Alicia Devine/Tallahassee Democrat/AP

State Reps. Jennifer Canady (left) and Jenna Persons-Mulicka embrace after the Republican-dominated Legislature approved a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, April 13, 2023, in Tallahassee, Florida.

It is the most personal of decisions, yet it has become a defining issue of our time: whether to bear a child.

And in the year since the United States Supreme Court ruled in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, eliminating a nearly 50-year federal right to abortion, the impact has been profound.

Overnight, U.S. women of childbearing age went from having a largely nationwide right to bodily autonomy to living in a country where one’s reproductive rights can vary dramatically from state to state. In post-Dobbs America, tens of thousands of fewer abortions have taken place, compared with the prior year, according to the Society of Family Planning, which specializes in abortion and contraception science. Several dozen clinics have closed.

In many cases, pregnant women and girls seeking abortions, even in the earliest stages, must travel out of state to receive services, either at great personal expense or with the help of travel aid organizations. Use of medication to terminate a pregnancy, whether under physician supervision or not, has skyrocketed – and accounts for more than half of all abortions.

Legal challenges abound, in both state and federal courts, and abortion promises to be a hotly debated topic in the 2024 elections up and down the ballot. But if there’s one thing activists and scholars on both sides of the divide agree upon, it’s this: that the U.S. abortion landscape, dramatically altered on June 24, 2022, by the overturning of Roe v. Wade, is still in flux. And no one is resting easy.

“It’s certainly been a nonstop year,” says Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America. Her organization’s volunteers have not relented, continuing to go door to door nationwide since the day Roe went down to tell people about alternatives to abortion.

From the abortion-rights perspective, the sense of urgency is no less evident.

“The biggest surprise is that people had predicted the worst – that all the states that had expressed hostility toward abortion would have fully banned abortion” by now, says Tracy Weitz, a sociology professor at American University and director of the Center on Health, Risk, and Society. “We’re not there.”

Abortion on the ballot 

Outside a courthouse in Florida’s Broward County on a recent spring day, Democratic volunteers are registering people to vote – and gathering signatures to put a state constitutional amendment on the 2024 ballot that would guarantee abortion rights up to the point of fetal viability, which is when a fetus can survive outside the womb, generally considered to be between 23 and 24 weeks.

Broward is a Democratic bastion in a state that turned sharply Republican in last fall’s gubernatorial election. But the volunteers are confident that Florida voters support abortion as a fundamental right, as expressed in the name of the coalition working to pass the amendment: Floridians Protecting Freedom.

“We don’t want politicians telling us what to do,” says Marsha E., a volunteer who declines to give her last name, but suggests she be photographed in her “I’m With the Banned” T-shirt depicting controversial books.

Linda Feldmann/The Christian Science Monitor

Marsha E. stands outside the Broward County courthouse in Plantation, Florida, June 16, 2023. She's a Democratic volunteer registering voters and gathering signatures of Florida residents to get a state constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights on the ballot in 2024.

About half the people she and her fellow volunteers approach agree to sign the abortion amendment petition, Marsha says.

Florida is consequential in many ways: It’s the third most populous state in the country, with 29 electoral votes. It’s the home state of the GOP’s top polling presidential candidates – former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis. And it’s a destination, for now, for people in nearby anti-abortion Southern states seeking abortions.

The Sunshine State highlights how the battle over abortion rights has evolved in the last year. In anticipation of Dobbs, Florida at first enacted legislation that bans most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Then in April, with new GOP supermajorities in both houses, the state Legislature limited abortion to six weeks, effectively an outright ban, as many women don’t know they’re pregnant at that point. Mr. DeSantis signed the bill late at night, without fanfare; with a majority of Americans opposing the overturning of Roe, he doesn’t bring up the subject much on the campaign trail.

Florida’s original 15-week ban is currently before the state Supreme Court, but even if it’s upheld, the new six-week ban would go into effect. And that would mean women and girls from nearby states with abortion bans – Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana – would effectively no longer be able to use Florida clinics as an option for services.

Abortion’s potency in 2024

Democrats are counting on the potency of abortion as an issue in the 2024 election, as it was in 2022. Kansas, a red state, upheld abortion rights in a stand-alone ballot measure last August. And in the November midterms, Michigan – a major battleground state – enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution. That set up the state as a regional hub for abortion services, given near-bans in nearby states. 

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Guttmacher Institute

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

The latest Gallup poll found a record-high 69% of Americans say abortion should be generally legal in the first three months of pregnancy, and 61% called the overturning of Roe a “bad thing.” 

But one expert on abortion warns that Democrats can’t rely on the issue as the savior of 2024. As always, most Americans – including suburban women – will prioritize the economy in their voting behavior, says David Garrow, author of the book “Liberty and Sexuality.” 

“Abortion isn’t something people go around thinking about, other than activists,” Mr. Garrow says. 

Still, the Biden administration went big on reproductive rights Friday, announcing President Joe Biden’s plan to sign an executive order aimed at protecting birth control access. In addition, the president and Vice President Kamala Harris were endorsed for a second term by three major abortion-rights groups – EMILY’s list, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Planned Parenthood Action Fund. 

Impact of Dobbs

Since the Dobbs ruling, experts on abortion rights have been crunching numbers on its impact. A study from the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) finds that in the first five months post-Dobbs, a third of American women of reproductive age faced “excessive travel times” to access abortion. Two-thirds of women were more than an hour away from an abortion provider, and the jump in travel time was biggest in Southern states. In Texas and Louisiana, travel time went from 15 minutes before Dobbs to more than six hours after the ruling.

Increasingly restricted access affects Black women the most, with 40% living at least a one-hour drive from abortion services after Dobbs, compared with 15% before the ruling. Before Dobbs, the figure was 40% among American Indians and Alaska Natives, who together with Black women face significantly higher maternal health risks than women of other races and ethnicities. Following the ruling, more than half of American Indian and Alaskan Native women found themselves at least an hour from care. 

Now, one year post-Dobbs, “we see an impact on anybody who can become pregnant,” says Katrina Kimport, a medical sociologist with the Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health program at UCSF.

Today, some 25 million women of childbearing age live in states with strict limits on access to abortion or outright bans. And for a woman whose pregnancy runs into problems, the ability to receive care can become exponentially more complicated. 

“There are cases where patients report being turned away from multiple institutions because the hospitals are fearful that they would then have to provide what they are worried is banned care,” says Professor Kimport. “So they just refused to take a patient or they discharged the patients.”

A new report known as #WeCount, from the Society of Family Planning, provides the latest data gathered from abortion providers on state-by-state increases and decreases in abortion: In the nine months after the Dobbs decision, states that limit abortion to six weeks’ gestation or ban the procedure altogether saw a decline of about 81,000 abortions, while states where abortion remains broadly legal increased by about 56,000, for a net decrease of about 25,000 abortions. 

States that are geographically close to states with bans are seeing surges, including North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Kansas, and Illinois, the report notes. 

“People don’t realize how difficult it is to navigate a whole new health care system, to leave one’s home state to get health care,” says Ushma Upadhyay, co-chair of the #WeCount Steering Committee. 

Margaret Johnson, a feminist law professor at the University of Baltimore, calls the post-Roe reality highly destabilizing, as abortion laws have devolved to the states. 

Even though there have been no criminal prosecutions thus far, she notes, “these laws create risk aversion and fear, and that alone is very powerful in eroding people’s rights.”

Some activists who favor abortion rights see cause for hope. Jeanné Lewis, executive director of the national advocacy group Faith in Public Life, sees an uptick in engagement since Roe was overturned. 

“People are responding more and engaging more in our democracy at the state level,” Ms. Lewis says. “I’ve seen individuals who were silent on this issue [reproductive rights], for a variety of reasons, now feeling very compelled to speak out.” 

A week before Ukraine’s counteroffensive began, the country’s ministry of defense posted what felt like a film trailer. The video pulsated – tanks rolling, rounds firing, missiles launching – with a chanted voice-over announcing “our decisive offensive.”

Three weeks in, that counteroffensive so far hasn’t followed script.

The Ukrainians have liberated territory, fighting at three main points across the country’s east and south. But it’s come at a slower pace, and likely with higher casualties, than expected. Early on, pictures of destroyed Ukrainian infantry fighting vehicles and tanks – supplied by the West for the fight – began to surface. Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, told the BBC this week that the progress has been “slower than desired.”

“Some people believe this is a Hollywood movie and expect results now,” he said in the same interview. “It’s not.”

President Zelenskyy and officials in the West have urged patience, arguing that Ukraine’s best-trained and best-equipped forces are still in reserve. That, reportedly, has begun to change.

Ukraine’s nine brigades, numbering 36,000 soldiers, that have been trained in Western tactics and armed with Western gear are now entering the fight. Their presence augurs a new act in the nascent counteroffensive and perhaps the war.

The U.S.-led coalition supporting Ukraine has resupplied and retrained swaths of the Ukrainian military to fight like a modern Western force. Whether those tactics and that gear – even in numbers less than the Ukrainians wanted – are enough to break formidable Russian lines is the grand experiment taking place right now on the front and a sign of whether the war in Ukraine can break from its long-grinding pace.

“The Ukrainians need to get out of an attrition war and into a maneuver [war], and that will require punching through lines,” says Seth Jones, director of the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank.

If they are not able to do that, he says, negotiations for a cease-fire might be the eventual result.

Justin Yau/ Sipa USA/Reuters

Ukrainian soldiers listen to instructions as they prepare for a mortar fire mission in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine on June 18, 2023.

Need for more weapons

To this point, the war in Ukraine has been a slow, punishing fight, with few exceptions. Russia seized almost 20% of Ukraine’s territory with overwhelming force soon after it invaded last March. Since then, it’s either retreated or made marginal gains in small Ukrainian cities like Severdonetsk and Bakhmut. 

The success of Ukraine in repelling these attacks and then retaking territory on its own – with offensives near Kharkiv and Kherson last year – aided the argument that with more kit they could liberate more territory. 

The supply of weapons so far hasn’t met Ukraine’s demand. Western countries never sent a requested long-range tactical missile artillery system known as ATACMS, and they still haven’t authorized the training or transfer of F-16 fighter jets to the country. 

“The Ukrainians are fighting with a hand tied behind their back because there have been limits on Western aid,” says Dr. Jones.

Testing for weak points

But in the last six months, sophisticated Western infantry fighting vehicles, tanks, and artillery have flowed into Ukraine in preparation for a counteroffensive in the south or east. 

That counteroffensive is still in its probing stage, says Peter Dickinson, editor of the Atlantic Council’s UkraineAlert blog. This involves testing different areas of the front for weak points, like poking Jenga blocks to see which one slides easily out. The intent is to fray Russian positions, identify a weak point, and then attack with intent to draw Russian reserve forces to the front.

The deployment of Ukraine’s best-trained brigades could signal a shift away from that probing stage, and, Ukraine hopes, toward a less static front. 

In its way are enormous obstacles.

Offensive operations are almost always more difficult than defensive ones. The front line is 600 miles, far more compact than it was last year during Ukraine’s surprise offensive near Kharkiv, perhaps making it easier to defend. And Russian positions are robust – minefields, trenches, tank-stopping “dragons teeth” layered like defensive tiramisu. These defenses have been assessed as the most extensive in Europe since World War II. 

Russia also has a distinct airpower advantage. So far in the counteroffensive, its forces have pounced on Ukrainians with helicopters, which emphasizes the limits of Western aid.

Serhii NuzhnenkoRadio Free Europe/Radio Liberty/Reuters

A Ukrainian serviceman rides in a T-80 main battle tank captured earlier from Russian troops, in a field near the frontline town of Bakhmut, Ukraine, June 19, 2023.

“What [Ukrainian forces are] trying to do is unprecedented,” says Mr. Dickinson. “I don’t think any major military power would even contemplate an attack like Ukraine is trying to do until they had complete air superiority.” 

Lastly, Ukraine’s best-equipped forces lack battle testing. Leadership chose to leave more experienced units on the front while training new ones for its counteroffensive, which means new units will inevitably have to harden as they fight. That takes time and will make it more difficult for Ukraine to increase the tempo.

To Ukraine’s advantage, analysts say, are morale, innovation, and certain equipment. The Ukrainians to this point have demonstrated a greater will to fight, driven by the stakes of the war for their country. They’ve also shown the ability to freestyle with Western equipment, using drones in particular to great effect during surveillance and sabotage operations. 

Western equipment has given the Ukrainians an advantage in fighting at night, which they’re now increasingly doing. They’ve also reportedly been able to inflict damage on Russian armor with their own, lighter, infantry fighting vehicles. 

Such edges may seem small but are all part of an overall effort to identify weaknesses in the Russian defense and then accelerate attacks against them. The war in Ukraine has been slow and attritional to this point, but so was World War I until the Central powers hit a breaking point in 1918, says Margaret MacMillan, a historian of warfare and professor emeritus at Oxford University.

“Quite often in a war, you get the two sides holding together until one begins to break,” she says. “Then that pivot, I think, can be very quick indeed.”

With Guatemalans heading to the polls Sunday for elections that range from the municipal to the presidential, confidence in the nation’s electoral system is hitting the lowest point since the 1985 transition to democracy.

Even as a record number of political parties have registered for the election, the Electoral Court has disqualified several top candidates over what are widely seen as political charges.

Contributing to the preelection turmoil, Guatemala’s independent judiciary has been destabilized, with its members more and more often in jail, under death threats, or in exile.

More than 25 judges and prosecutors have fled Guatemala in the face of pressure to drop large-scale corruption investigations or following threats and intimidation. Attorney General Consuelo Porras has suspended the immunity of some judges working on high-stakes cases, rendering them vulnerable to retribution.

The tumultuous run-up to the presidential elections underscores how far Guatemala has fallen in recent years – from having one of Latin America’s most admired anti-corruption judicial systems to the situation today, when judges and journalists are openly threatened.

The reason, say analysts, is that the country’s powerful elite – typically part of the political or business classes and military families – has felt threatened by court cases that have drawn attention to them in recent years, compelling many to lash out at judges and prosecutors.

“We’ve seen this in El Salvador and Nicaragua, too,” says Miguel Ángel Gálvez, a former high-risk court judge, exiled since November. “The first step for authoritarian leaders is to take over the judiciary.”

Moises Castillo/AP

Indigenous leader Thelma Cabrera, who had hoped to become Guatemala's next president, arrives at the closing campaign rally for the Movement for the Liberation of the People, in Guatemala City, June 22, 2023. The country's Electoral Court barred her from running.

“Breaking the record”

Thirty parties have registered for the elections, in which voters will select a president, members of Congress, mayors, and city councilors. But the commotion surrounding the election has led many to lose faith: Confidence in the electoral system has fallen to a historic low of 20%, according to recent polls.

“I don’t see any point in voting in these elections,” says Paulo Estrada, whose father and uncle were among the 183 victims of the Diario Militar, a dictatorship-era military operation on which Guatemalan judges are still working to hold aggressors accountable.

The Electoral Court “took out anyone who doesn’t agree with impunity, corruption, organized crime, and drug trafficking,” he says, referring to the exclusion of leading candidates, including his favorite, Thelma Cabrera, an Indigenous human rights defender.

Political polarization has triggered the recent plunge in confidence in democracy, analysts say. At its root, many see the unraveling of the International Commission Against Impunity (CICIG), which was established in 2007 as the first U.N.-backed anti-corruption panel in the world. The commission trained prosecutors and served as a beacon of hope for many in a region notorious for sky-high levels of impunity and corruption. But not everyone was pleased.

CICIG “was seen as a threat to historic elites,” says Eduardo Nuñez, director of Guatemala’s chapter of the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. nonprofit that aims to strengthen democratic institutions globally. The government did not extend its mandate, forcing it to close in 2019.

Since then, judges and prosecutors who worked closely with CICIG have been targeted for their anti-impunity work that sometimes implicates the nation’s most powerful citizens.

Mie Hoejris Dahl

Paulo Estrada, a human rights defender and civil prosecutor whose favorite candidate was barred from running, says, “I don’t see any point in voting in these elections."

This is not the first time that the Electoral Court has excluded candidates from a presidential election. Two of three leading candidates were not allowed to run in 2019. But what makes this weekend’s vote so complex is the scale of anti-democratic moves, such as the use of the judicial branch to disqualify key candidates. “We’re breaking the record on that,” Mr. Nuñez says.

“The message has been that if you do not align [with those in power], you go into exile,” says Mr. Estrada, a member of Famdegua, an association for survivors of human rights violations and their relatives.

The solution?

Judge Gálvez, who fled Guatemala last year, is known for his work investigating the Diario Militar case and genocide charges against former President José Efraín Ríos Montt. He now lives in Costa Rica.

Removing his glasses to wipe away tears one recent morning, he says the attacks on his person, and on his reputation, became “too much” last year. He was being followed by people in cars without license plates, and unknown individuals pressured his secretary to reveal details of his daily movements. He believes he and his family were targeted because of his high-profile caseload.

Judge Gálvez was one of six members of a specialized court that rules on the most serious crimes in the country. Three of its members have gone into exile since last year.

The government’s “solution” to uncomfortable criminal charges against politicians, former military officers, and members of Guatemala’s powerful business class “was to get rid of us,” says Juan Francisco Sandoval, head of the special prosecutor’s office from 2015 to 2021. He oversaw corruption cases against three former presidents, and weeks before Attorney General Porras dismissed him, he was investigating corruption charges that implicated outgoing President Alejandro Giammattei’s administration.

A Guatemalan court has issued five arrest orders for Mr. Sandoval on charges that he and international observers say are fabricated. He now lives in exile in Washington, but remains involved in Guatemalan affairs. “I receive so many messages” from citizens about wrongdoing in Guatemala and the need for change, he says. “That motivates me to keep going.”

Moises Castillo/AP

Judge Miguel Ángel Gálvez during a court hearing recess, in Guatemala City last year. He says death threats against him increased following his decision to order nine former police and military officers to stand trial for a range of alleged crimes during that country’s civil war.

“The whole movie”

There was a moment when Guatemala seemed to be moving in another, more democratic direction.

The creation of CICIG in the early 2000s led to high-profile investigations and what for many felt like an end to official impunity. Leaders like former President Otto Pérez Molina were forced to resign and sent to prison. But the commission’s investigation into the family of then-President Jimmy Morales in 2018 provoked a political backlash.

“Eventually CICIG went beyond its mandate,” says María Isabel Bonilla, associate researcher at the National Economic Research Center, a Guatemalan think tank. She argues it could have done more for the country if it had limited itself to training prosecutors, instead of kicking up dust on past war crimes or trying to leave its mark on the nation’s constitution.

Despite the dozens of prosecutors, judges, and others forced out of Guatemala in recent years, not everyone agrees the nation is in crisis.

“You cannot just look at a photograph. You have to watch the whole movie,” says Juan Carlos Zapata, director of the Foundation for the Development of Guatemala, a local think tank. “It looks like there’s political persecution,” he says. But he believes these are simply “pendulums in justice.” Economic and political elites, as well as members of the judicial branch, have been harassed in recent years, too, he points out.

Mr. Nuñez also sees this moment as a pendulum swing. “The current movement ... favors actors who are in power today,” he says. But eventually, “they will face limits.”

That won’t happen before this weekend’s election, however, to the frustration of people like Judge Gálvez. “They are not giving any space for anyone who is not ‘theirs’ to be in power.”

AP

People gather to buy charcoal at a busy market in Lusaka, Zambia.

Many of the world’s poorest nations have waited nearly two years for this moment. On Thursday, China and many Western countries struck a deal with Zambia to restructure $6.3 billion of the African country’s debt. While certainly good for Zambia – which defaulted on debt repayments during the pandemic – the deal sets a precedent for other nations to rid themselves of repressive red ink.

Most of all, it reflects a triumph in how wealthier countries – especially China – can cooperate to set new norms in debt relief.

Zambia was seen as a test case of whether China, the world’s largest bilateral creditor, would either conform to Western practices of debt restructuring or help shape new ones. Through prodding, patience, and persuasion, the West and China reached an agreement for Zambia that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) calls “unique and innovative.”

Even getting China to join in global talks over debt governance has been a triumph. Its various financial bodies have had to adopt new vocabulary and learn to cooperate with each other. “It took enormous courage for anyone on the Chinese side to ‘trust’ an international process that is led by ‘the West’, especially on an issue that China would have to incur huge financial loss in the short term,” wrote scholars Deborah Brautigam and Yufan Huang of Johns Hopkins University in an April paper.

China dropped a demand that the IMF – a key lender of last resort – take a financial “haircut” in granting debt relief. In the end, the deal resulted in Zambia’s debt being rescheduled over two decades with a three-year grace period during which only payments on interest are due. The World Bank may provide Zambia with loans with highly concessional or grant terms.

This deal sets a vital example of cooperation for Africa. Much of the continent would be at high risk if China and the West “decoupled” in trade and investments, according to the IMF. A desire to help the world’s poorest nations turned out to be a unifying moment.