Search Results for: motherhood

How Reshma Saujani Makes the Invisible Work of Motherhood Impossible to Ignore

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.

‘What About Me?’: Bringing Women’s Well-Being to the Forefront of Motherhood

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.

‘Tap Someone In’: Mini Timmaraju on Mentorship, Motherhood and Mobilizing Indian American Women

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.”

Why Trump’s Pronatalist Agenda Is Actually Anti-Motherhood

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.

Motherhood’s Dirty Secret? Sometimes It Feels Like Hate.

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.

Why Motherhood Is Harder in Some Countries Than Others: The Ms. Q&A With Abigail Leonard, Author of ‘Four Mothers’

“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.

‘Make Motherhood Great Again’: Pronatalism Finds a Comfortable Home in the Trump Administration

Once dismissed as fringe, pronatalism has moved into the mainstream—finding powerful champions in Trump, Vance and Musk, and gaining policy traction within the administration. Rooted in eugenics, antifeminism, and anti-immigrant sentiment, this ideology casts high birthrates as a patriotic duty and low fertility as a national threat.

Now, federal policies are beginning to reflect this dangerous worldview—one that sees women’s bodies as tools of the state and reproductive freedom as collateral damage.

U.N. Landmark Ruling Condemns Ecuador and Nicaragua for Forcing Girls Into Motherhood

For the first time in its history, the United Nations Human Rights Committee recognized in a Jan. 20 ruling that denying an abortion to a child is not just a denial of choice but an imposition of pregnancy and forced motherhood that irreversibly disrupts their health, well-being and life trajectory.

This landmark decision represents a crucial shift in how the international community addresses the intersection of children’s rights, reproductive rights and gender justice.

Rep. Kamlager-Dove: ‘IVF Allowed Me to Dream of Motherhood’

Last month, the Alabama State Supreme Court ruled that frozen embryos are children. The result: In vitro fertilization, or IVF, was paused for women across the state.  

Can you imagine the frustration that those women must be feeling? I can.

In Congress, I will continue to fight so that no one else has to go through the devastation that Alabama women are facing right now.