by its more than 4 million members from every state and congressional district in the country, representing the 8 in 10 Americans who support legal abortion.
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Average US Electric Bill Up $110—or 6.4%—Under Trump in 2025
"American families don't need a report to tell them that the president has broken his campaign promise to slash energy costs."
Mar 17, 2026
Over two weeks into President Donald Trump and Israel's illegal war on Iran, which is driving up oil prices around the world, Democrats on the congressional Joint Economic Committee revealed Tuesday that the average US electric bill increased by $110, or 6.4%, last year.
The Democratic JEC staff compared monthly data from the federal Energy Information Administration for 2024, when Trump was campaigning to return to office against then-Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, and 2025, when the Republican returned to power, having repeatedly promised to cut electric bills in half.
The JEC report highlights that last year's national average was "even higher than the increase the committee projected last November," plus "annual electricity costs were higher in 2025 in nearly every state, and were at least 10% higher in 12 states and DC."
The states with the highest bills were Connecticut and Hawaii, which each had an average of $2,490 for 2025. They were followed by Alabama at $2,230, Maryland at $2,220, Massachusetts at $2,190, Texas at $2,080, and Florida at $2,010.
In terms of the largest increases last year, the District of Columbia saw the biggest jump: a 23.5% rise from $1,360 to $1,680. New Jersey led all states with a 16.9% hike from $1,540 to $1,800, followed by Illinois at 15.9%, Pennsylvania at 12.1%, Kentucky at 11.8%, Maryland and Tennessee at 11.6%, New York at 11.4%, Ohio at 11.1%, and Missouri at 11%.
"American families don't need a report to tell them that the president has broken his campaign promise to slash energy costs; they already feel the impact of President Trump's actions every single day," said Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-NH), the panel's ranking member. "But this report is yet another indication that sky-high costs are continuing to rise—and are continuing to hurt American families."
Throughout last year, lawmakers and other experts warned of various policies expected to drive up utility bills, including the Republican budget package, or so-called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which eliminated tax credits for solar and wind energy.
"Trump and Republicans are accelerating their self-inflicted energy crisis with continued project cancellations," the group Climate Power declared in a December report that blamed the administration for hurting "projects that would have produced enough electricity to power the equivalent of 13 million homes."
The Trump administration is also advocating for the construction of artificial intelligence data centers, despite warnings that the unregulated buildup of such facilities is causing local electricity costs to soar, plus threatening nearby communities and the global climate.
There's also US liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, which are not only exacerbating the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency but also pushing up energy prices for Americans, as Public Citizen detailed in a December report. The watchdog noted that "1 in 6 Americans—21 million households—are behind on their energy bills," which "are rising at twice the rate of inflation."
"Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum have acted as global gas salesmen, traveling to Europe to push exports and gut European methane regulations while attacking mainstream climate science," Tyson Slocum, report author and director of the Public Citizen's Energy Program, said at the time. "Meanwhile, Trump has done nothing to keep prices down at home."
The report preceded Big Oil-backed Trump launching a war on Iran without congressional authorization. While causing oil prices to skyrocket, his Operation Epic Fury is expected to boost the US LNG industry, with one expert projecting earlier this month that American companies could see up to $20 billion per month in windfall profits if the global market is deprived of Qatari gas until the summer.
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'Things Are Not Okay': US Threatens to Withhold HIV Funding Unless Zambia Allows Plunder of Its Minerals
"The State Department is threatening Zambia with an embargo on essential medicines in order to plunder its minerals," said one HIV prevention advocate.
Mar 17, 2026
The US State Department is threatening to strip HIV/AIDS and other disease prevention funds for more than a million people in the African nation of Zambia in a bid to extort the country for greater access to its mineral wealth.
The New York Times reported Monday on the draft of a memo prepared for Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which states that "we will only secure our priorities by demonstrating willingness to publicly take support away from Zambia on a massive scale."
The Trump administration is considering whether to "significantly cut assistance" from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which provides daily HIV treatment to around 1.3 million Zambians and other funds for tuberculosis and malaria medications that save tens of thousands of lives each year.
At the time that PEPFAR was created, under the administration of President George W. Bush, HIV was killing around 90,000 people per year in Zambia. That number had been reduced to 16,000 in 2024, according to data from the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
"Things are not okay," said Justin Wolfers, an economics professor at the University of Michigan and a Brookings Institution fellow.
Threats to cut PEPFAR are part of a broader push by the Trump administration to wield desperately needed foreign medical aid as a tool of coercion against impoverished nations, whose health systems have been thrown into turmoil by the Trump administration's massive cuts to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) last year.
According to the Times, 24 African nations have signed memoranda of understanding (MOU) under the Trump administration's so-called "America First Global Health Strategy" in order to unlock some US funding that has been cut.
Many of the deals require nations to increase their own health spending in order to restore just a fraction of what the US previously provided:
"According to an analysis by the nonprofit Partners in Health, health funding under the agreements would drop by 69% to Rwanda, 61% to Madagascar, 42% to Liberia, and 34% to Eswatini, where a quarter of adults live with HIV," the Times reported in January.
Meanwhile, the deals have come with other, often ideological, strings attached. Kenya's memorandum requires it to provide data guaranteeing that no funding is being used for abortion care, and to direct funds to certain Christian faith-based providers, even though they refuse services like HIV care to LGBTQ+ people.
Nigeria's agreement likewise requires more than $200 million to over 900 Christian faith-based healthcare facilities across the country and emphasizes protecting Christian victims of violence from the Islamist group Boko Haram, even though the majority of the group's victims are Muslim.
Some countries have rejected the deals, calling them one-sided and exploitative. Last month, Zimbabwe walked away from a deal that would have provided $367 million over five years because it required the country to give the US unfettered access to citizens' health data and biological samples.
The deal offered to Zambia is similar to those offered to other countries in that it requires the government to commit $340 million in health spending in exchange for $1 billion from the US over five years, less than half of what it received under previous US administrations. It also demands that Zambia provide citizens' health data to the US for 10 years, longer than the deals agreed to by other nations.
But the deal also stipulates that, to receive any funding, Zambia must provide US corporations with easier access to the nation's vast mineral wealth.
Zambia has some of the world's largest reserves of minerals such as copper, lithium, and cobalt, which are essential to green energy technology. The Trump administration says the country has given China greater access to its mines than it has given to the US.
Zambia would also be required to share mining databases with US experts and renegotiate a massive 2024 contract with the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US-based foreign assistance agency, to reduce mining regulations.
After the terms of the deal leaked to The Guardian last month, Asia Russell, director of the HIV advocacy organisation Health GAP, derided it as a proposal for the "shameless exploitation" of Zambia.
In February, Zambia rejected the deal, with a spokesperson for the Ministry of Health saying it "did not align with the position and interests of Zambia."
Now the Trump administration is using HIV treatment funding in an effort to force its leaders back to the table and make an example of them for other countries that may seek to go their own way.
The memo describes threats to AIDS funding as a way to demonstrate the "use of sticks" to other countries with which it seeks to negotiate.
If Zambia refuses to sign, it says, “sharp public cuts to American foreign assistance would significantly demonstrate to aid-receiving countries the seriousness of our interest in collaboration and our insistence on tangible benefits under our America First foreign policy."
Zambia has already been stripped of more than half its annual PEPFAR funding from the US since the Trump administration returned to power last year through a combination of foreign aid freezes, rescissions, and budget cuts that stripped billions from the program.
A survey of 76 HIV clinics across 32 mostly African countries that received PEPFAR funds, conducted by the International Epidemiology Databases to Evaluate AIDS (IeDEA) consortium, found that, as a result of cuts, many experienced disruptions to testing and treatment, including drug shortages and staff layoffs.
Citing modeling studies, the researchers estimated that funding disruptions to PEPFAR just last year "resulted in more than 120,000 deaths by November 2025, including more than 13,000 child deaths."
Another study by Imperial College London predicted that just the three-month disruption at the beginning of President Donald Trump's second term would result in more than 37,400 excess deaths by 2060.
In a statement posted to social media on Monday, Republicans on the House Foreign Affairs Committee defended the threats to cut PEPFAR, saying that "Just like every other country, Zambia is free to walk away from these negotiations." The REpublicans said it was "ridiculous to assume the United States should fund entire health systems for countries that turn around and give priority access to critical supply chains to China."
Russell said that "the State Department is threatening Zambia with an embargo on essential medicines in order to plunder its minerals."
While she said "Zambia’s MOU text is the first we know of that explicitly ties exploitation of mineral wealth," she noted that similar "exploitative conditions" are reportedly part of other nations' memoranda as well, but that information is scarce because they have been "negotiated in secret" and texts have not been made public.
Julius Kachidza, the chair of Zambia’s Civil Society Self-Coordinating Mechanism, said that yet another massive cut in US government funding “would be apocalyptic. It could be quite a disaster, especially to me. And the majority of people living with HIV in Zambia.”
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‘Iran Posed No Imminent Threat’: Trump’s Counterterrorism Director Resigns in Protest
"I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people," the far-right former Army Ranger and CIA officer said.
Mar 17, 2026
National Counterterrorism Center Director Joe Kent announced his resignation Tuesday, accusing President Donald Trump of being manipulated by Israel into launching a war on Iran.
"I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby," Kent—a former Army Ranger and CIA paramilitary officer often described as a white nationalist and conspiracy theorist—wrote in his resignation letter to Trump.
"Early in this administration, high-ranking Israeli officials and influential members of the American media deployed a misinformation campaign that wholly undermined your America First platform and sowed pro-war sentiments to encourage war with Iran," Kent continued. "This echo chamber was used to deceive you into believing that Iran posed an imminent threat to the United States, and that should you strike now, there was a clear path to a swift victory."
"This was a lie and is the same tactic the Israelis used to draw us into the disastrous Iraq War that cost our nation the lives of thousands of our best men and women," he claimed.
While there is no solid evidence that Israel "drew" the US under then-President George W. Bush into invading Iraq and toppling longtime dictator and erstwhile US ally Saddam Hussein, then-Israeli opposition leader Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in 2008 that the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States—which Iraq had nothing to do with—were "benefiting" Israel. He also said two years later that "America is a thing you can move very easily, move it in the right direction."
Kent, whose first wife, Navy intelligence officer Shannon Smith, was killed in a 2019 bombing targeting US forces invading Syria, said that "I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people nor justifies the cost of American lives," said
"I pray that you will reflect upon what we are doing in Iran, and who we are doing it for," he told the president.
Kent—who has been a staunch Trump loyalist—is the most prominent US official to resign as the president, who infamously campaigned for reelection on a promise of no new wars, has attacked seven countries since returning to the White House and 10 over the course of his two terms.
In contrast to his vehement opposition to waging war on Iran, Kent led an effort to rewrite intelligence so that it did not clash with Trump's dubious claim that the government of Venezuela was involved with the Tren de Aragua drug trafficking gang ahead of the recent US invasion of the South American country and kidnapping of its president, Nicolás Maduro.
While Kent's resignation drew praise from many opponents of Trump and the illegal US-Israeli war of choice in Iran, others focused on his troubling record and associations.
Iran war was a bad idea from start. But Joe Kent is not the right messenger on this. See his alleged associations with Nick Fuentes and live streamer who said Hitler was “a complicated historical figure which many people misunderstand” @splcenter.org @westernstatescenter.org 2025 letter:
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— Ryan Goodman (@rgoodlaw.bsky.social) March 17, 2026 at 7:25 AM
"Joe Kent isn't suddenly a good guy," former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said on X. "He's a straight-up white nationalist. But there are fissures in the MAGA base."
MeidasTouch News CEO Ron Filipowski also took to social media, writing, "Just for the record, I'm glad Joe Kent resigned but he is still a POS."
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