Shefali Luthra
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shefali.bsky.social
Shefali Luthra
@shefali.bsky.social
5.1K followers 380 following 360 posts
Reproductive health reporter @19thnews.org‬
I wrote UNDUE BURDEN, a book about abortion post-Dobbs. Past lives: KHN, The Texas Tribune.

Julien Baker/Boston Celtics/Jaguars enthusiast. She / Her. sbluthra(at)19thnews(dot)org; Signal: shefaliluthra.94
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shefali.bsky.social
What it could mean for child care in the country’s largest city: 19thnews.org/2025/10/mamd...
The issue that forged the unlikely Mamdani-Hochul alliance
A shared interest in affordable, universal child care is a sign of how critical the issue is to many New York voters, experts say.
19thnews.org
November 5, 2025 at 2:14 AM
Reposted by Shefali Luthra
19thnews.org
Virginia has elected Ghazala Hashmi as the state’s next lieutenant governor, making her the first Muslim woman ever elected to statewide office in the United States. 19thnews.org/2025/11/virg...
November 5, 2025 at 12:41 AM
shefali.bsky.social
We spoke to lawyers, researchers and doctors about the conditions in which immigrants are being kept, and the consequences for their pregnancies.

All say signs point toward an increase in pregnant, postpartum and nursing people being detained. Only ICE knows how many.

Some stories of the impact:
Antonia Aguilar Maldonano, a mother of two from El Salvador, was arrested by ICE on her way to work and detained at the Kandiyohi County Jail in Minnesota for almost a month. Her youngest child is 22 months old and still nursing; he has acid reflux and an allergy to other forms of milk. The jail was not equipped to house someone who was nursing, said Gloria Contreras Edin, her lawyer: It did not have a breast pump when Aguilar Maldonado arrived, forcing her to use her hands to massage milk out until the facility was able to buy a pump. Workers helping integrate deported immigrants in Honduras told researchers from the Women’s Refugee Commission that nursing women who were deported had not received enough food and water to continue lactating. “They arrive with hardly any milk — or milk that looks like water — and this affects the babies’ weight,” one worker said, according to a report published by the organization.
October 20, 2025 at 1:02 PM