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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Wednesday, May 4th. I'm Shumita Basu. This is "Apple News Today." Each morning, hear about some of the most fascinating stories in the news, and how the world's best journalists are covering them.
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The leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade has a lot of people asking what will the future of abortion rights look like in the U.S.? To answer this, we might have to look to the past, to a time before Roe. Carter Sherman covers abortion rights for "VICE News." She told us the story of Renee Chelian, who was 15 years old when she became pregnant in 1966.
Carter Sherman: Essentially, she was afraid that her entire life would be over if she was forced to carry this pregnancy to term. And she didn't know that there were even other options to end that pregnancy.
But Renee's parents told her that abortion was an option and helped her look for one. Making the arrangements required secret codes and a meeting spot, where she and her father were blindfolded and driven to a warehouse.
Because Renee was fairly far along in her pregnancy, they couldn't do the procedure on site. They tried to treat her in a way that would force her into labor at home, which didn't work. She tried a second time at a different secret spot and was again sent home to wait.
Sherman: She basically described it as an incredibly traumatizing experience. She was trapped in the house. She was afraid to scream. She was afraid to alert any of the neighbors what was happening. And when she ultimately did pass the pregnancy, she didn't want to look at the fetus. She was just happy to have finally gotten through this whole process.
During the 1950s and '60s, up to 1.2 million illegal abortions were performed annually. Renee says, she felt lucky to be alive. And it changed the course of her life. She decided to become an abortion provider, to help people avoid the traumatic and unregulated process that she went through. Today, she runs three abortion clinics around Detroit.
Sherman: The stigma surrounding abortion really contributed to a lack of understanding around it. People felt that they couldn't share their stories. They couldn't talk to people for years or decades about what they went through, and that meant that we didn't really know what people were suffering through before Roe v. Wade came about. Abortion is still an incredibly stigmatized procedure.
Renee worries that if the Supreme Court ultimately does overturn Roe v. Wade, others might be forced to seek out dangerous illegal abortions like she did. At the same time, Sherman says a lot has changed since 1966.
Sherman: The pre-Roe years will not necessarily look like post-Roe years. The technology of abortion has evolved so far that people will not only be limited to getting surgical abortions. People are able to access self-managed abortions, and many medical experts say that you can self-manage an abortion using pills safely.
You can read more of Renee's story, and find in-depth coverage of the Supreme Court developments, on the Apple News app.
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The Supreme Court news and abortion are dominating the headlines right now. That makes it easy to miss other important developments in politics and policy. Let's start on the campaign trail. Presidents may nominate Supreme Court justices, but Senators determine which ones actually get the job. Keep that in mind when you watch midterm results, like in Ohio, where J.D. Vance is the winner of the Republican Senate primary. In his victory speech last night, he paid tribute to an important endorser.
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J.D. Vance: I have absolutely got to thank the 45th, the president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, ladies and gentlemen.
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This race was seen as an early test of Trump's influence. "Bloomberg" reports on how his backing seems to have helped Vance push ahead of a crowded GOP field. He'll face Democrat Tim Ryan in November. Other Trump-backed candidates are seeing mixed results in polls so far.
Anger over inflation is a big theme in this election, which brings us to another big story. In Washington today, the Federal Reserve is expected to hike interest rates by half a percentage point. Credit card rates typically follow, so "CNBC's" personal finance team says that makes it even more important to pay down debt if you can.
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Safe, stable housing. That's what many advocates for people who are homeless have said is key to helping them rebuild their lives. It's why San Francisco, a city that's seen homelessness skyrocket in the past few years, put tens of millions of dollars toward sheltering vulnerable people in hotels. The "San Francisco Chronicle" spent a year investigating this hotel program and found it's getting disastrous results.
Joaquin Palomino: They offer rooms that are about a hundred square feet with shared bathrooms in kitchens. And what we found was a lot of problems.
That's Joaquin Palomino, who reported this story with his colleague Trisha Thadani. The "Chronicle" interviewed more than 150 tenants and poured over tens of thousands of pages of documents for this reporting. He told us, city leaders have neglected these hotels.
Palomino: So there are problems with disrepair in a lot of buildings where you'd have broken elevators that would trap physically disabled people or seniors on their floors. Frequent plumbing issues. A lot of crime in the buildings, a lot of tenants said they didn't feel safe. And a lot of tenants were very unhappy and felt very unstable in these buildings.
Palomino said, some of the people they spoke to described feeling trapped.
Palomino: We spoke to one gentleman who was missing his chemotherapy appointments because the elevator was broken for six weeks.
One woman said, her living space was infested by hordes of mice.
Palomino: That was so bad that she actually put a tent in her room just to keep them out.
These buildings are clustered in the Tenderloin, a neighborhood where Mayor London Breed recently declared a temporary state of emergency. People were dying of drug overdoses in the streets.
The difficult conditions in these hotel arrangements add up to what the "Chronicle" calls "a pattern of chaos, crime, and death" for the people living there. When it comes to who should be held responsible for these failures, Palomino told us that there is blame to go around.
Palomino: We sort of found problems across the board, you know, in some cases, some of the nonprofits were falling short. In other cases, the Department of Homelessness was sort of failing to perform its duties, to oversee these programs. And the city at large has, has really underfunded a lot of them, especially considering what they're asking these nonprofits to do, which is the house and provide support to some of the most vulnerable people in the city.
When the "Chronicle" asked the mayor about issues with the program, the mayor blamed nonprofits who run these hotels and called for more scrutiny. To address these problems, the city's Department of Homelessness and Supportive Housing is asking for $24.5 million to increase staffing and services.
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Finally, | wanted to flag a story that takes a step back and gives you the long view on Starbucks. This is by "Fast Company" and it's been sparking a lot of interest. In a moment of renewed labor unrest, Starbucks is one of the most high profile American companies where employees have recently voted to join unions.
As "Fast Company" explains, Starbucks had a longtime image as a progressive company. Workers got good benefits. Part-time workers were eligible for company stock. It wasn't the place people expected to see a labor uprising. Just yesterday, the CEO offered expanded pay and benefits, but not to staffers in a union.
The piece looks at tensions between the company and its famed baristas. A big sticking point is workload. The publicly traded company wants to sell as much coffee as possible. Staffers say they're being pushed too hard to do too much.
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It's a surprising look inside an iconic company where so many Americans get their daily coffee, and how the people who make that coffee are riding the wave of a national labor movement. You can read the whole story, or just sit back and let a narrator read it to you, in the Apple News app. You can also find all the stories we talked about today. We're back with more news tomorrow.
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