American children lined up for the world’s first measles shots in the early 1960s, but it took nearly 40 years of shoring up immunization programs before the infamous contagion had been so thoroughly controlled that a panel of experts declared in 2000 that the United States had eliminated measles within its borders.

For a quarter century, the U.S. only saw outbreaks when infected travelers brought the virus in from abroad. The resulting waves of measles didn’t last more than a year.

Those days are gone.

Measles began tearing through the dusty plains of West Texas in January last year, and since then, all but a handful of states have seen cases. Two unvaccinated Texas girls and an adult across the border in New Mexico died before the West Texas outbreak seemed to burn out last July.

By then, measles was popping up in Utah, and state health officials couldn’t tell where the earliest patients had caught the virus. Infections in that state took off that fall and winter and continued into May of this year.

The Texas and Utah cases now sit at the center of an unusually technical — and politically fraught — question: whether the United States will lose its measles-free distinction.

Countries aren’t penalized for losing the status, but it’s an indication of cracks in a nation’s once rock-solid immunization programs, a loss of faith in vaccines among its people — or both.

To have any chance of keeping the designation, the U.S. will need to make a strong case that measles didn’t spread endemically — from person to person in a continuous chain within the country for more than a year. If the Texas virus, for example, made its way across the Southwest to Utah and continued infecting people there, that would be a problem. But if cases in Utah were instead sparked by a patient who caught measles abroad, that would be a new chain, restarting the clock.

For clues, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is analyzing the full genetic code of measles viruses that infected patients. Last November, the CDC’s leader at the time said preliminary genomic analysis suggested the Utah cases were not directly linked to those in Texas. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica that the work was done by the state laboratories and the CDC is conducting a more comprehensive investigation.

ProPublica embarked on its own analysis, reviewing over 1,800 whole genome sequences, including those released as recently as last month, to compare the genetic fingerprints of measles viruses circulating in the U.S. and Canada. This showed that the measles virus still spreading in Utah as of this May is very closely related to the one that sickened Texans over a year ago.

ProPublica’s analysis isn’t a smoking gun that proves endemic spread. It’s impossible to tell from this information whether the virus spread from state to state or if it at some point left the country and was brought back by a sick traveler.

But given how similar the viruses are in the sequences ProPublica identified, it’s going to be difficult for the U.S. to prove measles isn’t endemic — “unless CDC has something up their sleeves,” said Dr. Alberto Severini, a retired molecular virologist and measles expert who spent two decades at Canada’s Public Health Agency.

This is a small portion of the genetic code from a sample of measles virus collected in Utah in May 2026. Each letter represents one of the four molecules that encode the unique instructions for how the virus is built and operates.

ProPublica compared it to the sequence from a virus collected during the first days of the Texas outbreak in January 2025.

The two sequences are nearly identical. But when you look closely, mutations — tiny changes in the virus’s genetic code — begin to appear. These mutations form a distinct fingerprint.

Out of the nearly 16,000 genetic letters in each sequence, only 12 differ between the original Texas virus and the Utah virus sampled more than a year later. The mutations did not appear all at once.

As the virus spread in Texas, tiny copying errors appeared in its genetic code. One of these cropped up weeks into the outbreak: a G molecule turned into an A.

Over the following months, this branch of the outbreak continued spreading — and continued mutating. By May 2025, a virus collected from a Texas patient bore five distinct mutations.

Then those same five mutations appeared in Utah. A virus carrying this distinctive genetic pattern was found there in June 2025.

Soon, measles cases surged in Utah. Many viruses collected there carried the same five mutations, along with additional new ones. Related viruses continued infecting Utah residents as recently as this May.

The unique fingerprint of mutations hasn’t been limited to these states. The five mutations observed in Texas and Utah were also present in sequences the CDC published of viruses that infected patients last May and June in Iowa, North Dakota, Minnesota and Alaska.

But it’s not clear that the genetic fingerprint is only in the U.S.: No whole genome sequencing has been made public from cases in either Mexico or the Canadian province of Ontario, where measles has also raged.

That matters because whether the virus was spreading continuously in the United States for more than a year — rather than circulating abroad and being brought back into the country by travelers — is a key question facing a panel of experts convened by the Pan American Health Organization.

A regional office of the World Health Organization, PAHO will decide whether the U.S. keeps its measles-free designation. Canada lost its status last year. PAHO invited the U.S. to make its case in April, but American officials asked for more time to investigate how the virus had been spreading. The review was moved to November.

Daniel Salas, a PAHO official, said the kind of thorough analysis that CDC is doing “takes time.”

“What the U.S. is trying to do with this whole genome sequencing is trying to find some patterns that could eventually say, for example, this mutation of the virus occurred in a different country, in a different place to the current outbreak that they’re trying to analyze, so that eventually, that might be taken into consideration to somehow replace the epidemiological information that is missing,” he said. “There’s no country that has done this before.”

One of the biggest questions is how the virus got into Utah. Health officials determined that the first confirmed patient there, identified last June, couldn’t have been exposed to measles in another country or even another state. Utah State Epidemiologist Dr. Leisha Nolen said she and her team reviewed the places the patient had been and the people they had been around, but still couldn’t figure out where they caught the virus.

Clues suggested measles had been quietly spreading in the region. A CDC disease detective investigating subsequent cases that spanned the Utah-Arizona border said there had been reports of community members with rashes last June, but the patients declined measles testing and families were often reluctant to answer questions.

Throughout the outbreak, no interviews suggested any patient was exposed in another country, Nolen said, but she and her team cannot rule out the possibility.

ProPublica asked the CDC whether its epidemiologists had linked any of Utah’s measles cases to an international outbreak, but the agency wouldn’t say, nor would it directly comment on genetic similarities ProPublica found between viruses in Texas and Utah. In a written statement, a spokesperson said, “Sequencing alone cannot determine whether transmission has been continuous or sustained.”

While genomic analysis can provide clues, the spokesperson wrote, “These findings must be interpreted alongside epidemiological data, including travel history, exposure information, and known outbreak connections.”

The CDC is still working on “a comprehensive analysis of potential linkages among cases and outbreaks” and has gathered additional epidemiological data, the spokesperson said, but did not elaborate on what that shows.

With the midterm elections approaching, the spread of measles has become a political liability for President Donald Trump, who picked the founder of an antivaccine organization to be his health secretary. Since Trump’s inauguration last year, there have been more than 4,300 U.S. cases, a high not seen in three decades.

Eliminating the endemic spread of measles is the public health equivalent of slaying a dragon. The disease is among the most contagious humans have ever encountered. Patients are infectious even before the telltale rash appears, and the contagion can linger in a room for two hours after they leave.

Policymakers built the U.S. immunization system on lessons learned from measles outbreaks. To get the sky high-vaccination rates needed to stop the disease from spreading, states made shots mandatory for school and daycare attendance, and the federal government provided them free to low-income kids. When measles still managed to roar back, state lawmakers in California and New York cracked down on exemptions to their school mandates. The U.S. helped other countries fight measles, too, not only to prevent deaths but also because people in power recognized that infectious diseases kept in check abroad are less likely to return to American shores.

During prior U.S. outbreaks, health and political leaders, with unwavering language, urged Americans to vaccinate their children and assured them the shots were safe.

Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. haven’t followed that playbook. Both have fueled doubts about the safety of the MMR shot, which guards against measles, mumps and rubella.

Researchers around the world have found the vaccine does not cause autism. Nevertheless, at a press conference on autism last fall, Trump said he had heard for years that there was a problem with the combination vaccine and urged parents to insist on separate shots for their kids — even though standalone shots don’t exist in the U.S.

Kennedy has said the vaccine offers protection from measles, but he also has repeatedly made the shot sound scarier than the disease.

“There are adverse events from the vaccine,” he told Sean Hannity on Fox News last year. “It does cause deaths every year.”

On a podcast, Kennedy said that when he got the virus as a kid, he got to watch television for a week. “I got chicken soup and vitamin A, which nobody can patent,” he said.

Measles kills 1 to 3 out of every 1,000 people infected and can cause deafness, intellectual disability and brain swelling. In a “know the facts” post, the Infectious Diseases Society of America said there have been no deaths shown to be related to the shot in healthy people. “There have been rare cases of deaths from vaccine side effects among children who are immune compromised, which is why it is recommended that they don’t get the vaccine,” the medical society explained. “That’s why it is so important that everyone who can get vaccinated does so, to protect those who can’t.”

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in an email that Kennedy “believes Americans deserve clear information about both the benefits and risks of medical products so they can make informed healthcare decisions in consultation with their healthcare providers.”

Nixon said “heavy-handed mandates” contributed to the significant loss of trust in health institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The Secretary maintains that public health agencies rebuild trust through honesty, transparency, and respect for individual choice — not coercion,” Nixon wrote.

Kennedy has tried to distance himself and the administration from the measles resurgence. He said the U.S. has done a better job of limiting the spread than any other country and pointed to the far higher number of cases in Canada and Mexico, whose populations are much smaller.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai told ProPublica, “Fake News reporters should be spending more time examining why the Trump administration’s efforts to contain America’s measles outbreak has been so much more successful than those of Canada and Mexico instead of regurgitating the same, tired narratives.”

Kennedy has also reminded lawmakers that the Texas outbreak began before he became health secretary.

“We have a global pandemic,” he told senators in April. “It has nothing to do with me.”

Kennedy has been among the most prominent voices in the antivaccine movement for more than a decade.

Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease physician who wrote a book about measles, said Kennedy has done “everything in his power to undermine confidence in vaccines in the U.S.”

During a measles outbreak in New York City that began in 2018, Ratner treated at least five unvaccinated kids who were hospitalized, including a couple who needed intensive care, so he knows that not every child escapes the disease with nothing more than memories of screen time and soup.

While most parents still support immunizations, Ratner worries that the country no longer has the stomach for the kinds of policies that once stopped endemic spread. Rather than making school vaccine requirements stricter, some states are working to do away with them altogether in the name of medical freedom.

“You need a highly vaccinated population to control the spread,” he said. “In the absence of that, I think that we will have ongoing spread, and we’ll have tragedies like the ones that we saw in West Texas with the two kids who died.”

The U.S. may very well find the international travelers it needs to prove that the country is still measles free. But if all remains the same, experts said, it will only be delaying the inevitable.

“It doesn’t change the fact that there’s been transmission of measles in the United States for over a year,” Severini said. “If people don’t vaccinate, measles is going to be endemic.”

The post What ProPublica Found in the Genetic Code of America’s Measles Outbreaks appeared first on ProPublica.

Timmy G. Robinson Jr., founder and owner of what was once Kentucky’s largest drug addiction treatment company, was criminally indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

The indictment, filed in the Eastern District of Kentucky, charges Robinson with fraudulently selling millions of dollars of the same IRS tax credit to two companies. Robinson “devised a scheme” to “unlawfully enrich himself” by selling those tax credits to two parties, the indictment says. Robinson is also charged with two counts of money laundering  for spending the proceeds of the fraudulent sale. 

Robinson has resigned as CEO of ARC, company spokesperson Vanessa Keeton said Thursday. Robinson, 50, founded the company in 2012 after becoming sober and telling people he felt called by God to help people in the state with addiction. 

ARC, which at one point operated more than 40 drug treatment centers around the state, has been under FBI investigation for Medicaid fraud since July 2024. That investigation is ongoing, the FBI confirmed on Friday. The Lexington Herald-Leader, in partnership with ProPublica, reported in April firsthand accounts from former ARC employees and clients who said they were told by ARC to falsely bill Medicaid, or witnessed others billing for services that were not actually provided. The company said at the time that it “has never knowingly or fraudulently billed Medicaid for services, and there is no evidence that the organization encouraged employees to falsify group notes for billing purposes.”

Robinson’s attorney, Kent Wicker, said he and his client were surprised to learn an indictment had been placed over a “dispute with some investors that is now pending in a civil courtroom.”

That dispute escalated earlier this year, when ARC was sued by two companies to which Robinson had sold IRS credits, including the Bahamas-based Angelica Capital Trust. But both companies allege that when ARC received the IRS credits, it illegally kept more than $8 million the companies were owed. They allege ARC was refusing to repay the money in part so it could pay a preliminary $28 million settlement with the Department of Justice over alleged Medicaid fraud. Robinson has said he would make payments to creditors upon the sale of the company, which he described in January as imminent. 

“To be clear, Mr. Robinson did not defraud anyone, did not gain anything from the transaction at issue, and he has done nothing but deliver high quality care for over a decade to thousands of Kentuckians,” Wicker said in an emailed statement to the Herald-Leader and ProPublica. “We look forward to defending this case in court.”

Starting in 2023, ARC applied for two COVID-19-related tax credits, totalling nearly $7 million.

In July 2025, Robinson sold the rights to the first tax credit to a loan company, the indictment says. Under the agreement, the purchaser would pay ARC $2.7 million in exchange for a future repayment of the tax credit once the IRS funds arrived. Robinson signed that agreement, and later that month the buyer wired ARC the agreed amount. 

Soon after, the indictment says, Robinson “devised a scheme” to sell that same credit amount to a second company and in doing so “falsely represented” that the $2.7 million in initial tax credit was available to purchase. “Robinson concealed the prior transactions” to the new buyer, according to the indictment.

In November, Robinson signed an agreement with the second buyer, who sent a wire transfer that included $2.7 million for the twice-sold tax credit. 

In December, when the IRS paid ARC the COVID-19 tax refunds, “at Robinson’s direction, ARC spent the ERC [Employee Retention Credit] funds on other operational costs and debt obligations,” the indictment reads.

Keeton declined to comment further on the case, citing pending litigation. However, she said ARC continues to operate normally.

“All facilities, programs, and services remain open and fully operational,” Keeton said in an emailed statement. “Our leadership team, employees, and clinical staff remain committed to delivering high-quality care and support to the individuals and families we serve.”

Robinson faces 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or twice the gain or loss, for the wire fraud count. Each money laundering count carries up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The post Founder of Kentucky Drug Rehab Center Indicted on Fraud and Money Laundering Charges appeared first on ProPublica.

If Eric Murphy loses his primary election on June 9, he believes he already knows one reason why.

Last year, the North Dakota state representative, a Republican, tried to expand the window of pregnancy in which women could access abortion. The state legislature had banned it for almost everyone from the moment of conception.

Tied up in court, the ban hadn’t yet gone into effect. But Murphy wanted to lock in a less restrictive law, making abortion accessible up to 15 weeks and even later for women whose doctors deemed it a medical necessity.

To convince his fellow legislators, he read out loud from two ProPublica stories about women in Texas who died without lifesaving care. “Physicians felt compelled to follow the law,” he said in a hearing, “and both women died so that an inane law could be followed.”

A conservative colleague had warned him not to file the bill, Murphy told ProPublica, recalling the man’s words: “I can no longer protect you from who’s going to come after you.”

There was some truth to that sentiment.

At least four Republican state lawmakers who challenged severe abortion restrictions lost support from anti-abortion groups and key party allies and went on to lose primary elections, ProPublica found.

The blueprint in those races was remarkably similar. Opponents either embraced stricter abortion policies or avoided the issue altogether. Anti-abortion organizations campaigned against the incumbents, party endorsements shifted to their opponents and activists worked to turn out voters in low-participation primary elections.

In some of the races ProPublica examined, lawmakers who replaced abortion-ban reformers went on to support even stricter abortion legislation. In South Carolina, for instance, two new senators supported a bill to eliminate almost all exceptions to the state’s abortion ban. One provision of the bill would send women convicted of illegally terminating their pregnancies to jail.

Murphy is one of at least two Republican state lawmakers now facing a contested primary after trying to modify their states’ abortion restrictions. Richard Briggs, a state senator from Tennessee, is also fighting to keep his seat. In 2019, Briggs voted for the state’s so-called trigger law — a ban that would snap into place if the federal right to abortion was ever overturned.

But he had second thoughts after that actually happened. A cardiothoracic surgeon, Briggs realized the newly activated law didn’t provide adequate protections for patients having medical complications. “As a medical doctor, I drew the line,” he said in an interview. He introduced bills for a clearer medical exception and protection for doctors who intervened in cases where a fatal fetal anomaly risked the mother’s health.

The latter bill failed and now serves as ammunition for the challenger vying for his seat in the state’s Aug. 6 primary. “My opponent consistently works to weaken Tennessee’s pro life laws,” Kent Morrell says on his campaign website, noting that Tennessee Right to Life had revoked its endorsement of Briggs.

Murphy, who teaches biomedical sciences at the University of North Dakota’s medical school, ultimately did not succeed at reforming the state’s ban. His bill failed 87-6, and the state Supreme Court later reinstated the original ban, which forbids abortion from conception, with exceptions for rape and incest up to six weeks and to save the life of the mother.

The first time Murphy ran for election, his county’s Republican Party had endorsed him. Not this time. Instead, the party endorsed his two challengers, including Jill Chandler, the executive director of a “crisis pregnancy center” who believes abortion should be banned from conception.

She told ProPublica she happened to be present in the committee room when Murphy made the case for his bill. “To know that he was an endorsed Republican candidate from my district and one that I had voted for because of that endorsement was eye-opening,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘This can never happen again.’”

It was not the first time either Briggs or Murphy had taken positions that aggravated members of their parties in legislatures that have taken sharp turns to the right. Murphy voted against book bans and private school vouchers. Briggs had urged the public to get COVID-19 shots and has said that medical expertise should trump politics in decisions that involve public health.

Briggs expressed confidence in his election chances; he feels that voters agree with the decisions he’s made and noted that his Republican colleague, Sen. Becky Duncan Massey, survived a primary challenge over her support for abortion-ban exceptions.

Murphy believes the “silent majority” supports the intent of his abortion bill, but primary races historically have low turnout. It could come down to a handful of votes, he said.

“I might lose an election over this,” Murphy said, “but would I rather win an election by not doing the right thing?”

The Fallen Reformers

Mary DuBuisson, a former state Republican representative in a suburb outside of New Orleans, considers herself passionately “pro-life.” Like Briggs, she voted for her state’s near-total abortion ban in 2019. Three years later, just before Louisiana’s trigger law was implemented, it came before the legislature again.

Recognizing that women would now have to live under the restriction, DuBuisson wanted to make sure victims of rape and incest could terminate their pregnancies. When her colleagues refused to include those exceptions, she became the only Republican to vote against the ban.

A year later, she caused a stir when she sponsored a bill that would have allowed women whose pregnancies were not viable to end them. “To force a woman to carry to term with zero chance of survival is heartless and cruel,” she said at the time.

She didn’t feel it would be controversial. Other Republican women in the House told her she was doing the right thing. But when it was time to vote, another female Republican state lawmaker made a motion that ultimately succeeded at killing the bill in committee. “I mean, I just couldn’t understand,” she said of all her colleagues. “What if this was you, your daughter or granddaughter?”

When she came up for reelection, her primary opponent latched onto her record. Brian Glorioso was an attorney she had handily defeated in 2018. He called her proposed legislation a leftist attempt to circumvent the state’s abortion ban and said any “pro-abortion” doctor would falsely deem a pregnancy nonviable in records just to perform the procedure.

She beat him in the Oct. 14, 2023, primary by 384 votes — not enough to avoid a runoff.

Then, he got some extra support.

On Oct. 16, Louisiana Right to Life told its followers this runoff was key. Glorioso was expected to have a 100% “pro-life” voting record, while DuBuisson’s was 77%.

On Oct. 27, the state’s new governor-elect, Republican Jeff Landry, endorsed him, citing issues other than abortion; he wouldn’t tell ProPublica whether DuBuisson’s record on it played a role. But Landry, who had defended the state’s ban as attorney general, made clear during his campaign that he was “an unwavering defender of life, especially in the face of adversity,” citing his 100% rating from a national anti-abortion group.

“I think it partially cost me my election,” DuBuisson said of her attempts to reform the ban.

History repeated itself the following year, this time in South Carolina.

Three state senators — all Republicans who consider themselves “pro-life” — worked across party lines to defeat an abortion bill that essentially banned the procedure from conception and eliminated rape and incest exceptions. At the time, the state allowed abortion up to 20 weeks.

Sens. Sandy Senn and Penry Gustafson spoke out against limitations on abortion access for victims of rape and incest. Sen. Katrina Shealy, who had the longest tenure for a woman in the state legislature, pushed for making abortion accessible up to 12 weeks and later for exceptions in cases involving rape, incest and fatal fetal anomalies. Ultimately, a six-week window with rape, incest and fatal fetal exceptions became law.

Amid the Statehouse showdown, they were nicknamed the “Sister Senators.” All lost their county GOP’s endorsement to their male opponents.

But the bigger repercussions came from anti-abortion groups that mobilized a multifront grassroots campaign against them. Students for Life Action announced that it generated “37,000 pieces of mail, almost 130,000 personal text messages, more than 51,000 phone calls and thousands of doors knocked” to unseat the trio.

“All three of them got voted out — every single one of them lost because of that decision,” said Dr. Matthew Clark, the executive director of Personhood South Carolina, which believes abortion shouldn’t exist at all and that women who have them should be prosecuted for murder.

Clark, an allergist and Presbyterian pastor, said his group’s desired legislation has a better chance to advance now that the Sister Senators have been replaced.

Matt Leber, who beat Senn, previously co-sponsored a bill as a member of the state House that would make abortion a crime equivalent to homicide. It failed to advance, and Leber withdrew his name as a co-sponsor amid a controversy surrounding it in 2023.

This legislative session, Leber and Carlisle Kennedy, who beat Shealy, supported a bill that carries misdemeanor criminal penalties for women seeking abortions, with jail time up to two years. Senate Bill 1095 passed with supermajority support out of a committee Leber sits on.

The bill died before the session, but watchers of abortion restrictions noticed it got further than any other similarly repressive legislation ever has.

A Fateful Disconnect

The outcomes do not neatly match public polling. Surveys in states such as South Carolina and Louisiana have found that many Republican voters support at least some exceptions to abortion bans, including in cases of rape or threats to a woman’s health.

But primary elections often draw only a small share of eligible voters, giving outsized influence to highly engaged activists and organized interest groups.

DuBuisson’s runoff drew about one-third of registered voters. Participation in the South Carolina primaries was lower still. Some races were decided on tiny margins; Senn lost hers by 33 votes.

The North Dakota GOP has moved further to the right on abortion in recent years, even as polling suggested the state’s restrictions were losing support from Republican voters. At its 2026 convention, the party passed a resolution rejecting any policies that “normalize” abortion.

North Dakota is one of the few states with a multimember system, where two representatives and one senator govern together in the same district. District 43, which Murphy currently represents, is one of the only purple districts in an otherwise deeply red state. It includes part of Grand Forks, a growing college town home to the University of North Dakota.

Murphy’s fellow representative, Democrat Zac Ista, told ProPublica he hadn’t been able to make a dent in this legislature. He announced he wouldn’t be seeking reelection, opening up an opportunity for a Republican takeover of the district.

Ista said the lack of support rallying around Murphy is due to his position on abortion, as well as culture-war legislation he refused to support. “I think it’s illustrative of that schism, where at this district level, Republicans are really trying to sort of press the most extreme conservative opinions,” Ista said.

Richard Glynn, the GOP county chair in Murphy’s district, had previously supported Murphy’s abortion bill. In written testimony, Glynn shared his experience hearing about young women performing illegal abortions when he was a freshman at the University of South Dakota in 1966. Four young women who were in sororities died from using metal hangers to terminate their pregnancies, he wrote.

“These deaths were viewed as preventable if these girls could have received competent care. Unfortunately, North Dakota is going down the same path with limited access to obstetric care that negatively impacts the health of the woman,” his letter said.

When reached by phone, Glynn said delegates in the county voted and Murphy had the least amount of votes, which is why he did not receive the county’s endorsement.

Glynn declined to answer more questions before hanging up on a reporter.

One of Murphy’s opponents, Mike Holmes, has drawn a lot of excitement — and an endorsement from Gov. Kelly Armstrong — for his expertise in energy technology and industrial development. The governor said Holmes understands “what it takes to keep North Dakota’s economy strong.” Holmes has been silent on abortion and didn’t respond to ProPublica’s requests for an interview.

Chandler, who touted her “respect for life” in a campaign mailer, is favored among anti-abortion groups. “It’s a pretty stark contrast,” said Bridget Turbide, executive director of North Dakota Right to Life, who called Murphy’s proposal “the most extreme pro-choice bill we’ve ever seen.”

Citizens Alliance of North Dakota, a conservative group that opposes abortion among other causes, paid for a mailer calling Chandler a “champion of family values.” The same group marked Murphy in “bad standing” in an online roster of legislators, questioning his alignment with North Dakota values.

Murphy’s third colleague who also represents District 43, Republican State Sen. Jeff Barta, campaigned alongside him in 2022 as part of a unified Republican ticket when the primary election was uncontested.

Asked about the upcoming race and the candidates, Barta pointed to Murphy’s proposal that would have expanded abortion access in North Dakota.

“Last session, he introduced House Bill 1488, which created a little divide there,” Barta said.

Barta said Murphy has also broken with the party on other issues.

“That probably opened the door for the third candidate to run,” Barta added. Had that not happened, Murphy would have made it to the general election without having to defend his spot on the ballot.

Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, lawmakers taking such nuanced stands on abortion bans may not have risked a career death sentence, said abortion historian and law professor Mary Ziegler.

“The kind of incrementalism that Eric Murphy seems to be doing is something from a bygone era, where people were more pragmatic in the movement and not punished for it,” she said.

The post These Republican Lawmakers Challenged Abortion Bans. Then They Faced Backlash. appeared first on ProPublica.