32,000 more births
 November 30, 2023 Darling Meteor readers, Exciting news! If you click the button below, you’ll get your first annual Meteor Wrapped highlighting how much time you spent reading, what you clicked, and which Meteor events were your favorite. Just kidding! We don’t jive with creepy algorithms that put all your business out there (as entertaining as it is to see what everyone’s been listening to). In today’s newsletter, we check in with the abortion lawsuit in Texas, see dead things come back to life, and share our long reads for the weekend. Don’t need a Wrapped to know I only listened to Taylor, Shannon Melero  WHAT’S GOING ON32,000 more births: On Tuesday, the Texas Supreme Court heard testimony from some of the 22 plaintiffs in a lawsuit arguing that the medical exceptions in Texas’s abortion ban are too narrow to protect women with complicated or nonviable pregnancies. The testimonies, from women whose lives were threatened by the denial of an abortion, ranged from horrific to unspeakable: last-minute travel plans after heartbreaking ultrasounds; sepsis; purple limbs from severe blood clots; and giving birth to a fetus missing parts of its skull. Writer Jessica Valenti pointed out on Xwitter that when asked by a judge if acrania (the condition that prevents the skull from fully forming) qualifies as an exception to the state’s abortion ban, the lawyer representing Texas admitted she didn’t know what it was. Yet another reason why non-doctors shouldn’t have final say over medical decisions. While some of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs were eventually able to obtain abortions, a new data analysis from the Institute of Labor and Economics sheds light on pregnant people who weren’t. The data estimates that a “significant minority”—between one-fifth and one-fourth—of women living in ban states who may have otherwise gotten an abortion did not get one. That means that in the first six months of this year, 32,000 more people than were expected based on past trends gave birth in those states. One of the authors of the paper says this reflects an “inequality story”: Women in their 20s and Black and Latine women—all of whom tend to be lower-income and are less likely to have the resources to travel—were disproportionately among those who gave birth. Ultimately, this study paints a far broader picture of who is affected by abortion bans than the Texas lawsuit is able to. The stories from the Texas plaintiffs—most of whom are white, married, and wanted to be pregnant before they were faced with medical emergencies—are terrible and dehumanizing, and demand justice. But if you widen the lens, you find a number of invisible victims, who may or may not fit the “good victim” stereotype. People of color are most affected by bans like the one in Texas (where the population is 40% Latine) and yet they remain underrepresented. Perhaps some of those 32,000 pregnant people were also diagnosed with fetal abnormalities—but the rest of them likely would have sought abortions for all kinds of individual reasons. Those reasons don’t matter. The right to bodily autonomy is not conditional; we have to be in it for every last person. AND:
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 WEEKEND READING 📚
Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that the students in Vermont had been killed instead of injured. We regret the error.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? Subscribe using their unique share code or snag your own copy, sent Tuesdays and Thursdays.
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