SUMMARY: Eleven sets of twins are graduating from Cabot High School in Arkansas’s class of 2025, a rare and remarkable occurrence given the odds being less than 1%. These twins share a unique bond, having navigated 13 years of school together, supporting each other academically and personally. Some participate in sports like volleyball and soccer, while others pursue diverse interests like auto tech and broadcasting. As graduation approaches with three ceremonies scheduled, emotions run high—some twins will attend college together, while others will be apart for the first time. Despite the upcoming separation, their sibling rivalry and support remain a heartwarming highlight.

The Cabot High School class of 2025 will make you do a double-take— this senior class of nearly 800 features 11 sets of twins.

https://www.thv11.com/article/news/education/11-sets-of-twins-graduate-cabot-2025-class/91-77396f2e-2d10-45aa-ba3c-0b265977fecb

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by Antoinette Grajeda, Arkansas Advocate
May 15, 2025

Pregnant Arkansas women living in rural areas will face even greater challenges obtaining obstetric care if Congress approves proposed cuts in Medicaid, according to health policy experts who discussed a new report Thursday.

Arkansas as a whole has the 10th highest share of women of childbearing age covered by Medicaid in rural areas, according to a Georgetown University Center for Children and Families study presented during a webinar Thursday. 

The report also highlighted 20 U.S. counties where approximately half of their women of childbearing age are covered by Medicaid. One of those counties is in Arkansas, according to the study. Eastern Arkansas’ Lee County has about 8,100 residents and a nearly 39% poverty rate, according to the U.S. Census.

Medicaid is a significant source of health coverage for women of childbearing age, especially for those living in small towns and rural communities, the report found. The study defines these communities as non-metropolitan counties with urban areas of fewer than 50,000 residents.

Bills to improve Arkansas maternal health, change ballot initiative process head to Sanders’ desk

“It’s absolutely critical for maternal and infant health that women have access to affordable, comprehensive healthcare before, during and after they get pregnant,” said Joan Alker, Georgetown University Center for Children and Families director and lead author of the report.

Women in rural areas face greater challenges to accessing care because of a shortage of providers, hospital closures and the loss of labor and delivery units and obstetrical capacity, Alker said. 

Nationally, 23.3% of women of childbearing age (19 to 44 years old) in rural areas are covered by Medicaid, compared to 20.5% of women in metropolitan areas, according to the report. Louisiana and New Mexico have the highest share of Medicaid-covered women, with just over 40% each. Nearly 28% of women of childbearing age are covered by Medicaid in rural Arkansas.

For many Arkansas women, especially those living in rural areas with low-income families, Medicaid may be the only health insurance source to keep them healthy throughout pregnancy, Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families Health Policy Director Camille Richoux said in an interview.

“For me, it’s a great thing that we have Medicaid ensuring that women throughout the state have coverage options,” Richoux said. “It also means that we have more at stake whenever there are threats to Medicaid…this report really makes that case of how any kind of threats or cuts around Medicaid could have the potential to be devastating to a lot of women in the state and especially in a state that has so many challenges in maternal health.”

Arkansas has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the nation and the third-highest infant mortality rate, according to the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement.

Access to Medicaid could change under proposed federal legislation. A U.S. House panel approved a plan Wednesday that would reduce federal spending on Medicaid by $625 billion over the next decade. 

The proposal includes a provision for work requirements. Arkansas implemented a work-reporting requirement in 2018 that led to 18,000 people losing coverage, in part because enrollees were unaware or confused about how to report they were working. A federal judge later ruled the program was illegal. Arkansas officials submitted a request for a new work requirement earlier this year.

‘The first time didn’t work’: Georgia and Arkansas scale back Medicaid work requirements

Rural communities have a lot at stake with the congressional Medicaid debate, Alker said, because the loss of Medicaid revenue would place “additional pressure on a very strained system.” Nearly half of all births in rural areas are covered by Medicaid, and less access to obstetrical care leads to worse outcomes to moms and their babies, she said.

According to one study, 293 rural hospitals stopped providing obstetric care between 2011 and 2023. Another study found that more than 52% of rural hospitals did not provide obstetric care by 2022. 

Arkansas ranks sixth in terms of states with the highest percentage of maternity care deserts, according to the March of Dimes, which defines maternity care deserts as areas with no birthing facility or obstetric clinician. Nearly 51% of Arkansas is a maternity care desert, according to the organization’s 2024 report.

“If we see more hospital closures and loss of labor and delivery units, all women living in rural areas are at risk of losing out on the care they need, regardless of who is their insurer, if that care is just not available,” Alker said. “So these communities will not be able to grow and thrive without a robust system to support women and families.” 

Beyond reducing healthcare access for all rural community residents, not just those insured through Medicaid, Richoux noted hospital closures can hurt an entire community, especially when it’s the area’s largest employer. 

“Not everybody can just leave…to move out of an area is an easy thing to say, a lot harder to do,” she said. “And people shouldn’t have to be forced to leave their small, rural town because their hospital is unnecessarily closed.”

The full Georgetown University report is available here. 

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.

The post Nearly a third of pregnant rural Arkansans rely on Medicaid, study shows appeared first on arkansasadvocate.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

The article presents a factual discussion of the challenges faced by pregnant women in rural Arkansas, especially in relation to Medicaid coverage. It highlights concerns about proposed federal cuts to Medicaid and their potential negative impact on maternal and infant health, especially in rural areas. The language used suggests an advocacy for protecting Medicaid coverage for low-income women, with quotes from experts warning of the devastating consequences of such cuts. While the article is focused on health policy and presents the perspectives of health experts, it leans toward a more sympathetic view of Medicaid and rural healthcare issues, which is consistent with Center-Left positions on social welfare and healthcare access.

by Ariana Figueroa, Arkansas Advocate
May 15, 2025

WASHINGTON — U.S. Supreme Court justices appeared split Thursday hearing a major case in which the Trump administration defended not only the president’s order to end the constitutional right to birthright citizenship but also its efforts to limit nationwide injunctions.

Though the dispute before the justices relates to the executive order on birthright citizenship that President Donald Trump signed on his Inauguration Day, the Trump administration is asking the high court to focus on the issue of preliminary injunctions granted by lower courts, rather than the constitutionality of the order.

It means that the Supreme Court could potentially limit the power of federal judges in district courts who curtail the president’s authority.

The Trump administration argues that a federal judge granting a nationwide injunction that blocks the federal government from carrying out its policy anywhere in the country is unconstitutional.

The justices had before them three cases with injunctions levied by judges on Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship, from courts in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state. Under the 14th Amendment, all children born in the United States are considered citizens, regardless of their parents’ legal status.

Trump’s order, originally planned to go into effect Feb. 19, said that children born in the United States would not be automatically guaranteed citizenship if their parents were in the country without legal authorization or if they were on a temporary legal basis such as a work or student visa.

The justices questioned the practicality of a system in which judges can no longer issue nationwide injunctions and the logistics of instead having individuals file their own cases.

Liberal justice Elena Kagan said that would create a chaotic system, and conservative justice Neil Gorsuch said it would produce a “patchwork” of suits and noted how long it takes for a class — a group of affected people — to be put together for a court case.

Nationwide injunctions have stymied Trump’s agenda, but were also frequent during the Joe Biden administration. However, Trump has lashed out at judges who have blocked his actions, which in March prompted a rare response from conservative Chief Justice John Roberts on the importance of an independent judiciary.

‘Stateless’ children

If the Supreme Court, dominated 6-3 by conservatives, decides that nationwide injunctions are not allowed in the birthright citizenship cases, it would temporarily create a patchwork of citizenship rules varying from state to state while the cases are litigated. Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said it would create a class of stateless people.

“Thousands of children who are going to be born without citizenship papers that could render them stateless in some places because some of their parents’ homes don’t recognize children of their nationals unless those children are born in their countries,” she said.

If birthright citizenship were to be eliminated, 255,000 children born each year would not be granted U.S. citizenship, according to a study by the think tank Migration Policy Institute.

40 injunctions since Jan. 20

Arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, in his opening remarks, noted that since Trump took office in January, there have been 40 nationwide injunctions.

“Universal injunctions exceed the judicial power granted in Article III, which exists only to address the injury to the complaining party,” he said, referring to the Constitution. “They transgress the traditional balance of equitable authority, and it creates a host of practical problems.”

Sauer touched on the merits of birthright citizenship, arguing that the 14th Amendment was only meant to grant citizenship to newly freed Black people, and not for immigrants in the country without legal authorization.

“The suggestion that our position on the merits is weak is profoundly mistaken,” Sauer said. “That kind of snap judgment on the merits that was presented in the lower courts is exactly the problem with the issue of racing to issue these nationwide injunctions.”

He said that the Trump administration would follow the high court’s ruling on birthright citizenship.

Sotomayor said that the Supreme Court has ruled four times to uphold birthright citizenship, starting in 1898, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the court ruled children born in the U.S. are citizens.

The justice that seemed most inclined to agree with Sauer’s argument was conservative Clarence Thomas, who noted the use of nationwide injunctions began in the 1960s and the U.S. has survived without them.

However, conservative Justice Samuel Alito criticized that district court judges “are vulnerable to an occupational disease, which is the disease of thinking that ‘I am right and I can do whatever I want.’”

Citizenship ‘turned on and off’

New Jersey Solicitor General Jeremy Feigenbaum, who represented the states that sought an injunction against the birthright citizenship order, laid out how the patchwork of citizenship means that citizenship would be “turned on” and off depending on state lines.

“Since the 14th Amendment, our country has never allowed American citizenship to vary based on the state in which someone resides, because the post-Civil War nation wrote into our Constitution that citizens of the United States and of the states would be one and the same without variation across state lines,” he said.

Immigrant rights’ groups and several pregnant women in Maryland who are not U.S. citizens filed the case in Maryland; four states — Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon — filed the case in Washington state; and 18 Democratic state attorneys general filed the challenge in Massachusetts.

Those 18 states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. The District of Columbia and the county and city of San Francisco also joined.

Feigenbaum argued that the birthright citizenship case before the justices is the rare instance in which nationwide injunctions are needed because under a patchwork system, a burden would be created for states and local facilities such as hospitals where births occur.

“We genuinely don’t know how this could possibly work on the ground,” he said.

Kelsi Corkran, who argued on behalf of immigrant rights groups, said that the Trump order is “blatantly unlawful,” and that a nationwide injunction against the executive order was warranted.

“It is well settled that preliminary injunctions may benefit non-parties when necessary to provide complete relief to the plaintiffs or when warranted by extraordinary circumstances, both of which are true here,” she said.

Corkran is the Supreme Court director at Georgetown’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.

Lots of injunctions

The justices seemed frustrated with the frequent use of preliminary injunctions from the lower courts not only in the Trump administration, but others that occurred during the Biden administration.

Kagan noted that during the first Trump administration, suits were filed in the more liberal courts of California, and that during the Biden administration suits were filed in the more conservative courts in Texas.

“There is a big problem that is created by that mechanism,” Kagan said.

She added that it’s led to frequent emergency requests to the high court.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh agreed, and called it a “bipartisan” issue that has occurred during Republican and Democratic presidencies.

While the justices seemed concerned about the frequent use of nationwide injunctions, they also seemed eager to address the merits of the constitutionality of the birthright citizenship executive order that could potentially impact newborns.

Kavanaugh returned to the question of the logistics of birthright citizenship and how it would even be enforced.    

He pressed Sauer on how hospitals and local governments would implement the policy and if they would be burdened.

“What would states do with a newborn?” Kavanaugh asked, adding that the executive order requires a quick implementation within 30 days.

Sauer said that hospitals wouldn’t have to do anything differently because the executive order directs the federal government to “not accept documents that have the wrong designation of citizenship from people who are subject to the (executive) order.”

Kavanaugh asked how the federal government would know who is subject to the order.

“The federal officials will have to figure that out,” Sauer said.

Any decision on the case will come before the Supreme Court’s July Fourth recess. 

Last updated 2:09 p.m., May. 15, 2025

Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.

The post U.S. Supreme Court divided over Trump birthright citizenship ban, lower courts’ powers appeared first on arkansasadvocate.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

The content presents a detailed report on the U.S. Supreme Court case involving the Trump administration’s executive order on birthright citizenship. The language used reflects concerns from immigrant rights groups, liberal justices, and Democratic state officials about the potential impact of the executive order, with a focus on the legal, ethical, and social implications, including the risk of creating stateless individuals. The tone and framing lean toward defending birthright citizenship, as indicated by references to protests and criticisms of the administration’s stance. However, the article also includes perspectives from conservative justices, offering a balanced view of the legal arguments. Overall, the piece maintains a focus on the human and legal consequences, which aligns more with a center-left perspective on immigration and civil rights.