This story was originally reported by Nadra Nittle of The 19th, and republished through Rewire News Group‘s partnership with the 19th News Network. 

The same battle is playing out in classrooms nationwide: an effort to blur the line between church and state. Especially in the South, from Texas to Tennessee, lawmakers are attempting to impose religion on public schools. They’re pushing the Ten Commandments, organized prayer sessions, and the use of taxpayer dollars to fund faith-based charter schools.

The erosion of church-state boundaries in public education is worrisome enough on its own, critics of the trend contend—more so because states aren’t merely promoting benign Judeo-Christian values. Instead, critics say, these efforts reflect a White Christian nationalist agenda intended to marginalize students and families based on gender, sexuality, race, and religion. Moreover, legislative efforts to mandate religious displays or prayer often coincide with curriculum restrictions.

“Look no further than the religious extremists that were restricting the curriculum in Florida,” said Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. “‘Don’t say gay.’ No DEI. ‘Don’t teach about menstruation.’ Girls are implicated, right?” 

Florida has not passed laws requiring the Ten Commandments in classrooms, but it has taken other steps, such as allowing chaplains to counsel students in public schools. The state is currently considering a constitutional amendment on religious expression that could weaken the church-state boundary in public education there.

Religious freedom advocates say their concern isn’t just the presence of religious texts in classrooms, but how school personnel may explain them to students. The Ten Commandments, for example, contains language that frames women in relation to men. Take the commandment against coveting, they say, which discusses a neighbor’s wife in the same context as property—a reflection of the patriarchal perspective of biblical times but one that can shape how children today understand gender roles.

Laser said that when a narrow version of Christianity is injected into public schools, it is often used to single out students who are already vulnerable.

“There is a very active crusade to ruin the line between church and state,” she said. “It’s unconstitutional, un-American, against the will of the people, and ultimately, will also be very dangerous for religion itself.”

Over the past year, the mix of legal victories and new strategies employed by conservative lawmakers nationally has alarmed religious freedom advocates. They celebrated in 2024 when a federal judge blocked Louisiana’s Ten Commandments mandate for all public schools to display the scripture in classrooms. That same year, Louisiana passed a law requiring public school personnel to only use the names and pronouns on students’ birth certificates, unless they had parental permission to do otherwise. This February, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision to block the state’s Ten Commandments law. To date this year, over a dozen states have introduced legislation to post the religious text in classrooms. 

Imposing religion on schools—according to John C. Williams, legal director of the ACLU of Arkansas—tests the limits of the First Amendment during a time when the Supreme Court has taken an ultraconservative turn. 

“The First Amendment is often thought of as a speech amendment, but religious liberty is much part of that right,” Williams said. The amendment’s establishment and the free exercise clauses prohibit the government from instituting an official religion or infringing on individual religious practice.  

The Bible Belt is only part of the picture, experts and advocates say. Last year, about 20 states introduced Ten Commandments bills. They include Montana, Idaho, the Dakotas, Minnesota, and Ohio, but the legislation did not pass in most states where it was introduced. 

No matter their location, states attempting to copy Louisiana’s playbook—the Pelican State was the first to pass Ten Commandments legislation since Kentucky did in 1978—are encountering resistance from the courts and the public.

In March, a federal court permanently blocked Act 573, an Arkansas law that would have mandated every public school classroom and library post a King James version of the Ten Commandments selected by the state government. Just a few years earlier, the state passed the LEARNS Act and Act 542, which restricted discussions of LGBTQ+ topics in public schools. The laws also prohibited public school employees from using students’ preferred pronouns without parental consent if they clash with those assigned at birth. In his ruling about Act 573, U.S. District Judge Timothy Brooks wrote that “the only reason to display a sacred, religious text in every classroom is to proselytize to children.”

The ACLU of Arkansas represented families in the case. “I think the federal court recognized what was pretty clear from precedent already, which is that hanging the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom is unconstitutional,” Williams said.

For the religious and nonreligious families who brought the suit, the issue was also deeply personal, since they felt that the requirement violated their right to direct their children’s religious upbringing, Williams said.

But the win doesn’t mean Arkansas and other states will abandon efforts to smudge the lines between church and state in schools. The wave of Ten Commandments bills is part of a larger legal game plan, Laser contends. The aim is to prompt a “circuit split,” she said, which occurs when federal appeals courts rule differently on similar laws, forcing the Supreme Court to intervene and potentially reverse decades of precedent.

That strategy recently saw some success. Although a federal court initially blocked Louisiana’s Ten Commandments law, the full 5th Circuit permitted its enforcement as the case goes forward—a procedural move that has concerned opponents. Meanwhile, a Texas Ten Commandments law remains in litigation. 

“They’re using every possible opening to get this case back before the Supreme Court,” Laser said.

The Ten Commandments law isn’t the only policy sparking debates over religion in Texas. Last year, the state legislature passed Senate Bill 11, which requires every public school district to hold a vote on whether to adopt a “period of prayer and religious study” during the school day. The deadline for the votes was March 1.

The outcome marked a win for religious freedom advocates thanks to grassroots organizing in the state’s 1,200 school districts.

“An incredible number of school districts all across the state … voted to reject SB 11,” Caro Achar, engagement coordinator for free speech and pluralism at the ACLU of Texas, told The 19th. “That’s because inviting state-organized prayer into public schools would cause division and pressure students to conform.”

Achar also questioned the need for the law, pointing out that Texas students—like their peers across the country—already have the right to practice their faith.

“Texas students already have robust rights to voluntarily pray, to read religious literature, including the Bible, to engage in other religious activities during their free time,” she said. SB 11 instead serves to “hand over that practice of prayer to educators who neither wanted nor were qualified to guide that practice.” Last year, Texas also passed SB 12, which prohibits conversations about race, gender identity, and sexual orientation in K-12 schools.

A 2025 poll by the Pew Research Center found that 61 percent of Texans support school-led Christian prayers, while 38 percent oppose them.

Supporters of church-state separation warn that when schools take on a more active role in students’ religious lives, the consequences can extend beyond questions of constitutionality. It “can certainly open the door to mistreatment or exclusion or bullying, not just by educators but by other members of the school community,” Achar said.

A diverse coalition—including the ACLU, the Texas Freedom Network, the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, and the National Council of Jewish Women—swayed school districts to reject the measure. This indicates, Laser said, that support for church-state separation crosses partisan and religious lines.

“Christians and non-theists and religious minorities are rising up across this entire country,” she said.

Some conservative states have pushed the boundaries of church-state separation well beyond the Ten Commandments and school prayer. They’re attempting to make taxpayer funds available to launch religious charter schools. In 2024, Oklahoma officials attempted to open the nation’s first religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School, but the Oklahoma Supreme Court blocked that effort, a decision the Supreme Court let stand last year. But religious education proponents in Oklahoma remain undeterred.

In February, the Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board rejected the application of yet another religious public charter school, Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School. On March 25, the founding group of the school filed suit against the state’s attorney general and the charter school board in federal court on religious discrimination grounds. On Wednesday, a group of predominantly Jewish Oklahoma parents filed a motion to join the lawsuit out of concern that Ben Gamla plans to select students and staff based on religious affiliation. 

The strategy behind the repeated attempts to establish religious charter schools is clear, Laser said, pointing out how Justice Amy Coney Barrett recused herself from the St. Isidore case due to her ties to the legal team representing the school. 

“The strategy is, use every possible opening to get this case back before the Supreme Court where Amy Coney Barrett doesn’t have to recuse herself again,” she said, “and then let’s try to allow religious public schools in America.”

In Tennessee, a similar battle is underway over Wilberforce Academy, a proposed religious charter school in Knox County. The founders of that school sued the Knox County Board of Education on religious discrimination grounds in November when the agency prevented it from opening the institution. But a federal judge earlier this year allowed a team of parents and taxpayers to join the lawsuit. The group says they’re concerned about public funds being used to support Wilberforce should it open in an unprecedented move nationally.

As legal battles continue to unfold, the outcome may ultimately hinge not just on the courts but on how much the public is willing to accept religion’s role in public education. Increasingly, advocates say, the answer is becoming clear.

“Americans are awakening to what it looks like to live in a country without church-state separation, and they don’t like it,” Laser said.

The post The Push to Include Religion in Classrooms Could Shape How Schools Treat Gender and Identity appeared first on Rewire News Group.

GOP leadership investigates mifepristone drug makers

The GOP is upping its attacks on medication abortion. Last week, five Republican senators, including Senate Health Committee Chair Bill Cassidy, sent demand letters to the three manufacturers of the abortion drug mifepristone, seeking information about the companies’ compliance with FDA oversight and adverse event reporting rules. The letters are the latest escalation by anti-choice lawmakers and advocates as the Trump administration reportedly slow-rolls efforts to limit access to abortion drugs.

Idaho passes anti-trans bathroom ban

Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed a law Tuesday that bans trans people from using the bathroom that aligns with their gender identity. The law applies to government buildings and places of “public accommodation,” including private businesses, and makes the first offense a misdemeanor punishable by up to one year in jail. A second offense could result in a felony and up to five years of incarceration. Idaho is the fourth state to criminalize trans bathroom use.

Kansas lawmakers bar oversight of anti-choice pregnancy centers

Kansas’ GOP-majority legislature overrided Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto this week to enact an anti-abortion law exempting “crisis pregnancy centers” from regulations about the childbirth, pregnancy, and parenting resources they can provide. In 2022, Kansas voters rejected a proposed constitutional amendment that would have paved the way for an abortion ban. Kelly said she vetoed the bill because Kansans don’t want the government in “women’s private medical decisions.”

This news roundup first appeared in our newsletter, Rewire Weekly. Sign up here to get the latest reproductive rights news, expert analysis, and a peek into the RNG newsroom—fresh to your inbox.

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I didn’t see her car, her license plate, or even get her last name, but I knew she was a nurse. The handover was quick, and we lucked out on our first haul. She had hooked us up with extra needles, syringes and alcohol wipes. And she gave us a boost of confidence in our slightly unhinged plan to have a child without breaking the bank any further. 

Our second stop was 30 minutes east, in a random carpark, where we scored two bags, iced appropriately. The contents of both pick-ups were still cold by the time we made it home. 

That six-hour tour of southeastern Connecticut made a dent in the list of  medications we needed to start our in vitro fertilization (IVF) cycle. In the process, we uncovered the ways in which patients are quietly finding ways to subsidize their fertility costs. 

A daunting $30,000 price tag  

My wife and I live in the New York City area. Once we were 35, we were ready to start a family. The plan was to use my eggs and for me to carry the pregnancy, so we chose a sperm donor who had features resembling my wife’s. 

In 2024, three failed attempts at intrauterine insemination—or IUI, where concentrated sperm is placed into the uterus during ovulation—led us to a fertility clinic in Manhattan. The clinic quoted us $17,850 for a single egg retrieval. 

An egg harvesting cycle spans approximately two weeks. This price tag didn’t include the consult, diagnostic and genetic testing, anesthesia, sperm injection, or embryo-testing parts of that process. It also didn’t include the vital medications that stimulate the ovaries to produce more eggs and help time ovulation, so they can be harvested. Just the monitoring appointments, egg retrieval procedure, and inseminating the oocytes, or egg cells, with sperm would clock in at $17,850, roughly half the $30,000 cost of the total IUI cycle.

Neither of us had fertility insurance. I’m self-employed and my wife works for a small business, so we had to pay all our IVF expenses out-of-pocket. New York is one of 15 states that have laws requiring insurance to cover IVF, but these rules tend to come with caveats, such as exempting employers with fewer than 100 employees. 

Not willing to career jump just for benefits, I asked our doctor if there was anything we could do to reduce costs, especially the medication, which was quoted at $6,000 to $8,000. She said sometimes IVF patients donate their unused, unopened medications once they’re done with them. 

It was game on. 

I refreshed the r/IVF subreddit “Med Donation” tab every 30 minutes for weeks, so I could be the first to respond if I saw a post with a medication I needed. With 206,000 weekly visitors, I usually saw half a dozen medication donation posts per day. 

I also turned to Facebook Groups like IVF Garage Sale, with around 27,000 members, and the more local NYC IVF/IUI Support Group. While the latter only has 2,700 members, it’s specific to my area. 

Olena Kalo, a co-admin of the NYC IVF/IUI Support Group, took on the role because she wanted to give back to the community after experiencing challenges trying to conceive her second child. The group, which started in 2017, attracts between two and three new members per day, and Kalo sees a medication donation post about once a week. 

Facebook bans the selling of prescription drugs on its platform. 

“Our group rules state that you can’t put full names of medications,” Kalo added. 

“What I’ve seen is people say, ‘I have’ or ‘I have to DON,’” to avoid running afoul of the rules, Kalo said. 

A teacher I met through this group, who was also a patient at my Midtown Manhattan clinic, gave me five boxes of Menopur, a medication that helps the ovaries produce more eggs in a retrieval. It’s one of the most expensive fertility medications we needed, and her donation saved my family around $2,250. 

In our quest to save thousands more, we traveled to parts of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut over two months, and met with around a dozen former IVF patients in unassuming locations like parking lots, outside of offices, and even inside their homes. 

Those encounters were more than a medical exchange. Some of my sources were pregnant. Many of them, pregnant or not, shared their experiences, cheered us on, and gave us insider tips like medications to try, as we were embarking on the start of the countless shots, blood draws, bruises, and hormonal whiplash. 

Discounters get into the IVF business

Costco, the international wholesaler known for its bargain-bin prices, announced in March 2026 that it was getting into the fertility business and would offer its members IVF drugs at a steep discount of up to 80 percent—a signal of just how expensive the business of conceiving a child can be. 

According to GoodRx, an online prescription discount platform, the cost of IVF medications has surged by 84 percent since 2014. This vastly outpaces the 37 percent rise across all prescription drugs, a price hike experts say has been driven by surging demand and the limited insurance coverage of IVF medications.

The GoodRx report also found that there are few generic alternatives with IVF medications, leaving patients with more expensive, branded options. 

President Donald Trump made reducing prescription costs a key campaign promise in his 2024 presidential campaign platform. He also billed himself as the “fertilization president.” In February 2026, the administration launched TrumpRx, a discount drug platform, peddled in part as a way to reduce the cost of IVF. 

Of the six medications I needed for my IVF cycle, TrumpRx only lists three, at moderately reduced prices. A 900 IU vial of Gonal-F, a common IVF drug that stimulates egg development, is $504 on TrumpRx and $780 at Alto Pharmacy, one of my clinic’s partner pharmacies. 

Even with those savings, the rest of the fertility process would still cost a pretty penny. 

Online IVF communities are a response to this problem. 

Kalo, the co-admin of the NYC IVF/IUI Support Group, believes these online communities probably function better in some places than in others. There might be more availability of medication in New York due to the city’s size, she suggested, or because of the state’s mandated fertility coverage. 

People are also having children later, meaning they’re more likely to need IVF. According to CDC research, 2023 marked the first time in U.S. history that more women in their 40s are having babies than teenagers. The average age for first-time mothers in “urban cities” was about 28.5 years in 2023, compared to 24.8 years in rural areas. 

San Francisco had the oldest average age for first-time mothers—32.8—in 2023, according to the San Francisco Standard. New York came in third, at 31.9. 

It’s not just self-pay patients who are turning to online groups. Patients might need more cycles than their insurance will cover, or their plan imposes rigid conditions on how coverage can be used. Then there are patients whose medication protocol gets extended mid-cycle, requiring them to source extra drugs on a tight timeline—sometimes before they can get insurance approval for it.

Kalo and other fertility patients DIYing their meds are grateful for these groups where people can find medications, answers, and emotional support. 

Still, “if we found out that somebody was relying on a neighbor’s goodwill for their diabetes medication, we would be outraged,” Kalo said. 

For her, the online IVF community is a band-aid for a problem that needs a permanent fix.

“Things only happen in the medical field because we’ve banded together and demanded change,” she said. 

Medication exchanges are a symptom of a broken system that forces some patients to fill the gaps for others. While I’m grateful for the fellow patients and friends of friends whose donations helped my family do two IVF cycles, group chats shouldn’t have to be an access point for reproductive health care. 

Online versus overseas IVF meds 

Overseas online pharmacies can offer another, cheaper alternative for some U.S. patients. 

Fast IVF, for example, is an online pharmacy that sends IVF medications from their locations in Germany, Turkey, and Amsterdam. Europe caps what the medication can be purchased at, unlike the U.S. where there are no limits. 

Mary Copperman, one of Fast IVF’s U.S.-based representatives, said they work directly with the manufacturer, which is how they’re able to get better rates. 

If we take that 900 IU Gonal-F pen as an example again, it’s $439 through Fast IVF, compared to $504 at TrumpRx. 

Kara, a former IVF patient based in California who asked not to use her last name for privacy reasons, was told she’d never get pregnant naturally, after they found stage 4 endometriosis and fallopian tubes “as large as sausages—filled with fluid.” 

Kara was quoted $5,000 to $6,000 for one cycle of medication. She ended up spending $1,750 per cycle at two overseas websites—IVF Pharmacy and Discount IVF Meds. She was one of the many patients who didn’t have success on the first round. 

Customers who purchase their IVF drugs overseas need constant reassurance that it’s safe and that their meds will arrive on time, Copperman said—especially if they’ve found Fast IVF through a Google search. 

“Patients sometimes think it’s too good to be true,” she said. The FDA continues to warn consumers of safety and efficacy concerns as it relates to overseas pharmacies. 

In the end, Kara needed three egg retrievals and four transfers to conceive her three children. Multiple IVF cycles is the norm—something I wish was made clearer at the start. Two years, two egg retrievals, and three embryo transfers on, my journey continues. 

My story isn’t rare. 

For IVF patients like me, with costs adding up, the international route may be more appealing to those who worry about taking donated meds from strangers. 

“I felt better about getting medication shipped than donated because it seemed like a more controlled process and safer,” Kara said. “Also, most people aren’t donating the amount that I needed, and I didn’t want to try to source from a bunch of different places.”

“It was the same [medication] names, from the same manufacturer,” she continued. “They came on time. It was stressful to wonder if they’d come. But I had seen on some chat boards it worked for other people, so I went for it.”

IVF is ‘essential medicine’

Dr. Serena H. Chen MD, director of advocacy at a New Jersey fertility clinic called CCRM, agrees that IVF patients shouldn’t depend on donated drugs, which may not be as safe or reliable. 

“As a physician, it’s basically against the law. We really can’t condone that,” she said. “We get offers of donations all the time. And it’s a little heartbreaking because we know how much money people have paid for these meds and how much people need them.”   

She hopes the new pricing from the federal government will cause other major companies that produce fertility drugs in the U.S. to price match, ultimately increasing accessibility.

Dr. Chen doesn’t recommend overseas pharmacies, either, “because it’s not going through the U.S. system and we can’t vouch for those medications.” 

Instead, she works with the patient to try to find discounts locally, based on their insurance plan and location. 

Ultimately, she believes the game-changer for the industry would be if “fertility treatments including assisted reproduction” were added to the Centers for Medicare & Medicare Services (CMS) list of essential health care. That would mean IVF for all government and military employees would be covered, she said, prompting commercial insurance to recognize it as essential health-care too. 

“If we can get this as an essential health benefit listed with CMS, then it has a ripple effect through the whole system,” she said. 

IVF advocacy groups are also working to encourage states to pass more insurance mandates. 

In 2026, California began requiring health plans to cover the diagnosis and treatment of infertility, the latest state to do so. An Oregon bill seeking to to impose a similar mandate didn’t make it out of committee, but lawmakers are expected to try again next year. 

“Reproduction is essential to the continuation of the human race,” Chen said. “It’s really, in many ways, a life-or-death situation.” 

The post IVF is Pricey. Some Patients Are Crowdsourcing Their Fertility Medications  appeared first on Rewire News Group.

Rewire News Group has followed these political and legal assaults, and documented their human consequences. This Trans Day of Visibility, we’re highlighting our coverage of the people and places most impacted.  

Laws targeting trans youth

In June 2025, the Supreme Court ruled that Tennessee could stop transgender minors from receiving gender-affirming care via hormone therapy, puberty blockers, or surgery. The decision, United States v. Skrmetti, “blessed anti-trans discrimination,” wrote RNG Executive Producer Jessica Mason Pieklo. While the case narrowly focused on trans youth in one state, “conservative states across the U.S. now have permission from the highest court in the land to further crack down on health care for trans Americans,” Pieklo explained.

The next  month, as part of our TransMissives series, RNG published a letter from Daniel, a trans teen whose family had decided to leave the U.S. in hopes of finding a safer place to raise him. Between 2022 and the time Daniel’s story was published, more than 2,400 bills attempting to chip away at trans rights had been introduced across the United States. Many of them, like Tennessee’s gender-affirming care ban, target children and adolescents. 

Daniel is hardly the only student affected by the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies. 

In October 2025, a month into the first new school year since President Donald Trump took office for a second term, RNG contributor Rebecca Barker explained how his new higher education “compact” would put trans and nonbinary college students at risk. “The heavy-handed document promises federal funding in exchange for ideological compliance,” Barker wrote, requiring schools to “adhere to strict, binary definitions of sex and gender.”

And on the Boom! Lawyered podcast, Pieklo and co-host Imani Gandy analyzed another Supreme Court ruling that erodes the rights of younger trans kids. With Mirabelli v. Bonta, they said after the March 2026 decision, the Supreme Court rewrote parental rights law at the expense of trans children. 

Warning letters and bounty hunter laws

In December 2025, the Food and Drug Administration sent a letter that unleashed chaos on at least 12 companies that make and sell chest binders, or compression garments resembling sports bras. It warned them that their products could be seized and their sales halted if they continued to market binders as a treatment for gender dysphoria. 

“We will not allow intimidation or targeting to deter us from that work,” one trans shop owner told reporter Hallie Lieberman for her February 2026 story on their scramble to comply. 

Just a few weeks later, legal analyst Mia Brett documented a disquieting legal trend: Bathroom laws in Kansas and beyond were incentivizing people to police public bathrooms and sue trans people who use restrooms that align with their gender identities. The incentive: a  financial kickback. This tactic is modeled on Texas’ “bounty hunter” anti-abortion laws, Brett wrote. Earlier in March, we republished a story from Morgan Chilson at the Kansas Reflector about how the Kansas bathroom law puts trans people at even greater risk of verbal and physical harassment. 

Even amid all the bad news, we also found stories of trans resilience, normalcy, and joy. In August 2025, to conclude the TransMissives series, we published a letter by a young trans girl named Julia, who felt loved and supported by her family, teacher, and community. 

“We all get to decide who we want to be,” she wrote, “and I just want to be me.” 

This article was adapted from a Bluesky thread.

The post For Trans Community, U.S. is Less Safe Under Trump appeared first on Rewire News Group.

This story was originally reported by Candice Norwood of The 19th, and republished through Rewire News Group‘s partnership with the 19th News Network. 

Every survivor of sexual assault is forced to make a calculation: What are the repercussions if they speak out?

Dolores Huerta felt the weight of the entire labor rights movement, which she feared would crumble if she accused civil rights leader Cesar Chavez of sexual abuse.

“The weight of that calculation is the same weight for every single survivor in the farm worker industry,” attorney Karla Altmayer told The 19th. “They’re not thinking about the movement, but they’re thinking about: ‘Will my family be able to work next year?’ ‘Will I be abandoned in the field?’ ‘Will I be killed?’”

Huerta’s experience with sexual violence, and her reason for keeping it secret—first reported in a New York Times investigation — echos a current of fear running through the farmworkers she spent her life advocating for. An estimated 26 percent of U.S. farmworkers are women, and they face disproportionate risk of sexual harassment and assault in their workplaces. A majority of women farmworkers are Latina and foreign-born. Data capturing the full scope of sexual violence they experience is scarce.

One 2010 survey found that 80 percent of respondents—150 Mexican and Mexican-descent women working in the fields of California’s Central Valley—said they experienced some form of sexual harassment. A 2015 focus group with 49 Latina farmworkers in the Pacific Northwest found that a majority of participants experienced or witnessed sexual harassment or violence in the workplace.

Farms can hire workers directly for either permanent or seasonal work planting, tending, or harvesting crops. Other times, a crew leader or contractor, sometimes called a “foreman,” recruits and supervises workers who may travel together between farms for work. Another category of farmworkers are brought into the country under the H-2A program for seasonal work, and receive housing as part of their temporary work agreement.

“Migrant workers, specifically, are traveling throughout the seasons, following crops and harvest, and so they depend on everything—from a glass of water to where their housing is, where they’re going to sleep at night, to eat, whether they have the equipment to cook, or whether they can even go to the bathroom in the field,” said Altmayer, who began her career representing Illinois farm workers and later co-founded the organization Healing to Action, which focused on addressing gender-based violence. “So, it’s just the conditions are so specific and so dependent on the employer in a way that many other industries don’t experience.”

The result is a power structure where their ability to secure and maintain job opportunities can depend on a pool of men who have the power to fire them, target their family members, report them to immigration officials, or harass and follow them beyond the workplace.

For more than 15 years, Elizabeth Torres has worked to document the experiences of farm workers facing sexual violence in the Yakima Valley of Washington state. Torres told The 19th that some warehouse facilities have a space known as “the cold room,” a designated place where young women and girls are taken and assaulted. Many of the women on farms are mothers who bring their children to work because of lack of child care or a need for more family income.

What can happen next is often unexpected. Comments from a male supervisor complimenting a child’s appearance, or coaxing a mother to leave her child alone, according to Torres, who is director of operations at the Spanish-language public radio station KDNA.

If a woman is working in the fields with her husband or brother, for example, the foreman could assign the husband to one location and require the woman to work in a completely separate, more isolated spot where she can be assaulted.

Anali Cortez Bulosan and Josephine Weinberg, both attorneys with California Rural Legal Assistance, said that sexual harassment complaints from farmworkers are among the top three issues they handle in their work.

“The ones that come to us, generally, there’s been some shoddy investigation or attempt to resolve the matter, that basically didn’t resolve the matter. Or our client complained, and instead, the harassment continued or intensified until they couldn’t handle it anymore,” Weinberg said.

While some larger commercial farms have designated human resources teams that handle complaints, on other farms, the only person to complain to could be the abuser. Whether a large or small farm, workers have no guarantee that their complaints will lead to a remedy.

Accumulating enough evidence to prove a case is one of the biggest challenges, according to Cortez Bulosan and Weinberg. Farms and supervisors also punish the workers.

“Most of the time there are what we call it under the law, ‘constructive discharge,’ where the conditions have become so hostile that the worker is quitting, but it’s a forced quit,” Weinberg said. “In effect, it’s like a termination because the conditions have gotten so bad. It’s considered a firing.”

While a worker can be blacklisted from other jobs for being a “problem employee,” a violent supervisor or foreman often continues to work, sometimes traveling to farms throughout the country. Going directly to the police also comes with a high cost, on top of being fired. Law enforcement dismiss assault claims because of personal bias or lack of evidence, advocates said. They may also check a worker’s immigration status and report to federal immigration agents.

In the documentary “Rape in the Fields” by PBS Frontline, a former Iowa sheriff stated that it was their job “to do both,” meaning address reports of assault and also work with immigration enforcement. “Puts the victim in an almost impossible situation,” he acknowledged.

“If you see law enforcement coming in to the plant and taking your co-workers, you are not going to go to them the next day and say ‘by the way, can you help me?’” immigration lawyer Sonia Parras said in the documentary.

Since the release of “Rape in the Fields” in 2013, and since the viral #MeToo movement in 2017 put a spotlight on sexual harassment and assault happening in Hollywood, politics, and beyond, some states and farming companies have made modest changes. In 2018, California enacted a law to require farm labor contractors to provide regular sexual harassment training and to document that training. The state also expanded its law requiring more employers to provide sexual harassment training. Before 2018, California employers with fewer than 50 employees were exempt from these state requirements. That threshold was then lowered to five employees.

In Washington state, Torres and Jody Early, a professor at the University of Washington, Bothell, co-created Basta, a community-driven initiative. Basta provides sexual harassment training and resources like videos, guides, and even a comic book aimed at informing farmworkers of their rights and helping to change the workplace culture that enables abuse.

Torres said that while some farms have improved their resources, for example, by establishing an anonymous hotline, there are others where “they haven’t even started talking about sexual harassment or harassment in the workplace,” she said. “And so there is a huge variety within our community.”

Cortez Bulosan and Weinberg said they don’t believe broader systemic change will come from new laws.

“We have a lot of great laws,” Weinberg said. “It has more to do with how a woman or a man or whoever is received when they complain, how their complaints are treated.” That includes cultural competency training that meets the specific needs of individual workplaces. Basta is one community network pushing to change this culture.

“There are companies that want to do better. They want to do good by their employees, and we choose to work with them, and they can make a big difference in showing examples of creating that,” Early said. “Another thing to understand is that consumers have power. We’ve seen this happen even here: boycotts against certain growers that aren’t listening to the workers, that aren’t caring. That has a lot of power.”

The post Dolores Huerta Feared Speaking About Her Abuse for Years. The Farmworkers She Advocates for Understand. appeared first on Rewire News Group.

HHS to probe states for “discrimination” over abortion coverage

The Trump administration announced last week it’s investigating more than a dozen states that require abortion services to be covered by health insurers. An HHS official framed the probe as an attempt to identify whether the states were “discriminating” against insurers by requiring them to cover the care “contrary to conscience.” The move comes amid GOP lawmakers’ escalating attacks on abortion access at the state and federal levels—all while an FDA “review” of the safety of abortion drug mifepristone is pending.

Olympics officials ban trans women from women’s competitions

Trans women cannot compete in women’s sports at the 2028 LA Olympics—or ever, the International Olympic Committee decreed yesterday. To ensure they bring only “biological females,” countries must now genetically test their female athletes (and not the men). The IOC said its new rule “protects fairness,” but in the two decades the IOC has allowed trans women athletes to compete, few have; none have medaled. “This is solving for a problem that doesn’t exist,” said Harvard Law Prof. Alejandra Caraballo.

Colorado lawsuit says parental notification law “punishes” girls

Colorado might be at the epicenter of a creative new way for abortion rights advocates to expand abortion access, Carrie Baker wrote in Ms. Magazine this week. There, a doctor is challenging the state’s parental notification law for abortion care, arguing that it violates the state constitution’s equal rights amendment by disproportionately punishing young girls. “There is this fear … that young women are going to have sex for pleasure, and if [so] … they should pay a price for it,” an attorney from the law firm said.

This news roundup first appeared in our newsletter, Rewire Weekly. Sign up here to get the latest reproductive rights news, expert analysis, and a peek into the RNG newsroom—fresh to your inbox.

The post Government to Investigate States That Require Insurers to Cover Abortion Care appeared first on Rewire News Group.

If passed, the law would put bizarre restrictions on medication abortion under the guise of addressing “environmental contamination” associated with “abortion-related medical waste.” 

Medication abortions would have to be completed in the “physical presence of a health-care provider,” according to a statement from Miller. (It’s unclear whether this means that the prescription would have to be written in-person, or whether the medication would need to be taken with the provider watching.) 

The legislation would also require a medical examination of the patients, and the health-care provider would have to provide “a medical waste ‘catch kit’ and red bag disposal system, along with instructions for returning the waste to a health-care provider for proper handling.”

In effect, this bill would end telehealth abortion care and mail-order mifepristone. Anyone who somehow meets all those requirements would have to collect everything that comes out of their vagina after a medication abortion and return it in-person to their provider for disposal. All of this is purportedly to save our water supply from contamination. 

This is impractical, more than a little gross, and downright cruel. While the legislation might be wrapped in seemingly progressive environmental language, it’s clearly meant to punish abortion patients. Republicans in Congress have tried to use bogus environmental arguments to undermine abortion rights before, yet when it comes to actual, known sources of pollution and contamination, their party is all about deregulation. The GOP’s hypocrisy is showing.

Mifepristone has no known environmental harms

In a March 18, 2026 press release, Miller argued that “more than 50 tons of chemically tainted medical waste—including blood, placental tissue, and human remains—are flushed into U.S. water systems each year as a result of these drugs,” saying the statistic “raises serious concerns about environmental contamination.”

Miller should know that this is untrue. The New York Times reported in October 2025 that scientists told Republican lawmakers that there is no Environmental Protection Agency-approved way to detect mifepristone in wastewater. 

As supposed evidence to back her claim, Miller cites Students for Life America, a youth group whose mission is to “abolish abortion,” linking to its webpage on so-called “chemical” abortion. The website is full of statistics and graphics about how medications can impact our groundwater. 

Some of that information may be true. Trace amounts of many medications—from antibiotics and antidepressants, to contraceptives and steroids—end up in our water supply. Endocrine disrupters like steroids have been found to decrease fertility in fish and even cause fish to change sexes. Scientists are evaluating concerns that antibiotics in water may increase antibiotic resistance in some bacteria. 

But as the Guttmacher Institute, a policy and research organization specializing in sexual and reproductive health and rights, explains, “there is no evidence to suggest that mifepristone is harming the environment or people’s health.”  

That likely explains why the anti-abortion organization Students for Life cites no sources for its claim that more than 50 tons of chemical waste from abortion ended up in our drinking water in 2024. One video mentions a “first of its kind national study” that found traces of mifepristone in wastewater in several major cities, but I could find no further information about this alleged “study”—not the year, the title, the authors, or anything else. 

That conveniently makes the assertion impossible to investigate or invalidate.

Mifepristone helps thousands of people, hurts zero fish

A medication abortion is an alternative to a procedural abortion, meaning either aspiration or dilation and evacuation (D&E). Both of these are typically performed by a health-care provider at a medical facility. 

A patient can also self-manage a medication abortion. There were roughly 642,700 medication abortions in the U.S. in 2023—making up nearly two-thirds of all U.S. abortions that year—according to Guttmacher.

Here’s how they work: A pregnant person is generally prescribed two drugs. First, they take mifepristone, which stops the pregnancy by blocking progesterone. Between 12 and 24 hours later, they take misoprostol, which causes the uterine to contract so that it can expel the built-up blood and tissue.  

(Read more: Mifepristone, Misoprostol, and Abortion Medications: Experts Explain How These Drugs Can Be Used to Terminate a Pregnancy)

Typically, about one to four hours after taking the second medication, patients will feel cramps and start to bleed, according to Planned Parenthood. Some of what comes out may look like regular menstrual blood, but there will likely also be large blood clots that could be as big as a lemon. The bleeding may last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. 

The embryo will also come out as part of this, though it might not be distinguishable from other tissue depending on how far along the person was in their pregnancy. Medication abortions are only approved up to 10 weeks of pregnancy, so when Miller and her colleagues use phrases like “pre-born baby remains,” in their bill, it’s intentionally misleading. At ten weeks, a fetus weighs about 1.2 ounces and is roughly the size of a prune or small apricot. It is not a baby, and it does not look like a baby. 

A “catch kit,” which Miller wants to force patients to use, is, apparently, a receptacle for medical waste, but I admit I don’t know exactly what that would look like. I once had to collect all of my urine for 24 hours for a kidney test. I basically had to carry around a giant jug with a handle and pee into it whenever I had to go. Medication abortion patients might be given something similar, or they might use something more like the bed pans people use in hospitals. This would be a problem for doctors to solve, I suppose. 

Either way, patients would be required to sit on one of these things or hold it under their vagina for hours to comply with this legislative proposal. (It’s not clear what they would have to do for the next few days, when the bleeding slows but doesn’t entirely stop.) Then, they would have to transfer whatever they “caught” into a medical waste bag or multiple bags. And finally, they would have to take the bag(s) to their provider’s office. 

Don’t fall for it

Medication abortions have become more popular in recent years as some states restricted abortion access following the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022. They now comprise about 63 percent percent of all abortions nationwide, up from 53 percent in 2020. 

Abortion opponents hate this statistic. But direct attacks on abortion are very unpopular, because as of March 2026, most people in the U.S. support legal abortion in “most” or “all” cases—60 percent nationwide, according to Pew Research. This figure includes 36 percent of Republicans, and with midterms coming, Republican lawmakers are trying to pursue their anti-abortion agenda without alienating voters. 

For years, Republicans have attacked mifepristone from every direction. Most of their assaults have been based on trumped-up safety concerns—false claims that the medication is dangerous, even though decades of research and millions of real world uses worldwide disprove that claim. (Statistically, It’s safer than both Tylenol and Viagra.) 

Now, they’re trying out this environmental tactic. I’m not buying it, and you shouldn’t either. (Friends don’t let friends get propagandized.)

Historically, Republican lawmakers haven’t given a shit about climate change, species extinction, or air or water quality. And today’s Republican Party is about as intensely anti-environmental as it gets. 

In 2025, the Trump-appointed commissioner of the Environmental Protection Agency—the federal agency tasked with protecting the environment—cut more than 400 grants, including funding designated for improving drinking water in some areas. House GOP members have introduced the PERMIT Act, which would require states to lower water quality standards in the name of being “cost effective.” 

These are not people who care about your drinking water. They are, however, politicians who care very much what goes in—and comes out—of your vagina. And that’s none of their damn business. 

The post No, Abortion Pills Are Not Poisoning Your Drinking Water appeared first on Rewire News Group.

A Guttmacher Institute report, published March 24, 2026, estimated the total number of clinician-provided abortions and incidence of cross-state travel for abortion care in 2025. Researchers found that in the 13 states with total abortion bans—which include Alabama, Idaho, and Texas—telehealth abortions increased from 72,000 in 2024 to 91,000 in 2025. 

Meanwhile, fewer people crossed state lines to obtain abortion care, from approximately 74,000 in 2024 to 62,000 in 2025. 

The estimated total number of abortions provided by clinicians in 2025—1,126,000—remained largely unchanged from 2024, when an estimated 1,124,000 abortions were performed. 

“These data underscore what abortion advocates around the world have been saying for decades: Abortion bans and restrictions don’t stop people from needing and having abortions,”  Kimya Forouzan, principal state policy adviser at Guttmacher Institute, said in an email to Rewire News Group. 

The Guttmacher report noted that its estimates likely undercount the total number of abortions provided last year, as they exclude abortion pills obtained in advance of a pregnancy, the limited number of abortions still provided under exceptions to total bans, and abortions that were not provided by U.S. health-care professionals.

Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, revoking federal abortion protections, 13 states have instituted total abortion bans. Another six have implemented bans on abortion care between six and 12 weeks. Still, many residents living under abortion bans have been able to receive abortion pills from clinicians located in pro-choice states thanks to protective shield laws, which allow providers to offer reproductive and gender-affirming care to patients through telehealth and by mail in states with restrictions. 

Eight states—California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Maine, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington—have extended these “shield law” protections to providers who prescribe medication abortion to patients remotely, according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. Anticipating the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe, Connecticut became the first state to pass “shield” legislation in May 2022.

The FDA finalized a rule allowing prescription of the drug mifepristone, one of the medications used for abortion, without an in-person appointment in 2023, increasing access across the country. 

“​​Telehealth is not a workaround,” Dr. Amy Potter, chief medical officer at telehealth medication abortion provider Hey Jane, told RNG in an email. “It’s an established model of care, and patients are choosing it because it works.” 

Since its founding in 2021, Hey Jane—one of a number of online women’s health companies that exploded in popularity after Roe was overturned—says it has cared for more than 100,000 patients across 23 states, albeit none with total bans. For many of those recipients, however, “telemedicine was not just a preference but often the most accessible way to get care,” Potter said. 

Although telehealth abortions are increasingly becoming the primary way that residents of total-ban states get care—one in four abortions across the U.S. are facilitated via telehealth, Potter said—travel across state lines for in-person treatment is still more than double what it was prior to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision reversing Roe. From 2013 to 2020, between 19,000 and 25,000 abortions were sought out of state on an annual basis, according to the Guttmacher report. 

In-person treatment is typically pursued by patients who are further along in their pregnancies—medication abortion pills are generally effective within the first 10 weeks—or for those who want a procedural abortion. Federal and state lawmakers are targeting the shield laws that protect out-of-state telehealth care, with the intention of criminalizing providers and, in some cases, their patients.

“It’s important to note that none of the attacks against shield law provision or abortion via telehealth have been successful, a testament to the strength and legitimacy of these laws,” Fourozan said. “However, we know how relentless and cruel the anti-abortion movement can be, so it’s important to closely monitor these threats and take them seriously.”

The post Telehealth Abortions Increased in States that Ban Abortion in 2025: Report appeared first on Rewire News Group.

Transcript

Listen up! Imani Gandy now has her own podcast feed. Subscribe to B*tch, Listen! on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts so you don’t miss an episode. And yes, you need to subscribe even if you’re already following the Boom! Lawyered channel.

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The post We Did the Reading. Fascism Came Anyway (Podcast) appeared first on Rewire News Group.