Archives for February 2021

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina’s governor on Thursday signed a bill banning most abortions, one of his top priorities since he took office more than four years ago. Planned Parenthood immediately sued, effectively preventing the new law from taking effect.

The “South Carolina Fetal Heartbeat and Protection from Abortion Act, is similar to abortion restriction laws that a dozen states have previously passed. All are tied up in court. Federal law, which takes precedence over state law, currently allows abortion.

“There’s a lot of happy hearts beating across South Carolina right now,” Republican Gov. Henry McMaster proclaimed during a ceremony at the Statehouse attended by lawmakers who made the proposal a reality.

Immediately after he signed the bill, a group of legislators and members of the public, standing shoulder to shoulder and wearing masks to protect against the coronavirus, began singing the words “Praise God” to the tune of “Amazing Grace.”

The House passed the bill by a 79-35 vote on Wednesday after hours of emotional speeches from both supporters and opponents, and gave the measure final approval on Thursday. Moments after the Thursday vote, Planned Parenthood announced that it was filing a lawsuit. The South Carolina law, like those of other states that are currently being challenged, is “blatantly unconstitutional,” said Jenny Black, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood South Atlantic.

Supporters of restrictive abortion laws are trying to get the issue before the U.S. Supreme Court in the hopes that — with three justices appointed by Republican former President Donald Trump — the court could overturn Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision supporting abortion rights. The Supreme Court has previously ruled that abortion is legal until a fetus is viable outside the womb — months after a heartbeat can be detected, Black noted.

State bills to restrict or ban abortion “are plainly absurd,” she said. “There is no other way around it.”

South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson issued a statement Thursday saying that his office “will vigorously defend this law in court because there is nothing more important than protecting life.” He stood near McMaster as the governor signed the bill.

Abortion opponents have pushed for the ban for years, but it got stuck on a procedural hurdle in the Senate. Republicans gained three seats in the Senate in November’s election and the bill was tabbed “Senate Bill No. 1” to show it was the top priority.

“We’re about to do what I’ve been trying to do for 25 years: shut down the abortion industry in South Carolina,” Republican Sen. Larry Grooms said moments before the governor signed the bill.

Democrats say Republicans wasted taxpayer money by passing a bill that everyone knew would be challenged in court. They also argue that there are more important issues needing their attention, such as COVID-19, health care and education.

“We’re tired of the hypocrisy,” said House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford. Rutherford said Democrats have also had enough of lawmakers across the aisle telling them they don’t care about life.

“We care about life until death. We care about birth. … We care about people eating, people not dying because they can’t get vaccines,” he said.

The lawsuit by Planned Parenthood and The Center for Reproductive Rights argues that South Carolina’s new law “is in flagrant violation of nearly five decades of settled Supreme Court precedent.” The suit says a high rate of women, especially African Americans, die during or immediately after childbirth in South Carolina. The abortion ban would fall hardest on low-income women, who wouldn’t be able to travel to a nearby state where abortion is still permitted, the suit says.

A hearing to determine if the law should be suspended while the lawsuit is being heard is scheduled for Friday afternoon.

Like Democratic lawmakers, Black said the focus on abortion not only wastes money by fighting established law, but also ignores a host of other important issues.

“If lawmakers are really interested in making lives better, we have a long list of priorities they can focus on,” she said.

South Carolina’s law requires doctors to perform ultrasounds to check for a heartbeat in the fetus. If one is detected, the abortion can only be performed if the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest or the mother’s life is in danger.

The measure does not punish a pregnant woman for getting an illegal abortion, but the person who performed the abortion could be charged with a felony, sentenced up to two years and fined $10,000 if found guilty.

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Follow Jeffrey Collins on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JSCollinsAP.

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President Joe Biden is pushing for K-8 schools to fully reopen in his first 100 days. But don’t look for Omeisha Snape’s kids in the classrooms.

The New York City mother made the decision to keep her six children home in the fall when given the option of some in-person learning, and she’s heard nothing to change her mind about continuing remote learning for the rest of the school year.

Other parents, though, have joined lawsuits to force schools to fully open their doors, illustrating a divide that often breaks down along racial lines. The reticence of large numbers of parents who are skeptical of schools’ ability to keep their children safe complicates reopening plans for districts that also are weighing other factors including resistance of teachers unions and the logistics involved in keeping up social distancing.

“Absolutely not. They’re not going,” said Snape. She said her children have adjusted well to distance learning, while staying safe from the coronavirus.

If they returned to their charter school, there is no guarantee they would have their current teachers, while the masks, distancing and hand sanitizing would be a challenge, said Snape, who is Black. Not to mention the uniforms she would have to buy for the waning few weeks of school that would be left in the year.

Her 13-year-old daughter did recently return to the building part-time, Snape said, but only because she didn’t feel her teacher was responsive online.

Many other parents feel just the opposite.

Christina Maley Higley has been advocating for a full reopening of schools, citing among other reasons, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ statements that in-person learning does not seem to significantly increase community transmission of the virus.

“I’m glad (the President is) saying that but it needed to have been done months ago,” Higley said. She is homeschooling her first-, fourth- and sixth-grade children this year because she found the hybrid model offered in her suburban Webster, New York district — in-person some days, online on others — too disruptive.

Teachers unions have said they support the idea as long as COVID-19 mitigation strategies are in place to make the buildings safer, but they need the $130 billion included in Biden’s proposed American Rescue Plan to make it happen.

It will take that and more for many parents to feel comfortable, said Keri Rodrigues, a Latina mother of five in Somerville, Massachusetts.

As president of the grassroots National Parents Union, Rodrigues pressed the Biden Administration to embrace the reopening plan for the academic and emotional well-being of students. But she said there is much work to be done to convince parents, especially Black and brown families who have been disproportionately impacted by the virus, that their children will be safe.

Black, Hispanic and Native American people are dying from COVID-19 at almost three times the rate of white people, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Polling by the National Parents Union, which represents many parents of color and low-income parents, has found about 40% of families are not ready to send their children back to school and roughly the same number are either unwilling or unsure about having them vaccinated.

“There’s a definite correlation,” Rodrigues said.

“There are 40% of families saying we don’t trust these systems at all because they don’t do right by our kids on a good day,” Rodrigues said. “We don’t have toilet paper. We don’t have running water. We don’t have soap on a good day. Now, you’re telling us that you’re going to have PPE and disinfectants and you’ve got us covered? No, you don’t. So just like trust is earned, mistrust is also earned.”

A CDC report in December similarly found that racial and ethnic minority parents were more concerned about some aspects of school reopening than white parents, including that mitigation measures wouldn’t be followed and the possibility their children would bring the virus home with them.

In New York City public schools, where 66% of students are Hispanic or Black, the Snape children are among the vast majority of students who, when given a choice to attend school part-time, chose remote-only.

In contrast, a questionnaire in the small, majority white Mt. Lebanon, Pennsylvania, school district found 77% of elementary school parents would send their children to school five days a week if offered, according to a Feb. 15 presentation to the school board.

Philadelphia schools sent an enrollment survey to parents of nearly 28,000 pre-kindergarten through second-grade students in November, of whom about a third favored the hybrid model, a quarter intended to keep their children virtual, and the remainder, 43%, did not make a choice.

Teachers and some parents say they don’t trust the district, given its poor track record abating environmental problems like lead, asbestos and mold in school buildings. Many have ridiculed the district’s plan to install plastic window fans, which are attached to plywood, in more than 1,000 classrooms to boost air flow.

Fully remote since last March, the district had been set to resume some in-person instruction next week. But ongoing mediation between the school district and the teachers union over the district’s safety plan will force another delay, Superintendent William Hite said Wednesday.

Jerry Jordan, president of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, said too many school buildings remain unsafe for occupancy, citing a lack of ventilation.

“While we all want our children to return to school sooner than later, we are not willing to sacrifice their health and safety to give them a false sense of normalcy,” said Brandy Stewart, president of the home and school association at Philadelphia’s Powel Elementary.

Claire Murphy, the parent of a Philadelphia kindergarten student, said her daughter needs to be in a classroom.

“My very social 5-year-old is honestly really struggling emotionally with staying home, not being able to go to school,” she said. “I really don’t think we can make it until next fall and miss kindergarten completely.”

Rodrigues herself reluctantly enrolled two of her children in a private school just last week after seeing them reach a breaking point with remote learning.

“Even though I am terrified of the virus and I do not trust that we have this covered and the coronavirus, that my kids are going to be safe from it, watching my third-grader get up last Monday morning and at 8 o’clock in the morning, being on the verge of tears, dreading his life,” she said. “As a mom, there comes a tipping point where my fear of the virus versus my fear of losing my kids.”

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Associated Press writer Michael Rubinkam contributed from northeastern Pennsylvania.

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DALLAS (AP) — Ashley Archer, a pregnant, 33-year-old Texas financial adviser, and her husband have been cautious about the coronavirus. They work from home, go out mostly just to get groceries and wear masks whenever they are in public.

But when a friend lost power amid the winter storms that have left millions of Texans without heat in freezing temperatures, the couple had to make a decision: Should they take on additional risk to help someone in need?

Archer said they didn’t hesitate. They took her husband’s best friend into their suburban Dallas home.

“He’s like family,” she said. “We weren’t going to let him freeze at his place. We figured, ‘OK, we’re willing to accept a little bit of risk because you’re not in our little pandemic group.’”

Weighing the risks in the pandemic era is fraught enough. But the storms and outages that have hit a big swath of the U.S. over the past several days have added a whole new layer of complexity.

Do we open doors to the neighbors? Should we stay in a hotel or go to a shelter? And what to do about hand-washing, the most basic of precautions, when there is no running water?

The last few months have been challenging enough for Jonathan Callahan. He lost his job cleaning mail trucks in Jackson, Mississippi, and soon found himself homeless, sleeping in an abandoned church at night. Then the storm hit Mississippi this week, bringing bouts of snow and freezing cold.

Callahan, 40, was one of 14 people staying at a warming shelter at a community center in Jackson, with cots spread around the gym. He said the space has been comfortable, meals have been provided, and he and some others played a game of pickup basketball, which “warmed us right up.”

He said he felt comfortable with the coronavirus precautions; he and most everyone else were wearing masks and there was room for distancing.

“I’m grateful they let us be here,” he said. “If we weren’t here, where would we be?”

Public health experts say that crowding people into shelters can contribute to the spread of COVID-19, but that there are ways to lower the risks, through masks and distancing.

“The ethics of the situation are simple enough,” said Dr. Stefan Kertesz, a University of Alabama at Birmingham professor of medicine and a homeless health researcher who runs a clinic for homeless veterans. “We can’t protect people tomorrow if they die today. Warming stations are needed.”

The storms that have disrupted social distancing precautions and thrown people from different households together have also undermined the nation’s vaccination drive, with tens of thousands of vaccine doses stranded and inoculations canceled. Concern is mounting in some places.

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker said Thursday he is thinking of sending the National Guard into the South to bring back held-up shipments of vaccine earmarked for the state. He said the state can’t afford to go a week without getting any new doses.

And North Carolina vaccine providers have yet to receive tens of thousands of doses the federal government was set to deliver this week, state officials said.

Like Archer, Ella Ewart-Pierce, a public health analyst, said her family has been especially cautious about the coronavirus because her husband is in a vulnerable group. The Dallas couple has been working from home, avoiding places where people gather and getting groceries delivered.

But when they lost power, the risk calculation shifted. Ewart-Pierce said they decided to take their young kids to a hotel Monday after their home became so cold they had to shut off the water to keep the pipes from bursting.

“It was 13 degrees outside and our house was 38 degrees inside,” Ewart-Pierce said. “The kids were already crying because they were cold even though they were wearing all their clothes.”

When the family arrived at the hotel they plan to stay at until Sunday, “it was a scene,” said Ewart-Pierce.

“There was one lady trying to figure out where to buy formula for her baby. There are families and a lady in a wheelchair with a blanket. It’s a hotel that has pets, so there were dogs,” she said.

They’re taking precautions while there, she said, including wearing two face masks each and keeping their distance from other people. With the hotel’s restaurant open but dining in prohibited, they’re eating on the floor of their room.

In Austin, Anissa Ryland also was forced to move her family to a hotel. She, her husband and their five children lost power at their 115-year-old home around 2 a.m. Monday and left following a frigid night.

When they returned Tuesday to pick up supplies, the thermostat read just 7 degrees above freezing, and icicles had begun to form.

Under normal circumstances, the family could stay with neighbors or family, but the pandemic has made that harder. For one thing, one of her children has a compromised immune system, she said.

“You have to weigh the risks and say, ‘Danger now versus a theoretical risk,’” Ryland said. “How do you do that? It’s a hard discussion.”

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Bleiberg reported from Dallas, Willingham from Jackson, Mississippi, and Noveck from New York. Associated Press writers Carla K. Johnson in Washington state; Bryan Anderson in Raleigh, N.C.; Acacia Coronado in Austin, Texas; and Mark Pratt in Boston also contributed.

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