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abortion rights
Florida’s Anti-Vax Misogyny and Trump’s Hypocrisy
The Florida surgeon general believes you have sovereignty over your own body... unless you’re a woman!
Sep 11, 2025
On September 3, Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo made news again. With a grinning Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at his side, he announced that his state would no longer require vaccines for children. Even more shocking were Dr. Ladapo’s subsequent admissions on national television.
Laced throughout were Republican hypocrisy and misogyny to which US President Donald Trump added an exclamation point a few days later.
“A Gift From God”
Describing Florida’s new anti-vaccine policy, Dr. Ladapo said, “Your body is a gift from God.” He added that the administration would be “working to end” all vaccine mandates. “Every last one of them is wrong and drips with disdain and slavery.”
On September 7, he tried to defend his actions on CNN’s “State of the Union”:
Anchor Jake Tapper: “Before you made this decision to lift vaccine mandates for Florida, which include obviously public schools, did your department do any data analysis, did you do any data projections of how many new cases of these diseases there will be in Florida, once you remove vaccine mandates?”
Ladapo: “Absolutely not….There is this conflation of the science and sort of what is the right and wrong thing to do… I’m saying it’s an issue of right and wrong.”
Tapper confronted Dr. Ladapo with facts: 82% of Florida parents with kids in school wanted mandatory vaccines for children; every medical organization in the country (American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, Florida Medical Association) urged mandatory vaccines for children; and even Florida Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) supported Florida’s existing vaccine mandate, which allows religious exemptions.
Tapper: “All of these people are wrong, and you’re right.”
Ladapo: “Casting it in that way is not what I would do. It’s not how I would look at it.”
Dr. Ladapo then explained why facts don’t matter: “I share what is the right thing to do. Whether it’s popular or not…. It’s really about ethics. Is it really appropriate for a government or any other entity to dictate to you what you should put in your body? It is absolutely not appropriate.”
Then came Dr. Ladapo’s money quote: “You have sovereignty over your body.”
He forgot an important GOP caveat: unless you’re a woman.
Hypocrisy and Mysogyny
Dr. Ladapo and Gov. DeSantis campaigned to defeat a Florida abortion-rights measure on the November 2024 ballot. During that effort, Dr. Ladapo signed a letter to Florida TV stations telling them to stop running an abortion rights ad, asserting that it was false and dangerous. His letter also said that broadcasters could face criminal prosecution.
A federal court enjoined Dr. Ladapo’s actions as a violation of the First Amendment right to free speech and barred him from taking any further action to coerce or intimidate broadcasters running the commercials.
The abortion-rights initiative received 57% of the popular vote, but failed to meet the 60% supermajority required for adoption.
And Then Came Trump
But when it comes to misogyny and hypocrisy among government leaders, Trump has few peers. The day after Dr. Ladapo’s appearance on CNN, Trump addressed his newly-created Religious Liberty Commission at the Museum of the Bible. He boasted that Washington DC’s crime rate was down 87% and asserted that it would be down even more—100%—if domestic violence wasn’t included in the city’s crime statistics:
Much lesser things, things that take place in the home, they call crime. You know, they’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say, ‘This was a crime, see?’ So now I can’t claim 100%.
The federal government has long recognized domestic violence as a national public health and safety crisis.
Among homicides in the United States, intimate partners kill almost 50% of female and 10% of male victims, according to a recent study published in the Journal of Family Violence.
A national survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that 4 in 10 women and 1 in 4 men have experienced physical or sexual violence or stalking by an intimate partner.
An average of 24 people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner in the United States—more than 12 million women and men over the course of a single year.
One in 4 women (24.3%) and 1 in 7 men (13.8%) aged 18 and older in the US have been the victim of severe physical violence by an intimate partner in their lifetime.
The same day Trump appeared at the Religious Liberty Commission, the federal Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed E. Jean Carroll’s $83.3 million verdict against Trump for defamation. She had accused him of sexual assault in a dressing room at Bergdorf Goodman’s in Manhattan; he said that her claim was “totally false.” A jury found that Trump had acted with malice in defaming her.
The Epstein Story Gets Worse
Before September 8 ended, the dead hand of Jeffrey Epstein grabbed Trump again. For months, Trump had denied sending a signed sketch outlining a naked woman for inclusion in the child sex trafficker’s “50th-birthday book.” In addition to vehement denials, he sued The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion for publishing the sketch.
The House Oversight Committee subpoenaed the Epstein estate for the “birthday book.” On September 8, the committee’s Democrats released the page of the book on which that sketch appeared. The signature “Donald” is remarkably similar to Trump’s other signed notes at the time, although the White House still denied that it was his.
Meanwhile, on September 4, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) was trying to help quell Trump’s ongoing Epstein debacle when he said that Trump had been an “FBI informant to try and take this [Epstein] stuff down.” Three days later, Johnson was eating those ridiculous words.
It’s All About Faith… in Marketing
In his hour-long rambling before the Religious Liberty Commission on September 8, Trump urged, “We have to bring back religion in America, bring it back stronger than ever before.”
Trump also said that he was donating his personal family Bible for display at the museum.
News reports of his appearance don’t indicate whether Trump’s “God Bless the USA” Bibles were on sale at the event. The autographed version is $1,000. The Presidential, First Lady, Vice President, Veteran, Platinum, Golden Age, and Inauguration Editions are $99.99 each. Trump earned $1.3 million from his Bible sales in 2024.
And don’t forget to check out Trump crypto, pumpkin spice, MAGA caps, jackets, tote bags, tumblers, gold sneakers, pickleball equipment…
If you don’t live near a Trump Store, those items and more are available at his online shop.
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Totalitarian Rule Is Here: Project 2025 9 Months Along
MAGA is devotion to a single-party system, a charismatic leader, closed political culture, and war on civic society.
Sep 10, 2025
I had the opportunity to engage the author of the Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” Paul Dans, this Saturday on BBC World News Radio. The essential question was whether Project 2025 was a document of totalitarian rule. Dans, who was fired from the Heritage Foundation during the presidential campaign for linking Donald Trump to the fascist playbook, has returned in full force as a MAGA senate candidate in South Carolina. He is a conservative committed to attacking democratic institutions, although he would claim that Project 2025 centers on returning the federal government to the hands of the people.
According to various trackers, the Project 2025 agenda has been nearly 50% completed. The assault on the federal system is well in hand. But is this totalitarianism?
Yes, it is.
I have written earlier about totalitarianism in the science policy of the White House. The totalitarian model extends further, up and down from the White House to the reactionary Supreme Court and especially to MAGAlytes in Congress. MAGA is devotion to a single-party system, a charismatic leader, closed political culture, and war on civic society.
First, recall that Project 2025 is a 900-page cornucopia of conservative delights. It calls for the replacement of merit-based federal civil service workers with people loyal to Trump and for taking partisan control of such critical law-enforcement agencies as the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It promotes the closing of the Department of Education and the restructuring of museums, foundations, and even private universities to challenge fact-based institutions in their primary missions. In the economy, Project 2025 institutionalizes trickle-down economics: It reduces taxes on corporations, cuts social welfare and medical programs, draws financial and communications firms into the totalitarian fold, and rewards wealthy collaborators and industrialists as Hitler did in Nazi Germany with access to the halls of power. It promotes anti-LGBT discrimination; it ends Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs. In fact, Project 2025 does not rein in the administrative state, its major stated goal, but gives additional tools to weaponize the corrupt Trump presidency.
Hence, Project 2025 reflects totalitarian political culture, in particular the persistence of a one-party system with an authoritarian leader who uses extra-legislative means to achieve his goals. For example, Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to root out “inefficiency” in government, but he in fact directed the faux department to emasculate agencies he and Project 2025 adherents disliked. In subservience to the president, MAGA republicans in Congress allowed DOGE to usurp their oversight. Further, while railing against executive orders (EO) of past presidents, Trump has used them in fact to replace policy making. Trump averaged 55 EO annually his first term; by mid-2025 he was averaging 330 per year with the goal to drown the courts and Congress in executive branch power.
Like in Hitler or Stalin who created a cult of personality, Trump has bullied MAGA to ensure allegiance to him as the all-powerful leader. This leader is the promoter of disorder, the arbitrator of conflict, the omniscient problem solver, the stager of domestic military sweeps and other Epstein flyovers to distract the populace, the organizer of state dinners and cabinet meetings in which his magalytes sickeningly faun for him. He is the Department of War lobbyist for the Nobel Peace Prize and the UFC organizer for a wrestling event on the White House Lawn. One senses he is jealous that Russian President Vladimir Putin miraculously scored eight goals in a charity hockey exhibition game (no one checked him, strangely). He is certainly angry that Kim Jong-Il shot a 38 will 11 holes-in-one, while the president must cheat at his golf game at his courses to win trophies.
Totalitarian states claim to give individual rights priority, but they seek control over private morality.
Totalitarian governments bathe the public sphere with propaganda; the Soviets were masters at misinformation. Putin has reestablished state control of all media. For his totalitarian push, Trump promotes branded presidential newspeak on his own channel, Truth Social. Such loyal media outlets as Fox help him spread false claims. Indeed, totalitarians want to control the medium and the message, not educate the public; destroy expert independence in government agencies, not encourage it; and in general to sully data, not analyze them. The complete weaponization of government comes in the selective assault of academic and intellectual freedom in the Trump administration attack on universities, law firms, and other private businesses.
The totalitarian state embraces the veneer of legality, but engages extrajudicial confiscation of power. Like the Stalin Constitution of 1936 or Nazi laws of the 1930s, magalytes treat the US Constitution as vaguely important when its language fits their plans. Otherwise, they rely on executive branch overreach and on specious interpretation of congressional laws (the Enemy Aliens Act 1798; Posse Comitatus Act of 1878) to end due process and deploy military troops in blue states. Partnering with such mega-maga-communications magnates as Peter Thiel, they deploy AI to create a surveillance state. DOGE sought personal information of US citizens to build a surveillance regime.
A signal action of totalitarian regimes is the identification of external and internal enemies, heavily colored with homophobia and xenophobia. AG Pam Bondi and FBI Director Patel are aggressively prosecuting people who crossed the president: former adviser John Bolton, prosecutors, judges, and even congresspeople. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other unidentified government police, their faces covered, their uniforms obscured, their racism barely concealed, resemble Stalin’s NKVD in their black overcoats as they round up, subdue, and cart enemies away to secret facilities. The major enemies are undocumented immigrants, which SCOPUS has now okayed to arrest on the basis of skin color alone. Recall that so fearful are the Trumpisti of immigrants that they have separated children from their parents to secret them out of the country; Putin, another authoritarian ruler, approves the kidnapping of Ukrainian children.
Project 2025 harps on the fear of internal enemies over alleged supposed additional rights given to individuals based on gender and color (“DEI”). In fact, like the Nazi prosecution of homosexuals or the Putinite illegalization of LGBTQ public existence, so the Trump administration has set forth a litany of enemies to be deprived of rights. They include Venezuelan gangs, lesbians, gays, people of color, Democrats, and trans individuals, the last who may be denied the Second Amendment right to bear arms by a finding that they are insane (“mentally ill”).
Totalitarian states claim to give individual rights priority, but they seek control over private morality. Women’s rights are anathema to the conservatives of Project 2025 who mention abortion over 200 times in the 900-page document. They claim to be pro-life and pro-family, but they pursue regressive natalism and forced pregnancy such as that imposed on women in socialist Romania under Nicolae Ceausescu. More and more gerrymandered states are following the examples of Texas and Florida to criminalize women and their personal physicians for not carrying fetuses full term—no matter the circumstances (rape, insist, mortal risk to the mother).
It's all there in Program 2025. And it’s all there in the White House.
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Young Pregnant People Need Choices, Not Shame
With young people’s autonomy so limited, we must ensure young pregnant and parenting people have the support they need.
Aug 09, 2025
Access to affordable family planning and sexual health services is under attack, with the current administration threatening millions of dollars in Title X funding.
Millions of poor, uninsured, low-income individuals rely on this program not only for contraception but for cancer detection, HIV testing, and other essential services. The administration’s hostility toward proven programs like this puts young people at greater risk of pregnancy, in an environment where reproductive choices are limited. The consequences of abortion bans are clear: People are getting sick and losing their lives because access to basic reproductive healthcare is being stripped away. But what if you are young? What if you are Black? What if you live in a state restricting abortion? What if you do not get to decide?
For young pregnant people, these bans and funding cuts are even harder to navigate because of barriers to their independence. With the potential cuts to Title X programs, young people’s access to contraception will be even more limited. If they become pregnant when they don’t want to be, some states that still allow abortion have restrictions requiring consent from parents. With young people’s autonomy so limited, we must ensure young pregnant and parenting people have the support they need.
Reproductive justice is a human rights framework coined in 1994 by 12 Black women in response to the reproductive rights and health groups that excluded the lived experiences of those who have been marginalized. This concept includes the right to parent, the right not to parent, the right to parent children in safe and healthy communities, and the right to bodily autonomy. Young people, too, deserve reproductive justice.
What if young people had access to healthcare free from biases and shame?
A powerful misconception is that we are often just one decision away from shaping the course of our lives. But it isn’t the one individual decision. It’s the collective punitive reaction from society that stands in the way of young people getting the support they need. For the young pregnant person who is parenting, there is a systemic lack of support coupled with stereotypes that lead to negative outcomes.
As a child, my knowledge about the consequences resulting from decisions we make about our bodies was limited to the concrete and practical, such as skinning my knee in the neighborhood kickball tournaments when I ran around the bases too quickly. That knowledge quickly expanded when my older sister became pregnant as a teen, and I observed the organized shunning she experienced from family members to healthcare workers to teachers and friends. This was the first time I witnessed shame. I heard how family members talked about her pregnancy as a defining moment, as if any glimpse of a future was now extinguished. Those family members and friends who were “supportive” disappeared once my niece was born. It was at this moment that I decided that I wanted to offset that shame for her, for us, for every young Black girl who is navigating a pregnancy.
I did my best to be a supportive little sister as a child, standing up to all who spoke negatively about my sister and her choices. This experience stayed with me, and as a first year medical student, I founded Sisters Informing Healing Living Empowering (SIHLE) Augusta, renamed Choices Within Reach, an organization that works to support young Black mothers in Augusta, Georgia, through providing community, financial resources, and infant supplies. For the past seven years, in addition to my medical and residency training, we have worked to disempower the systems that shame and marginalize young people about their reproductive choices. Transforming that childhood rage to triumph, this ever-expanding sisterhood is my greatest accomplishment.
Now, as an OB-GYN and community organizer, I continue to hear the echoes of my sister’s story through my patients and the young people I serve in Georgia.
These stereotypes of young parenting people that go back to public condemnation of “teen moms” and “welfare queens” in the 1970s and 80s are still alive in the collective shunning of young Black pregnant people. In many schools, there is a “pregnant student” policy that states that the school won’t make accommodations for a pregnant student unless required by documented medical circumstances. High school students are not granted “maternity leave.” These policies are penal and don’t support the pregnant student’s success, especially when combined with isolation that the pregnant adolescent may be enduring within her community.
It is these punitive policies and attitudes that lead to statistics like only 50% of teen mothers receive their high school diploma by age 22, compared to 90% of teens who do not give birth in their adolescence. The lack of education and support makes it hard for them to find job opportunities, leading to a hard time making ends meet, and so on. This is a collective shunning of young motherhood.
These roots also shape our healthcare system. Just as young moms slip through the cracks of the community, they also often do in the healthcare system. Adolescent medicine providers try to close these gaps for young people. However, the gap widens when they become pregnant. Is it the OB-GYN who receives little to no training on how to specifically care for a pregnant teen or the pediatrician who has not specialized in pregnancy that is trying to care for the teen who is pregnant? When the gaps are felt by young moms, they might disengage from prenatal care, lose trust in their providers, and face poor health outcomes for the mother and baby.
This is especially true when the stereotypes of pregnant adolescents are woven into the implicit and explicit biases of the providers. These biases affect how their providers view them, the care they receive, and their outcomes. Kia, who experienced pregnancy at 16 years old, had her pregnancy confirmed by her pediatrician, who had been caring for her since she was an infant. However, once her urine pregnancy test was positive, there was an obvious disconnect. They told her she could no longer be seen in the office and was not offered any options counseling, OB-GYN references, or even an ultrasound. This experience led Kia to delay seeking prenatal care. What if the pregnancy was in the wrong location? What if there were complications? As we attempt to close the gap of maternal morbidity and mortality rates in the U.S., which are disproportionately higher in Black people, we must address the systems that increase risks faced by young Black parents.
The fight against the societal punishment of young Black parents is an issue of reproductive justice. In a nation where systemic barriers persist, the futures of young Black parents don’t come down to personal choices; they are intricately tied to the what kind of support, education, and resources they can access. It is far beyond time to restructure the narratives and fill the gaps society created for our young Black pregnant and parenting people.
What if we had culturally sound, group prenatal care that focused on and highlighted the needs of young, Black pregnant people? What if we built a community that came together to support young parents with childcare, financial resources, and school or job support? What if medically accurate, comprehensive sex education were available to all young people? What if young people had access to healthcare free from biases and shame? We can create the kind of world where we all have equitable access to the full spectrum of reproductive freedoms, no matter our age or location.
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