South Dakota Republicans aren’t satisfied with imposing one of the nation’s longest waiting periods for women seeking abortions. As RH Reality Check reports, the state legislature will also consider a bill that would adopt a “business hours only” definition for its waiting period: while women wait the state-mandated three days before getting an abortion, weekends and holidays won’t count toward fulfilling that quota.

South Dakota’s extreme waiting period was enacted in 2011 and has been tied up in court for the past year — but since Planned Parenthood recently decided to drop the case in order to focus their resources on more pressing attacks to women’s health in the region, it may soon take effect. But on top of the restrictive law itself, RH Reality Check points out that a new bill seeks to further clarify the strict parameters of the 72-hour waiting period:

No surgical or medical abortion may be scheduled except by a licensed physician and only after the physician physically and personally meets with the pregnant mother, consults with her, and performs an assessment of her medical and personal circumstances. [...] No Saturday, Sunday, federal holiday, or state holiday may be included or counted in the calculation of the seventy-two hour minimum time period between the initial physician consultation and assessment and the time of the scheduled abortion procedure. No physician may have the pregnant mother sign a consent for the abortion on the day of this initial consultation.

Mandatory counseling sessions and waiting periods are simply methods of limiting women’s reproductive rights, and they don’t actually help women decide whether or not to have an abortion. Women can make up their own minds, and studies show that nearly 90 percent of the women seeking an abortion already feel very confident about their decision when they first approach their doctors. Unnecessary roadblocks that attempt to shame them out of having the voluntary medical procedure don’t actually work, and simply end up creating outsized barriers for low-income women who may not be able to make multiple trips to a health clinic.

Excluding weekends and holidays from South Dakota’s unnecessary waiting period puts an even bigger burden on women seeking reproductive care, and there’s no good justification for it. RH Reality Check notes that no other state with this restrictive policy defines their waiting period in this way.

Last week, Louisiana’s poor and terminally ill residents won a surprising victory when Gov. Bobby Jindal (R) announced that his state would not stop providing hospice care to its Medicaid beneficiaries. Unfortunately, that’s about the only piece of good news for low-income Louisianans’ health coverage, as the state is still set to implement massive cuts for Medicaid programs that “provide behavioral health services for at-risk children, offer case management visits for low-income HIV patients and pay for at-home visits by nurses who teach poor, first-time mothers how to care for their newborns” this Friday.

While Jindal administration officials argue that the cuts could be mitigated by Medicare and private managed care programs, the reality is that many of these specialty services are simply unavailable — or unaffordable — outside of Medicaid:

Health and Hospitals Secretary Bruce Greenstein said he targeted programs that were duplicative, costly and optional under the state’s participation in the state-federal Medicaid program.

Greenstein said in many instances, people can get the care they’re losing through other government-funded programs. But he acknowledged that won’t happen in every case, meaning some people will simply lose the services or receive reduced services. [...]

Jan Moller heads the Louisiana Budget Project, which advocates for low- to moderate-income families. Moller said he’s most distressed by the cut to the Nurse-Family Partnership Program.

The health department is eliminating the portion of the program that offers at-home visits to low-income women who are pregnant with their first child. Registered nurses visit the women early in their pregnancy and until their children’s second birthday, offering advice on preventive health care, diet and nutrition, smoking cessation and other child developmental issues. [...]

“What the Nurse-Family Partnership does goes above and beyond what a good obstetrician does,” Moller said. “It’s really about teaching life-skills to at-risk moms to make them better parents and make them better able to care for their children, and it’s been proven to work.”

Speech therapy programs for low-income children are also on the chopping block. The cuts — as well as Jindal’s proposals to raise taxes on the poor while slashing public education and other health care funding — are meant to plug a midyear budget deficit. But they are more likely to raise health care costs and poverty levels in a state that already ranks among America’s least-insured and poorest locales by pushing people poor people into finding services that they will no longer be able to afford.

While Jindal has spoken at length on the Republican Party’s existential need to stop being “the stupid party,” the “austerity” policies that he has pursued for his state are some of the most regressive in the entire country.

The Kansas Department of Health and Environment used to provide free HIV testing kits and specimen analysis to 40 counties — but this year, it’s scaling back its services to cover just the 10 most populous counties, a move that health advocates warn could end up restricting care for some of the state’s most vulnerable residents living in rural areas.

State and federal agencies are attempting to allocate their prevention funds strategically. Since Kansas is considered a “low incidence” state for HIV, cutting back on free testing in some counties is an attempt to concentrate resources where they are most needed. But health officials warn that the strategy may backfire, particularly because the state’s poorest residents may not seek out preventative care and get themselves tested:

“What we’re really talking about is potentially decreased access to services,” said Michelle Ponce, executive director of the Kansas Association of Local Health Departments. “If there’s not an entity in a community able to provide HIV testing on a basis which clients can afford, it’s not going to be done.” [...]

In Kansas, Medicaid pays for HIV testing if a physician orders it, Wilmoth said.

Donna Sweet, University of Kansas director of internal medicine education at Via Christi Regional Medical Center in Wichita, cautioned that people who live in rural communities where everyone knows everyone may be unwilling to discuss their concerns with a primary care physician. They might not recognize the signs or understand the risks, she said.

“Certainly it’s going to make an impact. People who are poor generally don’t have the money to pay for anything that is not free,” said Sweet, who has been the principal investigator for the Mountain Plains AIDS Education and Training Center since 1988.

State officials note that, since Obamacare seeks to expand the Medicaid program to cover additional low-income people, the health reform law will help improve access to free testing in Kansas because Medicaid picks up the tab for HIV tests. But that’s only true if Kansas agrees to accept the optional expansion and add an estimated 240,000 low-income people to its Medicaid rolls. A Democratic lawmaker in the state recently introduced a bill to expand Medicaid, but Gov. Sam Brownback (R) — a staunch Obamacare opponent — hasn’t yet indicated whether he will cooperate with that provision of the health law.

Obamacare does take big strides to improve access to HIV testing and treatment. But, since the Centers for Disease Control estimates that about 20 percent of all HIV-positive Americans don’t realize they have the virus — which includes half of the HIV-positive people between the ages of 13 and 24 — a widespread emphasis on preventative testing is critical to reach that population.

Gatorade will stop putting brominated vegetable oil (BVO), a synthetic chemical that is used as a flame retardant, into its products after a barrage of complaints, the Los Angeles Times reports.

Although the company has reportedly been considering removing BVO from its beverages for some time now, it was spurred to act after receiving overwhelming pressure from consumers regarding the potentially harmful chemical, including a popular Change.org petition that was initiated by 15-year-old Sarah Kavanagh:

A recent petition on Change.org to drop the chemical – which has more than 200,000 supporters – did not inspire the decision, Carter said, though she acknowledged that consumer feedback was the main impetus.

In the petition, posted by Sarah Kavanagh of Hattiesburg, Miss., “BVO” is described as banned in Japan and the European Union.

The effort quotes a Scientific American article suggesting that “BVO could be building up in human tissues” and that studies on mice have shown “reproductive and behavioral problems” linked to large doses of the chemical.

BVO is used to “distribute Gatorade’s coloring throughout the bottle” equally. The Times also reports that, while Gatorade will stop including BVO in newly produced drinks, there are no plans to recall products already on the market.

The FDA will allow a Pennsylvania-area college to continue dispensing emergency contraception to its students through a vending machine, just as it has done for the past three years, after a politically-motivated uproar last spring prompted a review of the university’s practices.

Back in February, Shippensburg University landed in the national spotlight for installing what may have been the nation’s first Plan B vending machine — allowing students to receive the morning after pill by inserting $25 dollars into the machine in the nurse’s office, rather than potentially being forced to delay taking the pill by scheduling an appointment. Under FDA guidelines, Plan B is already available to everyone over the age of 17 without a prescription, so the university simply verified their rolls to make sure all of their students were above that age as well.

After controversy over Obamacare’s contraception mandate first erupted last year, fueled by the anti-choice community’s widely perpetrated myth that Plan B induces abortions, emergency contraception became more controversial. But the morning after pill (which is safer than aspirin) simply prevents pregnancy within the first 72 hours after intercourse. And recent investigations into universities’ health policies have suggested that it’s not as accessible as it needs to be on college campuses. Shippensburg installed its vending machine after 85 percent of the student body said they thought Plan B should be available on campus grounds.

And after reviewing Shippensburg’s vending machine — which now requires students to swipe their IDs, an extra step to verify they attend the college and are above 17 years old — FDA officials have concluded there’s nothing wrong with expanding access to birth control in this way. “FDA looked at publicly available information about Shippenburg’s vending program and spoke with university and campus health officials and decided not to take any regulatory actions,” an agency official told Public Opinion.

Dispensing birth control in vending machines helps make contraceptive methods directly available without an adult intermediary, which can make a big difference for the teens and young adults who may be too embarrassed to ask a nurse or a pharmacist about it. Last spring, when Shippensburg’s vending machine first drew public attention, junior Chelsea Wehking told the Associated Press she supports it for exactly that reason. “I think it’s great that the school is giving us this option,” she said, explaining she has “heard some kids say they’d be too embarrassed” to make a trip into the surrounding small town to purchase Plan B.

A proposed abortion bill introduced in Arkansas this week would ban all abortion services after a fetal heartbeat is detected — which can occur as early as six weeks, before some women even realize they’re pregnant — and charge doctors who perform abortions after that arbitrary cut-off with a Class D felony, punishable by up to six years in prison and up to a $10,000 fine.

GOP lawmaker Jason Rapert filed the legislation on Monday, and half of Arkansas’ state senators — 18 of the Senate’s 35 total members — have already signed on as co-sponsors. Rapert says he may bring the bill before the Arkansas Senate’s Public Health Committee later this week.

So-called “heartbeat bills” are an attempt to redefine the medical terms of pregnancy, as well as a direct challenge to women’s constitutional rights. Even though medical professionals agree the point of viability typically occurs around 22 or 23 weeks of pregnancy — and Roe v. Wade grants women the right to terminate a pregnancy up until viability — fetal heartbeat measures would narrow the window for obtaining legal abortion services by as much as 17 weeks. This type of legislation is so radical that it often divides the anti-choice community. A similar measure failed in Ohio at the end of last year because abortion opponents couldn’t reach a consensus on it.

Rapert has acknowledged his bill may face legal challenges — particularly since it’s even more stringent than other states’ 20-week abortion bans that are currently being blocked in court. But, as he explained to the Associated Press, he is committed to imposing his own medical definitions on the women in his state. “When there is a heartbeat there, you have a living human being,” he said.

Since Republicans won both chambers of Arkansas’ state legislature in November’s elections, they’ve made it clear that abortion restrictions are high on their agenda — even though Arkansas, which only has one surgical abortion clinic left in the entire state, is already fairly hostile to reproductive rights. Abortion opponents are pressuring GOP lawmakers to push through a slew of new anti-choice legislation, including a 20-week abortion ban and a measure to block health insurance coverage of abortion services.