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HOUSTON (AP) — At least two people were killed and six more injured as several tornadoes touched down in Texas and Mississippi on Saturday, damaging homes and flipping vehicles.

One person died in the Liverpool area, located south of Houston, and four people suffered injuries that weren’t considered critical, said Madison Polston, spokesperson for the Brazoria County Sheriff’s Office.

Polston said there were “multiple touchdown points” in the county between Liverpool and Hillcrest Village and Alvin. She said that so far officials knew of around 10 damaged homes but were still working to determine the extent of the damage.

In Mississippi, one person died in Adams County and two people were injured in Franklin County, according to a spokesperson for the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency. The National Weather Service said two tornadoes hit around Bude and the city of Brandon, ripping the roofs from several buildings.

It appeared that at least six tornadoes touched down in the Houston area, though they may discover there were more when crews go out to survey the damage, Litcher said. He said there was damage in the area from both tornadoes and straight-line winds.

North of Houston, mobile homes were damaged or destroyed in Katy and Porter Heights, where the doors of a fire station were blown in, the weather service said.

The storms also caused departure delays of over an hour Saturday afternoon at Houston’s two main airports — Bush Intercontinental and Hobby — according to the website FlightAware.

About 71,000 utility customers were without power in Mississippi, and that number was expected to rise, said Malary White, chief communications officer for the state’s Emergency Management Agency.

The agency did not have any official damage reports but expected them to come in later. First responders were focused on ensuring people’s safety and making sure everyone was accounted for, according to White.

“We do anticipate more thorough damage assessments starting in the early morning hours,” she said.

(AP) — Abortion has become slightly more common despite bans or deep restrictions in most Republican-controlled states, and the legal and political fights over its future are not over yet.

It’s now been two and a half years since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and opened the door for states to implement bans.

The policies and their impact have been in flux ever since the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

Here’s a look at data on where things stand:
Abortions are slightly more common now than before Dobbs

Overturning Roe and enforcing abortion bans has changed how woman obtain abortions in the U.S.

But one thing it hasn’t done is put a dent in the number of abortions being obtained.

There have been slightly more monthly abortions across the country recently than there were in the months leading up to the June 2022 ruling, even as the number in states with bans dropped to near zero.

“Abortion bans don’t actually prevent abortions from happening,” said Ushma Upadhyay, a public health social scientist at the University of California San Francisco.

But, she said, they do change care.

For women in some states, there are major obstacles to getting abortions — and advocates say that low-income, minority and immigrant women are least likely to be able to get them when they want.

For those living in states with bans, the ways to access abortion are through travel or abortion pills.

Pills become a bigger part of equation — and the legal questions
As the bans swept in, abortion pills became a bigger part of the equation.

They were involved in about half the abortions before Dobbs. More recently, it’s been closer to two-thirds of them, according to research by the Guttmacher Institute.

The uptick of that kind of abortion, usually involving a combination of two drugs, was underway before the ruling.

But now, it’s become more common for pill prescriptions to be made by telehealth. By the summer of 2024, about 1 in 10 abortions was via pills prescribed via telehealth to patients in states where abortion is banned.

As a result, the pills are now at the center of battles over abortion access.

This month, Texas sued a New York doctor for prescribing pills to a Texas woman via telemedicine. There’s also an effort by Idaho, Kansas and Missouri to roll back their federal approvals and treat them as “controlled dangerous substances,” and a push for the federal government to start enforcing a 19th-century federal law to ban mailing them.
Travel for abortion has increased
Clinics have closed or halted abortions in states with bans.

But a network of efforts to get women seeking abortions to places where they’re legal has strengthened and travel for abortion is now common.

The Guttmacher Institute found that more than twice as many Texas residents obtained abortion in 2023 in New Mexico as New Mexico residents did. And as many Texans received them in Kansas as Kansans.

The ban that took effect in Florida this year has been a game-changer
Florida, the nation’s second most-populous state, began enforcing a ban on abortions after the first six weeks of pregnancy on May 1.

That immediately changed the state from one that was a refuge for other Southerners seeking abortion to an exporter of people looking for them.

There were about 30% fewer abortions there in May compared with the average for the first three months of the year. And in June, there were 35% fewer.

While the ban is not unique, the impact is especially large. The average driving time from Florida to a facility in North Carolina where abortion is available for the first 12 weeks of pregnancy is more than nine hours, according to data maintained by Caitlin Myers, a Middlebury College economics professor.

Clinics have opened or expanded in some places
The bans have meant clinics closed or stopped offering abortions in some states.

But some states where abortion remains legal until viability – generally considered to be sometime past 21 weeks of pregnancy, though there’s no fixed time for it – have seen clinics open and expand.

Illinois, Kansas and New Mexico are among the states with new clinics.
There were 799 publicly identifiable abortion providers in the U.S. in May 2022, the month before the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade. And by this November, it was 792, according to a tally by Myers, who is collecting data on abortion providers.

But Myers says some hospitals that always provided some abortions have begun advertising it. So they’re now in the count of clinics – even though they might provide few of them.
Lack of access to abortions during emergencies is threatening some patients’ lives

How hospitals handle pregnancy complications, especially those that threaten the lives of the women, has emerged as a major issue since Roe was overturned.
President Joe Biden’s administration says hospitals must offer abortions when they’re needed to prevent organ loss, hemorrhage or deadly infections, even in states with bans. Texas is challenging the administration’s policy and the U.S. Supreme Court this year declined to take it up after the Biden administration sued Idaho.

More than 100 pregnant women seeking help in emergency rooms and were turned away or left unstable since 2022, The Associated Press found in an analysis of federal hospital investigative records.

Among the complaints were a woman who miscarried in the lobby restroom of Texas emergency room after staff refused to see her and a woman who gave birth in a car after a North Carolina hospital couldn’t offer an ultrasound. The baby later died.

“It is increasingly less safe to be pregnant and seeking emergency care in an emergency department,” Dara Kass, an emergency medicine doctor and former U.S. Health and Human Services official told the AP earlier this year.
Abortion rights are popular with voters

Since Roe was overturned, there have been 18 reproductive rights-related statewide ballot questions.

Abortion rights advocates have prevailed on 14 of them and lost on four.

In the 2024 election, they amended the constitutions in five states to add the right to abortion. Such measures failed in three states: In Florida, where it required 60% support; in Nebraska, which had competing abortion ballot measures; and in South Dakota, where most national abortion rights groups did support the measure.

AP VoteCast data found that more than three-fifths of voters in 2024 supported abortion being legal in all or most cases – a slight uptick from 2020. The support came even as voters supported Republicans to control the White House and both houses of Congress.

FORT WORTH – The Fort Worth Report says that across the state, 78,000 families currently sit on a waitlist to receive subsidized child care, according to nonprofit organization Texans Care for Children. Nearly 22,000 of these families live in Tarrant County, said Kara Waddell, CEO of nonprofit Child Care Associates. As the Texas Legislature gears up for its 2025 session, an often overlooked aspect of education and economic development will soon come into focus: early childhood education. The growing demands for child care and pre-K intersect with the state’s economic resilience and the well-being of its families, according to state and local experts. In Tarrant County, the child care crisis is multifaceted, Waddell told the Report. As more than 20,000 families throughout the county wait to receive child care, the shortage undermines children’s early learning during developmental years, burdens working families with limited and costly care options, and strains the ability to maintain a reliable workforce across various sectors.

The crisis, she said, affects families, educational outcomes and the wider economy. State lawmakers must find ways to relieve the burden off of families and child care providers, she said. “Even when they’re able to get a scholarship or subsidy or afford it on their own, then families need to find a good match.” Waddell said. “These are gaps that are critical here in Fort Worth, but certainly across Texas as well.” One proposal to keep an eye on this session would be the introduction of child care innovation grants, Waddell said. The grants would aim to empower five to six local workforce development boards in high-need areas across the state to collaborate with employers, providing competitive base grants that encourage child care programs to expand capacity in line with regional workforce needs. Through now-expired COVID-19 relief funds, Child Care Associates worked with Workforce Solutions of Tarrant County to expand child care in areas lacking those services. That could be emulated across the state with further funding, Waddell said.

HEBBRONVILLE, Texas (AP) — In this corner of southern Texas, the plump cacti seem to pop out of arid dust and cracked earth, like magic dumplings.

It’s only here and in northern Mexico that the bluish-green peyote plant can be found growing naturally, nestled under thorny mesquite, acacia and blackbrush.

For many Native American Church members who call this region the “peyote gardens,” the plant is sacrosanct and an inextricable part of their prayer and ceremony. It’s believed to be a natural healer that Indigenous communities have counted on for their physical and mental health as they’ve dealt with the trauma of colonization, displacement, and erosion of culture, religion and language.
Lack of access for religious use

The cactus contains a spectrum of psychoactive alkaloids, the primary one being the hallucinogen mescaline, and is coveted for those psychedelic properties. Even though it is a controlled substance under federal law, an exemption afforded by a 1994 amendment to the American Indian Religious Freedom Act made it legal for Native Americans to use, possess and transport peyote for traditional religious purposes.

For over two decades, Native American practitioners of peyotism, whose numbers in the U.S. are estimated at 400,000, have raised the alarm about lack of access to peyote, which they reverently call “the medicine.” They say poaching and excessive harvesting of the slow-growing cactus, which flowers and matures over 10 to 30 years, are endangering the species and ruining its delicate habitat.

Native American Church members say the situation has worsened with demands from advocates of the psychedelic renaissance seeking to decriminalize peyote and make it more widely available for medical research and treatment of various ailments. Agriculture, housing developments, wind farms in the region and the border wall, are also damaging the habitat, experts say.

A vast majority of peyote people agree the plant must be protected and should be out of reach for medical researchers, Silicon Valley investors and other groups advocating peyote decriminalization. But there are diverse opinions within the Native American Church on how to accomplish that goal.

While at least one group spearheaded by Native American Church leaders has begun efforts to conserve and propagate peyote naturally in its habitat using philanthropic dollars, others in the church are more suspicious of investors’ intentions, saying they fear exploitation and would rather get funding from the U.S. government to protect peyote.
Peyote embodies the Creator’s spirit

Darrell Red Cloud, who is Oglala Lakota, remembers at age 4 using peyote and singing ceremonial songs at all-night peyote ceremonies with his family. Peyote has always been about forging a connection with the Creator, said Red Cloud. He’s the vice president of the Native American Church of North America.

“Our people were not religious people, we were prayerful people.”

Frank Dayish, former vice president of the Navajo Nation and chairperson of the Council of the Peyote Way of Life Coalition, compared peyote to the Eucharist in Catholicism.

“Peyote is my religion,” he said. “Everything in my life has been based on prayers through that sacrament.”

Adrian Primeaux, who is Yankton Sioux and Apache, says he grew up hearing the story of a malnourished and dehydrated Apache woman who fell behind her group during a forced relocation by the U.S. government in the 1830s.

“She was about to give up on life as she lay close to the Earth when she heard a plant speaking to her,” Primeaux said. “The peyote was telling her: Eat me and you will be well.”

She carried this plant back to Apache medicine men and elders who meditated and prayed with it, said Primeaux. He believes the Native American Church and what would become the Peyote Way of Life was unveiled during that spiritual quest.

Peyote is not just a medicinal herb — it is “a spiritual guide and a north star,” said Primeaux, who comes from five generations of peyote people. The plant has been a guiding light amid their traumatic history.

“It gave us hope and helped us process our thoughts, emotions and life purpose,” he said.
An initiative to conserve and protect peyote

In October 2017, the National Council of Native American Churches purchased 605 acres in Hebbronville, Texas, to establish a peyote preserve and a “spiritual homesite” that is now run by the Indigenous Peyote Conservation Initiative or IPCI.

Steven Benally, a Navajo elder from Sweetwater, Arizona, and an IPCI board member, remembers his annual pilgrimages to the peyote gardens with his family. He recalls losing access to the gardens after the “peyotero” system took over, where government-licensed peyoteros harvested the button-like tops of the plant by the thousands and sold them to Native American Church members.

This meant that Native American people could not freely go onto privately owned ranches and prayerfully harvest peyote as they had done for generations. They lost their sacred connection with the land, Benally said.

It wasn’t until he threw open the gate to their sprawling ranch, affectionately called “the 605,” that Benally felt connected once again. He was so overcome by emotion that he placed a sign at the entrance with the words: “This is real.”

“It felt like we were finally living what we just dreamed, prayed and talked about,” he said.

One of Benally’s favorite spots on the property is a hilltop bench — a tranquil corner where visitors have placed prayer notes, painted rocks and other offerings to a nearby cluster of naturally sprouted peyote. Benally sits on the bench inhaling the gentle breeze and taking in the stillness.

“Our belief is that these plants, these animals, these birds are just like us,” he said. “They can hear, they can understand. They have their powers, they have their place, a purpose and a reason — just like us.”

The peyote preserve is a conservation site where the plant is not harvested but propagated and replanted naturally in its habitat without chemicals, said Miriam Volat, executive director for the nonprofit that oversees it. Native Americans who can produce their tribal identification cards can camp at the preserve and prayerfully harvest from amiable surrounding ranches, she said.

The goal is to restore peyote and its habitat, making it abundant in the region within the next 50 years.

Peyote grown in their nursery is under the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency’s watchful eye, she said. Licensed to operate, the nonprofit tries to balance being welcoming with satisfying the agency’s requirement to secure the plant behind locked gates and camera monitoring.
The debate over peyote conservation

Those trying to protect peyote disagree on whether it should be grown outside its natural habitat. While scientists and conservationists say it is essential for the protection of the species, many Native American Church members say doing so would dilute its sacred nature.

Keeper Trout, a research scientist and co-founder of Texas-based Cactus Conservation Institute, remembers how abundantly peyote grew in the region during the 1970s. It’s all but disappeared.

“It was like walking on mattresses,” he said.

Trout empathizes with those who object on religious grounds, but he believes people should be able to cultivate and harvest anywhere. With a little help, Trout is confident the resilient plant can survive.

But many Native American Church members say where the plant grows matters. The ceremonial protocols were bestowed by the Creator’s grace and preserved through storytelling, said Hershel Clark, secretary for the Teesto chapter of the Azee Bee Nahagha of Diné Nation in Arizona.

“This is why we don’t support greenhouses, growing it outside its natural habitat or synthesizing it to make pills,” Clark said.

Red Cloud fears those changes would harm its sacredness.

“Then, it just becomes a drug that people depend on rather than a spiritual medicine,” he said.

Funding peyote preservation and conservation efforts has been a challenge as well.

The Native American Church of North America is calling on the U.S government to uphold its obligation to protect and preserve peyote in its natural habitat in southern Texas, which includes financial incentives for landowners, said Red Cloud. His organization is asking for a $5 million federal grant to jumpstart such a program.

IPCI started with seed money from Riverstyx Foundation, which is run by Cody Swift, a psychotherapist and prominent supporter of psychedelic therapy research. The organization continues to seek philanthropic dollars to carry the conservation effort forward and is not opposed to receiving funding from the U.S. government, Volat said.

“But, we’re not waiting for it,” she said.

There is suspicion and skepticism about Swift and other investors’ intentions in some corners of the Native American Church, Clark said. Swift has said in interviews that IPCI’s goal is to preserve peyote in its natural habitat under the leadership and guidance of Native American peyote people, a stance Volat, his co-director at the foundation, also affirms.
Demand for peyote exceeds supply

There is no question that opening peyote up to a broader market will create a supply crisis and increase access to those who have the financial resources, said Kevin Feeney, senior social sciences lecturer at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, who has studied the commodification of peyote.

Indigenous people would struggle to access their sacred plant while seeing others use it in a way they deem profane, he said.

Peyote supply remains limited for the Native American Church. Today, in southern Texas, only three licensed peyoteros are legally allowed to harvest the plant for sale to church members. Zulema “Julie” Morales, based in Rio Grande City, is one of them. She inherited the business from her father, Mauro Morales, who died two years ago.

She has been out in the fields since she was 10. Now 60, she says the peyote habitat is dwindling not because of peyoteros who harvest legally and ethically, but because of illegal poaching. She remembers her father gathering enough peyote to fill a dozen large trays while she can barely fill one.

Even though she is Mexican American and a Catholic, Morales, who charges 55 cents a button, considers it a privilege to provide peyote for ceremonial purposes. Her father, who customers called “grandpa,” hosted ceremonies for Native people every year and she has been a keen observer.

“As Mexican Americans, we value our traditions,” she said. “This is their tradition and it’s beautiful for us to be a part of that in our own way.”
Teaching future generations

At IPCI, one of the main goals is to teach future generations the value of getting back to their ancestors’ spiritual and healing ways, said Sandor Iron Rope, an Oglala Lakota spiritual leader and president of the Native American Church of South Dakota. At least 200 people gathered on IPCI’s grounds over Thanksgiving week, learning about peyote through panels, discussions, ceremony and prayer.

“We’ve put our moccasins and our footprints in this place,” Iron Rope said. “The hope is that these children, the next generation, will see the therapeutic value in getting rid of their phones and learning about what is right in front of them.”

Iron Rope says this is how he is fulfilling his responsibility to future generations.

“You can pray all you want, but you’re going to have to meet the Creator halfway somewhere,” he said. “You’re going to have to implement that prayer into action. And I see this as prayer in action.”

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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP’s collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.