Tesla, the electric vehicle company owned by billionaire and soon-to-be Twitter owner Elon Musk, is paying for employees to get out-of-state abortions.

According to the company's 2021 Impact Report, Tesla began providing an "expanded Safety Net program and health insurance offering" last year, which includes "travel and lodging support for those who may need to seek healthcare services that are unavailable in their home state."

That came after the company relocated to Texas, where abortion was outlawed after the six-week mark in August 2021.

That policy places Tesla among a growing list of companies that are helping employees access abortion care in the wake of new restrictions passed at the state level, as well as fresh concerns that Roe v. Wade could be overturned next month following the unprecedented leak of a draft opinion doing just that.

And it puts Musk — who's otherwise become a hero among conservatives following his purchase of Twitter last month — at odds with some of his cheerleaders.

A bill advanced Wednesday by Louisiana legislators would classify abortion as a homicide, potentially allowing authorities to charge women and girls with murder and criminalize in vitro fertilization, critics said.

The bill, dubbed the Abolition of Abortion in Louisiana Act, passed 7-2 out of a state House subcommittee two days after Politico published a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion suggesting that the court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade.

The bill will now move to a full House vote. The legislation would still need support from the Senate and the governor before it could become law.

Speaking at the Hialeah National Day of Prayer Breakfast, Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL) declared that “our rights come from God and not from government.” He added that the primary purpose of government is to provide a structure for an ordered society in which "individual liberties are respected.”

Despite his position on individual liberties, DeSantis recently signed an anti-choice measure that bans abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy in Florida into law. However, the first-term governor, and potential GOP presidential candidate, has not taken a position yet on the contents of the recently leaked Supreme Court draft ruling on Roe v. Wade. The draft indicated that the Court was leaning towards overturning the 1973 landmark court case that established a woman’s constitutional right to choose to have an abortion.

DeSantis reinforced his anti-choice position during his remarks at the prayer breakfast. “We've enacted protections for the right to life,” he said.

In Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, perhaps what’s hardest to bear for abortion rights advocates is the implicit suggestion that the progress women have made is a reason to throw out Roe. In a sense, he turns feminism against itself.

Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 Supreme Court decision that reaffirmed the right to abortion, were both based on the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of liberty, which the court interpreted as protecting a woman’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy free of unreasonable government interference. Roe said the liberty interest included a right to privacy. Casey added that the right to choose whether and when to have a child made it easier for women “to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation.”

Justice Alito rejected that reasoning, arguing that the right to an abortion isn’t a protected liberty interest in the Constitution because it’s not rooted in the country’s history and tradition. But that argument would actually reinforce the historical discrimination women face, as Julie Rikelman, the lawyer for the Mississippi abortion clinic at the center of the case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, argued to the court in December.

And it would threaten many constitutional rulings the court has made, such as Griswold v. Connecticut, the privacy decision freeing married couples from state restrictions on contraception that was an underpinning of Roe, and Obergefell v. Hodges, the same-sex marriage ruling. For the moment, Justice Alito’s draft “sharply distinguishes” some of these rulings from Roe. But who knows what will happen down the road?

Justice Alito also addressed the argument by abortion rights supporters that, as he described it, “changes in society” require the right to end a pregnancy. But he reduced it to one tepid sentence — that defenders of Roe and Casey contend that without access to abortion, people won’t be able to “choose the types of relationships they desire, and women will be unable to compete with men in the workplace and in other endeavors.”

Missing here is the extensive social science evidence — which is crucial for linking access to abortion to the 14th Amendment’s liberty guarantees — that “Roe changed the arc of women’s lives,” as a brief filed with the court by 154 economists and researchers argued. The legalization of abortion “had large effects on women’s education, labor force participation, occupations and earnings,” their brief said, which Ms. Rikelman took care to bring up during the court’s December argument.

The brief made clear, too, that abortion continues to function as a lever of equality. Pregnant people are still denied accommodations at work, despite a 1978 law that’s supposed to protect them from discrimination. Women still experience an economic “motherhood penalty.” And the financial effects of being denied an abortion, according to one important study the economists cite, are “as large or larger than those of being evicted, losing health insurance, being hospitalized or being exposed to flooding” resulting from a hurricane.

Justice Alito grappled with none of this. Instead, he devoted a long paragraph, replete with footnotes, to the arguments by opponents of abortion rights. He listed more accepting attitudes toward pregnant women who aren’t married, state and federal laws that ban discrimination on the basis of pregnancy, family leave laws and health insurance and government assistance to cover the costs of having a baby. He also noted, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett did during the oral argument before the court, that safe haven laws allow women to drop off babies anonymously.

Taxpayers of a county adjacent to Disney’s theme park area have joined the battle of Reedy Creek, claiming that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis violated their rights when he signed a law dissolving the special tax district.

In a complaint seeking to block the law filed Tuesday in Florida federal court, residents who live near Disney World argue they and other taxpayers will be burdened with at least $1 billion in Disney’s bond debt if the state follows through with its plan to dissolve the Reedy Creek Improvement District. “It is without question that Defendant Governor DeSantis intended to punish Disney for a 1st Amendment protected ground of free speech,” reads the lawsuit. “Defendant’s violation of Disney’s 1st Amendment rights directly resulted in a violation of Plaintiffs’ 14th Amendment rights to due process of law.”

Lawsuit filed on behalf of voters over New York’s congressional districts and upcoming primary elections. The state’s primary elections for congressional and state Senate districts were postponed by a state trial court judge from June 28, 2022 to Aug. 23, 2022 after the state’s highest court struck down the maps following litigation. However, the plaintiffs point out that New York is under a federal court order to hold non-presidential federal primaries — which includes congressional primaries, but not state Senate primaries — on “the fourth Tuesday in June.” Because the state has failed to adopt new congressional districts in time to comply with the federally-mandated timeline, placing uniformed and overseas voters at risk of disenfranchisement, the lawsuit argues that the federal court should step into the redistricting process and adopt the previously-enacted congressional map for upcoming elections.

One of Germany's biggest energy firms has said it is preparing to buy Russian gas using a payment system that critics say will undermine EU sanctions.

Uniper says it will pay in euros which will be converted into roubles, meeting a Kremlin demand for all transactions to be made in the Russian currency.

Other European energy firms are reportedly preparing to do the same amid concerns about supply cuts.

Uniper said it had no choice but said it was still abiding by EU sanctions.

"We consider a payment conversion compliant with sanctions law and the Russian decree to be possible," a spokesman told the BBC.

"For our company and for Germany as a whole, it is not possible to do without Russian gas in the short term; this would have dramatic consequences for our economy."

Germany's biggest energy supplier RWE declined to comment on how it would pay for Russian gas.

In late March, Russia said "unfriendly countries" would have to start paying for its oil and gas in roubles to prop up its currency after Western allies froze billions of dollars it held in foreign currencies overseas.

Under the decree, European importers must pay euros or dollars into an account at Gazprombank, the Swiss-based trading arm of Gazprom, and then convert this into roubles in a second account in Russia.