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Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Republican support for same-sex marriage is lowest in a decade, Gallup poll finds
Marriage for same-sex couples has been legal across the United States since the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision a decade ago. While Democratic support for gay nuptials has risen steadily since that landmark 2015 ruling, Republican support has tumbled 14 points since its record high of 55% in 2021 and 2022, according to a Gallup report released Thursday. In the latest Gallup poll, 41% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats said marriages between same-sex couples should be 'recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages.' This 47-point gap is the largest it has been since Gallup first started asking the question in 1996. The report found 76% of independents and 68% of all U.S. adults surveyed backed marriage rights for same-sex couples. A separate question about whether 'gay or lesbian relations' are 'morally acceptable or morally wrong' found a similar political trend, with 86% of Democrats, 69% of independents and 38% of Republicans answering answering 'morally acceptable.' When broken down by nonpolitical subgroups, women, younger people and college graduates were more likely to support gay marriage and find same-sex relations morally acceptable than men, older people and those who did not graduate college. The Gallup report's authors noted that the 'widening political divide suggests potential vulnerabilities in the durability of LGBTQ+ rights' in the country. The report cited Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling — which overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision — that stated the high court 'should reconsider' some of its past rulings, including the 2015 same-sex marriage decision. And, as NBC News reported earlier this year, lawmakers in at least nine states have introduced measures to try to chip away at same-sex couples' right to marry. This article was originally published on
NBC News
6 days ago
- Politics
- NBC News
Republican support for same-sex marriage is lowest in a decade, Gallup poll finds
Marriage for same-sex couples has been legal across the United States since the Supreme Court's Obergefell v. Hodges decision a decade ago. While Democratic support for gay nuptials has risen steadily since that landmark 2015 ruling, Republican support has tumbled 14 points since its record high of 55% in 2021 and 2022, according to a Gallup report released Thursday. In the latest Gallup poll, 41% of Republicans and 88% of Democrats said marriages between same-sex couples should be 'recognized by the law as valid, with the same rights as traditional marriages.' This 47-point gap is the largest it has been since Gallup first started asking the question in 1996. The report found 76% of independents and 68% of all U.S. adults surveyed backed marriage rights for same-sex couples. A separate question about whether 'gay or lesbian relations' are 'morally acceptable or morally wrong' found a similar political trend, with 86% of Democrats, 69% of independents and 38% of Republicans answering answering 'morally acceptable.' When broken down by nonpolitical subgroups, women, younger people and college graduates were more likely to support gay marriage and find same-sex relations morally acceptable than men, older people and those who did not graduate college. The Gallup report's authors noted that the 'widening political divide suggests potential vulnerabilities in the durability of LGBTQ+ rights' in the country. The report cited Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion in the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization ruling — which overturned the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision — that stated the high court ' should reconsider ' some of its past rulings, including the 2015 same-sex marriage decision. And, as NBC News reported earlier this year, lawmakers in at least nine states have introduced measures to try to chip away at same-sex couples' right to marry.
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
The Devastating History of Baby Relinquishment
At New York's Foundling Hospital a policewoman turns an abandoned child over to a staff member. Credit - Orlando—In 2016, Monica Kelsey, a Christian anti-abortion activist, debuted an invention allowing for completely anonymous infant surrender: the Safe Haven Baby Box. A relinquishing parent simply opens the door to the device—now at more than 150 hospitals, health care centers, and fire stations across the United States—and places their newborn in the climate-controlled bassinet. When the parent closes the door, the box locks and a silent alarm alerts responders. Supporters frame baby drop boxes as a beautiful solution for all parties involved—relinquishing parents, infants anonymously surrendered, and families who eventually adopt them. They argue that this innovation protects vulnerable babies from grievous harm, though there is no reliable data to support these assertions. The federal government does not track how frequently babies are surrendered directly to professionals under safe haven laws, which exist in all 50 states, let alone how many babies are left anonymously in drop boxes. Nevertheless, conservative religious groups position safe havens as an alternative to abortion. During arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade, Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that safe haven laws 'take care' of the 'problem' of 'the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy.' This framing ignores evidence that 91% of women who are denied abortion in the U.S. choose parenting over adoption or relinquishment. How Online Adoption Ads Prey on Pregnant People Positioning Safe Haven Baby Boxes as a solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancy also ignores important historical lessons about the harms caused by anonymous infant relinquishment. Charitable institutions in our country supported this practice on a much larger scale in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the results were devastating. While the technology they rely on has been updated for the 21st century, Safe Haven Baby Boxes are a new spin on a very old idea, motivated by religious conservatism and societal policing of women's sexuality and reproduction. The earliest mechanisms for anonymous infant surrender debuted thousands of years ago in Europe. Among the first were so-called 'ruota,' or wheel, systems at Catholic-run hospitals for orphans and foundlings in medieval Italy, where turntables were built into outdoor niches. A parent could place a baby on the turntable outside and rotate it indoors without being identified. Institutions dedicated to the care of so-called "foundlings" and mechanisms like the ruota spread throughout Europe in the medieval and Renaissance periods—especially in Catholic countries that heavily stigmatized extramarital sex—in order to prevent infanticide and care for 'illegitimate' babies surrendered by poor single women seeking to hide the evidence of their supposed sins. Historians now estimate that by the 18th century, as many as one third of babies born in cities in France, Italy, and Spain were abandoned. The foundling trend didn't reach American shores until the mid-19th century, when industrialization and mass migration brought huge numbers of people into cities like New York and, in turn, created conditions under which infant abandonment flourished. If a poor single woman who came to New York to work in an unstable low-wage job became pregnant out of wedlock, shame, stigma, poverty, lack of childcare options, and the anonymity of city living might lead her to leave her infant on a stoop. In the 1860s, four different foundling asylums opened in New York City to care for abandoned children. Among them was the Catholic New York Foundling Hospital, founded by the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul in 1869. That October, Sister Mary Irene Fitzgibbon, with two other nuns, placed a cradle on the stoop of their brownstone in Manhattan to secretly receive 'illegitimate' babies. That very first night, someone left a baby in the cradle on the stoop. By 1871, they had taken in 2,560 foundlings through the cradle, which was moved into the entryway but still hidden from sight to ensure anonymous surrender. The Catholic New York Foundling Hospital, often referred to as simply "the Foundling," was the only New York asylum that allowed for such secrecy. For decades, the organization received babies in a self-described effort to save their souls and launder the reputations of their poor 'fallen' mothers. In 1880, the charity opened St. Ann's Maternity Hospital, which served unmarried mothers 'seek[ing] shelter and seclusion with hope of preserving character and family reputation,' as the Foundling put it in a biennial report. The newborns would be cared for by the sisters, who baptized them into the Catholic faith. If they lived long enough to become 'run around[s],' the children might be chosen to ride 'baby trains' to go live with new Catholic families in far-flung towns all across the country, a practice that persisted through 1927. Some 30,000 children rode those baby trains. The Foundling came to participate in the orphan train movement because its Protestant counterpart and progenitor of the social engineering experiment, the New York Children's Aid Society (CAS), was seen by Catholic-run charities as 'an unqualified menace that had caused thousands of Catholic children to lose their religion and thus their only hope for eternal salvation.' By sending toddlers off on baby trains, the Foundling worked to preserve the minority Catholic faith against encroachment by Protestant charities like the CAS, ensuring that Catholic culture would be perpetuated and reproduced across the United States. Russia Is Trying to 'Erase' Ukrainian Identity in Captured Territories, European Officials Allege With a secretive system whereby women who 'sinned' by giving birth out of wedlock would be permanently severed from their children, who were then sent to live with new families, the Foundling may have propagated the Catholic faith. But it also harmed the very children it purported to save. The Foundling's own archives at the New York Historical hold evidence of how the organization's practices, which cut children off from basic forms of self-knowledge and from the possibility of ever reconnecting with their birth families, caused lifelong suffering for some baby train riders. Nestled into folders of correspondence to the Foundling from the 1980s and 1990s are requests from former riders, now elderly, seeking vital information about themselves and their families of origin. Some riders were hoping for details that would make sense of their medical histories. In 1994, a rider named Sylvia Wolk who was born in 1918, wrote asking for whatever information the charity had on her parents, an urgent request, as she and her brother, Joseph, were 'both in poor health, in their seventies, and under a doctor's care.' Sylvia wrote that she was 'desperately seeking truth before Joseph dies.' After a lifetime apart, Sylvia and her brother had reunited in 1989—and not through the Foundling. Instead, the siblings reconnected after Sylvia's search for her long-lost brother was featured on an episode of the television show Unsolved Mysteries. Joseph died in 1996, likely without ever learning the 'truth' about his ancestry from the Foundling. Other letters illustrate the frustration riders felt in the charity's withholding of basic details about their lives. Helen Macior, who was born in 1913 and rode a baby train to Illinois in 1915, wrote in a 1994 request form that she was seeking information 'to learn who I am.' The next year, she sent another letter: 'Seven months have elapsed, and nary a word. This in addition to the last five years of correspondence. . . . If there is one thing I strongly believe, every human being is entitled to know from whence they came, be it good or bad.' Yet the Foundling's system was entirely presaged on the idea that some people's origins need to be concealed. The tension between the Foundling's desire to keep unwed mothers' identities secret and the desire of former baby train riders to know about their origins foreshadows a central conundrum of modern adoption: the difficulty that adoptive children face in accessing information about their birth parents. The nationwide practice of sealing original birth certificates of adoptees and issuing revised documents that list the names of adoptive parents keeps secrecy alive. But that is changing—thanks to the efforts of adopted people and birth parents in recent years, adoptees in 15 states now have the right to access their original birth certificates. The conservative movement for anonymous infant relinquishment and supporters of Safe Haven Baby Boxes ignore this history and create a system that makes it difficult—if not impossible—for child and parent to ever learn the truth about one another. Babies surreptitiously left in such drop boxes will likely never have accurate birth certificates, and relinquishing parents swiftly lose their parental rights and any chance of legally reclaiming or reconnecting with their children. History has already taught us the harms of withholding self-knowledge and the possibility of reunification. It is past time we learn these lessons. Kristen Martin is the author of The Sun Won't Come Out Tomorrow: The Dark History of American Orphanhood. Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors. Write to Made by History at madebyhistory@
Time Magazine
28-05-2025
- Politics
- Time Magazine
The Devastating History of Baby Relinquishment
In 2016, Monica Kelsey, a Christian anti-abortion activist, debuted an invention allowing for completely anonymous infant surrender: the Safe Haven Baby Box. A relinquishing parent simply opens the door to the device—now at more than 150 hospitals, health care centers, and fire stations across the United States—and places their newborn in the climate-controlled bassinet. When the parent closes the door, the box locks and a silent alarm alerts responders. Supporters frame baby drop boxes as a beautiful solution for all parties involved—relinquishing parents, infants anonymously surrendered, and families who eventually adopt them. They argue that this innovation protects vulnerable babies from grievous harm, though there is no reliable data to support these assertions. The federal government does not track how frequently babies are surrendered directly to professionals under safe haven laws, which exist in all 50 states, let alone how many babies are left anonymously in drop boxes. Nevertheless, conservative religious groups position safe havens as an alternative to abortion. During arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court case that overturned Roe v. Wade, Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that safe haven laws 'take care' of the 'problem' of 'the consequences of parenting and the obligations of motherhood that flow from pregnancy.' This framing ignores evidence that 91% of women who are denied abortion in the U.S. choose parenting over adoption or relinquishment. Positioning Safe Haven Baby Boxes as a solution to the problem of unwanted pregnancy also ignores important historical lessons about the harms caused by anonymous infant relinquishment. Charitable institutions in our country supported this practice on a much larger scale in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and the results were devastating. While the technology they rely on has been updated for the 21st century, Safe Haven Baby Boxes are a new spin on a very old idea, motivated by religious conservatism and societal policing of women's sexuality and reproduction. The earliest mechanisms for anonymous infant surrender debuted thousands of years ago in Europe. Among the first were so-called 'ruota,' or wheel, systems at Catholic-run hospitals for orphans and foundlings in medieval Italy, where turntables were built into outdoor niches. A parent could place a baby on the turntable outside and rotate it indoors without being identified. Institutions dedicated to the care of so-called "foundlings" and mechanisms like the ruota spread throughout Europe in the medieval and Renaissance periods—especially in Catholic countries that heavily stigmatized extramarital sex—in order to prevent infanticide and care for 'illegitimate' babies surrendered by poor single women seeking to hide the evidence of their supposed sins. Historians now estimate that by the 18th century, as many as one third of babies born in cities in France, Italy, and Spain were abandoned. The foundling trend didn't reach American shores until the mid-19th century, when industrialization and mass migration brought huge numbers of people into cities like New York and, in turn, created conditions under which infant abandonment flourished. If a poor single woman who came to New York to work in an unstable low-wage job became pregnant out of wedlock, shame, stigma, poverty, lack of childcare options, and the anonymity of city living might lead her to leave her infant on a stoop. In the 1860s, four different foundling asylums opened in New York City to care for abandoned children. Among them was the Catholic New York Foundling Hospital, founded by the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul in 1869. That October, Sister Mary Irene Fitzgibbon, with two other nuns, placed a cradle on the stoop of their brownstone in Manhattan to secretly receive 'illegitimate' babies. That very first night, someone left a baby in the cradle on the stoop. By 1871, they had taken in 2,560 foundlings through the cradle, which was moved into the entryway but still hidden from sight to ensure anonymous surrender. The Catholic New York Foundling Hospital, often referred to as simply "the Foundling," was the only New York asylum that allowed for such secrecy. For decades, the organization received babies in a self-described effort to save their souls and launder the reputations of their poor 'fallen' mothers. In 1880, the charity opened St. Ann's Maternity Hospital, which served unmarried mothers 'seek[ing] shelter and seclusion with hope of preserving character and family reputation,' as the Foundling put it in a biennial report. The newborns would be cared for by the sisters, who baptized them into the Catholic faith. If they lived long enough to become 'run around[s],' the children might be chosen to ride 'baby trains' to go live with new Catholic families in far-flung towns all across the country, a practice that persisted through 1927. Some 30,000 children rode those baby trains. The Foundling came to participate in the orphan train movement because its Protestant counterpart and progenitor of the social engineering experiment, the New York Children's Aid Society (CAS), was seen by Catholic-run charities as 'an unqualified menace that had caused thousands of Catholic children to lose their religion and thus their only hope for eternal salvation.' By sending toddlers off on baby trains, the Foundling worked to preserve the minority Catholic faith against encroachment by Protestant charities like the CAS, ensuring that Catholic culture would be perpetuated and reproduced across the United States. With a secretive system whereby women who 'sinned' by giving birth out of wedlock would be permanently severed from their children, who were then sent to live with new families, the Foundling may have propagated the Catholic faith. But it also harmed the very children it purported to save. The Foundling's own archives at the New York Historical hold evidence of how the organization's practices, which cut children off from basic forms of self-knowledge and from the possibility of ever reconnecting with their birth families, caused lifelong suffering for some baby train riders. Nestled into folders of correspondence to the Foundling from the 1980s and 1990s are requests from former riders, now elderly, seeking vital information about themselves and their families of origin. Some riders were hoping for details that would make sense of their medical histories. In 1994, a rider named Sylvia Wolk who was born in 1918, wrote asking for whatever information the charity had on her parents, an urgent request, as she and her brother, Joseph, were 'both in poor health, in their seventies, and under a doctor's care.' Sylvia wrote that she was 'desperately seeking truth before Joseph dies.' After a lifetime apart, Sylvia and her brother had reunited in 1989—and not through the Foundling. Instead, the siblings reconnected after Sylvia's search for her long-lost brother was featured on an episode of the television show Unsolved Mysteries. Joseph died in 1996, likely without ever learning the 'truth' about his ancestry from the Foundling. Other letters illustrate the frustration riders felt in the charity's withholding of basic details about their lives. Helen Macior, who was born in 1913 and rode a baby train to Illinois in 1915, wrote in a 1994 request form that she was seeking information 'to learn who I am.' The next year, she sent another letter: 'Seven months have elapsed, and nary a word. This in addition to the last five years of correspondence. . . . If there is one thing I strongly believe, every human being is entitled to know from whence they came, be it good or bad.' Yet the Foundling's system was entirely presaged on the idea that some people's origins need to be concealed. The tension between the Foundling's desire to keep unwed mothers' identities secret and the desire of former baby train riders to know about their origins foreshadows a central conundrum of modern adoption: the difficulty that adoptive children face in accessing information about their birth parents. The nationwide practice of sealing original birth certificates of adoptees and issuing revised documents that list the names of adoptive parents keeps secrecy alive. But that is changing—thanks to the efforts of adopted people and birth parents in recent years, adoptees in 15 states now have the right to access their original birth certificates. The conservative movement for anonymous infant relinquishment and supporters of Safe Haven Baby Boxes ignore this history and create a system that makes it difficult—if not impossible—for child and parent to ever learn the truth about one another. Babies surreptitiously left in such drop boxes will likely never have accurate birth certificates, and relinquishing parents swiftly lose their parental rights and any chance of legally reclaiming or reconnecting with their children. History has already taught us the harms of withholding self-knowledge and the possibility of reunification. It is past time we learn these lessons. Kristen Martin is the author of
Yahoo
28-05-2025
- Health
- Yahoo
Ali Velshi: Creatively cruel: GOP's abortion crackdown means losing a pregnancy could land you in jail
This is an adapted excerpt from the May 24 episode of 'Velshi.' As the journalist and author Jessica Valenti recently wrote, 'We don't need to imagine a dystopian future where women are being used as incubators and arrested for miscarriages, because that future is already here.' It's been almost three years since the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, ending the constitutional right to an abortion, and post-Roe America is turning out to be much worse than most of us imagined. It's not just the inhumanity of denying women rights over their own bodies and futures, or the deadly danger of forced birth. What we're witnessing is the criminalization of women's bodies. Women aren't just being arrested and jailed for their miscarriages; they are being pursued in creatively cruel ways that are a direct result of the radical anti-abortion ideology of fetal personhood. If a fetus is legally a person, then law enforcement is empowered to criminally investigate pregnancies. Let that sink in for a moment: If a fetus is a person in the eyes of the law, any miscarriage — which, by the way is not uncommon, 10% to 20% of known pregnancies end in miscarriages — if you live in the wrong state, can be treated as a potential homicide. This isn't theoretical. Consider the case of Mallori Patrice Strait, a Texas woman who was released from jail last week after spending nearly five months in custody for miscarrying in a public bathroom. Strait was arrested for 'corpse abuse' and accused of trying to flush fetal remains down the toilet. Ultimately, the medical examiner found she had, in fact, miscarried — that her fetus died in utero — and prosecutors found 'no direct evidence' that she tried to flush anything. But what she experienced cannot be undone: the compounded trauma of being criminalized after suffering something as emotionally and physically taxing as a miscarriage. Strait was dealt punishment when what she really needed was care. In Ohio, Brittany Watts was also arrested on corpse abuse charges after she had a miscarriage in a toilet; Watts' charges were also dropped. In Georgia, Selena Maria Chandler-Scott had a miscarriage and was arrested for disposing of the fetal tissue. Law enforcement accused her of 'concealing a death' and 'abandoning a dead body.' But just like the other cases, her charges were eventually dropped. According to the advocacy group Pregnancy Justice, there were at least 210 pregnancy-related prosecutions in the year after Roe was overturned, the highest number to ever be documented in a single year. It's important to note that low-income women and women of color have been disproportionately targeted. It's only expected to get worse as more states pass fetal personhood laws, declaring that fertilized eggs have the same legal rights as people, even though they cannot survive outside the womb. According to Pregnancy Justice, at least 24 states now include some form of personhood language in their anti-abortion laws. Seventeen already have laws on the books, and several others are considering extreme expansions, including Florida, where the University of Florida newspaper points out: If state lawmakers have their way, a simple sip of wine or a single cigarette — taken before a woman even knows she is pregnant — could become a criminal offense. Anything a woman does that could potentially injure a fetus, whether that be accidental or intentional, could be deemed as child abuse and neglect according to the proposed fetal personhood bill. Meanwhile, as the push to police and criminalize pregnant women intensifies, the Trump administration has been working to decriminalize activists who target abortion providers and their patients. One of Trump's first presidential actions was to pardon nearly two dozen people who'd been convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (known as FACE), a federal law that protects patients from violence, threats and obstruction when seeking reproductive care. Then, the Justice Department announced that, moving forward, it would limit enforcement of the FACE Act. The FACE Act was passed 30 years ago with bipartisan support amid a wave of extremist violence against abortion providers. According to the National Abortion Federation, the violence has continued in post-Roe America. Over the past two years, there have been more than 700 incidents of obstruction, over 600 trespassing attempts, nearly 300 violent threats and over 128,000 protests aimed at abortion providers across the country. Despite this reality, Republicans in Congress are now pushing legislation to repeal the FACE Act altogether. This article was originally published on
