Category: News

The Oklahoma Legislature gave final approval on Thursday to a bill that prohibits nearly all abortions starting at fertilization, which would make it the nation’s strictest abortion law.

The bill is modeled on one that took effect in Texas in September, which has relied on civilian instead of criminal enforcement to work around court challenges. But it goes further than the Texas law, which bans abortions after about six weeks of pregnancy.

The bill subjects abortion providers and anyone who “aids or abets” an abortion to civil suits from private individuals. It would take effect immediately upon signature by Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican who has pledged to make his state the most anti-abortion in the nation.

The Republican-led Legislature has assisted him, passing ban upon ban in an attempt to outlaw abortion entirely. Together, they have put Oklahoma at the head of the pack of Republican-led states rushing to pass laws that restrict or prohibit abortion in anticipation that the Supreme Court is soon likely to overturn Roe v. Wade, which established a constitutional right to abortion.

A leaked memo written by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. — along with oral arguments in the case at hand, a Mississippi law that bans the procedure after 15 weeks of pregnancy — indicated that the court was prepared to do so.

If signed by the governor, the Oklahoma bill would cut off another option for Texas women who had been flooding across the state border to seek legal procedures, and it seeks to punish even those from out of state who assist Oklahoma women in getting abortions.

Oklahoma already has a trigger ban that would immediately ban abortion if the court overturns Roe, as well as a ban on abortion that has remained on the books since before the Roe decision in 1973. Two weeks ago, just after the leak of the memo, Mr. Stitt signed a six-week ban closely modeled on the Texas legislation. The previous month he had signed one that will take effect in late August, outlawing abortion entirely except to save the life of the mother.

The bill passed on Thursday attempts to combine two approaches: banning abortion entirely and using civilian enforcement. The U.S. Supreme Court and the Texas Supreme Court both declined to block the Texas law because it relies on civilian rather than the state enforcement.

The Oklahoma bill would allow civilian lawsuits against anyone who performs or induces an abortion as well as those who knowingly “aid or abet” a woman who gets an abortion. That includes those who help pay for them, which could implicate people across the country who have been donating to charitable organizations that help women in restrictive states get abortions elsewhere.

Those who sue successfully would be given awards of at least $10,000, and compensatory damages including for “emotional distress.” The bill exempts women who get abortions from lawsuits, which has been a red line that legislatures have been unwilling to cross. It does not apply to abortions necessary to “save the life of the unborn child” or the life of the mother “in a medical emergency.” It also allows abortion if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, as long as that crime has been reported to law enforcement.

It defines an unborn child as “a human fetus or embryo in any stage of gestation from fertilization until birth.” Anti-abortion groups, believing abortion to be murder, have tried unsuccessfully since the Roe decision to pass federal or state legislation defining life as beginning at fertilization. Abortion rights supporters have argued that this would effectively ban contraceptive methods that prevent implantation, such as an intrauterine device, but the Oklahoma bill specifies that it does not apply to contraception.

Asked on “Fox News Sunday” how he would help women who carried out their pregnancies despite financial or other challenges that would make it difficult to raise a child, Mr. Stitt blamed the “socialist democrat left” for attempting to abort poor children.

“We believe that God has a special plan for every single life and every single child, and we want everybody to have the same opportunities in Oklahoma, and aborting a child is not the right answer,” he said.

BUDAPEST — Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary has fiercely resisted a proposed European embargo of Russian oil, saying it would devastate his country’s economy. Another potential casualty of such a ban would be something close to his heart: a financial gravy train for culture warriors in Europe and in the United States that has been fueled by Hungary’s profits from Russian crude.

Gorged with cash thanks to cheap supplies of Russian oil and gas, the Hungarian energy conglomerate MOL — one of the Central European nation’s biggest and most profitable companies — last month announced it would pay dividends of $652 million to its shareholders.

More than $65 million of that will go to a privately managed education foundation that last year hosted the Fox News host Tucker Carlson at a festival of right-wing pundits in Hungary. It has also provided stipends and fellowships to conservative Americans and Europeans looking for a safe haven from what they bemoan as the spread of “cancel culture” back home.

Some of them featured this week at the first Hungarian edition of the Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC, a gathering of the right wing of American politics. The event, attended by Mr. Orban, opened in Budapest on Thursday under the slogan “God, Homeland, Family.”

Hungary has for years served as a beacon for foreign conservatives who admire Mr. Orban’s hostility to immigrants, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, George Soros and liberals in general. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, however, has put severe strain on that role, stirring anger among some conservatives about Mr. Orban’s cozying up to the Kremlin.

It has also threatened to strain Mr. Orban’s pact with voters, who gave his Fidesz party a landslide victory in elections last month on the promise that, thanks to cheap energy from Russia, gas and utility prices would not skyrocket as has happened elsewhere in Europe.

A steady supply of Russian energy has become such a central part of Mr. Orban’s economic and political model that ending it “is a red line for him,” said Andras Biro-Nagy, founder and director of Policy Solutions, a Budapest research group. “Russian oil and gas are absolutely vital to his whole scheme.”

This dependence has alarmed even some of his foreign fans who have taken up paid positions at Mathias Corvinus Collegium, known as M.C.C., the education foundation that benefits from the Hungarian energy company’s business with Russia. The foundation holds a 10 percent stake in MOL, which relies heavily on deliveries of Russian oil to feed its main refinery southwest of Budapest and another one it owns in Slovakia.

“I am very unhappy about the Hungarian position vis-à-vis Russia broadly speaking, and specifically about energy,” said Daniel Pipes, a conservative American scholar awarded a paid “senior fellowship” by the foundation. “At the same time, I am very positive about the Hungarian stance on immigration,” he said. “So I’m ambivalent. I dislike the Russia policy and I do like the immigration policy.”

Also unhappy is Poland, whose governing party, Law and Justice, shares Mr. Orban’s hostility to liberals but has been infuriated by his dogged resistance to efforts by the European Union to ban Russian oil, his refusal to let arms destined for Ukraine pass through Hungary and his failure to condemn Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin.

Worried that the Hungarian energy company is too beholden to Russia, the Polish Senate passed a resolution in March blocking a deal with Poland’s state-owned energy company that would have allowed MOL to acquire more than 400 Polish gas stations.

Bogdan Borusewicz, the opposition senator who initiated the move, said in an interview in Gdansk, the site of a big Polish refinery, that the war in Ukraine had made it dangerous to let a Hungarian company dependent on Russia into his country’s market.

“You could debate about this before the war,” he said, “but now it is impossible to have any illusions” about the loyalties of Mr. Orban, whom he described as “Putin’s most important ally in the E.U.” For the MOL conglomerate, he said, “cooperation with Russia is a crucial part of its business and even its survival.”

MOL declined interview requests but, in public statements, has stressed the difficulty and expense of shifting to non-Russian oil. Its Danube Refinery, south of Budapest, invested heavily over eight years to accommodate crude from other countries, which is generally more expensive, but it still depends on Russia for 65 percent of its needs.

Reporting a big jump in profits, the Hungarian company warned in its annual financial report this spring that it was exposed to Russia through a minority stake in a small Russian oil company, BaiTex, and by “the physical flow of crude oil through the transportation system in Russia and Ukraine.” That flow, it noted, had not “to date” been restricted.

Since then, the executive arm of the European Union has sought to cut it off entirely.

Doing that, said Tamas Pletser, an oil and gas analyst with Este Bank in Budapest, would be a severe blow. MOL, he said, has profited until now from a widening price difference between European Brent and the cheaper Russian crude.

“They make an additional $10 million per day on this current situation, which is based on the Russian supply and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine,” Mr. Pletser said.

Many millions of dollars have gone to the Mathias Corvinus Collegium and two other nominally independent foundations, which together hold 30.49 percent of the energy company and are its biggest shareholders. The shares used to be held by the state, but Mr. Orban two years ago gifted them, along with other valuable assets, to the foundations as part of what he said was an effort to overhaul education but which critics called legalized theft. The chairman of M.C.C. is Balazs Orban, who is also the prime minister’s political director (though not a relation).

Zoltan Szalai, the foundation’s general director, acknowledged in an interview, “This year, MOL has been very good to us.” The dividend money M.C.C. received this year from MOL is more than double its annual budget.

Mr. Szalai said his foundation should be able to cope with a decline in energy company profits if Mr. Orban loses his fight to keep Russian crude flowing. “We are thinking in the long term, and MOL is a very good and serious company,” Mr. Szalai said.

When it comes to banning Russian oil, “it is not true that Hungary does not have a choice,” said Piotr Wozniak, Poland’s energy minister in a previous Law and Justice government and longtime energy executive. “It will not be cheap or easy but it is not impossible.”

But, he added, “The question is whether Hungary wants to make this choice.”

Making that choice particularly difficult is Mr. Orban’s vote-winning promise last month to keep energy prices in check through government-imposed price caps.

Shortly before the Ukraine invasion, Mr. Orban traveled to Moscow to meet Mr. Putin, securing assurances that Hungary could count on supplies of Russian natural gas.

Moscow last month abruptly cut off deliveries to Poland and Bulgaria but is still supplying Hungary. Any suspension, either by Russia or as a result of Western sanctions, would force Hungary to buy more expensive supplies on the market.

Giving the keynote address at CPAC on Thursday, Mr. Orban mentioned the war in Ukraine, calling Russia the aggressor, but mostly focused on advising conservatives how to succeed politically. “The first point,” he said, “is that we must play by our own rules.”

Mr. Carlson, the Fox News host who recently said that he was “rooting” for Russia in its war with Ukraine, sent a brief video message of support for the conference.

Most speakers avoided the issue of Ukraine, though one, Gavin Wax, a conservative commentator from New York, complained about tens of billions of dollars spent supporting Ukraine and “nonstop media propaganda pushing for World War III” with Russia.

The main organizer of the event is the Center for Fundamental Rights, a Hungarian outfit funded by the government that says it is fighting to repel the “relentless attack” on “Judeo-Christian culture, patriotism, sovereignty, the family, the created nature of man and woman and our commitment to life.”

The center initially said it was working on CPAC’s Budapest event with the Mathias Corvinus Collegium. The foundation, however, denied helping to organize CPAC, though it said it supported its aims.

Mr. Szalai, the M.C.C. general director, denied his foundation pushed any political agenda, saying in an interview that its mission was to promote “classic common sense.”

“To say we are far right is not fair,” he added.

Mr. Orban’s critics say that M.C.C. has established itself as what Mr. Biro-Nagy of Policy Solutions calls “one of the crown jewels of Orban’s mission to create a conservative, cultural hegemony.”

Among the foreign culture warriors listed by the Mathias Corvinus Collegium among the “guest instructors” this year was Rod Dreher, an American writer who has praised Hungary’s hard-line stance against Muslim immigrants.

Mr. Dreher said he was “not in the least bothered” that M.C.C. benefited from Russian oil. He said his own pay, however, came from another Hungarian government-funded entity.

“I deplore Russia’s invasion, and hope Ukraine prevails, but I don’t share this horror of Russia and ties to Russia that the ruling class in the U.S. and Western Europe do,” he said.