Your questions, answered.

An essential part of Tangle is engaging with readers — through live events, email exchanges, and now in social channels like Reddit and our new texting platform, Subtext. But something we’ve done since the beginning is answer a reader question in our main newsletter. Over time, we’ve gotten more questions than we can answer — but many of the questions that haven’t made it into the daily newsletter or podcast are still worth answering. 

So we devote an occasional Friday edition to getting to the questions we didn’t have the space to answer. A lot of these questions allow us to get into more detail and cover ground we might not cover in the daily newsletter, so we love the opportunity to dig in and go deep. Today, the whole Tangle editorial team is fielding your questions on topics ranging from abortion to immigration to our editorial standards. Enjoy!

Q: When researching a news story to write a My Take, how do you avoid or minimize poisoning the waters, so to speak, with opinions and biases that might affect your take? Or do you just absorb it all and then try to press a mental reset button before forming your opinion?

— Ann from Missoula, MT

Managing Editor Ari Weitzman: It’s definitely more of the latter. I find that my first reaction to a story is almost never the full opinion that I end up having after I pause, read more, and consider multiple points of view. As an example, look at the last take I authored — on the appeals court greenlighting Trump’s National Guard deployment to Portland. I came in thinking that the arguments the Trump administration had been advancing were insufficient to justify the deployments, but their arguments had actually evolved to something I found more convincing and my perspective shifted. I think that’s the whole point of doing this work; you come in with a bias, you read more, then your opinion shifts to encompass the validity of different viewpoints. 

Senior Editor Will Kaback: Like Ari, I typically start by reading a range of sources and opinions about the topic, often taking notes about disputed facts, differences in framing, and areas where the sides seem to be talking past each other. I also make note of my initial feelings about the story before I start this research, then assess how my position has moved (if at all) after doing this reading. From there, I feel prepared to start organizing my thoughts. 

Executive Editor Isaac Saul: I have a very specific strategy of seeking out opinions I suspect will challenge my own first. So if a Supreme Court ruling comes down that my initial gut reaction is to oppose, I make sure to first poison the well against my priors and then see what happens. You can’t always overcome your own biases, but I think having your own waters poisoned a bit is kind of the point!

Q: Can you track the effects so far on women from the Dobbs decision that undid the Roe v. Wade decision? 

Specifically, the medical restrictions, for example Adriana Smith from Georgia who was on life support and forced to birth a child against family wishes. 

How else does this decision affect women’s health access in this country? 

— Sonja from Los Angeles, CA 

Associate Editor Audrey Moorehead: I’m going to address this question in two parts, starting with how Dobbs has affected women’s healthcare. Then, I want to talk about the case of Adriana Smith, because — contrary to media coverage — Smith’s case would likely have played out the same way regardless of Dobbs. 

In the aftermath of Dobbs, states took various approaches to their laws on abortion. According to the Center for Reproductive Rights, 12 states enacted complete bans; 14 states are “hostile,” which encompasses a variety of restrictions that fall short of total bans; 5 states have no protections for abortion but still permit the procedure; 14 states have protected abortion access; and 11 states have expanded abortion access. This analysis leaves out some detail about abortion restrictions and protections in each state, but it’s an effective summary.

Beyond access to abortion as a procedure, the Dobbs decision has impacted women’s health more broadly. One analysis from the Gender Equity Policy Institute found that the maternal mortality rate in states with abortion bans is up to two times higher on average than it is in states with abortion protections, and that this disparity disproportionately affects women of color. Meanwhile, other analyses have found that restrictions on abortion access worsened access to contraceptive, miscarriage, and maternity care because of funding issues, stigma, and providers’ fears of litigation.

However, many states’ abortion restrictions provide explicit carveouts that protect providers’ ability to remove miscarriages and ectopic pregnancies. While data and media coverage show that some women have been turned away from necessary, non-abortion-related care in states with abortion restrictions, pro-life advocates who track women’s health contend that the issue lies with fear and miseducation, not the laws themselves. In response, these states are issuing more specific guidance on how to implement their laws, which could improve maternal health outcomes.

Now, let’s talk about the case of Adriana Smith, and how the media got it wrong.

For the unfamiliar, Adriana Smith was a Georgia nurse who was declared brain dead in February 2025 after suffering from blood clots in her brain. Her case garnered national media attention because at the time, she was eight weeks pregnant — and Smith’s family claimed the Georgia hospital treating her said they were legally required to keep Smith on life support until her fetus could be delivered safely. Smith’s mother, April Newkirk, told the media that while she wouldn’t say whether the family would have taken Smith off life support and terminated the pregnancy, she felt that they “should have had a choice.”

Multiple outlets claimed that Smith was kept on life support as a result of Georgia’s LIFE Act, a law that went into effect after the Dobbs decision and banned abortions after fetal heartbeats become detectable. In fact, Smith’s family said that this was what the hospital had told them. The hospital claimed in a statement that it made its decision “in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws.” 

The last part of that statement is the key, here: “all other applicable laws.” Because, as Georgia’s attorney general said in a statement, the LIFE Act’s language only prohibits actions taken “with the purpose to terminate a pregnancy,” with exceptions for miscarriages (“spontaneous abortions”) and ectopic pregnancies. Taking Smith off life support doesn’t fit those guidelines because Smith’s pregnancy would have ended as a secondary effect of stopping Smith’s treatment, not as the result of an intentional abortion.

However, another Georgia law likely created the legal gray area in which Smith’s case tragically fell: a 2007 law regarding advance directives for pregnant women upon brain death. This law requires physicians to satisfy two conditions before ending life support care for pregnant patients: First, the fetus must be determined inviable. Second, the patient must have had an advance directive in place requesting the halt of life-saving measures. In Smith’s case, the heartbeat language in the LIFE Act may have impacted doctors’ determination of fetal viability; but even in that case, the 2007 law’s language requires inviability and an advance directive. Smith didn’t have an advance directive in place, and the Georgia law didn’t include a provision that allowed her family to make that decision after she was incapacitated — so, legally, it shouldn’t have been a consideration.

Smith’s case presents a genuinely unsettling picture of the way medical advancements have created fraught questions surrounding the definition of death and the ethics of life support in cases of pregnancy — but these questions aren’t predicated on abortion access. Indeed, many states with abortion protections have life-support laws similar to Georgia’s. 

Unfortunately, the media attention’s focus on Georgia’s abortion law obscured the important details of the case that are worthy of more nuanced, separate debate.

Finally, an update on Adriana Smith and her child: Smith’s baby, whom her family named Chance, was born on June 13, and Smith was taken off life support and passed away the following week. In mid-October, Smith’s mother shared in a GoFundMe update that baby Chance, still in the NICU, is doing well.

Q: As the person who asked the question [about how Tangle would cover Nazi Germany in the 1930s], I want to say that I’ve been able to have a fruitful email dialogue with Ari about it. He let me know that part of his interpretation of the question was that it was my attempt to imply that present-day U.S. is the same as early 1930s Germany. I was honestly trying to understand how to contextualize Tangle’s perspectives on the difference between the two and thought that was a concrete way to ask the question. 

I want to be clear that I absolutely agree that it is unhelpful to throw around historical references in callous, simplistic, unthoughtful, and inflammatory ways. I do not — and never have — called any public figure Hitler. I have no illusions about the horrors and atrocities of the Holocaust, and I would never invoke it as a way to gain political points.

But this wasn’t the question I really wanted Tangle to answer. I was hoping that Tangle would have covered the Nazis on their ascendancy, in the late 1920s when Hitler was just out of (or still in) prison and before the Reichstag fire. I was wondering if Tangle would be able to see the rising fascist state coming, and if they think their format would have prevented them from calling it out.

— Sarah from Estes Park, CO

Executive Editor Isaac Saul: First, I’ll just throw out that when I read your initial question, I also interpreted it the way Ari did. I appreciated a lot of what Ari wrote, including the stark comparisons between how Nazi Germany operated in the wake of the Reichstag fire and how different (and far away) that world is from anything we are experiencing here, today.