Sepsis Rates Have Skyrocketed Since This Red State Banned Abortion

Texas lawmakers instituted a sweeping six-week abortion ban in 2021, using the threat of criminal conviction to sway providers against offering the medical procedure. The law offered a controversial $10,000 cash incentive for citizens to report medical practitioners in defiance of the ban, and left little room for emergency scenarios in which the pregnancy threatened the life of the person carrying the fetus.

But the result of the ban has only proved to make pregnancy dramatically more dangerous in Texas, according to a report published Thursday by ProPublica, which found that the rate of sepsis—the body’s extreme response to an infection—skyrocketed by 50 percent after the law went into effect for women who were hospitalized after losing their pregnancies during the second trimester.

Sepsis is one of the leading causes of death in hospitals. For those who survive, it can lead to permanent kidney failure, brain damage, and blood clotting. In order to avoid the risk of sepsis, the standard procedure for miscarrying patients in the second trimester is to evacuate the uterus. A patient’s risk of infection and eventual sepsis climbs with every hour after their water breaks, or their cervix opens, reported ProPublica.

The risk of sepsis was even greater for patients whose fetus may have still had a heartbeat when they arrived at the hospital, according to the investigative nonprofit. At least two people have died from sepsis since the ban. Both had miscarried but died due to politically caused medical delays in inducing what would have been considered an abortion. Their deaths prompted a coalition of 111 Texas OB-GYN’s to plead with state lawmakers to allow them to provide lifesaving care for pregnant patients on the verge of death.

Under Texas law, medical professionals who provide abortions could face sentences of up to 99 years.

Federal agencies and state-appointed review panels have yet to analyze the consequences of abortion bans on mortality rates for pregnant people, making ProPublica’s analysis the first of its kind.

In 2021, 67 patients who lost their pregnancy in the second trimester were diagnosed with sepsis, according to Texas hospitals’ discharge data obtained by the publication. But by 2023, that number had climbed to 99.  ProPublica also noted that its analysis was on the conservative side and likely missed some sepsis cases. Patients whose fetus was still found to have a heartbeat were much more likely to develop sepsis.

“What this says to me is that once a fetal death is diagnosed, doctors can appropriately take care of someone to prevent sepsis, but if the fetus still has a heartbeat, then they aren’t able to act and the risk for maternal sepsis goes way up,” Dr. Kristina Adams Waldorf, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at UW Medicine and an expert in pregnancy complications, told ProPublica. “This is needlessly putting a woman’s life in danger.”

Texas’s draconian abortion restrictions do provide an emergency abortion clause for life-threatening situations, but accessing the loophole isn’t cut and dry—even for some women who appear to overtly qualify for it.

In May, the Texas Supreme Court unanimously rejected a challenge to the state’s abortion laws, overturning a lower court’s decision that would have allowed women in Texas to actually access abortions granted within the confines of the state’s ban. The Center for Reproductive Rights, which brought the suit in 2023, argued that while the state’s laws technically left room for abortions in urgent circumstances, they were also so vague that they practically restricted all medical practitioners from actually considering the procedure as an option. Specifically, people could undergo abortions during complicated pregnancies so long as their doctor made a “good faith judgment” that it was medically necessary. 

Some women in the state, such as Kate Cox, have been forced to flee for care after failing to legally obtain access to abortions under the state’s emergency clause.

Still, despite the legal confusion, Governor Greg Abbott doesn’t believe the law needs clarification.

“There have been hundreds of abortions that have been provided under this law, so there are plenty of doctors and plenty of mothers that have been able to get an abortion that saved their lives and protect their health and safety,” Abbott told the Houston Chronicle on Tuesday, adding that his intention when the law was signed was to protect the lives of mothers. “So I know as the law as it currently exists can work if it is properly applied.”

By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 12 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 69 percent believe that it should be legal in the first trimester of pregnancy.

Trump is hosting some of the most questionable guests at the White House’s Black History Month celebration, as he continues his sweeping attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion at all levels of the federal government. 

The White House will be filling the room with talking heads, entertainers, politicians, and more, all of whom have either advocated for Trump, received a pardon from Trump, or both.  

The guest list will include rapper and convicted rapist Kodak Black (who was granted a pardon from Trump in 2021), known homophobe Lil Boosie, singer Rod Wave, Senator Tim Scott, failed Senate candidate and current ambassador to the Bahamas Herschel Walker, Martin Luther King’s right-wing grifting niece Alveda King, and former ESPN host turned MAGA podcaster Sage Steele. 

This pitiful list of representatives—two extremely controversial rappers and every bigoted white person’s favorite “Black friend”—is par for the course from an administration that has been hostile towards Black voters from the jump. From the “Black jobs” comment to Trump’s meltdown at the National Association of Black Journalists conference, to his outright attack on DEI (even blaming the horrific DCA plane crash on it), it’s clear that this administration does not take Black Americans seriously. 

Donald Trump is taking aim at a government agency that helps the U.S. recover from natural disasters.

The New York Times reports that the Trump administration plans to cut the Office of Community Planning and Development, part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), by 84 percent. The office helps with recovery efforts, including rebuilding homes, after disasters like Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and Hurricane Milton in Florida.

When Trump was sworn in as president last month, the office had 936 employees. The administration plans to reduce that number to 150, which would hurt recovery efforts underway across the country, including in places that voted for Trump and Republicans overall. The office helps to supplement and fill in gaps left by the primary government agency responsible for disaster recovery, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).

Congress often uses the office for disaster relief by using a HUD program known as the Community Development Block Grant—Disaster Recovery, which can bring in more money than even FEMA can provide. For example, the Times reports that in 2006, Congress provided nearly $17 billion from the grant program to rebuild the Gulf Coast following Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma.

Funding for the office has grown in recent years as disasters become more frequent thanks to climate change. In the 1990s, the office received a few hundred million dollars each year, but for the past decade, has received up to tens of billions of dollars in funding every year. For people who might not know how important the office is, like Elon Musk and administration officials, the office might seem ripe for cuts.

Trump has repeatedly said that he wants to get rid of FEMA and have states instead “take care of” disaster recovery on their own. The planned cuts to this office fit into his philosophy of the federal government refraining from helping Americans struggling to recover after a hurricane, wildfire, or other serious disaster. But every state needs funding from the government to recover after one of these events, and Trump’s policies could leave Americans who have lost everything with much less relief.

JD Vance has weighed in on what he thinks masculinity is, and it’s one big joke.

During an interview to kick off the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington Thursday, Vance pontificated over what makes him a man.

“I think about like, ‘What is the essence of masculinity?’ You could answer this in so many different ways,” Vance said. “But when I think about me and my guy friends, we really like to tell jokes to one another.”

It’s entirely possible that the simple question caught him off guard. After all, Vance has been more or less shunned from the public eye since entering office, in favor of Donald Trump’s actual favorite Elon Musk. So maybe he’s just warming up to answering questions again.

Vance’s comment is particularly ironic considering that on the campaign trail, the ineffectual vice president demonstrated time and time again that he’s actually too hostile to deliver a joke, let alone a funny one.

There are those of us who still remember his weak attempt to rib cancel culture over his choice of Diet Mountain Dew. Or his sexist “childless cat lady” comment. Vance claimed it was just a joke, but in reality, it stood only to demonstrate his actual approach to manhood, what Ginny Hogan for The Nation called his “insecure, backward-looking, and grievance-driven” brand of masculinity.

Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency members have wasted no time making themselves comfortable during their efforts to take an axe to federal agencies and reshape them to the liking of tech bros, The Atlantic reported Thursday. 

One month after DOGE’s raid of USAID offices at the beginning of February, the non-agency of non-employees seems to be everywhere, or at least that’s how it feels, according to one USAID contractor. “It’s like the panopticon,” the contractor told The Atlantic. “There’s a sense that Elon Musk, through DOGE, is always watching. It has created a big sense of fear.”

While a memo barred USAID officials from returning to agency headquarters after the takeover, it made no mention of its other offices, providing a window into the goings-on of Musk’s minions. 

One USAID staffer told The Atlantic that after DOGE’s descent into her agency’s offices, she returned to find ample evidence of “activity overnight.” Some of her materials had been moved from where she left them, and there were Panera cookie wrappers strewn across her desk and in the nearby waste bin. 

“Books were open, and things had been riffled through,” another USAID staffer told the magazine. 

The impression that DOGE is always watching takes on a new meaning when considering the unprecedented level of access staffers have been granted to the offices of the agencies they’re gutting. The contractor told The Atlantic that she kept her government laptop under a pile of clothes in her closet, and her colleagues considered storing their computers in the fridge, in case DOGE was using it to spy on them.

During a town hall in Leesburg, Virginia, earlier this month, a man who identified himself as a federal worker claimed that a DOGE employee had moved into the federal building where he worked, bringing with him a wife and baby, according to The Daily Beast. 

It’s not clear where the rest of Musk’s minions reside, but DOGE headquarters, located at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, recently received a shipment of sleep pods to fuel their supposed efficiency.  

“In the last week, we had Elon Musk in our building, and after he visited the building, called for a 50 percent cut of the entire agency,” the man claimed. “My colleagues are getting 15-minute one-on-one check-ins with 19-, 20-, and 21-year old-college graduates asking to justify their existence.”

According to The Atlantic, DOGE has subjected federal employees to extensive corporate-style questioning as part of its efforts to learn even more about the staff it hopes to obliterate. 

Federal employees received short-notice invitations from nongovernmental email addresses, asking them to complete a form probing them for their recent “wins” and “blockers,” and to attend 15-minute interviews. Some people received short coding quizzes, while others were pressed to speak on their beliefs about DOGE itself. While the specific questions varied, many hit the same flavor. 

In one recording obtained by The Atlantic, an employee of the General Services Administration was asked by one of Musk’s twenty-something goons, “Like, what’s your superpower?” 

As one recently departed federal technology official wrote in a draft testimony for lawmakers, this level of access is an obvious double-edged sword. 

“At present, every hacker in the world knows there are a small number of people new to federal service who hold the keys to access all US government payments, contracts, civil servant personal info, and more,” they wrote. “DOGE is one romance scam away from a national security emergency.”

The sheer extent to which these agencies have become inundated with random tech bros may seem laughable, but the purpose of their permeation is much more sinister. 

In addition to sifting through government contracts for words such as “diversity” to put them on the chopping block (and then in an increasing number of cases, hurriedly reinstalled), Musk’s young technologists attempted to gain access to the U.S. Treasury system to stop the payments coming from USAID without having to order the agency to stop spending, according to The Atlantic. 

With a few clicks on a keyboard, DOGE has snatched the purse strings for the entire federal government out of the hands of Congress, and into the hands of the executive—or more likely, the executive’s technocrat buddy. 

Donald Trump’s new commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, says the president wants to get rid of the Internal Revenue Service.

“His goal is to abolish the Internal Revenue Service and let all the outsiders pay,” Lutnick said to Jesse Watters on Fox News Wednesday, adding that the president’s planned “External Revenue Service” will fund the government with tariffs from the rest of the world.

Trump has already started cutting the government agency, with plans to lay off about 7,000 IRS workers beginning Thursday, despite tax season being in full swing. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has also demanded access to the private data of every single taxpayer, business, and nonprofit, and Musk claimed earlier this month that he killed a popular government program that allowed Americans a free and easy way to file their taxes.

In December, in negotiations to avert a government shutdown, Republicans already set the stage for Trump’s plan, cutting $20 billion in funding for the IRS, hurting its ability to conduct audits and adding $140 billion to the national debt, the Biden administration said at the time. Trump’s choice to run the agency, former Representative Billy Long, has yet to be confirmed by the Senate, but he repeatedly sought to abolish the IRS while serving in the House.

While killing the IRS might once have been a half-baked scheme for Republicans, that no longer seems to be the case. Trump has already destroyed one government agency, barring legal challenges. But will he actually be able to get rid of the IRS, which is responsible for bringing in the money that runs the federal government? It remains to be seen if he can overcome all of the legal issues with his goal, as well as Congress.

Vice President JD Vance is asking the American public to reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.

Speaking before the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Thursday, the vice president insisted that Donald Trump still held all his cards in negotiations over Ukraine’s fate—just one week after his defense secretary told NATO they didn’t.

“I think President Trump—what makes him such an effective negotiator, I’ve seen this in private—is that he doesn’t take anything off the table,” Vance told CPAC host Mercedes Schlapp. “When he walks in a negotiation, he says, ‘Everything is on the table.’”

But Vance’s comments came barely a week after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explicitly told the NATO conference that the administration’s peace talks with Russia had actually taken several bargaining chips “off the table.”

That included Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine. He also added that it would be “unrealistic” for Ukraine to return to its pre-war borders, effectively ceding land to Moscow.

The announcement came as a complete 180 on American and NATO policy regarding the eastern European country, and left U.S. allies and defense experts reeling. The deal, per Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton, amounted to Russian propaganda and was practically “written in the Kremlin.”

Hegseth walked back the brazen settlement terms the following day, insisting that, despite having already shown the American hand, “everything is on the table” when it comes to arranging peace between Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Trump denied telling Hegseth to walk back his comments during an Oval Office press conference, describing them as “pretty accurate.”

Hot heads and rocky promises have resulted in several days of tumult on a potential peace deal, including Trump branding Zelenskiy a “dictator.” But beyond the administration’s seismic hiccups, perhaps the most egregious error remains that Trump has continued to relegate Kyiv to the sidelines of a negotiation that will decide Ukraine’s future.

The U.S. and Russia opened discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership. Critics excoriated the administration for doing so, but Vance did little more than brush off the global concern at CPAC.

“And of course that makes the heads explode in the American media, because they say, ‘Why are you talking to Russia?’” Vance told the conference. “Well, how are you going to end the war unless you’re talking to Russia? You’ve got to get everybody involved in the fighting if you actually want to bring it to a close, and I know the president does.”

Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine.

Mitch McConnell has finally decided to call it quits.

The longest-serving Senate leader in history announced on Thursday that he will not run for reelection in 2026.

“Seven times, my fellow Kentuckians have sent me to the Senate,” McConnell said to the Associated Press. “Every day in between I’ve been humbled by the trust they’ve placed in me to do their business here. Representing our commonwealth has been the honor of a lifetime. I will not seek this honor an eighth time. My current term in the Senate will be my last.”

This ends McConnell’s decades-long reign of conservative terror that upended years of liberal and progressive policy, cemented conservative courts across the nation, and saw the rise of Donald Trump—leading to McConnell’s own eventual dethroning.

McConnell spent his leadership tenure obstructing campaign finance reform and packing the federal courts with likeminded conservatives, providing fertile ground for Citizens United and the debilitating influx of corporate influence onto American politics. He also helped create the correct circumstances for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, as he held up Merrick Garland’s nomination under former President Barack Obama and then helped Trump confirm three justices to the high court.

McConnell unsuccessfully tried to thread the needle near the end, critiquing Trump’s brand of conservatism while protecting it and the power his proximity to it gave him. He backed the president for years, fighting against his impeachment and supporting his claims of a stolen election even after lambasting January 6 as a “violent insurrection.”

McConnell’s exit serves as a fitting end to the Republican Party’s rejection of traditional conservatism and full embrace of Trump’s MAGA movement.

This story has been updated.

Fear might be the driving motivator behind Republican lawmakers’ continual bend to Donald Trump.

The GOP caucus is reportedly “scared shitless” of not just Trump’s ire—but the personal vindictiveness and constant threat of political violence from his MAGA base across the country.

The final straw that reportedly flipped Senator Thom Tillis’s vote on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth were “credible death threats” against the North Carolina lawmaker, according to sources that spoke with Vanity Fair. Tillis was the final Republican holdout on confirming the former Fox News star to lead the Pentagon.

“According to the source, Tillis has said that if people want to understand Trump, they should read the 2006 book Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work,” Vanity Fair reported.

Trump’s violent rhetoric offers one obvious reason why Republicans are so wary of crossing him. The president has a bizarre relationship with the more reactive sectors of his base. During the first presidential debate of the 2020 cycle, Trump issued a direct missive to the Proud Boys, a militant white supremacist group, telling them to “stand back and stand by.” And the MAGA leader has also encouraged direct violence at his rallies, encouraging his supporters to “knock the crap out of” protesters who exercise their First Amendment rights against Trump’s agenda.

The president also made his reciprocal loyalty to his base obvious from the first day of his second administration: after claiming for years that he would free the men and women who rioted through Congress in 2021—and forced the legislature to delay the certification of the presidential election result—Trump overrode internal debate amongst his administration hours after his inauguration to pardon some 1,500 January 6 offenders.

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration told Vanity Fair.

Trump’s decision to legally and unilaterally forgive his most aggressive supporters was, actually, wildly unpopular with the American public. A November Scripps News/Ipsos survey found that few Americans—just 30 percent—actually supported a legal reprieve for the Capitol rioters, versus an overwhelming 64 percent of the country that was against it. Just one percent of respondents believed that the pardons should be Trump’s first priority—let alone something that he issued a sweeping executive order for on his first day in office.