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The Abortion Battle Needs a Fighting President

On this episode of The Time of Monsters, Moira Donegan on Joe Biden’s need to embrace pro-choice politics.

Jeet Heer

February 4, 2024

Demonstrators protest in front of the Supreme Court Building as the justices hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.(Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images)

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The Nuclear Club, Pt. 2 w/ Jonathan Hunt | American Prestige
byThe Nation Magazine

On this episode of American Prestige, Danny welcomes back Jonathan Hunt, assistant professor at the U.S. Naval War College and a fellow of the Nuclear Security Program at Yale University, to talk about his book The Nuclear Club, which follows the efforts of a select few world powers to maintain exclusive access to nuclear weapons. This second part of the discussion picks up in the mid-1950s after Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech, non-proliferation movement leaders like Irish foreign minister Frank Aiken, the flexible response policy and other changes to America’s nuclear posture under the Kennedy Administration, the 1963 Partial Test Ban Treaty, proliferation optimists vs pessimists, and more through the late 1960s.

Note: The views expressed here are those of the author alone and do not necessarily represent the views, policies, or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense or its components, to include the Department of the Navy or the U.S. Naval War College.

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Abortion will be one of the top issues in the 2024 presidential race and will also be crucial for control of the Senate and House of Representatives. The good news for Democrats is that the public is four-square pro-choice. The battle over abortion has energized Democratic voters and helped the party consistently outperform for the last two years. The bad news for Democrats is that Joe Biden is, at best, a reluctant warrior on the issue.

Writing in The Guardian, Moira Donegan looked at Biden’s history on reproductive freedom and his continued preference for a nonconfrontational approach to the issue.

I spoke to Moira about this and we had a wide-ranging conversation on how the politics of abortion have changed and about the dangers of having a party leader who doesn’t voice the passion of the base. A columnist for the Guardian, Moira is a frequent guest of the podcast. As always, she brings a fierce clarity to the topic on hand.

The Nation Podcasts

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Jeet HeerTwitterJeet Heer is a national affairs correspondent for The Nation and host of the weekly Nation podcast, The Time of Monsters. He also pens the monthly column “Morbid Symptoms.” The author of In Love with Art: Francoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman (2013) and Sweet Lechery: Reviews, Essays and Profiles (2014), Heer has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, The American Prospect, The GuardianThe New Republic, and The Boston Globe.


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