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Legal Wrap: The Dangers of Politicizing Pregnancies

From Catholic hospitals to juries in Indiana, more and more pregnant people are finding themselves pitted against their pregnancies.

From Catholic hospitals to juries in Indiana, more and more pregnant people are finding themselves pitted against their pregnancies. Shutterstock

Legal Wrap is a weekly round-up of key legal reproductive rights and justice news.

Rewire Director of Online Campaigns Natasha Chart shares her recent experience with an ectopic pregnancy in this powerful and important piece that quite soberly sums up why we at Rewire do the work that we do.

Didn’t see this one coming: The GOP’s alternative to Obamacare fails to cover contraception or maternity care.

Here we go again. Another federal court rules that even the most recent changes by the Obama administration to the accommodation process for nonprofits wanting to opt out of covering contraceptives do not go far enough to appease religious concerns.

A bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks failed to advance out of a Virginia subcommittee, while in South Dakota a bill that would prevent the “prepayment” of abortion services moved forward.

The Montana Supreme Court ruled the state can go ahead and defend two recent parental involvement statutes despite the fact that a court struck previous, practically identical versions as unconstitutional.

People of color comprise approximately a quarter of the population of Kansas yet account for only 3 percent of the judges in the state.

An Indiana jury convicted 33-year-old Purvi Patel of both feticide and felony neglect of a dependent. Patel’s sentencing is scheduled for March 6, and she faces up to 70 years in prison.

Civil rights advocates have sued the cities of Ferguson and Jennings, Missouri, claiming the municipalities are running the equivalent of debtors’ prisons by illegally jailing hundreds of mostly poor, Black residents for unpaid fines like traffic tickets.

Mandatory drug tests for welfare recipients is all the rage among conservatives, which, as this New Republic piece explains, is really just a new way for red states to tax their poor.

A Papa John’s franchise in New York is the latest fast food company ordered to pay employees damages related to wage theft claims, this time to the tune of almost $800,000.

On a related note, half of January’s job gains for women were in low-wage jobs.

A new poll suggests conservatives want even more abortion restrictions. Shocking, I know.

The plaintiffs behind the lawsuit trying to gut the Affordable Care Act are as awful as you’d expect. Maybe even more so.

Insurance companies, in their quest to prove they are simply the worst, have found a way around the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that health plans cover contraceptives at no additional cost by removing generic birth control pills from the list of such contraceptives.

The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could gut one of the most successful pieces of civil rights legislation, the Fair Housing Act. Needless to say, I’m not very optimistic about the law’s chances.

Florida state Rep. Frank Artiles (R-Miami) has filed a bill that would make it a crime for transgender people to use single-sex public restrooms that conform to their gender identity.

What could go wrong here? The Florida Supreme Court has been asked to define “sexual intercourse” and whether or not the definition applies to sex between two men.

You should read Andrea Grimes on the Texas legislature every week.

Imani Gandy is the antidote to this legislative session’s most bananas proposals.

Finally! In movement-building news, a new textbook could revolutionize the way law students learn about reproductive rights.