The 19th annual event, hosted by the Quota Club of Oroville, Youth for Change and the Oroville YMCA, provides high school students and eighth grade graduates in need with free dresses, suits, jackets, dress shirts, slacks, ties, shoes jewelry and hygiene products donated by businesses and community members.

“We reach out to every high school from here to Sacramento and Redding and as many social workers and foster organizations as we have contacts for to let them know the kids can come and shop for free clothing for prom and graduation,” said Kiki Silva, Quota Club Prom Project chair.

This year’s event will take place from 3 to 6 p.m. April 8 through 12 and from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. April 13 at the Oroville YMCA  and Convention Center at 1200 Myers St. Income verification is not required to shop the pop-up boutique. Students may come alone to shop but parents must bring their students with them to take advantage of the giveaway.

All clothing, including the more than 2,000 dresses, are on clothing racks or arranged on tables by size. Dresses are available in sizes zero to 28 and shoes are available in sizes six to 12. Silva said they are still in need of plus-size dresses as well as men’s dress wear. Donations of gently used and new items are accepted.

“We would also really like to have donations of gift certificates for manicures and tuxedo rentals,” said Silva.

High school seniors are invited to shop for prom, graduation and  job interview outfits while high school juniors may select prom and job interview clothing. Eighth-grade graduates are also welcome to shop for graduation ensembles.

“When students come in, they are assigned a personal shopper who finds out what their needs are and stays with them through the whole experience helping them find what they need and make selections,” said Silva. “When they are finished shopping, the students come to the front where we wrap their items nicely in tissue and put them in a bag, giving them the complete boutique experience.”

About 50 volunteers work to make the Prom Project a success including those who serve as personal shoppers. These volunteers are specially trained to work with students including with young people who may have “image problems” so that all students leave “feeling good about themselves and their choices,” said Silva.

“So many of the kids come in expecting just used clothing or think we won’t have anything in their size,” said Silva. “They are always surprised to see how much of the clothing like the dresses donated by Lulus.com and Macy’s are new and how many sizes we have. We see so many smiles and the kids and parents are so grateful when we tell them we can absolutely find them something they need.”

More than 200 students from as far south as Olivehurst to as far north as Quincy enjoyed shopping at the Prom Project in 2023. This was an increase of 25% over the previous year. Silva said she expects the number will increase again this year as there are more families in “greater need at this point in time.”

“There are so many wonderful moments during Prom Project,” said Silva. “It just makes our hearts happy.”

Donations for the projects are being accepted through April 8 and may be dropped off in Oroville at the YMCA or in Chico at Youth for Change, 260 Cohasset Road. For more information about the Prom Project or to make special arrangements for gift certificate or other donations call Silva at 530-534-3387.

A while back, I did a column that compiled a list of scam terms and today I’m going to feature one in particular: Smishing.

As I previously wrote, I hate this word. It sounds gross and feels gross to write and say. According to the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, the term is a combination of SMS (Short Message Service, or texting) and phishing, a scam in which the perpetrator pretends to be a legitimate organization or company. In shorthand, smishing is just phishing but through text instead of email.

Recently, the United States Postal Service had to issue a warning because scammers pretending to be USPS are sending fake package tracking links to people that ultimately put malware on devices.

The target gets a text message from someone claiming to be with the USPS offering to provide free package updates, even though tracking is generally free to begin with through most legitimate carrier websites, and asks you to fill out an online form to see where your package is at.

You go to the website and at that point, the site can begin creeping nasty software to your phone or tablet. The form itself can even ask for personal information directly. The goal of these scams is to get as much information about you as possible to eventually commit some form of financial fraud.

In the case of the postal service, a statement was issued declaring that it would never send text messages or emails without the customer asking for it or agreeing to it beforehand.

Stay safe out there folks and enjoy the spring weather while we have it.

Scam of the Week generally runs every Tuesday. Readers are welcome to contact reporter Jake Hutchison to report scams and potential scams they have come in contact with by calling 828-1329 or via email at jhutchison@chicoer.com.

EDDINGER: Richard Aaron Eddinger Jr., 55, of Paradise, died March 4, 2024, in Paradise. Arrangements are under the direction of Newton-Bracewell Chico Funeral Home, 530-342-9003. No services are planned.

WHEAT: Pam Wheat, 61, of Chico, died March 29, 2024, in Chico. Arrangements are under the direction of Affordable Mortuary, 530-214-0177.

The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial expanded a recently imposed gag order to include family members of the court and family members of the Manhattan district attorney, according to a late Monday ruling.

This comes after Trump leveled comments against the judge’s daughter in recent days.

Earlier Monday, the Manhattan district attorney’s office had asked the judge to expand the gag order to stop the former president from attacking family members of people involved in the case.

“This Court should immediately make clear that defendant is prohibited from making or directing others to make public statements about family members of the Court, the District Attorney, and all other individuals mentioned in the Order,” prosecutors wrote in a motion to Judge Juan Merchan on Monday.

Last week, soon after Merchan issued a gag order stopping Trump from making statements about witnesses, jurors, prosecutors, court staff or the family members of prosecutors and court staff, Trump launched a series of posts on his social media platform. The gag order did not cover District Attorney Alvin Bragg or the judge or his family.

Trump said Merchan was “compromised” and he identified by name the judge’s daughter who works for a political consulting firm. Trump then cited posts on X from an account he said belonged to the daughter. A spokesman for the court said the judge’s daughter deactivated her account two years ago and the posts were not from her.

Trump has argued he has a First Amendment right to defend himself and engage in campaign speech.

“Defendant knows what he is doing, and everyone else does too. And we all know exactly what defendant intends because he has said for decades that it is part of his life philosophy to go after his perceived opponents ‘as viciously and as violently’ as he can,” prosecutors wrote.

“But the suggestion that defendant is merely engaging in political counter-speech is an obvious fiction that this Court should emphatically reject,” prosecutors wrote. “None of defendant’s attacks in the past week consist of campaign advocacy. Instead, defendant has viciously and falsely smeared the Court and the family member for no reason other than the Court’s presiding over this criminal trial.”

Trump may appeal gag order

Trump’s lawyers oppose any expansion of the gag order that they say already goes too far and indicated they might appeal the order issued by Merchan last week.

“The Court should reject the People’s invitations to expand the gag order, which is already an unlawful prior restraint that improperly restricts campaign advocacy by the presumptive Republican nominee and leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election,” Trump’s attorneys wrote in an opposition filing Monday.

Trump’s defense team says the gag order as it stands does not apply to family members of the judge or Bragg, pointing to news reports similarly interpreting the order to say that family members like Merchan’s daughter are fair game for Trump’s public criticisms.

“Accordingly, because the gag order expressly does not apply to family members of the Court or the District Attorney, and because the challenged social media posts were not intended to materially interfere with these proceedings, President Trump did not violate the gag order and no contempt warning would be appropriate.”

Trump’s lawyers also asked Merchan to allow them to file a recusal motion to remove the judge from the case, now just two weeks before the trial is set to begin, “based on changed circumstances and newly discovered evidence.”

Merchan denied a similar recusal motion from Trump last year.

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — The Florida Supreme Court on Monday paved the way for a ban on abortions after six weeks of pregnancy, before many women know they are pregnant, while also giving voters a chance to remove restrictions in November and restore abortion rights in most cases.

The court that was reshaped by former presidential candidate and Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis ruled 6-1 to uphold the state’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, meaning a ban on six weeks could soon take effect. But under a separate ruling, the court allowed a ballot measure on abortions rights to go to voters.

Most abortions are obtained before the 15-week mark, so the current ban does not affect most people seeking abortion. But a six-week ban would likely have a major impact on women seeking abortions in Florida and throughout the South.

DeSantis, who signed the 15-week ban in 2022, appointed five of the court’s seven justices.

The lawsuit challenging the ban was brought by Planned Parenthood, the American Civil Liberties Union and others. They argued the Florida Constitution’s unique privacy clause for more than 40 years has explicitly protected a right to abortion in the state and should remain in force.

Lawyers for the state, however, said when the privacy clause was adopted by voter referendum in 1980, few people understood it would cover abortion. They told the justices the clause was mainly meant to cover “informational privacy” such as personal records and not abortion.

Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, most Republican-controlled states have adopted bans or restrictions on abortions. Every ban has faced a court challenge.

A survey of abortion providers conducted for the Society of Family Planning, which advocates for abortion access, found that Florida had the second-largest surge in the total number of abortions provided since Roe v. Wade was overturned. The state’s data shows that more than 7,700 women from other states received abortions in Florida in 2023.

The neighboring or nearby states of Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi are among the 14 states with bans now in place on abortion in stages of pregnancy, with limited exceptions. Georgia and South Carolina bar it once cardiac activity can be detected, which is generally considered to be around six weeks into pregnancy.

Associated Press writers Geoff Mulvihill in Cherry Hill, N.J.; Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida; Mike Schneider in Orlando; Curt Anderson in St. Petersburg; and David Fischer in Miami contributed to this report.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Heavy gunfire erupted Monday in the downtown area of Haiti’s capital as police battled gang members near the National Palace for several hours.

Local media reported that at least one policeman was shot after he and other officers were forced to flee an armored car that was later set on fire.

Scores of people were trapped by the gunfire in downtown Port-au-Prince while dozens of others managed to flee. One man who declined to provide his name out of fear for his life told The Associated Press that he was stuck for five hours until police rescued him.

“It’s the armored car that covered us (so we could) leave the area,” he said.

A spokesman for Haiti’s National Police did not return messages for comment.

The latest gunbattle comes more than a month after powerful gangs began attacking key government infrastructure. They have torched police stations, opened fire on the main international airport that remains closed and stormed the country’s two biggest prisons, releasing more than 4,000 inmates.

The violence has somewhat subsided in certain areas since the attacks began on Feb. 29, but gunfire still echoes daily.

At least 1,554 people have been reported killed up to March 22 and another 826 injured, according to the U.N.

The situation forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to announce last month that he would resign as soon as a transitional council is created. Henry, who was on an official trip to Kenya to push for the U.N.-backed deployment of a police force from the East African country, remains locked out of Haiti.

The proposed transitional council of nine members, which has yet to be formally established, will be responsible for choosing a new prime minister and council of ministers.

On Monday night, Haiti’s government issued a statement raising concerns over its creation, saying that the current council of ministers “stumbled over proven constitutional and legal questions. The Constitution and Haitian laws nowhere provide for this institution.”

The government noted the ministers met Monday to talk about the transitional council and shared the draft decree with legal experts so they “could finalize it and make it compliant with the laws of the republic.”

The current council of ministers also plans to create a joint commission to oversee the handover of responsibilities.

Haiti’s government noted that Henry received a list of nine people nominated to the transitional council on Friday and a draft decree establishing the council on Sunday.

___

Follow AP’s Latin America and Caribbean coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

One January morning in 2021, Carol Rosen took a standard treatment for metastatic breast cancer. Three gruesome weeks later, she died in excruciating pain from the very drug meant to prolong her life.

Rosen, a 70-year-old retired schoolteacher, passed her final days in anguish, enduring severe diarrhea and nausea and terrible sores in her mouth that kept her from eating, drinking, and, eventually, speaking. Skin peeled off her body. Her kidneys and liver failed. “Your body burns from the inside out,” said Rosen’s daughter, Lindsay Murray, of Andover, Massachusetts.

Rosen was one of more than 275,000 cancer patients in the United States who are infused each year with fluorouracil, known as 5-FU, or, as in Rosen’s case, take a nearly identical drug in pill form called capecitabine. These common types of chemotherapy are no picnic for anyone, but for patients who are deficient in an enzyme that metabolizes the drugs, they can be torturous or deadly.

Those patients essentially overdose because the drugs stay in the body for hours rather than being quickly metabolized and excreted. The drugs kill an estimated 1 in 1,000 patients who take them — hundreds each year — and severely sicken or hospitalize 1 in 50. Doctors can test for the deficiency and get results within a week — and then either switch drugs or lower the dosage if patients have a genetic variant that carries risk.

Yet a recent survey found that only 3% of U.S. oncologists routinely order the tests before dosing patients with 5-FU or capecitabine. That’s because the most widely followed U.S. cancer treatment guidelines — issued by the National Comprehensive Cancer Network — don’t recommend preemptive testing.

The FDA added new warnings about the lethal risks of 5-FU to the drug’s label on March 21 following queries from KFF Health News about its policy. However, it did not require doctors to administer the test before prescribing the chemotherapy.

The agency, whose plan to expand its oversight of laboratory testing was the subject of a House hearing, also March 21, has said it could not endorse the 5-FU toxicity tests because it’s never reviewed them.

But the FDA at present does not review most diagnostic tests, said Daniel Hertz, an associate professor at the University of Michigan College of Pharmacy. For years, with other doctors and pharmacists, he has petitioned the FDA to put a black box warning on the drug’s label urging prescribers to test for the deficiency.

“FDA has responsibility to assure that drugs are used safely and effectively,” he said. The failure to warn, he said, “is an abdication of their responsibility.”

The update is “a small step in the right direction, but not the sea change we need,” he said.

Europe Ahead on Safety

British and European Union drug authorities have recommended the testing since 2020. A small but growing number of U.S. hospital systems, professional groups, and health advocates, including the American Cancer Society, also endorse routine testing. Most U.S. insurers, private and public, will cover the tests, which Medicare reimburses for $175, although tests may cost more depending on how many variants they screen for.

In its latest guidelines on colon cancer, the Cancer Network panel noted that not everyone with a risky gene variant gets sick from the drug, and that lower dosing for patients carrying such a variant could rob them of a cure or remission. Many doctors on the panel, including the University of Colorado oncologist Wells Messersmith, have said they have never witnessed a 5-FU death.

In European hospitals, the practice is to start patients with a half- or quarter-dose of 5-FU if tests show a patient is a poor metabolizer, then raise the dose if the patient responds well to the drug. Advocates for the approach say American oncology leaders are dragging their feet unnecessarily, and harming people in the process.

“I think it’s the intransigence of people sitting on these panels, the mindset of ‘We are oncologists, drugs are our tools, we don’t want to go looking for reasons not to use our tools,’” said Gabriel Brooks, an oncologist and researcher at the Dartmouth Cancer Center.

Oncologists are accustomed to chemotherapy’s toxicity and tend to have a “no pain, no gain” attitude, he said. 5-FU has been in use since the 1950s.

Yet “anybody who’s had a patient die like this will want to test everyone,” said Robert Diasio of the Mayo Clinic, who helped carry out major studies of the genetic deficiency in 1988.

Oncologists often deploy genetic tests to match tumors in cancer patients with the expensive drugs used to shrink them. But the same can’t always be said for gene tests aimed at improving safety, said Mark Fleury, policy director at the American Cancer Society’s Cancer Action Network.

When a test can show whether a new drug is appropriate, “there are a lot more forces aligned to ensure that testing is done,” he said. “The same stakeholders and forces are not involved” with a generic like 5-FU, first approved in 1962, and costing roughly $17 for a month’s treatment.

Oncology is not the only area in medicine in which scientific advances, many of them taxpayer-funded, lag in implementation. For instance, few cardiologists test patients before they go on Plavix, a brand name for the anti-blood-clotting agent clopidogrel, although it doesn’t prevent blood clots as it’s supposed to in a quarter of the 4 million Americans prescribed it each year. In 2021, the state of Hawaii won an $834 million judgment from drugmakers it accused of falsely advertising the drug as safe and effective for Native Hawaiians, more than half of whom lack the main enzyme to process clopidogrel.

The fluoropyrimidine enzyme deficiency numbers are smaller — and people with the deficiency aren’t at severe risk if they use topical cream forms of the drug for skin cancers. Yet even a single miserable, medically caused death was meaningful to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, where Carol Rosen was among more than 1,000 patients treated with fluoropyrimidine in 2021.

Her daughter was grief-stricken and furious after Rosen’s death. “I wanted to sue the hospital. I wanted to sue the oncologist,” Murray said. “But I realized that wasn’t what my mom would want.”

Instead, she wrote Dana-Farber’s chief quality officer, Joe Jacobson, urging routine testing. He responded the same day, and the hospital quickly adopted a testing system that now covers more than 90% of prospective fluoropyrimidine patients. About 50 patients with risky variants were detected in the first 10 months, Jacobson said.

Dana-Farber uses a Mayo Clinic test that searches for eight potentially dangerous variants of the relevant gene. Veterans Affairs hospitals use a 11-variant test, while most others check for only four variants.

Different Tests May Be Needed for Different Ancestries

The more variants a test screens for, the better the chance of finding rarer gene forms in ethnically diverse populations. For example, different variants are responsible for the worst deficiencies in people of African and European ancestry, respectively. There are tests that scan for hundreds of variants that might slow metabolism of the drug, but they take longer and cost more.

These are bitter facts for Scott Kapoor, a Toronto-area emergency room physician whose brother, Anil Kapoor, died in February 2023 of 5-FU poisoning.

Anil Kapoor was a well-known urologist and surgeon, an outgoing speaker, researcher, clinician, and irreverent friend whose funeral drew hundreds. His death at age 58, only weeks after he was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer, stunned and infuriated his family.

In Ontario, where Kapoor was treated, the health system had just begun testing for four gene variants discovered in studies of mostly European populations. Anil Kapoor and his siblings, the Canadian-born children of Indian immigrants, carry a gene form that’s apparently associated with South Asian ancestry.

Scott Kapoor supports broader testing for the defect — only about half of Toronto’s inhabitants are of European descent — and argues that an antidote to fluoropyrimidine poisoning, approved by the FDA in 2015, should be on hand. However, it works only for a few days after ingestion of the drug and definitive symptoms often take longer to emerge.

Most importantly, he said, patients must be aware of the risk. “You tell them, ‘I am going to give you a drug with a 1 in 1,000 chance of killing you. You can take this test. Most patients would be, ‘I want to get that test and I’ll pay for it,’ or they’d just say, ‘Cut the dose in half.’”

Alan Venook, the University of California-San Francisco oncologist who co-chairs the National Comprehensive Cancer Network, has led resistance to mandatory testing because the answers provided by the test, in his view, are often murky and could lead to undertreatment.

“If one patient is not cured, then you giveth and you taketh away,” he said. “Maybe you took it away by not giving adequate treatment.”

Instead of testing and potentially cutting a first dose of curative therapy, “I err on the latter, acknowledging they will get sick,” he said. About 25 years ago, one of his patients died of 5-FU toxicity and “I regret that dearly,” he said. “But unhelpful information may lead us in the wrong direction.”

In September, seven months after his brother’s death, Kapoor was boarding a cruise ship on the Tyrrhenian Sea near Rome when he happened to meet a woman whose husband, Atlanta municipal judge Gary Markwell, had died the year before after taking a single 5-FU dose at age 77.

“I was like … that’s exactly what happened to my brother.”

Murray senses momentum toward mandatory testing. In 2022, the Oregon Health & Science University paid $1 million to settle a suit after an overdose death.

“What’s going to break that barrier is the lawsuits, and the big institutions like Dana-Farber who are implementing programs and seeing them succeed,” she said. “I think providers are going to feel kind of bullied into a corner. They’re going to continue to hear from families and they are going to have to do something about it.”

(KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs of KFF — the independent source for health policy research, polling and journalism.)

©2024 KFF Health News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

HONOLULU — The last living survivor of the USS Arizona battleship that exploded and sank during the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor has died. Lou Conter was 102.

Conter passed away at his home Monday in Grass Valley following congestive heart failure, his daughter, Louann Daley said.

The Arizona lost 1,177 sailors and Marines in the 1941 attack that launched the United States into World War II. The battleship’s dead account for nearly half of those killed in the surprise attack.

Conter was a quartermaster, standing on the main deck of the Arizona as Japanese planes flew overhead at 7:55 a.m. on Dec. 7 that year. Sailors were just beginning to hoist colors or raise the flag when the assault began.

Conter recalled how one bomb penetrated steel decks 13 minutes into the battle and set off more than 1 million pounds (450,000 kilograms) of gunpowder stored below.

The explosion lifted the battleship 30 to 40 feet (9 to 12 metes) out of the water, he said during a 2008 oral history interview stored at the Library of Congress. Everything was on fire from the mainmast forward, he said.

“Guys were running out of the fire and trying to jump over the sides,” Conter said. “Oil all over the sea was burning.”

His autobiography “The Lou Conter Story” recounts how he joined other survivors in tending to the injured, many of them blinded and badly burned. The sailors only abandoned ship when their senior surviving officer was sure they had rescued all those still alive.

The rusting wreckage of the Arizona still lies in waters where it sank. More than 900 sailors and Marines remain entombed inside.

Conter went to flight school after Pearl Harbor, earning his wings to fly PBY patrol bombers, which the Navy used to look for submarines and bomb enemy targets. He flew 200 combat missions in the Pacific with a “Black Cats” squadron, which conducted dive bombing at night in planes painted black.

In 1943, he and his crew where shot down in waters near New Guinea and had to avoid a dozen sharks. A sailor expressed doubt they would survive, to which Conter replied, “baloney.”

“Don’t ever panic in any situation. Survive is the first thing you tell them. Don’t panic or you’re dead,” he said. They were quiet and treaded water until another plane came hours later and dropped them a lifeboat.

In the late 1950s, he was made the Navy’s first SERE officer — an acronym for survival, evasion, resistance and escape. He spent the next decade training Navy pilots and crew on how to survive if they’re shot down in the jungle and captured as a prisoner of war. Some of his pupils used his lessons as POWs in Vietnam.

Conter retired in 1967 after 28 years in the Navy.

Conter was born in Ojibwa, Wisconsin, on Sept. 13, 1921. His family later moved to Colorado where he walked five miles (eight kilometers) one way to school outside Denver. His house didn’t have running water so he tried out for the football team — less for a love of the sport and more because the players could take showers at school after practice.

He enlisted in the Navy after he turned 18, getting $17 a month and a hammock for his bunk at boot camp.

In his later years, Conter became a fixture at annual remembrance ceremonies in Pearl Harbor that the Navy and the National Park Service jointly hosted on the anniversaries of the 1941 attack. When he lacked the strength to attend in person, he recorded video messages for those who gathered and watched remotely from his home in California.

In 2019, when he was 98, he said he liked going to remember those who lost their lives.

“It’s always good to come back and pay respect to them and give them the top honors that they deserve,” he said.

Though many treated the shrinking group of Pearl Harbor survivors as heroes, Conter refused the label.

“The 2,403 men that died are the heroes. And we’ve got to honor them ahead of everybody else. And I’ve said that every time, and I think it should be stressed,” Conter told The Associated Press in a 2022 interview at his California home.

Elizabeth Bauer was working out at the gym one morning last August when she got a phone call from her fertility nurse. It was a call that Bauer and her wife, Rebecca, had long been waiting for.

Elizabeth dialed in Rebecca so they could listen together: They were pregnant.

The Washington, D.C., couple decided before they got married three years ago that they wanted to have a child. Both wanted to play a biological part in the pregnancy. So, they used a process called reciprocal in vitro fertilization, through which eggs were retrieved from Rebecca and fertilized with donor sperm to create embryos. Then one of the embryos was implanted in Elizabeth’s uterus.

Elizabeth, a 35-year-old elementary school teacher, and Rebecca, a 31-year-old nonprofit consultant, had health insurance, but it wouldn’t cover the roughly $20,000 procedure, so they had to pay out of pocket.

But beginning next year, insurers providing coverage in D.C. will have to pay for IVF for beneficiaries, including same-sex couples, who can’t conceive on their own. Only seven states (Colorado, Delaware, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, New Jersey and New York) have similar mandates. However, a new definition of “infertility” could prompt other states to follow suit.

The American Society for Reproductive Medicine in October expanded the definition of infertility to include all patients who require medical intervention, such as use of donor gametes or embryos, to conceive as a single parent or with a partner. Previously, the organization defined infertility as a condition in which heterosexual couples couldn’t conceive after a year of unprotected intercourse.

The group emphasized the new definition should not “be used to deny or delay treatment to any individual, regardless of relationship status or sexual orientation.”

Dr. Mark Leondires, a reproductive endocrinologist and founder and medical director at Illume Fertility and Gay Parents To Be, said the new definition could make a huge difference.

“It gives us extra ammunition to say, ‘Listen, everybody who meets the definition of infertility, whether it’s an opposite-sex couple or same-sex couple or single person, who wants to have a child should have access to fertility services,’” he said.

At least four states (California, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island) are currently weighing broader IVF coverage mandates that would explicitly include same-sex couples, according to RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association. Bills were introduced but failed to advance in Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin.

A recent policy shift at the federal level also might add to the momentum. Earlier this month, the departments of Defense and Veterans Affairs announced expanded IVF service benefits to patients regardless of marital status, sexual orientation or whether they are using donor eggs or sperm. The new policy follows a lawsuit filed in federal court last year.

“The federal government is the largest employer in the country, so if they’re providing these type of benefits, it definitely adds pressure on other employers and states to do the same,” said Betsy Campbell, RESOLVE’s chief engagement officer.

A total of 21 states have laws mandating that private insurers cover fertility treatments, but only 15 include at least one cycle of IVF in that mandate. Only New York and Illinois provide some fertility coverage for people who are insured through Medicaid, the state-federal program for people with low incomes and disabilities. Neither state covers IVF for Medicaid recipients.

100,000 babies

IVF involves collecting mature eggs from ovaries, using donated sperm to fertilize them in a lab, and then placing one or more of the fertilized eggs, or embryos, in a uterus. One full cycle of IVF can take up to six weeks and can cost between $20,000 and $30,000. Many patients need multiple cycles before getting pregnant.

Nearly 100,000 babies in the U.S. were born in 2021 through IVF and other forms of assisted reproductive technology, such as intrauterine insemination, according to federal data.

IVF continues to garner nationwide attention in the wake of the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling last month that under state law, frozen IVF embryos are children, meaning patients or IVF facilities can be criminally charged for destroying them. The decision caused an uproar, and three weeks later Alabama Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed a bill into law that provides criminal and civil immunity for IVF clinicians and patients.

Polly Crozier, director of family advocacy at GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, or GLAD, described the Alabama decision as “a shock to the system.” But Crozier said the reaction to it sparked a “bipartisan realization that family-building health care is important to so many people.”

Crozier praised the insurance mandates in Colorado, Illinois, Maine and Washington, D.C., for more explicitly including LGBTQ+ people. Maine’s law, for example, states that a fertility patient includes an “individual unable to conceive as an individual or with a partner because the individual or couple does not have the necessary gametes for conception,” and says that health insurers can’t “impose any limitations on coverage for any fertility services based on an enrollee’s use of donor gametes, donor embryos or surrogacy.”

Christine Guarda, financial services representative at the Center for Advanced Reproductive Services at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine, said more same-sex couples are seeking help starting families. One reason, she said, is that more large employers that provide insurance directly to their employees, such as Amazon, are including broad IVF coverage.

‘Elective procedure’?

But some lawmakers are skeptical of expanding the definition of infertility to include same-sex couples. That was evident at a hearing on the Connecticut bill earlier this month, where Republican state Rep. Cara Pavalock-D’Amato noted that “infertility isn’t necessarily elective, but having a baby is.”

“Now, we are changing definitions to cover elective procedures,” Pavalock-D’Amato said. “If we’re changing the definition for this elective procedure, then why not others as well?”

She added: “Infertility, whether you are straight or gay, up to this point has been a requirement. Now, is it through this bill that we are no longer requiring people to be sick? They no longer have to be infertile?”

But proponents of the change argue that extending IVF mandates to cover same-sex couples is a question of fairness.

“I don’t think anybody in the LGBTQ community is asking for more. They’re just asking for the same benefit, and it is discriminatory to say, ‘You don’t get the same benefit as your colleague simply because you have a same-sex partner,’” Leondires said in an interview.

“If you’re paying to the same health care system as the person sitting next to you, then you should have the same benefit,” he said.

Elizabeth and Rebecca Bauer, who are busy decorating a nursery and buying baby clothes, recognize that they were fortunate to have the money to pursue IVF even without insurance coverage, and that “there are plenty of people who don’t have the time or the ability.”

“There are so many ways that people who want to build a family might struggle,” Elizabeth said, adding that the previous infertility definition felt like a “pretty impossible barrier” for non-straight couples. “Insurance should make building a family possible for any person or persons who want to.”

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.

©2024 States Newsroom. Visit at stateline.org. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (AP) — The Florida Supreme Court issued rulings Monday allowing the state’s voters to decide whether to protect abortion rights and legalize recreational use of marijuana, rejecting the state attorney general’s arguments that the measures should be kept off the November ballot.

The court was not ruling on the merits of the measures, but only whether they meet the requirements for clarity and don’t violate the state constitution’s mandate that they only cover one subject.

The court’s ruling came the same day it upheld the state’s ban on most abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. State lawmakers had tightened the ban to six weeks while the issue was still in court. Monday’s ruling, therefore, likely paves the way for the six-week ban to go into effect.

The justices by a 4-3 vote approved for the ballot a proposed amendment that would protect the right to an abortion. The four male justices constituted the majority while the three women opposed allowing the measure to proceed.

The proposed amendment says “no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.” It provides for one exception that is already in the state constitution: Parents must be notified before their minor children can get an abortion.

The majority rejected Republican Attorney General Ashley Moody ‘s argument that the proposed amendment is deceptive and that voters won’t realize just how far it will expand access to the procedure.

They also rejected an argument that the measure violates the single-subject clause because it would both allow abortions before the fetus is viable and for the mother’s health. The opponents had argued that some voters might approve of allowing abortions to protect the mother’s health, but would reject allowing unrestricted abortions before viability. They claimed those are separate subjects.

The majority said that under both Florida and federal law, “abortion has historically involved two major interconnected matters: the viability of the fetus and the health of the mother.”

“The mere fact that electors might not agree with the entirety of the amendment does not render it violative of the single-subject requirement,” the justices wrote.

Writing for the dissenters, Justice Jaime Grosshans wrote that the measure’s ballot summary is misleading and should have been rejected.

“The summary does not give the voter any clarity on the decision they must actually make or reveal the amendment’s chief purpose. Instead, it misleads by omission and fails to convey the breadth of what the amendment actually accomplishes — to enshrine broad, undefined terms in our constitution that will lead to decades of litigation.”

The ruling could give Democrats a boost in the polls in a state that used to be a toss-up in presidential elections. While many voters aren’t enthusiastic about a rematch between former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden, it could inspire more abortion rights advocates to cast a ballot. Trump won Florida four years ago.

Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis’ office issued a statement criticizing the ruling and supporting “the three women on the Court who got it right.” He appointed all three women to the court and two of the four men.

“This amendment is misleading and will confuse voters,” the statement said. “The language hides the amendment’s true purpose of mandating that abortions be permitted up to the time of birth.”

But Anna Hochkammer, executive director of Florida Women’s Freedom Coalition, applauded the decision, calling it “a huge step forward in our ongoing fight to safeguard a woman’s right to have an abortion and to limit government interference in their personal healthcare decisions.”

“The overwhelming response from Floridians from every political affiliation, religion and walk of life signifies that this issue transcends partisan politics; it’s about healthcare, plain and simple,” she said.

Florida will now be one of several states where voters could have a direct say on abortion questions this year.

There has been a major push across the country to put abortion rights questions to voters since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and removed the nationwide right to abortion. Referendums to guarantee abortion rights are set for Maryland and New York, and activists on both sides of the issue in at least seven other states are working to get measures on 2024 ballots.

The justices voted 5-2 to allow on the ballot a measure that would allow companies which already grow and sell medical marijuana to sell it to adults over 21 for any reason. The ballot measure also would make possession of marijuana for personal use legal.

Moody argued that the proposal is deceptive, in part, because federal law still doesn’t allow recreational or medical use of marijuana. She argued that the court previously erred when it approved the language for the medical marijuana ballot initiative voters passed in 2016.

In the majority opinion, Grosshans rejected Moody’s argument, saying the measure will not confuse voters as it “clearly states that the amendment legalizes adult personal possession and use of marijuana as a matter of Florida law.”

Grosshans rejected an argument by others that the measure violates the prohibition against multi-subject ballot measures because it both decriminalizes marijuana and allows for its sale. Grosshans wrote that those two are logically linked.

“Legalization of marijuana presumes the product will be available for the consumer. Likewise, the sale of personal-use marijuana cannot be reasonably undertaken while possession is criminalized. Selling and possessing marijuana appear, for better or worse, directly connected,” Grosshans wrote.

This measure, too, could be an issue that motivates more Democrats to vote.

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Spencer reported from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Associated Press writers Curt Anderson in St. Petersburg, Florida, and David Fischer in Miami contributed to this report.