By India Gardener / Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan reporting for the Kent State-Ohio News Connection Collaboration.
In Ohio, the rate of congenital syphilis has increased more than 300%, from 22 cases in 2018 to 93 in 2022. Nationally, syphilis in newborns reached a 10-year high in 2022 with more than 3,700 cases.
According to the Ohio Hospital Association, untreated congenital syphilis can have harmful consequences, potentially leading to miscarriage, low birth weight, premature birth, and other complications.
According to the CDC, syphilis is a sexually transmitted bacterial infection transmitted through direct contact with a syphilis sore. Pregnant individuals with syphilis can pass the infection to their unborn child.
“So that goes to show us that if it's left untreated, then we can have severe complications such as infection to the brain, nervous system, eyes, hearing loss, stroke, and blindness,” said Caroline Kingori, an associate professor of community and public health at Ohio University. “The other thing is it puts someone at a heightened risk of contracting HIV. So when syphilis is untreated during pregnancy, you're putting the mother and the child at risk.”
Public health advocates say early detection and treatment of the disease is critically important to the health of mothers and babies. Syphilis can cause a wide variety of symptoms or no symptoms at all, at least for a while, so mothers may not know they’re infected — especially if they don’t have ongoing access to healthcare.
“Syphilis symptoms can be delayed,” said Fred Wyand, director of communications of the American Sexual Health Association. “They may not show up immediately, right at birth. It may take a little while. And that's also true when people acquire syphilis with these dull sexual contact symptoms that may not be immediate and then they tend to come and go. Somebody referred to syphilis as the great pretender because you can have symptoms like some skin rashes and ulcers that just clear up and go away, but it didn't. It's still there and can do some damage underneath.”
Public health advocates say the rise could be due to multiple factors, including a lack of testing and treatment. In Ohio in 2021, only 78.6% of babies were born to mothers who received early prenatal care. One in seven infants were born to mothers who received inadequate prenatal care.
Newborns of Black, Hispanic, and Native American/Alaskan Native mothers are eight times more likely to have congenital syphilis than those of white women, suggesting the disparity is linked to potential gaps in prenatal care and health insurance access within nonwhite communities.
“If you're dealing with communities that are underserved and rural, you're talking about people who don't have access to health insurance,” Kingori said. “Then the socioeconomic status includes education, employment, and if they don't have income, they're struggling. And if they don't have employment, then they also don't have health insurance. If they do, they're underinsured, and so health becomes secondary to people trying to find an opportunity to eat.”
While healthcare is crucial in preventing the transmission of syphilis to infants, experts say we also need to improve conversations and education about sexually transmitted infections (STIs).
“About half of young people will have an STD by the time they reach age 25,” Wyand said. “To think about that one out of two people, by the time they reach age 25 in this country, will have an STI. A lot of these cases are undiagnosed. But young people in that age group from the teens up to the mid-20s, bear the highest burden of STI of any age group,”
The World Health Organization emphasizes that children and adolescents have the right to age-appropriate and developmentally suitable comprehensive sexuality education (CSE) for their health and well-being.
“Raising awareness is critical,” Kingori said. “It's raising awareness and normalizing the language we associate with sexually transmitted infections. The weight that we give cervical cancer and the concern we produce for that, we should do the same with STIs, with the same empathy. It will help combat that stigma and also find ways to use non-stigmatizing language so that pregnant mothers or pregnant individuals can have access to the prevention and treatment services outside of the judgment.”
According to the Federal Office of Disease and Health Prevention, parents have the greatest impact on a young person's decisions about relationships and sex, even more than friends or the media. Open communication between parents and children leads to delayed sexual activity and a higher likelihood of making healthy choices, such as using condoms to prevent pregnancy and STIs.
“We think a real barrier to all this stuff is that we are not comfortable talking about it and we don't know how to talk about it,” Wyand said, pointing to a resource on ASHA’s website called “Be an Askable Parent.” “And that's not our fault. We're not blaming anybody. You don't know this stuff, but that's a big part of what we do and as we try to help people have these conversations and we give them practical stuff, we just don't tell them you need to talk.”
This collaboration is produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.
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Wyoming ranks 42nd in the U.S. for women's health and reproductive care, according to a new report - and some are urging lawmakers to make changes.
According to a new state scorecard from the Commonwealth Fund, Wyoming ranks among the bottom 10 states on multiple indicators for women's health care.
The state is especially low for rates of preventive measures, including cervical and breast cancer screenings and routine checkups.
Rates of maternal deaths and infant mortalities in Wyoming are on par with national averages - but the state's birth rate is going down.
Rebekah Hazelton, director of the Wyoming Women's Foundation, said that's been hard on rural hospitals.
"Those small maternity care centers are not really receiving enough births in their care," said Hazelton, "in order to keep up their core competencies, and have enough staff as well."
Hazelton said that makes it economically challenging for hospitals to provide maternal health services. There were just over 6,000 births in Wyoming in 2022 - a 20% decrease from 2012.
Another low score is on women's health coverage, access and affordability.
Hazelton said access to specialists can be minimal in a rural state. And then there's health coverage - Wyoming is one of only ten states that hasn't yet expanded Medicaid.
"That leaves a significant amount of the population in the gap," said Hazelton, "not able to pay for health care out of pocket and not able to access health insurance."
Hazelton said she hopes the Health and Labor interim committee discusses potential solutions at its upcoming meeting - including training and certifying more nurse-midwives, and improving relations between hospitals, lay-midwives, and doulas.
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By Shoshanna Ehrlich for Ms. Magazine.
Broadcast version by Freda Ross for Texas News Service reporting for the Ms. Magazine-Public News Service Collaboration
The state of Texas does not believe its overflowing arsenal of antiabortion laws-including a near-total ban on abortion, the infamous SB 8 that turns private parties into bounty-hunters by offering them cash prizes for turning in abortion "aiders and abettors," and municipal travel bans that similarly encourage vigilante justice against anyone using local roads to transport abortion seekers across state laws-has done enough to strip pregnant people of control over their bodies.
Represented by antiabortion warrior Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas is suing the Biden administration in a challenge to the Title IX rule that abortion-related discrimination is prohibited sex discrimination. Two professors from the University of Texas-Austin-John Hatfield, a professor of finance, and Daniel Bonevac, a philosophy professor-subsequently joined the suit as named plaintiffs.
As stated in their court declarations, the two professors object to and refuse to comply with the "Biden Administration's recently announced edict ... [which] represents an attempt to force every educator in the United States to conform to a highly contentious interpretation of ... abortion rights."
Although identified as a "recent edit," abortion-based discrimination has been prohibited since the Title IX regulations first went into effect in 1975.
While my focus is on the challenge to abortion protections, the lawsuit also challenges the 2024 Title IX regulations affirming that discrimination and harassment based on "sexual orientation, gender identity and sexual characteristics" are prohibited under Title IX due to the multiple harms, including bullying and harassment, of not having one's identity recognized or respected.
In virtually identical court declarations, the professors declare that they will not "honor any student's demands to be addressed by the singular pronoun 'they'" to avoid being made "a fool of ... to accommodate a student's delusional beliefs," and that teaching assistants will not be permitted to "engage in cross-dressing while teaching my classes or interacting with ... students."
To make sense of this case, originally filed at the end of April in the Amarillo division of the federal district court for the northern district of Texas, let's start by taking a quick look at some of the key players. Once again, older white men are leading the charge-this time, by bringing the patriarchal surveillance state into the classroom.
Ken Paxton has served as attorney general of Texas since 2015. According to Texas Monthly, he "has used his office as a cudgel in the culture wars for the Christian right," including an unrelenting legal campaign against abortion. Celebrating the fall of Roe, he declared June 24 the annual Sanctity of Life holiday to memorialize the "70 million babies that have been killed in the womb," and proclaimed that he looked "forward to defending the pro-life laws of Texas and the lives of all unborn children moving forward."
In a move the Washington Post characterized as "unnecessary, inexplicable cruelty," after a lower court ruled that Kate Cox, whose fetus had a lethal anomaly, could obtain an abortion under the state's narrow medical emergency exception, Paxton wrote to the hospitals where her doctor had admitting privileges warning them that the court's order would not insulate them from criminal and civil liability, including "first degree felony prosecutions."
The lawsuit was presumably filed in Amarillo because Trump appointee Mathew Kaczmaryk, who is notoriously antiabortion, is its sole presiding judge. Kaczmaryk ruled in favor of the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine in its challenge to the FDA's approval of mifepristone and its subsequent relaxing of regulations in an opinion that was permeated with both "junk science" and "misleading antiabortion tropes." The case was just dismissed by the Supreme Court based on the lack of "legal standing to bring the lawsuit because they were not harmed by the FDA's loosening of restrictions on mifepristone over the last eight years."
Bonevac has been one of Trump's most prominent academic supporters, according to an article that calls him one of "the only conservative [scholars] on campus." During Trump's last campaign, Bonevac "became a spokesman of sorts for the Scholars and Writers for America group, which argued that the property tycoon was 'the candidate most likely to restore the promise of America.'"
Hatfield and Bonevac are represented by Jonathan Mitchell, Trump's attorney before the Supreme Court in his case to stay on the presidential ballot-and more locally as the legal strategist behind both SB 8 and municipal travel bans, which promote vigilante justice against those aiding or transporting abortions seekers. Through these efforts, Mitchell has been instrumental in transforming Texas into an abortion desert. Adamant about keeping it this way, he is representing several men intent upon punishing their ex-partners for having had abortions. Mitchell is also a key strategist in the growing conservative push to resurrect the moribund 1873 Comstock Act as the basis for imposing a national abortion ban.
Title IX forces Texas educators to "protect women who abort their pregnancies even when doing so violates Texas law," the lawsuit alleges, such as by requiring them to excuse abortion-related absences as they would any other health-related absence. They say Title IX prohibits discrimination against students who "have engaged in the shipment or receipt of abortion pills and abortion-related paraphernalia in violation of federal law." (Emphasis added.)
The above reference to federal law points to the Comstock Act-Mitchell's favorite Victorian era purity law, which was intended to cleanse the nation of sexual corruption by prohibiting the sending of obscene materials, including contraceptives and anything that could be used to cause an abortion. The resurrection of this moribund law has become the conservative backdoor strategy for imposing an abortion ban on the country as a whole. This plan is now firmly embedded in Project 2025-the "unprecedented effort being orchestrated with dozens of right-flank organizations" in order to "dismantle the U.S. government and replace it with Trump's vision," according to the Associated Press.
Let's look more closely at what Hatfield and Bonevac are apparently so upset about when it comes to Title IX's non-discrimination protections for those who have had abortions or have sent or received abortion pills or "abortion-related paraphernalia" such that they have openly declared their intent to flout federal law.
One key objection is that abortion-related accommodations make them "complicit" in criminal activity. They also apparently hold their students to the same standard by expecting "their teaching assistants to obey and respect the laws of Texas and the laws of the United States"-so presumably they screen and reject prospective TAs for any kind of legal infraction, such as a speeding ticket or smoking weed.
Additionally, while the professors claim they will accommodate students who need "medically necessary abortions," they refuse to "accommodate a purely elective abortion that serves only to kill an unborn child that was conceived through an act of voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse."
This sets up a binary when it comes to their understanding of the sexual and reproductive lives of their students-namely, that there are only two kinds of abortions:
- those that are medically necessary (which is an extremely high bar under Texas law), or
- those that, as they seem to suggest, are undertaken in rather 'frivolous' circumstances when weighted against the "act of violence committed against the most vulnerable and defenseless members of the human family."
Assuming the genuineness of their commitment to antiabortion values, one must noneetheless pause to consider whether something more is involved. A perusal of social media comments makes clear this is indeed the case:
At its core, this case is about the surveillance and control of the sexual and reproductive lives of students, and the chillingly privileged view that professors are somehow entitled to this measure of control over students' lives based upon their own views about abortion.
Shoshanna Ehrlich wrote this article for Ms. Magazine.
Disclosure: Ms. Magazine contributes to our fund for reporting. If you would like to help support news in the public interest,
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Five hundred high school girls from Missouri are the stars of a new documentary.
Girls State is described as a political coming-of-age film. The girls participate in a weeklong, immersive democratic experiment. They build a mock government from scratch and deal with such significant issues as abortion rights and encouraging more women to serve in government.
The film is a companion to Boys State, which won a major film festival prize in 2020. Filmmaker Amanda McBaine, who co-directed both with Jesse Moss, said the comparison between the Girls State and Boys State programs was interesting to observe, as they were held during the same week for the first time.
"The degree of difference was what shocked me and the kids. I think they (the girls) were held back in a lot of ways from forming a government as quickly as the boys were," McBaine observed.
The filmmakers said they chose Missouri because it reflects America's political diversity. Girls State is trending now on the streaming platform Apple TV Plus.
McBaine described the communication among the young women as respectful despite their diverse views, and noted they didn't shy away from big subjects.
"They were empowered to build a Supreme Court, to hear a privacy case that very much mirrored the Dobbs Jackson case," she explained. "They took that moment and ran with it in a way that they recognized in each other, 'Oh, your politics may be different, but I see you in how much we need this empowerment.'"
McBaine added that the Girls State participants highlight the importance of representation in a democracy. According to Pew research, in 2023, only about 30% of state Senate seats were held by women. McBaine calls the documentary "a powerful look at politics through the eyes of young women."
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