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A Wave of New Abortion Restrictions Is Eroding Roe v. Wade
The dream of overturning Roe v. Wade may yet come to pass for abortion opponents. But as state-level restrictions on the right to abortion continue to mount, the anti-abortion movement is steadily chipping away at the spirit of Roe while it remains on the books.

The case that recognized a constitutional right to abortion, Roe v. Wade, is now 41 years old, and 2014 marks the 41st year of determined opposition to the ruling.
A new report from the Guttmacher Institute shows that the past few years have brought the anti-Roe camp the most significant victories it has achieved in four decades. The inroads against the right to abortion have come, by and large, in state legislatures, not in courts. They have been piecemeal. They have come brick-by-brick. But they have constructed a new foundation that effectively limits abortion rights for millions of American women. Last year alone, 70 new laws to restrict access to abortion were enacted in 22 states.
The restrictions come in many forms. Nine states now ban abortions beyond 20 weeks, about a month before the point of fetal viability established as the permissible threshold in post-Roe Supreme Court litigation. Thirty-nine states prohibit physician assistants, certified nurse midwives and nurse practitioners from providing early abortions, limiting the practice to licensed doctors. Eight states enacted new limits on the licensing of abortion clinics in 2013. Most notorious was Texas’s licensing law, ruled unconstitutional in October and currently under review by an appeals court, that would result in the closure of about a third of the state’s abortion clinics.
The Guttmacher report chronicles the magnitude of the trend:
In 2000, 13 states had at least four types of major abortion restrictions and so were considered hostile to abortion rights (see Troubling Trend: More States Hostile to Abortion Rights as Middle Ground Shrinks); 27 states fell into this category by 2013. In contrast, the number of states supportive of abortion rights fell from 17 to 13, while the number of middle-ground states was cut in half, from 20 to 10. The proportion of women living in restrictive states went from 31% to 56%, while the proportion living in supportive states fell from 40% to 31% over the same period.
The dream of overturning Roe v. Wade may yet come to pass for abortion opponents. But as state-level restrictions on the right to abortion continue to mount, the anti-abortion movement is steadily chipping away at the spirit of Roe while it remains on the books.
Image credit: Shutterstock
What early US presidents looked like, according to AI-generated images
"Deepfakes" and "cheap fakes" are becoming strikingly convincing — even ones generated on freely available apps.
Abraham Lincoln, George Washington
- A writer named Magdalene Visaggio recently used FaceApp and Airbrush to generate convincing portraits of early U.S. presidents.
- "Deepfake" technology has improved drastically in recent years, and some countries are already experiencing how it can weaponized for political purposes.
- It's currently unknown whether it'll be possible to develop technology that can quickly and accurately determine whether a given video is real or fake.
The future of deepfakes
<p>In 2018, Gabon's president Ali Bongo had been out of the country for months receiving medical treatment. After Bongo hadn't been seen in public for months, rumors began swirling about his condition. Some suggested Bongo might even be dead. In response, Bongo's administration released a video that seemed to show the president addressing the nation.</p><p>But the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=324528215059254" target="_blank">video</a> is strange, appearing choppy and blurry in parts. After political opponents declared the video to be a deepfake, Gabon's military attempted an unsuccessful coup. What's striking about the story is that, to this day, experts in the field of deepfakes can't conclusively verify whether the video was real. </p><p>The uncertainty and confusion generated by deepfakes poses a "global problem," according to a <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/is-seeing-still-believing-the-deepfake-challenge-to-truth-in-politics/#cancel" target="_blank">2020 report from The Brookings Institution</a>. In 2018, the U.S. Department of Defense released some of the first tools able to successfully detect deepfake videos. The problem, however, is that deepfake technology keeps improving, meaning forensic approaches may forever be one step behind the most sophisticated forms of deepfakes. </p><p>As the 2020 report noted, even if the private sector or governments create technology to identify deepfakes, they will:</p><p style="margin-left: 20px;">"...operate more slowly than the generation of these fakes, allowing false representations to dominate the media landscape for days or even weeks. "A lie can go halfway around the world before the truth can get its shoes on," warns David Doermann, the director of the Artificial Intelligence Institute at the University of Buffalo. And if defensive methods yield results short of certainty, as many will, technology companies will be hesitant to label the likely misrepresentations as fakes."</p>The COVID-19 pandemic has introduced a number of new behaviours into daily routines, like physical distancing, mask-wearing and hand sanitizing. Meanwhile, many old behaviours such as attending events, eating out and seeing friends have been put on hold.
VR experiments manipulate how people feel about coffee
A new study looks at how images of coffee's origins affect the perception of its premiumness and quality.
Expert drinking coffee while wearing a VR headset.
- Images can affect how people perceive the quality of a product.
- In a new study, researchers show using virtual reality that images of farms positively influence the subjects' experience of coffee.
- The results provide insights on the psychology and power of marketing.
Is empathy always good?
Research has shown how important empathy is to relationships, but there are limits to its power.
