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Somehow, even though Roe v. Wade has been in place for 46 years, and even though the majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal, and even though the data is clear that criminalizing abortion is not an effective and safe way to reduce abortions, we are still on the brink of witnessing abortion rights in America disappear. Just last week, more than 200 mostly white male members of Congress submitted an amicus brief to the Supreme Court advocating for the reconsideration and repeal of Roe v. Wade. (Rita Bosworth, 1/18)

Laws prohibiting abortion based on the child’s sex, race or disability provide a window into the racist and eugenic history of abortion. Exposing the practice of live-dismemberment abortion illustrates abortionists’ callous disregard of human suffering. We will prevail, but not by seeking to “nullify” Roe. We will win by tenacious legislative efforts and persistent witness to the fact that Roe is a constitutional contradiction and a human tragedy. (Teresa Collett, 1/21)

The National Institute of Family and Life Advocates can’t catch a break. Not two years after battling a California law all the way to the Supreme Court in Nifla v. Becerra—and winning—the Virginia-based pro-life organization is now suing New York state officials over legislation that undermines the ability of its Empire State member centers to hire workers who support their mission. The law “violates our very reason for being,” says Anne O’Connor, Nifla’s vice president of legal affairs. (Nicole Ault, 1/17)

No one loves a food fight more than President Trump. But now, he has picked the wrong one: His administration is taking aim at children’s lunch plates. The Agriculture Department, which runs nutritional programs that feed nearly 30 million students at 99,000 schools, is proposing new rules that would allow schools to reduce the amount of vegetables and fruits required at lunch and breakfasts. (Karen Tumulty, 1/20)

Childhood obesity is a major public health problem, and has been for some time. Almost 20 percent of American children are affected by obesity, as well as about 40 percent of adults. Over all, this costs the United States around $150 billion in health care spending each year. Pediatricians like me, and many other health professionals, know it’s a problem, and yet we’ve been relatively unsuccessful in tackling it. (Aaron E. Carroll, 1/20)

Lost in the shuffle of competing plans for saving health care is the radical call by Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren for “no more copays, no more deductibles” as part of their “Medicare for All” plans. (The plans are actually misnamed, since regular Medicare has 20% copays with no cap — the opposite of what they are proposing — but I’ll leave that aside.) (Christopher T. Robertson, 1/20)

A buzzy concept in the healthcare industry for the last several years is “transformation.” Many organizations have established an office of transformation or recruited and hired a chief transformation officer. Some provider organizations have even incorporated “transformation” into their mission and vision statements and strategic plans. However, in general, as an industry we have not made much transformative progress. In short, our industry appears to be struggling with transformation. (Jonathan Manis, 1/18)

Y'all, it smelled like fear out here in Virginia. Scores of men — plus a handful of women — dressed up in battle rattle and draped themselves with assault weapons, long guns and handguns on Monday. They strapped hunting knives to their thighs and wore body armor and body cameras on their chests, shoulders and helmets. (Petula Dvorak, 1/20)

As science invents new cures and tools to fight disease, an intractable problem continues to plague American health care: medical errors by doctors and hospitals. The issue of medical error is hardly a new one: We have just passed the 20th anniversary of the release of “To Err is Human," a landmark government report that exposed the shocking toll of medical error in the United States. It sparked widespread media attention, public hearings and action by the Clinton administration. (Pelu Tran, 1/17)

What’s the health care system to do when thousands of individuals, many of them between the ages of 18 and 34, arrive at hospitals across the country with serious, previously unknown breathing problems that may be related to their use of e-cigarettes and vapes? Maybe take a lesson from Hippocrates: First, do no harm. Reports of this lung problem, now being called e-cigarette or vaping product use associated lung injury (EVALI), began emerging in June 2019. (Diane Nelson, 1/20)

In the mid-20th century, federal, state and local governments pursued explicit racial policies to create, enforce and sustain residential segregation. The policies were so powerful that, as a result, even today blacks and whites rarely live in the same communities and have little interracial contact or friendships outside the workplace. This was not a peculiar Southern obsession, but consistent nationwide. In New York, for example, the State legislature amended its insurance code in 1938 to permit the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company to build large housing projects “for white people only” — first Parkchester in the Bronx and then Stuyvesant Town in Manhattan. (Richard Rothstein, 1/20)

As my 8-year-old son and I drive past the cow pasture near our house, he asks, “Why do they have to have bulls in there?” “So the cows can have babies,” I say. “They need a boy and a girl, a male and a female,” I correct myself, “to have babies.” Borrowing what little I know about human anatomy and applying it to the animal kingdom, I tell him how women have eggs and men have sperm — which are like tadpoles — and that the sperm try to bust their way into the egg to fertilize it so the cow can have a baby. Humans are much the same, I say. (Chesler, 1/18)

The National Football League’s Super Bowl will be played on Feb. 2 and the Iowa Caucuses kick off the national Political Super Bowl on Feb. 3. Both will make you sick. During the college football bowl season, giving way to the professional football Super Bowl, American companies will spend more than $2 billion in television ads … to eventually add an estimated $200 billion to America’s annual national health care costs. (Grady Means, 1/20)

Spreading faster than Ebola, and with a higher death toll, measles has ravaged all 26 provinces of Congo in a year. More than 6,000 people have died, and more than 311,000 have become infected. The virus has sliced through the massive country in part because so many of its people had not been protected with a vaccine, and because of other deficiencies, including poor government and serious security threats. (1/20)

It stands to reason that PDMPs alone would not markedly reduce overdoses. We must pursue efforts to address other opioids such as heroin and fentanyl, as well as illegal drug supplies, in our initiatives to engage patients in drug treatment programs. But a robust monitoring program — one that incorporates features that have worked to reduce overdoses in other states — would move Missouri in the right direction. (Shavonne Danner, 1/21)

We often picture today’s teens as social-media zombies, staring at their phones 24/7 and lashing out when they can’t have their Instagram fix. But the truth is more complicated: While they depend on social media to keep up with friends, it does have a tendency to overwhelm them, and they know it. When I spoke to four students at Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, Calif., as part of my nationwide teen listening tour, they told me they make conscious choices about who they share things with on social media, how they manage their accounts and how they handle their own burnout. (Julie Jargon, 1/21)