Senate Bill 2420<\/a>, authored by state Sen. Angela Paxton (R-McKinney) and sponsored by Dunmoyer\u2019s wife, state Rep. Caroline Fairly (R-Amarillo), in the Texas House last year, requires operators to verify the age of consumers and also mandates parental consent for app store purchases and downloads for those under the age of 18.\u00a0<\/p>\nSeveral committee members expressed dismay as Dunmoyer detailed the various methods by which social media algorithms are believed to be shaped, including \u201cby pupil dilation, how you\u2019re engaging with the content, and whether it gets your heart rate activated.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the general consensus among lawmakers on the committee appeared to be that it\u2019s “going to take an act of Congress\u201d to fully address the issue, as Pierson stated, several lawmakers and witnesses alike pushed for exploration into how the state could increase accountability for such harms caused by the platforms \u2014 while concluding that further discussion will be needed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The issue will once again bring the subject of the government\u2019s role in regulating private companies, intersecting with parental responsibility and the corresponding legislation\u2019s odds in court, back to the Texas Legislature\u2019s attention. \u00a0<\/p>\n
Among the more contentious subjects broached during the hearing on Thursday was the prevention of infant mortality, which brought up the state\u2019s handling of abortion and the reasons behind certain demographics\u2019 higher rates of infant and maternal mortality.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The health of the mother when the child was conceived, as well as preterm birth before 37 weeks gestation, were listed as the primary contributors to excess infant mortality, per Dr. Kelly Fegan-Bohm, associate deputy commissioner at the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS). She also shared that DSHS has updated its data on the subject to include the years through 2025 and offered a few suggestions for programs that could be created in the state to address the issue.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cTo address very low birth weight, it could focus on early consistent education for preconception health and supporting women and families for them to be as healthy as possible before becoming pregnant and accessing prenatal care in the first trimester,\u201d Fegan-Bohm said.<\/p>\n
One witness, Dr. Uchenna Jones, a family physician in Freeport, Texas, criticized the state for lacking the following initiatives: a statewide Sudden Infant Death Syndrome program, infant mortality advisory council, regional infant mortality coordinators, coordinated statewide home visiting infrastructure \u201cthat reaches all high-risk families,\u201d and a statewide perinatal grief and family support program.\u00a0<\/p>\n
In one of the more direct comments made by a Democratic lawmaker on the committee against Republican leadership, state Rep. Lauren Ashley Simmons (D-Houston) said, \u201cTexas cannot tout itself as a pro-life state with carefully curated photo ops at the Governor’s Mansion and then scoff at opportunities to save babies because we\u2019re worried about cost, or we want to argue with the experts and the doctors about science.\u201d<\/p>\n
In response to Simmons\u2019 request for her to elaborate on the higher rate of black infant and maternal mortality, Jones said that she was \u201cvery careful\u201d in how she laid out the data in her testimony, \u201cknowing that we have a Republican stint in our state.\u201d She said she didn\u2019t want to be written off as just being concerned about one particular race of babies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The driving question for much of the remaining conversation centered on improving related data: whether the numbers surrounding infant and closely connected maternal mortality are being collected properly, why they might not be, how to reform the process, and the necessity of such information before moving forward with the issue legislatively.\u00a0<\/p>\n
As Republican and Democratic lawmakers clashed on several points when abortion was tied back into the conversation, the struggle for the committee members in the upcoming session was laid out, promising robust future hearings \u2014 particularly as they\u2019ll be tackling the new charge on women\u2019s hormonal health and improved infant health policy in the coming months, with starkly different worldviews on beginning-of-life ethics.\u00a0<\/p>\n
VanDeaver was honored at the end of the nine-hour hearing, as it will be the last one he chairs due to his impending retirement<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It took nearly all day Thursday for the Texas House Committee on Public Health to discuss a plethora…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":415240,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4970,2498,144680,144679,35934,19836,125565,144678,702,144677,27,29,144676,1862,28],"class_list":["post-415239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-abortion","tag-angela-paxton","tag-caroline-fairly","tag-daniel-flint","tag-gary-vandeaver","tag-infant-mortality","tag-katrina-pierson","tag-menopause-and-access-to-evidence-based-medicine","tag-social-media","tag-subcommittee-on-maternal-health","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-house-committee-on-public-health","tag-texas-house-of-representatives","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415239","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415239"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415239\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/415240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415239"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415239"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415239"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}