What? You’re calling my kid a simp? | CNN

Editor’s note: After we first published this story in 2021, we received reader feedback about the term’s derivation and use in pop culture. We updated the story to reflect those additional details.



CNN
 — 

Shannon was used to her socially awkward son being bullied by other boys at the private school he attends.

But when she picked him up from school and he told her he was being called a “simp,” Shannon, who’s only using her first name to protect her son’s identity, didn’t know what to think.

“He’s telling me this and I’m driving and I’m trying to make sense of it,” she said. “I’d never heard the word.”

“He told me, ‘It basically means that I’m just being nice to girls because I like them,’” she said. “I was like, wait, my kid is being picked on for being nice to girls?”

Her son had told her he had recently been put in the “friend zone” by one of the girls, who made it clear she wasn’t interested in dating him. They had continued to be friendly.

“You do all these things as a parent to raise your kid right, to be nice to everyone, especially kids without many friends,” Shannon said. “And you never think that by making your kid the nice one you could be making them a target for bullies.”

Many parents might be unfamiliar with the word “simp,” but chances are your tween or teen has used or at least heard the term.

Simp hashtags are rampant on TikTok. Instagram has more 600,000 posts tagged #simp, and there are Facebook groups devoted to simps and simping. (It can be a verb, too.)

Depending on whom you talk to, there is some debate on the word’s usage and how much (if at all) it has evolved over time. While simp’s origins are connected to the word “simpleton,” its current usage is linked to West Coast American rappers such as Too Short, who first used it in the mid-1980s in a way that denotes the opposite of “pimp” in his song “Pimpology.”

In 1992, Boyz II Men released a song called “Sympin’ Ain’t Easy,” offering a different spelling of the word and evoking frustrated yearning.

Urban Dictionary’s top definition of a simp is “someone who does way too much for a person they like.” Other definitions on the crowdsourced online dictionary include “a guy that is overly desperate for women, especially if she is a bad person, or has expressed her disinterest in him whom which he continues to obsess over.”

“‘Simp’ is slang for a person (typically a man) who is desperate for the attention and affection of someone else (typically a woman),” said Connor Howlett, then a digital strategist in New York City in 2021, in an email to CNN.

“Think the energy of puppy dog eyes but manifested in a romantic, human form,” Howlett said. “It’s used in an insulting manner. Though typically playful, there are definitely undertones of toxic masculinity since it’s related to showing too much emotion.”

Karen McClung first encountered the word in group chats she closely monitors with her daughter and son.

“I saw the word and quickly looked it up,” McClung said. “I asked my kids what they thought it meant and my son said, ‘It’s basically if you had $1,000 and you could do anything with it, you’d use it to get the attention of a girl — then everyone would make fun of you.”

“I blocked the thread,” she said.

McClung said her son wasn’t being called a simp in the thread, but she said she’s “curious to see how it impacts my son because he’s very chivalrous by nature.”

A word that emerged into Generation Z vernacular from social media usage, as simp is thought to have arrived, is bound to get muddled and continue to evolve.

And simp can have different contexts depending on the age group using it, said Laura Capinas, a clinical social worker in Sonoma County, California.

“Depending on if it’s a middle schooler or a high schooler using it, it could be different,” she said, and it’s not just boys talking about simps and simping either.

“Girls in high school sometimes throw out the term to their high school girlfriends,” Capinas said. “Some kids I’ve talked to have said it’s not a derogatory term. It’s sort of like teasing someone, like ‘You’ve left us to go hang out with your friends, you’re simping us.’”

“If you have someone saying it who’s used to being a bully, it will be received as a bully comment,” she said.

She hasn’t heard kids or parents in her practice be overly concerned about the word, but Capinas often hears kids use it in describing their day or their peer groups.

Myra Fortson said she has discussed the word with her daughter and thinks such words often “spread more quickly than their meaning.”

“Kids will also own their language by refusing to go back to its original meaning,” said the mother of three. “They will say things like, ‘Maybe that’s where it comes from, but it doesn’t mean that anymore.’ And they keep using the term the way they want.”

One way to think of a simp, said Sean Davis, a marriage and family therapist in California, is “simply someone who is ahead of their time.”

“Though it hurts in the moment, in the big picture, a boy who is called a ‘simp’ can wear it as a badge of honor,” Davis said.

“Today’s boys are being raised in the middle of the biggest redefinition of male gender roles in recent history,” Davis said. “Should I be kind and sensitive or distant and aloof when trying to win a partner over?”

As with all bullying, teens and tweens should first tell their parents or a trusted adult who may be able to intervene on their behalf, he said. “Otherwise, simply owning it and refusing to be ashamed can help.”

It’s important for parents to remember that there have always been slang terms to navigate for kids and parents alike, Capinas said, and the goal is to “make sure it’s being received in a playful manner and used playfully.”

“I think we are always looking to stop our kids from being hurt,” she said. “We don’t like language that’s slang and has potential for negative connotation.”

One tactic she teaches kids in her therapy sessions, she said, is the “humor tool.”

“It’s comic relief. You practice not putting down the other person, you put down the situation,” she said.

If someone is being called out for always “simping the girls,” Capinas said, “he could turn it around and say, ‘It’s tough being the lone soldier simp nice guy, who wants to join me?’”

“You can turn it and make it into comedy,” she said.

Davis pointed to a similar approach.

“Telling the bully, ‘That’s right,’ while holding your head up high and walking away can help, as bullies usually give up if they don’t succeed in tearing the other person down,” he said. “And you can tell yourself that being bullied is simply the price a revolutionary has to pay for standing up for what’s right.”

Shannon said her son’s therapist advised similar tactics, but the boy said he only comes up with the perfect retort three hours later.

“It’s just been really heartbreaking, especially because I know a lot of these boys bullying him. He’s been at the school since second grade,” Shannon said. “If their moms knew, they’d be horrified. But my son doesn’t want me to tell them because it will just get worse.”

This story was originally published in February 2021 and has been updated.

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Nearly two years after Texas’ six-week abortion ban, more infants are dying | CNN



CNN
 — 

Texas’ abortion restrictions – some of the strictest in the country – may be fueling a sudden spike in infant mortality as women are forced to carry nonviable pregnancies to term.

Some 2,200 infants died in Texas in 2022 – an increase of 227 deaths, or 11.5%, over the previous year, according to preliminary infant mortality data CNN obtained through a public records request. Infant deaths caused by severe genetic and birth defects rose by 21.6%. That spike reversed a nearly decade-long decline. Between 2014 and 2021, infant deaths had fallen by nearly 15%.

In 2021, Texas banned abortions beyond six weeks of pregnancy. When the Supreme Court overturned federal abortion rights the following summer, a trigger law in the state banned all abortions other than those intended to protect the life of the mother.

The increase in deaths could partly be explained by the fact that more babies are being born in Texas. One recent report found that in the final nine months of 2022, the state saw nearly 10,000 more births than expected prior to its abortion ban – an estimated 3% increase.

But multiple obstetrician-gynecologists who focus on high-risk pregnancies told CNN that Texas’ strict abortion laws likely contributed to the uptick in infant deaths.

“We all knew the infant mortality rate would go up, because many of these terminations were for pregnancies that don’t turn into healthy normal kids,” said Dr. Erika Werner, the chair of obstetrics and gynecology at Tufts Medical Center. “It’s exactly what we all were concerned about.”

The issue of forcing women to carry out terminal and often high-risk pregnancies is at the core of a lawsuit filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights, with several women – who suffered difficult pregnancies or infant deaths shortly after giving birth – testifying in Travis County court this week.

Prior to the recent abortion restrictions, Texas banned the procedure after 20 weeks. This law gave parents more time to learn crucial information about a fetus’s brain formation and organ development, which doctors begin to test for at around 15 weeks.

Samantha Casiano, a plaintiff in the suit filed against Texas, wished she’d had more time to make the decision.

“If I was able to get the abortion with that time, I think it would have meant a lot to me because my daughter wouldn’t have suffered,” Casiano said.

When Casiano was 20 weeks pregnant, a routine scan came back with devastating news: Her baby would be stillborn or die shortly after birth.

The fetus had anencephaly, a rare birth defect that keeps the brain and skull from developing during pregnancy. Babies with this condition are often stillborn, though they sometimes live a few hours or days. Many women around the country who face the prospect choose abortion, two obstetrician-gynecologists told CNN.

But Casiano lived in Texas, where state legislators had recently banned most abortions after six weeks of pregnancy. She couldn’t afford to travel out of the state for the procedure.

“You have no options. You will have to go through with your pregnancy,” Casiano’s doctor told her, she claimed in the lawsuit.

In March, Casiano gave birth to her daughter Halo. After gasping for air for four hours, the baby died, Casiano said during her testimony on Wednesday.

“All she could do was fight to try to get air. I had to watch my daughter go from being pink to red to purple. From being warm to cold,” said Casiano. “I just kept telling myself and my baby that I’m so sorry that this had to happen to you.”

Casiano and 14 others – including two doctors – are plaintiffs in the lawsuit. They allege the abortion ban has denied them or their patients access to necessary obstetrical care. The plaintiffs are asking the courts to clarify when doctors can make medical exceptions to the state’s ban.

Casiano and two other plaintiffs testified Wednesday about hoping to deliver healthy babies but instead learning their lives or pregnancies were in danger.

 Plaintiffs Anna Zargarian, Lauren Miller, Lauren Hall, and Amanda Zurawski at the Texas State Capitol after filing a lawsuit on behalf of Texans harmed by the state's abortion ban on March 7 in Austin, Texas.

“This was just supposed to be a scan day,” Casiano told the court. “It escalated to me finding out my daughter was going to die.”

Lawyers representing the state argued Wednesday that the plaintiffs’ doctors were to blame, saying they misinterpreted the law and failed to provide adequate care for such high-risk pregnancies.

“Plaintiffs will not and cannot provide any evidence of any medical provider in the state of Texas being prosecuted or otherwise penalized for performance of an abortion using the emergency medical exemption,” a lawyer said during the state’s opening statement.

Kylie Beaton, another plaintiff, also had to watch her baby die. Beaton, who didn’t testify this week, learned during a 20-week scan that something was wrong with her baby’s brain, according to the suit.

The doctor diagnosed the fetus with alobar holoprosencephaly, a condition where the two hemispheres of the brain don’t properly divide. Babies with this condition are often stillborn or die soon after birth.

Beaton’s doctor told her he couldn’t provide an abortion unless she was severely ill, or the fetus’s heart stopped. Beaton and her husband sought to obtain an abortion out of state. However, the fetus’s head was enlarged due to its condition, and the only clinic that would perform an abortion charged up to $15,000. Beaton and her husband couldn’t afford it.

Instead, Beaton gave birth to a son she named Grant. The baby cried constantly, wouldn’t eat, and couldn’t be held upright for fear it would put too much pressure on his head, according to the suit. Four days later, Grant died.

Amanda Zurawski of Austin, Texas, center, is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit.

Experts say that abortion bans in states like Texas lead to increased risk for both babies and mothers.

Maternal mortality has long been a top concern for doctors and health-rights activists. Even before the Supreme Court decision, the United States had the highest maternal mortality rate among wealthy nations, one study found.

Amanda Zurawski, the lawsuit’s lead plaintiff, testified Wednesday that her water broke 18 weeks into her pregnancy, putting her at high risk for a life-threatening infection. Zurawski’s baby likely wouldn’t survive.

But the fetus still had a heartbeat, and so doctors said they were unable to terminate the pregnancy. She received an emergency abortion only after her condition worsened and she went into septic shock.

Zurawski described during Wednesday’s hearing how her family visited the hospital, fearing it would be the last time they would see her. Zurawski has argued that had she been able to obtain an abortion, her life wouldn’t have been in jeopardy in the same way.

“I blame the people who support these bans,” Zurawski said.

Zurawski previously said the language in Texas’ abortion laws is “incredibly vague, and it leaves doctors grappling with what they can and cannot do, what health care they can and cannot provide.”

Pregnancy is dangerous, and forcing a woman to carry a non-viable pregnancy to term is unnecessarily risky when it’s clear the baby will not survive, argued Dr. Mae-Lan Winchester, an Ohio maternal-fetal medicine specialist.

“Pregnancy is one of the most dangerous things a person will ever go through,” Winchester said. “Putting yourself through that risk without any benefit of taking a baby home at the end, it’s … risking maternal morbidity and mortality for nothing.”

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A 45-year-old got pregnant in a state with a ban on abortions. She flew across the country to get one | CNN



CNN
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When 45-year-old Victoria realized she was five weeks late and the lines showed as positive on two pregnancy tests, the New Orleans resident dreamed up a plan to get an abortion.

Traveling out of state was the only abortion option for Victoria, who asked CNN to withhold her last name out of fear of backlash against her and her family. Louisiana is one of several states that have essentially banned all abortions.

“It was probably one of the hardest things I’ve had to go through, from the moment of discovering that I was pregnant at age 45 to actually having to have to take time off work, travel across the country, do a meeting with a doctor, and then take the pills and then skedaddle back home and then go to work like nothing had happened,” Victoria told CNN of her experience earlier this year.

Victoria’s story about the distance she traveled and the hardships she endured to get an abortion reflects a wider American reality, where women seeking the procedure must navigate through a patchwork of states with varying levels of access.

The average travel time to an abortion facility more than tripled, from less than 30 minutes to more than an hour and a half, after the US Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, according to a November study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. And for women in Texas and Louisiana, average travel times to the nearest abortion facility were seven hours longer – almost a full workday in travel time to get an abortion.

Victoria says she was grateful she could drop everything and afford to spend $1,000 for the procedure, including same-week airfare with connections both ways and appointment and medication fees.

“It was so hard for me wrap my head around the fact that I was able to do this, but I’m one of the lucky ones and that there are so many women who are in much tighter positions,” Victoria said. “And, God, what are they going to do?”

Victoria says plans materialized quickly once she knew which states seemed more accessible.

She researched the parameters for abortion in a state, how long she would have to take off work, travel options and how soon she could get an appointment. She found abortionfinder.org to be a helpful and reliable source, she says.

“Because the situation is so fluid, it changes from day to day, that was really of paramount importance for me to be able to have a reliable source of information,” she said.

Driving to a neighboring state was not an option, as every state adjoining Louisiana has a similarly restrictive law that bans virtually all abortions. Victoria says she considered close states, like Florida, but she ultimately dismissed them because available appointments were farther out.

“Once I saw that Oregon was so, so protective of reproductive rights, I said, ‘Why would I think about going anywhere else?’” she said. “The second I got the definitive pregnancy result, I was like, ‘OK, let’s book a flight to Oregon. When can we do this?’”

She reached out to a friend from college and asked if she could stay with her, detailing the reason for her visit. She then made an appointment and booked a flight for that week, she says.

The provider sent instructions, including that the patient must be in Oregon for the telehealth appointment, according to documents provided to CNN. They contacted her within an hour of making the appointment to make sure she had proof of travel documents because she had made it from Louisiana, where the procedure is illegal.

Victoria planned to take a day off to fly across the country and work remotely for two days, which fits her hybrid work situation. She says she was grateful to have a supportive, female boss who showed understanding for why she had to take the unexpected time off.

“She was the only person I actually kind of broke down and cried for,” Victoria said. “I think it’s because I had been holding it back all week, and telling her was sort of the last thing that I needed to get in place before I could do everything.”

Victoria says the hardest part of her experience was telling her mother because she didn’t know how her mom would feel about it. Victoria and her siblings were raised Catholic. Her father had a strong faith and her mother was a non-practicing Catholic, her mother says. Victoria’s mom asked not to be named for privacy reasons.

Victoria’s mother says she wanted to support her daughter, even if she does not agree with what her daughter did. Victoria coming to her with tickets purchased and a full plan made it easy for her mother to support her, the mother says.

“I agreed to drive her to the airport and that that was the only thing I could do because this would be a real game-changing thing in her life,” her mother said. “I wanted to support what she wanted to do because she has supported me on several family crises. I just wanted to do it because I love her. “

Victoria said she appreciated her mom for being supportive in a way she didn’t expect. They talked about some of her mother’s friends who had abortions throughout the years, both say. Victoria’s mother even told her about when she tried to get her tubes tied, but her husband found out and she did not pursue it.

“I feel like, if anything, it’s made our relationship stronger,” Victoria said. “We already had a fantastically strong relationship, though. So, it’s another rock in the wall.”

After boarding early on a Wednesday in March, Victoria traveled for eight hours on two flights and landed in Portland, Oregon.

Victoria reunited with her friend, and they did the things that old friends do, from staying up late talking about college memories to talking about why Victoria was there. They both described the situation as surreal.

“The vast majority of reproductive conversations I have with friends at this point are people who are trying desperately to get pregnant,” said her friend, Emily, who asked that CNN not use her last name to keep Victoria’s privacy. “The sort of irony is that there could still be an unplanned pregnancy and it would still be just as devastating as it would have been when we were in our teens and twenties was kind of a shock to me.”

Emily, who has been friends with Victoria for about 25 years, says it took so little effort for her to drive to the airport and let her friend stay with her.

“I felt honored that she trusted me,” she said. “I was really proud of Victoria. I was impressed that she had taken this in stride and that she had reached out to someone she knew – I think a lot of people would have been ashamed or hidden it.”

After the telehealth appointment the next day, Victoria received an overnight package.

Victoria took two medications as part of a medication abortion. She took mifepristone at her friend’s home. The next day she took misoprostol before boarding her flight home – she was careful not to take them in her home state, where it’s illegal.

Misoprostol, taken after mifepristone, is a common combination prescribed for a medication abortion.

“It was like a heavy period,” she said. “I took some Aleve, had to get some extra jumbo pads, and I bled a lot on the flights home, but it was fine.”

Physically, she felt fine – it was more of what was happening psychologically that she noticed, she says.

“I had this feeling that I should be having some kind of deep, psychological moment of reckoning or something, but I didn’t really feel that,” Victoria said of the experience. “I’ve never wanted to have a kid. I wasn’t torn about this decision.”

When Victoria learned she was pregnant, a big part of the shock came from not thinking she could get pregnant at age 45, she says.

“You hear so much culturally out there about you’re in your forties, are told you’re too old to get pregnant and carry a child to term,” she said. “I feel like I had sort of a false sense of security.”

Victoria joked that she’s “careening toward menopause,” but she says she has not been diagnosed as perimenopausal.

Her pregnancy news came several months after she was treated for a uterine fibroid, a benign growth, in July 2022, according to medical records. Victoria also tested positive for a PALB2 gene mutation, which can lead to an increased chance of breast cancer, according to a study in the New England Journal of Medicine. She underwent a preventative double mastectomy and reconstruction earlier in 2022, according to medical records provided to CNN.

She says she got an excellent standard of care around her surgeries, but it felt dissonant with her state’s laws around abortion.

“It felt so surreal to get this really high standard of care around my secondary sexual characteristics, but then to have that freeze, slam shut when it comes to reproductive health, it just felt abrupt,” she said.

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Black or ‘Other’? Doctors may be relying on race to make decisions about your health | CNN

Editor’s Note: CNN’s “History Refocused” series features surprising and personal stories from America’s past to bring depth to conflicts still raging today.



CNN
 — 

When she first learned about race correction, Naomi Nkinsi was one of five Black medical students in her class at the University of Washington.

Nkinsi remembers the professor talking about an equation doctors use to measure kidney function. The professor said eGFR equations adjust for several variables, including the patient’s age, sex and race. When it comes to race, doctors have only two options: Black or “Other.”

Nkinsi was dumbfounded.

“It was really shocking to me,” says Nkinsi, now a third-year medical and masters of public health student, “to come into school and see that not only is there interpersonal racism between patients and physicians … there’s actually racism built into the very algorithms that we use.”

At the heart of a controversy brewing in America’s hospitals is a simple belief, medical students say: Math shouldn’t be racist.

The argument over race correction has raised questions about the scientific data doctors rely on to treat people of color. It’s attracted the attention of Congress and led to a big lawsuit against the NFL.

What happens next could affect how millions of Americans are treated.

Carolyn Roberts, a historian of medicine and science at Yale University, says slavery and the American medical system were in a codependent relationship for much of the 19th century and well into the 20th.

“They relied on one another to thrive,” Roberts says.

It was common to test experimental treatments first on Black people so they could be given to White people once proven safe. But when the goal was justifying slavery, doctors published articles alleging substantive physical differences between White and Black bodies — like Dr. Samuel Cartwright’s claim in 1851 that Black people have weaker lungs, which is why grueling work in the fields was essential (his words) to their progress.

The effects of Cartwright’s falsehood, and others like it, linger today.

In 2016, researchers asked White medical students and residents about 15 alleged differences between Black and White bodies. Forty percent of first-year medical students and 25% of residents said they believed Black people have thicker skin, and 7% of all students and residents surveyed said Black people have less sensitive nerve endings. The doctors-in-training who believed these myths — and they are myths — were less likely to prescribe adequate pain medication to Black patients.

To fight this kind of bias, hospitals urge doctors to rely on objective measures of health. Scientific equations tell physicians everything from how well your kidneys are working to whether or not you should have a natural birth after a C-section. They predict your risk of dying during heart surgery, evaluate brain damage and measure your lung capacity.

But what if these equations are also racially biased?

Race correction is the use of a patient’s race in a scientific equation that can influence how they are treated. In other words, some diagnostic algorithms and risk predictor tools adjust or “correct” their results based on a person’s race.

The New England Journal of Medicine article “Hidden in Plain Sight” includes a partial list of 13 medical equations that use race correction. Take the Vaginal Birth After Cesarean calculator, for example. Doctors use this calculator to predict the likelihood of a successful vaginal delivery after a prior C-section. If you are Black or Hispanic, your score is adjusted to show a lower chance of success. That means your doctor is more likely to encourage another C-section, which could put you at risk for blood loss, infection and a longer recovery period.

Cartwright, the racist doctor from the 1800s, also developed his own version of a tool called the spirometer to measure lung capacity. Doctors still use spirometers today, and most include a race correction for Black patients to account for their supposedly shallower breaths.

Turns out, second-year medical student Carina Seah wryly told CNN, math is as racist as the people who make it.

The biggest problem with using race in medicine? Race isn’t a biological category. It’s a social one.

“It’s based on this idea that human beings are naturally divided into these big groups called races,” says Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, who has made challenging race correction in medicine her life’s work. “But that’s not what race is. Race is a completely invented social category. The very idea that human beings are divided into races is a made-up idea.”

Ancestry is biological. Where we come from — or more accurately, who we come from — impacts our DNA. But a patient’s skin color isn’t always an accurate reflection of their ancestry.

Look at Tiger Woods, Roberts says. Woods coined the term “Cablinasian” to describe his mix of Caucasian, Black, American Indian and Asian ancestries. But to many Americans, he’s Black.

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“You can be half Black and half White in this country and you are Black,” says Seah, who is getting her medical degree and a PhD in genetics and genomics at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. “You can be a quarter Black in this country — if you have dark skin, you are Black.”

So it can be misleading, Seah says, even dangerous, for doctors to judge a patient’s ancestry by glancing at their skin. A patient with a White mother and Black father could have a genetic mutation that typically presents in patients of European ancestry, Seah says, but a doctor may not think to test for it if they only see Black skin.

“You have to ask, how Black is Black enough?” Nkinsi asks. And there’s another problem, she says, with using a social construct like race in medicine. “It also puts the blame on the patient, and it puts the blame on the race itself. Like being Black is inherently the cause of these diseases.”

Naomi Nkinsi is a third-year medical and masters of public health student at the University of Washington in Seattle. She has been advocating for the removal of race correction in medicine.

After she learned about the eGFR equation in 2018, Nkinsi began asking questions about race correction. She wasn’t alone — on social media she found other students struggling with the use of race in medicine. In the spring of 2020, following a first-year physiology lecture, Seah joined the conversation. But the medical profession is nothing if not hierarchical; Nkinsi and Seah say students are encouraged to defer to doctors who have been practicing for decades.

Then on May 25, 2020, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.

His death and the growing momentum around Black Lives Matter helped ignite what Dr. Darshali A. Vyas calls an “overdue reckoning” in the medical community around race and race correction. A few institutions had already taken steps to remove race from the eGFR equation. Students across the country demanded more, and hospitals began to listen.

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Four days after Floyd’s death, the University of Washington announced it was removing race correction from the eGFR equation. In June, the Boston-based hospital system Mass General Brigham where Vyas is a second-year Internal Medicine resident followed suit. Seah and a fellow student at Mount Sinai, Paloma Orozco Scott, started an online petition and collected over 1600 signatures asking their hospital to do the same.

Studies show removing race from the eGFR equation will change how patients at those hospitals are treated. Researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Penn Medicine estimated up to one in every three Black patients with kidney disease would have been reclassified if the race multiplier wasn’t applied in earlier calculations, with a quarter going from stage 3 to stage 4 CKD (Chronic Kidney Disease).

That reclassification is good and bad, says Dr. Neil Powe, chief of medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Black patients newly diagnosed with kidney disease will be able to see specialists who can devise better treatment plans. And more patients will be placed on kidney transplant lists.

On the flip side, Powe says, more African Americans diagnosed with kidney disease means fewer who are eligible to donate kidneys, when there’s already a shortage. And a kidney disease diagnosis can change everything from a patient’s diabetes medication to their life insurance costs.

Dr. Neil Powe says by simply removing race from the eGFR equations,

Powe worries simply eliminating race from these equations is a knee-jerk response — one that may exacerbate health disparities instead of solve them. For too long, Powe says, doctors had to fight for diversity in medical studies.

The most recent eGFR equation, known as the CKD-EPI equation, was developed using data pooled from 26 studies, which included almost 3,000 patients who self-identified as Black. Researchers found the equation they were developing was more accurate for Black patients when it was adjusted by a factor of about 1.2. They didn’t determine exactly what was causing the difference in Black patients, but their conclusion is supported by other research that links Black race and African ancestry with higher levels of creatinine, a waste product filtered by the kidneys.

Put simply: In the eGFR equation, researchers used race as a substitute for an unknown factor because they think that factor is more common in people of African descent.

Last August, Vyas co-authored the “Hidden in Plain Sight” article about race correction. Vyas says most of the equations she wrote about were developed in a similar way to the eGFR formula: Researchers found Black people were more or less likely to have certain outcomes and decided race was worth including in the final equation, often without knowing the real cause of the link.

“When you go back to the original studies that validated (these equations), a lot of them did not provide any sort of rationale for why they include race, which I think is appalling.” That’s what’s most concerning, Vyas says – “how willing we are to believe that race is relevant in these ways.”

Vyas is clear she isn’t calling for race-blind medicine. Physicians cannot ignore structural racism, she says, and the impact it has on patients’ health.

Powe has been studying the racial disparities in kidney disease for more than 30 years. He can spout the statistics easily: Black people are three times more likely to suffer from kidney failure, and make up more than 35% of patients on dialysis in the US. The eGFR equation, he says, did not cause these disparities — they existed long before the formula.

“We want to cure disparities, let’s go after the things that really matter, some of which may be racist,” he says. “But to put all our stock and think that the equation is causing this is just wrong because it didn’t create those.”

In discussions about removing race correction, Powe likes to pose a question: Instead of normalizing to the “Other” group in the eGFR equation, as many of these hospitals are doing, why don’t we give everyone the value assigned to Black people? By ignoring the differences researchers saw, he says, “You’re taking the data on African Americans, and you’re throwing it in the trash.”

Powe is co-chair of a joint task force set up by the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society of Nephrology to look at the use of race in eGFR equations. The leaders of both organizations have publicly stated race should not be included in equations used to estimate kidney function. On April 9, the task force released an interim report that outlined the challenges in identifying and implementing a new equation that’s representative of all groups. The group is expected to issue its final recommendations for hospitals this summer.

Race correction is used to assess the kidneys and the lungs. What about the brain?

In 2013, the NFL settled a class-action lawsuit brought by thousands of former players and their families that accused the league of concealing what it knew about the dangers of concussions. The NFL agreed to pay $765 million, without admitting fault, to fund medical exams and compensate players for concussion-related health issues, among other things. Then in 2020, two retired players sued the NFL for allegedly discriminating against Black players who submitted claims in that settlement.

01 race correction Kevin Henry Najeh Davenport SPLIT

The players, Najeh Davenport and Kevin Henry, said the NFL race-corrected their neurological exams, which prevented them from being compensated.

According to court documents, former NFL players being evaluated for neurocognitive impairment were assumed to have started with worse cognitive function if they were Black. So if a Black player and a White player received the exact same scores on a battery of thinking and memory tests, the Black player would appear to have suffered less impairment. And therefore, the lawsuit stated, would be less likely to qualify for a payout.

Race correction is common in neuropsychology using something called Heaton norms, says Katherine Possin, an associate professor at the University of California San Francisco. Heaton norms are essentially benchmark average scores on cognitive tests.

Here’s how it works: To measure the impact of a concussion (or multiple concussions over time), doctors compare how well the patient’s brain works now to how well it worked before.

“The best way to get that baseline was to test you 10 years ago, but that’s not something we obviously have for many people,” Possin says. So doctors estimate your “before” abilities using an average score from a group of healthy individuals, and adjust that score for demographic factors known to affect brain function, like your age.

Heaton norms adjust for race, Possin says, because race has been linked in studies to lower cognitive scores. To be clear, that’s not because of any biological differences in Black and White brains, she says; it’s because of social factors like education and poverty that can impact cognitive development. And this is where the big problem lies.

In early March, a judge in Pennsylvania dismissed the players’ lawsuit and ordered a mediator to address concerns about how race correction was being used. In a statement to CNN, the NFL said there is no merit to the players’ claim of discrimination, but it is committed to helping find alternative testing techniques that do not employ race-based norms.

The NFL case, Possin wrote in JAMA, has “exposed a major weakness in the field of neuropsychology: the use of race-adjusted norms as a crude proxy for lifelong social experience.”

This happens in nearly every field of medicine. Race is not only used as a poor substitute for genetics and ancestry, it’s used as a substitute for access to health care, or lifestyle factors like diet and exercise, socioeconomic status and education. It’s no secret that racial disparities exist in all of these. But there’s a danger in using race to talk about them, Yale historian Carolyn Roberts says.

We know, for example, that Black Americans have been disproportionally affected by Covid-19. But it’s not because Black bodies respond differently to the virus. It’s because, as Dr. Anthony Fauci has noted, a disproportionate number of Black people have jobs that put them at higher risk and have less access to quality health care. “What are we making scientific and biological when it actually isn’t?” Roberts asks.

Vyas says using race as a proxy for these disparities in clinical algorithms can also create a vicious cycle.

“There’s a risk there, we argue, of simply building these into the system and almost accepting them as fact instead of focusing on really addressing the root causes,” Vyas says. “If we systematize these existing disparities … we risk ensuring that these trends will simply continue.”

Nearly everyone on both sides of the race correction controversy agrees that race isn’t an accurate, biological measure. Yet doctors and researchers continue to use it as a substitute. Math shouldn’t be racist, Nkinsi says, and it shouldn’t be lazy.

“We’re saying that we know that this race-based medicine is wrong, but we’re going to keep doing it because we simply don’t have the will or the imagination or the creativity to think of something better,” Nkinsi says. “That is a slap in the face.”

Shortly after Vyas’ article published in The New England Journal of Medicine, the House Ways and Means Committee sent letters to several professional medical societies requesting information on the misuse of race in clinical algorithms. In response to the lawmakers’ request, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is also gathering information on the use of race-based algorithms in medicine. Recently, a note appeared on the Maternal Fetal Medicine Units Network’s website for the Vaginal Birth After Cesarean equation — a new calculator that doesn’t include race and ethnicity is being developed.

Dorothy Roberts is excited to see change on the horizon. But she’s also a bit frustrated. The harm caused by race correction is something she’s been trying to tell doctors about for years.

“I’ve taught so many audiences about the meaning of race and the history of racism in America and the audiences I get the most resistance from are doctors,” Roberts says. “They’re offended that there would be any suggestion that what they do is racist.”

Nkinsi and Seah both encountered opposition from colleagues in their fight to change the eGFR equation. Several doctors interviewed for this story argued the change in a race-corrected scores is so small, it wouldn’t change clinical decisions.

If that’s the case, Vyas wonders, why include race at all?

“It all comes from the desire for one to dominate another group and justify it,” says Roberts. “In the past, it was slavery, but the same kinds of justifications work today to explain away all the continued racial inequality that we see in America… It is mass incarceration. It’s huge gaps in health. It’s huge differences in income and wealth.”

It’s easier, she says, to believe these are innate biological differences than to address the structural racism that caused them.



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Texas woman almost dies because she couldn’t get an abortion | CNN



CNN
 — 

Another woman has come forward with the harrowing details of how the Supreme Court’s decision four months ago to overturn Roe v. Wade put her life in danger.

CNN has told the stories of several women – including one from Houston, one from central Texas and one from Cleveland – and what they had to do to obtain medically necessary abortions.

Now, a woman from Austin, Texas, has come forward because she nearly died when she couldn’t get a timely abortion.

This is her story.

Amanda Eid and Josh Zurawski, both now 35, met in 1991 at Aldersgate Academy preschool in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and dated in high school.

“Josh always tells me he’s been in love with me since we were 4 years old,” Amanda said.

Three years ago, they married in Austin, Texas, where they both work in high-tech jobs.

They tried to have a family but failed. Amanda had fertility treatments for a year and a half and finally became pregnant.

“Very excited to share that Baby Zurawski is expected in late January,” Amanda shared on Instagram in July. The post included a picture of her and her husband in “Mama” and “Dad” hats, Amanda holding a strip of ultrasound photos of their baby girl.

“The fact that we were pregnant at all was a miracle, and we were beside ourselves with happiness,” she said.

But then, 18 weeks – just four months – into her pregnancy, Amanda’s water broke.

The amniotic fluid that her baby depended upon was leaking out. She says her doctor told her the baby would not survive.

“We found out that we were going to lose our baby,” Amanda said. “My cervix was dilating fully 22 weeks prematurely, and I was inevitably going to miscarry.”

She and Josh begged the doctor to see if there was any way to save the baby.

“I just kept asking, ‘isn’t there anything we can do?’ And the answer was ‘no,’ ” Amanda said.

When a woman’s water breaks, she’s at high risk for a life-threatening infection. While Amanda and Josh’s baby – they named her Willow – was sure to die, she still had a heartbeat, and so doctors said that under Texas law, they were unable to terminate the pregnancy.

“My doctor said, ‘Well, right now we just have to wait, because we can’t induce labor, even though you’re 100% for sure going to lose your baby,’ ” Amanda said. “[The doctors] were unable to do their own jobs because of the way that the laws are written in Texas.”

Texas law allows for abortion if the mother “has a life-threatening physical condition aggravated, caused by, or arising from a pregnancy that places the female at risk of death or poses a serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function.”

But Texas lawmakers haven’t spelled out exactly what that means, and a doctor found to be in violation of the law can face loss of their medical license and a possible life sentence in prison.

“They’re extremely vague,” said Katie Keith, director of the Health Policy and Law Initiative at Georgetown University Law Center. “They don’t spell out exactly the situations when an abortion can be provided.”

In September, CNN reached out to 28 Texas legislators who sponsored anti-abortion legislation, asking them for their response to CNN stories about the woman in Houston and the woman in central Texas.

Only one legislator responded.

“Like any other law, there are unintended consequences. We do not want to see any unintended consequences; if we do, it is our responsibility as legislators to fix those flaws,” wrote state Sen. Eddie Lucio, who will be leaving the Senate at the end of the year.

The Zurawskis participated in an ad for Beto O’Rourke’s unsuccessful Texas gubernatorial campaign.

After her water broke, Amanda’s doctors sent her home and told her to watch for signs of infection, and that only when she was “considered sick enough that my life was at risk” would they terminate the pregnancy, Amanda said.

“My doctor said it could take hours, it could take days, it could take weeks,” she remembers.

Once they heard “hours,” they decided there was no time to travel to another state for an abortion.

“The nearest ‘sanctuary’ state is at least an eight-hour drive,” Amanda wrote in an online essay on The Meteor. “Developing sepsis – which can kill quickly – in a car in the middle of the West Texas desert, or 30,000 feet above the ground, is a death sentence.”

So they waited it out in Texas.

On August 26, three days after her water broke, Amanda found herself shivering in the Texas heat.

“We were having a heat wave, I think it was 105 degrees that day, and I was freezing cold, and I was shaking, my teeth were chattering. I was trying to tell Josh that I didn’t feel good, and my teeth were chattering so hard that I could not even get the sentence out,” she said.

Josh was shocked by his wife’s condition.

“To see in a matter of maybe five minutes, for her to go from a normal temperature to the condition she was in was really, really scary,” he said. “Very quickly, she went downhill very, very fast. She was in a state I’ve never seen her in.”

Josh rushed his wife to the hospital. Her temperature was 102 degrees. She was too weak to walk on her own.

Her temperature went up to 103 degrees. Finally, Amanda was sick enough that the doctors felt legally safe to terminate the pregnancy, she said.

But Amanda was so sick that antibiotics wouldn’t stop the bacterial infection raging through her body. A blood transfusion didn’t cure her, either.

About 12 hours after her pregnancy was terminated, doctors and nurses flooded her room.

“There’s a lot of commotion, and I said, ‘what’s going on?’ and they said, ‘we’re moving you to the ICU,’ and I said, ‘why?’ and they said, ‘you’re developing symptoms of sepsis,’ ” she said.

Sepsis, the body’s extreme response to an infection, is a life-threatening medical emergency.

Amanda’s blood pressure plummeted. Her platelets dropped. She doesn’t remember much from that time.

But Josh does.

“It was really scary to see Amanda crash,” he said. “I was really scared I was going to lose her.”

Family members flew in from across the country because they feared it would be the last time they would see Amanda.

Doctors inserted an intravenous line near her heart to deliver antibiotics and medication to stabilize her blood pressure. Finally, Amanda turned the corner and survived.

But her medical ordeal isn’t over.

Amanda’s uterus suffered scarring from the infection, and she may not be able to have more children. She had a surgery recently to fix the scarring, but it’s unclear whether it will be successful.

That leaves the Zurawskis scared – and furious that they might never have a family because of a Texas law.

“[This] didn’t have to happen,” Amanda said. “That’s what’s so infuriating about all of this, is that we didn’t have to – we shouldn’t have had to – go through all of this trauma.”

The Zurawskis say the politicians who voted for the anti-abortion law call themselves “pro-life” – but they don’t see it that way.

“Amanda almost died. That’s not pro-life. Amanda will have challenges in the future having more kids. That’s not pro-life,” Josh said.

“Nothing about [this] feels pro-life,” his wife added.

In many ways, Amanda feels fortunate. She wonders whether she’d be alive today if it weren’t for her husband, who rushed her to the hospital and made sure she got the best care possible. And they have good jobs with good health insurance and they live in a big city with high quality health care.

“All of these things I had going for me, and still, this was the outcome,” she said.

She and Josh worry about women in rural areas, or poor women, or young, single mothers in states like Texas. What would happen to them, considering what happened to Amanda?

“These barbaric laws prevented her from getting any amount of health care when she needed it, until it was at a life-threatening moment,” Josh said.

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We all need ‘Sushi Tuesdays’: Lessons in understanding and finding a way forward after suicide | CNN

Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know is struggling with mental health, help is available. Dial or text 988 or visit 988lifeline.org for free and confidential support.



CNN
 — 

When Sam Maya, a beloved husband, father, friend, stockbroker and coach, died by suicide 16 years ago, he left a note. He apologized to his wife, Charlotte, for being a burden and telling her and their two sons, then 6 and 8, that he loved them.

In her recent heartbreaking memoir, “Sushi Tuesdays: A Memoir of Love, Loss and Family Resilience,” Charlotte Maya bears witness to Sam’s life, death and the aftermath with a singular purpose: to humanize the face of suicide and help readers develop a fluency in discussing mental health.

She spent nearly a decade writing “Sushi Tuesdays,” beginning with a blog by the same name, an homage to the weekly ritual she created after her husband’s death.

Every Tuesday while her kids were at school, Maya set aside her overwhelming to-do list as a lawyer and widowed single parent. Tuesdays began with a yoga class, then therapy, followed by whatever she needed most: perhaps going back to bed, going on a hike or heading to a solo sushi lunch.

I met Maya in a memoir workshop last year. I have a family history of mental illness and suicide, so I connected with her work and motivation for sharing her story.

In 2021, suicide was the second leading cause of death for Americans ages 10 to 34, the fifth for ages 35 to 54, and the 11th leading cause of death nationwide, claiming the lives of more than 48,000 people, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The suicide rate among men in 2021 was nearly four times higher than the rate of women, according to the CDC. Research supports the assumption that men typically choose more effective and lethal means, such as firearms, to complete suicide, according to Dr. Ashwini Nadkarni, a psychiatrist and researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Additionally, men are less likely to seek treatment for depression due to gendered expectations that equate masculinity with emotional stoicism, Nadkarni said.

Suicide is a national health crisis, Maya told me, but when we hear of such a loss, we often attribute each death to the unique problem the deceased faced, such as financial or legal troubles.

These stressors don’t explain suicide, she said. “Lots of people lose money, and they don’t take their own lives. They figure things out.”

When her husband died, Maya knew he had back pain and was stressed about work and money, but she didn’t think these things added up to being suicidal. In retrospect, she can now spot clues, such as his review of his will shortly before he died.

“I wanted to turn back the clock after Sam died,” she said. “I felt so strongly that if I could get back to that morning, I could have changed everything. It’s hard to reckon with what cannot be undone, to face straight into what I did or didn’t do, where I failed, where Sam failed.”

“Whenever I say that Sam made a mistake, the mistake I mean is that he didn’t ask for help,” Maya said. “It’s hard to say you’re suffering when you’re suffering, so let your loved ones know you are available to help.”

Asking people directly about suicidal thoughts may reduce, rather than increase, suicidal ideation, according to a 2014 review of scholarly literature in the journal Psychological Medicine.

That does require that people look for and notice signs that others may be struggling, such as changes in mood, behavior, appetite or sleep habits or that they are giving away cherished possessions.

The writer has since remarried. The combined family includes Gregory Stratz (from left), Tim Stratz, Jason Maya, Parker (the dog), Charlotte Maya, Danny Maya and Daniel Stratz, here in 2011.

Speaking directly about mental health became a trademark of Maya’s single parenting. She aimed for her boys “to live full and fruitful lives, not defined by their father’s suicide, not limited by their father’s suicide, but also not ignoring their father’s suicide.”

Her sons grieved their dad in their own ways, including denial (one pretended his father was on an extended business trip) and rageful episodes that ended with destroyed Lego sets and tears. Maya mourned with them about the “daddy-shaped space in their hearts” but promised that someday they’d be able to say, “I survived my father’s suicide, and I can do anything.”

“It can be awkward to say yes when people ask to help,” Maya said. “Because I was so shocked and overwhelmed, I just said yes. I recommend that course of action to people. Let people show up and help you.”

The support from Maya’s village was so vast that she wrestled with which of her friends would be fully fledged characters in “Sushi Tuesdays” and which would have cameo appearances.

She dealt with this challenge — and the confusion caused by many friends with names starting with the letter J — by cleverly referring to her friends, collectively, as “The Janes.” Given her background as a lawyer, she thought of them as Jane Doe No. 1, Jane Doe No. 2 and so on.

In the book, readers meet District Attorney Jane who helped with the coroner’s office, Engineer Jane who gets the boys to school each day on time and Prayer Warrior Jane who prays for Maya while she’s “not exactly on speaking terms with God.”

One friend, identified not as a “Jane” but as “Bess” in the narrative, is Katherine Tasheff, a college friend from Rice University. When Sam Maya died, Tasheff was a single mother living on a budget in Brooklyn and couldn’t travel to California to visit. So, she did what she could: She wrote her friend an email. And then another. And another. Morning and night for 365 days following Sam’s death.

The emails were always heartfelt and genuine but often mixed with dark humor. In one, Tasheff wrote, “We did an informal poll on whose husband was most likely to take his own life, and I want you to know that Sam came in last place.”

Almost immediately, Charlotte Maya replied, “Dead last?”

This kind of banter fueled Maya, who told her therapist to “call 911” if she ever lost her sense of humor. Finding moments of levity, she said, helped her hold onto her humanity. “Humor doesn’t cancel out what is devastating,” Maya told me. “Just like gratitude cannot cancel out what is horrifying. What’s important is having the capacity to hold both of those things.”

After her husband's death, Charlotte Maya says moments of levity helped her hold on to her humanity.

Seven years after her husband died, in 2014, Maya felt ready to write about surviving his suicide. Tasheff acted with her signature hadn’t-been-asked swiftness, setting up a blog site for sushituesdays.com within an hour.

By then, Maya had met and married the most eligible widower in her town, now nicknamed Mr. Page 179 because that’s where he shows up in the book. They each brought two sons to the marriage. (Coincidentally, each has a child named Daniel, so they now have two Daniels.)

Maya continues to honor her Tuesdays with therapy and yoga, a hike with a friend, and sometimes a sushi lunch.

She urges everyone — especially single parents and anyone managing anxiety or depression — to carve out a similar weekly ritual, even if it’s just an hour to “treat yourself with the same compassion as you treat your dearest friends.”

The coping mechanisms that Maya relied on in her grief may further explain the gender disparity in suicide rates, according to psychologist Lauren Kerwin.

Men may be less likely to have strong support networks or to engage with them when in stress or emotional pain and may be more likely to use maladaptive coping strategies, such as substance abuse or isolation, Kerwin said.

Seeking social connection and professional help is critical to preventing suicide.

“Now, more than ever, we have a better understanding of the neuroinflammatory basis for depression — the medical framework gives us a model in which to consider depression as a medical condition and one which can be treated,” said Nadkarni, the Boston psychiatrist.

If you see warning signs or are worried about someone who may be struggling, the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention recommends you assume you are the only one who will reach out. Find a time to speak privately and listen. Let people know their life matters to you and ask directly if they are thinking about suicide. Then encourage them to use the national suicide hotline by calling or texting the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, contact their doctor or therapist or seek treatment.

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How the nursing shortage may lead to gaps in sexual assault care | CNN


Missoula, Montana
KFF Health News
 — 

Jacqueline Towarnicki got a text as she finished her day shift at a local clinic. She had a new case, a patient covered in bruises who couldn’t remember how the injuries got there.

Towarnicki’s breath caught, a familiar feeling after four years of working night shifts as a sexual assault nurse examiner in this northwestern Montana city.

“You almost want to curse,” Towarnicki, 38, said. “You’re like, ‘Oh, no, it’s happening.’”

These nights on duty are Towarnicki’s second job. She’s on call once a week and a weekend a month. A survivor may need protection against sexually transmitted infections, medicine to avoid getting pregnant, or evidence collected to prosecute their attacker. Or all the above.

When her phone rings, it’s typically in the middle of the night. Towarnicki tiptoes down the stairs of her home to avoid waking her young son, as her half-asleep husband whispers encouragement into the dark.

Her breath is steady by the time she changes into the clothes she laid out close to her back door before going to bed. She grabs her nurse’s badge and drives to First Step Resource Center, a clinic that offers round-the-clock care for people who have been assaulted.

She wants her patients to know they’re out of danger.

“You meet people in some of their most horrifying, darkest, terrifying times,” Towarnicki said. “Being with them and then seeing who they are when they leave, you don’t get that doing any other job in health care.”

A former travel nurse who lived out of a van for years, Towarnicki is OK with the uncertainty that comes with being a sexual assault nurse examiner.

Most examiners work on-call shifts in addition to full-time jobs. They often work alone and at odd hours. They can collect evidence that could be used in court, are trained to recognize and respond to trauma, and provide care to protect their patients’ bodies from lasting effects of sexual assault.

But their numbers are few.

As many as 80% of U.S. hospitals don’t have sexual assault nurse examiners, often because they either can’t find them or can’t afford them. Nurses struggle to find time for shifts, especially when staffing shortages mean covering long hours. Sexual assault survivors may have to leave their town or even their state to see an examiner.

Gaps in sexual assault care can span hundreds of miles in rural areas. A program in Glendive, Montana — a town of nearly 5,000 residents 35 miles from the North Dakota border — stopped taking patients for examinations this spring. It didn’t have enough nurses to respond to cases.

“These are the same nurses working in the ER, where a heart attack patient could come in,” said Teresea Olson, 56, who is the town’s part-time mayor and also picked up on-call shifts. “The staff was exhausted.”

The next closest option is 75 miles away in Miles City, adding at least an hour to the travel time for patients, some of whom already had to travel hours to reach Glendive.

Nationwide, policymakers have been slow to offer training, funding, and support for the work. Some states and health facilities are trying to expand access to sexual assault response programs.

Oklahoma lawmakers are considering a bill to hire a statewide sexual assault coordinator tasked with expanding training and recruiting workers. A Montana law that takes effect July 1 will create a sexual assault response network within the Montana Department of Justice. The new program aims to set standards for that care, provide in-state training, and connect examiners statewide. It will also look at telehealth to fill in gaps, following the example of hospitals in South Dakota and Colorado.

There’s no national tally of where nurses have been trained to respond to sexual assaults, meaning a survivor may not know they have to travel for treatment until they’re sitting in an emergency room or police department.

Sarah Wangerin, a nursing instructor with Montana State University and former examiner, said patients reeling from an attack may instead just go home. For some, leaving town isn’t an option.

This spring, Wangerin called county hospitals and sheriff’s offices to map where sexual assault nurse examiners operate in Montana. She found only 55. More than half of the 45 counties that responded didn’t have any examiners. Just seven counties reported they had nurses trained to respond to cases that involve children.

“We’re failing people,” Wangerin said. “We’re re-traumatizing them by not knowing what to do.”

First Step, in Missoula, is one of the few full-time sexual assault response programs in the state. It’s operated by Providence St. Patrick Hospital but is separate from the main building.

The clinic’s walls are adorned with drawings by kids and mountain landscapes. The staff doesn’t turn on the harsh overhead fluorescent lights, choosing instead to light the space with softer lamps. The lobby includes couches and a rocking chair. There are always heated blankets and snacks on hand.

Kate Harrison turns on her pager at the start of her night shift as a sexual assualt nurse examiner.

First Step stands out for having nurses who stay. Kate Harrison waited roughly a year to join the clinic and is still there three years later, in part because of the staff support.

The specially trained team works together so no one carries too heavy a load. While being on night shift means opening the clinic alone, staffers can debrief tough cases together. They attend group therapy for secondhand trauma.

Harrison is a cardiac hospital nurse during the day, a job that sometimes feels a little too stuck to a clock.

At First Step, she can shift into whatever role her patient needs for as long as they need. Once, that meant sitting for hours on a floor in the lobby of the clinic as a patient cried and talked. Another time, Harrison doubled as a DJ for a nervous patient during an exam, picking music off her cellphone.

“It’s in the middle of the night, she just had this sexual assault happen, and we were just laughing and singing to Shaggy,” Harrison said. “You have this freedom and grace to do that.”

When the solo work is overwhelming or she’s had back-to-back cases and needs a break, she knows a co-worker would be willing to help.

“This work can take you to the undercurrents and the underbelly of society sometimes,” Harrison said. “It takes a team.”

That includes co-workers like Towarnicki, who dropped her work hours at her day job after having her son to keep working as a sexual assault nurse examiner. That meant adding three years to her student loan repayment schedule. Now, pregnant with her second child, the work still feels worth it, she said.

On a recent night, Towarnicki was alone in the clinic, clicking through photos she took of her last patient. The patient opted against filing a police report but asked Towarnicki to log all the evidence just in case.

Towarnicki quietly counted out loud the number of bruises, their sizes and locations, as she took notes. She tells patients who have gaps in their memories that she can’t speculate how each mark got there or give them all the answers they deserve.

But as she sat in the blue light of her computer screen long after her patient left, it was hard to keep from ruminating.

“Totally looks like a hand mark,” Towarnicki said, suddenly loud, as she shook her head.

All the evidence and her patient’s story were sealed and locked away, just feet from a wall of thank-you cards from patients and sticky notes of encouragement among nurses.

On the harder evenings, Towarnicki takes a moment to unwind with a pudding cup from the clinic’s snacks. Most often, she can let go of her patient’s story as she closes the clinic. Part of her healing is “seeing the light returned to people’s eyes, seeing them be able to breathe deeper,” which she said happens 19 out of 20 times.

“There is that one out of 20 where I go home and I am spinning,” Towarnicki said. In those cases, it takes hearing her son’s voice, and time to process, to pull her back. “I feel like if it’s not hard sometimes, maybe you shouldn’t be doing this work.”

It was a little after 11 p.m. as Towarnicki headed home, an early night. She knew her phone could go off again.

Eight more hours on call.

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How a medication abortion, also known as an ‘abortion pill,’ works | CNN



CNN
 — 

While legal battles over access to mifepristone, one of two drugs used for medication abortions, play out in court, the drug continues to be available in states which consider abortion legal.

“While many women obtain medication abortion from a clinic or their OB-GYN, others obtain the pills on their own to self-induce or self-manage their abortion,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, a professor of obstetrics, gynecology and reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco.

“A growing body of research indicates that self-managed abortion is safe and effective,” he said.

Mifepristone blocks the hormone progesterone, which is needed for a pregnancy to continue. The drug is approved to end a pregnancy through 10 weeks’ gestation, which is “70 days or less since the first day of the last menstrual period,” according to the FDA.

In a medication abortion, a second drug, misoprostol, is taken within the next 24 to 48 hours. Misoprostol causes the uterus to contract, creating cramping and bleeding. Approved for use in other conditions, such as preventing stomach ulcers, the drug has been available at pharmacies for decades.

Together, the two drugs are commonly known as the “abortion pill,” which is now used in more than half of the abortions in the United States, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group that supports abortion rights.

“Some people do this because they cannot access a clinic — particularly in states with legal restrictions on abortion — or because they have a preference for self-care,” said Grossman, who is also the director of Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health, a research group that evaluates the pros and cons of reproductive health policies and publishes studies on how abortion affects a woman’s health.

What happens during a medication abortion? To find out, CNN spoke with Grossman. The conversation has been edited for clarity.

CNN: What is the difference between a first-trimester medication abortion and a vacuum aspiration in terms of what a woman experiences?

Dr. Daniel Grossman: A vacuum aspiration is most commonly performed under a combination of local anesthetic and oral pain medications or local anesthetic together with intravenous sedation, or what is called conscious sedation.

An injection of local anesthetic is given to the area around the cervix, and the cervix is gently dilated or opened up. Once the cervix is opened, a small straw-like tube is inserted into the uterus, and a gentle vacuum is used to remove the pregnancy tissue. Contrary to what some say, if the procedure is done before nine weeks or so, there’s nothing in the tissue that would be recognizable as a part of an embryo.

The aspiration procedure takes just a couple of minutes; then the person is observed for one to two hours until any sedation has worn off. We also monitor each patient for very rare complications, such as heavy bleeding.

Grossman: A medication abortion is a more prolonged process. After taking the pills, bleeding and cramping can occur over a period of days. Bleeding is typically heaviest when the actual pregnancy is expelled, but that bleeding usually eases within a few hours. On average people continue to have some mild bleeding for about two weeks or so, which is a bit longer than after a vacuum aspiration.

Nausea, vomiting, fever, chills, diarrhea and headache can occur after using the abortion pill, and everyone who has a successful medication abortion usually reports some pain.

In fact, the pain of medication abortion can be quite intense. In the studies that have looked at it, the average maximum level of pain that people report is about a seven to eight out of 10, with 10 being the highest. However, people also say that the pain can be brief, peaking just as the pregnancy is being expelled.

The level of cramping and pain can depend on the length of the pregnancy as well as whether or not someone has given birth before. For example, a medical abortion at six weeks or less gestation typically has less pain and cramping than one performed at nine weeks. People who have given birth generally have less pain.

CNN: What can be done to help with the pain of a medication abortion?

Grossman: There are definitely things that can be used to help with the pain. Research has shown that ibuprofen is better than acetaminophen for treating the pain of medication abortion. We typically advise people to take 600 milligrams every six hours or so as needed.

Some people take tramadol, a narcotic analgesic, or Vicodin, which is a combination of acetaminophen and hydrocodone. Recent research I was involved in found medications like tramadol can be helpful if taken prophylactically before the pain starts.

Another successful regimen that we studied combined ibuprofen with a nausea medicine called metoclopramide that also helped with pain. Other than ibuprofen, these medications require a prescription.

Another study found that a TENS device, which stands for transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulator, helps with the pain of medication abortion. It works through pads put on the abdomen that stimulate the nerves through mild electrical shocks, thus interfering with the pain signals. That’s something people could get without a prescription.

Pain can be an overlooked issue with medication abortion because, quite honestly, as clinicians, we’re not there with patients when they are in their homes going through this. But as we’ve been doing more research on people’s experiences with medication abortion, it’s become quite clear that pain control is really important. I think we need to do a better job of treating the pain and making these options available to patients.

CNN: Are there health conditions that make the use of a medication abortion unwise?

Grossman: Undergoing a medication abortion can be dangerous if the pregnancy is ectopic, meaning the embryo is developing outside of the uterus. It’s rare, happening in about two out of every 100 pregnancies — and it appears to be even rarer among people seeking medication abortion.

People who have undergone previous pelvic, fallopian tube or abdominal surgery are at higher risk of an ectopic pregnancy, as are those with a history of pelvic inflammatory disease. Certain sexually transmitted infections can raise risk, as does smoking, a history of infertility and use of infertility treatments such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).

If a person is on anticoagulant or blood thinning drugs or has a bleeding disorder, a medication abortion is not advised. The long-term use of steroids is another contraindication for using the abortion pill.

Anyone using an intrauterine device, or IUD, must have it removed before taking mifepristone because it may be partially expelled during the process, which can be painful.

People with chronic adrenal failure or who have inherited a rare disorder called porphyria are not good candidates.

CNN: Are there any signs of trouble a woman should watch for after undergoing a medication abortion?

Grossman: It can be common to have a low-grade fever in the first few hours after taking misoprostol, the second drug in a medication abortion. If someone has a low-grade fever — 100.4 degrees to 101 degrees Fahrenheit — that lasts more than four hours, or has a high fever of over 101 degrees Fahrenheit after taking the medications, they do need to be evaluated by a health care provider.

Heavy bleeding, which would be soaking two or more thick full-size pads an hour for two consecutive hours, or a foul-smelling vaginal discharge should be evaluated as well.

One of the warning signs of an ectopic pregnancy is severe pelvic pain, particularly on one side of the abdomen. The pain can also radiate to the back. Another sign is getting dizzy or fainting, which could indicate internal bleeding. These are all very rare complications, but it’s wise to be on the lookout.

We usually recommend that someone having a medication abortion have someone with them during the first 24 hours after taking misoprostol or until the pregnancy has passed. Many people specifically choose to have a medication abortion because they can be surrounded by a partner, family or friends.

Most people know that the abortion is complete because they stop feeling pregnant, and symptoms such as nausea and breast tenderness disappear, usually within a week of passing the pregnancy. A home urine pregnancy test may remain positive even four to five weeks after a successful medication abortion, just because it takes that long for the pregnancy hormone to disappear from the bloodstream.

If someone still feels pregnant, isn’t sure if the pregnancy fully passed or has a positive pregnancy test five weeks after taking mifepristone, they need to be evaluated by a clinician.

People should know that they can ovulate as soon as two weeks after a medication abortion. Most birth control options can be started immediately after a medication abortion.

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Amid contradictory laws, hospitals in one state were unable to explain policies on emergency abortion care, study finds | CNN



CNN
 — 

Oklahoma’s laws restricting abortions have created a confusing, contradictory environment that may have a chilling effect on health care, new research says.

After the US Supreme Court overturned the right to an abortion last year with the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, several states quickly passed laws that restricted such procedures. A report released Tuesday and described in the medical journal the Lancet finds that the laws in at least one state left workers at many hospitals confused about how to proceed.

When the court made its decision, the Oklahoma law that criminalized abortion in 1910 went back into effect, according to the state’s attorney general. Lawmakers then created multiple overlapping laws that further criminalized abortion and increased penalties for those who performed or assisted in an abortion procedure, according to the new report from Physicians for Human Rights, Oklahoma Call for Reproductive Justice and the Center for Reproductive Rights.

The Oklahoma laws allow abortion in the case of a medical emergency, but one doesn’t define a medical emergency. Another says it allows for the “preservation of life in a medical emergency,” defined as causing “substantial and irreversible body of bodily impairment” – which is not a medical term, experts say.

To understand exactly how well Oklahoma hospitals understood the laws, the researchers used a “secret shopper method,” study co-author Dr. Michele Heisler said.

Researchers posed as prospective patients and called 34 hospitals to ask about the emergency pregnancy care they offered.

Heisler said that when the researchers designed the study, she expected the hospitals to tell the patients that they could get help in an emergency but that a second provider might have to sign off on an abortion or that a doctor would have to get the decision past an “onerous” hospital oversight committee.

“What we weren’t expecting is that there would be so much confusion and contradictory information and really not clear information,” said Heisler, who is medical director at Physicians for Human Rights and a professor of internal medicine and public health at the University of Michigan.

The researchers said that none of the hospitals they contacted in Oklahoma was totally able to articulate clear, consistent policies for emergency obstetric care to potential patients.

Specifically, 65% – 22 of the 34 hospitals – were unable to provide information about policies, procedures or the support provided to doctors when it is clinically necessary to terminate a pregnancy to save the life of a pregnant patient.

In 14 of the 22 cases, hospital representatives provided unclear and/or incomplete answers about whether doctors require approval to perform a medically necessary abortion.

Three of the hospitals said they do not provide abortions at all, even though it remains legal in the case of a medical emergency or to “preserve the life” of the pregnant person. Four others provided information that was factually wrong, the report says.

Four hospitals said they had formal approval processes that clinicians must go through if they have a situation in which it is medically necessary to terminate a pregnancy; they cannot make that decision on their own.

Three hospitals indicated that they have policies for these situations but refused to share any information about them.

“Unfortunately, it is being just left up to individual health systems and clinicians to try to make sense of these laws and provide guidance and support,” Heisler said.

The Oklahoma Hospital Association said it has been in conversations with Oklahoma’s medical licensure boards to seek clarity about the state’s conflicting abortion laws.

The association sent guidance to its members in September to explain what it interpreted as “saving the life of a pregnant woman” and what the laws would mean for a person made pregnant through rape or incest, among other issues. The guidance explains that the state’s criminal laws do not make an exception for these circumstances unless it is to save the life of someone who is pregnant in a medical emergency.

The guidance also warns that a person convicted of “administering, prescribing, advising, or procuring a woman to take any medicine drug or substance, or a person convicted of using or employing any instruction or ‘other means whatever,’ with the intent to procure an abortion, shall be guilty of a felony punishable by two (2) to (5) years imprisonment. From August 27, 2022, forward, a person convicted of performing or attempting to perform an abortion shall be guilty of a felony punishable by a fine not to exceed One Hundred Thousand ($100,000.00) and/or imprisonment not to exceed ten (10) years.”

The guidance says the “persons potentially liable” are the provider, not the pregnant person.

Study co-author Rabia Muqaddam, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights who is working on multiple cases challenging the abortion bans in Oklahoma, called the overlapping laws a “bizarre” situation.

“Aside from the fact that there are so many of them is that they all conflict,” she said. “All of the laws have inconsistent definitions, which is where a lot of the confusion comes from for health care providers. What’s most dangerous for patients is the fact that the definitions of medical emergency and life-preserving abortions is unclear and inconsistent.”

“If I was the hospital general counsel and I was looking at these laws, I have absolutely no idea what my physician could or could not do in any particular circumstance,” she said.

When there is a lack of clarity and when penalties are involved, “what you get is massive chill.”

“Physicians are terrified. They’re terrified that if they make the wrong decision, they’re going to go to jail. They’re going to lose their license. And at the other end of that is that patients are being seriously harmed,” Muqaddam said.

Sonia M. Suter, a professor of law at George Washington University who was not involved in the new research, said recent abortion laws have created “such a mess.”

“You are telling physicians that they have two conflicting obligations,” said Suter, whose scholarship focuses on issues at the intersection of law, medicine and bioethics, with a particular focus on reproductive rights.

There is an obligation to stabilize patients in emergencies that may not always qualify as “life-threatening,” but doctors and hospitals could also risk being sued because the doctors are not following the standard of care, “which you can’t do with how some of these exceptions are worded.”

She said hospitals also don’t know how the laws will be applied. Lawyers typically will instruct institutions to interpret the law as conservatively as possible, and physicians may be equally conservative because they don’t want to risk their licenses or face stiff penalties.

“It’s just devastating for everybody,” Suter said. “It’s just cruel.”

Molly Meegan, general counsel for the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, said state laws to restrict abortion with emergency exceptions are not comprehensive.

“They can’t be applied in a medical situation. They just aren’t practical,” she said. “They have an ethical and personal duty to their patients to do what is best for their patients. It can at times be in direct conflict with whatever the laws are, especially if they’re vague, and most of the ob/gyns throughout the country, including in Oklahoma, are in an impossible situation.”

Meegan and Suter both believe the confusion will lead to the deaths of more women. Those who survive may be left with dire health problems, including losing the ability to have children in the future.

“They already have horrific maternal mortality and infant mortality rates,” Suter said. “It feels like the end of evidence-based medicine.”

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Oklahoma persistently ranks among the states with the worst rates of maternal deaths, even before the new abortion laws went into effect. The state had a maternal mortality rate of 25.2 deaths per 100,000 live births for 2018-20, well above the national average.

For communities of color, the rate is significantly worse, according to the Oklahoma Health Department.

White women had 23.2 maternal deaths per 100,000 live births for 2018-20, the lowest rate overall in Oklahoma. The rates for Black women and Native American women were about twice as high: 49.4 and 44.4, respectively.

Oklahoma is not alone. The 13 states where most abortions are banned generally have some of the highest infant and maternal mortality rates in the country, Heisler said. Even more states could be restricting abortion access soon, the experts believe, with potentially more problems to come.

“The hostile climate many states are creating for the health care field by enacting criminal and other penalties for abortion care is an outcome whose reverberations we are only just beginning to see,” said Kelly Baden, vice president for public policy at the reproductive health nonprofit Guttmacher Institute.

Heisler noted that the researchers don’t blame the hospitals or the doctors for this confusion. Overall, she said, the staffers who talked to the researchers “were wonderful,” despite the circumstances.

“They were empathetic. They said, ‘I completely understand.’ They tried to give answers. They acted in good faith. But really, none of the hospitals were really able to say what we were hoping for, which is to unequivocally state that they would stand behind their clinicians and that clinicians at their facilities would be able to use their best clinical judgment for the individual case and that it would be made as medical decisions should be in collaboration with the patient, taking into account to their needs, their preferences and their values,” she said.

“We are recognizing that hospitals and clinicians are in an untenable situation,” Heisler added.

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These women ran an underground abortion network in the 1960s. Here’s what they fear might happen today | CNN



CNN
 — 

The voice on the phone in 1966 was gruff and abrupt: “Do you want the Chevy, the Cadillac or the Rolls Royce?”

A Chevy abortion would cost about $200, cash in hand, the voice explained. A Cadillac was around $500, and the Rolls Royce was $1,000.

“You can’t afford more than the Chevy? Fine,” the voice growled. “Go to this address at this time. Don’t be late and don’t forget the cash.” The voice disappeared.

Dorie Barron told CNN she recalls staring blankly at the phone in her hand, startled by the sudden empty tone. Then it hit her: She had just arranged an illegal abortion with the Chicago Mafia.

The motel Barron was sent to was in an unfamiliar part of Chicago, a scary “middle of nowhere,” she said. She was told to go to a specific room, sit on the bed and wait. Suddenly three men and a woman came in the door.

“I was petrified. They spoke all of three sentences to me the entire time: ‘Where’s the money?’ ‘Lie back and do as I tell you.’ And finally ‘Get in the bathroom,’” when the abortion was over, Barron said. “Then all of a sudden they were gone.”

Bleeding profusely, Barron managed to find a cab to take her home. When the bleeding didn’t stop, her bed-ridden mother made her go to the hospital.

At 24, Barron was taking care of her ailing mother and her 2-year-old daughter when she discovered she was pregnant. Her boyfriend, who had no job and lived with his parents, “freaked,” said Barron, who appears in a recent HBO documentary. The boyfriend suggested she get an abortion. She had never considered that option.

“But what was I to do? My mom was taking care of my daughter from her bed while I worked — they would read and play games until I got home,” Barron said.”How was either of us going to cope with a baby?

“Looking back, I realize I was taking my life in my hands,” said Barron, now an 81-year-old grandmother. “To this day it gives me chills. If I had died, what in God’s green earth would have happened to my mom and daughter?”

Women in the 1960s endured restrictions relatively unknown to women today. The so-called “fairer sex” could not serve on juries and often could not get an Ivy League education. Women earned about half as much as a man doing the same job and were seldom promoted.

Women could not get a credit card unless they were married — and then only if their husband co-signed. The same applied to birth control — only the married need apply. More experienced women shared a workaround with the uninitiated: “Go to Woolworth, buy a cheap wedding-type ring and wear it to your doctor’s appointment. And don’t forget to smile.”

Marital rape wasn’t legally considered rape. And, of course, women had no legal right to terminate a pregnancy until four states — Alaska, Hawaii, New York and Washington — legalized abortion in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade became the law of the land.

Illinois had no such protection, said Heather Booth, a lifelong feminist activist and political strategist: “Three people discussing having an abortion in Chicago in 1965 was a conspiracy to commit felony murder.”

Despite that danger, a courageous band of young women — most in their 20’s, some in college, some married with children — banded together in Chicago to create an underground abortion network. The group was officially created in 1969 as the “Abortion Counseling Service of Women’s Liberation.”

But after running ads in an underground newspaper: “Pregnant? Don’t want to be? Call Jane,” each member of the group answered the phone as “Jane.”

Despite their youth, members of Jane managed to run an illegal abortion service dedicated to each woman's needs.
From left: Martha Scott, Jeanne Galatzer-Levy, Abby Pariser, Sheila Smith and Madeline Schwenk.

“We were co-conspirators with the women who called us,” said 75-year-old Laura Kaplan, who published a book about the service in 1997 entitled “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service.”

“We’ll protect you; we hope you’ll protect us,” Kaplan said. “We’ll take care of you; we hope you’ll take care of us.”

What started as referrals to legitimate abortion providers changed to personalized service when some members of Jane learned to safely do the abortions themselves. Between the late 1960s and 1973, the year that the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade, Jane had arranged or performed over 11,000 abortions.

“Our culture is always searching for heroes,” said Kaplan. “But you don’t have to be a hero to do extraordinary things. Jane was just ordinary people working together — and look what we could accomplish, which is amazing, right?”

Even after several members were caught and arrested, the group continued to provide abortions for women too poor to travel to states where abortion had been legalized.

“I prayed a lot. I didn’t want to go to jail,” said 80-year-old Marie Learner, who allowed the Janes to perform abortions at her apartment.

“Some of us had little children. Some were the sole breadwinners in their home,” Learner said. “It was fearlessness in the face of overwhelming odds.”

Marie Learner opened her home to women undergoing abortions. Her neighbors knew, she said, but did not tell police.

The story of Jane has been immortalized in Kaplan’s book, numerous print articles, a 2022 movie, “Call Jane,” starring Elizabeth Banks and Sigourney Weaver, and a documentary on HBO (which, like CNN, is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery).

Today the historical tale of Jane has taken on a new significance. After the 2022 Supreme Court reversal of Roe v. Wade and the mid-term takeover of the US House of Representatives by Republicans, emboldened conservative lawmakers and judges have acted on their anti-abortion beliefs.

Currently more than a dozen states have banned or imposed severe restrictions on abortion. Georgia has banned abortions after six weeks, even though women are typically unaware they are pregnant at that stage. In mid-April, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill that would ban most abortions after six weeks. It won’t go into effect until the state Supreme Court overturns its previous precedent on abortion. Several other states are considering similar legislation. In other states, judicial battles are underway to protect abortion access.

“It’s a horrific situation right now. People will be harmed, some may even die,” said Booth, who helped birth the Jane movement while in college.

“Women without family support, without the information they need, may be isolated and either harm themselves looking to end an unwanted pregnancy or will be harmed because they went to an unscrupulous and illegal provider,” said Booth, now 77.

A key difference between the 60s and today is medication abortion, which 54% of people in the United States used to end a pregnancy in 2022. Available via prescription and through the mail, use of the drugs is two-fold: A person takes a first pill, mifepristone, to block the hormone needed for a pregnancy to continue.  A day or two later, the patient takes a second drug, misoprostol, which causes the uterus to contract, creating the cramping and bleeding of labor.

In early April a Texas judge, US District Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk – a Trump appointee who has been vocal about his anti-abortion stance — suspended the US Food and Drug Administration’s approval of mifepristone despite 23 years of data showing the drug is safe to use, safer even than penicillin or Viagra.

On Friday, the Supreme Court froze the ruling and a subsequent decision by the Fifth US Circuit Court of Appeals at the request of the Justice Department and the drug manufacturer. The action allows access to mifepristone in states where it’s legal until appeals play out over the months to come.

However, 15 states currently restrict access to medication abortion, even by mail.

The actions of anti-abortion activists, who have been accused of “judge shopping” to get the decisions they want, is “an unprecedented attack on democracy meant to undermine the will of the vast majority of Americans who want this pill — mifepristone — to remain legal and available,” Heather Booth told CNN.

“This is a further weaponization of the courts to brazenly advance the end goal of banning abortion entirely,” she added.

If women in her day could have had access to medications that could be used safely in their homes, they would not have been forced to risk their lives, said Dorie Barron, thinking back to her own terrifying abortion in a sketchy Chicago motel.

“I’m depressed as hell, watching stupid, indifferent men control and destroy women’s lives all over again,” she said. “I really fear getting an abortion could soon be like 1965.”

Chicago college student Heather Booth had just finished a summer working with civil rights activists in Mississippi when she was asked to help with a different kind of injustice.

Heather Booth, 18, with civil rights heroine Fannie Lou Hamer during

A girl in another dorm was considering suicide because she was pregnant. Booth, who excelled at both organization and chutzpah, found a local doctor and negotiated an abortion for the girl. Word spread quickly.

“There were about 100 women a week calling for help, much more than one person could handle,” Booth said. “I recruited about 12 other people and began training them how to do the counseling.”

Counseling was a key part of the new service. This was a time when people “barely spoke about sex, how women’s bodies functioned or even how people got pregnant,” Booth said. To help each woman understand what was going to happen to them, Booth quizzed the abortion provider about every aspect of the procedure.

“What do you do in advance? Will it be painful? How painful? Can you walk afterwards? Do you need someone to be with you to take you home?” The questions continued: “What amount of bleeding is expected, and can a woman handle it on their own? If there’s a problem is there an urgent number they can call?”

Armed with details few if any physicians provided, the counselors at Jane could fully inform each caller about the abortion experience. The group even published a flyer describing the procedure, long before the groundbreaking 1970 book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” began to educate women about their sexuality and health.

“I don’t particularly like doctors because I always feel dissatisfied with the experience,” said Marie Learner, who spoke to many of the women who underwent an abortion at her home.

“But after their abortion at Jane, women told me, ‘Wow, that was the best experience I’ve ever had with people helping me with a medical issue.’”

Eileen Smith, now 73, was one of those women. “Jane made you feel like you were part of this bigger picture, like we were all in this together,” she said. “They helped me do this illegal thing and then they’re calling to make sure I’m OK? Wow!

“For me, it helped battle the feeling that I was a bad person, that ‘What’s wrong with me? Why did I get pregnant? I should know better’ voice in my head,” said Smith. “It was priceless.”

Like many young women in the 60s, Heather Booth often protested for civil and women's rights.

Many of the women who joined Jane had never experienced an abortion. Some viewed the work as political, a part of the burgeoning feminist movement. Others considered the service as simply humanitarian health care. All saw the work as an opportunity to respect each woman’s choice.

“I was a stay-at-home mom with four kids,” said Martha Scott, who is now in her 80s. “We knew the woman needed to feel as though she was in control of what was happening to her. We were making it happen for her, but it was not about us. It was about her.”

Some volunteers, like Dorie Barron, experienced the Jane difference firsthand when she found herself pregnant a few years after her abortion at the hands of the Mafia.

“It was a 100% total reversal — I had never experienced such kindness,” Barron said. Not only did a Jane hold each woman’s hand and explain every step of the process, “they gave each of us a giant supply of maternity sanitary pads, and a nice big handful of antibiotics,” she said. “And for the next week, I got a phone call every other day to see how I was.”

Barron soon began volunteering for Jane by providing pregnancy testing for women in the back of a church in Chicago’s Hyde Park.

“It wasn’t just abortion,” Barron explained. “We also said, ‘You could consider adoption,’ and gave adoption referrals. And if the woman wanted to continue with her pregnancy, we said, ‘Fine, please by all that is holy make sure you get prenatal care, take your vitamins, and eat as best you can.’ It was women helping women with whatever they needed.”

Most of the women who contacted Jane were unable to support themselves, in unhealthy relationships, or already had children at home, so the service was a way of “helping them get back on track,” said Smith, who, like Barron, had begun working for Jane after her abortion.

“We were telling them ‘This isn’t the end of the world. You can continue to leave your boyfriend or your husband or continue to just take care of those kids you have.’ We were there to help them get through this,” said Smith, who later became a homecare nurse.

From left: Eileen Smith, Diane Stevens and Benita Greenfield were three of the dozens of women who volunteered for Jane.

Diane Stevens says she came to work for Jane after experiencing an abortion in 1968 at the age of 19. She was living in California at the time, which provided “therapeutic abortions” if approved in advance by physicians.

“I’d had a birth control failure, and I was coached by Planned Parenthood on how to do this,” said Stevens, now 74. “I had to see two psychiatrists and one doctor and tell them I was not able to go through with the pregnancy because it would a danger to both my physical and mental health.

“I was admitted to the psychiatric ward, although I didn’t really know that — I thought I was just in a hospital bed. But oh no, ‘I was mentally ill,’ so that’s where they put me,” said Stevens, who later went to nursing school with Smith. “Then they wheeled me off for the abortion. I had general anesthesia, was there for two days, and then I was discharged. Isn’t that crazy?”

Sakinah Ahad Shannon, now 75, was one of the few Black women who volunteered as a counselor at Jane. She joined after accompanying a friend who was charged a mere $50 for her abortion. At that time, Jane’s fee was between $1 and $100, based on what the woman could afford to pay, Shannon said.

“When I walked in, I said, ‘Oh my God, here we go again. It’s a room of White women, archangels who are going to save the world,’” said Shannon, a social worker and member of the Congress of Racial Equality, an interracial group of non-violent activists who pioneered “Freedom Rides” and helped organize the March on Washington in 1963.

What she heard and saw at her friend’s counseling session was so impressive it “changed my life,” Shannon said. She and her family later opened and operated three Chicago abortion clinics for over 25 years, all using the Jane philosophy of communication and respect.

“It was a profoundly amazing experience for me,” she said. “I call the Janes my sisters. The color line didn’t matter. We were all taking the same risk.”

Sakinah Ahad Shannon and her daughters went on to open and run three abortion clinics in Chicago.

It wasn’t long before the women discovered a “doctor” performing abortions for Jane had been lying about his credentials. There was no medical degree — in the HBO documentary, he admitted he had honed his skills by assisting an abortion provider.

The group imploded. A number of members quit in horror and dismay. For the women who stayed, it was an epiphany, said Martha Scott. Like her, several of the Janes had been assisting this fake doctor for years, learning the procedures step by step.

“You’d learn how to insert a speculum, then how to swap out the vagina with an antiseptic, then how to give numbing shots around the cervix and then how to dilate the cervix. You learned and mastered each step before you moved on to the next,” said Laura Kaplan, who chronicled the procedure in her book.

By now, several of the Janes were quite experienced and willing to do the work. Why not perform the abortions themselves?

“Clearly, this was an intense responsibility,” said Judith Acana, a 27-year-old high school teacher who joined Jane in 1970. She started her training by helping “long terms,” women who were four or five months along in the pregnancy.

“Remember, abortion was illegal (in Illinois) so it could take weeks for a woman to find help,” said Arcana, now 80. “Frequently women who wanted an abortion at 8 or 10 weeks wound up being 16 or 18 weeks or more by the time they found Jane.”

The miscarriage could happen quickly, but it rarely did, she said. It usually took anywhere from one to two days.

“Women who had no one to help them would come back when contractions started,” Arcana said. “One of my strongest memories is of a teenage girl who had an appointment to have her miscarriage on my living room floor.”

The group also paid two Janes to live in an apartment and be on call 24/7 to assist women who had no one to help them miscarry at home, said Arcana, a lifelong educator, author and poet. “But many women took care of it on their own, in very amazing and impressive and powerful ways,” she said.

Judith Arcana learned how to do abortions herself and wrote about the Jane experience in poems, stories, essays and books.

Any woman who had concerns or questions while miscarrying alone could always call Jane for advice any time of the day or night.

“People would call in a panic: ‘The bleeding won’t stop,’” Smith recalled. “I would tell them, ‘Get some ice, put it on your stomach, elevate your legs, relax.’ And they would say ‘Oh my gosh, thank you!’ because they were so scared.”

For women who were in their first trimester, Jane offered traditional D&C abortions — the same dilation and curettage used by hospitals then and today, said Scott, who performed many of the abortions for Jane. Later the group used vacuum aspiration, which was over in a mere five to 10 minutes.

“Vacuum aspiration was much easier to do, and I think it’s less difficult for the woman,” Scott said. “Abortion is exactly like any other medical procedure. It’s the decision that’s an issue — the doing is very straightforward. This was something a competent, trained person could do.”

It was May 3, 1972. Judith Arcana was the driver that day, responsible for relocating women waiting at what was called “the front” to a separate apartment or house where the abortions were done, known as “the place.”

On this day, a Wednesday, the “place” was a South Shore high-rise apartment. Arcana was escorting a woman who had completed her abortion when they were stopped by police at the elevator.

“They asked us, ‘Which apartment did you come out of?’ And the poor woman burst into tears and blurted out the apartment number,” Arcana said. “They took me downstairs, put cuffs on me and hooked me to a steel hook inside of the police van.”

Inside the apartment on the 11th floor, Martha Scott said she was setting up the bedroom for the next abortion when she heard a knock at the door, followed by screaming: “You can’t come in!”

“I shut the bedroom door and locked it,” Scott said, then hid the instruments and sat on the bed to wait. It wasn’t long until a cop kicked the door in and made her join the other women in the living room.

“We tell this joke about how the cops came in, saw all these women and said, ‘Where’s the abortionist?’ You know, assuming that it would be a man,” Scott said.

By day’s end, seven members of Jane were behind bars: Martha Scott, Diane Stevens, Judy Arcana, Jeanne Galatzer-Levy, Abby Pariser, Sheila Smith and Madeleine Schwenk. Suddenly what had been an underground effort for years was front page headlines.

“Had we not gotten arrested, I think no one would ever have known about Jane other than the women we served,” Scott said.

Top: Sheila Smith and Martha Scott.
Bottom: Diane Stevens and Judith Arcana.

An emergency meeting of Jane was called. The turnout was massive — even women who had not been active in months showed up, anxious to know the extent of the police probe, according to the women with whom CNN spoke.

Despite widespread fear and worry, the group immediately began making alternate plans for women scheduled for abortions at Jane in the next few days to weeks. The group even paid for transportation to other cities where abortion had already been legalized, they said.

News reports over the next few days gave further details of the bust: There was no widespread investigation by the police. It was a single incident, triggered by a call from a sister-in-law who was upset with her relative’s decision to have an abortion, they said.

“It wasn’t long after I was arrested that I came back and worked for quite a few months,” said Scott, one of the few fully trained to do abortions.

“I like to think I was a good soldier,” Scott said. “I like to think what did made a difference not only to a whole bunch of people, but also to ourselves. It gave us a sense of empowerment that comes when you do something that is hard to do and also right.”

As paranoia eased, women began to come back to work at Jane, determined to carry on.

“After the bust, we had a meeting and were told ‘Everybody needs to start assisting and learn how to do abortions.’ I was like, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa!’” said Eileen Smith, who had not been arrested. “But you felt like you really didn’t have much of a choice. We had to keep the service running.”

Laura Kaplan volunteered for the Janes, later immortalizing the group in her book,

The preliminary hearing for the arrested seven was in August. Several of the women in the apartment waiting for abortions the day of the arrest suddenly developed amnesia and refused to testify. According to Kaplan’s book, one of the women later said, “The cops tried to push me around, but f**k them. I wasn’t going to tell on you.”

It didn’t matter. Each Jane was charged with 11 counts of abortion and conspiracy to commit abortion, with a possible sentence of up to 110 years in prison.

As they waited for trial, the lawyer for the seven, Jo-Anne Wolfson, adopted delaying tactics, Kaplan said. A case representing a Texas woman, cited as “Jane Roe” to protect her privacy, was being considered by the US Supreme Court. If the Court ruled in Roe’s favor, the case against the Jane’s might be thrown out.

That’s exactly what happened. On March 9, 1973, three months after the Supreme Court had legalized abortion in the US, the case against the seven women was dropped and their arrest records were expunged.

Later that spring, a majority of Janes, burned out by the intensity of the work over the last few years, voted to close shop. An end of Jane party was held on May 20. According to Kaplan’s book, the invitation read:

“You are cordially invited to attend The First, Last and Only Curette Caper; the Grand Finale of the Abortion Counseling Service. RSVP: Call Jane.”

Today, most of the surviving members of Jane are in their 70s and 80s, shocked but somehow not surprised by the actions of abortion opponents.

“This is a country of ill-educated politicos who know nothing about women’s bodies, nor do they care,” said Dorie Barron. “It will take generations to even begin to undo the devastating harm to women’s rights.”

In the meantime, women should research all available options, keep that information confidential, seek support from groups working for abortion rights, and “share your education with as many women as you can,” Barron added.

As more and more reproductive freedoms have been rolled back over the past year, many of the Janes are angry and fearful for the future.

Abortion rights demonstrators walk across the Brooklyn Bridge in New York nearly two weeks after the leak of a draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade.

“This is about the most intimate decision of our lives — when, whether and with whom we have a child. Everyone should have the ability to make decisions about our own lives, bodies, and futures without political interference,” said Heather Booth, who has spent her life after leaving Jane fighting for civil and women’s rights.

“We need to organize, raise our voices and our votes, and overturn this attack on our freedom and our lives. I have seen that when we take action and organize we can change the world.”

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