Ahead of the first presidential debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and with less than two months left until polling day, James Menendez and team travel to Missouri, the first state to impose a nearly total ban on abortion, to see if this issue moves voters from one aisle to the other. Also in the programme: With the Midwest crucial in this year’s presidential election, we ask “what does it mean to be a Midwestener?” ; and we’ll hear from the Afghan hospital struggling to save its starving babies . (Picture: Newshour’s presenter James Menendez with American businessman Billy Busch. Credit: BBC).
Hello and welcome to Newsafe and the BBC World Service.
We're coming to you today live from St.
Louis, Missouri, in the United States.
We're broadcasting from the studios of our friends and partners at St.
Louis Public Radio, just down the road from the soaring steel of the city's famous gateway arch, the gateway to the west.
It's long been a crossroads for people on the move, a melting pot of european and african american cultures with a rich tradition of music, blues, jazz and classical.
And it is St.
Louis.
Whatever Judy Garland may have sung, it's also part of America's midwest, a key region.
As the country enters the final stretch of the presidential election campaign in early November, it is home to two battleground states and home to both vice presidential nominees.
Later on, we'll be looking at what being a midwesterner means for people in Missouri.
But first, we're going to look at one of the most important issues nationally in this election, and one that's actually on the ballot here in November.
Access to abortion.
And just to give you the context, in 2022, when the US Supreme Court overturned its landmark Roe v.
Wade ruling to protect a womans right to an abortion, Missouri became the first state to implement a near blanket ban on the procedure, the only exception being cases where the mothers life was in danger.
Now, though, that could be about to change even in this rock solid republican state.
Voters here will be asked, assuming it gets the legal go ahead today, if they want to amend the Missouri constitution and restore that right to an abortion.
That would end the need for women to travel to clinics outside the state, something thousands have had to do.
Over the past two years, I've been hearing the experiences of one of them.
It was heart wrenching.