Episode Details

Hey fam, welcome back to the Gilead Gazette, where every week the war on women gets fresh letterhead and somehow the same six guys keep signing it. Today Donald Trump hands the FDA to a woman who calls abortion corrosive, the Pentagon explains that being raped is incidental to your service, Texas publishes a maternal death report with the deadly years torn out, and a list of criminal immigration agents triples in a single afternoon. Let’s get into it.

Trump’ “ROCKSTAR” FDA Chief

Donald Trump nominated Heidi Overton to run the Food and Drug Administration on Wednesday and announced it on Truth Social by calling her a “ROCKSTAR,” then added that Secretary Kennedy says she is “ALWAYS RIGHT.” Two capitalized endorsements, zero mention of qualifications, which tracks, because she has never worked a day in federal regulation. What she has done is write. At the America First Policy Institute she co-authored a brief calling abortion “corrosive to children, women, and society broadly.” She called the fall of Roe “a huge victory for life.” And she refers to medication abortion as “teleabortion,” a word she appears to have invented so she’d have something new to be against.

The agency she’d run is sitting on a safety review of mifepristone, the pill used in most abortion care in this country and in miscarriage management, on the market for twenty-six years. Her predecessor Marty Makary quit in May, and Senator Josh Hawley’s complaint was that Makary “slow walked” that review. So the job opened up because a man wasn’t anti-abortion fast enough, and it’s being handed to a woman who thinks the drug is a plague. Anti-abortion groups have already publicly asked her to yank it off the market. They didn’t wait for the hearing. Live Action put out a statement of encouragement, which is what you send a candidate, not a regulator.

She also stood next to the president last week while he cut the childhood shot schedule from eighteen to eleven. Rockstar.

Rape is Incidental to Military Service

The Pentagon logged 8,195 reports of sexual assault in fiscal 2024, and not one of those service members can sue the government over it, because a Supreme Court decision from 1950 holds that being raped is incidental to your military service. That is not my paraphrase. That is the standard. Incident to service. Filed alongside the bad knee and the ringing in your ears.

I spent a year in a combat zone. I signed up for a lot. I knew what I was signing up for. Nobody handed me a form that said you may be assaulted by the guy in the next bunk and the United States government will classify it as an occupational hazard.

The doctrine is called Feres, and it is so indefensible that Justice Clarence Thomas, a man who has never once been mistaken for a feminist, wrote a dissent pointing out that if two people get hit by a bus in the Pentagon parking lot, only the civilian gets to sue. The soldier eats it. In 2021 the Court declined to hear the case of a West Point cadet who said the academy failed to protect her from being raped by a classmate. Attorney Christine Dunn, who represents survivors, said it plainly. “The idea that being raped is ‘incident’ to your military service is so absurd.” Researchers at Brown estimate the real assault numbers run two to four times what gets reported, and about a third of women who do report are discharged inside a year. Report it and you’re out. Don’t report it and you’re stuck. Senators Jeanne Shaheen and John Kennedy filed a fix in June. It has been sitting on a shelf ever since, which for Congress counts as urgency.

Texas Hides Abortion Ban Maternal Deaths

Porsha Ngumezi died in a Houston hospital after being denied care during a miscarriage, and Texas has decided there’s nothing there worth looking at. On September 1 the state’s Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Review Committee publishes its report, and it will not review a single death from 2022 or 2023, the first two y