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Virginia has long been a haven for abortion care in the South, where many states have near-total bans.
(Konstantin L/Shutterstock/Cage Rivera/Rewire News Group)
Virginia voters will decide the future of abortion access
Jan 26, 2026
Virginia lawmakers have approved a constitutional amendment that would protect reproductive rights in the Commonwealth. The proposed amendment—which passed 64-34 in the House of Delegates on Wednesday and 21-18 in the state Senate two days later—will be presented to voters later this year.
“Residents of the Commonwealth of Virginia can no longer allow politicians to dominate their bodies and their personal decisions,” said House of Delegates Majority Leader Charniele Herring, the resolution’s sponsor, during a committee debate before the final vote.
The Democrat-led state Senate first passed the measure in January 2025. The House of Delegates followed a few weeks later. Virginia law requires an identical proposal to pass in two consecutive legislative sessions before a constitutional amendment can be put to voters.
Virginia currently allows abortion through the second trimester of pregnancy, or until about 27 weeks. Later abortions are allowed if the pregnancy is life-threatening. It is the only Southern state that has not passed any new abortion restrictions since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Abigail Spanberger, the state’s Democratic governor-elect, made protecting reproductive rights a centerpiece of her 2025 campaign. In an October 9 gubernatorial debate, Spanberger accused her anti-abortion opponent Republican Winsome Earle-Sears, of wanting to “inflict upon Virginia” the kind of extreme abortion restrictions passed in nearby states.
“Women have died,” she said of those laws.
Dems prioritize civil rights
Virginia, a onetime Republican stronghold that swung Democratic in 2008’s election of Barack Obama, is often called a “purple” state. The governor’s mansion has swapped party hands regularly in the past 30 years, and in 2017, the House of Delegates became evenly split at 50-50.
In the 2025 election, Democrats won a historic 64 seats, all but ensuring voters the opportunity to enshrine reproductive rights into their state constitution. In addition to codifying the state’s current abortion access laws, the legislature is expected to pass proposals to permanently enshrine same-sex marriage and restore voting rights to formerly incarcerated people who completed their sentences for felony convictions into the state constitution.
A fourth proposed constitutional amendment would allow Democrats to redraw the state’s congressional districts to add up to four blue seats in Virginia, potentially in time for the 2026 midterm elections.
If voters ultimately approve these measures at the polls, they would all become constitutional law in Virginia.
With a Democratic governor and Democrat-majority legislature, Virginia could also join the growing ranks of blue states passing “shield” laws. These laws protect providers from prosecution or civil penalties for prescribing medication abortion to patients in states with restrictions or bans.
Regional destination
“Virginians have been loud and clear about their support for reproductive freedom,” said Autumn Celeste, Blue Ridge Abortion Fund’s communications director, in a statement to Rewire News Group.
Abortion funds help patients find clinics and pay for their abortion care. They also sometimes arrange child care and support patients’ care following the procedure. The Blue Ridge Abortion Fund serves both Virginians seeking abortions and a growing number of out-of-state patients traveling to Virginia for care.
After Roe fell, Celeste said, most other Southern states soon enacted restrictive abortion laws.
Neighboring North Carolina now bans abortion at 12 weeks. Florida and Georgia both outlaw it after six weeks, with a few exceptions. Tennessee has a total abortion ban with limited exceptions.
In 2024, people traveling from other states made up a quarter of all Blue Ridge Abortion Fund callers, up from 13 percent just before Roe was overturned in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia topped the group’s patient list, Celeste told Rewire News Group in late 2025.
Other research backs this observation. Virginia clinics performed 6,600 more abortions in 2024 than in 2023, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization aiming to improve reproductive rights. The number of out-of-state patients increased by about 4,400. A Guttmacher policy advisor attributed that spike mainly to Florida’s May 2024 six-week abortion ban.
“Enshrining the right to abortion care within our state is a necessary—and popular—step in the ongoing effort to protect reproductive freedom in Virginia, not just for today, but for generations to come,” Celeste said.
This story was originally published by Rewire News Group, a national, nonprofit media organization exclusively dedicated to reporting on reproductive and sexual health, rights, and justice.
Catesby Holmes is the editorial director at Rewire News Group.
Cameron Oakes is a Staff Editor at Rewire News Group..
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Photo by Adam Michael Szuscik on Unsplash
What Really Guides Lawmakers’ Decisions on Capitol Hill
Jan 21, 2026
The following article is excerpted from "Citizen’s Handbook for Influencing Elected Officials."
Despite the efforts of high school social studies teachers, parents, journalists, and political scientists, the workings of our government remain a mystery to most Americans. Caricatures, misconceptions, and stereotypes dominate citizens’ views of Congress, contributing to our reluctance to engage in our democracy. In reality, the system works pretty much as we were taught in third grade. Congress is far more like Schoolhouse Rock than House of Cards. When all the details are burned away, legislators generally follow three voices when making a decision. One member of Congress called these voices the “Three H’s”: Heart, Head, and Health—meaning political health.
Heart. People who make decisions that affect others' lives and well-being are usually first guided by their own beliefs and values. When asked how he made decisions, a GOP House lawmaker said, “I’m guided by the values my parents taught me. What’s the most common-sense, ethical way to solve the problem?”
There’s no directory listing which legislators are mostly guided by conscience and which are motivated by other factors. Generally, senators—who enjoy six-year terms—are expected to demonstrate a “leadership” model of decision-making, sometimes bucking public opinion. This is by design: the Senate was intended to be a more deliberative, thoughtful institution, acting as a check on the House, which could be swayed by the public's hot passions.
Head. Working in Congress is a policy wonk’s dream. You have access to every study ever written, every expert in the country, and every federal, state, and local agency. And if that is not enough, the largest library in the world—the Library of Congress—is across the street from your office. Most legislators and staff enjoy researching public policy problems. This is why they chose this career—to analyze complex issues and develop approaches or solutions to improve the human condition.
Legislators are constantly seeking unbiased, independent research to inform their decisions. There are both practical and political reasons for this: in addition to guiding their thinking, independent studies that justify a policy also provide them with political cover. A member of Congress told me he had changed his position on climate change, from opposing mandatory caps on emissions to supporting them. Since he represented a coal-producing district, I asked him what contributed to his change in thinking. “I read the 300-page United Nations study on the topic,” he said.
Health (political). Politics is often considered a dirty word, but what citizens and pundits fail to realize is that when a legislator factors “politics” into a decision, it means they are listening to constituents. Usually, a legislator’s personal beliefs and the general attitudes of his constituency are not far apart—that is why they got elected. Yet most decisions do not affect a majority of the citizenry in a district or state; they tend to impact small groups in significant ways. For example, Medicare reimbursement rates primarily affect doctors, research funding for a particular disease primarily affects those afflicted with the illness, and visa limits for high-skilled foreign workers primarily concern technology companies.
There may be major issues—such as war in the Middle East or immigration—which engender opinions in nearly everyone. But those issues are rare in the day-to-day world of government. Most decisions affect a narrow class of people, which makes the politics easy to assess. When faced with a new issue, one House chief of staff said he first asks, “Who’s for it, who’s against it?”
There are many ways legislators assess the political impact of a decision, but for each, they conduct a political analysis of how it affects voters’ perceptions in their district or state and how it might affect their next election. It’s important to note that even legislators in safe districts are strongly influenced by their constituents’ views. This is for two reasons. First, they feel an ethical responsibility to honestly represent the people who elected them (it sounds corny, but they do). Second, every politician wants to be loved by everyone—that’s part of why they went into politics. One Representative told me, “I sometimes think that every member of Congress is a middle child who is still trying to please his father.”
This collision between cynical popular belief and the reality of public service became clear to me in the most surprising setting: talking to congressional interns. During my 13 years on Capitol Hill, I always supervised the interns in the office. And at the end of their three-month tenure, I always asked the same question: “What belief or stereotype about Washington or Congress was debunked during your time here?” The most common response went something like this: “I was surprised by how much you all wrestle with trying to do the right thing, and how much you worry about the impact of your decisions on constituents.” If you spend a little time in the real Washington—not the one shown on the front pages or in movies—you’ll come to the same conclusion.
Bradford Fitch is the former CEO of the Congressional Management Foundation, a former congressional staffer, and author of “The Citizen’s Handbook for Influencing Elected Officials."
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Trump-era misinformation has pushed American politics to a breaking point. A Truth in Politics law may be needed to save democracy.
Getty Images, SvetaZi
The Need for a Truth in Politics Law: De-Frauding American Politics
Jan 20, 2026
“Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?” With those words in 1954, Army lawyer Joseph Welch took Senator Joe McCarthy to task and helped end McCarthy’s destructive un-American witch hunt. The time has come to say the same to Donald Trump and his MAGA allies and stop their vile perversion of our right to free speech.
American politics has always been rife with misleading statements and, at times, outright falsehoods. Mendacity just seems to be an ever-present aspect of politics. But with the ascendency of Trump, and especially this past year, things have taken an especially nasty turn, becoming so aggressive and incendiary as to pose a real threat to the health and well-being of our nation’s democracy.
The slide into a more aggressive misinformation campaign began during Obama's presidency. Republicans such as Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, and yes, Donald Trump, promoted outrageous claims against Obama—and many Republicans believed them. A CBS/New York Times poll in 2011 found that 25% of all Americans and 45% of Republicans thought that Barack Obama was not a U.S. citizen. The health care reform debate was hijacked by fears that the law would create “death panels” and that it contained “Hitler-like” policies. The silly fear that the reform legislation posed the threat of creeping socialism was, by comparison, quaint.
During Trump's campaigns and his time in office, the misinformation became bigger, more all-encompassing. He could be seen as following Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels' theory of the "big lie": tell a lie big enough, often enough, and people will come to believe it as truth. Hence, we have Trump calling all truthful, legitimate news "fake" news, compared to his own false statements, which he presents as the truth. It started during the first campaign with his outrageous claims about the criminality of undocumented immigrants and has been an aspect of just about every topic he's addressed.
These claims are all incredulous positions that fly in the face of the facts. Why then do so many Americans, not just a small radical fringe, hold these beliefs so adamantly?
The answer is clear … they respect Trump or people such as Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin, and so they have been fodder for the extreme demagoguery that Trump and others have used to create a rabid, angry, believing voter block. As for the Republican members of Congress, who have either repeated these charges or remained quiet, there's no way of knowing how much of their complicity is a product of their fear of Trump and how much is having come to believe his lies.
If actors on the political scene are so ready to pervert the truth, if they feel no ethical constraints, if they have no shame, we have reached a point where the American people need a Truth in Politics law to protect them.
To this suggestion, both liberals and conservatives will no doubt react with indignation and raise the flag of the Constitution’s 1st Amendment right of free speech. But the right of free speech is not absolute.
The Supreme Court has long recognized that there are limits to free speech. Perhaps the most relevant is the Truth in Advertising law that protects consumers from deceptive advertising. Specifically, under federal law, advertising must be truthful and non-deceptive; there must be evidence to back up any claims made; and it cannot be unfair. The law is enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.
Why is this exception made to the Constitution’s right of free speech? The reasoning behind this, and other consumer protection laws, is that the consumer is at a disadvantage vis a vis the businesses that cater to them … in this instance, because they don’t have the ability to reasonably determine for themselves the truthfulness of advertising claims and they therefore might make purchase decisions that either actually cause harm or are not in their best interest.
If consumers can be protected from false and deceptive advertising, surely the general public should be protected from false and deceptive claims in political statements and advertising that are likely to mislead and distort the voting process. Free speech advocates will say that citizens have the opportunity to learn the truth; that public debate exposes all falsehoods. That is the myth.
That was, at one time, true. But because of the advent of cable channels that cater to misinformation, the polarized nature of the populace, and the power of social media, not only do incendiary charges go viral within minutes, but people don't have the disposition to question what people they believe in say. Charges can be publicly refuted, but that has no impact.
The danger here is twofold: first, citizens will cast their vote or take other action in ways they wouldn’t if they knew the truth, acting contrary to their interests – such misinformation is thus another type of fraud used to alter election outcomes and policy decisions; second, these incendiary falsehoods have created an emotional, angry, polarized electorate making meaningful substantive debate on the issues impossible, thereby stifling the lifeblood of American democracy – the marketplace of ideas. Much of today’s debate appeals to the emotions; reasoned thought is a scarce commodity.
Much as it goes against my grain and the grain of most Americans, we have reached that point where to save our democracy, we must enact a Truth in Politics law. We can no longer depend on ethics or rational thought to save us from the demagogues.
Ronald L. Hirsch is a teacher, legal aid lawyer, survey researcher, nonprofit executive, consultant, composer, author, and volunteer. He is a graduate of Brown University and the University of Chicago Law School and the author of We Still Hold These Truths. Read more of his writing at www.PreservingAmericanValues.com
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Waiting for the Door to Open: Advocates and older workers are left in limbo as the administration’s decision to abandon a harsh disability rule exists only in private assurances, not public record.
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Silence, Signals, and the Unfinished Story of the Abandoned Disability Rule
Jan 18, 2026
We reported in the Fulcrum on November 30th that in early November, disability advocates walked out of the West Wing, believing they had secured a rare reversal from the Trump administration of an order that stripped disability benefits from more than 800,000 older manual laborers.
The public record has remained conspicuously quiet on the matter. No press release, no Federal Register notice, no formal statement from the White House or the Social Security Administration has confirmed what senior officials told Jason Turkish and his colleagues behind closed doors in November: that the administration would not move forward with a regulation that could have stripped disability benefits from more than 800,000 older manual laborers. According to a memo shared by an agency official and verified by multiple sources with knowledge of the discussions, an internal meeting in early November involved key SSA decision-makers outlining the administration's intent to halt the proposal. This memo, though not publicly released, is said to detail the political and social ramifications of proceeding with the regulation, highlighting its unpopularity among constituents who would be affected by the changes.
Despite the absence of public acknowledgment, nothing in the intervening weeks suggests the rule has been revived. Since November 30, there have been no new entries on the administration's regulatory agenda. Key regulatory milestones have been bypassed, including deadlines for public comment periods and potential congressional hearings that would typically follow such a proposal. Additionally, no agency guidance or fresh reporting indicates a change in direction. The only developments from the Social Security Administration since November have concerned routine matters such as cost-of-living adjustments, modernization efforts, and internal restructuring, none of which affect the substance of the abandoned proposal. This lack of action stands out as an anomaly in standard federal rule-making practices, where a clear procedural timeline is typically observed.
For advocates, the lack of formal withdrawal is both reassuring and unsettling. Reassuring because every signal from inside the agency still points to the same conclusion: the rule is dormant. Unsettling because the decision that affects hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Americans exists only in private assurances, not in public commitments. As one advocate put it, 'We were told it was dead. But nothing is dead in Washington until it’s buried.' An administration spokesperson, however, might argue that the lack of a formal withdrawal is a standard due-process measure to ensure that all perspectives and interests are considered before finalizing any regulatory decision. They might emphasize that the administration is committed to balancing the needs of affected workers while ensuring sustainable policy outcomes.
The stakes remain enormous. The proposed rule would have redefined disability eligibility for older workers by effectively erasing age as a factor — a shift that would have hit hardest in communities already battered by economic transition: coal country, rural manufacturing towns, and regions where desk jobs are scarce and digital skills are not easily acquired late in life. The administration’s internal polling reportedly showed that older Trump voters overwhelmingly opposed such changes, a political reality that may have helped elevate the issue to the desks of senior officials in November.
But political sensitivity is not the same as policy certainty. Until the administration publicly affirms what it has privately conveyed, the disability community remains in a defensive crouch — vigilant, watchful, and aware that regulatory ideas have a way of resurfacing when attention drifts.
Perhaps concerns about the upcoming mid-term elections next November have played a role in the administration's reversal. As reported in November by the Fulcrum, "New polling by a Trump-aligned firm has suggested that older Trump voters would overwhelmingly oppose such changes to disability eligibility." According to the poll, 78% of voters over 55 opposed the rule, highlighting the political risk of moving forward with the proposed changes. In the wake of Democrats’ strong showing in recent elections, two people with knowledge of the situation said that the administration may have been particularly sensitive to these views. As one lobbyist put it, it’s all about the "elevation of an issue, and getting it on the right desks."
The deeper issue raised by this episode is not just the fate of a single regulation but the way major policy decisions can be made and unmade without the public ever being told. When a rule with the potential to reshape the lives of hundreds of thousands of disabled Americans can be advanced for years, nearly finalized, and then quietly shelved without a single formal notice, it exposes a structural weakness in how our government communicates with the people it serves. Transparency is not a procedural nicety; it is the foundation of democratic legitimacy. Legal frameworks such as the notice-and-comment process in administrative law underscore the principle that public participation is essential to developing regulations that reflect society's will and needs. Without such transparent processes, even good decisions can feel provisional and contingent on political winds rather than grounded in principle.
This is especially true in areas like Social Security disability, where the stakes are existential, and the public’s ability to monitor policy is limited by complexity. When agencies operate in the shadows — whether by design or inertia — trust erodes. People who depend on these programs are left to parse rumors, off‑the‑record assurances, and secondhand accounts from advocates who themselves are trying to interpret signals rather than respond to clear, public commitments. A system that governs millions of vulnerable Americans should not rely on whispered confirmations in West Wing hallways. It should rely on transparent processes, accountable leadership, and a shared understanding that decisions of this magnitude deserve daylight.
For now, the story is one of absence: no movement, no revival, no formal announcement. But in a system where silence can be strategic, it is also a reminder of how fragile protections can be when they depend on unwritten assurances rather than transparent governance.
David Nevins is the publisher of The Fulcrum and co-founder and board chairman of the Bridge Alliance Education Fund.
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