Erika Christensen, left, with her husband, Garin, and her daughter in New York in 2018. Christensen and her husband founded Patient Forward, a nonprofit organization that advocates for later abortion access, after she had to fly to Colorado from New York to terminate a pregnancy with severe complications in 2016. (Photo courtesy of Erika Christensen) Kate Dineen assumed she would always have access to reproductive healthcare because of where she lived. It came as a shock when she was denied an abortion in 2021 because of gestational limits to the procedure in Massachusetts law. Dineen was 33 weeks into her pregnancy, the third trimester, when a routine ultrasound detected a problem with the fetus’s brain. An MRI showed that her son, whom she’d named Teddy, had suffered a catastrophic stroke in utero. A pediatric neurologist gave her the news over a Zoom call during the COVID-19 pandemic. “I said, ‘What’s the best-case scenario? Is there any chance of a normal, healthy outcome?’ And ...
Voters in Grand Rapids, Michigan, cast their ballots during the state’s August 2024 primary. (Photo by Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline) A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled the Department of Justice isn’t entitled to access the sensitive personal data of Michigan voters, a setback in President Donald Trump’s push to assert power over state-run elections. The decision moves the country closer to a potential fight at the U.S. Supreme Court over state voter rolls ahead of the November midterm elections, with Michigan at the center. The Trump administration has sued 30 states for copies of their voter information. Federal officials want to run the data through a Department of Homeland Security computer program to identify possible noncitizen voters. In a 2-1 decision , a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals found that Michigan Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson isn’t required to turn over sensitive voter data, including dates of birth, driver’s license a...