More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Transcript: Welcome to The Long Way Home. A five-part limited series that journeys into the heart of substance use disorders and recovery. With a focus on women, people in recovery, vulnerable communities, and those who have traveled the long way home, we explore how addiction uniquely impacts pregnant people, mothers, adolescents, and young adults. Through […]
The Trump administration is using one of the oldest tools of patriarchy—promising rewards for compliance—through a wave of proposed pronatalist policies designed to push women into motherhood and encourage them to give birth to more children.
A recent report by the National Women’s Law Center warns that these proposals are not random: They stem from an “obscure, dangerous, and increasingly influential movement of ‘pronatalists’” that are now dictating the Trump administration’s family policy.
According to NWLC, there are two major groups of pronatalists: Silicon Valley tech elites, such as Elon Musk, who claim that “high-IQ” people like themselves should be having more children; and traditional conservatives, who advocate for pushing women back into stay-at-home motherhood.
We can say, “We knew this would happen,” and tell Black single mothers, “I told you so,” all day long, but then what? There’s something hollow in the phrase—especially when it follows public documentation of abuse.
If we are people who truly believe that Halle Bailey, Keke Palmer and Skai Jackson deserved better, then we should be extending that same belief to the women we actually know.
(This essay is part of a collection presented by Ms. and the Groundswell Fund highlighting the work of Groundswell partners advancing inclusive democracy.)
In a state where abortion bans endanger lives and strip away autonomy, one South Carolina mother shares how fear, grief and rage have made her question whether she can risk motherhood again:
“I had to leave the state, my support system and my young son just to access the healthcare I needed.”
(This essay is part of a collection presented by Ms. and the Groundswell Fund highlighting the work of Groundswell partners advancing inclusive democracy.)
Most women are taught to make motherhood look effortless. Reshma Saujani wants you to see that we were never supposed to do it alone.
In a country that still treats caregiving as a personal responsibility rather than a public good, Saujani is changing the script. Not by asking for sympathy, but by exposing the architecture of the lie—and building something better in its place.
“I come from a long line of rule-breakers,” she told me. “My parents fled a dictator. They landed in Chicago with nothing. I grew up surrounded by refugees who were just trying to make it work. That kind of survival teaches you two things: one, that struggle is constant—and two, that silence is dangerous.”
She was a rule-breaker long before she was a movement-builder—always challenging authority, always in detention. “I’ve never been good at following the script,” she said. And that’s exactly what makes her effective.
Earlier this month, I attended a “power breakfast” hosted by the Chamber of Mothers, an organization and movement driving national support for mothers. I was shocked and frankly disillusioned by how much basic maternal healthcare was emphasized as an area of desperate need.
The way the U.S. understands, or refuses to understand, maternal health makes even asking for care a baffling proposition. Dawn Huckelbridge, founder of Paid Leave for All, recounted the moment she truly became “fired up and fed up” after giving birth to her first child. Huckelbridge was prepared in every sense: She had a supportive partner, health insurance and parents who could help her out. Upon delivering her baby, what she recalls as a traumatic experience for her mind and body, she was given even more resources for the baby: diapers, blankets, instructive care literature.
And when she asked her doctor, “Well, what about me? What do I have to do to take care of my body?” he replied, “Things just have a way of healing.” That was the official prescription for a mother who had been carrying a baby for 40 weeks and had only given birth a moment ago.
“I’d hate to believe that it’s because we don’t care about mothers and that we don’t want to see them in power,” said Erin Erenberg, co-founder and CEO of the Chamber of Mothers.
Mini Timmaraju, president and CEO of Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL), doesn’t just rise—she brings others with her. This ethos of tapping in challenges Indian American women to move from individual achievement to collective empowerment.
As my conversation with Timmaraju unfolded, we explored her childhood, her professional journey and the simplest yet most impactful action she believes Indian American women should take right now. It’s clear that Timmaraju’s story is not just about her own path, but about building pathways for others.
“We need to build our own villages—not just for family, but for career and leadership, too,” she said. “We shouldn’t do it alone.”
This Mother’s Day, for the 111th year in a row, families across the nation will gather to celebrate all the love, care and work provided by the mothers in their lives. Woodrow Wilson declared Mother’s Day a federal holiday nearly a year after he established the basis of today’s modern income tax system, allowing him to lower tariff rates on many of the basic necessities American families relied on in 1914.
It is darkly ironic that more than a century later, the Trump administration is attempting to reverse these pro-family policies, while at the same time promoting a pronatalist agenda aimed at creating more mothers and larger families.
Despite promoting motherhood, Trump’s policies threaten the economic stability of the 45 percent of mothers who are primary breadwinners—especially single moms and women of color.
Mothering is traditionally expressed in terms of extremes: The mother is imagined as either all giving, tender and devoted … or its opposite: mean, selfish and self-serving.
Social media generally mirrors this trend and divides mothering between something that is achievable in all its wonder and selflessness, or an experience that is continually dismal.
It is both.
“Parenthood is shaped by the broad systems our societies have built over time,” writes award-winning journalist and mother Abigail Leonard in Four Mothers: An Intimate Journey Through the First Year of Parenthood in Four Countries. “Many of the big decisions, like how much time to spend with their children and how to divide the emotional and physical labor with their partner, are heavily determined by the social structures of the place women give birth.”
The ways this works to reinforce or expand ideas about gender, family, reproduction and out-of-home work are at the core of Leonard’s deeply reported interrogation of the social, emotional and physical toll of parenthood in Finland, Japan, Kenya and the United States.