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Shumita Basu, Narrating: Good morning! It's Friday, May 20th. 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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A bill passed in Oklahoma would ban all abortions from what the legislation defines as "the moment of fertilization." There are very few exceptions. If it's signed into law by the governor as expected, it would go into effect immediately, making it America's strictest abortion law.
With states passing more restrictive laws and the Supreme Court expected to overturn "Roe V. Wade," there's a new focus on the impact of access to abortion. A landmark study has some insight. See, in 2007, then-Justice Anthony Kennedy speculated that abortions lead to poor mental health, saying some women end up regretting their decision. But he also acknowledged there wasn't good data to know for sure.
That comment caught one researcher's attention. Dr. Diana Greene Foster decided to test the justice's hypothesis. She ran a study tracking nearly 1,000 women over a span of five years. She called it "The Turnaway Study." Some women had an abortion, some women wanted one but were denied for various reasons, and what Dr. Foster found was being denied an abortion is more likely to lead to negative mental health than having one.
Here's Dr. Foster speaking with NPR's Emily Kwong on the podcast "Short Wave"…
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Dr. Diana Greene Foster: We see a couple of areas where their lives dramatically diverge in outcomes.
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The first outcome: the health of the mom.
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Dr. Diana Greene Foster: Consistent with the medical literature, carrying a pregnancy to term and delivering a child is much more physically risky than having an abortion, even a later abortion. We see much more severe physical health complications from birth, including, most tragically, two women who died after delivery. One died of an infection and one died of a very common pregnancy complication.
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The second outcome: economic well-being. For the women who were denied access to abortions, they were more likely to struggle to pay for basic necessities.
And the third outcome measured in the study was mental health. Foster told NPR that for the women who had an abortion, some reported having negative emotions in the beginning, but over time 95% of them said they felt they'd made the right choice.
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Dr. Diana Greene Foster: People can experience the emotion regret and still feel like they made the right decision about having an abortion, so "I regret that I was in the position where I needed an abortion, but given that I was, I'm glad I had it."
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Foster says while she was conducting her study, she wasn't thinking about the possibility of "Roe V. Wade" being overturned, but her findings are a warning of what can happen when someone is denied an abortion they want.
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President Biden is in Asia today. He's visiting South Korea and Japan and meeting with leaders of other countries. "Politico" reports on how his first Asia trip as president is a bit of playing catch-up.
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The Biden administration came into office prepared to focus on China, but Afghanistan and the war in Ukraine forced a change in focus. Now Biden is trying to get allies in the region on board, to be ready to counter Chinese moves.
But doing that without provoking China is tricky. If Beijing perceives the U.S. as trying to forge some kind of alliance, an Asian NATO, if you will, that could be interpreted as a threat. "Politico" hosted a Twitter roundtable ahead of Biden's trip. Here's U.S.-China relations expert Yun Sun…
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Yun Sun: Asian NATO, that's Beijing's worst nightmare. That's what they're afraid of, that there will be a strengthened and reinforced the U.S. alliance system in the region and China will be blocked in.
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How things shake out during Biden's trip to Asia could have global implications. Here's "Politico" reporter Gavin Bade…
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Gavin Bade: There are many ways that, you know, this supposedly consensus-based world order that was supposed to be all liberal democracies and all capitalist… that's degrading, right? The war in Ukraine has degraded that, COVID degraded that, China's aggression degraded that. We're in a new world system right now, and I think what you see is the Biden administration and the entire U.S. political system struggling to figure out how we lead that. What do we want that new system to look like, and how are we going to lead it? And it's a very difficult thing to do.
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It seems like one of the hardest parts of modern parenthood is deciding when to give your kid a smartphone. Recently, Ellen McCarthy from "The Washington Post" profiled some parents who are trying their best to hold out for as long as possible.
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Ellen McCarthy: Some of them were worried about smartphones being addictive and not being able to sort of regulate how their kids were using the smartphones or how often they were reaching for the smartphones.
More than half of American kids have their own smartphone by the time they're eleven years old, and almost every high schooler has one. The concern among parents is what this is doing to their kids' brain development and to their mental health.
McCarthy: They were worried about the social media that they were regularly tapping into through it, or violent video games, or pornography, you know. It wasn't just the phone itself, but it was what the phone was giving them access to.
Experts say smartphone addiction is a real thing, that it can trigger dopamine responses in the brain. But whether it's harming kids' development and contributing to mental health issues, there still isn't a lot of good data on that.
McCarthy: So there's no question that adolescents are having a really hard time right now, or many of them are, more of them are struggling with their mental health than they were 15 years ago or 20 years ago, but there's not a lot of research to say this is the cause.
McCarthy profiled one parent named Adriana Stacey. She's a psychiatrist who works primarily with high school and college students. In her work, she's seen the detrimental effects that phones are having on her patients, so she decided that her kids won't get phones at all. Not until they turn 18. For her daughter, Annalise, who's 15 now, this has been pretty tough.
McCarthy: She talked about sort of being at dance competitions and all of her teammates, you know, while they're waiting for their turn to perform, would be staring at their phones, and she didn't have anyone to talk to. She got left out of a lot of stuff and, you know, didn't get included on the group texts. And sometimes she didn't know about the gossip or what was happening, and I think it really was hard.
But lately, Annalise has come around.
McCarthy: Annalise has really sort of done a 180 on her parents where she now has sort of taken her parents side on this because she feels like it was so beneficial to her to not just miss out on the gossip, but she missed out on the drama. You know, she saw her friends just get wrecked by some of the things that happened to them through their phones, you know, on social media, or some of the gossip, or the comments on their pictures or whatever. And she also feels like not having a phone forced her to be more outgoing.
<v For parents who are struggling with when and how to give their kids phones, there's no one right answer here, no perfect age when your kids should get a phone, or perfect numbers of hours that they should be limited to. But I will shout out one piece of advice for parents from this article>"Model the behavior that you want to see in your kids." If you're on your phone all the time, your kids will want to do the same, so set rules that the whole family can follow together.
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This last story comes from "Popular Science". Their latest issue is all about metals. There's a lot of interesting stuff, even if you're not a metals nerd. One article looks at common misconceptions about metals in cooking, and there are a couple things in here that I really think will surprise you.
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First, you've probably heard that microwaving metal is dangerous. That's actually false, with a caveat. You should not put a fork in the microwave, because you might get sparks, you know that, but technically the problem is the shape of the fork, not the material. It has to do with how microwaves heat stuff up, stirring up electrons on sharp edges. But if you put a spoon in the microwave, the energy will disperse and it'll just get hot.
Also, let's talk about cast-iron skillets. I know there's a lot of opinions here. Cast-iron hive, do not come for me. This article definitively says soap does not ruin cast-iron skillets, not anymore. Things were different many years ago, but modern soaps don't have lye or abrasive ingredients so they're just not strong enough to strip off that coating you've worked so hard to build up.
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There's more stuff on metals in the kitchen, and all the stories that we talked about today, in the Apple News app. And check out our weekend interview show, "In Conversation". This week, I speak with "ProPublica's" Doug Bock Clark about the anatomy of Trump's big lie about the supposedly stolen election. Extensive reporting reveals how key people pushed evidence that they knew to be false, which snowballed into something much bigger.
Doug Bock Clark: It's an extraordinary thing to think that a small group of people has spread an idea to millions, but at least in the case of sort of suspicions about voting machines, which this group was really, really instrumental in pushing, a lot of that can be traced back to them.
Check out that weekend listen. We'll be back with the news on Monday.
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