Texas law sides with pregnancies, not pregnant women

In 1973 the U.S. Supreme Court held that the Constitution protected a woman’s right to an abortion prior to the fetus’s viability. This month, the Supreme Court imposed patrimony on all women by refusing 5-4 to block the fundamentalist Texas abortion law.

This law deputizes vigilantes to earn a $10,000 bounty by suing anyone who “aids or abets” a woman to obtain an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. Many women don’t realize they’re pregnant until after six weeks. There are no exceptions for rape, sexual abuse or incest.

This law will not affect wealthy women who can go elsewhere. The danger is for poor white, Black and brown women, rural women, and young women who have no financial resources to obtain a safe and legal abortion. It effectively codifies and enforces pregnancy.

To paraphrase a famous poem during Nazi rule: “First they came for immigrants. Then they came for people of color. Then they came for voting rights. Now they’ve come for women.”

KATHLEEN COLLOMB, DECATUR

Plan to improve health care access smacks of welfare expansion

Re: “How to improve health care access” (Insights, Sept. 3), David Schaefer’s suggestion for improving health care access is a rehash of previous requests for welfare expansion. It’s always the same: more funds from the federals to the states for more Medicaid coverage if only the states would agree. Where do people like Schaefer think the funds originate? Do they think money grows on trees? No, it doesn’t. It comes from the pockets of taxpayers who support all the other welfare programs. Schaefer is endorsing Biden’s promise to eliminate inequity through the redistribution of wealth. Schaefer’s remedy is not new; it’s as old as the Democratic Party, the same party that supported Jim Crow and the KKK.

Schaefer doesn’t have insight - his record is stuck on welfare expansion that increases dependency.

JACK FRANKLIN, CONYERS

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Tamara Lamia puts her voting sticker after casting her ballot at the Israel Baptist Church in Kirkwood during the Georgia Public Service Commission’s special election at Ron Anderson Community Center in Cobb County on Tuesday, June 17, 2025. (Miguel Martinez/AJC)

Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez

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Fulton DA Fani Willis (center) with Nathan J. Wade (right), the special prosecutor she hired to manage the Trump case and had a romantic relationship with, at a news conference announcing charges against President-elect Donald Trump and others in Atlanta, Aug. 14, 2023. Georgia’s Supreme Court on Tuesday, Sept. 16, 2025, upheld an appeals court's decision to disqualify Willis from the election interference case against Trump and his allies. (Kenny Holston/New York Times)

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