The Catholic Church Is Spending Big To Defeat Abortion Rights Ballot Measures

In the days leading up to the election, the firehose of lies, half–truths, dumb memes, inflammatory political claims, and private obsessions emanating from Elon Musk’s Twitter account has grown ever more pressurized, with the world’s richest man posting in a frenzied effort to elect Donald Trump. Musk’s own attempts to sway the election are drawing legal scrutiny. Musk has returned to a set of ideas he’s been preoccupied with for much of the year: the threat of voter fraud, the necessity of voter ID laws, and his persistent concern that “non-citizens” will somehow vote.

Earlier this month, the Lincoln Project rolled out an ad centered on abortion rights featuring a chilling line uttered by the narrator, a young woman, in a monologue addressed to her Trump-voting father: “You knew his politics would end my freedom, my rights, my life,” she says. “You chose hate over me.” The ad, which depicts a woman dying in agony as she suffers complications while giving birth, was produced by the Lincoln Project to swing a demographic group they’ve dubbed “Dobbs Dads”—a group of men open to voting to protect or restore their daughters’ access to abortion—who just might be the downfall of Trump.

As Donald Trump campaigns to be a dictator for one day, he’s asking: “Are you better off now than you were when I was president?” Great question! To help answer it, our Trump Files series is delving into consequential events from the 45th president’s time in office that Americans might have forgotten—or wish they had. Five years ago, Donald Trump told Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to go ahead and invade Syria—an unexpected capitulation to personal pressure from the Turkish strongman that upended US policy, allowing Turkish attacks on Kurdish fighters seen as staunch US allies. Trump’s green light to Erdogan during an October 6, 2019, phone call forced US troops in Syria to hastily flee from posts near the Turkish border and shocked Washington, drawing bipartisan condemnation of the president’s decision. The Turkish troops who invaded went on to display “shameful disregard for civilian life, carrying out serious violations and war crimes, including summary killings and unlawful attacks that have killed and injured civilians,” Amnesty International charged.

This story is part of an ongoing investigation into disinformation in collaboration with The War Horse, the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, and Mother Jones. Just as former president Donald Trump told Fox News last week that he wanted to use the US military to “handle” what he called the “enemy from within” on Election Day, an obscure military policy was beginning to make the rounds on social media platforms favored by the far right.

There are more than 45 million people with student loans, and many more who are gearing up to go to college at a time when tuition is at record highs: The average annual cost of a private university hit nearly $60,000 in 2024. The next president will have the power to either ease that financial burden or aggravate it.

This story was produced in partnership with the National Catholic Reporter. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, every state-level campaign to limit abortion has failed. But that hasn’t stopped Catholic organizations from stepping into the fight again this election year. Catholic organizations are bankrolling campaigns against abortion-rights measures, spending more than $1.9 million so far in five of the 10 states where such measures are on the ballot, according to a joint investigation by National Catholic Reporter and Mother Jones. In Florida alone, dioceses and bishops have spent more than $1.1 million, and church entities in South Dakota have recently ramped up spending as the election nears.