State Abortion Restrictions and the New Supreme Court: Women’s Access to Reproductive Health Services

The US Supreme Court’s landmark 1973 ruling in Roe v Wade established a privacy right to choose abortion. In 1992, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v Casey reaffirmed Roe with the Supreme Court calling reproductive decisions “the most intimate and personal choices a person may make…central to personal dignity.” Casey allows abortion regulations, but states cannot impose an “undue burden,” where the law’s “purpose or effect” places a substantial obstacle in a woman’s path in accessing an abortion previability. State abortion restrictions—meaning laws that restrict whether, when, and under what circumstances a woman may obtain an abortion—increased in the aftermath of Roe and Casey. The Supreme Court is unlikely to review bans on abortion under all or most circumstances but appears poised to incrementally uphold multiple restrictions, including those that affect the medical procedures, health professionals and institutions, decision-making, and funding involved in the provision of abortion services. This article explores how these restrictions would limit the affordability of or access to abortions, undermine trust in the patient-physician relationship, and jeopardize women’s health, emotional well-being, and dignity. It also examines how they would disproportionately affect already disadvantaged and underserved women, raising concerns about equity and justice

Banning Abortion in Cases of Down Syndrome: Important Lessons for Advances in Genetic Diagnosis

In December 2017, Ohio passed into law legislation that prohibited physicians from performing abortions if the pregnant woman’s decision was influenced by her belief that the fetus has Down syndrome. Physicians who perform abortions in these cases would face fourth-degree felony charges and revocation of their medical license. No other state bans abortion specifically for Down syndrome, but several ban abortions in cases of genetic diseases. Lower courts have struck down most such laws, holding they violate the constitutional rights of women. In February 2018, a federal district court judge blocked enforcement of Ohio’s law pending a final determination. This article explores the compelling legal and ethical issues raised by the Ohio statute. It compares the statute with similar bans on abortion in other states and considers why courts have struck many of these bans down as unconstitutional. The article also examines the potential consequences of the Ohio statute for women and their families; for the patient-physician relationship; and for persons with disabilities. Ultimately, such laws do little to advance the values that are at the heart of both reproductive rights and disability rights movements, namely bodily autonomy, self-determination, equality, and inclusion

Women\u27s Health and Abortion Rights: Whole Woman\u27s Health v Hellerstedt

Nearly a quarter century ago, the Supreme Court asked pro-choice and right-to-life advocates “to end their national division by accepting a common mandate rooted in the Constitution.” Nothing of the sort materialized. If anything, the social and political battles intensified, with states enacting 1074 abortion restrictions. The Court has not considered various appeals in the face of an avalanche of legislation, but on June 27, 2016, it struck down 2 onerous restrictions on physicians and clinics offering abortion services. In Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt, the Court found Texas’s requirements that physicians conducting abortions obtain admitting privileges at local hospitals and that licensed abortion facilities meet the standards of ambulatory surgical centers to be unconstitutional. Stephen Breyer, writing for a 5-3 majority, held that the restrictions failed to offer medical benefits sufficient to justify the burdens on women’s access to abortion. This article explores the implications of Whole Woman’s Health v Hellerstedt for other abortion restrictions that purportedly safeguard women’s health; for access to abortion in Texas and other parts of the country; and for the health, rights, and dignity of women seeking abortion, particularly those who are disproportionately affected by restrictions and other burdens on access. The article includes a table describing state abortion restrictions across the country, together with pending court cases

Sexual Assaults Among University Students: Prevention, Support, and Justice

Sexual assault is common among college-aged women (18 to 25 years), with 1 in 5 reporting having experienced these crimes during their college years. Acute and long-term consequences of sexual assault may include physical trauma, sexually transmitted infections, posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and substance abuse. Survivors have the option of reporting assaults to the university or to the police, but the goals of these 2 systems—and women’s experiences with them—can be quite different. The criminal justice system’s principal aim is to adjudicate guilt, but the university has the broader purpose of fostering a safe learning environment. This article explores how university administrators can help prevent sexual assaults and, if necessary, fairly adjudicate claims. The critical points of intervention include nurturing a respectful environment; encouraging reporting; ensuring fair and rigorous investigations; implementing appropriate sanctions for inappropriate behavior; and reintegrating survivors back into the academic community. Importantly, coordination and cooperation between the university and criminal justice systems will improve experiences for survivors of sexual assault

Pseudorandom Generators for Width-3 Branching Programs

We construct pseudorandom generators of seed length $\tilde{O}(\log(n)\cdot \log(1/\epsilon))$ that $\epsilon$-fool ordered read-once branching programs (ROBPs) of width $3$ and length $n$. For unordered ROBPs, we construct pseudorandom generators with seed length $\tilde{O}(\log(n) \cdot \mathrm{poly}(1/\epsilon))$. This is the first improvement for pseudorandom generators fooling width $3$ ROBPs since the work of Nisan [Combinatorica, 1992]. Our constructions are based on the `iterated milder restrictions' approach of Gopalan et al. [FOCS, 2012] (which further extends the Ajtai-Wigderson framework [FOCS, 1985]), combined with the INW-generator [STOC, 1994] at the last step (as analyzed by Braverman et al. [SICOMP, 2014]). For the unordered case, we combine iterated milder restrictions with the generator of Chattopadhyay et al. [CCC, 2018]. Two conceptual ideas that play an important role in our analysis are: (1) A relabeling technique allowing us to analyze a relabeled version of the given branching program, which turns out to be much easier. (2) Treating the number of colliding layers in a branching program as a progress measure and showing that it reduces significantly under pseudorandom restrictions. In addition, we achieve nearly optimal seed-length $\tilde{O}(\log(n/\epsilon))$ for the classes of: (1) read-once polynomials on $n$ variables, (2) locally-monotone ROBPs of length $n$ and width $3$ (generalizing read-once CNFs and DNFs), and (3) constant-width ROBPs of length $n$ having a layer of width $2$ in every consecutive $\mathrm{poly}\log(n)$ layers.Comment: 51 page

Supreme Court Ruling on the Texas Abortion Law: Beginning to Unravel \u3ci\u3eRoe v Wade\u3c/i\u3e

In 2021, Texas enacted an abortion statute, SB8, stating “a physician may not knowingly perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman if the physician detected a fetal heartbeat for the unborn child.” SB8’s prohibition applies broadly against anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion.” The law’s design is unprecedented, enforced solely by private lawsuits, providing damages of $10,000 or more for each abortion. SB8 prohibits government enforcement, with the explicit intent of preventing federal judicial review. SB8 clearly violates current Supreme Court precedent creating a constitutional right to abortion before fetal viability. Private litigants and the Justice Department launched a series of lawsuits in federal court to enjoin the law. On December 10, 2021, the Supreme Court, 8-1, in a fractured set of opinions, ruled that abortion providers may seek to enjoin a narrow group of government officials and employees, but the justices ruled against Justice Department litigation. Pending lower court decisions, the Court let SB8 stand despite the clear fact it violates Roe v. Wade. This article explores majority’s reasoning, what it means for future enforcement of SB8 and access to abortion in Texas, and what may happen next in this case and related litigation, including the Supreme Court’s upcoming ruling in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization. It also examines the decision’s implications for other constitutional rights beyond abortion

Entangled networks, synchronization, and optimal network topology

A new family of graphs, {\it entangled networks}, with optimal properties in many respects, is introduced. By definition, their topology is such that optimizes synchronizability for many dynamical processes. These networks are shown to have an extremely homogeneous structure: degree, node-distance, betweenness, and loop distributions are all very narrow. Also, they are characterized by a very interwoven (entangled) structure with short average distances, large loops, and no well-defined community-structure. This family of nets exhibits an excellent performance with respect to other flow properties such as robustness against errors and attacks, minimal first-passage time of random walks, efficient communication, etc. These remarkable features convert entangled networks in a useful concept, optimal or almost-optimal in many senses, and with plenty of potential applications computer science or neuroscience.Comment: Slightly modified version, as accepted in Phys. Rev. Let

Pseudorandomness for Regular Branching Programs via Fourier Analysis

We present an explicit pseudorandom generator for oblivious, read-once, permutation branching programs of constant width that can read their input bits in any order. The seed length is $O(\log^2 n)$, where $n$ is the length of the branching program. The previous best seed length known for this model was $n^{1/2+o(1)}$, which follows as a special case of a generator due to Impagliazzo, Meka, and Zuckerman (FOCS 2012) (which gives a seed length of $s^{1/2+o(1)}$ for arbitrary branching programs of size $s$). Our techniques also give seed length $n^{1/2+o(1)}$ for general oblivious, read-once branching programs of width $2^{n^{o(1)}}$, which is incomparable to the results of Impagliazzo et al.Our pseudorandom generator is similar to the one used by Gopalan et al. (FOCS 2012) for read-once CNFs, but the analysis is quite different; ours is based on Fourier analysis of branching programs. In particular, we show that an oblivious, read-once, regular branching program of width $w$ has Fourier mass at most $(2w^2)^k$ at level $k$, independent of the length of the program.Comment: RANDOM 201

Derandomized Squaring of Graphs

We introduce a “derandomized ” analogue of graph squaring. This op-eration increases the connectivity of the graph (as measured by the second eigenvalue) almost as well as squaring the graph does, yet only increases the degree of the graph by a constant factor, instead of squaring the degree. One application of this product is an alternative proof of Reingold’s re-cent breakthrough result that S-T Connectivity in Undirected Graphs can be solved in deterministic logspace.

Constraint Satisfaction with Counting Quantifiers

We initiate the study of constraint satisfaction problems (CSPs) in the presence of counting quantifiers, which may be seen as variants of CSPs in the mould of quantified CSPs (QCSPs). We show that a single counting quantifier strictly between exists^1:=exists and exists^n:=forall (the domain being of size n) already affords the maximal possible complexity of QCSPs (which have both exists and forall), being Pspace-complete for a suitably chosen template. Next, we focus on the complexity of subsets of counting quantifiers on clique and cycle templates. For cycles we give a full trichotomy -- all such problems are in L, NP-complete or Pspace-complete. For cliques we come close to a similar trichotomy, but one case remains outstanding. Afterwards, we consider the generalisation of CSPs in which we augment the extant quantifier exists^1:=exists with the quantifier exists^j (j not 1). Such a CSP is already NP-hard on non-bipartite graph templates. We explore the situation of this generalised CSP on bipartite templates, giving various conditions for both tractability and hardness -- culminating in a classification theorem for general graphs. Finally, we use counting quantifiers to solve the complexity of a concrete QCSP whose complexity was previously open