I need to apologize for the lack of posts the last three days. I have been spending a lot of time with Ron and I have been cooking three meals a day and doing the dishes and laundry which has left little time for posting. Then late last night Ron realized how much he had been taking of my time and so today he wanted to leave me alone. But then I did something I had not done for a month or more, I went to the abuse survivor site. And one post led to the next and eventually to eventally 40 open tabs of fellow abuse survivors discussions of what they went through. When Ron got back at 3:30 he noticed I was very upset. He kept asking why until I told him. Then he was angry. He wanted to go in and close the entire window of open tabs. He joked of taking my computer away from me like a teenager who went to the wrong websites. I had to explain it to him. I can’t talk to anyone about my childhood / young adult abuse. I don’t have anyone to share the memories with other than the blog and I feel horrible when I do that even though it helps me because I can’t help but think I am hurting people I care about like it hurts Ron when I share my memories with him. But on that site, on the male survivor website are people who went through what I did, and they understand, they can hear me, and I can hear them with out it harming us, except that it becomes a loop I struggle to break out of. I want to read every post and give a reply because I was there as they were, I am suffering as they are, and I can understand their pain and anger as they can mine. It is a place to share my memories with people and not feel I am damaging them because they are already hurt. Ron struggled to understand that and I told him. “You did not know my abusers like I did. But by the time you met them I had moved out of their home and they had moved on to their own homes and families. I reminded him my abusive hellspawn sister who threw parties offering me as a party flavor to any teen who wanted me male or female required her own son to sleep in her bedroom from his preteen years until he left the house as an adult”. I know she made me please her, did she do the same to him? I was paralyzed to help him. At the time ron did not know of my abuse but he felt something was wrong. It was well known in the “family” and no one thought it wrong. I suspect my oldest male hellspawn did the same to his two young daughters. I reminded Ron how my adoptive mother kept trying to kiss me on the lips when she was in the park model we owned. He looked stricken and walked away, I think he had not connected the dots of that and how I had to try to avoid that. Anyway I have deleted the window those tabs were in and I am going to reply to a few comments do the few dishes, and then try to do a cartoons / memes / news roundup hopefully for tomorrow. Hugs
Trump told his Republican henchmen when he was going to attack Iran. The day before the war started they all invested in defense stocks and made a fortune.
We read and write a great deal about the SAVE Act that may or may not pass. It is a federal law, and really it’s unconstitutional, because the states control their own elections. If it passes as a federal law, well, there are still a few things that can be done. In the meantime, state legislatures are busy. Depending upon your own state’s legislature, it’s at least likely there’s committee work happening on this. Or, possibly, your state has progressed (ha) as far as my state has.It’s a fine day to check in with your state’s business, so you aren’t caught unawares come your next election.
Kansas is not rewriting its election system with one sweeping law.
It is doing so in pieces.
A deadline adjustment here. A database requirement there. A repeal of mail-in ballot authority. A restriction on ballot return methods. A new reporting mandate. A rule centralizing constitutional challenges in one county. A provision that repeals advance voting if courts intervene.
Individually, each bill appears technical. Administrative. Procedural.
Collectively, they form a kind of architecture, and architecture is never accidental.
The justification offered repeatedly is election integrity, specifically, noncitizen voting. Yet documented cases of noncitizen voting in Kansas have been counted in the single digits through the decades.
National reviews of millions of ballots have found similarly rare occurrences. The problem, statistically, is exceedingly small.
The legislative response, however, is structurally expansive.
Consider what is being built.
One bill requires certain public assistance agencies to report identifying information about noncitizen recipients to the secretary of state. Another one mandates recurring comparisons between Kansas’s voter registration system and the federal SAVE database.
Others expand the removal triggers to include driver’s license status or database mismatches.
In practical terms, that creates a dubious data pipeline: Public benefits system data is sent to the Secretary of State, where it is cross-referenced against the federal immigration database, then checked against the statewide voter rolls and then returned to the secretary of state, who has removal authority.
Public benefits databases were designed to determine eligibility for food, health care, and housing assistance. The federal SAVE system was designed to verify immigration status for entitlement programs. Kansas’s voter registration system was designed to facilitate elections.
Now, these systems are being interconnected for enforcement.
Even small database error rates become significant when the right to vote is at stake. Federal oversight reports have documented reliability and oversight concerns within SAVE.
Legislative testimony in Kansas has acknowledged audit-tracking issues within the state’s voter system. When automated cross-checking expands and removal authority increases, the margin for error shrinks, and the constitutional risk grows.
At the same time, access pathways are narrowing.
Deadlines for advance mail ballots are shortened. Remote ballot return boxes are eliminated. The statutory authority for certain mail ballot elections is repealed. These changes do not eliminate voting, but they constrict time and space.
When time compresses, errors matter more.
If a voter is flagged incorrectly due to a database mismatch, an outdated record or a clerical error, there is less opportunity to correct the problem. Fewer alternatives. Less flexibility.
Then there is process.
Several of these election bills have moved rapidly through the House, advancing from committee to floor debate to final action within compressed timelines. Emergency procedural tools reduce the space between debate and final vote. Hearings are scheduled even when broad support is thin.
Procedure is not neutral.
When legislative time is compressed, public scrutiny thins. Stakeholder response shortens. Amendments shrink. The result may comply with formal rules, but deliberative depth diminishes.
Finally, litigation itself is being reshaped. House Bill 2569 centralizes constitutional challenges to election laws in Shawnee County. Another contains a provision that would repeal advance voting statutes if courts invalidate certain signature verification requirements. These measures alter the terrain of judicial review, raising the stakes of constitutional challenges.
States unquestionably possess the authority to regulate elections. That authority is granted by the Constitution. But it exists alongside equal protection guarantees, due process protections, and the Voting Rights Act.
The question is not whether Kansas can regulate elections.
The question is whether it should construct an expansive enforcement and restriction architecture in response to a statistically rare problem.
From a social work perspective, policy is not evaluated solely by its stated purpose but also by its impact.
Who is most likely to be flagged incorrectly in database cross-checks? Who relies most heavily on mail voting? Who has the least time and fewest resources to correct administrative errors?
Who bears the burden when access narrows, and timelines tighten? When election administration shifts from facilitation to filtration, those questions matter.
This is not about one bill. It is about the convergence of data centralization, verification expansion, access contraction, procedural acceleration and litigation hardening, all moving in the same direction, creating a cumulative burden on Kansas voters.
Kansas may not rewrite its election system in a single dramatic stroke.
But architecture does not require drama. It requires design. And Kansans deserve to understand the structure being built in their name.
Robin Monroe is a native Kansan living and working in Wichita. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
Kansas Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Kansas Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sherman Smith for questions: info@kansasreflector.com.
Sorry this article is so old. I have dozens more older than this in open tabs with the hope of one day being able to get what I think is important news out to those who may have missed it at the time. Here is the southern states patriarchy punishing women for not bringing forth a well formed offspring of a male who bred them. That is the way this reads to me. The woman means nothing, just the fetus, zygote, the failed issue of a man must be the fault of a woman. Think of this being promoted as prolife while they are willing to torture live females for a few cells in the human body that act parasitic. Remember no man is required to give any part of his body to another even his own dying child. Tht is the law. But a woman, a female is required to give her body over entirely and all actions of her life entirely to that male inserted parasitic entity that will drain her life force and can cause life long medical problems. It tells you exactly how these male law makers and their Christian supports see women. Hugs
Hundreds of US women charged with pregnancy-related crimes since fall of Roe
Study finds prosecutors targeting low-income women mainly in US south – and figure likely to be an undercount
Abortion rights supporters protest outside the supreme court in Washington in June last year. Photograph: Aashish Kiphayet/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
In the first two years after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade, prosecutors in 16 states charged more than 400 people with pregnancy-related crimes, new research released on Tuesday found.
Of the 412 cases tracked by Pregnancy Justice, the vast majority took place in the US south, targeted low-income women and involved allegations that women broke laws against child abuse, endangerment or neglect, according to the research, which was compiled by the reproductive justice group. About 300 prosecutions took place in Alabama and Oklahoma. In 16 cases, law enforcement charged women with homicide.
Because there is no national database of US arrest or court records, the group believes the tally is likely to be an undercount. In a report released in September 2024, Pregnancy Justice said it had recorded 210 pregnancy-related prosecutions in the first year after Roe fell – the highest number ever recorded at that time. Pregnancy Justice is now devoting more resources to unearthing records of pregnancy-related prosecutions, so the group can’t say for sure whether these prosecutions are on the rise post-Roe or whether they are simply tracking them more closely.
Louisiana issues warrant for California doctor accused of mailing abortion pills
Read more
Nearly 400 of the cases included in the new report involved allegations of substance use during pregnancy. In an example described to the Guardian, after one woman gave birth, the hospital tested her umbilical cords for drugs. When the test came back positive for marijuana, the woman was arrested for felony child neglect, even though she had a medical marijuana card.
The laws used in most of these prosecutions, Pregnancy Justice pointed out, are typically meant to protect children, not fetuses. By prosecuting pregnant women under them, the group says, states are cementing the legal doctrine of “fetal personhood”, which seeks to grant embryos and fetuses full legal rights and protections – sometimes at the cost of the rights of the woman carrying them. Alabama and Oklahoma are both hubs for the growing fetal personhood movement.
“That is the ultimate goal of the anti-abortion movement,” said Dana Sussman, the senior vice-president at Pregnancy Justice, which scoured court and police records to find the cases. “It wasn’t just to overturn Roe. It is to establish full personhood, full rights for embryos and fetuses.”
Sussman said a number of women have faced criminal consequences for taking substances that were legal or prescribed to them. For that reason, Donald Trump’s claim last week that pregnant women who take Tylenol may give their children autism, raised alarms. Scientific research does not support this claim.
“It’s a perfect storm of all of the things that we work on: stigmatizing pregnant people for not being perfect pregnant people, blaming them for their perceived failures, and relying on misinformation and junk science to create a panic when there shouldn’t be one or isn’t one – while also increasing surveillance in the police state to monitor and potentially criminalize people when they don’t meet these impossible ideals,” Sussman said.
Only 31 of the cases documented by Pregnancy Justice included a stillbirth or miscarriage, while almost 300 of the cases led to a live birth.
A woman whose case was included in the Pregnancy Justice report reportedly didn’t realize she was pregnant until she started to feel intense pain in her stomach. The woman, a new immigrant to the US, suspected that she had food poisoning and decided to drive herself to the hospital.
Before she could get in the car, however, the woman started to give birth. She ultimately delivered what police records listed as a stillbirth. Pregnancy Justice did not factcheck the cases in the report and could not say whether the fetus was past 20 weeks of pregnancy, after which the term stillbirth is used. After police found the remains, the woman was charged with abuse of a corpse.
Abortion pill providers targeted by new Texas law refuse ‘anticipatory obedience’
Read more
The report indicates there are far more cases of miscarriage criminalization than have made national headlines. In one widely covered case in late 2023, police charged an Ohio woman with felony abuse of a corpse after she miscarried into a toilet. In another, earlier this year, a Georgia woman who had been found bleeding and unconscious after a miscarriage faced one count of concealing the death of another person, and one count of throwing away or abandonment of a dead body. The charges against both women were ultimately dropped.
Nine cases discovered by Pregnancy Justice involved allegations that women had considered abortions, such as ordering abortion pills or looking for information about abortion online. Only one woman in those cases was charged with violating a criminal abortion ban, likely because it is legal in most states to “self-manage” one’s own abortion. US abortion bans tend to penalize providers and people who help abortion patients, not the patients themselves.
In 2025, lawmakers in at least 12 states – including Alabama and Oklahoma – introduced legislation that would treat fetuses as people, which would leave women who have abortions vulnerable to being charged with homicide. In several of those states, that charge would carry the death penalty.
“What our work has proven is that, unfortunately, anything is possible when it comes to policing pregnancy,” Sussman said.
Kavanaugh claims the court does the same for every president not just tRump. The facts don’t show that to be true. tRump has a near perfect record of the court giving himwhat ever he asks for, while Biden was often either denied a chance for the court to rule or the court ruled against him often having to ignore precedent and prior rulings to do so. Either tRump has compromising material on the right wing justices or they are ruling based on poltical idology and racism. Hugs.
Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh disagreed about frequent rulings in favor of the Trump administration at a rare joint appearance.
Supreme Court Justices Kentanji Brown Jackson, left, and Brett Kavanaugh.AP; Getty Images
WASHINGTON — Internal Supreme Court divisions over how the high court has frequently ruled in favor of the Trump administration in emergency situations spilled out into public Monday with liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh locking horns.
The court’s conservative majority has on a regular basis blocked lower court rulings that have stymied President Donald Trump’s agenda, sparking criticism from within and outside the judiciary.
Jackson, often a vocal dissenter in those cases, forcefully aired her critique of the court’s actions in a rare public appearance with Kavanaugh at an event for lawyers and judges held at the federal courthouse in Washington.
Bemoaning the recent increase in such emergency filings — requested to challenge lower court rulings — she suggested that the number of filings would drop if the court were stingier about granting them.
The procedure has become known as the “shadow docket” because the court rarely hears arguments and often issues terse decisions with little explanation. The Supreme Court decisions can allow policies to go into effect at early stages in legal challenges, long before lower courts have reached any definitive conclusions. The casesmight then return to the Supreme Court later in the process, leading to final decisions on the merits.
In the last year, the court has, among other things, allowed Trump to fire thousands of federal workers, assert control over previously independent federal agencies and implement various aspects of his hard-line immigration policy. All those moves, done through the shadow docket, had been blocked by lower courts.
“I just feel like this uptick in the court’s willingness to get involved … is a real unfortunate problem,” Jackson said. Among other things, it affects how lower court judges approach cases, as they already have a preliminary sense of how the Supreme Court might approach them on appeal, creating “a warped kind of proceeding,” she added.
Jackson and Kavanaugh during introductions at the beginning of Monday’s event.Lawrence Hurley / NBC News
“It’s not serving the court or this country well,” Jackson said.
Kavanaugh, usually in the majority in shadow docket cases, defended the court — as he has done in the past — saying it has to act one way or another when the government or another litigant files an emergency application.
Kavanaugh noted that the increase in government applications is not unique to Trump, saying the court also granted similar requests made by the Biden administration, albeit at a lower rate.
The reason successive administrations have rushed to the Supreme Court is that presidents have relied more on executive orders in recent years because of the difficulty of persuading Congress to enact legislation, and those actions are often challenged in court, he said.
The justices have aired their disagreements in written opinions, but this was a rare example of two justices entering into a public debate about internal court business.
“None of us enjoy this,” Kavanaugh said of the shadow docket trend, noting that the court has opted in some cases to hear oral arguments and issue longer written rulings in response to some of the criticism.
“We have to have the same position regardless of who is president,” he added, a statement that Jackson expressed agreement with.
Responding to questions posed by Washington-based Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman, the justices were otherwise mostly on the same page during the hourlong event.
In particular, they both expressed concern about the increase in violent threats against judges. Recently, judges who have ruled against Trump have been regular targets.
“There’s no easy answer, for sure,” Jackson said. “It’s unfortunate because it relates to a lack of understanding about judicial independence.”
Kavanaugh praised Chief Justice John Roberts, who he said had “picked his spots” to push back against the criticism.
Roberts, for example, put out a statement rebuking Trump and his allies for suggesting judges should be impeached for ruling against the administration. One of the judges some Republicans want to impeach, Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of Washington, D.C., was among those at Monday’s event.
I emailed this to me on Sunday, but have only just gotten back to it to post here. My apologies on that, but it’s been both busy and stormy here! Anyway, I haven’t heard anything about the status of this; I hadn’t heard anything about it at all until I read it in Kansas Reflector. With no further ado:
LAWRENCE — Kansans won’t know until at least Tuesday if a judge will delay implementation of the state’s new “bathroom law,” but a concession by Attorney General Kris Kobach means key components of the law can be delayed until March 26.
Douglas County District Judge James McCabria heard arguments Friday about Senate Bill 244, the controversial new law that forces people to use bathrooms in government buildings and gender markers on driver’s licenses based on sex assigned at birth.
The three-hour hearing focused on technicalities, including whether the law meets any one of five specific criteria that would lead the judge to approve a temporary restraining order and pause enforcement of the law for up to 14 days.
Attorneys with the American Civil Liberties Union and the Kansas Department of Administration said the law’s speedy implementation provided no grace period to Kansans needing a new driver’s license and for government leaders statewide to put a system in place for tracking bathroom usage.
The law took effect Feb. 26, a little over a week after the GOP-led Legislature overrode Gov. Laura Kelly’s veto. Kansans who held driver’s licenses with a gender marker that didn’t match their sex at birth were told their licenses were immediately invalidated and government leaders statewide were told they had to immediately enforce the bathroom portion of the bill.
Kobach told McCabria he agreed to give Kansans who needed to update driver’s licenses until March 26 to complete that. He also said he wouldn’t enforce the law’s penalties — which could be as high as $125,000 per day for violations — for cities, counties, municipalities and schools that might violate the bathroom rules, as well.
Harper Seldin, senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, talks to reporters after a Douglas County District Court hearing on March 6, 2026. Seldin asked the judge to place a temporary restraining order on the state to stop implementation of a new law that forces Kansans to use bathrooms and have documentation in their biological sex at birth. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
Harper Seldin, an ACLU attorney representing the two Lawrence transgender men who brought a case against the law under pseudonyms Daniel Doe and Matthew Moe, told the judge the law violates the Kansas Constitution.
SB 244 infringes on the rights of personal autonomy, expectations of privacy, and equal protection under the law, and has other issues, he said.
“The attorney general is incorrect when he says that we’re asking the court to break new ground,” Seldin said. “This is not a novel set of theories that require the government to do anything. The thread through these individual rights claims is that this is about Daniel and Matthew’s right to be left alone by the government.”
Seldin also said the law targets transgender individuals, which can be shown by the results of its implementation even if it’s not stated outright. He said the way SB 244 was implemented violated the Kansas Constitution when the bathroom portion of the bill was “logrolled” into the bill that originally addressed driver’s license and birth certificate gender markers.
Logrolling refers to dropping a bill into an unrelated bill, sidestepping the opportunity for public input. Seldin said cramming two separate subjects into one law violates the Kansas Constitution, which has a “single subject” clause.
Kobach said the two issues are congruent in that they both deal with defining sex within Kansas government.
“It’s this idea that bills should mean what they say and say what they mean,” Seldin said. “There’s a particular perniciousness to a law that hides the law.”
Kobach told the judge that a driver’s license is a government document, used for government purposes, and the state has the right to define the information contained in the document.
McCabria questioned Kobach about briefs included in the plaintiff testimony outlining the negative psychological effects on transgender people being made to use documents that don’t match their gender identity.
“Whatever a person may feel about their need to be perceived by the world in a certain way, what right do I have to compel the government to identify me in that way?” McCabria asked.
Kobach said the driver’s license is a document that records pertinent information, and sex is one of the elements, along with eye color and birthdate, that doesn’t change over time.
Kobach said the bathroom portion of the bill maintains the status quo in Kansas, where he contended residents have always gone to the bathroom that matches their biological sex at birth.
Seldin said trans people in the state have been going to the bathroom without any harms for decades.
Kobach said women who hear a man’s voice or see a man in private spaces could become anxious about their safety.
He acknowledged plaintiff’s assertions about the psychological or emotional harm they may suffer but told McCabria that in a balance of equities, that didn’t outweigh the harms of “99-plus percent of the population.”
When McCabria asked him to substantiate that number, Kobach said he didn’t mean to imply that everyone outside of transgender individuals were harmed by the law.
“Many courts have recognized the fear that ‘biological females’ have when a ‘biological male’ is in the bathroom with them, and that is something that I think any Kansan can identify with, especially a female,” Kobach said after the hearing.
Asked how women would be affected by seeing or hearing a transgender man who now has to use a woman’s bathroom, Kobach said, “All kinds of hypothetical cases are possible.”
McCabria said he had hoped to make a ruling Friday but that he needs more time to study the filings in the case and examine constitutional issues. He said he expects to rule by Tuesday.
“I think most people want to be respectful,” Seldin said after the hearing. “I think most people don’t want to pry into other people’s private lives. I think a law like this suggests the opposite, that Kansans have some prurient interest in other people’s habits and private spaces. And I don’t think that’s right.”
Z Kemp attended the hearing because her partner and many friends are affected. She said the law has caused “a lot of stress and anxiety.”
“That’s just unnecessary because as they’ve stated before, there was — especially with the bathroom situation —- no prior problem,” she said. “It’s only a problem whenever you make it a problem. I don’t think it’s that radical to just let trans people be. Just let them go to the bathroom.”
Avie Fallis said she has been through a lot of physical and legal changes to find herself. She said she is tired of well-meaning people recommending that she leave Kansas, which is her home state where her family and loved ones live.
“I feel like it’s a fire that’s just growing,” she said. “I’m not going to run away from fire. I feel like it should be extinguished.”
Z Kemp, left, and Avie Fallis attended a Douglas County District Court hearing March 6, 2026, about Kansas’ new law because it affects them and their loved ones. The law forces people to use the bathroom related to their biological sex at birth and to put that sex marker on their driver’s licenses and birth certificates. (Photo by Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
Think of all the public safety nets we have lost this year. Slashing Medicare for the poor, cutting the ACA subsidies, ending food programs for poor kids, and ending heating assistance for the elderly. We also lost funding for education. Noem before she got fired ordered three planes for her personal use inclusing a luxury jet with a bar and bed. Hugs
Abortion rights supporters protest outside the supreme court in Washington in June last year. Photograph: Aashish Kiphayet/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images
Scottie's Playtime 