MAGA Stephen Miller and the cult are obsessed with "birthright citizenship" but their objections are racist propaganda

What Trump gets wrong about ‘birth tourism’ (Frankly, there is no such thing.....women of other nationalities do not give birth in the U.S. as "tourists".....they want their children to have access to American passports for the purpose of being able to apply for American education in private schools, colleges and universities.  Also, these women, regardless of where they came from, pay cash for their labor and delivery.  Thousands of American women are the mothers who need Medicaid, not the immigrants.)

Echo report published in the Boston Globe by Amy Reed Sandoval

The right-wing panic over birthright citizenship is built on a simple tale of foreigners gaming the system. My interviews with Mexican mothers at the border tell a very different story.

Amy Reed-Sandoval is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of the book “Intimate Borders: Feminist Migration Ethics.”

Donald Trump isn’t giving up on his quest to get rid of birthright citizenship. In August, he signed two new executive orders cracking down on so-called birth tourism to the United States. Stephen Miller, his homeland security adviser, said “people come here, pretend to be a tourist … say they want to go to Disneyland.

“But the real reason they’re here is to have a child, to make that child an automatic citizen, leave our country. ... It gives them access under this broken system to welfare benefits … and all the other rights and privileges that belong solely to Americans.” (HELLO❓But even many needy Americans are unable to access these "rights".)

Condemnation of birth tourism has become Trump’s go-to argument for attacking birthright citizenship, the right, a century and a half old, granting citizenship to individuals who are born in the United States, regardless of their parents’ nationality.

The Trump administration even deployed this argument when it asked the Supreme Court to get rid of birthright citizenship. The court upheld that right last month. But the administration’s rhetoric seemed to have some effect: Justice Clarence Thomas devoted much of his dissent to describing the abuses of birth tourism.

But the Trump administration’s preoccupation with birth tourism is an obsession and not justifiable.

Start with this: The documented number of cases of pregnant women coming into the country just to give birth to an American citizen is very small. In fact, a recent Penn State study showed that “birth tourism accounts for fewer than 0.3 percent of all US births in any year between 2014-2024.” According to the Centers for Disease Control, in 2024 about 9,500 babies were born to mothers with addresses abroad. The Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative group that supports immigration restrictions, put the number of potential birth tourism births at 20,000 to 26,000 in its most recent estimate, still only a small fraction of births to mothers who do not live in the United States.

MAGA's Miller, Thomas, and Trump act as though there aren’t safeguards in place to prevent birth tourism. But though it’s true that there is a cottage industry of businesses that charge wealthy foreigners tens of thousands of dollars for private coaching on how to give birth in the United States, the US government has always had the power to deny visas to people whose motives they deem suspect. If a couple misrepresents their intentions for visiting the United States, that is considered visa fraud. And the Justice Department has already prosecuted travel agencies found to be promoting birth tourism.

The Make America Great Again birth tourism narrative — that women come here to access welfare benefits or get US citizenship themselves — offers a warped and simplistic vision of the motivations that foreigners have for giving birth in the United States. In reality, their reasons are complex. I interviewed 30 Mexican women living in Ciudad Juárez and El Paso who had crossed the border from Mexico to give birth. All had legal permission to enter the United States, and all had paid out of pocket for their health care. Still, they were regularly treated by many immigration officers and medical professionals as if they were doing something illegal.

I asked the women to tell me their reasons for giving birth in the United States. And they agreed to speak with me as long as they could remain anonymous.

“I knew I had to move my family to the United States to receive prenatal care,” one woman said while rocking her napping daughter in her arms in their El Paso home. “My baby could come at any minute, and I was told my own life was in danger.”

Some women told me that they had no intention of permanently relocating themselves or their families to the United States; they simply wanted to give their children a broader array of life options. Relatedly, one woman told me that she is concerned about gender-based violence on both sides of the US-Mexico border — but particularly about high rates of femicides in Mexico. When she found out she was going to give birth to a girl, she decided she wanted to give her daughter legal options for international migration if she needed to relocate for her safety.

“It’s better to have two citizenships than one,” she told me over a heaping plate of flautas in a downtown El Paso restaurant. She had just crossed the border from Ciudad Juárez — where she and her family still live — for a day of shopping and errands. “If things get really bad here [in Mexico], she won’t have to suffer through the process of asking for asylum.”

Another woman told me that she decided to have her baby in the United States because there was a chance that her husband, who is employed as a truck driver, was going to be transferred from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso. She was preparing to keep the family together.

“But it would have been much easier for me to give birth in Ciudad Juárez; I would have preferred it!” she lamented during our interview at her kitchen table. And one woman told me that she felt that giving birth in the United States would make her a “true fronteriza,” a true woman of the borderlands, with deepened cultural and political ties to both the United States and Mexico.

Some reported that they wanted to give their children the opportunity to connect with relatives in the United States, many of whom are US citizens. Some said they wanted to have access to better health care in the event of pregnancy complications.



Of course, my sample size of 30 was small, and I only interviewed middle-class women with legal permission to enter the United States.

However, it is clear from what I and other scholars have been able to document that there is little chance that hoards of migrant women masquerading as Disneyland tourists are dipping into the social welfare systems by way of their deviant childbirth practices.

These arguments may not convince people who are determined to see the end of birthright citizenship. But it’s simply not true that birth tourism is a large enough issue to warrant skewering a constitutional right, and the over-the-top rhetoric inflicts real harm.

This birth tourism myth gets used to justify holding nearly 70,000 people in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers across this country, 70 percent of whom have not been charged with any crime. This dangerous myth also supports sexist ideas, as reflected in a statement by MAGA lawyer Mike Davis, who called on Trump to “get these pregnant women and women who could be pregnant the hell out of our country,” and in another by Sean Davis, CEO of the right-wing media outlet The Federalist, who called for the “sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.”

The MAGA birth tourism myth is just that, a myth. Its job is not to address a real problem but to dismantle a cherished constitutionally protected right.

Post Script, this article is focused on Mexican women. Reed-Sandoval overlooks the other nationalities of women who chose to give birth in the United States for the purpose of obtaining American passports for their babies at birth. This makes it it easier for their children to attend American schools, colleges and universities. Plus, all of these transactions are paid with cash, the pre-natal care, the labor, delivery and the tuitions to attend American private schools, colleges and universities. Stephen Miller's objection to "birthright citizenship" is entirely racist. 

Donald Trump and maga stupidity created a preventable international trade war with "lose-lose" failed result

Echo opinion by Bill Saporito published in The New York Times:

Canada has lots of options about where to sell their aluminum. Donald Trump failed to secure the American relationship with Canada whereby aluminum was available. But now ❓ 
Not so much❗

The list of Canadian imports now subject to 50 percent tariffs in the United States includes steel, seaweed, ink, animal hides, dog leashes, saddlery, suitcases, plywood, knit hats (toques, to Canadians), floating docks, furniture, whiskey, honey and, of course, hockey sticks. But the tariffs on aluminum show most starkly the irrationality of President Trump’s trade war with our northern neighbor.

Canada shipped nearly $10 billion in aluminum products to the United States last year. The metal is used in construction, cars, furniture, drink cans and countless other things. Trump has every obligation to enforce trade laws and prevent other nations from taking unfair advantage of us. But the Canadian aluminum industry hasn’t bilked the United States. America needs aluminum to keep its auto plants running and to keep food and drink prices down, and Canada is just better at making it.

Aluminum isn’t cooked like steel; it’s made from alumina, a powder refined from bauxite ore and zapped with electricity until it renders into a metal. The electric bill alone can account for up to 40 percent of the manufacturing cost. When you think about trade with Canada, it’s useful to imagine aluminum not as a metal but as electricity in solid form.

With its abundant snow, lakes and rivers, Canada has huge hydroelectric power resources, often in sparsely populated areas. As a result, the country has lots of reliable, inexpensive electricity, which gives it an edge over the United States in aluminum smelting. Today there are eight smelters operating in Quebec and one in British Columbia, producing about 3.6 million tons of metal annually. The United States gets 60 to 70 percent of its imported aluminum from Canada.

The United States tried to develop a competitive domestic aluminum sector. It began to expand with the Tennessee Valley Authority, a Depression-era project that was a model for rural electrification initiatives across the country. Low-cost energy attracted increased investment in aluminum smelters, like the one in Alcoa, Tenn., the ultimate company town. Alcoa, founded in 1888 as the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, became the biggest aluminum smelting operation in the country. But the population grew after World War II, and in the second half of the 20th century the energy crises helped flip the cost calculus. Many American smelters shuttered.

Canada’s often less expensive, more reliable energy supply — nobody’s moving into northern Quebec to compete for it — proved decisive.

Since 1980, almost 30 American smelters have shut down, with companies typically citing inadequate guarantees about the supply and price of power as the reason. You can’t just hope that there’s enough juice to run the smelter.

Alcoa led the retreat to Canada. The company today operates three aluminum plants in Canada and has just two operational plants in the United States. It’s looking to sell some 10 of its shuttered or curtailed sites to the data center industry. One of its remaining smelters, in Massena, N.Y., depends on a New York State allocation of low-cost power and recently received several million dollars in incentives. Alcoa is investing nearly 💲60 million in the plant through 2028. Canada might call that a state subsidy — cheating — but without it, the company can’t operate competitively.

The closure of struggling American smelters means that the United States must import — and that the cost of tariffs is destructive to American industry. As of March, the automobile industry had paid more than 💲35 billion since 2025, thanks to tariffs on aluminum, steel and car parts and other items. This is money that carmakers could have spent on research and development or lowering car prices.

Trump wants to reverse history and create domestic manufacturing jobs in industries such as aluminum. He’s not the only one. The dream of increasing well-paying manufacturing jobs was what inspired states such as New York to shell out money to open factories and keep them in business. Alcoa’s plant in Massena pays 💲37.71 an hour for a general mechanic.

Donald Trump has failed, at least so far. Manufacturing jobs have declined in his second term. On aluminum specifically, Trump is promoting a 💲4 billion smelter in Oklahoma, backed by the United Arab Emirates-based Emirates Global Aluminum and Century Aluminum, along with 💲500 million in federal dollars and a couple of hundred million in state incentives, including tax breaks. This factory might get built, but few — if any — others will.

Even with all the incentives, building smelters in the United States isn’t all that appealing. Our electric grid is in terrible shape, electricity rates are rising, and the Trump administration is actively discouraging new sources of power, such as renewables. And no one knows whether Donald Trump will waver on tariffs again. Try selling your board of directors a multibillion-dollar, two- or three-year investment on that basis. Emirates Global might be willing to shoulder the risk, but few other companies are.

It’s not cheating when Canadians undersell American aluminum producers. It’s an advantage. It’s logical for the United States to import lower-cost Canadian aluminum and invest in industries in which America enjoys its own advantages — chip design and artificial intelligence, for instance.

Who would flout this logic, trashing a 150-plus-year relationship with a close ally in a disruptive attempt to separate two interdependent economies❓ Oh, right.🙄

To our Canadian friends please accept our apology because Americans wrongly elected stupid Donald Trump and Republicans will not impeach him

Stupid Donald Trump tariffs are hurting Canadian tourism in the U.S. But let's be honest about the bigger picture. Tariffs are hurting everybody.

Echo opinion published in the Sun Sentinel by the Editorial Board

Canadians aren’t simply staying home because of higher prices caused by Donald Trump's stupid tariffs. Many are deliberately choosing not to spend their vacation dollars in the U.S.  because of how Canada has been treated by the Trump administration: the tariffs, threats, repeated talk of making Canada the “51st state,” and the increasingly hostile rhetoric toward a longtime ally.

Echo letter published in The New York Times: "Something vital is being ignored in the negotiations about tariffs between Canada and the United States — the decades of warm and mutually supportive neighborliness between our countries. I’ll always remember the many Canadians who stepped forward immediately in solidarity after the September 11, 2001, attacks. Before that, their troops fought and died on Normandy’s Juno Beach just as American paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne, including my father, were engaged at Utah Beach.
Canadian travel to the U.S. fell about 25% last year, costing our tourism industry billions of dollars. The decline has continued in 2026 as Canadians choose other destinations. They are spending their money elsewhere," From John Elder in Bristol, Vermont

This should concern Florida especially. Canadians have long been among our most important international visitors. This isn’t simply a tourism problem — it is the economic consequence of alienating people who have traditionally loved coming to America.

If we want Canadian visitors back, lowering tariffs would help. But restoring goodwill and treating Canada as a valued neighbor and ally would help even more. From Andrea Culberson, in Weston, Florida

Extending a sincere apology😢

Canada, please accept our sincere apologies for the behavior of stupid Donald Trump.  I think little Donny failed in the “plays well with others” department and he never developed that emotional skill set. Even though he had 30 dolls, he wanted everyone else’s, too. Thus, he grew up a bully and a sore loser. And when those dolls became real life women, he grabbed them by their private parts, just because he could. I guess it’s all about the power trip.

Canada, please know you are America’s BFF and that is one of the few things most Americans can agree on these days. Please know his insane reign will end one day soon, and we will have a real president again — one who works for the benefit of all Americans and our allies, not just for his own wealth and ego.

I have no idea where this animus to our allies came from. (IOW, it is completely idiotic❗)

The Donald actually had a good idea when pressing NATO allies to contribute their fair share. But his personality defect could not let him take the win, and he had to double down. Your leader’s speech at Davos established what inspirational, moral leadership looks and sounds like. Making Donnie look bad (even though it was his own rambling, self-praising, Greenland poking and general incoherence that made him look like a fool) was the unforgivable sin. Don’t abandon us, Canada. We need you and love you. From Tanya Miller, in Hallandale Beach, Florida

Measles in Pennsylvania- All measles infections are preventable and death associated with the virus must quickly be accurately reported

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Rachael Bedard.

The United States has had at least 2,777 confirmed measles cases this year, the most on record this century and more than the country had in all of 2025. 

Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, a Democrat, announced that there had been two measles-associated deaths in the state — the first such deaths this year. That’s when a new kind of trouble started.

Over the following 48 hours, the public received conflicting information about the deaths from the Pennsylvania Department of Health, the Lancaster County coroner, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., (aka "RJKjr") the secretary of health and human services. The parties disagreed about exactly what led to the two deaths. Much of their discord played out over social media, where a cacophony of voices amplified the acrimony and confusion.

The stakes of this moment — measles transmission is high, confidence in government and public health is low — require a standard of engagement, clarity and transparency that the initial Pennsylvania response failed to meet. We should be honest about what’s gone wrong here and try to correct course.

Pennsylvania is the country’s most recent measles hot spot, and Lancaster County, where there are large Mennonite and Amish communities with lower vaccination rates, has had a majority of those cases. On Aug. 25 the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced there had been two measles-associated deaths; “associated” is careful language that conveys that measles was detected but not confirmed as the direct cause of death. During a news conference, Mr. Shapiro emphasized that both “individuals were unvaccinated” and said that deaths from measles were “completely preventable.”

The governor went on to describe a phone conversation he’d had with Kennedy, during which Mr. Shapiro said he’d been “blunt” about the Trump administration’s anti-vaccine talk. “There’s real-life consequences to spreading misinformation,” he said he told  Kennedy.

In response to inquiries from a Lancaster County commissioner, Josh Parsons, a Republican, the county coroner’s office reported that it had no current cases of people who had died of measles and only one who had tested positive for measles: a newborn with evidence of a measles infection acquired before birth whose immediate cause of death was a laceration to the spleen. Measles was listed on the baby’s death certificate as a factor implicated in the death; the coroner then made public statements saying he didn’t believe measles played a role in the baby dying. The other measles case was not in the coroner’s charge.

Mr. Parsons, Kennedy and a host of the Kennedy (deranged❗) supporters seized on these details to suggest that the state’s initial statements were misleading. And, indeed, they might have been — at a minimum, they were premature, and the apparent lack of coordination between the coroner’s office and state officials left room for doubt. The governor’s claim that the deaths were “completely preventable” was perhaps too definitive. And referring to the infant as an “unvaccinated individual,” without the context that a baby would not have been eligible for vaccination, could be seen as disingenuous and in service of an agenda to scare and shame people who are hesitant about vaccines.

A laceration to the spleen in a newborn implies injury. It’s plausible that the baby’s measles led the spleen to rupture and that birth trauma caused the laceration, but that is not yet confirmed, and other explanations are possible.

When pushed for details, state health officials declined to provide additional information, citing privacy concerns. That’s hard to justify. Confirming the age ranges of the people who died and providing general information about comorbidities, hospitalization statuses and exposures would not have made the cases identifiable. The state had already, of course, confirmed the vaccination statuses of the two individuals; vaccination opponents seized on what they perceived as hypocrisy, and recriminations escalated again.

(Stupid and incompetent)...Kennedy got into a social media dust up with Governor Shapiro.  Kennedy wrote an essay-length post on X saying the governor had dismissed some Americans’ religious concerns about how the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine contains the tissue of aborted fetuses. (A component of it was developed in the 1960s, on a fetal cell line, but the vaccine does not contain such tissue.) He accused the governor of “gaslighting” the public. In response, Mr. Shapiro posted an equally long response in which he challenged the secretary’s claims and accused him of stoking vaccine hesitancy.

Kennedy posited that perhaps the measles deaths had been completely fabricated. A coterie of anti-vaccine personalities with large follower counts echoed the accusation, seizing on inconsistencies and filling the void of official information with their own speculation. On Thursday the C.D.C. posted that “discrepancies” in what had been announced about the deaths “raise important questions.”

This is our low-trust, politicized public health reality, in which every ambiguity creates space for conspiracy. This means that there’s no room for error.

I understand why Mr. Shapiro, a decisive communicator who has demonstrated strong leadership during prior crises and who seems to have presidential ambitions, wanted to say that measles-associated deaths reflect politically badly on Kennedy and Donald Trump. 

But the governor made a mistake by not speaking carefully enough. In a polarized environment where vaccine-hesitant Americans lean Republican, his approach was geared toward the wrong public: affirming to liberals and alienating to the very people he needs to reach.

Kennedy, in turn, exploited a public health crisis to score points with his base. His approach for years has been to weaponize misstatements, inconsistencies and ambiguities about public health claims, and he has been employing that playbook here. As a result, Pennsylvania’s health leaders have seemed reluctant to share information with the C.D.C. at a time when they’d normally rely on the federal agency for maximum support.

Pennsylvania's measles outbreak does not appear to be ending any time soon, and there’s still time to rebuild confidence and trust. Luckily, the profession has a well-established crisis communications playbook to employ in just these situations. It’s time everyone started using it.

The C.D.C.’s longstanding crisis and emergency risk communication protocol is based on six core principles: Be first, be right, be credible, express empathy, promote action and show respect. To those tenets, I’d add four: Be transparent, be consistent, acknowledge uncertainty and stay apolitical.

Pennsylvania's Department of Health is doing heroic work getting people vaccinated: Its staff members have administered over 2,100 doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine this month, more than three times as many as they administered in July. Public health teams are tracking cases, advising sick families and supporting people who are unvaccinated, as well as those who are willing to get the vaccine. That necessary work is where attention should be focused — not on trying to score points against political opponents.

A designated state health official should deliver all updates to the public. The updates should be frequent and, when possible, scheduled well ahead of time and should focus on the steps the state is taking to contain the outbreak. The official should err on the side of giving more information, not less, including when there is uncertainty.

Saying “This is what we don’t yet know, and here’s how we intend to find out” increases trust in the competence and integrity of a response.

The public is entitled to know about measles-associated deaths, but in this case the information provided would have better served a fractured ecosystem had it been more complete, honest and clear. For instance, an official could have said: “This is an unusual case. Measles was associated with an infant’s death, but we have yet to establish the role of the virus. We’re working with the coroner to establish what happened and will share additional updates as soon as we can.”

Pentagon erupts over classified leak about Iran war dissent

Echo report published in The Hill by Jarod Gans

(Question❓ Has Iran surrendered yet❓)

The Pentagon is seething over a Washington Post report that top military leaders recently warned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth against extending large-scale Iran war operations.

People familiar with a classified assessment prepared for Hegseth told the Post that several combatant commanders have advised the Defense chief that prolonging operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening the U.S.’s ability to address threats elsewhere, including on U.S. soil.

The warnings appear in the August 14 edition of the Secretary of Defense Orders Book (SDOB), detailed by the heads of the Army, Navy and Air Force, and the four-star commanders overseeing U.S. operations throughout Europe, Asia and Latin America, the Post reported Sunday.

Defense Department spokesperson Sean Parnell lambasted the report in a post on the social platform X.

“Publishing highly classified assessments from the Secretary’s orders book is a crime. It’s a betrayal of the force,” he said. “And much of what they’re publishing is inaccurate.”

Parnell said the Pentagon wants “candid” advice and disagreements are common.  “Hegseth sees them constantly (Maine Writer....but does he actually READ them❓). That’s how you run a real military. We are in great shape around the world.🤥🤥 🙄This story isn’t about readiness,” he said, alleging it is about “TDS,” an acronym that Trump and his allies often use to mean “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” (Maine Writer....duh❓And your point is...😕❓)

Washington Post military affairs reporter Dan Lamothe defended his colleagues’ work with a response to Parnell.

“Fact check: Independent journalism is not a crime,” he said. “It’s also especially important at a time when government officials are withholding key details and concerns about a war being fought on behalf of the American people with their taxpayer dollars.”

The August 14 SDOB directs some U.S. forces currently deployed in the Middle East to remain through September and others into 2027, those familiar with the document told the Post.

The heads of U.S. European, Pacific and Southern Commands, along with the Navy’s top admiral, responded with a “non-concur” — signaling their disagreement with Hegseth’s order to extend their forces, the Post reported.

The report comes as the U.S. and Iran traded fire for the first time in almost a month. The war, now in its sixth month, has drained the Navy’s budget and significantly depleted U.S. stockpiles of missile interceptors and long-range precision missals. 

Throughout the conflict, U.S. ships, personnel, aircraft and equipment have been redirected from various parts of the world to the Middle East. The sources told the Post that this has limited the military’s ability to conduct missions and ensure proper training.

In addition to Parnell, other accounts on X with links to the Pentagon weighed in to slam the Post for reporting on classified information.

(So what❓)

The account DataRepublican, which is run by Utah software engineer Jennica Pounds, a special government employee at the Defense Department, responded to Lamothe. 

Let's Write about finding lost family even after the Holocaust

How I found out in my 60s that I have cousins on two other continents. We thought our grandfather’s family was decimated in the Holocaust. Now we’re finding family we didn’t know we had.

Echo article from Connecticut Magazine published in the Boston Globe Magazine by Richard Newman.

The writer’s grandfather Sam Ajdels in his Russian army uniform in 1914. Sam and his brother Harry reunited in New York in 1979 after 65 years apart. (illustration by Albee Lu; photographs from richard newman)

For years, we believed our family history was complete. We knew our Polish origins had spread across oceans when two brothers left their homeland. My grandfather Sam Ajdels immigrated to America in 1926, after serving in the Russian army from 1914, to 1922. His brother Harry left for London in 1919. We presumed their six siblings perished in the Holocaust.

It wasn’t until 1979 that Sam and Harry reunited. We thought that emotional encounter would be the most extraordinary chapter of our family narrative. I even wrote a memoir about it, believing I’d told the whole story. But recently, we discovered just how much we didn’t know.

Harry’s grandson Jonathan, living in London, had taken a DNA test some years ago, and in April he heard from the Holocaust Reunion Project: a woman in California named Suzanne was a match. DNA revealed her grandmother Frajda was Sam and Harry’s sister. She had died in 1920, leaving behind an infant son who later survived Auschwitz, came to America, and raised two daughters (Suzanne and her sister, Liliane) in California. Our family tree had a newly revealed branch.

Jonathan started a WhatsApp group: The Long Lost Ajdels. Within days, we were in a nonstop conversation, sharing photographs, stories, and discoveries. For a family shaped by trauma and inherited silence, the most surprising feature of our texts was not grief — it was humor.

Harry’s daughter Jeanette, 88, posted witty comments at 1 a.m. from London. My sister Leslie wrote Dr. Seuss-inspired poems with every family revelation. 

Newly discovered cousins interrupted at the same moments, deflected emotion with the same sarcasm, laughed in the same rhythm. Apparently, comedic timing was the trait most successfully passed down across generations.

Then my sister found two photographs — an unnamed woman and an unnamed boy — stored for decades in a leather satchel belonging to our grandfather Sam. Suzanne recognized the boy as her father; the woman almost certainly was the faceless grandmother she had spent years searching for.

Suzanne texted: “Whoa Whoa Whoa.” Suzanne’s middle name is Frieda — named for that grandmother.

Discoveries accelerated. For years, a rumor floated that another sister, Fajga, had escaped to Argentina before the war — but we couldn’t track her without her married name. Within days, our WhatsApp group uncovered long-lost answers through intensified sleuthing.

We learned Fajga left Poland years before arriving in Buenos Aires in 1923, where she raised five children. Immediately, we set up a Zoom call with Argentine cousins in their 70s and 80s who, a week earlier, had no idea we existed. 

The writer's great-aunt Frajda Ajdels Chojnowski, who died in 1920, and his cousin Izzy Chojnowski, who later survived Auschwitz and other concentration camps. The writer did not know about either until a few months ago. from Richard Newman.

Fajga’s great-grandson translated. We laughed like people who’d been connected their whole lives.

We learned that Fajga’s youngest son, Arie, now 91, had immigrated to Israel from Argentina decades ago. I identified someone on LinkedIn who I thought could be his son and messaged him. The response arrived within minutes: “Yes. Arie is indeed my father. He knew nothing about his mother’s family.”

Now our Zoom calls include relatives from four continents. Arie met his London-based first cousins (ages 88 and 94) online for the first time, his son translating stories into Hebrew as they unfolded. Though we’d just met, nobody spoke with the guarded politeness of strangers. The familial warmth was immediate.

Sam and Harry spent their whole lives believing they were the only ones who’d survived. They couldn’t have imagined that a century later, the extended Ajdels family would reunite. 

In October, we’re gathering in London — long-lost cousins from America, Argentina, England, and Israel.

The strangest part of this story is not that we found each other. It’s how quickly we recognized one another❗ 

We started by exchanging old pictures, but in a matter of weeks, the group chat was full of birthday wishes and good-natured World Cup trash talk. The extraordinary quickly became ordinary.

Jeanette, posting from London at 1 a.m. as usual, said it best: “I’m running out of wow words.”

Richard Newman is a writer in Newton and author of Don’t Be Such a Big Shot: A Family Memoir of Identity, Secrets, and Survival. 

Emergency! Where are mothers to go? Birthing Centers are closing. Women and babies will die.

You Can’t Be Born Here. You Can Only Die.

Echo opinion report published in The New York Times by Jessica Grose:

When Bonner General Health stopped providing labor and delivery services in 2023, the families of Sandpoint, Idaho, were devastated. Jen Jackson Quintano told me that back in 2014, she had planned on a home birth, but it was not progressing, and her midwife took her to Bonner General, where she had a C-section. It went so well, she became friends with her obstetrician.

If you’re a pregnant woman in Bonner County, in the northern panhandle of the state, your options for receiving prenatal and postpartum care and giving birth are quite limited. If you want to get an ultrasound, you are probably driving nearly an hour to Coeur d’Alene, or over an hour to Spokane, Wash. That’s in good weather. But try navigating a bumpy dirt road and mountain passes, which sometimes close, in an ice storm, while in labor.

As a result, many pregnant women in the area are either opting for planned home births with midwives, or, if it’s possible, they are booking short-term rentals or staying with family near hospitals with obstetric units. If a planned home birth goes sideways, fast, some of these women may end up in Bonner’s emergency room, which no longer has obstetricians nor pediatricians to manage neonatal resuscitations. Some of them are buying helicopter insurance in case they need to be airlifted.

Quintano, who is a progressive activist, gathered birthing stories from other community members when Bonner closed its labor and delivery unit three years ago.

Without having Bonner’s obstetric care available, “I likely never would have tried to start a family knowing that all my prenatal appointments were over an hour away,” a woman named Jonell said as part of the collected stories.

The closure of rural labor and delivery units is not just a northern Idaho problem. According to a 2024, report on maternity care deserts from the March of Dimes, “In 1,104 U.S. counties, there is not a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician.” 

This is also not solely a recent problem, though it will be worsened by cuts to Medicaid by the Trump administration. The federal Rural Health Fund, which seeks to modernize ailing country hospitals, among other improvements, will not offset these cuts by much.

I’d describe it more as a slow-rolling disaster that is picking up speed across the country.

The existential pain of losing birth services

While reporting this article, I heard from mothers, physicians, nurses, midwives and doulas living in rural areas from Maine to Oregon.

They described the same interwoven set of dynamics making it hard to keep rural labor and delivery units open. The first issue is the aging population of rural America, which means fewer babies, and less revenue. Rural hospital administrators say that if a labor and delivery unit drops below 200 births a year, its financial viability is endangered, and it may no longer be able to guarantee the safety of its maternity care.

Maternity care tends to be a financial loser at urban hospitals, too, because insurance reimbursement rates for it are not great. But higher-volume procedures compensate for the losses. And if a city hospital ends labor and delivery services, a prospective patient’s travel time to another hospital tends to be far shorter and less perilous.

Over 130 rural labor and delivery units have closed since 2020, per the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform, a nonpartisan policy organization. Women who live in rural areas (that are not adjacent to urban areas) without hospital-based obstetric care are more likely to have preterm births and less likely to receive adequate prenatal care, according to a 2018 investigation published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. They are more likely to give birth in emergency rooms that are not set up for obstetric emergencies.

I have now heard stories from across the country of women giving birth on the side of the road or in their cars because they did not make the long journey to the hospital in time.

Still, when any hospital loses obstetric services, it puts pressure on the closest hospitals. 

Patients now wait longer to see providers, and I heard anecdotes about women having to give birth in the hallways of hospitals because there was no bed for them.

Richard Leidinger is the medical director of surgical specialists at Northern Light Health in Presque Isle, Maine, part of Aroostook County. Half of the county’s obstetrics departments have closed in the past 10 years. So Leidinger’s hospital, which has one of the two remaining units in a county larger than Connecticut, is seeing women who “have had no prenatal care and arrive in active labor on our doorstep with no warning.”

Keeping staff at rural hospitals is a huge problem in many medical specialties, because doctors and nurses often prefer to be closer to the amenities of more populous areas. Elizabeth Khan, a primary care physician who was formerly based in sparsely populated Mendocino County, California, and also gave birth while living there, said that the closest obstetrician to her hospital “was an hour-and-a-half drive through the mountains from us” while some of her patients have to drive four hours to San Francisco, where she now lives, to see a neurologist.

Katy Backes Kozhimannil, a co-director of the Rural Health Research Center at the University of Minnesota, told me that when a community loses its labor and delivery unit, that loss is about so much more than just some medical procedures — it becomes existential. We all have a story of where we were born, she told me.

“What does it mean to live a good life in a place❓” Kozhimannil mused. “It feels like there is a deep loss in a community if you can’t be born there — you can only die.”

Cutting red tape, increasing reimbursements

The good news is that there are many common-sense, bipartisan policy solutions to this problem, and there is both state and federal legislation in the works aimed at some of the obstacles to rural women’s getting quality care.

“The simplest solution is for health insurance plans (both commercial insurance and Medicaid) to pay adequately for labor and delivery services. ‘Adequately’ means enough to cover the lowest feasible cost of delivering high-quality care in that community, not some amount that might be adequate, on average, for large hospitals,” said Harold Miller, the president and chief executive of the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. Because there are fewer deliveries at small hospitals, there needs to be a higher payment per delivery to keep them afloat.

Miller also explained that ideally hospitals should be receiving what’s called a standby capacity payment from each health insurance plan, a payment that would “support the minimum fixed costs of maintaining labor and delivery staffing in that community regardless of how many births there are.” After all, he said, we don’t fund fire departments based on how many fires there are every year.

There is a bill sitting in Congress called the Rural Obstetrics Readiness Act that would provide grants to rural hospitals for equipment and emergency obstetric training for physicians. I heard from many family medicine doctors who said that it would be useful to have additional obstetrics training, since they are providing cradle-to-grave care in many hospitals in rural America. This doesn’t fix the problem of keeping staff in rural areas, but it’s something.

Another policy solution, which some states have already taken steps to institute, is unbundling Medicaid payments for prenatal, birth and postpartum care. In many states, Medicaid reimbursement is a one-time payment for everything. In practice this can result in a delay in reimbursement or in hospitals potentially seeing no money at all if someone receives prenatal care from their obstetricians but delivers in another setting. By reimbursing on a fee-for-service plan, small rural hospitals can see more funding for what they are providing.

There also needs to be better reimbursement for and easier access to midwives and doulas, who are providing essential care to rural women. I spoke to Sara Fichtenbauer, who is planning a home birth for her third child in Chippewa Falls, Wis. She told me she is paying $6,000 out of pocket for midwife care, and she isn’t sure she’s going to get reimbursed — she’s still filling out paperwork. California recently passed a law that cut some of the red tape for midwife-run birthing centers to help ease the burden of maternity deserts. This isn’t a cure-all, though, because midwives cannot perform C-sections, and sometimes infants really need a NICU, and fast.

The babies are going to keep coming whether there’s a labor and delivery unit to care for them. 

There is no shortage of ideas, nor of passion for fixing this problem. The issue is the political will and the slow pace of legislative solutions.

Leidinger, the hospital medical director in Presque Isle, told me that he served at a combat surgical hospital in Iraq, and he also treated patients in rural Guatemala. What he is seeing now in Maine makes him think that we’re headed in the direction of those levels of medical care.

This shouldn’t happen in the richest country in the world, Leidinger said. Exactly❗ And I couldn’t agree more.