“The 12-week abortion ban Nebraska lawmakers passed in May 2023 included exceptions for pregnancies caused by rape or incest, or to save the life of the mother.
As in other states, these exceptions have proved ambiguous for doctors on the ground, and many patients who need abortion care have been unable to get it.
Kim Paseka, a 34-year-old woman based in Lincoln, Nebraska, was one of those patients. Paseka lives with her husband and their 3-year-old son, and though they wanted at least two children, they were unsure about pursuing that in Nebraska after Roe was overturned.
“We knew it was probably inevitable that our state government was going to work on banning reproductive health care in some capacity and it definitely gave us pause, like should we move, do we stay and fight? Those were our dinner table conversations,” she told Vox. In the summer of 2023, just after Nebraska lawmakers passed their 12-week ban, Paseka learned she was pregnant again.
Initial blood tests looked fine, but following a routine ultrasound, Paseka was informed that her baby’s heartbeat was slower than expected. In subsequent appointments, the doctors determined the heartbeat was diminishing and that Paseka was carrying a nonviable pregnancy.
Because of the new ban and the fact that Paseka’s life was not immediately threatened, her doctors weren’t comfortable ending the pregnancy. They sent her home with instructions for “expectant management” — meaning to wait until she’d bleed out eventually with a miscarriage.
“I had to go back to the hospital for three more scans, where I had to see the heartbeat weaken further week by week, and during this whole time I’m so nauseous, I’m tired, I’m experiencing all the regular pregnancy symptoms, but I was carrying a nonviable pregnancy,” she said. It took roughly a month for Paseka to finally bleed out the pregnancy at home.
“In Nebraska, we have these exceptions, but in my situation it wasn’t assault, it wasn’t incest, and my life wasn’t in immediate danger, so I automatically just lose health care,” she said. “They’re forgetting how detrimental that can be to mental health, that it’s not just about physical endangerment. … I felt like a walking coffin.”
Mann, the executive director of Nebraska’s statewide abortion fund, emphasized that the 12-week ban has had far-reaching consequences that most people underestimate.
“Not only are folks now restricted in how and when they can get the care they need, but it’s additionally problematic that these rules are designed to be confusing and were brought about during a time when confusion was at an all-time high,” she told Vox. “We talk to callers and members of the community all the time who have no idea when and if abortion is even legal here in Nebraska.”
There are two remaining abortion clinics in the state, though both only perform abortions part-time, meaning there sometimes are not enough appointments to go around, including for patients traveling in from states with near-total bans like Iowa and South Dakota.
“This means that not only are patients who are past the 12-week mark forced to flee the state for care, but even patients under that ban restriction are sometimes having to travel just to get an appointment in a timely manner,” Mann explained. “These patients are going to places like Minneapolis, Chicago, and Denver … this travel is often expensive, inconvenient, and overall an enormous burden on pregnant people.””
https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/377639/nebraska-abortion-ballot-measure-trimester-ban-election-reproductive-freedom
Trump’s latest push to steal a Nebraska electoral vote appears to have flopped
https://www.vox.com/politics/2024/4/3/24119984/nebraska-electoral-college-vote-trump-biden-kirk
“in 1989, I entered a world where Nebraska straddled the middle of the political spectrum. But since then, the state has drifted so far from the center it’s hard to remember it was ever there. Using DW-NOMINATE data from the congressional vote tallying website Voteview, we can see just how far Nebraska’s political representatives have drifted rightward in the last thirty years. As you can see in the chart below, the average ideology score of Nebraska’s U.S. representatives and senators, as measured by DW-NOMINATE’s first dimension, shifted more than half a point between 1990 and 2020.1 Put in today’s terms, in 1990, the average Nebraskan in Congress was similar in ideology to outgoing Democratic Sen. Doug Jones of Alabama, a moderate; whereas today she would more closely resemble Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who isn’t the most conservative Republican in Congress (that’s Sen. Mike Lee), but still drifts pretty far to the right on the ideological spectrum.”
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“the Electoral College has always favored smaller states like Nebraska. But it is only somewhat recently that these states have heavily favored Republicans.”
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“So what’s driving Nebraska’s (and other states’) rightward shift? In part, it has to do with the nationalization of American politics. Since the 1990s, Democratic voters have moved to the left on issues such as health care and immigration, while Republicans have become more likely to identify as conservative as their moderate candidates have dwindled. And in turn, this nationalization and polarization has made it more difficult for local candidates to successfully create their own platforms. For example, as governor and senator, Nelson often broke from his own party in an attempt to attract conservative voters, taking stances like advocating for a “hard barrier” to prevent illegal immigration or supporting various anti-abortion measures. But the days of candidates creating their own platforms are largely over, and the share of registered Democratic voters in Nebraska has also dropped.”
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“This trend extends to lower levels of government, too, like the state legislature and city councils. Republican state lawmakers have also tried to eliminate prenatal care and repeal in-state tuition for immigrants, while giving local police the power to question the immigration status of anyone they suspect of living in the country illegally. A few towns have even passed ordinances that formally ban undocumented immigrants from renting property. All this is happening in a state that, until recently, settled a high number of refugees.
Meanwhile, on the education front, Republican lawmakers have leaned into national Republicans’ growing aversion toward public education, trying to eliminate Nebraska’s democratically elected board of education, while perpetual tax cuts and exemptions have led to two-thirds of Nebraska’s school districts receiving no general financial assistance from the state, which has contributed to public schools in rural Nebraska having “the most inequitable [state aid] distribution in the nation,” according to a nationwide study by the think tank, The Rural School and Community Trust. This is all in a state where Republicans once implemented income and sales taxes to increase K-12 schools’ funding, among a host of other progressive legislation.
But lest one think the effects of nationalization have completely remade states like Nebraska, many Nebraskans disagree with the GOP’s positions. Through ballot initiatives, for instance, Nebraska voters have approved a higher minimum wage, Medicaid expansion and casino gambling, even though Republicans officials, who continue to cruise to statewide victories, have opposed these measures.”
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““If you ask people to vote for things that might be in their own interest, and you explain the issue to them in one paragraph on the ballot, they will vote for the thing that is good for them,” said Ari Kohen, a professor of political science at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. “But you can’t ask them to give up their party affiliation.”
People are reluctant to switch parties, but they can be swayed to change their mind about a specific cause, particularly when an issue is presented outside of a partisan context. State Sen. Tony Vargas, a Democrat in Omaha, told me that he thought Medicaid expansion passed — even though Nelson encountered a brouhaha over a similar issue just eight years prior— because it wasn’t tied to a particular politician or party. “If our ballot said ‘expanding Obamacare,’ I feel like people would have voted against it,” Vargas said. “Instead, we said ‘expanding Medicaid and addressing the gap.’ … It’s a lot harder to attack the issue. It’s much easier to attack the person.””