Your trusted source for contextualizing the news. Subscribe to our daily newsletter. Texas will continue enforcing bans on performing abortions even when pregnancies develop serious complications, following a decision issued Friday by the state Supreme Court. The ruling means physicians must wait until patients are dangerously ill before terminating their pregnancies — in some cases resulting in otherwise preventable health complications. Under the law, learning that a fetus is unlikely to survive does not allow doctors to perform an abortion. Under this case, known as Zurawski v. Texas, 20 wo ..read more

This Pride Month, we’re telling the untold stories of LGBTQ+ people. Subscribe to our daily newsletter. This year, as Pride Month starts, I’m feeling hopeful for the future for LGBTQ+ people. That may seem counterintuitive, given that I report on the effects of escalating political rhetoric and violence targeting LGBTQ+ people, and that I cover the court cases that could massively reshape transgender rights in this country. However, there are a lot of bright spots emerging this year.  Many anti-LGBTQ+ bills stalled in statehouses this year. In Southern and Republican-controlled state ..read more

This AAPI Heritage Month, we’re telling the untold stories of women, women of color and LGBTQ+ people. Subscribe to our daily newsletter. This reporting was supported by the Trans Journalists Association. In the 1980s, Willy Chang Wilkinson was a young adult struggling as he navigated coming into his own gender identity. He had known he was male since he was a child, but he’d never had the language to describe himself. As an adult, he was living in the lesbian community because there was no concept of being transgender — it just wasn’t an option.  “A lot has changed in three dec ..read more

The Supreme Court is set to rule soon on how the abortion drug mifepristone can be used and prescribed, but conservative states — most recently Arkansas and Louisiana — haven’t waited to take their own steps to attempt to undercut access to the medication. States have been able to ban or restrict abortion, including via medication, since the Supreme Court ended the federal right to abortion in June 2022. Yet the number of abortions has risen since Roe v. Wade was overturned — a development health researchers attribute in part to a growing share of pregnant patients seeking medication abortions ..read more

This story was co-reported in partnership with Connecticut Public. Listen to the radio story using the audio player below. HARTFORD, CT — Everyone seems to know Diane Lewis on The Avenue — and those who don’t stare at her like they want to.  She is something of a local activist for the residents of Hartford’s Upper Albany neighborhood, a majority-Black area peppered with more than a dozen churches and seven Caribbean restaurants across a one-mile section of Albany Avenue, better known as just “The Avenue.” The sight of Lewis walking down the street is hard to miss. On a chilly Thursday in ..read more

Donald Trump on Thursday was found guilty in a first-of-its-kind criminal trial of a former U.S. president that put a spotlight on an attempt to falsify business records, keep secret an adult film actor’s story of an affair and change the outcome of an election. Now the question becomes one that some witnesses in the trial said was asked in 2016: Will women voters care? During the roughly six-week trial, witnesses testified on the Trump campaign’s heightened concern in the lead-up to the 2016 election about his standing with women voters. Reporting at the time spotlighted several women claimin ..read more

The Biden administration and the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center celebrated this year’s Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month with the theme “Bridging Histories, Shaping Our Futures.” The joint motif serves as a tribute to the interconnectedness of histories that make up the American story.  “The 2024 theme is an homage to our ancestors and invites all Americans to delve into the legacies, triumphs, and challenges that have shaped AA and NHPI communities,” a statement released by the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islander ..read more

This story is part of the series Expecting worse: Giving birth on a planet in crisis, a collaboration between Grist, Vox, and The 19th that investigates how climate change impacts reproductive health — from menstruation to conception to birth.  On their very first date, Kirsti and Justin Mahon talked about wanting kids. They met on a dating app in 2016, nine months after Kirsti moved from Texas to Florida. Almost immediately, they fell in love.  A little over two years later, they got married. Six months after that, they started trying for a baby. To their surprise, they got pregnant ..read more

When Emma Burns, then a 19-year-old college student in Flagstaff, Arizona, found out she was pregnant with twins, she felt scared and alone.  Abortion wasn’t openly discussed in the rural community where she grew up, where the sole clinic provided abortions just one day a week. Arizona’s mandatory 24-hour waiting period required two separate visits. Still, Burns was ultimately able to obtain a medication abortion, a decision she said saved her life.  Now, Burns shares her experience as she gathers signatures for a proposed ballot measure that would enshrine a right to abortion in Ari ..read more

Michigan State University. Oxford High School in Michigan. Topps Supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Just-In-Time bowling alley and Schemengees Bar & Grille Restaurant in Lewiston, Maine. Isotopes Park in Albuquerque, New Mexico.  These are the sites of some of the most notorious mass shootings in America in the past two years. And in their aftermath, state lawmakers took action. Extreme risk protection order laws. Safe storage child protection mandates. Waiting periods for the purchase of firearms.  What also makes these states notable in their actions to curtail the American gun ..read more