President Biden’s campaign is launching a new seven-figure ad buy Thursday centered around abortion, a centerpiece issue for his campaign, as it attempts to link restrictive state abortion bans to former President Donald Trump. 

It will run on the two-year anniversary of the leak of a Supreme Court draft opinion on the Dobbs case, which overturned Roe v. Wade and transferred decisions about abortion access to the states. 

The campaign ad, titled “Prosecute,” first shared with CBS News, features an OBGYN physician in Texas talking about how the state’s near-total abortion ban, enacted after the Dobbs decision, forced her to flee the state to get care.

“If Donald Trump is elected, that is the end of a woman’s right to choose. There will be no place to turn. We could lose our rights in every state, even the ones where abortion is currently legal,” says Austin Dennard in the ad. 

The ad begins with a portion of Mr. Trump’s interview with Time Magazine in which he said that it should be up to states to decide whether to prosecute women who receive abortions. 

“The states are going to say,” Trump told Time magazine in the interview, published Tuesday, when asked if he’s “comfortable” with states prosecuting women who get abortions. “It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It’s totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.” 

In the interview, Trump also indicated he’d allow states to monitor women’s pregnancies to know if they underwent an abortion procedure. 

The Biden campaign ad begins airing one day after a six-week abortion ban took effect in Florida, as well as a repeal by Arizona’s legislature of an 1864 law that would have enacted a near-total abortion ban in that state. The ad will run in seven battleground states on various cable networks and will also air during the Kentucky Derby on Saturday. 

The focus of the ad underscores the ongoing effort by the Biden campaign to hinge restrictive bans on Trump’s legacy in appointing judges who helped overturn Roe v. Wade. Biden’s campaign has aired six other television spots related to abortion, according to political advertisement tracking firm AdImpact. 

“He’s saying he approves of states surveilling, prosecuting, and punishing women for receiving reproductive care,” said Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez about Trump, adding that the campaign will “continue to relentlessly remind voters every single day about the very real and horrifying stakes for women this November if Trump has his way.”  

As the Biden campaign intends to mobilize voters through ads, Vice President Kamala Harris is expected to continue her “Fight for Reproductive Freedoms” tour. CBS News has learned exclusively that Harris will make a May 6 campaign stop in Philadelphia focused on abortion access. 

Harris has visited Pennsylvania twice this year, but this trip would mark the first time the vice president addresses abortion in the Keystone state. Her Philadelphia stop comes after her visit to Florida Wednesday to discuss the state’s six-week abortion ban.

“Joe Biden and I have a different view,” Harris pitched to Floridians. “We believe no politician should ever come between a woman and a doctor.” 

Throughout her tour stops, Harris has blamed abortion bans on Trump, referring to him as the “architect of this health care crisis.” Harris warns her crowds that a second Trump term would be worse, claiming he would sign a national abortion ban if elected in November. 

Trump showed support for a national abortion ban bill during his term in the White House, and as a candidate, he suggested in an interview last month that he could potentially support a 15-week national abortion ban. But in recent weeks he’s punted on whether he’d sign a national ban, and has said abortion access should be left up to the states. 

On Wednesday he said in an interview with Fox 6 in Wisconsin that he is “not signing a national abortion ban. That’s Democrat misinformation.”

According to the Guttmacher Institute, since Roe v. Wade was overturned, 21 states have enacted either near-total abortion bans, or bans in the first 18 weeks of pregnancy.   

A CBS News battleground state poll of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin showed that at least 60% of voters in each state were following the news about restrictive abortion bans in Arizona and Florida.

However, not all voters blame Trump for the overturning of Roe v. Wade. In Wisconsin, where current state law prohibits abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, 40% blamed Trump for the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the poll found, while 44% didn’t give him credit or blame. 

Voters in these three competitive states also ranked other issues, such as the economy, democracy and crime, as higher factors than abortion. 

During a rally in Freeland, Michigan, Wednesday, Trump touted the overturning of Roe v. Wade and said, “a lot of controversy has now been taken out.”

“You’ve seen what’s taken place over the last period of a couple of months,”  Trump said. “People are getting together and they’re deciding within their own states.”

“You have to fight for what’s in your heart and what’s the right thing to do, but remember, you also have to get elected,” he added, in a message to other Republicans about their messaging on abortion. 

A Utah woman has been arrested and charged with murder after a friend was shot in what police said was an uncompleted suicide pact the women had reached several weeks earlier. Police documents say Heavenly Faith Garfield, 21, intended to die by suicide but was “too scared to kill herself.”

Garfield was arrested Tuesday and remains jailed in Utah County on Wednesday without bail, where jail records show she faces charges of murder and discharge of a firearm. Jail records didn’t list an attorney who could speak on her behalf and no charges have been filed.

A voicemail seeking comment left Wednesday with a phone number believed to belong to Garfield’s mother was not immediately returned.

Garfield’s father called 911 just before 3:30 p.m. Tuesday to report the shooting, police said. He said his daughter shot the 21-year-old victim at 10:45 a.m. as part of a suicide pact, an affidavit of probable cause says.

Family members said Garfield and the victim had been discussing the pact for several weeks, the affidavit says.

The victim’s name has not been released.

CBS affiliate KUTV, citing police documents, reported that a friend of the victim told officers the victim had texted him that she “intended on committing suicide, but was too scared to kill herself.” That friend also told police the victim had a suicide pact with Garfield.

Detectives on scene found a 9mm bullet near the victim’s body, KUTV reported, citing police documents,

If you or someone you know is in emotional distress or a suicidal crisis, you can reach the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline by calling or texting 988. You can also chat with the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline here.

For more information about mental health care resources and support, The National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) HelpLine can be reached Monday through Friday, 10 a.m.–10 p.m. ET, at 1-800-950-NAMI (6264) or email info@nami.org.

A British team of archaeologists on Thursday revealed the reconstructed face of a 75,000-year-old Neanderthal woman, as researchers reappraise the perception of the species as brutish and unsophisticated. 

Named Shanidar Z after the cave in Iraqi Kurdistan where her skull was found in 2018, the latest discovery has led experts to probe the mystery of the forty-something Neanderthal woman laid to rest in a sleeping position beneath a huge vertical stone marker.

The lower part of her skeleton is believed to have been excavated in 1960 during groundbreaking excavations by American archaeologist Ralph Solecki in which he found the remains of at least 10 Neanderthals.

“I think she can help us connect with who they were,” said Dr. Emma Pomeroy, a palaeo-anthropologist on the project from the University of Cambridge.

“It’s extremely exciting and a massive privilege actually to be able to work with the remains of any individual but especially one as special as her,” she told BBC News.

Solecki’s discovery of a cluster of bodies with one surrounded by clumps of ancient pollen led him to controversially argue that this was evidence of funerary rituals with the dead placed on a bed of flowers.

Political difficulties meant it took around five decades for a team from Cambridge and Liverpool John Moores universities to be allowed back to the site in the Zagros mountains of northern Iraq.

“Skull was as flat as a pizza”

The last Neanderthals mysteriously died out around 40,000 years ago, just a few thousand years after humans arrived.

Shanidar Z’s skull — thought to be the best preserved Neanderthal find this century — had been flattened to a thickness of 0.7 inches, possibly by a rockfall relatively soon after she died.

Professor Graeme Barker from Cambridge’s McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, told the BBC the “skull was as flat as a pizza, basically.”

“It’s a remarkable journey to go from that to what you see now,” Barker said. “As an archaeologist, you can sometimes get blasé about what you’re doing. But every now and then you are brought up short by the fact you are touching the past. We forget just what an extraordinary thing it is.”

Shanidar Z is the fifth body to be identified in the cluster buried over a period of at least several hundred years right behind the rock in the center of the cave.

Archaeologists believe the stone was used as an identifier to allow itinerant Neanderthals to return to the same spot to bury their dead.

Latest research by team member Professor Chris Hunt of John Moores now suggests the pollen that gave rise to Solecki’s contentious “flower burial” theory might in fact have come from bees burrowing into the cave floor.

But Hunt said there was still evidence — such as the remains of a partially paralyzed Neanderthal found by Solecki —  that the species were more empathetic than previously thought.

“There’s been this huge reappraisal which was actually started by Ralph Solecki in this cave with ‘Shanidar 1’ with his withered arm and his arthritis and his deafness who must have been looked after. That tells us there was compassion,” he said.

The positioning of the bodies in the cluster in the same spot, in the same position and facing in the same direction implied “tradition” and the “passing of knowledge between generations,” he said.

“Exciting” and “terrifying” discovery

“It looks much more like purposeful behavior that you wouldn’t associate with the text book stories about Neanderthals which is that their lives were nasty, brutish and short,” he added.

Pomeroy, the Cambridge palaeo-anthropologist who uncovered Shanidar Z, said finding her skull and upper body had been both “exciting” and “terrifying.”

The skeleton and the surrounding sediment had to be strengthened in situ with a glue-like consolidant before being removed in dozens of small foil-wrapped blocks.

Lead conservator Lucia Lopez-Polin then pieced together the over 200 bits of skull as the first step in the facial reconstruction for the just-released Netflix documentary “Secrets of the Neanderthals.”

Pomeroy said the task had been like a “high stakes 3D jigsaw puzzle” especially as the fragments were very soft “similar in consistency to a biscuit dunked in tea”.

The rebuilt skull was then 3D-printed allowing palaeo-artists and identical twins Adrie and Alfons Kennis in The Netherlands to complete the reconstruction with layers of fabricated muscle and skin for the documentary, which was produced by the BBC Studios Science Unit.

Pomeroy said Neanderthal skulls looked very different to those of humans “with huge brow ridges and lack of chins.”

But she said the recreated face “suggests those differences were not so stark in life,” highlighting the interbreeding between Neanderthals and humans “to the extent that almost everyone alive today still has Neanderthal DNA.”

The BBC reported that the researchers are confident the Neanderthal is a female. Because no pelvic bones were recovered, archaeologists relied on certain dominant proteins found in the tooth enamel that are associated with female genetics. The slight stature of the skeleton also supports the interpretation.