“Many providers like Balay see an obvious link between rising congenital syphilis rates and sparse access to obstetric care (i.e., care for pregnant people, also called maternity or prenatal care). That’s largely because, historically, prenatal care is where syphilis transmission to a fetus has been interrupted. Testing is standard in prenatal care, and all but eight states require syphilis testing during pregnancy.
The problem is simple, as Balay explains. “There just is not enough obstetric care,” she said. And as prenatal care becomes increasingly scarce, so do opportunities to catch and treat syphilis.
Balay is not alone in thinking that scarcity helps explain what’s happening with congenital syphilis, especially among Indigenous Americans.
In a recent CDC report, 37 percent of US babies with syphilis were born to parents who didn’t get timely syphilis testing during pregnancy. But that number was higher, 47 percent, when the parents were American Indian. And most of those parents who didn’t get timely testing didn’t get any prenatal care at all.
In rural states, increasingly inadequate maternity care access is making intensified mother-to-child syphilis transmission all but inevitable. That puts Indigenous women and their newborns at especially high risk.”
…
“One of the most promising solutions to South Dakota’s maternal care scarcity problem got a boost last year when the state’s voters approved an initiative to expand Medicaid beginning in early 2023. The expansion means more than 52,000 of the state’s residents are newly insured, which shifts the costs of their care from IHS to a better-funded federal program. It also means that hospitals caring for these patients will get paid more for the care they provide to the thousands of tribal residents newly covered by Medicaid. And most importantly to patients, expansion will make it more financially feasible to get the care they need.”
“The Texas Supreme Court has ruled against Kate Cox, a 31-year-old woman who sought an abortion in the state. Previously, Cox argued that the lethal condition impacting her fetus and health risks she’d face during the pregnancy meant she qualified for the exemptions outlined in Texas’s abortion ban. The court decision, which comes after Cox left Texas to obtain an abortion, sets a disturbing new precedent in a state that already has one of the most restrictive abortion bans in the country.
It’s a notable ruling because it further narrows what Texas law considers medical exceptions to its abortion ban, and could have implications for other states with similar policies. Currently, abortion is broadly banned in the state, and there are limited exceptions for conditions that endanger the life of the mother or that cause “substantial impairment” of bodily functions. Given how opaque the law is, it was not clear exactly what those exceptions entailed, and though the court didn’t explicitly clarify that ambiguity in its ruling, its decision suggests that health challenges like those Cox faced — including risks to future pregnancies — don’t qualify for the exemption.
“Some difficulties in pregnancy … even serious ones, do not pose the heightened risks to the mother the exception encompasses,” the court concluded, noting that Cox’s doctor hadn’t effectively affirmed that the complications she could face — including threats to future fertility — reached the threshold for an exception to the ban.
The justices also maintained existing uncertainty when it came to providers’ prerogative to conduct abortions in the state. Some providers have refrained from giving abortion care due to fear of legal consequences: Medical professionals found in violation of Texas’s abortion law can face up to 99 years in prison as well as large fines, while those who are found to have aided in providing abortion access can face civil suits.
The court ruled that the decision about whether a condition constituted a medical emergency, and thus qualified for an exemption, should be left up to physicians and not the courts. “Under the law, it is a doctor who must decide that a woman is suffering from a life-threatening condition during a pregnancy, raising the necessity for an abortion to save her life or to prevent impairment of a major bodily function,” the decision reads. The court didn’t resolve the legal tension inherent in the fact that Cox’s doctor felt an abortion was warranted in her case while the court said it was not.”
“a few jurisdictions in Texas are now breaking with this consensus. As the Washington Post reports, two Texas counties and two Texas cities have passed local ordinances making it illegal to transport someone through one of these counties or cities for the purpose of obtaining an out-of-state abortion.
Notably, this list of anti-abortion localities includes Mitchell County, Texas, a sparse community of about 9,000 people. This matters because Interstate 20, the route that many people traveling from Dallas to New Mexico to receive an abortion will take, passes through Mitchell County. Several other counties with major highways or airports are also considering similar laws.
These ordinances and proposed ordinances largely track model legislation, which anti-abortion activist Mark Lee Dickson shared on Twitter, that is itself modeled after SB 8 — the statewide anti-abortion law that allows private bounty hunters to sue abortion providers and collect bounties of $10,000 or more.
In fairness, Dickson’s model legislation does prohibit such bounty hunter suits from being filed against “the pregnant woman who seeks to abort her unborn child.” But the legislation would potentially allow abortion funds that help pay for abortion care, or anyone who drives a pregnant patient to an out-of-state abortion clinic, to be sued.
Ordinarily, Kavanaugh’s preemptive rejection of travel bans would be a clear sign that these laws will not survive judicial review. But, in Whole Woman’s Health v. Jackson (2021), the Supreme Court effectively shut down federal lawsuits challenging unconstitutional laws that are enforced solely by bounty hunters. And Kavanaugh joined the Court’s decision in Jackson.
The upshot is that these unconstitutional Texas ordinances may succeed, not because they are lawful but because the Supreme Court has largely immunized them from constitutional review.”
“Mexico’s Supreme Court threw out all federal criminal penalties for abortion Wednesday, ruling that national laws prohibiting the procedure are unconstitutional and violate women’s rights in a sweeping decision that extended Latin America’s trend of widening abortion access.”
“For existing operators, they find that automation had real costs. Operators in a city that transitioned to mechanical switching were substantially less likely to have any job 10 years later than operators in cities that were slower to automate; those that did find work tended to find worse, lower-paying jobs.
But Feigenbaum and Gross also examine the results for young white women coming of age during automation, who just a few years earlier would’ve been ideal candidates for telephone operator jobs. Remarkably, they find little or no negative effects at all: they were just as likely to find work as they would have been before, and job openings in fields like secretarial work and restaurants increased even as telephone operation was automated away. Some of those jobs (like restaurant work) paid less, but others were competitive with telephone operation.
This is just one case, and economists have a long way to go in understanding how automation affects workers — a question that is more important than ever with the rapid progress in AI. But telephone operation appears like a mostly heartening example. Even though a job that once employed 2 percent of all working women was automated away, new workers entering the labor market were not significantly worse off.”
X chromosome MedlinePlus. https://medlineplus.gov/genetics/chromosome/x/#:~:text=Females%20have%20two%20X%20chromosomes,cells%20other%20than%20egg%20cells. Turner syndrome Mayo Clinic. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/turner-syndrome/symptoms-causes/syc-20360782#:~:text=Turner%20syndrome%2C%20a%20condition%20that,to%20develop%20and%20heart%20defects. The Myth Of Biological Sex Kim Elsesser. 2020 6 15. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2020/06/15/the-myth-of-biological-sex/?sh=2099280e76b9