Owning a business in California has become a challenge — unless you’re running a U-Haul franchise.

As a political scientist, I’ve long believed political competition to be the keystone of representative democracy. Yet in the 2024 election cycle, I’m consciously limiting my time, attention and contributions to politics. I’ve turned off the news and social media app notifications on my phone. I plan to visit two or three trustworthy news websites only once a day. And I’ve unsubscribed to candidate fundraising emails.

For more than two decades, the pharmaceutical mifepristone, used in tandem with misoprostol, has been allowing Americans to have safe and effective medication abortions at home, saving the expense and complexity of clinical visits. Medically speaking, the compound has side effects so infrequent that it is statistically safer than common over-the-counter drugs like Tylenol.