Tennessee joined eight other states in allowing school employees to carry guns on K-12 campuses. Students and educators worry it could do more harm than good.
Tag: Texas
Title IX Says Universities Must Accommodate Students Who Have Had Abortions. Texas Is Suing.
The state of Texas does not believe its arsenal of antiabortion laws has done enough to strip pregnant people of control over their bodies.
Represented by antiabortion warrior Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas is suing the Biden administration in a challenge to the Title IX claim that abortion-related discrimination is prohibited sex discrimination. Two professors from the University of Texas-Austin—John Hatfield, a professor of finance, and Daniel Bonevac, a philosophy professor—subsequently joined the suit as named plaintiffs.
At its core, this case is about the surveillance and control of the sexual and reproductive lives of students, and the chillingly privileged view that professors are somehow entitled to this measure of control over students’ lives based upon their own views about abortion.
Texas’ Abortion Ban Nearly Killed His Wife. Now He’s Speaking Out.
Ryan Hamilton had to race his wife to the hospital after she had a miscarriage, fell unconscious, and started bleeding out on their bathroom floor. Here, he explains what happened.
“What happened to us here in Texas should not be normalized—what happened to my wife was nothing ‘normal.’ I think the Texas abortion law has made it gray and confusing for doctors. … I want women to be protected and miscarriage and abortion to be between a woman and her doctor. Period.
“It should be something a family feels safe to go through. I want to do my part in undoing these barbaric laws and go back to where women can get the care they need. My wife was a victim and the horrible reality here is this could happen to anyone.”
Supreme Court Allows Continued Access to Abortion Pills … For Now
Reproductive rights advocates breathed a sigh of relief on Thursday after the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit attempting to restrict access to the abortion pill mifepristone and telehealth abortion nationwide.
“While the Supreme Court did the bare minimum today, we know anti-abortion extremists aren’t stopping any time soon.”
The fall 2024 elections are critical to maintaining abortion pills access. The president appoints the head of the FDA, who controls the status of mifepristone. A Trump administration could rescind the FDA’s recent expansions of access to abortion pills or even try to withdraw mifepristone from the market altogether.
‘Vote for Abortion’ Bus Tour and Rally Show the Power of Grassroots Organizing
An extraordinary grassroots activation took place this past Saturday at 8 a.m., when two buses full of organizers, activists, celebrities, politicians, doctors and influencers braved the Phoenix heat—which would top out at 107 degrees by the afternoon—to set out on the inaugural Vote for Abortion Bus Tour and Rally, a nationwide campaign to register voters and protect abortion access and reproductive healthcare during another contentious and precarious election season.
‘Evil in Washington Flooding Into Amarillo’: Abortion Travel Bans at the City Level
Amarillo residents will vote on an abortion travel ban—which would ban the use of the city’s roads and highways to seek an abortion out of state—in the November election.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: Celebrating a Win for Mexico Women, Mourning a Loss for Texas Ones
The start of this week marked a feminist milestone for our southern neighbors: the election of the first-ever woman president in Mexico—a culmination of decades of political interventions like gender quotas and parity mandates aimed expressly at elevating more women to higher office.
Just days before, in Texas—home to 10 percent of U.S. women of reproductive age—the state Supreme Court issued a huge loss to women, in the form of a callous ruling that forces pregnancy on women until (and even past) the brink of death and mandates them to continue pregnancies even when their fetus has no chance of survival after birth. To wish such suffering on pregnant Texans and their children goes beyond heartless indifference. It is violent and inhumane.
Felicidades a mis hermanas en México. And buena suerte—good luck—to my sisters in Texas. You are not alone.
Texas Ruling and Louisiana Abortion Pill Restrictions Are Bad Omens for Pending SCOTUS Decisions
Even as we wait for U.S. Supreme Court decisions in two cases set to come down this month that could have massive impacts on abortion access, I fear that a court decision out of Texas and a new law passed in Louisiana foreshadow how the Court might rule.
The cases pending before the U.S. Supreme Court involve whether federal law requiring hospitals to provide emergency abortions in cases when a woman’s health—not only her life—is threatened supersedes state abortion bans, and whether the FDA acted properly in its decision to ease regulations making it easier to dispense abortion pills without in-person visits.
Texas Supreme Court Rejects Challenge to Abortion Laws
The Texas Supreme Court has unanimously rejected the most significant challenge to Texas’ new abortion laws yet, ruling Friday that the medical exceptions in the law were broad enough to withstand constitutional challenge.
The initial lawsuit was filed in March 2023, and unlike previous wholesale, pre-enforcement challenges to abortion bans, this case focused on a very narrow argument—women with complicated pregnancies were being denied medically necessary abortions because doctors were unclear on how and when they could act. Amanda Zurawski, the named plaintiff in the suit, was 18 weeks pregnant with a daughter they’d named Willow when she experienced preterm prelabor rupture of membranes. Despite the condition being fatal to the fetus and posing significant risks to the pregnant patient, her doctors refused to terminate the pregnancy because there was still fetal cardiac activity. Eventually, Zurawski went into sepsis and spent three days in the intensive care unit. While she survived, the infection has made it difficult for her and her husband to conceive again.
“The people in the building behind me have the power to fix this, yet they’ve done nothing,” Zurawski said. “So it’s not just for me, and for our Willow, that I stand here before you today—it’s for every pregnant person, and for everyone who knows and loves a pregnant person.”
Texas Medical Board’s Proposed Abortion Guidance *Still* Doesn’t Clarify When Doctors Can Legally Perform Abortions
Doctors, lawyers and advocates say the state board’s new guidance still doesn’t clarify when doctors can legally perform abortions.
“Unfortunately, the increased requirements for documentation are truly unworkable,” testified Dr. Richard Todd Ivey, a Houston OB-GYN. “These decisions should be made by a patient in consultation with their physicians, because that is the practice of medicine. We as physicians want to work within the confines of the law, but we cannot do so if our hands are tied.”