New School Year, Same Texas Chaos. From The Barbed Wire.

Howdy, folks! I’m Brian Gaar, senior editor of The Barbed Wire. The backpacks are loaded, the buses are here, and Texas is already failing its first pop quiz of the new school year. Kids are getting stabbed across the state, women are still suffering under abortion bans, and in Austin, Facebook detectives are convinced the cops are hiding a serial killer. Meanwhile, the unthinkable has happened: Just when I thought I’d never budge on hating the Dallas Cowboys, Netflix managed to make Jerry Jones… almost likable.

The Wild Texas Newsletter is here with your homework reading assignment: four stories that prove the Lone Star State is still the weirdest classroom in America. 

Four years into abortion bans, pregnancy is more dangerous, healthcare providers are burning out, and lawmakers are doubling down with $100,000 bounties for anyone caught providing pills. The bill, which passed the Texas Senate on Tuesday night, is just another way Texas makes women suffer while pretending these laws are about “life.” In a moving guest essay, Texas mother Kaitlyn Kash begs Gov. Greg Abbott not to sign the “bounty hunter” ban when it hits his desk.

Moving on, after fewer than two weeks back on campus, a boy younger than 17 was stabbed in Denton. Parents say the school district downplayed the attack with a vague email about a student “in need of medical attention,” leaving many to learn the truth from social media. It’s the same story across Texas — in Harris County, Killeen, and Frisco — where other stabbings have left students dead or hospitalized while parents say administrators failed to protect their children or even communicate properly about the violent crimes. 

Meanwhile, a Texas State study says there’s no “Rainey Street Ripper.” The drownings in Lady Bird Lake are tragic accidents consistent with the city’s growing population and increased night life, not murder. But with 92,000 Facebook sleuths convinced the cops are covering for themselves, the conspiracy lives on. In Austin, reality never stood a chance.And finally, I wrote about my lifelong hatred of the Dallas Cowboys. I watched Netflix’s new Jerry Jones doc and, against my will, started liking the man. He’s rich, loud, hated, and eternal — basically our royal family, if the Windsors knew what a 3-4 defense was.

I Almost Died After Giving Birth. Texas Just Made That More Likely for Everyone.

Guest Essay: The Women and Child Protection Act does not protect anyone. Instead, it will cause clinicians to second guess if they can use the very tools needed to keep patients alive.

By Kaitlyn Kash

I remember the moment my world went sideways: My daughter had just been born, warm against my chest, when the room shifted from joy to panic. I was hemorrhaging. My placenta was not delivering as it should. I kept asking, “Are we going to the OR?” Minutes stretched into an hour. Cabinets slammed. People rushed. I thought, I am going to die, and I won’t even get to name my child.

I survived — barely. I needed a procedure that, in normal circumstances, is routine and fast. 

Instead, I waited while blood gushed out on my hospital bed. Afterward, I learned what many Texans already know: Care that should be straightforward becomes confusing and delayed when politics wedges itself between doctors and their patients.

That day turned me from a grateful new mom into a reluctant witness. It shouldn’t take nearly dying to understand that in Texas, the simplest reproductive care — care used for miscarriages, for preventing hemorrhage, for clearing the uterus — is treated with suspicion by politicians with zero medical training. And now lawmakers led by the Texas GOP want to supercharge that fear.

Let’s call House Bill 7 what it is: an attack on maternal health. House Bill 7, The Women and Child Protection Act, does not protect anyone. 

Instead, it will cause clinicians to second guess if they can use the very tools needed to keep patients alive — the same medications and procedures used every day to control bleeding after delivery, manage miscarriages, and avoid sepsis. If you punish the people who prescribe, dispense, or even discuss those tools, care gets slower and sloppier. In obstetrics, delays are critical. They result in blood loss, infection, hysterectomies, and funerals.

What does that mean in real life? A pharmacist hesitates and a postpartum mom bleeds longer. 

A hospital lawyer needs to sign-off and a D&C gets delayed. A miscarriage patient is told to “come back sicker” so the paperwork is cleaner. House Bill 7 doesn’t create safety — it creates second-guessing in the hour when minutes matter most.

I’ve heard people say, “Well, abortion doesn’t affect me.” 

It’s hard to hear that and not think of the blood pooling under my body while I waited for a basic procedure. This isn’t theoretical. The same medications and techniques labeled “abortion” are often the fastest, safest way to treat complications after childbirth and miscarriage. If you’ve ever needed care after birth — control a hemorrhage, remove retained placenta, treat an incomplete miscarriage — you’ve already relied on the very care House Bill 7 puts under threat.

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