Sorted by date Results 1 - 25 of 65
WASHINGTON (AP) — Anti-abortion advocates say there is still work to be done to further restrict access to abortion when Republican Donald Trump returns to the White House next year. They point to the federal guidance that the administration of Democratic President Joe Biden released around emergency abortions, requiring that hospitals provide them for women whose health or life is at risk, and its easing of prescribing restrictions for abortion pills that have allowed women to order the medication online with the click of a button. "Now the w...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Millions of people with private health insurance would be able to pick up over-the-counter methods like condoms, the "morning after" pill and birth control pills for free under a new rule the White House proposed on Monday. Right now, health insurers must cover the cost of prescribed contraception, including prescription birth control or even condoms that doctors have issued a prescription for. But the new rule would expand that coverage, allowing millions to buy condoms, birth control pills, or "morning after" pills from l...
ATLANTA (AP) — For the first time since she ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket, Vice President Kamala Harris is set to give a speech focused squarely on abortion rights and she'll do so in Georgia, where news reports have documented women's deaths in the face of the state's six-week ban. "It is a time of mourning, but it's also a time where great action can come out of this," said Park Cannon, a Georgia state lawmaker and a doula who provides guidance and support to pregnant woman during labor. ProPublica reported this week that t...
As the pregnant woman's contractions rolled in every two minutes, staff at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, dispatched an ambulance to send her elsewhere. Just two minutes later, she gave birth to a 6-pound baby girl in the cab of the ambulance down the road from the 900-bed hospital. The incident, government investigators concluded last year, was a violation of a federal law that requires emergency rooms to stabilize patients in medical distress before discharging or transferring them. Yet, Our Lady of...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Bleeding and in pain, Kyleigh Thurman didn't know her doomed pregnancy could kill her. Emergency room doctors at Ascension Seton Williamson in Texas handed her a pamphlet on miscarriage and told her to "let nature take its course" before discharging her without treatment for her ectopic pregnancy. When the 25-year-old returned three days later, still bleeding, doctors finally agreed to give her an injection to end the pregnancy. It was too late. The fertilized egg growing on Thurman's fallopian tube ruptured it, destroying p...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court will hear arguments Wednesday in a case that could determine whether doctors can provide abortions to pregnant women with medical emergencies in states that enact abortion bans. The Justice Department has sued Idaho over its abortion law, which allows a woman to get an abortion only when her life — not her health — is at risk. The state law has raised questions about when a doctor is able to provide the stabilizing treatment that federal law requires. The federal law, called the Emergency Medical Treat...
WASHINGTON (AP) — As Salvatore LoGrande fought cancer and all the pain that came with it, his daughters promised to keep him in the white, pitched roof house he worked so hard to buy all those decades ago. So, Sandy LoGrande thought it was a mistake when, a year after her father's death, Massachusetts billed her $177,000 for her father's Medicaid expenses and threatened to sue for his home if she didn't pay up quickly. "The home was everything," to her father said LoGrande, 57. But the bill and accompanying threat weren't a mistake. Rather, i...
WASHINGTON (AP) — One woman had to carry her baby, missing much of her skull, for months knowing she'd bury her daughter soon after she was born. Another started mirroring the life-threatening symptoms that her baby was displaying while in the womb. An OB-GYN found herself secretly traveling out of state to abort her wanted pregnancy, marred by the diagnosis of a fatal fetal anomaly. All of the women were told they could not end their pregnancies in Texas, a state that has enacted some of the nation's most restrictive abortion laws. Now, t...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Widespread loneliness in the U.S. poses health risks as deadly as smoking up to a dozen cigarettes daily, costing the health industry billions of dollars annually, the U.S. surgeon general said Tuesday in declaring the latest public health epidemic. About half of U.S. adults say they've experienced loneliness, Dr. Vivek Murthy said in an 81-page report from his office. "We now know that loneliness is a common feeling that many people experience. It's like hunger or thirst. It's a feeling the body sends us when something we n...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Two hospitals that refused to provide an emergency abortion to a pregnant woman who was experiencing premature labor put her life in jeopardy and violated federal law, a first-of-its-kind investigation by the federal government has found. The findings, revealed in documents obtained by The Associated Press, are a warning to hospitals around the country as they struggle to reconcile dozens of new state laws that ban or severely restrict abortion with a federal mandate for doctors to provide abortions when a woman's health is a...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The White House on Wednesday proposed a new federal rule to limit how law enforcement and state officials collect medical records if they investigate women who flee their home states to seek abortions elsewhere. The proposal, prompted by a string of blows to abortion across the country, comes as the White House is staring down a legal challenge to a commonly used abortion pill that could upend access to the care across the entire country by Friday. Vice President Kamala Harris told reporters that it's one of several new a...
WASHINGTON (AP) — If you get health care coverage through Medicaid, you might be at risk of losing that coverage over the next year. Roughly 84 million people are covered by the government-sponsored program, which has grown by 20 million people since January 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. But as states begin checking everyone's eligibility for Medicaid for the first time in three years, as many as 14 million people could lose access to that health care coverage. A look at why so many people may no longer qualify for the M...
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden informed Congress on Monday that he will end the twin national emergencies for addressing COVID-19 on May 11, as most of the world has returned closer to normalcy nearly three years after they were first declared. The move to end the national emergency and public health emergency declarations would formally restructure the federal coronavirus response to treat the virus as an endemic threat to public health that can be managed through agencies' normal authorities. It comes as lawmakers have already ended e...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration said Wednesday it will release doses of prescription flu medicine from the Strategic National Stockpile to states as flu-sickened patients continue to flock to hospitals and doctors' offices around the country. This year's flu season has hit hard and early. Some people are even noticing bare shelves at pharmacies and grocery stores when they make a run for over-the-counter medicines as cases have spiked. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that the flu has resulted in 150,000 h...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration is still actively searching for ways to safeguard abortion access for millions of women, even as it bumps up against a complex web of strict new state laws enacted in the months after the Supreme Court stripped the constitutional right. Looking to seize on momentum following a midterm election where voters widely rebuked tougher abortion restrictions, there's a renewed push at the White House to find ways to help women in states that have virtually outlawed or limited the treatment, and to keep the i...
WASHINGTON (AP) — COVID-19 drove a dramatic increase in the number of women who died from pregnancy or childbirth complications in the U.S. last year, a crisis that has disproportionately claimed Black and Hispanic women as victims, according to a government report released Wednesday. The report lays out grim trends across the country for expectant mothers and their newborn babies. It finds that pregnancy-related deaths have spiked nearly 80% since 2018, with COVID-19 being a factor in a quarter of the 1,178 deaths reported last year. The p...
WASHINGTON (AP) — After decades of failed attempts, Democrats passed legislation that aims to rein in the soaring costs of drugs for some in the United States. It will take years for people to realize some of the most significant savings promised in the climate and health care bill that President Joe Biden signed this month. The bill mostly helps the roughly 49 million people who sign up for Medicare's drug coverage. But many will be left out from direct savings after lawmakers stripped cost-savings measures for a majority of those covered b...
WASHINGTON (AP) — The social media posts are of a distinct type. They hint darkly that the CIA or the FBI are behind mass shootings. They traffic in racist, sexist and homophobic tropes. They revel in the prospect of a "white boy summer." White nationalists and supremacists, on accounts often run by young men, are building thriving, macho communities across social media platforms like Instagram, Telegram and TikTok, evading detection with coded hashtags and innuendo. Their snarky memes and trendy videos are riling up thousands of followers o...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, said it will start publicly providing more details about how advertisers target people with political ads. It is acting just months before the U.S. midterm elections and years after criticism that the social media platforms withhold too much information around how campaigns, special interest groups and politicians target small pockets of people with sometimes polarizing and misleading messages. Meta will start showing the demographics and interests of audiences advertisers s...
Elon Musk, the world's richest man, is spending $44 billion to acquire Twitter with the stated aim of turning it into a haven for "free speech." There's just one problem: The social platform has been down this road before, and it didn't end well. A decade ago, a Twitter executive dubbed the company "the free speech wing of the free speech party" to underscore its commitment to untrammeled freedom of expression. Subsequent events put that moniker to the test, as repressive regimes cracked down on Twitter users, particularly in the wake of the...
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The reports of hateful and violent posts on Facebook started pouring in on the night of May 28 last year, soon after then-President Donald Trump sent a warning on social media that looters in Minneapolis would be shot. It had been three days since Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin kneeled on the neck of George Floyd for more than eight minutes until the 46-year-old Black man lost consciousness, showing no signs of life. A video taken by a bystander had been viewed millions of times online. Protests had taken over M...
WASHINGTON (AP) — In March, as claims about the dangers and ineffectiveness of coronavirus vaccines spun across social media and undermined attempts to stop the spread of the virus, some Facebook employees thought they had found a way to help. By altering how posts about vaccines are ranked in people's newsfeeds, researchers at the company realized they could curtail the misleading information individuals saw about COVID-19 vaccines and offer users posts from legitimate sources like the World Health Organization. "Given these results, I'm a...
For many parents, revelations this week from whistleblower Frances Haugen showing internal Facebook studies of the harms of Instagram for teenagers only intensified concerns about the popular photo sharing app. "The patterns that children establish as teenagers stay with them for the rest of their lives," Haugen said in Senate testimony Tuesday. "The kids who are bullied on Instagram, the bullying follows them home. It follows them into their bedrooms. The last thing they see before they go to bed at night is someone being cruel to them,"...
YouTube announced a sweeping crackdown of vaccine misinformation Wednesday that booted popular anti-vaccine influencers from its site and deleted false claims that have been made about a range of immunizations. The video-sharing platform said it will no longer allow users to baselessly speculate that approved vaccines, like the ones given to prevent the flu or measles, are dangerous or cause diseases. YouTube's latest attempt to stem a tide of vaccine misinformation comes as countries around the globe struggle to convince a somewhat vaccine hes...
COLLEGE PARK, Md. (AP) — For years, legions of QAnon conspiracy theory adherents encouraged one another to "trust the plan" as they waited for the day when President Donald Trump would orchestrate mass arrests, military tribunals and executions of his Satan-worshipping, child-sacrificing enemies. Keeping the faith wasn't easy when Inauguration Day didn't usher in "The Storm," the apocalyptic reckoning that they have believed was coming for prominent Democrats and Trump's "deep state" foes. QAnon followers grappled with anger, confusion and d...
