To some, strengthening a system created to address child abuse and neglect might sound like a reasonable response to restrictive abortion laws. After all, poverty fuels most child welfare involvement, and for many new parents, bringing home a new baby is a financially precarious moment. Even back in the before-Dobbs days of 2022, who are in poverty or low-income. In places with abortion bans, that proportion is likely to grow, as it is low-income women who most often lack the money, time and child care to head out-of-state for abortions.

But to many, the idea of preparing for forced births by activating a system empowered to forcibly remove children from parents judged as unfit sounds “dystopic.” “This is a coerced family,” said Erin Miles Cloud, co-director of the nonprofit and a former family defense attorney. “And then you want to create a condition where the child and parent in the coerced family only gets support if the family is disrupted and separated and the child is put with people who are deemed to be better.”

Thankfully, a host of recent studies by economists point to a far less extreme and more cost-effective way to protect children from maltreatment and foster care: give low-income parents material supports. “Even a small amount of resources either in terms of food or in terms of cash are the difference between being able to provide adequate care for your kid or not,” said Donna Ginther, an economics professor at the University of Kansas.��

Ginther is co-author of two recent studies suggesting that strengthening social safety nets reduces child maltreatment and child welfare involvement. In one, published in , Ginther and her co-authors found that states which made it harder for families to access TANF cash assistance—such as restricting the amount of time a family can receive it, or requiring mothers to return to work before their child turns one—saw a marked rise in both the number of substantiated reports of child maltreatment and the number of children removed from homes and placed in foster care.

If all states had instead made it easier for families to access TANF during the 12 years studied, more than 29,000 fewer children would have entered foster care, the researchers estimate. Considering that at the time of the study, foster care for one child in Kansas cost five times more than the monthly TANF payments for a family of three, that would have added up to huge savings for states. “And that’s not counting the potential negative impact of a child being in foster care,” said Ginther.

In another study also , Ginther along with Michelle Johnson-Motomaya of Ohio State University and other co-authors determined that making it easier for families to access SNAP, the program formerly known as food stamps, also reduced a state’s child welfare caseloads; every 5 percent increase in the number of families receiving SNAP reduces a state’s child protective and foster care caseloads between 8 to 14 percent, they estimate. “If a state is more generous with SNAP benefits, that protects kids from entering foster care,” said Ginther.

Such findings are part of demonstrating that material supports given to parents help to keep families intact. at the University of Chicago details the many different forms of assistance that have been linked to lowered child welfare involvement: a higher minimum wage, no-strings-attached cash assistance, lower gas costs, access to subsidized child care, housing help.

Researchers and family advocates say the reason is simple: such supports reduce economic hardship, which makes it easier to parent. About 85 percent of families investigated for child welfare have incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, according to the Chapin Hall report. While poverty is not supposed to be a cause for states to remove a child from home, conditions such as not having money to pay for child care can impact a child’s safety and make a family more likely to be investigated for child maltreatment.

“If you don’t have a home and you’re bumping back and forth between different shelters, that makes it difficult to get to school,” said Miles Cloud. “If you don’t have food, then your kid is hungry, so you’re trapped for the conditions to care for your kid, not your ability to care.”

About one in every three children in the U.S. become part of a child protective investigation at some point in their lives; for Black children, that number rises to more than half. Though most child welfare investigations do not result in a maltreatment finding, they do add strain and stress to already vulnerable families. Some research suggests that in low-income neighborhoods saturated with child welfare cases, parents can be reluctant to seek help for their children for fear of triggering an investigation. This is part of why Miles Cloud and other proponents for abolishing child welfare systems have long called for increases in no-strings-attached material supports for families such as cash assistance and free child care.��

Many of the states embracing abortion bans are notorious for their. Some even that could provide cash assistance to parents into child welfare programs, instead. Miles Cloud said that state child welfare systems, meanwhile, are more likely to offer supports focused on changing behaviors, such as parenting classes or substance abuse treatment, rather than material help, “creating this idea that child welfare involvement is about character flaws and not about money.”

If states want to protect children born due to abortion bans, Ginther said the research is clear on what to do: help parents financially. “If we provided support to the mother and father of that unplanned child, the child would be better off, and that means having a robust social safety net.”

Thomas and their peers watched videos during high school gym class that stressed the importance of abstinence — and the horrors that can come from sex before marriage. But for Thomas, who is bisexual and nonbinary, the lessons didn’t explain who they were as a person. 

“It was very confusing trying to navigate understanding who I am and my identity,” said Thomas, now a student at Arizona State University. It was on the internet that Thomas learned about a whole community of young people with similar experiences. Blog posts on Tumblr helped them make sense of their place in the world and what it meant to be bisexual. “I was able to find the words to understand who I am — words that I wouldn’t be able to piece together in a sentence if the internet wasn’t there.” 

But now, as states adopt anti-LGBTQ laws and abortion bans, the digital footprint that Thomas and other students leave may come back to harm them, privacy and civil rights advocates warn, and it could be their school-issued devices that end up exposing them to that legal peril.

For years, schools across the U.S. have used digital surveillance tools that collect a trove of information about youth sexuality — intimate details that are gleaned from students’ conversations with friends, diary entries and search histories. Meanwhile, student information collected by student surveillance companies are regularly shared with police, according to a recent survey conducted by the nonprofit Center for Democracy and Technology. These two realities are concerning to Elizabeth Laird, the center’s director of equity in civic technology. Following the Supreme Court’s repeal of Roe v. Wade in June, she said information about youth sexuality could be weaponized. 

 “Right now — without doing anything — schools may be getting alerts about students” who are searching the internet for resources related to reproductive health,” Laird said. “If you are in a state that has a law that criminalizes abortion, right now this tool could be used to enforce those laws.”

Teens across the country are already to fill the void for themselves and their peers in the current climate. Thomas, the ASU student and an outspoken reproductive justice activist, said that while students are generally aware that school devices and accounts are monitored, the repeal of Roe has led some to take extra privacy precautions. 

“I have switched to using Signal to talk to friends and colleagues in this space,” they said, referring to the . “The fear, even though it’s been common knowledge for basically my generation’s entire life that everything you do is being surveilled, it definitely has been amplified tenfold.”

Police have long used social media and other online platforms to investigate people for breaking abortion rules, including where police obtained a teen’s private Facebook messages through a search warrant before charging the then-17-year-old and her mother with violating the state’s ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. 

LGBTQ students face similar risks as lawmakers in Florida and elsewhere impose rules that prohibit classroom discussions about sexuality and gender. This year alone, lawmakers have proposed 300 anti-LGBTQ bills and about a dozen have . They so-called “Don’t Say Gay” laws in Florida and Alabama that ban classroom discussions about gender and sexuality and require school officials to tell the parents of children who share that they may be gay or transgender. 

In a survey, a fifth of LGBTQ students told the Center for Democracy and Technology that they or another student they knew had their sexual orientation or gender identity disclosed without their consent due to online student monitoring. They were more likely than straight and cisgender students to report getting into trouble for their web browsing activity and to be contacted by the police about having committed a crime. 

LGBTQ youth are nearly twice as likely as their straight and cisgender classmates to search for health information online, according to . But as anti-LGBTQ laws proliferate, student surveillance tools should reconsider collecting data about youth sexuality, Christopher Wood, the group’s co-founder and executive director, told ����Ӱ��. 

“Right now, we are not in a landscape or an environment where that is safe for a company to be doing,” Wood said. “If there is a remote possibility that the information that they are trying to provide to help a student could potentially lead them into more harm, then they need to be looking at that very carefully and considering whether that is the appropriate direction for a company to be taking.”

‘Extraordinarily concerned’

For decades, has required school technology to block access to images that are obscene, child pornography or deemed “harmful to minors,” and schools have used web-filtering software to prevent students from accessing sexually explicit content. But in some cases, the filtering to block pro-LGBTQ websites that aren’t explicit, including those that offer crisis counseling.  

Many student monitoring tools, which saw significant growth during the pandemic, go far beyond web filtering and employ artificial intelligence to track students across the web to identify issues like depression and violent impulses. The tools can sift through students’ social media posts, follow their digital movements in real time and scan files on school-issued laptops — from classroom assignments to journal entries — in search of warning signs. 

They’ve also come under heightened scrutiny. In a report this year, Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey warned that schools’ widespread adoption of the tools could trample students’ civil rights. By flagging words related to sexual orientation, the report notes, LGBTQ youth could be subjected to disproportionate disciplinary rates and be unintentionally outed to their parents. 

In in July, Warren and Markey cautioned that the tools could pose new risks following the repeal of Roe and asked four leading student surveillance companies — GoGuardian, Gaggle, Securly and Bark — whether they flag students for using keywords related to reproductive health, such as “pregnant” and “abortion.”

“We are extraordinarily concerned that your software could result in punishment or criminalization of students seeking contraception, abortion or other reproductive health care,” Markey and Warren wrote. “With reproductive rights under attack nationwide, it would represent a betrayal of your company’s mission to support students if you fail to provide appropriate protections for students’ privacy related to reproductive health information.”

The scrutiny is part of a larger concern over digital privacy in the post-Roe world. In August, the Federal Trade Commission and accused the company of selling the location data from hundreds of millions of cell phones that could be used to track peoples’ movements. Such precise location data, the , “may be used to track consumers to sensitive locations, including places of religious worship, places that may be used to infer an LGBTQ+ identification, domestic abuse shelters, medical facilities and welfare and homeless shelters.” 

School surveillance companies have acknowledged their tools track student references to sex but sought to downplay the risks they pose to students. Bark spokesperson Adina Kalish said the company began to immediately purge all data related to reproductive health after a leaked Supreme Court draft opinion suggested Roe’s repeal was imminent – despite maintaining a 30-day retention period for most other data. 

“By immediately and permanently deleting data which contains a student’s reproductive health data or searches for reproductive health information, such data is not in our possession and therefore not produce-able under a court order, subpoena, etc.,” Bark CEO Brian Bason , which the company shared with ����Ӱ��. 

GoGuardian spokesperson Jeff Gordon said its tools “cannot be used by educators or schools to flag reproductive health-related search terms” and its web filter cannot “flag reproductive health-related searches.” Securly didn’t respond to requests for comment. Last year its web-filtering tool categorized health resources for LGBTQ teens as pornography. 

Gaggle founder and CEO Jeff Patterson to the senators that his company does not “collect health data of any kind including reproductive health information,” specifying that the monitoring tool does not flag students who use the terms “pregnant, abortion, birth control, contraception or Planned Parenthood. ” 

Yet tracking conversations about sex is a primary part of Gaggle’s business — more than references to suicide, violence or drug use, according to nearly 1,300 incident reports generated by the company for Minneapolis Public Schools during a six-month period in 2020. The reports, obtained by ����Ӱ��, showed that 38% were prompted by content that was pornographic or sexual in nature, including references to “sexual activity involving a student.” Students were regularly flagged for using keywords like “virginity,” “rape,” and, simply, “sex.” 

Patterson, the Gaggle CEO, has acknowledged that a student’s private diary entry about being raped wasn’t off limits. In touting the tool’s capabilities, he told ����Ӱ�� his company uncovered the girl’s diary entry, where she discussed how the assault led to self-esteem issues and guilt. Nobody knew she was struggling until Gaggle notified school officials about what they’d learned from her diary, Patterson said. 

“They were able to intervene and get this girl help for things that she couldn’t have dealt with on her own,” Patterson said.

Any information that surveillance companies collect about students’ sexual behaviors could be used against them by police during investigations, privacy experts warned. And it’s unclear, Laird said, how long the police can retain any data gleaned from the tools. 

‘Don’t Say Gay’

Internet search engines are “particularly potent” tools to track the behaviors of pregnant people, by the nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. In 2017, for example, a with second-degree murder of her stillborn fetus after police scoured her browser history and identified a search for an abortion pill. 

While GoGuardian and other companies offer web filtering to schools, Gaggle has sought to differentiate itself. In his letter to the senators, Patterson said the company — which sifts through files and chat messages on students’ school-issued Microsoft and Google accounts — is not a web filter and therefore “does not track students’ online searches.” Yet Patterson’s assurance to lawmakers appears misleading. The company acknowledges on its website that it partners with several web-filtering companies, including Linewize, to analyze students’ online searches. By working in tandem, flags triggered by Linewize’s web filtering “can be sent straight to the Gaggle Safety Team,” if the material “should be forwarded to the school or district.” 

In an email, Gaggle spokesperson Paget Hetherington said that in “a very small number of school systems,” the company reviews alerts from web filters before they’re sent to school officials to “alleviate the large number of false positives” and ensure that “only the most critical and imminent issues are being seen by the district.” 

Gaggle has also faced scrutiny for including LGBTQ-specific keywords in its algorithm, including “gay” and “lesbian.” Patterson said the heightened surveillance of LGBTQ youth is necessary because they face a disproportionately high suicide rate, and Hetherington shared examples where the keywords were used to spot cyberbullying incidents. 

But critics have accused the company of discrimination. Wood of the nonprofit LGBT Tech said that anti-LGBT activists have used surveillance to target their opponents for generations. Prior to the seminal 1969 riots after New York City police raided the Stonewall Inn gay bar, LGBTQ spaces and made arrests for “inferring sexual perversion” and “serving gay people.” From the colonial era and into the 19th century, anti-sodomy laws carried the death penalty and police used the rules to investigate and incarcerate people suspected of same-sex intimate behaviors. 

Now, in the era of “Don’t Say Gay” laws, digital surveillance tools could be used to out LGBTQ students and put them in danger, Wood said. Student surveillance companies can claim their decision to include LGBTQ terminology is designed to help students, but historically such data have “been used against us in very detrimental ways.” 

Companies, he said, are unable to control how officials use that information in an era “where teachers and administrators and other students are encouraged to out other students or blame them or somehow get them in trouble for their identity.” In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott calling on child protective services to investigate as child abuse any parents who provide gender-affirming health care to their transgender children. 

“They can’t control what’s going to happen in Florida or Texas and they can’t control what’s going to happen in an individual home,” where students could be subjected to abuse, Wood said. “Any person in their right mind would be horrified to learn that it was their technology that ended up harming a youth or driving a youth to the point of feeling so isolated that they felt the only way out was suicide.” 

When private thoughts become public

Susan, a 14-year-old from Cincinnati, knows firsthand how surveillance companies can target students for discussing their sexuality. In middle school, she was assigned to write a “time capsule” letter to her future self. 

Until Susan retrieved the letter after high school graduation, her teacher said that no one — not even him — would read it. So Susan, who is now a freshman and asked to remain anonymous, used the private space to question her gender identity. 

But her teacher’s assurance wasn’t quite true, she learned. Someone had been reading the letter — and would soon hold it against her. 

In an automated May 2021 email, Gaggle notified her that the letter to her future self was “identified as inappropriate” and urged her to “refrain from storing or sharing inappropriate content.” In a “second warning,” sent to her inbox, she was told a school administrator was given “access to this violation.” After a third alert, she said, access to her school email account was restricted. She said the experience left her with “a sense of betrayal from my school.” She said she had no idea words like “gay” or “sex” could get flagged by Gaggle’s algorithm.

“It’s frustrating to know that this program finds the need to have these as keywords, and quite depressing,” she said. “There’s always going to be oppression against the community somewhere, it seems, and it’s quite disheartening.” 

School administrators reviewed the time capsule letter and determined it didn’t contain anything inappropriate, her mother Margaret said. While Susan lives in an LGBTQ-affirming household, Thomas, who grew up in Mississippi, warned that’s not the case for everyone.

“That’s not just the surveillance of your activities, that’s the surveillance of your thoughts,” Thomas said of Susan’s experience. “I know that wouldn’t have gone very well for me and I know for a lot of young people that would place them in a lot of danger.”

Such harms could be exacerbated, Margaret said, if authorities use student data to enforce Ohio’s strict abortion ban, which has already become the subject of national debate after a 10-year-old girl traveled to Indiana for an abortion. A 27-year-old man and accused of raping the child. 

Cincinnati Public Schools spokesman Mark Sherwood said in an email that “law enforcement is immediately contacted” if the district receives an alert from Gaggle suggesting that a student poses “an imminent threat of harm to self or others.” 

Given the state of abortion rules in Ohio, Susan said she’s concerned that student conversations and classroom assignments that discuss gender and sexuality could wind up in the hands of the police. She lost faith in school-issued technology after her assignment got flagged by Gaggle. 

“I just flat out don’t trust adults in positions of power or authority,” Susan said. “You don’t really know for sure what their true motives are or what they could be doing with the tools they have at their disposal.”

What students learn in sex ed has taken on new urgency following the Supreme Court’s decision in June to reverse Roe v. Wade, leaving abortion access up to the states. And as the Texas Republican Party takes aim at what kids learn in school, that dynamic is front and center for many advocates.

Research indicates that comprehensive sexual education leads teens to  Most states, however, do not require schools to teach comprehensive sex ed, and new policy proposals and legislation in some states may limit the curricula already offered to students.

The , released last week, would ban“teaching of sex education, sexual health, or sexual choice or identity in any public school” and enforce policies embraced by anti-abortion movements, such as having students observe live ultrasounds and requiring schools to teach that life begins at fertilization. Students would also have to read a booklet that contained medically false risks about abortion.

Gaps in sex ed instruction in Texas and around the country could have life-changing impacts for students. This includes sexually transmitted infections and unplanned pregnancies they can’t legally terminate that make them vulnerable to . 

“Programs that don’t include high quality, inclusive sex ed are really harmful to young people,” said Gillian Sealy, chief of staff at Power to Decide, the campaign to prevent unplanned pregnancy. “We anticipate that [the Supreme Court] ruling will have a negative impact on young people. We really want young people to be able to finish school; we want them to get an education.” 

While elected officials don’t have to implement their parties’ platforms, Republican lawmakers in Texas could attempt to reframe the curriculum based on the newly released GOP agenda, sex ed proponents contend.

“It’s absolutely possible,” said Elizabethe Payne, a former Houston teacher and the founder and director of the Queering Education Research Institute, which works to create LGBTQ+ youth-affirming schools. “Texas education policy has always been impacted by the conservative right. These ideas all have been percolating for a number of decades in the state.”  

Representatives for Texas Gov. Greg Abbott did not respond to The 19th’s request for comment about the state’s plans for sex ed. Texas currently offers a sex ed curriculum, but it does not require instruction to be medically accurate, stresses abstinence, does not discuss consent and frames homosexuality negatively. Rather than opt their children out of sex ed instruction, Texas families must opt them in, a setup that sex ed advocates say will result in too few students taking such classes.

Comprehensive sex ed includes lessons on sexual behavior and sexual health as well as on human development and healthy relationships, according to the Guttmacher Institute. In comprehensive sex ed, instructional materials are medically accurate, LGBTQ+ inclusive and age appropriate. Most students nationally do not receive sex ed that’s this exhaustive, and the information they do receive depends largely on the state where they live.  

“What’s being delivered in classrooms around the country is a patchwork of policy and practice,” said Diana Thu-Thao Rhodes, vice president of policy, partnerships and organizing for Advocates for Youth, a nonprofit that promotes adolescent sexual health programs and policies. “All 50 states have varying different sex education requirements, if at all, and much of that power is then given to local school districts that also vary from district to district.”

While the District of Columbia and , only 17 states mandate that the material covered be medically accurate. Just D.C. and 20 states require schools to teach students about contraception. Twenty-nine states mandate schools to emphasize abstinence in contrast to comprehensive sex ed, which characterizes sex as a normal part of life. 

Advocates for comprehensive sex ed say that the push for lessons with an anti-abortion bent intersects with the national movement to prevent educators from discussing issues such as race, gender identity and sexual orientation. 

“Now, because of the recent Supreme Court decision, teachers and educators are already facing concerns about what they are allowed to teach, and what they are able to discuss in classrooms,” Thu-Thao Rhodes said. “That goes beyond the recent Supreme Court decision to the fact that schools have become the center of the culture wars across the board, whether it is around , whether it is around LGBT inclusion, whether it is critical race theory.” 

Limiting access to abortion exacerbates existing concerns about sexual health instruction in Texas, Thu-Thao added. In the months before the high court’s ruling, Texas took steps to  and has now implemented a functional total ban.

Texas ranks  ages 15 to 19, according to 2019 statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the most recent available. In 2005, Texas, along with New Mexico, had the nation’s highest teen pregnancy rate. That year, almost 62 births occurred per 1,000 Texas teens ages 15 to 19, but the teen pregnancy rate fell by more than 60 percent by 2019. Although this is a dramatic improvement, one that many attribute to efforts to teach kids about their reproductive health, the Texas teen pregnancy rate (22.4 per 1,000 teens) remains significantly higher than the national teen birth rate (16.7 per 1,000), which has been declining since 1991. The state still ranks .

“We’ve done such a good job bringing [teen pregnancy] rates down,” Sealy said. “And it seems as though we’re moving backward, where we could possibly see those rates increase, especially among communities of color and rural communities, where there’s economic disadvantages.”

Should the Texas GOP platform become a reality in the state, experts fear that unplanned pregnancies among teens could raise the high school dropout rate. About . Public schools often lack the funding and wraparound services needed to truly give pregnant and parenting teens the support they need, Sealy said. School districts are unlikely to have the resources to respond to an uptick in teen pregnancies that stem from abortion restrictions at the state and federal level. That’s why teens need access to contraception, Sealy said, but sex ed programs that exclude information about contraception and school health centers and insurance plans that don’t cover contraception both pose barriers. 

“If you’re in the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Texas is one of only two states that does not reimburse for contraceptives,” said Texas Rep. Donna Howard, a Democrat. She added that the barriers teens in the state face don’t end there. “If you are a teen, you can consent for health care decisions about your baby, but you cannot cannot consent for yourself if you’re a minor. You cannot get contraceptives without parental consent even if you’re already a parent.”

Teen pregnancies have ripple effects that touch the next generation. Not only are themselves, they also have increased odds of entering the child welfare and criminal justice systems, dropping out of school and facing joblessness as adults. Howard is particularly concerned about the impact a lack of sex ed and abortion access will have on vulnerable teens such as those in foster care, who have higher rates of pregnancy than their peers outside the system.

“Some of these kids are in a foster care situation where they have their babies with them, but a lot of times the baby is placed in a separate foster care home,” Howard said. “They’re not even kept together. It’s a tragic kind of situation.”

Howard would like to see Texas youth receive long-acting reversible contraception. In Colorado, teens and young people received intrauterine devices and implants through the state’s family planning initiative, which a private donor funded in 2008. The initiative led to . In addition, births to women without a high school education fell 38 percent and repeat teen pregnancies fell by 57 percent. 

Now that Roe has been overturned, scholars affiliated with the Johns Hopkins Center for Adolescent Health have joined the . They want district leaders to allow school-based health centers to provide contraception to students and schools to exclusively use comprehensive sex ed programs. 

Payne said that schools should also consider sidestepping mandates about what they’re permitted to teach by bringing in advocacy groups to provide medically accurate sex ed information. These groups may offer opportunities for students to get involved outside of school. Planned Parenthood of Greater Texas, for example, has a  in which they engage in peer-to-peer outreach on issues such as sexually transmitted infections, dating violence and pregnancy prevention.

But school will continue to play a major role in what the bulk of students learn about their sexual health. That’s why the Texas GOP’s new platform planks worry Howard, who questions if they’re scientifically sound. When life begins is far from settled. She cited Texas’ , one of a handful of laws across the nation known as “heartbeat bills” because they prohibit abortion after six weeks, the point at which their supporters argue that a fetal heartbeat can be detected. 

“There is no heart at that point in time,” Howard said. “There are only cells that emit electrical activity that can be picked up by a Doppler machine and translate it into the sound of a heartbeat.”

She added that she has no problem with students learning about all aspects of pregnancy, but she fears that the GOP wants to use ultrasounds to perpetuate “mythological ideas.”

Texas GOP spokesperson James Wesolek told The 19th that the party would not “offer any further comment on the platform beyond what was said in our ,” which explains the procedures the party uses to vote and adopt its policy proposals.  

The quality of sex ed, Payne said, is not just a Texas issue. She pointed out that in New York, where she now lives, sex ed is not mandated, materials are often outdated or include gender stereotyping that frame girls as the gatekeepers of sexual activity. 

“It’s really important for us to be aware that the lack of sex education is a nationwide problem,” Payne said. “Even if you’re educating students in a state where abortion is still accessible, that does not mean that those young people are going to go to college in that state or they’re going to grow up and find jobs in that state.”

Proponents of comprehensive sex ed are also concerned about the impact that Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law will have on sex education. That law took effect July 1, and it prohibits educators from teaching lessons about sexuality or gender identity to students in grades K-3 or to older students in a manner that would not be age appropriate. 

Payne said that this law and Roe’s reversal could have grave consequences for queer youth.

“It is important to know that  as their sexually active straight counterparts to be involved in an unplanned pregnancy, and this includes gay boys,” she said. “Abortion is a queer issue. … We can only imagine that the outcome is also going to be disproportionate on queer kids when they can’t access the kinds of health care they need.”

Just 12 states and D.C. require sex ed that includes the LGBTQ+ community, even though . Critics of Don’t Say Gay say that it is written intentionally broadly and reports have already circulated that LGBTQ+ educators have removed pictures of their partners for fear of violating the legislation and facing disciplinary or legal action. The law will inevitably affect what educators feel they can discuss in sex education, sex ed advocates said. Even before its enactment, Florida was one of just four states, including Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, to require . 

This does a disservice to young people, according to Thu-Thao Rhodes. She said they deserve and need access to a full range of information about their reproductive and sexual health to make healthy decisions. 

“And what we’re seeing is law after law about what can be discussed in classrooms impacting their sexual health education and also their ability to affirm their identities and create safe and supportive environments in schools,” she said.

Along with her peer Reese Wiley, Laufgraben decided to launch a new group, IU Students for Reproductive Rights. In Indiana, Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb on Friday announced an emergency legislative session in early July, likely to enact a . 

With that backdrop, IU Students for Reproductive Rights will support people on campus with uteruses, run voter registration drives and share information about ways to take action, such as a Monday in Bloomington, said Laufgraben.

On Saturday, the leaders created an for the new group. Just a few days since its founding, the account already has hundreds of followers. More than 80 students have reached out asking how they can get involved. 

“We were not expecting so many people to be coming to us, saying, ‘I’m passionate, I want to help,’” Laufgraben told ����Ӱ��.

The co-founders created a group chat for their new student members. A cascade of messages quickly began pouring in:

“Hey guys,” one student wrote, “I just wanted to say to anyone on here, if you need support or love during this time, don’t hesitate to reach out.”

“I’m so grateful for the support because this is such an important issue that needs action immediately,” added another.

The camaraderie and uplift after a Friday ruling that left her and others “heartbroken,” said Laufgraben, has been encouraging.

“It has been sparking so many conversations and it’s honestly really beautiful because people are finding support within this group,” she said.

The response among Indiana University students is one of many examples of youth across the country rallying for reproductive rights in response to the Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Organization decision.

“Young people who have not been previously involved in the abortion movement are feeling called to act,” Tamara Marzouk told ����Ӱ��. 

Marzouk works with hundreds of youth advocates for reproductive rights as director of abortion access at the nonprofit . In the days since the Friday ruling, she’s seen a new wave of young people become galvanized over abortion access. 

In the 24 hours after the Supreme Court announced it was overturning Roe, more than 150 young people across the country — in states where abortion remains legal as well as where it is now banned — signed up to join the and work for reproductive rights in their communities, she said.

Since a leaked majority SCOTUS opinion came out in early May, youth advocates have been preparing for the possible overturn of Roe, including similar to what Laufgraben and her peers will pursue.

“We still need to be fighting for abortion policy, but in the meantime, young people are really taking care of one another,” said Marzouk.

, a Gen Z-led organization working to help youth nationwide get involved in politics, issued a statement promising mobilization at the polls in response to the ruling.

“[Friday’s] decision makes clear that the Supreme Court does not represent Gen Z or the future we imagine for our country,” the organization wrote. “We must elect representatives who will protect us when the courts have failed. Our generation will not stop fighting for reproductive rights — for human rights.”

Abortions are now illegal or heavily restricted in , and 12 other states have laws in place that could pave the way for similar bans. Still more, including Indiana, are expected to soon enact new laws outlawing the procedures.

In the past, Indiana University students seeking to terminate a pregnancy have been able to receive treatment at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Bloomington, Indiana, said Laufgraben. But if the legislature criminalizes the procedures, young people would soon have to trek out of state to receive care — an option that will be difficult for students who don’t have access to transportation or can’t get permission to skip their classes and on-campus jobs.

In Arkansas, a near-total abortion ban is already in effect with . Ali Taylor, president and co-founder of the Arkansas Abortion Support Network, said the law will have a disproportionate impact on young people.

“It’s difficult for minors to travel,” she told ����Ӱ��. “Most minors will probably [now] have great difficulty in accessing abortion.”

Taylor’s organization is based in Little Rock and the closest clinic now available is in Granite City, Illinois, a five hour drive away.

The fall of Roe “most adversely affects communities that are already marginalized,” Marzouk emphasized. “There are some people who might be able to travel across state lines. That may not be a burden as much for some people as it is for others.”

Laufgraben, for her part, is still absorbing the possible implications on her Indiana campus. But she’s determined to continue to push for change.

“Right now is really scary,” said the young organizer. But “the fight isn’t over.”

The likely end of federal abortion rights won’t just make it more difficult for women to get an abortion. It’s also almost certain to make it more difficult to train medical professionals on abortion procedures — a skill that doctors and others who take care of women’s health consider essential.

The prospect raises “a huge public health issue” in the words of one doctor — and one that can affect not just patients seeking an abortion, but those who experience miscarriage or stillbirth.

Any day now, the U.S. Supreme Court will hand down its decision over a Mississippi law that bans abortion after 15 weeks. In a draft of the pending opinion that was , Justice Samuel Alito calls for overturning the 1973 opinion in Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide. 

If the final opinion reflects that conclusion, in Wisconsin it would bring back an 1849 state law that . While that is expected to face a legal challenge, if the 173-year-old law takes effect, it would become a crime to terminate a pregnancy, regardless of the reason.

Overturning Roe would at least endanger, and could very likely end, training in abortion procedures for medical residents learning to practice obstetrics and gynecology in Wisconsin and other states with abortion bans on the books. OB/GYN residency programs are required to offer that training; in the worst-case scenario, Wisconsin OB/GYN residency programs might lose national accreditation.

National standards

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education () sets requirements for medical residency programs in every specialty, including obstetrics and gynecology. OB/GYN programs must include a family planning curriculum, which the  must include “training or access to training in the provision of abortions.” OB/GYN residents “must have experience in managing complications of abortions and training in all forms of contraception, including reversible methods and sterilization.”

The requirements allow residents with a religious or moral objections to opt out and state that they cannot be required to take part in abortion training or performing abortions. 

Accreditation “enforces a uniform set of specialty peer developed standards across all residency programs within each specialty so that patients have access to the highest quality care across the United States,” the council’s spokeswoman, Susan White, said in an email message.

The council’s priority in its requirements for abortion training “is safeguarding women’s health,” White said. “Should it become illegal in some states to perform aspects of family planning, the ACGME is exploring alternative pathways for completing this training.”

The UW Hospital and Clinics Authority — UW Health — sponsors an OB/GYN residency program in Madison, with faculty from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health’s OB/GYN department serving as educators.

 “We expect the impact of a final decision by the Supreme Court on the future of Roe v. Wade could have broad implications for institutions such as ours,” said Emily Kumlien, UW Health press secretary, in an email statement. “However, until that decision is reached, we are unable to speculate on outcomes.”

The residency programs are accredited by ACGME, Kumlien stated. “We expect to closely monitor for any changes to requirements and work to ensure continuity of the robust training opportunities we provide.”

Broader applications 

Dr. Abigail Cutler, a Madison OB/GYN, says medical students and medical residents far beyond just the OB/GYN field need to learn how to counsel patients in a wide range of situations where pregnancy is involved. Those include  unintended pregnancies, pregnancy complications including fetal anomalies and other complications that affect the health of the fetus or the health of the mother. They also include patients who have a miscarriage.

(Cutler is a member of the UW medical school faculty, but she adds she is speaking as a private citizen and medical professional, not as a representative of the medical school.)

“Most physicians in general who are taking care of patients in the office setting will be seeing some patients who are capable of becoming pregnant,” says Cutler. “This comes up not just for OB/GYNs but for all physicians.”

And for doctors who will enter the OB/GYN field, knowing abortion procedures, including the use of medication as well as surgical options, equips them to take better care of their patients, she says, whether or not a patient wants to terminate a pregnancy. Surgical abortion procedures “are also procedures used to manage miscarriage, or in the second trimester or later, fetal demise” — stillbirth.

In surveys of OB/GYN doctors, those who have had less training in abortion care or none at all have reported that they “felt less prepared to offer comprehensive care to people who are experiencing a miscarriage,” Cutler says. For doctors with more exposure to and practice in abortion care, “there was a correlation between that and their comfort level with surgically managing miscarriage later on.”

If a state’s laws severely restrict or ban abortion, that will limit access to that training, Cutler says, which causes her concern. 

“One in five pregnancies end in abortion,” Cutler says. Restricting access “results in preventable morbidity and death. This is a huge public health issue.” 

Support for abortion access

In May the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), the specialty’s primary professional association, updated its longstanding policy that . “All people should have access to the full spectrum of comprehensive, evidence-based health care. Abortion is an essential component of comprehensive, evidence-based health care,” the policy states.  

“Abortion is a critical medical intervention,” said Dr. Iffath Abbasi Hoskins, ACOG’s president and board chair, in a statement that accompanied the policy revision. The policy was revised, she said, to “make it unmistakably clear that ACOG trusts doctors and patients — and not lawmakers — to make decisions about what is best for patients’ health and well-being.”

Surveys have found broad support for abortion rights and abortion care among doctors. In 2019, the Collaborative for Reproductive Equity (CORE) at the UW medical school polled the school’s doctors on the impact of restrictions on abortion that had been enacted since 2011. More than 900 doctors responded to the survey, and more than 90% said overturning Roe v Wade “would worsen Wisconsin women’s health,” says Jenny Higgins, CORE’s director. 

“We surveyed people across all medical specialties, and we found overwhelming support for abortion services as well as abortion providers,” Higgins says. In addition to the concerns for women’s health, a majority said that more restrictions on abortion “make it more difficult to recruit faculty and trainees.”

Cutler says among the residents and medical students she has encountered, “there’s a high desire for this training and education.” She expects that to persist even if Roe is overturned, “and maybe an increased demand for that training,” she adds. “But that will leave only so many states where that training will be available.”

“This Supreme Court does not represent Gen Z or the future we imagine for our country,” , the youth-led organization behind the protest, wrote in a press release signed by several other youth-powered groups including and the . 

“Young people are appalled and horrified by the leaked Supreme Court decision to strip all people who can become pregnant of their basic right to choose.”

Hundreds of youth activists rallied outside the U.S. Supreme Court Thursday evening denouncing the leaked majority opinion set to overturn the landmark 1973 decision, which guarantees federal constitutional protection of abortion rights. More protests are planned in cities across the country in the coming weeks, organizers said.

Eve Levenson, who emceed the Thursday event and is a senior at George Washington University, said the rally was meant to send a message to elected officials.

“It was really about making it clear to those in power … how much Generation Z cares about this issue,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Generation Z includes individuals roughly born between 1997 to 2012, or those currently ages 10 to 25. A majority of abortion patients nationwide are , and 37% are 24 or younger.

Organizers estimate that there may have been nearly 1,000 young protesters outside the Supreme Court, Levenson said, some who traveled from as far as New York state. Another 40,000 viewers watched the stream on Twitter and 80,000 watched on TikTok. Many youth who could not make the trek to the nation’s capital are now planning their own local demonstrations, she said.

The rally was “100% Gen Z led,” Levenson explained, including many high school-age organizers. On the evening of May 2, when the leaked draft majority opinion published by revealed that the Supreme Court appears poised to reverse Roe, her group chat of youth organizers exploded, she said. Someone suggested the idea of a rally in front of the Supreme Court and “it kind of just came together really quickly from there,” said the college senior.

“We all felt so galvanized,” added Levenson. “[Young people] are for bodily autonomy, we are for access to abortion, we are for reproductive health care and people are really pissed off to see those things taken away.”

Speaker Soraya Bata, a student at Georgetown University, pointed out that over a dozen states have trigger laws set to immediately ban abortions should Roe fall. Her home state of Florida in April passed a law banning the medical procedures just 15 weeks into pregnancy, replacing a previous rule that allowed abortions within the first 24 weeks. States including Oklahoma and Texas have recently passed similar restrictions.

“Some people won’t even know that they are pregnant at that stage,” said the young leader. “These laws mean that the only people who will have access to abortions are wealthy Americans who can afford to travel out of state.”

Nearly half, 49%, of those who had abortions in 2014, the most recent year for which data are available, were . Another 26% made less than twice the level, meaning 3 in 4 people seeking abortions had little, if any, disposable income.

Addressing the crowd Thursday, Sofia Ongele, a youth activist with , took aim at the underlying logic put forward in the leaked Supreme Court draft.

“Justice Alito’s core argument is that abortion is ‘not deeply rooted in this nation’s history and traditions,’” she said. “Our nation’s history is marked by genocide, slavery [and] classism. … We owe it to our ancestors to fight for a better world than they had.”

Contraception, the young speaker explained, saved her life. In 2018, she received an emergency blood transfusion after her periods caused extreme anemia. Since then, she has used hormonal birth control to regulate her cycle.

“To stay alive, I had to have complete control over my body,” said Ongele. “Should anyone infringe on those rights, my health and safety would immediately be threatened.”

Though many of the organizations behind the rally self-identify as nonpartisan, several speakers implied there would be political ramifications for officials who oppose policy measures to protect reproductive rights, along with other issues such as addressing climate change, LBGTQ rights and health equity. The young protesters were by Democratic U.S. Sen. Raphael Warnock, who ​​is running for re-election in a Georgia race that could determine whether Democrats maintain control of the Senate.

“Our politicians work for us,” said Melissa Altschiller, an organizer with March for Our Lives. “If they continue to make decisions about our bodies, we will continue to make decisions about their jobs.”

Roughly two-thirds of 18- to 24-year old voters in the 2020 presidential election voted for Joe Biden, NBC revealed — 11 percentage points more than any other age group. Between Generation Z and Millennials, who on many social issues, are eligible to vote in the 2022 election cycle.��

“I think we’re going to see young people continuing to organize around this going forward,” said Levenson.

Exactly half have no mandate that schools teach sex education, from the Institute reveals, and only four of the 26 require curricula to cover the topic of contraception. Twenty-three allow districts to skip over consent entirely.

Restricting abortion access in a country that already limits young people’s resources for learning about sexual health is “a horrifying picture,” said Cassandra Corrado, a sex educator who works with high school and college students in Florida, where an abortion ban now is expected.

“We’re going to have a lot of people being afraid of their own bodies and we’re going to have a lot of people turning to unreliable sources of information,” she told ����Ӱ��.

Teens who receive comprehensive sex education are significantly less likely to have unwanted pregnancies than those who don’t get lessons on the topic or receive abstinence-only teachings, show. The five states with the — Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Alabama — are also among those set to outlaw abortion if Roe is overturned.

Nationwide, only 29 states and Washington, D.C. require public school students to receive any form of sex education and just 18 require such teachings to be medically accurate.

With the map of U.S. sex ed laws patchy at best, a published by Politico on Monday evening revealed that the Supreme Court appears poised to reverse the 1973 Roe decision, which guarantees federal constitutional protection of abortion rights. Chief Justice John Roberts confirmed Tuesday that the .

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” writes Justice Samuel Alito on behalf of the majority. “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

If the 50-year-old ruling falls, 22 states have laws that will immediately take effect outlawing abortion, including trigger bans and clauses in their state constitutions. Analysts expect four more to ban the procedures legislatively.

Matisse Laufgraben is a rising sophomore at Indiana University Bloomington where she works as student leader promoting sexual well-being on campus with the organization . Attending school in a state that has enacted 55 abortion restrictions and bans in the past decade, paving the way for a comprehensive ban should Roe be struck down, she’s hyper-aware of the fallout for her and her peers.

“If you get pregnant, you [will] have to deal with the consequences. There’s no escape,” she told ����Ӱ��. “It takes away that freedom for women.”

Despite Laufgraben’s work to inform peers about consent and healthy relationships, there’s still a “​​scary amount of sexual assault cases and sexual violence” on campus, she said. The prospect of abortion access rolling back in her state amplifies such fears, she explained, especially for female-identifying students who are more likely to be assault victims.

“It feels like we don’t have control over what happens to our bodies. … We don’t have control over whether or not we get sexually assaulted. And then we don’t have control over whether or not we want to have the baby,” said the college student. “It really just feels like everything is turned against us.”

The state abortion bans have an inverse relationship with rules requiring comprehensive sex ed. Of the 26 states expected to enact abortion bans in the coming months, only Iowa, Tennessee and Utah mandate sexual education in school and require that lessons be medically accurate. South Carolina is the sole state among the 26 that orders schools teach sex education and also requires lessons on consent.

Meanwhile, were filed in U.S. statehouses during the first three months of 2022, including “Don’t Say Gay” laws and bans on trans-related books in school. Many of the laws would bar educators from discussing or providing students with materials involving sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the .

“It’s not a coincidence that … state abortion restrictions are getting tighter at the same time as we’re seeing more restrictions on sex education, more restrictions on trans youth and how they can engage in schools,” said Corrado.

With laws stipulating what schools staff can and can’t discuss in Florida classrooms, many of her colleagues have to walk a “fine line,” she said, in order to deliver the information that youth — especially those who identify as queer, trans or nonbinary — need for their sexual well-being.

“As sex educators, one of the conversations that we’re having all the time right now is ‘How can we … protect our careers and also still be giving people the information that they need,’ ” said Corrado.

Even though schools in her state legally must provide lessons on sex education, she said, they often give students an incomplete or even false picture. According to state law, curricula need not be medically accurate, may promote religion and must stress the importance of abstinence.

“We shouldn’t assume that students are getting [accurate] information in schools right now, because they might not be,” said Corrado.

Since Sept. 1, the country’s most restrictive ban on abortion has prevented Texans from accessing care if their pregnancy is beyond six weeks. 

Two weeks after the law’s signing, then-high school senior Paxton Smith went viral for swapping her pre-approved valedictorian address to speak out against the legislation in her home state. 

Since giving the speech, Smith says her life has taken a “massive shift.” Now a freshman at the University of Texas at Austin, she balances full-time school with beginning a music career and expanding her activism. 

Smith is leading A War on My Body; A War on My Rights, a featuring contributors across generations, from medical professionals to reproductive rights activists and prominent women’s rights attorneys and . The book’s title references of her valedictory address.   

Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for ����Ӱ�� Newsletter

Her activist work, it seems, is just beginning. Smith also serves on advisory boards for two nonprofits: , which uses art and storytelling to end abortion stigmas and shame, and the , which helps individuals access safe abortions and contraceptives across the country. And on Sept. 30, she delivered another speech at Power of Women event, ending with a call to action: 

“And if you can’t do it for me, and if you can’t do it for yourself, then do it for every girl who comes after us, every young person who comes after us. Because they are counting on you. So what will you do?”

It’s unclear when Smith and others Texans will regain access to legal abortions. Though a to the conservative Fifth Circuit. The Supreme Court did not delay or prevent the law from taking effect, refusing to act on an emergency appeal made by abortion providers in early September. will likely not pass the Senate. 

President Biden has openly the Texas ban, issuing a statement that it “will significantly impair women’s access to the health care they need, particularly for communities of color and individuals with low incomes.”

Health care providers, lawyers and activists await December 1, when the Supreme Court will hear a Mississippi case challenging the state’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks. Their decision may upend or solidify Roe v. Wade’s protection of the right to choose prior to “viability,” typically around 24 weeks.

����Ӱ�� spoke with Paxton Smith to get a pulse on how she feels given federal moves and why she’s decided to continue her activism through the collaborative book. 

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

What spurred your personal activism — was it in any way connected to or motivated by your education experiences? 

My personal activism really sparked with the speech. In giving the speech, really what I wanted was for people to understand how it felt, what it really meant for a piece of legislation like this to go into effect and understand that having a pregnancy can have life-changing effects. Nobody else should have the right to make that life-changing decision than me. I am the person that’s going to live that future and I should be the one making those decisions. I wanted people to understand … what it felt like for the decision to be taken out of my hands and put into the hands of a stranger.

I know you’ve mentioned before that your family has often had open conversations on politics and other controversial issues at home even though you sometimes disagree — did you have that openness to talk and explore these issues during the school day as well? 

Sometimes. I think in high school, a lot of times you find a niche group, where they carry a lot of the same perspectives, the same ideas. I didn’t necessarily have the exact same opportunity at school, where people might have had very different opinions than I do. But we definitely did have conversations about politics and things surrounding general human rights.  

Why did you decide to continue your activism through a bigger project? How did you choose a collaborative book, and what impact do you hope that model of storytelling might have? 

One of the things that this book is going to do is try and highlight the different perspectives around abortion that people don’t talk about. It’s going to highlight the racial disparities in being able to access health care. It’s going to address what it’s like being gender queer and being in a situation where you can get pregnant. It’s going to address the LGBTQ+ experience, the experience of being a minor. 

The reason it’s a collaborative book is really to better accomplish that goal, of telling those stories and different perspectives. If I wrote this book alone it would come from an 18- year-old, white, upper middle-class cisgendered girl. It would continue the problem of people’s voices not being listened to, and that’s not what I wanted.

What stories or issues stuck with you after submitting the first draft of the book? 

I can’t really speak to the stories in the book as of right now. But I receive hundreds of messages from people, and a lot of times people share their stories surrounding abortion. Some of the biggest things that stuck with me are the stories of what took place before Roe v. Wade, when abortion was still illegal, and people had to take medical care into their own hands. 

They were getting these back-alley, unsafe abortions and . Thousands of people ended up in emergency rooms. And thousands ended up with severe, life-long injuries. Just hearing these stories — firsthand accounts of people in emergency rooms and doctors saying they are not willing to help because they’re scared of the legal implications, or hearing the stories of people who lost their mothers to unsafe abortions — those really stick with me and motivate what I can try to do.

How did you learn about the and choose it as the place to direct proceeds? 

I actually heard about the Afiya Center at a that was organized by a . Ultimately we chose them because they address the racial disparities in accessing reproductive health care. It’s incredibly important to be able to open up access to more than just white people, because everyone deserves reproductive rights and access to care.

Do you see a future for yourself in education or politics? If not those fields in particular, what are you hoping to do in the future?

I’m actually hoping to become a musical performing artist. I make pop and pop-alternative music. I mostly do it alone. I played trumpet for about eight years and am pretty novice at piano and guitar. My main thing is music production.

Right now, I’m working on putting together a first album. I’m sending out some music to people to see what they think. It’s very much in the early stages but I’m excited to pursue music as a career. That has been my dream since I was a child and I have been so involved with music my entire life. 

Why did you choose to stay in Texas and attend UT Austin?

I chose UT Austin mostly because of the music scene. There’s a lot of music downtown so I’m hoping to do some live gigs once or twice a week. My life has taken a massive shift with the speech and the activism takes up a lot of time. 

What are your songs about? Do you imagine incorporating your activism into your lyrics and songwriting?

I think there’s definitely room to incorporate activism in songwriting. Generally, I write music about what I’m experiencing, thinking and feeling. My life is what runs through the core of all my music, so naturally some of it will be charged with my activism.

I wonder if we could reflect briefly about what’s happening at the federal level. SCOTUS refused to block Texas’s law and the House passed the Women’s Health Protection Act, an attempt to codify the rights established with Roe, though it’s unlikely to pass the Senate. The Department of Justice is also your home state, but that hasn’t reopened access. How are you feeling in light of these moves? How do you hope your peers might push for reproductive rights at this moment?

I’m feeling very hopeful. Really right now there’s a lot of things up in the air and it’s kind of hard to tell where things will land. I’m hoping that my peers continue to do what they’re doing now, which is putting pressure on legislators, bringing attention to the topic and all in all, making it extremely clear that they believe that abortion is a human right. 

A War on My Body; A War on My Rights will be released Jan. 22, 2022, the 49th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade decision, by Di Angelo Publications, a small press in Houston. All proceeds will be donated to , a reproductive justice organization run by and for Black women and girls to transform relationships to sexual and reproductive health. The center educates and provides resources to break down racial inequities, decreasing maternal death and HIV rates.