Opinion

The Supreme Court is playing a dangerous game with women’s health

BZZZZZ! Game over!

Nice try, but you forgot to check whether saving a pregnant woman’s life is allowed in your state! Thanks for playing Operation: Post-Roe!

Listening to oral arguments on Wednesday for the Supreme Court case Idaho v. United States — concerning whether federal law can require hospitals to perform emergency abortions in states with bans — Alexandra Petri saw fit to update America’s favorite hospital board game for certain realities after the 2022 Dobbs decision stripped the federal right to an abortion.

The fun-ectomy version of the game has brand-new “state legislator” and “vintage law from 1864” cards, as well as the inevitable involvement of other unsavories. From Alex’s FAQs:

Q: Actually, I have a question about the inclusion of Justice Samuel Alito as an unavoidable character in this game. Why?

A: What game isn’t more fun with the inclusion of Justice Samuel Alito?

Ruth Marcus watched the proceedings, too, and observed that Joshua Turner, the lawyer representing Idaho, tried arguing that the state law’s exceptions in reality allow emergency abortions pretty much along the same lines as what federal law requires.

“Nice try,” Ruth writes, “except that’s not what’s actually happening in Idaho, where women are either having care postponed or are being sent out of state.” The court’s three liberal justices — note: all women — didn’t buy it either.

Alas, the conservative majority seems inclined to rule with Idaho. “Gender hung over the proceedings like a silent rebuke to that apparent inevitability,” Ruth writes.

But the fate of Idahoan women’s health was loud and clear: BZZZZZ!

Chaser: Cartoonist Edith Pritchett has invented a new board game, too. Try your hand at making it through a day as a tradwife without any shattering realizations!

From former National Economic Council director Brian Deese’s op-ed on how China seems dead-set on growing what’s already a manufacturing juggernaut.

To give a sense of how much China is flooding the manufacturing market: Its capacity for making electrolyzers (tech used to produce low-emission hydrogen) is four times the global demand.

The country’s decision to ramp up manufacturing will have all sorts of ill effects throughout the global economy, Deese explains, one of which is undermining other countries’ ability to maintain a strong industrial base.

“Responding to China’s anti-market behavior strongly enough to discourage it — and yet not so strongly as to inadvertently replicate it,” Deese writes, “is challenging but essential to the well-being of our economy and that of our peers.”

More politics

It’s clear that Russian leader Vladimir Putin has no intention of relaxing his expansionist ambitions should he succeed in Ukraine, and few feel this worry more keenly than Mihai Popsoi, the foreign minister of Moldova — the country quite likely next on Putin’s to-conquer list.

Popsoi was in Washington this week, where he spoke to Josh Rogin about the threat his country faces. In the resulting column, Josh describes the recent history of Russia’s incursions into Moldova (including in the already breakaway region of Transnistria), as well as what Moldovans can expect next.

The threat raises the stakes of the Ukraine war ever higher, because “the only thing standing between Moldova (which has fewer than 10,000 personnel in its armed forces) and a Russian attack,” Josh writes, “is the Ukrainian army.”

Chaser: Back at the start of the Ukraine war, Robert Kagan anticipated that Moldova would swiftly fall if Ukraine did. He then charted what would happen after, too.

Smartest, fastest

• It’s about time to hold Donald Trump in contempt of court, Jen Rubin argues.
• Sudan’s second year of war brings little hope, the Editorial Board writes. The world should keep trying anyway.
• PhD student Violetta Soboleva explains the awful Catch-22 that she and her fellow Fulbright scholars from Russia have become trapped in: How exactly did she become a security threat to her home country?

It’s a goodbye. It’s a haiku. It’s … The Bye-Ku.

In probes of the law,

Are concerns for women real?

Is it just a game?

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Have your own newsy haiku? Email it to me, along with any questions/comments/ambiguities. See you tomorrow!