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America's Youth Mull Potential High Court Changes Over Abortion
![President Donald Trump watches as Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas administers the Constitutional Oath to Amy Coney Barrett on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, Oct. 26, 2020, after Barrett was confirmed by the Senate earlier.](https://gdb.voanews.com/3b56de7c-8e0d-4e12-96a5-3428aa6e301b_w250_r1_s.jpg)
A possible challenge to Roe v. Wade, a Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in the United States in 1973, has young people considering how it might impact their lives.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative judge from Indiana who was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court Monday evening, has previously disagreed with the decision, as well as the Affordable Care Act, which provides many women with free or low-cost contraception.
Among 18- to 29-year-old Americans, 70% support abortion rights, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study. Among all ages, 60% of Americans support legalized abortions.
“I am scared, because a threat to Roe v. Wade means a threat to women's rights over their own body,” Zoe Tishaev, a freshman at Duke University in North Carolina, told VOA. “It means a threat to the rights of women to make choices. For me, it is a direct threat to my autonomy to make choices.”
By comparison, 55% of Americans 65 and older support legal abortion.
Kristi Hamrick, spokesperson for Students for Life of America, said in an email to VOA that she believes Roe v. Wade needs to be “reviewed, reversed and returned to the states.”
“A flawed understanding of someone else’s humanity may have allowed a bad law to come into existence,” said Hamrick. “But later generations past put a stop to the injustice when they considered the impact of bad laws on real people. That will happen for the preborn, dehumanized by Roe.”
Future of Roe
Barrett publicly opposed abortion in 2006 in an anti-abortion letter and ad in the South Bend Tribune, calling for “an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade.” South Bend is in Barrett’s home state, Indiana.
In 2016, the most recent tally, 623,471 abortions were performed in the U.S. and reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Abortion rates in the U.S. fell to their lowest point that year since abortion was legalized in 1973, according to the CDC.
As contraceptive use among women increased from 2000 and 2019, abortion rates declined.
“Personally, I think the ruling of Roe v. Wade was misguided in the first place, since it ignored the rights protected for all persons under the 14th Amendment,” said Sam Sparks, a student at Wheaton College, who said he was “very happy” with Barrett’s appointment.
“No one should be forced to carry the burden of a child they are unable to care for,” Tishaev, from Duke University, said. “Roe v. Wade was liberating for thousands and thousands of women across the United States. To take that away is not just regression, it is oppression, and a systemic stripping of rights.”
“As a Black woman, I view the potential challenge of Roe v. Wade as an attack on reproductive rights, and I feel that the government's encroachment of our rights to bodily autonomy is disgusting,” said Adetoyosi Atewologun, a junior at Boston College.
Atewologun told VOA that overturning the law could have a “devastating psychological effect” on some young women and how they view themselves if abortion were not accessible.
Ginsburg's view
Barrett was appointed to fill the seat of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September.
Ginsburg spent a career focusing on women’s rights and once said she found the Roe decision flawed. She said it should have been based on gender equality instead of privacy.
“The court wrote an opinion that made every abortion restriction in the country illegal in one fell swoop, and that was not the way that the court ordinarily operates,” Ginsburg said in an interview with Bloomberg in 2019. She believed the decision, as written, left the ruling open to attack by abortion opponents.
On Friday, the full Supreme Court of nine justices will decide whether to hear a Mississippi case that bans abortions after 15 weeks. It is seen as a case that could directly challenge the Roe v. Wade decision.
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Got a student visa? Here's how to maintain that status
![FILE - Graduates at the University of Toledo commencement ceremony in Toledo, Ohio, May 5, 2018.](https://gdb.voanews.com/01000000-0aff-0242-5150-08dc74e8547d_w250_r1_s.jpg)
Getting a student visa to study in the United States takes time and planning. So does keeping it.
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India Today's top US colleges for international students
![FILE - A tassel with 2023 on it rests on a graduation cap as students walk in a procession for Howard University's commencement in Washington, May 13, 2023.](https://gdb.voanews.com/01000000-0aff-0242-afbd-08db97f4e50d_w250_r1_s.jpg)
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MIT's enrollment of Black, Latino students drops after affirmative action ban
![FILE - Students walk past the 'Great Dome' atop Building 10 on the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus, April 3, 2017, in Cambridge, Mass.](https://gdb.voanews.com/01000000-0aff-0242-f3b4-08dbb665bcf0_w250_r1_s.jpg)
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's incoming freshman class this year dropped to just 16% Black, Hispanic, Native American or Pacific Islander students compared to 31% in previous years after the U.S. Supreme Court banned colleges from using race as a factor in admissions in 2023, the elite engineering school said.
The proportion of Asian American students in the incoming class rose from 41% to 47%, while white students made up about the same share of the class as in recent years.
MIT administrators said the statistics are the result of the Supreme Court's decision last year to ban affirmative action, a practice that many selective U.S. colleges and universities used for decades to boost enrollment of underrepresented minority groups.
Harvard and the University of North Carolina, the defendants in the Supreme Court case, argued that they wanted to promote diversity to offer educational opportunities broadly and bring a range of perspectives to their campuses. The conservative-leaning Court ruled that their race-conscious admissions practices violated the U.S. Constitution's promise of equal protection under the law.
"The class is, as always, outstanding across multiple dimensions," MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in a statement about the Class of 2028.
"But what it does not bring, as a consequence of last year’s Supreme Court decision, is the same degree of broad racial and ethnic diversity that the MIT community has worked together to achieve over the past several decades."
This year's freshman class at MIT is 5% Black, 1% American Indian/Alaskan Native, 11% Hispanic and 0% Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander. It is 47% Asian American and 37% white. (Some students identified as more than one racial group).
By comparison, the past four years of incoming freshmen were a combined 13% Black, 2% American Indian/Alaskan Native, 15% Hispanic and 1% Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander. The previous four classes were 41% Asian American and 38% white.
U.S. college administrators revamped their recruitment and admissions strategies to comply with the court ruling and try to keep historically marginalized groups in their applicant and admit pool.
Kornbluth said MIT's efforts had apparently not been effective enough, and going forward the school would better advertise its generous financial aid and invest in expanding access to science and math education for young students across the country to mitigate their enrollment gaps.
California announces new deal with tech to fund journalism, AI research
![FILE - Assemblywoman Buffy Wicks, D-Oakland, smiles after measure that would force Big Tech companies to pay media outlets for using their news content was approved by the Assembly at the Capitol in Sacramento, Calif., June 1, 2023.](https://gdb.voanews.com/30104ff3-475d-4fd0-95bb-cab18a2454ff_w250_r1_s.jpg)
California will be the first U.S. state to direct millions of dollars from taxpayer money and tech companies to help pay for journalism and AI research under a new deal announced Wednesday.
Under the first-in-the-nation agreement, the state and tech companies would collectively pay roughly $250 million over five years to support California-based news organization and create an AI research program. The initiatives are set to kick in in 2025 with $100 million the first year, and the majority of the money would go to news organizations, said Democratic Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who brokered the deal.
"This agreement represents a major breakthrough in ensuring the survival of newsrooms and bolstering local journalism across California — leveraging substantial tech industry resources without imposing new taxes on Californians," Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement. "The deal not only provides funding to support hundreds of new journalists but helps rebuild a robust and dynamic California press corps for years to come, reinforcing the vital role of journalism in our democracy."
Wicks' office didn't immediately answer questions about specifics on how much funding would come from the state, which news organizations would be eligible and how much money would go to the AI research program.
The deal effectively marks the end of a yearlong fight between tech giants and lawmakers over Wicks' proposal to require companies like Google, Facebook and Microsoft to pay a certain percentage of advertising revenue to media companies for linking to their content.
The bill, modelled after a legislation in Canada aiming at providing financial help to local news organizations, faced intense backlash from the tech industry, which launched ads over the summer to attack the bill. Google also tried to pressure lawmakers to drop the bill by temporarily removing news websites from some people's search results in April.
"This partnership represents a cross-sector commitment to supporting a free and vibrant press, empowering local news outlets up and down the state to continue in their essential work," Wicks said in a statement. "This is just the beginning."
California has tried different ways to stop the loss of journalism jobs, which have been disappearing rapidly as legacy media companies have struggled to profit in the digital age. More than 2,500 newspapers have closed in the U.S. since 2005, according to Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism. California has lost more than 100 news organizations in the past decade, according to Wicks' office.
The Wednesday agreement is supported by California News Publishers Association, which represents more than 700 news organizations, Google's corporate parent Alphabet and OpenAI. But journalists, including those in Media Guild of the West, slammed the deal and said it would hurt California news organizations.
State Sen. Steve Glazer, who authored a bill to provide news organizations a tax credit for hiring full-time journalists, said the agreement "seriously undercuts our work toward a long-term solution to rescue independent journalism."
State Senate President Pro Tempore Mike McGuire also said the deal doesn't go far enough to address the dire situation in California.
"Newsrooms have been hollowed out across this state while tech platforms have seen multi-billion-dollar profits," he said in a statement. "We have concerns that this proposal lacks sufficient funding for newspapers and local media and doesn't fully address the inequities facing the industry."
Discarded gender and diversity books trigger new culture clash at Florida college
![FILE - A student makes her way past the sign at New College of Florida, Jan. 20, 2023, in Sarasota, Fla.](https://gdb.voanews.com/01000000-0aff-0242-9ee1-08dcbe57d0d9_cx0_cy9_cw0_w250_r1_s.jpg)
When hundreds of books got hauled away in a dumpster from the library of the New College of Florida on Thursday, the tiny liberal arts college with a governing board dominated by appointees of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis once again found itself at the center of the state's culture wars.
"We abolished the gender studies program. Now we're throwing out the trash," Christopher Rufo, a DeSantis appointee to the Sarasota college's governing board, posted Friday on X, formerly Twitter.
The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, condemned the college for "a brazen act of censorship."
"These actions are nothing short of a cultural purge, reminiscent of some of history's darkest times, where regimes sought to control thought by burning books and erasing knowledge," Bacardi Jackson, executive director of the ACLU of Florida, said in a statement.
Both sides were responding to accounts spread through social media that officials at the campus of roughly 700 students had sent a large collection of books from the college's recently shuttered gender studies program to a local landfill.
But a statement by New College administrators said people were confusing two different batches of books. It said volumes taken away by dumpster came from a routine culling of the main library's collection, largely to get rid of old and damaged books. Books related to gender studies, it said, were also placed outside the library and "were later claimed by individuals planning to donate the books locally."
A student who alerted classmates to the book dumping told The Associated Press that she saw two large boxes filled with books Thursday at the campus' student-run Gender and Diversity Center, located in a building where staff were busy moving furniture, repainting and otherwise preparing for students to return to campus next week.
Natalia Benavides said those boxes got moved to the library parking lot near the dumpster, but fellow students and activists responding to her alert managed to save most of the Gender and Diversity Center's books before they got thrown away.
"Primarily what was in the dumpster were library books —- they were stamped with 'discard' and they were bound so that you knew they were from the library," said Benavides, a fourth-year student. "They seemed to be of every topic under the sun: art history books, books on aesthetics, psychology books."
It's not surprising that discarding books would trigger controversy at New College. Known for decades as a progressive school with a prominent LGTQ+ community, the campus became a target for DeSantis and as war on "woke." In early 2023, the governor overhauled the college's Board of Trustees by installing a majority of conservative members.
The new trustees promptly fired the college president and replaced her with a Republican politician. Several other administrators also lost their jobs. The board dismantled the office of diversity and equity and a year ago voted to shut down the campus' gender studies program.
"Every couple of months, they have destroyed some part of this campus whether it is physical spaces or our books," said Amy Reid, the professor who led the college's gender studies program and now plans a yearlong leave of absence.
Reid said she believes books were removed from the Gender and Diversity Center, a student-run office that was independent of the academic gender studies program, because it's also being shuttered. She said the center's sign was also taken down and that it had housed more than two boxes of books, many of which she suspects ended up in the trash.
"Was I surprised that this happened?" Reid said. "No, because we've seen an effort to refashion this campus and make it unwelcoming."
New College's statement said only that books "associated with the discontinued Gender Studies program" had been removed from a room "that is being repurposed." A college spokesperson, Nate March, declined to to answer further questions.
Zander Moricz, who leads a group of student activists called the SEE Alliance, said books from the Gender and Diversity Center that were nearly thrown out included volumes on slavery, a collection of Jewish stories and three copies of the Bible.
Campus police prevented students from retrieving books from the dumpster, he said, which was loaded onto a truck that members of his group followed to a local landfill.
"The vast majority of the books were 100% readable and in good condition," Moricz said.
The American Library Association encourages academic libraries to cull books in poor physical condition or no longer deemed accurate or relevant — though its guidelines say books should never be removed because they're controversial.
Association spokesperson Jean Hodges said it's up to individual libraries what to do with removed books.
"Donation, recycling, resale, and disposal all fall within normal practice," Hodges said by email.