A man is suing three women for wrongful death, alleging they helped his now ex-wife end her pregnancy
At the end of this month, an Idaho labor and delivery unit will shutter its doors. It’s not exactly an anomaly; it’s the third such closure in the state following the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which triggered laws in the state that criminalize physicians who provide abortion care and make access to the procedure impossible.
As of April 1, 2024, West Valley Medical Center in Caldwell, Idaho, will no longer deliver infants. According to a statement on the hospital’s website, the closure was an outcome the institution “worked for years to avoid.” While West Valley Medical Center didn’t cite restrictive abortion laws as the reason for the closure, Dr. Kara Cadwallader, who is a family medicine physician in Idaho, told Salon in a phone interview that providers feel as if their “hands are tied” and they can’t do their jobs in a state where abortion is completely banned (with only a narrow exception in which an abortion is “necessary to prevent the death of the pregnant woman”) and where physicians face jail time for providing a standard part of care.
More specifically:
The each state gets two seats in the senate, no matter how many people in it. In the house of representatives, each state gets a proportional number based on population, with a minimum of one, and those districts should have a roughly equal population within each state. Due to the cap on representatives and the minimum of one though, it can end up with an uneven number of people represented by each elected official when you compare between states.
If they control the legislature of the state though, they can also control the redistricting process that decides where the boundaries are for the federal house of representative districts and thus can gerrymander things. See this for an explanation of how one can produce districts that don’t resemble the underlying population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering