A bill to outlaw abortions based on sex or race that Democratic lawmakers and advocates have called a “nightmare” made its way to the US House of Representatives committee floor late on Thursday, where Republicans invoked Frederick Douglass, the Book of Matthew and Thomas Jefferson in arguing that abortions they believe to be discriminatory should be criminalized.

The Prenatal Discrimination Act (Prenda) seeks to make it illegal to have an abortion based on the sex or race of the fetus. But advocates argued the proposal would force physicians to report on patients they suspect of having an abortion for those reasons without having any real way of knowing. They warn it would also effectively institutionalize racial profiling on the part of doctors and violate the physician-patient relationship.

“This bill is so horrendous that I could not believe it when it was first brought up,” said Representative Judy Chu of California. “It is a nightmare. This is a piece of legislation that would impose criminal penalties on providers and limit the reproductive choices of women of color and all women.”

She said providers facing the possibility of jail time for failing to report on minority women having abortions as a catch-all, and worried that it could also further discourage physicians from serving underrepresented communities.

Chu also pointed out that the committee is composed entirely of men.

“If you ask a black woman if she has had an abortion because her child is black, she will say that’s absolutely insane. She would instead talk about her economic state, her access to healthcare, whether she might be in a violent relationship,” Simpson says. “Our elected officials are supposed to be in office to move forward legislation to make us healthier and better, but I’m seeing the opposite. So it makes me question a lot of things, especially as a black woman living in this country. With bills like this, it becomes more and more obvious that my life doesn’t matter and that’s disheartening and hard to hold as a person who has to walk in this world every day.”

Sen. Bernie Sanders' (I-VT) campaign on Thursday night suspended Simone Zimmerman, the campaign's new national Jewish outreach coordinator over comments she made about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Facebook, the New York Times reported.

"She has been suspended while we investigate the matter," Sanders spokesman Michael Briggs wrote in an email to the Times.


Zimmerman was hired by the Sanders campaign on Tuesday, and the news was followed by a Wednesday Washington Free Beacon report with a screenshot of a Facebook post by Zimmerman.

"Fuck you, Bibi," Zimmerman wrote in the post, calling Netanyahu "an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative asshole."

Bernie Sanders told “Nightly Show” host Larry Wilmore at a taping Wednesday evening that scheduling Southern states early in the Democratic primary “distorts reality.”

Sanders’ remarks came after Wilmore asked him whether he believed the Democratic primary system is “rigged.”

“Well, you know,” Sanders said, “people say, ‘Why does Iowa go first, why does New Hampshire go first,’ but I think that having so many Southern states go first kind of distorts reality as well.”

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Despite his Southern struggles, Sanders insisted to Wilmore that he can win the Democratic nomination, despite lagging by more than 200 pledged delegates. “Our path is with the math,” the Vermont senator said. “We started off this campaign having to run in the Deep South—”