Congratulations to our six incredible Women Winning endorsed candidates that were elected to DFL House Caucus Leadership this week!

This term's DFL Leadership team is not only majority Women Winning endorsed, it's two thirds women! Women Winning candidates don't just run for office and win, they LEAD!

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Two years ago, Leigh Finke became the first trans person elected to the Minnesota state legislature. Even though she endured numerous threats, she leveraged her position, and a Democratic majority, to help pass legislation protecting other trans people in her state. Finke joined William Brangham to discuss the triumphs and the vitriol surrounding transgender rights in America.

When Alicia Kotz and her husband were ready to have children, she struggled to conceive. She miscarried before her first child arrived. She then experienced medical issues again, losing another pregnancy before finally having her second child. Recently, her doctor told her if she got pregnant again, it would be too hard on her body and she could die. While she has no plans on getting pregnant, she also hasn’t entered menopause. She has painful periods that often mimic contractions, as well as uterine cysts. 

As she spent the last six months debating what to do, a major event impacted her choice — the reelection of Donald Trump as president.

“I thought no, I have to make a permanent decision now. I have to have it removed, I cannot risk getting pregnant again,” Kotz, of Shakopee, Minn., said about deciding to get a hysterectomy. “I expedited the decision because I am so scared of getting pregnant again.” Kotz isn’t alone in worrying about how Trump might impact the ability to access abortion, despite living in one of the most accessible states in the nation.

Planned Parenthood North Central States recently reported it has seen a 150 percent increase in patients scheduling appointments for long-acting birth control options like implants and intrauterine devices, or IUDs, since Trump won. 

Efforts to reduce the nation’s persistently high maternal mortality rates involve state panels of experts that investigate and learn from each mother’s death.

The panels — called maternal mortality review committees — usually do their work quietly and out of the public eye. But that’s not been the case recently in three states with strict abortion laws.

Georgia dismissed all members of its committee in November after information about deaths being reviewed leaked to the news organization ProPublica. Days later, The Washington Post reported that Texas’ committee won’t review cases from 2022 and 2023, the first two years after the state banned nearly all abortions. In Idaho, the state let its panel disband in 2023 only to reinstate it earlier this year.

“They’ve become more of a lightning rod than they were before,” said epidemiologist Michael Kramer, director of the Center for Rural Health and Health Disparities at Mercer University in Georgia.

Here’s what maternal mortality review committees across the nation do and what might happen next.