US state passes bill that allows Governor Ron DeSantis to run for president without resigning from his current position.

Republicans have had 10 months to hammer out a coherent post-Roe message on abortion. You would think they’d have nailed it by now.

Yet on Tuesday, Nikki Haley set out to declare her position on the issue—and proceeded to be about as clear as concrete.

She began with plausible precision. “I want to save as many lives and help as many moms as possible,” the former South Carolina governor and ambassador to the United Nations told reporters gathered at the Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America headquarters, in Northern Virginia—a press event billed as a “major policy speech.” But her statements quickly got squishier. It’s good that some states have passed anti-abortion laws in the past year, she said. And as for the states that have reacted by enshrining abortion-rights protections? Well, she wishes “that weren’t the case.”

And then she seemed to channel Veep’s Selina Meyer. “Different people in different places are taking different paths,” Haley said, with a self-assurance that belied the indeterminacy of her words.

[Read: Abortion pills will be the next battle in the 2024 election]

Questioning whether any national anti-abortion legislation would ever pass, Haley did gesture at a need for some action. “To do that at the federal level, the next president must find national consensus,” she said. As for what that might look like, she had no words. And she took no questions.

Some people seemed to like Haley’s speech, in a tepid way. She sounded human when she described how her husband had been adopted, and how she’d struggled with infertility. “Ms. Haley deserves credit for confronting the subject head on, with a speech that wasn’t sanctimonious or censorious,” The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote, before concluding, “The party could do worse than Ms. Haley’s pitch.” But it could do better—or at least do with something more specific.  

Leaders of the self-described pro-life movement were predictably annoyed at Haley’s conciliatory-sounding vagueness. “Disappointing speech by @NikkiHaley today. Leads with compromise & defeatism, not vision & courage,” Lila Rose, who heads the group Live Action, tweeted. “We agree that consensus is important, but to achieve consensus we will need to stake out a principled position,” wrote Kristan Hawkins, the president of Students for Life of America.

Even Haley’s hosts seemed on the wrong page. “We are clear on Ambassador Haley’s commitment to acting on the American consensus against late-term abortion by protecting unborn children by at least 15 weeks,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, said in a statement sent to me. But a few hours later, Team Haley emailed me to correct the record: “She committed to working to find a consensus on banning late-term abortion. No specific weeks,” Nachama Soloveichik, Haley’s communications director, wrote. Not only did Haley alienate both sides—she confused them!

[Mary Ziegler: Abortion restrictions targeted at minors never stop there]

Haley is in a tough spot, as are all of the Republican presidential wannabes. They each have their own personal convictions on abortion; former Vice President Mike Pence, for example, has been outspoken in his support for a national ban. But they’re up against an issue that seems to have cost their party a string of recent elections. Most Americans believe that abortion should be accessible, with some limits.

The “consensus” position, then, is somewhere in the foggy zone between no abortion ever and abortion whenever. But primary elections tend to push candidates toward one extreme or another. “The gap between what the base demands and what swing voters will tolerate has gotten really wide,” Sarah Longwell, the publisher of the Never Trump site The Bulwark, told me. “Nowhere is this more true than on abortion.”

What all politicians need to do “is settle on a position they believe they can defend, and they need to repeat it consistently and clearly,” Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, told me. “Any politician whose position on abortion is vague will be wrapped around the axle eventually with questions and doubts about where they actually stand.”

Some GOP candidates have followed Ayres’s advice. But much axle-wrapping has occurred already in the early days of the 2024 primary season.

Asked on the campaign trail whether he’d support a 15-week federal ban on abortion, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina told CBS, “I do believe that we should have a robust conversation about what’s happening on a very important topic,” before pivoting so hard to an anecdote about Janet Yellen that I thought he’d need a neck brace. In a follow-up interview, Scott backtracked, clarifying that as president, he would “literally sign the most conservative pro-life legislation” Congress sent to his desk.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to mount a presidential bid, did approve a very conservative state law recently—a six-week abortion ban. But he signed that legislation in the dead of night earlier this month, while most people in Tallahassee were probably in bed. (By contrast, last year, he celebrated the signing of a 15-week ban with a big party at a church.) The following day, DeSantis gave a speech at a Christian university full of students who are opposed to abortion, yet said nothing about his major legislative achievement. He’s mostly stayed quiet about it since—even at glad-handing events in early primary states.

So far, the only confirmed presidential candidate who seems clear on his position and keenly aware of the political optics is Donald Trump. Despite being hailed by anti-abortion activists as the “most pro-life president” in history, Trump has never been rigid on abortion (probably because he supported abortion rights for most of his life as a public figure), and he doesn’t talk much about the issue now. But a spokesperson told The Washington Post recently that Trump “believes that the Supreme Court, led by the three Justices which he supported, got it right when they ruled this is an issue that should be decided at the State level.” Shorter Trump: I’ve done my bit—it’s up to the states now. God bless.

If any national consensus on abortion exists, the GOP strategist Ayres said, Trump’s position “is pretty close” to it. Trump has always seemed to have “a lizard-brain sense of where the voters are,” Longwell said. “He has a relationship to the base, and he doesn’t have to pitch what he believes.” And, unlike DeSantis, Trump has never signed a law banning abortion at any stage, so it’ll be harder to pin him down. Sure, there’s an activist class that would like to see abortion banned in all cases. To them, Trump could reply, You got your justices. You’re welcome.

[Read: The new pro-life movement has a plan to end abortion]

Right now Trump and his lizard brain have a commanding lead in the GOP primary. His victory would set up an interesting general-election situation—a fitting one for our complicated post-Roe country: a former president who once personally supported abortion rights and is now politically opposed to them running against a sitting president whose own position on abortion is the exact opposite.

Until a Republican presidential nominee emerges, we’ll hear many more Haley-esque platitudes that sound thoughtful and weighty but ultimately aren’t.

“Whether we can save more lives nationally depends entirely on doing what no one has done to date,” Haley told reporters on Tuesday, before wrapping up her speech with—you could almost hear a drumroll—“finding consensus.” The waffling will continue, in other words, until the primary concludes.

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More than six months after the FDA announced a shortage of the ADHD drug Adderall and its generic variations, many Americans who rely on the medication continue struggling to obtain it. This supply crisis points to serious inadequacies in the diagnosis and treatment of the disorder, especially in adults.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

America is in its insecure-attachment era. “I don’t want to see you get high.” Clarence Thomas is winning his war on transparency. Dangerous Gaps

Much has been written about the toll of the ongoing Adderall shortage on Americans with ADHD, a population that includes me. But we don’t get enough credit for our ingenuity.

This week, for instance, I repeated the baroque prescription-refill process that I first developed last summer—months before the FDA’s formal announcement of a supply shortage in October, but by which point the shortage was apparent to legion prescribers and patients across the country. Among other steps too tedious to detail here, the task involves placing prescription orders at small neighborhood pharmacies (which are more likely than national chains to have the drug in stock) with somewhat restrictive hours of operation. On the whole, this strategy has worked out; throughout the supply shortage, I’ve gone very few days without access to medication. Many others have been less lucky.

As my colleague Yasmin Tayag noted in a recent Atlantic article, this medication shortage is the result of a “perfect storm” of manufacturing and regulatory factors, compounded by a dramatic surge in demand. Although the pandemic accelerated that trend, it’s been in motion for years: From 2007 to 2016, adult-ADHD diagnoses shot up by 123 percent in the U.S., and adults replaced children as the primary consumers of the medications typically prescribed to treat the condition. Both the acute spike and the longer-running pattern can be attributed, at least in part, to growing awareness about the presentation of ADHD and other executive-functioning disorders.

More recently, COVID-19 lockdowns disrupted daily routines and forced many people to adapt to new schedules that posed conflicting demands on their attention. For some, this highlighted difficulties with time management, organization, and focus. Increased stress and anxiety likely also exacerbated ADHD symptoms, or made them more apparent.

But even people without ADHD have likely experienced a range of emotional and cognitive effects of pandemic-related stress—difficulty concentrating, irritability, restlessness—that resemble ADHD symptoms. And in the U.S., where the diagnosis of adult ADHD largely relies on self-reported symptoms, clinicians may not always be able to tell whether a patient’s account of their experience is accurate. As such, it’s plausible that the pandemic drove an increase in ADHD misdiagnoses, which, in turn, contributed to greater overall demand for Adderall. (It’s important to note that the passing similarities between ADHD symptoms and other human responses to the quotidian challenges of 21st-century life are also responsible for some of the lingering stigma that surrounds the disorder, including the common misperception that it isn’t “real”—a misperception that is at least partly to blame for the likelihood that the overwhelming majority of adults who meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD remain undiagnosed.)

The problem is double-pronged. For one, as Yasmin pointed out, the U.S. lacks standardized clinical guidelines for identifying ADHD in adults. In an interview for The Guardian last year, the clinical psychologist and ADHD researcher Margaret Sibley told me that, in an ideal world, the assessment process for ADHD would involve hours of legwork on the part of practitioners: talking to the individuals, assessing their medical histories, and even reaching out to family members to get their perspective. In other words, the best-practice scenario would require time investments that are completely untenable within the current health-care system.

For patients to benefit from such a comprehensive evaluation by a licensed mental-health clinician, they would need to have access to those services in the first place, and the time off work with which to use them. In a country without universal health care, let alone universal mental-health care, the logistical arithmetic doesn’t add up for the millions of people who might otherwise benefit from procedural improvements in diagnosing ADHD and all kinds of other disorders.

Which leads us to the second issue: treatment. In the United States, prescription psychostimulant medications such as Adderall are almost always the first course of action after an ADHD diagnosis, but stimulants aren’t necessarily the safest treatment route, let alone the most effective. Moreover, the Drug Enforcement Administration classifies these medicines as Schedule II drugs with a high potential for addiction or misuse. What this means, in practice, is that sharp increases in ADHD diagnosis—and thus greater demand for ADHD medication—aren’t guaranteed to be met with expanded drug-production allotments by the DEA. And although limiting the circulation of Schedule II medications is, in theory, sound public-health policy, the approach creates new challenges when those medications are the first-line treatment for a chronic condition.

There are no simple solutions here, but the Adderall shortage has sharpened the picture of the ripple effects produced by mental-health-care access gaps. And although my geographic and financial privilege will likely keep working in my favor for as long as these drugs remain difficult to obtain, scores of other Americans with ADHD will be forced to make do with no recourse.

Related:

Adult ADHD is the Wild West of psychiatry. ADHD is different for women. Today’s News At a news conference in Jerusalem, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said that the recent lawsuit filed by the Walt Disney Co. was “political.” Carolyn Bryant Donham, whose accusation resulted in the brutal murder of Emmett Till, has died. South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol addressed a joint session of Congress and urged North Korea to end its nuclear provocations. Evening Read Illustration by The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

You Will Miss Bed Bath & Beyond

By Amanda Mull

On the first day of the rest of my life, I went to Bed Bath & Beyond. It was a rainy spring Monday in 2011, and like generations of optimistic 20-somethings before me, I had just washed up on New York City’s shores with two bulging suitcases and the keys to a tiny, dingy apartment. I had spent most of the previous year saving every cent possible so that I could rent and furnish a bedroom in an unfashionable, relatively cheap part of Manhattan, but before I could unpack my clothes or sleep in the new bed I had scheduled for delivery the next day, I needed to buy everything else: sheets, blankets, pillows, towels, hangers, a hamper.

This shopping trip was the kind of minor domestic milestone that abounds in young adulthood. I had no idea how to navigate anything about New York, and I was looking everywhere for signals that this new life would be viable for me. On that first day, I began the process of figuring all of that out by getting myself to a store that sold affordable bed linens.

Read the full article.

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Read. Kelly Link’s new story collection, White Cat, Black Dog, which masterfully twists familiar source material into unexpected new shapes.

Watch. The movie adaptation of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (in theaters now), which successfully captures the cross-generational power of Judy Blume’s beloved novel.

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P.S.

Late this morning, I found out that Jerry Springer had died. I heard the news the way I suspect many of my approximate age-peers across the country did: by text from a very old friend. A pal I’ve known since elementary school broke the news (“oh wow, Jerry Springer died”); a few hours later, my partner chimed in (“damn, Jerry Springer”). For our particular young-Gen-Xer-to-elder-Millennial generational slice, the notorious talk-show pioneer (and onetime mayor of Cincinnati, Ohio) transcends the voyeuristic television spectacle that, for better or worse, is what history will remember him for. As my colleague Megan Garber writes, “His show’s concessions predicted the ease with which American politics would give way to entertainment. He was an omen of all that can go wrong when audiences treat boredom as vice.” But he was also a reflection of what in retrospect seems like the comparable innocence of our 1990s childhoods—when Springer-esque entertainment was strictly a guilty pleasure.

— Kelli

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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.