Entergy is proud to support programing on LP and greener practices that preserve Louisiana.

The goal of our environmental and sustainability initiatives really is to ensure that our kids and future generations can be left with a cleaner planet.

Additional support provided by the Fred Bea and Ruth B, Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you.

I think we've got some serious erosion of just common place, settled law, civil rights.

Roe versus Wade in jeopardy.

Low income people have a better standard of living.

If you're willing to set a higher floor for wages.

Where Louisiana stands on minimum wage, the leading cause of maternal death is actually substance use disorder.

A Senate bill reveals a dangerous trend among Louisiana's pregnant women.

I'm really thankful that I'm able to have that impact on people.

Introducing you to our last young hero.

Hi, everyone.

I'm Care Saints here.

And I'm.

Andre Mauro.

The US is trudging into what could become another COVID19 surge.

Cases rising, hospitalizations rising.

The new overcrowded sub variant seen mostly in the Northeast and also southern California is expected to wash over the nation.

Keeping the surge in check, experts say, is a higher level of immunity.

But there are unknowns and it comes after a two month decline.

Cases in Louisiana, again, are on the rise.

Also this week, the death of one of the sheriff's deputies shot during the 2016 ambush following Alton Sterling death.

Nick Toll died Thursday morning from an infection.

A large procession took toia from Our Lady of the Lake Hospital in Baton Rouge to Denham Springs.

Toya was badly wounded and many felt it was miraculous that he fought the odds to live this long.

Governor John Bel Edwards asked that flags be lowered to half staff at government buildings as a tribute.

In a statement, he said that Tulia and the other officers injured during that ambush were true heroes who fiercely love their community that they vowed to protect.

Till they spent the last six years of his life in and out of hospitals.

He was 46 years old.

And now to news making headlines across the state.

A bill to keep transgender women and girls in the state from competing on college and K-through-12 womens and girls.

Sports teams moved a step closer to passage.

The governor opposes it.

He vetoed it last year, but has not said if he'd veto again this year.

Legislators in committee rejected the don't say gay bill for public schools in the state.

Representative Dodie Horton's bill would have prohibited a teacher or school employee from discussing his own sexual orientation or gender identity with students.

K-through-12.

Opponents say the ban would have been too broad.

Also, barring educational or historical information, from being taught A critical shortage of Louisiana teachers spurred the House to pass legislation to try and lure some retired teachers back to the classroom.

It would increase earnings without reducing retirement benefits.

It passed 96 to zero.

The bill applies to those certified to teach math, science, English, language arts and any teachers aid The Saints tweeted Done deal for the honey badger to come back home.

LSU and pro football great Tyron Mathews signed to play in the city where he grew up three years.

$33 million.

Matthew says it's a dream come true.

Fans in Louisiana are ecstatic This is LSU's Tiger Stadium this past Saturday night.

A jam packed crowd estimated at 120,000 to see Garth Brooks perform on the six year old entertainer sinkhole in Baton Rouge.

The eruption of cheers was so great it registered as a small earthquake on a seismograph at LSU.

The leak of a draft from the Supreme Court this week ignited both sides of the abortion issue.

The draft was not final, but it said the court was on the verge of overturning the law of the land on abortion.

Since 1973 Roe v Wade.

So what does this mean for our state, Louisiana?

Let's start right there with first Mary Patricia Ray, who is the founder of Top Drawer Strategies, a government relations political consulting PR firm.

Also, adjunct professor at Tulane University and Dr. Melissa Flournoy, who chairs the Board of Louisiana Progress, past executive director of Planned Parenthood for the Gulf Coast Region and a former state legislator.

Mary Patricia, I'm going to begin with you and the law, because I'm curious.

Louisiana, one of 13 states where abortion will become automatically illegal, is that in all circumstances?

And what are the risks?

Louisiana is one of 13 states that has a trigger law.

The exceptions under this opinion, should it become final, are a little ambiguous and unclear.

The opinion states that there can be exceptions in the case where a life sustaining organ is at stake for the childbearing person.

It's not yet clear what that's going to mean.

But we know that historically the number of women seeking an abortion does not change whether it is legal or not.

The number that changes is the number of women who die trying to get an abortion.

And that will certainly be the case here in Louisiana and across the country should this opinion become final.

Melissa, what does this, practically speaking, mean for impacting women in our state?

Well, right now, Louisiana has three clinics that provide abortion, one in Shreveport, one in Baton Rouge and one in New Orleans.

And so those clinics are still operating until this Supreme Court decision is is formally released.

But as Mary Patricia said, you know, women have been having abortions for millennia since women got pregnant, women have had abortions.

And so my real concern is we're going to go back to the dark ages where, you know, women were having a self induced abortions.

Women were having abortions sort of in the back alley.

You know, abortion has only been legal and safe since 1973.

And we are about to jeopardize the health of a whole new generation of of girls in one of.

The rallies that sprung up all over the country yesterday, one at the state capitol at 5:00 yesterday afternoon, full of the turnout like.

We had over a hundred people and we had a lot of groups co-sponsor on very short notice.

So we've got Lift Louisiana, Planned Parenthood AAUW, the YWCA, ACLU, Louisiana Progress.

So there's a lot of energy in response to this attack.

On the rights of women to control their own bodies.

So I was pleased with the immediate response.

And so we're going to have to have a longer term strategy to mobilize and fight back.

I'm curious, Patricia, about the draft.

Were the arguments persuasive and what else could it mean from the arguments?

Great question, Andre.

And we're really in some unknown territory in terms of the credibility of our Supreme Court.

Regardless of who leaked this information, what we've got before us is a draft opinion that is really unlike any other opinion I've ever seen from the court.

Some of the citation does in this opinion support the argument that there is no constitutional right to abortion by citing things like English legal president, precedent, men and authors who were famous for hanging women, for being witches, or supporting the concept of marital rape.

And these are the sources that are cited in support of this argument.

So these.

Aren't recent sightings of this guy hundreds of years.

Back?

No, but what is recent is that this case not only would overturn Roe, would overturn Planned Parenthood, v Casey and all the progeny of Roe v Wade.

Since the original opinion, it affects cases that rely on a privacy argument that is set up in those prior opinions to support fundamental rights like the right to contraception, the right to same sex marriage, and so other things that affect people's quality of life, their health and actually their ability to stay alive.

Those opinions are being kind of jostled by this one, should it become final.

I think we've got some serious erosion of just commonplace settled law, civil rights that have been established over the last 50 years.

Do you see this as you read it, as something that will happen, or could you see it changing before it gets to that?

Well, we had a very interesting statement from the chief justice of the Supreme Court.

He said that this opinion, although it's a valid document and is what it alleges to be, is not final and that it does not represent a final vote of the court on this opinion.

So there is still time for it to change.

And we know that the chief justice is looking more for a more restricted access to abortion himself rather than maybe going this far.

But it's going to be interesting to see how the court handles this and whether they can regain some of their own credibility and legitimacy.

Thank you very much, both of you, for being here.

I appreciate it so much.

Thanks for having us.

Andre.

Louisiana is ranked number one for the highest maternal mortality rate in the country.

For every 100,000 pregnant women, about 58 will die here.

Last week, the legislature contemplated a bill that could possibly change that.

Dr. Veronica Gillespie, Bill with the Louisiana Department of Health explains how to curb Louisiana's maternal mortality rate.

Senate Bill 60 was introduced in the capital last week.

The bill would require pregnant women to undergo tests for illegal drug use.

The legislation didn't have the support it needed to become a law.

It did reveal issues among one of Louisiana's most vulnerable population.

Once pregnant women.

So based on our 2018 review, which was our last report, the leading cause of maternal death was actually substance use disorder, followed by motor.

Vehicle.

Collisions and then homicide.

Veronica Gillespie Belle is the medical director of the Louisiana Perinatal Quality Collaborative Mortality Review.

Her job is to study and compile information on mortality rates among pregnant women and babies.

The last completed report from 2018 showed that accidental overdose was the most common cause of death in pregnant women.

The report went on to say that drug use accounted for 37% of pregnancy associated deaths because through the maternal mortality review we don't look at the particular type of substance that they died from.

I can say that in reviewing cases this.

Year we are seeing.

Some newer medication newer types of.

Drugs.

We're seeing more fentanyl and we're seeing more of the synthetic medications and drugs making it into our homicide deaths.

In 20, 21 the Louisiana Department of Health recorded over 300 hospital admissions of babies born with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome.

The increase in fentanyl and opioid overdoses is consistent with the rest of the country.

Following the start of the pandemic, the U.S. saw a surge in drug usage and drug related deaths.

It's not enough to screen but we have to be able to offer our patients treatment.

And we also have to work on our stigma and our bias, which is one.

Of the things that we also do with our birthing facilities.

Through the I.

Said initiative, mothers will not come forward to even admit that they are using substances when they are afraid that they're.

Going to lose their children or that they're going to be.

Criminalized for having.

Substances in their system.

And so we have to de-stigmatize the way we treat those individuals so they feel comfortable.

Coming forward if we are doing any.

Harm by doing a blood test where we're checking everyone's blood.

And then there may be ramify conditions for that.

We're actually that could make us have.

Worse maternal outcomes because mothers will not come in to seek care.

Gillespie Bell says that the Department of Health drafted initiatives to reduce overdoses and fatalities in pregnant women.

The initiatives focus heavily on preventative measures and therapy.

Senate Bill six was postponed for the session.

The author, Senator Stewart Cathy, said he'd be willing to find ways to reduce overdose deaths with the Louisiana Department of Health and DCFS.

At the state Capitol, Republicans blocked a number of bills that would have raised the state minimum wage.

This was at the end of last week.

The minimum wage is 725 an hour.

It ties Louisiana with six other states for having the lowest minimum wage.

John Mohler, executive director of the Louisiana Budget Project, is the man to talk to on this issue.

My question first among many, is why do lawmakers, why do business leaders block this every single time saying it's going to hurt the economy?

Well, I can't speak for the business lobby on this, but it really is like Groundhog Day at the Louisiana legislature, because every year this issue comes up, we know that this is very popular with the public.

Every poll I've ever seen of Louisiana voters show that up to 80% of voters support across party lines, across racial lines, all support the need to raise the minimum wage.

Everybody understands that $7.25 an hour is simply unacceptable in today's economy, especially with prices going up.

But the business lobby fights this every single year and every single year in the House.

Labor Committee, they managed to convince enough legislators to vote it down.

They simply don't think government has any role in setting wages for businesses.

But all the research that we've seen shows the opposite, that you really can help hundreds of thousands of hardworking people.

Low income people have a better standard of living.

If you're willing to set a higher floor for wages.

Higher, slightly standard of living, and also the data across the board shows that this stimulates the economy, that it doesn't drive people out of business or in the tank.

And that's the that's the fear working here all the time.

Oh, my.

We can't pay that.

Absolutely.

No, you've heard from the opponents of minimum wage that if you raise the minimum wage, you are going to kill jobs.

Right.

There has been just an enormous amount of research that says exactly the opposite, that when you put more money in people's pockets, they especially low income workers, they spend that money in their community and that spending in turn stimulates the community economy and creates jobs.

Now, I'm sure there are levels at which you could set the minimum wage where maybe it would have the opposite effect.

But we're talking about modest increases going to ten, 11, $12 an hour, which, you know, again, you couldn't get a job in some cities in this country that pay that little.

But here in Louisiana, that would be a substantial raise for hundreds of thousands of people, particularly workers of color, people who work in retail, who work in low level health care jobs, people we see every day who work hard and simply don't make enough money to make ends.

Meet, many of them frontline workers, as we recall.

Right.

Two years ago, we were calling them heroes.

And now we are saying that they don't deserve a simple raise.

And you bring up the point there that this is not going from 725 to $15 in one moment, that it's an incremental increase.

Representative Marcelle, that was her pitch.

It was shot down again.

This is the argument.

We hear that it's going to break us.

Absolutely not.

It is going to what it's going to do is, you know, one thing people forget about poverty in Louisiana and everywhere is that most poor people, almost all poor households have somebody who works and they go to work every day and the jobs simply don't pay enough to stay above water.

And so if you raise people's wages, you know, you're really not talking about even bringing people into the middle class, but maybe just having enough to make ends meet so that they can, you know, put food on the table every week, every month, pay the rent and buy clothes for their kids.

That's what we're talking about, a decent wage and at minimum.

At a minimum.

Truly, too.

We're not talking about we're.

Talking about a minimum wage.

We know it's going to stimulate the economy.

One thing You know, the Annie Casey Foundation puts out a kids count ranking every year.

That looks at how children are doing in each state.

And they counted by a number of metrics and they do it for every single state.

Louisiana has always been 48, 49th and 50th.

One of the states that were just ahead of Louisiana for years was Arkansas.

They used to be around, you know, 45, 46, a little bit ahead of Louisiana.

A few years ago, they started raising their minimum wage in less and Arkansas.

They did it by referendum.

The people in Arkansas voted to raise the minimum wage.

And one thing that happened when that happened, when the minimum wage went up is that their rankings on the kid count started to go up.

So they are actually now in the mid thirties.

And so the state of Arkansas doing are they collapsing?

They are collapsing.

Arkansas I mean, Arkansas has problems just like Louisiana's problems.

But when you measure abide by the welfare of children in Arkansas, they are doing better relative to other states than they were just a few years earlier.

And I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that families have a little bit more money in their pocket.

So many of the problems that we associate.

Crime, yes, dysfunction, mental health.

There's so many factors that correlate with poverty.

And the best way to to fight poverty is simple.

People need money.

And I really believe that legislators, for the most part, try really hard to represent the people back home to represent their wishes at the Capitol.

This is one of those issues where the will of the people simply is not represented in the votes of the people in the legislature.

And I'm confident that one day we will we will change the direction.

But but this is won't be the year.

It won't be soon enough for everybody, though.

You in the lives you on a budget project are on top of this all the time.

Thank you, John.

I appreciate your time.

Thank you for having me.

Mason McCartt is a 17 year old with a knack for community service.

And it all started during the pandemic he started a blog to help his peers cope with mental struggles, and he started a baking business intended to help those in need.

Tonight, I'm taking you to Natchitoches for this week's Young Hero.

I'm Mason Lockhart, and I'm 17, and I go to St Mary's Catholic School.

I'm really just social.

I'm a really big social butterfly.

I just love to go out and meet new people and just learn a lot about others.

So it's really I think that's how to be described.

But Mason wasn't always that way.

There was a time when his parents would have called him an introvert with a shy disposition.

He was really pretty quiet and reserved and just with others I guess.

He didn't didn't do much.

He was he was shut in a lot.

And then it started with social media.

The bad influence to a lot of a lot of people.

But he took it and used it to.

To gain personal growth.

Social media was the beginning of his transformation.

During the pandemic, feelings of isolation and loneliness were starting to surface, but the Internet provided an outlet.

So I started this blog where I started cooking for a cause.

I really started posting on it cause I felt like I felt the impact of negative mental health when I was in quarantine.

And I just wanted to make sure that everyone, like all of my friends and all just my mutual friends, that they were able to have resources and that they could they knew that they could talk to me if they were ever having issues.

And so I started this blog just as an outlet for me to honestly just advocate saying, hey, like, it's all right.

Everything will get better eventually.

And so I really just started this to sort of make sure everyone knows that they have a friend.

And I think that's one of the most important things to know because in high school, it's one of the hardest times for a person in life.

And so just knowing that you have someone to lean on whenever you are going through times of trial and tribulations, I think that's really just necessary for kids my age to have.

The blog is called All Smiles Here, Dawg.

Mason purchased the domain.

So he could keep everything going throughout the outbreak.

I would say my most viewed post on is like 120 views.

I was very happy to be able to have that outreach, and I have had multiple people just come up and talk to me about it and just saying about how it's helped them get through hard times.

I'm really thankful that I've been able to have that impact on people.

But this wasn't Mason's only breakthrough during the pandemic When schools closed, he thought up an idea to bake and sell banana bread.

But he was met with some resistance to that idea behind.

And I said, Well, maybe you can't just go around selling banana bread and we're in quarantine.

You know, you can't if it's just not safe right now, people are not going to want to be buying banana bread when this corn, you know, we're quarantine and that kind of virus is going around.

And we really didn't know much about it.

So he said, Well, I'd like to I don't want to keep the money, Mama.

I want it to go to, you know, to needy people.

And that's what he did.

When schools opened back up in August 20, 28, Mason asked the school principal if he could walk the halls and sell cookies he baked.

He got the green light to create what's now called cooking with a cause.

So cooking for a cause is a really it is a baking club where we just sell baked goods every single week and we donate the proceeds to an organization word shared.

You were an individual in need.

And so we've donated to places such as the Women's Visitor Center, innocuous or just a teacher at my school who had COVID.

And we really just wanted to help with everything with that.

So it really just we donate so people who are in need and people who we think could really use this.

And so we collect the proceeds every month.

It's new person every single month or new organization every month that we donate to, they call me the cookie.

I was just hoping to donate maybe $100 to the Women's Resource Center, like not just Humane Society.

And then within six months, we had signed an $8,000 to help in Dallas Scholarship Fund that we were donating to.

So we end up being able to donate over $6,000 to help in Dallas scholarship.

And I was really shell like that was just felt like, I mean, like I was just like I was I was just so surprised whenever we were able to do that.

So really just I I didn't think we would get this far.

The blog and cooking for a cause are only one part of Mason's life.

The rest of it is pretty busy.

He's a mascot for St Mary's Catholic School.

He plays tennis and runs cross-country.

And it doesn't stop there.

Mason has been a president for the state of Louisiana.

He's also a member of the National Honor Society, and that's just to name a few of his accomplishments.

I like to keep myself busy.

I always love just being out, but I really do appreciate the quiet time that I have.

I really just love just giving back to the community and working in the community with others and serving others.

They never meet the stranger.

He's just always born and helping others and doing things that we're just very proud of him and who we become.

He's got some time before college to figure it all out, but until then, Mason will continue to lead an inspiring life full of community service Mason says that he's interested in film and business, so when he finishes up his senior year, we'll see where that takes him.

I'm sure it will be a good place.

We've introduced seven wonderful high schoolers.

It was a pleasure getting to meet each and every one of you.

We have no doubt that each of you will go on to do great things.

So the best of luck to you all and thank you to the generous sponsors who supported this year's Young Heroes.

Mary.

Health Care Toss Louisiana.

The East Baton Rouge Parish Library.

Community Coffee.

The US Army Baton Rouge Recruiting Battalion.

Demko.

And Hotel Indigo.

And everyone.

That's our show for this week.

Remember, you can watch anything LP be any time, wherever you are.

With our live PBS app.

You can catch LP News and Public Affairs shows as well as other Louisiana programs you've come to enjoy over the years.

And please, like us on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram.

For everyone here at Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

I'm Andre Mauro.

And I'm care things here.

Until next time.

That's the state we're in.

Entergy is proud to support programing on LP and greener practices that preserve Louisiana.

The goal of our environmental and sustainability initiatives really is to ensure that our kids and future generations can be left with a cleaner planet.

Additional support provided by the Fred Bea and Ruth B Ziegler Foundation and the Ziegler Art Museum, located in Jennings City Hall.

The museum focuses on emerging Louisiana artists and is an historical and cultural center for Southwest Louisiana and the Foundation for Excellence in Louisiana Public Broadcasting.

With support from viewers like you.