On today’s episode of the 5 Things podcast: Oklahoma passes nation’s most restrictive abortion law
The move has ripple effects around the country. Plus, Supreme Court correspondent John Fritze looks at the rest of the court’s term, the Senate approves more aid for Ukraine, reporter Elizabeth Weise tells us that COVID-19 cases are on the rise and Harry Styles has some new music.
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Hit play on the player above to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript below. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I’m Taylor Wilson and this is 5 Things you need to know Friday, the 20th of May 2022. Today, the strictest anti-abortion law in the country. Plus a look at what else the Supreme Court is considering beyond abortion and more.
Here are some of the top headlines:
- President Joe Biden begins his five day Asia trip today with a visit to a Samsung semiconductor plant. The stop is meant to show growing cooperation between the US and South Korea on technology and other issues.
- Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers have ordered all female presenters on TV channels to cover their faces on air. After taking back power last year, the Taliban said there would not be a strict dress code for women, but they’ve taken a sharp hard line turn in recent weeks.
- And a man is celebrating his 50th anniversary of eating a McDonald’s Big Mac almost every day. Donald Gorske has missed only eight days in the last 50 years and says he often eats two of the burgers a day. According to Guinness World Records, he broke the record for most Big Macs eaten in a lifetime in 1999, with more than 15,000. As of 2021, that number was more than 32,000.
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Lawmakers in Oklahoma have given final passage to the strictest anti-abortion law in the country. Nearly all abortions in the state would be prohibited under the legislation that would take effect immediately once signed by Governor Kevin Stitt. That could come any day, though abortion providers plan to challenge in court. The move comes weeks after a leak showed the Supreme Court is willing to overturn Roe vs. Wade, the landmark 1973 decision that upheld the right to abortion. The Oklahoma House overwhelmingly passed the bill on a 73 to 16 vote, though two Republicans broke party ranks to oppose the measure. The bill modeled after a similar one in Texas allows private citizens to sue anyone who helps those seeking abortion at any point during pregnancy. The person though actually pursuing the abortion could not be sued. There are limited exceptions for life-saving procedures and for rape or incest, but only if the crime was reported to law enforcement. The bill would take the place of a ban on abortions after six weeks in the state signed by Governor Stitt earlier this month.
Abortion providers in Oklahoma are increasingly anxious about what comes next. Marie Hoffman is a reproductive health assistant with Planned Parenthood.
Marie Hoffman:
I had a patient the other day who, she was from Oklahoma but she lives about four hours away. So she was constantly, it took her about a week to get an appointment to actually get in to see us, and in that entire week she said that she would Google abortion laws several times day, almost obsessing over it and calling us, making sure that, “Does my appointment still stand? Can I still come see you? What’s happening?” I mean just on top of already being anxious enough about having to have an abortion, how much that’s going to cost, how she’s going to get here, and just the anxiety of having an abortion, being scared that you’re going to be stigmatized, things like that. On top of that, then she has to worry about whether or not she is going to be able to keep this appointment or does she have to actually start calling somewhere else and how is she going to figure that out and how far do they go? And it’s just, it’s rough.
Taylor Wilson:
She works at the Tulsa Planned Parenthood clinic. Dr. Joshua Yap works there too, but says he plans to regularly fly to Kansas to work there if the latest abortion bans take effect. He told The Oklahoman, part of the USA TODAY Network, that bills will disproportionately affect low-income people in the state who may not have the means to travel long distances for the procedure.
Debate ahead of the bill’s vote got emotional on the Oklahoma House floor. Republican representative, Garry Mize voted against the bill after voting for other anti-abortion bills. He expressed frustration at Oklahoma not doing more to help pregnant people get better resources. Republican Rep. Denise Crosswhite Hader was near tears as she talked about regretting her own abortion decades ago.
Denise Crosswhite Hader:
I gave birth to a wonderful daughter, I gave birth to a son that died at 20 weeks, and I’ve had an abortion of a child that I will never know what he was on this earth. After I stood up and did that, I can’t tell you the number of people that have come to me in this building and outside of this building, women and men talking about the regret of having an abortion, paying for abortion, having something to do with abortion.
Taylor Wilson:
Meanwhile, Planned Parenthood Great Plains Interim President and CEO, Emily Wales, said the Oklahoma abortion ban is a reversal of history. And nationally, Vice President Kamala Harris called the legislation extreme.
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The legal fight over abortion is not the only controversial issue to be decided by the Supreme Court in coming weeks. Supreme Court correspondent John Fritze tells us what other cases are coming up this term.
John Fritze:
I mean, yeah, the abortion case has really dominated headlines and I think it’s worth noting that, if not for the abortion case, we would be writing a whole lot about this guns case out of New York. I mean in any other year, this gun case would be getting a ton of attention and it’s basically a case that a challenge to a New York requirement that people in that state have a good reason to carry a gun around in public. And so, if the court rules against New York in that case, it has the potential to really expand the number of people who are able to conceal carry handguns. That’s one big case that I think would be getting a ton of attention, but for the abortion case.
Another big one is climate and there’s this big case dealing with the administration’s ability to regulate power plants in the country and emissions from power plants and it’s a pretty technical case, but it really gets at the power agencies have to regulate these admissions. And if they don’t have the power, they can’t do it and I think that has a pretty big potential impact on the environment. That, too – and I just want to be clear, it’s not like we’re saying the abortion case is not important. I mean it’s unquestionably the most important case to come before the Court in a really long time. It’s just that there are all these other really important and fascinating cases on the docket as well, and I suspect they’re all going to land around the same time, and I think that probably the focus is going to be almost entirely on the abortion case.
So traditionally, we’d look for decisions in all these cases at the end of the term. These are the big ones and the big ones always come down in late June, early July, sort of looking for the last day of the term, which would be the last day in June most likely. That’s when we traditionally see it. I think there’s some question about whether this leak opinion from Alito on the abortion case is going to throw that timeline off a little bit. I think that’s not clear. I think the smart money is that it’s not and that the centers want to craft their dissents and there’s a lot of negotiation yet to happen in that case, but there have been calls certainly on the right for the court to issue an opinion quickly. There’s some argument for doing that. We’ll just have to wait and see. I think in any other year, it would be very clear that these decisions would all come down in the last week of June.
Taylor Wilson:
You can find more of John on Twitter @jfritze.
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The Senate yesterday approved more than $40 billion in additional aid for Ukraine, with the last aid package expected to run out this week. The bill includes triple the amount of aid the US has already committed to the country trying to fight against Russia’s invasion. It passed on an 86 to 11 vote with most Republicans joining every Democrat in approving the bill. The aid includes more than 20 billion for weapons and nearly 14 billion for food aid, refugee assistance, and other diplomatic programs.
Meanwhile, more than 1,700 Ukrainian troops have surrendered in recent days in the port Ukrainian city of Mariupol. Some have been taken to areas controlled by Russian-backed separatists and there are concerns of possible retribution against the troops. The International Committee of the Red Cross is trying to register the Ukrainian troops as prisoners of war as part of its role in ensuring humane treatment of POWs under the Geneva Conventions. Ukraine is hoping for a prisoner exchange, though Russia has said it might investigate and put on trial some of the soldiers for war crimes. Many of the last defenders of Mariupol are in rough shape. Russian state television has shown what it said were injured Ukrainian fighters at a hospital in the Donetsk region. Hospital Department Head, Natalia spoke of the scene.
Taylor Wilson translating for Natalia:
“Most of the patients are in serious condition. Almost all of them have fractures with displacement. Many of the patients need prosthetics. Many have advanced wounds.
In that same region, 12 people were killed when Russia shelled the cities of Severodonetsk and Lysychans’k.
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COVID-19 cases are back on the rise. National correspondent Elizabeth Weise has an update on how much of an increase we’re seeing and three reasons why.
Elizabeth Weise:
So, anybody who’s living in the US right now knows that there is a lot of COVID out there. Our cases are up 26% just over last week. And that is, I’m sure, a very deep undercount because that’s only reported tests and a lot of people are doing tests at home. So, 32% of the country is now considered to be in a high or at least medium COVID level.
There are three main reasons we’re seeing so much COVID right now. The first is that we’re seeing a lot of sub-variants of omicron out there, and omicron is just a whole lot more infectious than previous variants of COVID. In addition to that, there’s waning immunity, both from vaccinations and from previous infections. So if you got vaccinated or if you got sick six months, a year ago, the protection that you had is beginning to wane. And then of course, the other thing is people are just, they’re kind of done with COVID, they’re not masking up, and so they’re not just using physical barriers that could protect them against getting the infection.
The good news is the omicron variant for the vast majority of people is milder than previous variants. It doesn’t mean it can’t kill you, especially if you’re unvaccinated, but it is milder. So something that’s coming up is we know that vaccine manufacturers are working on next generation COVID vaccines, which it’s likely we’ll start seeing them in the fall and the winter. And these would be, just like the flu vaccine right now, protects you against – it’s called quadrivalent, it protects you against four different strains of the flu. The next kind of the COVID vaccine’s 2.0 will protect you against multiple strains, and that’s going to be important because there was a paper that came out in Nature that was really interesting because they looked and they found that if you had had a case of omicron, it doesn’t really protect you against any of the other variants and that hasn’t been the case in the past. I mean if you got COVID a year and a half ago, and you got gamma or delta – or beta or the original form of COVID – that provided a lot of protection against future variants that might pop up. But it turns out that omicron doesn’t do that.
And so moving forward – and actually the researchers did the study because they saw that all these people were getting sick and they thought, “Huh, this could actually be a good thing. It’s relatively mild and maybe this is what’s going to get us to that magical herd immunity because so many people will have gotten COVID and now they’ll all be immune.” Unfortunately it turns out they’re all getting the omicron variant, or various sub-variants of omicron, and that doesn’t look like it protects you against other variants. So, moving forward, if you get sick right now, it may not protect you against something that shows up six months from now.
Taylor Wilson:
Rising cases come as a CDC Advisory Committee yesterday voted to recommend a third dose of the Pfizer vaccine for children aged five to 11. CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky signed off on the recommendation last night.
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Happy New Music Friday. Harry Styles is back with his first album since 2019 called Harry’s House. The record comes after its first single, As It Was, topped the Billboard Global 200 Chart for multiple weeks. The album’s title was a nod to Joni Mitchell’s 1975 song called Harry’s House/Centerpiece. In her review, USA TODAY’S Melissa Ruggieri says the album features a wide slew of sounds from horns to synthesizers and baselines. She writes that his pursuit of “musical experimentation somehow never sounds indulgent and his blatant signals to his forbearers, whether 80s new wave or 70s funk, are always freshly dressed.”
Taylor Wilson:
Thanks for listening to 5 Things. You can find us on whatever your favorite podcast app is, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your smart speaker device. Thanks to PJ Elliot for his great work on the show and I’m back tomorrow with more of 5 Things from USA TODAY.