Ivanka Trump Says She Respects “All Sides” of the Debate Over Abortion, Which She is “Unapologetically” Opposed To

Four years into her job as a senior adviser to the president, a.k.a. her father, it still remains mostly a mystery what Ivanka Trump does all day. One thing she definitely pretends to do, though, is “empower” women. “In the coming year, we can work to empower millions of women to lift their families out of poverty, to grow the economies in their country, to reduce dependence and to deliver on the promise of greater peace and prosperity,” she said last February. Obviously, the first daughter allegedly being all about the ladies would be a lot more believable if she wasn’t part of an administration that has weakened Title IX, waged a war on birth control, and tried to scrap an Obama-era rule requiring companies to report pay data by gender. Similarly, it would also be easier to believe that Ivanka was passionate about women’s empowerment, particularly of the economic variety, if she didn’t apparently believe that women should be forced to have babies regardless of the circumstances.

In an interview with RealClearPolitics published Thursday, on the eve of an election in which evangelicals are expected to back her dad just like they did in 2016, Ivanka said that when it comes to abortion, while she “respect[s] all sides of a very personal and sensitive discussion…I am also a mother of three children, and parenthood affected me in a profound way in terms of how I think about these things.” She added: “I am pro-life, and unapologetically so.” (A White House aide said “a huge driving part of” the first daughter’s pro-life stance is “where the Democratic Party has gone,” without explaining what that meant.)

While this is reportedly the first time Ivanka has publicly and unequivocally stated that she opposes abortion, it’s not the first time there have been hints that she didn’t believe in a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body. In 2017, she and her husband, Jared Kushner, quietly reached out to then Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards and told her that if the organization wanted to continue to keep its federal funding, it would have to stop providing abortions, offering an increase if it would agree to do so, according to Richards’s memoir. (Obviously, she did not take the deal.) Earlier this week, Ivanka tweeted a photo of Judge Amy Coney Barrett at a White House gathering celebrating her confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Barrett, of course, is expected to help overturn Roe v. Wade the first chance she gets, having previously signed a letter calling the ruling “barbaric.” She also declined to answer a question from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse re: if abortion could be made a capital crime, punishable by death.

Anyway, woo-hoo women’s empowerment! Up top, girlfriends!

Trump gives the go-ahead to destroy America’s biggest national forest

The president is never too busy to stop and give the planet an orange middle finger. Per the Washington Post:

President Trump will open up more than half of Alaska’s Tongass National Forest to logging and other forms of development, according to a notice posted Wednesday, stripping protections that had safeguarded one of the world’s largest intact temperate rainforests for nearly two decades. As of Thursday, it will be legal for logging companies to build roads and cut and remove timber throughout more than 9.3 million acres of forest—featuring old-growth stands of red and yellow cedar, Sitka spruce, and Western hemlock. The relatively pristine expanse is also home to plentiful salmon runs and imposing fjords. The decision, which will be published in the Federal Register, reverses protections President Bill Clinton put in place in 2001 and is one of the most sweeping public lands rollbacks Trump has enacted.

For years, federal and academic scientists have identified Tongass as an ecological oasis that serves as a massive carbon sink while providing key habitat for wild Pacific salmon and trout, Sitka black-tailed deer and myriad other species. It boasts the highest density of brown bears in North America, and its trees—some of which are between 300 and 1,000 years old—absorb at least 8% of all the carbon stored in the entire Lower 48′s forests combined.

“While tropical rainforests are the lungs of the planet, the Tongass is the lungs of North America,” Dominick DellaSala, chief scientist with the Earth Island Institute’s Wild Heritage project, told the Post. “It’s America’s last climate sanctuary.” Unfortunately for North America, the president wants to put those lungs through a wood chipper.