More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Beth Osborne, a Las Vegas writer and activist, had an abortion as a teenager. Now, she is working to convince Nevadans to approve Question 6 on their November ballots, which would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and preserve safe, legal abortion in the state.
In 2022, Amanda Zurawski became a national figure after she nearly died from pregnancy complications in Texas. Zurawski had conceived that pregnancy through intrauterine insemination (IUI), but when her water broke at 18 weeks, doctors delayed abortion care until she developed life-threatening sepsis. The infection left severe scarring in her reproductive organs, leading her and her husband, Josh, to pursue IVF and a surrogate, who gave birth to their son, August, on Sept. 13.
“August Mikel James Zurawski was born on Sep. 13, and he is happy and healthy. We are the happiest. … For the present, we hope to stay in Texas and fight. But now we have someone else to think about.”
With just two months until the midterm elections, voters across party lines are looking for candidates who are willing to take on corruption, hold powerful abusers accountable and demand the full release of the Epstein files.
A new nationwide poll conducted by public opinion research firm GBAO and released Wednesday by COURIER and Reckoning Action found that 88 percent of Americans who plan to vote in the midterms, including 83 percent of Republican voters, will prioritize candidates who promise to hold powerful people accountable, including through the release of the full Epstein files. Justice for Epstein’s victims ranked higher for voters than almost every other issue, including healthcare, affordability, immigration, public safety and the Iran War.
Releasing the Epstein files became a national priority in 2025, as the Trump administration became engrossed in an apparent cover-up of the records, what they contained, and who they might implicate. The most grievous transgressions include secret meetings in the Situation Room; moving Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell to a low-security prison; holding a fake Epstein files release party with far-right media personalities; and closing its investigation into Epstein without additional prosecutions after a hasty review of less than 7 percent of the DOJ’s investigative files.
In lieu of executive accountability, the public turned to Congress. Pressure from voters grew so intense that the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA) passed with virtually unanimous support.
But the new polling suggests that voters may now turn to the ballot box to punish those they believe have failed to ensure the law is upheld. To date, only half of the 6 million records from the government’s case files on Epstein have been released, and the U.S. Department of Justice has failed to provide Congress with explanations for redactions and omissions as required by law.
The full release of the Epstein files will take a Congress willing to use its power to force the DOJ to comply with the law, as Attorney General Todd Blanche has stonewalled any attempts to do so. Senate Republicans approved Blanche’s nomination to his role in August, despite pleas from survivors of Epstein’s abuse to reject him. Blanche took lead on the Epstein investigation in 2025, members of Congress currently investigating his handling of the case say his priority has been to protect the president every step of the way.
(Editor’s note: The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room—a traveling exhibit that organizes the 3.5 million pages of DOJ’s released Epstein files into 3,437 bound books—is on tour. Five cities will host the full Reading Room; the smaller Bookmobile will visit 20+ more along the way; read on for the full schedule.)
After his 35-year-old wife bled to death from a miscarriage in a Houston-area hospital, a Texas father is suing—and taking her story to Capitol Hill.
“Choosing to bring new life into the world shouldn’t be a death sentence,” insisted Michelle Maloney, the San Antonio attorney working to bring justice to Texas widower Hope Ngumezi and his two young sons.
Three years ago, in June 2023, Hope’s beloved wife Porsha was happily expecting the couple’s third child until she began to miscarry at 11 weeks pregnant. The healthy 35-year-old finance manager for a charter school went to the emergency room at Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital, just 10 minutes from her home in suburban Houston.
Both she and Hope were certain that she would receive the safe and critical medical care that she needed as she passed fetal tissue and blood clots the size of grapefruits at the hospital. An ultrasound confirmed that she had partially miscarried and that her fetus no longer had a heartbeat. But the heavy bleeding didn’t stop.
Still, the hospital’s OB-GYN, who examined her just once, moved Porsha from the ER—where staff were equipped to respond to emergencies—to a regular floor, where she received less monitoring. Porsha arrived at the hospital at 3:37 p.m. By 2 a.m., she began gasping for air and within minutes, she had died of hemorrhage.
A dozen doctors who reviewed her medical records for ProPublica, which broke the story about her death, said that Porsha should have urgently received a very simple and standard procedure for a miscarriage—a D&C (dilation and curettage). The 10-15 minute D&C would have removed all remaining fetal tissue in her womb, which her uterus was trying to expel with heavy contractions and bleeding. The procedure would have stopped the bleeding.
“The poor thing bled to death for lack of a D&C. It’s atrocious,” Austin OB-GYN Nancy Binford told Courier Texas.
When Hope Negumezi took his pregnant wife, Porsha, to a Texas hospital for a miscarriage, he expected routine emergency care. Ten hours later, she bled to death.
Hope Ngumezi shares with journalist Bonnie Fuller how his pregnant wife, Porsha, bled to death while waiting in agony for hours for medical care. In this harrowing personal account, Hope recounts Porsha’s final hours—and the dangerous legal “gray area” that kept doctors from saving her life.
“Why did this nightmare happen?
“Our first meeting was at my 21st birthday party. … As soon as I saw her, it was like in the movies, when everything stops. There seemed to be an aura around her. I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face to sober up and to figure out how I was going to talk to her.
“She was a great mother. She just loved her boys so much and they loved her, too. They were both mama’s boys and were always hanging around her, which I loved.”
The fear of losing their lives is precisely what many pregnant Texas residents say they’ve experienced after four young women died in the state when they were unable to access medically necessary abortions.
Three died while doctors delayed their care for hours as they miscarried. Another, Tierra Walker, was 20 weeks pregnant and suffered from soaring blood pressure that had required multiple hospitalizations, yet was given no option for what would have been a lifesaving abortion by any of the 90 doctors who examined her.
She died in bed of preeclampsia, a serious, persistent high blood pressure disorder, and was found by her son on his 14th birthday.
Two of the dead women were also already moms, while another, Nevaeh Crain, was just 18 and expecting her first baby when she died of an infection while miscarrying. Crain had been sent home by two hospitals in the hours before her death, and a third delayed care while they waited to confirm that her fetus had no heartbeat.
These deaths and near-deaths have created an atmosphere where “100% of my patients are afraid” of experiencing complications in their pregnancies, said Dallas OB-GYN Dr. Austin Dennard. “It’s an extra stress to every stage of pregnancy. These laws are stealing the joy out of pregnancy.”
“Women are afraid to get pregnant in Texas. There is a pervasive unease with pregnancy. Women in their 40s with high-risk pregnancies are very afraid. Those pregnancies are fraught with difficulties,” she said.
Molly (last name withheld for privacy), a 35-year-old clinic escort, says they will not be deterred from helping patients get the care they need at a Milwaukee clinic that provides abortions.
Molly outlines the current landscape of threats facing providers, the history that informs this moment, and what is at stake when violence against reproductive healthcare workers is minimized or ignored.
“Being an abortion escort appealed to me because I would be able to interact with people who were coming to the clinic to receive an abortion and give them support. …
“Abortion clinic escorts are doing de-escalation with radicalized people, and we have no weapons. We are a unique group of people with strong de-escalation training. … When I train new escorts, I tell them the names of some of our regular protesters: ‘This is Joe. This is Sam.’ I think names hold a lot of power, and if you know someone’s name, it takes away some of the fear. …
“I tell new escorts to approach a car slowly. Sometimes people arrive early and want to sit and take a breath. Sometimes they have children with them and are getting situated. … Then as they walk into the clinic, stand between them and the people shouting on the sidewalk to act as a physical sound barrier.
“What’s kept me coming back to this work is the other clinic escorts, who are all passionate about reproductive rights. You make incredible friends and build strong bonds when you spend so much time together. I advise other escorts, especially new people, to practice self-care after a shift. It’s not normal to be yelled at for hours. We get called ‘harlots,’ ‘jezebels’ and ‘sinners,’ so I encourage decompression time. Everybody has their own post-clinic ritual for self-centering. … I usually come home and do some baking. …
“I think the protesters believe we escorts have very sad lives. But I get to go home to a happy, loving place and a freshly cooked meal with my husband and two dogs.”
A first-person account from Dr. Bayo Curry-Winchell, a Black family physician and the medical director for Saint Mary’s Urgent Care Group in Reno, Nevada. Curry-Winchell nearly died after giving birth by C-section at her own hospital after repeated warnings that something was seriously wrong were dismissed. Her story—shared with writer Bonnie Fuller—underscores the stark realities of America’s maternal mortality crisis, which disproportionately endangers Black women regardless of education or income.
“I was 38 and had just delivered my second baby, a little girl, at the Reno hospital where I was a medical director at the time. …
“I remember holding my new daughter in the recovery room, then being wheeled into my hospital room. That’s when I started feeling like something wasn’t right. I didn’t feel like myself. I was having a hard time talking, and I was in a lot of pain. …
“I wasn’t capable of using my medical training in that moment. But I had to do something. I handed my phone to my husband, James, and told him to call my OB-GYN right away. … Dr. Jack believed him and came right back to the hospital. …
“It turned out that I still had retained products, including placenta and fetal tissue, in my uterus. Unfortunately, this can happen sometimes, especially after a prior C-section. I also was bleeding internally. I had lost so much blood, I had to have a transfusion. …
“American Black women have a very high maternal mortality rate, and I lived it myself. If my doctor had not believed my husband and me and returned to care for me, I would have been like other Black women you hear about passing away after giving birth.”
Cancer. Infertility. Unintended abortion.
These are just a few of the fears young patients bring to Dr. Bayo Curry-Winchell, a family physician in Reno, Nevada.
Curry-Winchell, medical director for the Saint Mary’s Urgent Care Group, said the trend away from hormonal birth control has become pervasive in recent years among her patients between about 14 and 32 years old—the same age group most likely to say they get their health information from social media.
When she talks with young patients, Curry-Winchell hears concerns about sinister long-term impacts of hormonal birth control—and the language often echoes conservative influencers who have no medical training.
Doctors say what is at stake is not whether every patient chooses the pill or an IUD, but whether they can make evidence-based decisions about preventing pregnancy in a country with some of the highest maternal mortality rates among wealthy nations.
What kind of man would sue the state of Arizona on behalf of the women here? Dr. Paul Isaacson.
Thanks to his recent win court (with legal lead the Center for Reproductive Rights), women in Arizona are no longer forced to go through a 24-hour period between scheduling and getting an abortion, which is an outdated practice that suggests women can’t make rational decisions. They also no longer have to listen to state-mandated, antiabortion propaganda before ending a pregnancy.
“All of these requirements were done under the guise of improving healthcare for women, which they did not,” he says. “I can’t imagine a similar situation with anything to do with a man’s health. It felt like we were talking down to women. I think that’s been one of the major drivers for me in being active and challenging these laws, because they are so dishonest.”