Consider This from NPR - After SCOTUS Decision, The Future Of Abortion Rights; Mask Mandates

Episode Date: June 29, 2020

On Monday, the Supreme Court issued a major decision on access to abortion. The court struck down a Louisiana law that required doctors who perform abortions at clinics to also have admitting privileges at nearby hospitals. NPR's Sarah McCammon reported from the clinic at the center of the case last year.With coronavirus cases surging in North Carolina, officials issued a statewide mandate for face coverings, and are hiring bilingual contact tracers to work with the state's Latinx community.Warehouses are a big source of temporary jobs in New Jersey, especially for undocumented immigrants. Workers often have to travel in crowded vans, despite guidelines to social distance. Now, WNYC's Karen Yi reports, some of them are getting sick.Find and support your local public radio station. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

We know how this works. Basically, it's three phases. First, cases go up. Then, hospitalizations go up. And then, the number of people who die goes up. This is a very, very serious situation, and the window is closing for us to take action and get this under control. On Sunday, Alex Azar, Secretary of Health and Human Services, acknowledged on CNN these phases usually take weeks to play out. And at this point, some states have already moved through phases one and two, cases and hospitalizations. these hot zones would be if you have engaged in behaviors in the last couple of weeks where you have not exercised appropriate social distancing, worn face coverings, we encourage you get tested because you could put yourself, but more importantly, you could put our most vulnerable citizens at risk of severe complications or even fatality. Coming up, what a major Supreme Court

decision on abortion tells us about how the court might take up the issue in the future, and how health officials are dealing with a surge of new coronavirus cases in North Carolina. This is Consider This from NPR. I'm Kelly McEvers. Today is Monday, June 29th. Today, the Supreme Court issued a major decision on access to abortion. This particular case started in Shreveport, Louisiana, at a place called Hope Medical Group for Women. This is our little ultrasound room. Kathleen Pittman, a clinic administrator, was working there on a recent Saturday when there were a couple dozen patients sitting quietly in the waiting room.

We'll have one physician over here, another physician here. It's running two rooms. Back in 2014, a new law forced a change at the clinic. That's when the Louisiana legislature decided that for a doctor to perform an abortion, that doctor had to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. Lawmakers said it was in case of an emergency. Hope Medical challenged the law in court because they said, in practice, it's hard for doctors to get these privileges. The whole process of trying to obtain privileges is crazy. Which means there would be fewer doctors who could provide abortions. It's time-consuming. It could be a process of a few months to actually years. There are no guarantees. One of the doctors at the clinic, Pittman said, spent years trying to get privileges, with no success.

Not all hospitals will just outright deny privileges. They just won't take any action, which is the same thing. But it's not in writing, so what do you do? Another employee at Hope Medical, Lillian Newton, says Louisiana is in a region that already has restrictive abortion laws and a declining number of clinics. We've had patients who drive from Mississippi, from Arkansas, from Oklahoma.

We've seen patients make four-, five-, six-hour trips. Requiring doctors who perform abortion to have hospital privileges was not a new tactic in the fight over abortion. Texas passed a similar law years ago. And in 2016, the Supreme Court struck that law down. The court said admitting privileges do not provide any substantial medical benefit to patients. It just makes abortion harder for patients to access. That Texas case is important because in that decision, Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the minority, meaning he would have allowed the privileges law to remain.

But in today's 5-4 decision, Roberts was a key vote on the other side. That's significant, obviously, because there are plenty of abortion restrictions that the Supreme Court has yet to evaluate. Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University, told NPR that in the future, Roberts could still rule to uphold other existing restrictions on abortion, like laws that ban abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, bans on certain trimester abortions, or bans on abortions for other reasons like race, sex, or disability discrimination. And I think many abortion opponents think Roberts would give those a serious look if they were to return to the court again. So as usual, there's no shortage of options if the Supreme Court does want to consider eliminating Roe v. Wade, and we should expect to see more of the same in the future.

Mary Ziegler at Florida State University. In many places where cases of coronavirus are rising, state and local leaders are making face coverings mandatory in public spaces. North Carolina is one of those places because one community there is being hit especially hard. Ari Shapiro is going to take it from here. Dr. Mandy Cohen is the state's health director, and she told me everybody expected cases would creep up once things started to reopen.

Then last week, North Carolina hit a new record. We knew when we'd move around more, we'd likely see more cases. And now we're trying to find that balance between protecting the public health and reigniting the economy. So last week, Cohen and the state's Democratic Governor Roy Cooper put a pause on any further reopening. And they also said everyone has to wear a mask in public. We know face coverings is the best way North Carolinians can show that they can actually support businesses and support the economy by wearing those face coverings. We know it only works if everyone does it together. And so we knew that we had to move to a statewide mandate for wearing coverings in public spaces. In North Carolina, about 45 percent of coronavirus patients

are Latinx. So Dr. Cohen told me the state's trying to work more closely with community organizations to deliver clear public health messages in multiple languages. We're also making sure we're surging our testing and our tracing capacity in those communities. We're going down to not just the zip code level, but the census tract level, and then individual apartment complexes where we're going to where folks are to make sure that we're finding them. And we are hiring almost exclusively bilingual contact tracers to make sure that we are able to reach folks in

the language that is most comfortable for them. But we have a lot of work to do here. I don't want to say that this is something that we have completely figured out. We have a lot of work to do here. I don't want to say that this is something that we have completely figured out. We have a lot of work still to do. Yeah. Vice President Mike Pence said on Friday that none of the southern states dealing with this new surge in cases need supplies from the federal government. Is that consistent with your experience in North Carolina? Well, we certainly need some additional assistance from the federal government. We've been talking to them about some additional testing sites that they could support here. A number are meant to close here in the next few days. We're hoping that they can keep those open. But we're also seeing a shortage in lab reagents. These are the chemicals needed to process our tests at the lab that we are needing here in North Carolina.

But truly, that's not unique to us. And that's in a lot of labs around the country. If I could ask you to just take a step back and sort of reflect on this journey that you've been on with the rest of the country for the last few months. We locked down in mid-March. And if I had told you then that North Carolina would have close to 2,000 new infections a day at the end of June, what would you have said? Well, I would say we have a lot to learn about this virus. And I'd say we need to build our capabilities to test and trace and surge our capacity as fast as we can, and that's what we've been doing. Look, this is a challenge of our lifetimes. While it is an incredible honor to serve in this role, it is incredibly challenging.

We're trying to build a public health infrastructure that has been weakened over a number of decades by lack of funding. We don't have the data we would like. The science is still evolving. We have a lot of work to do. So the simple things like wearing a face covering are so, so critical here. And we're going to keep making sure everyone hears that message and continues to heed that warning while we try to find this balance between safely reopening more businesses and doing activities, but protecting public health. That was North Carolina State Health

Director Mandy Cohen talking to NPR's Ari Shapiro. Temporary workers make up at least a quarter of the workers in warehouses across New Jersey. These are warehouses that process food, fill clothing orders, or package medical supplies. They have been continuing to work throughout the pandemic, but the temp industry in New Jersey is largely unregulated. Working conditions have gotten worse. Many of the workers are undocumented immigrants. And now four temp workers have told member station WNYC that they've come down with COVID-like symptoms. Karen Yee reports. It's 5.30 in the morning and Reynalda Cruz is sitting in her car outside a pharmaceutical warehouse in East Brunswick. She's counting how many workers spill out of vans that pull up to the facility, one after the other. That tiny van is full of people, she says. 16 people in a vehicle meant to hold 15.

It's like they're not in a pandemic, she says. State officials are urging businesses to enforce social distancing to stop the spread of the virus. But temp workers who don't have cars or a driver's license have to keep riding on crammed cars to get to work. These stuffed vans are a known nightmare in the temp world, and that practice has continued despite the health risks. Cruz is a former temp worker turned organizer. She says people who lost other jobs are turning to temp work. She says people turned to temp agencies because they stayed open. Six temp workers told WNYC vehicles owned by the agency or a third party remained at or near capacity, and four of them say they eventually came down with COVID-like symptoms.

Maria turned to a temp agency after the restaurant she worked at shut down during the outbreak. After a week working at a cookie factory, I started with a headache, I started with a cold. Maria says she started getting chills and headaches. She didn't want us using her last name because she's undocumented. A man on her same overnight shift who worked for the same agency died from COVID-19, his family said. Who are the people who are risking their lives and going to work to those factories, to those agencies? It's us, the immigrants.

For what? So people who are citizens and who are getting help have something to eat. Temp agencies popped up in immigrant-heavy cities in New Jersey to absorb a ready-made workforce with limited mobility. Carmen Martino is a labor history professor at Rutgers University. Because there's no unemployment for undocumented workers, temp agencies sort of become, in a very strange way, the only social safety net that undocumented workers have. On a recent day, I went to New Brunswick with Gruz, the labor organizer. We saw dozens of workers waiting for their ride to work.

A bus arrived partly full. A temp agency employee told workers to wait. The bus left, and a few minutes later, two buses arrived. Bruce says the agency called another bus because we were there. I went back alone the following week. There were nearly two dozen workers waiting for a ride. This time, only one bus arrived to pick them up. Karen Yee of member station WNYC. Earlier in this episode, you heard reporting from the Hope Medical Group for Women in Louisiana from NPR's Sarah McCammon. We'll be back with more tomorrow.

I'm Kelly McEvers.