Author: Carrie N. Baker

Carrie N. Baker, J.D., Ph.D., is the Sylvia Dlugasch Bauman professor of American Studies and the chair of the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. She is a contributing editor at Ms. magazine. Read her latest book at Abortion Pills: U.S. History and Politics (Amherst College Press, December 2024). You can contact Dr. Baker at cbaker@msmagazine.com or follow her on Bluesky @carrienbaker.bsky.social.

‘Fake Clinics Are Spooky!’ and ‘Haunted by Hidden Agendas’: Feminist Halloween Campaign Unmasks CPCs’ Antiabortion Deception

The real Halloween horror villains are antiabortion organizations masquerading as legitimate healthcare clinics while working to prevent women from accessing abortion care.

Throughout October, Reproductive Transparency Now and the Southwest Women’s Law Center have joined forces for a Halloween-themed campaign exposing the deceptive practices of crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs): antiabortion organizations that seek to reach vulnerable women and girls facing unintended pregnancies to prevent them from accessing abortion and prenatal care.

“Challenging CPCs is about more than identifying deceptive practices. It is about protecting people’s ability to make informed decisions about their bodies, pregnancies and families without coercion or manipulation and ensuring that people can access both comprehensive reproductive healthcare and the support they need,” said Hailey Zock of the Southwest Women’s Law Center.

The Ripple Effect: How Abortion Bans Threaten the Entire Healthcare Ecosystem

In her new book Side Effects: How Abortion Bans Impact Everyone’s Health, journalist Alice Miranda Ollstein shows that abortion bans aren’t just restricting reproductive care—they’re disrupting cancer treatments, chronic disease medications, fertility services and lifesaving medical research.

“… Legal restrictions on reproductive healthcare ripple outwards, compromising the health and safety of all patients.”

“… We are seeing a broader access crisis: Doctors are leaving restrictive states because they feel they can no longer practice medicine ethically or legally …”

“In emergency care, misoprostol is vital for stopping postpartum hemorrhage. … Now, strict controlled-substance storage rules force providers to retrieve it from locked rooms down the hall or in another building.”

An ‘Old Boy’s Network’: Groundbreaking Report Exposes Decades of Catholic Clergy Abuse and Ongoing Protection of Abusers

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Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell released a 203-page report on Sept. 30 showing more than 270 Catholic priests abused at least 1,000 children over several decades in the dioceses of Fall River, Springfield and Worcester.

The report focuses on how church leadership, including bishops, perpetuated this abuse by failing to report crimes to the police, obstructing investigations into these crimes and repeatedly reassigning perpetrators to new parishes, where they abused even more children. The report also details the ways current Catholic leadership continues to circumvent policies and procedures designed to protect children.

“For decades, survivors of clergy sexual abuse, including those who are no longer alive, have carried the devastating consequences of abuse, while the institutions entrusted with their care too often failed to protect them,” said AG Campbell. “This report provides for the first time a public accounting of the unimaginable harms afflicted on children in the Fall River, Springfield and Worcester dioceses.”

This report is the latest of many revealing widespread clergy sexual abuse and institutional coverups in the Catholic Church and other male-dominated patriarchal religions.

The Massachusetts attorney general’s report catalogs testimony from several survivors of abuse, including Frank Fitzpatrick, who was repeatedly gang-raped by James Porter and other priests beginning when he was a 9-year-old altar boy.

“I am that boy. I carry him with me, always,” wrote Fitzpatrick. “He took your violence, you shameful enablers who do nothing but cover up and perpetuate the cycle of systemic abuse. You call yourselves representatives of God. God has no place in anything you stand for. God is safety; God is nurturing; God is protection; God is Love.”

Female Student-Athletes File Title IX Lawsuit Against UC Davis for Sex Discrimination, Condemn Treating Women Like ‘Second-Class Citizens’

On Sep. 29, 19 former members of UC Davis’ recently-eliminated female equestrian team filed a sex discrimination class action against the school.

The students allege the school discriminated against all its female student-athletes by depriving them of equal athletic financial aid, in violation of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.

“We were devastated when UC Davis eliminated the equestrian team, which was successful and thriving,” said Anna Donovan, a UC Davis senior and award-winning former equestrian team member. “Then, we were stunned even more when the school tried to defend its decision by releasing a consultant’s report showing it was depriving women athletes annually of hundreds of thousands of dollars in equal athletic financial aid.”

Antiabortion Politics Blocks Research on Fibroids, Endometriosis and Breast Cancer. The Media Is Finally Paying Attention.

Mifepristone is known as the abortion pill, but it has other uses most Americans have never heard about. For more than three decades, scientists have known this medication could do far more than end a pregnancy. Research shows mifepristone and a similar drug ulipristal acetate (sold under the brand name ella) can shrink fibroids, treat endometriosis and may treat and even prevent breast cancer.

Despite this huge potential to improve women’s health and well-being, abortion opponents have obstructed research into these treatments for decades, fearing anything that could make mifepristone more available would weaken their fight against abortion.

The burden of this obstruction has fallen on women, left to suffer from years of painful fibroids and endometriosis, heavy bleeding and reduced fertility, or death from aggressive forms of breast cancer, while research that could help sits on the shelf.

For years, the fight to unlock mifepristone’s lifesaving potential was a story only feminist media would tell, but mainstream media is finally catching up.

‘Furious’ Is a Cathartic Feminist Fable After Years of Epstein Stonewalling

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Congress passed the Epstein Transparency Act in November 2025, yet the Department of Justice is refusing to release all the Epstein files. For those they have released, the DOJ redacted the perpetrators’ names while revealing the victims’ names. We have watched the victims demand accountability at the Capitol and attend congressional hearings, while being ignored by attorneys general, politicians and prosecutors—over and over. No one has been charged. No one has been charged, prosecuted or convicted other than one woman, Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell.

As we rage against the injustices of Epstein’s crimes and the ongoing cover-ups, we find dark satisfaction in the new Hulu series Furious that portrays women with no other recourse fighting back against perpetrators and the protectors and systems that are failing to hold these abusers accountable.

Furious invites survivors of sexual abuse and allies to imagine what it would feel like to “have all the fucking power in the world,” then tap into that power to continue the work of destroying rape culture.

Fifth Circuit Judges Seem Skeptical of Louisiana’s Challenge to Telehealth Abortion

On Wednesday, Sep. 9, a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans heard oral arguments in Louisiana v. FDA, a lawsuit filed by the Louisiana attorney general seeking to end telehealth abortion nationwide, even in states that protect abortion access.

Since the fall of Roe and a national snapback of abortion rights in a majority of U.S. states, the antiabortion movement has been laser focused on trying to restrict telehealth abortion because it’s increasing in both awareness and popularity, and it allows patients to circumvent state bans.

The 5th Circuit is considered one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country. But the three-judge panel randomly selected to hear Wednesday’s case included two judges appointed by Democratic presidents: Judge Stephen Higginson, appointed by former President Barack Obama; and Judge Dana Douglas, by former President Joe Biden. The third judge, Judy Richman, was appointed by George W. Bush.

During oral arguments, all three judges indicated skepticism about Louisiana’s arguments, starting with Louisiana’s right to bring the case.

While the recent 5th Circuit hearing offers hope that efforts to restrict mifepristone through the courts will not succeed anytime soon, two greater threats remain: Trump’s antiabortion nominee to lead the FDA, Heidi Overton, and Attorney General Todd Blanche’s promise to restrict the mailing of mifepristone under the Comstock Act. (This move would spur immediate lawsuits by Democratic states and manufacturers of mifepristone.)

Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates will never give up in finding new ways to put abortion pills in women’s hands.

Massachusetts Decriminalized Later Abortion, No Health Emergency Required

Massachusetts law no longer imposes a gestational-age limit on abortion—meaning for the first time, a woman in the state can choose to end her pregnancy at any point, without a prosecutor looking over her doctor’s shoulder.

Gov. Maura Healey (D) last month signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, joining nine other states—Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon and Vermon, plus D.C.—in trusting patients and medical professionals to make abortion decisions throughout pregnancy, rather than politicians, police and prosecutors.

In Massachusetts, the legislative hearings focused on women who experienced a severe fetal diagnosis or a threat to their own health and had to travel out of state for medical care, which are very sympathetic stories that were able to win over many supporters.

While it’s certainly important that states like Massachusetts have made later abortion more accessible to people experiencing health emergencies, the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act is important for everyone seeking later abortion care, whatever the reason.

Beyond Abortion: How the ERA Could Transform Pregnancy, Work and Family Life

On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband, John, beseeching him to “remember the ladies” as he and his peers were drafting the Declaration of Independence. She warned, “All Men would be tyrants if they could” and urged him to “not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.”

He ignored her warning when she wrote: “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

Now, 250 years later, women are still fighting for inclusion.

The potential for state ERAs to advance the rights of women and girls is tremendous, but only if we have the will—and the resources—to push for favorable state supreme courts and to use ERAs to challenge discriminatory government policies.

While we fight for a Congress that will publish the federal ERA and a U.S. Supreme Court that will robustly interpret it, feminists are building an ERA jurisprudence that will one day achieve Abigail Adams’ dream: for women to finally, truly, be equal citizens and live freely, safely and empowered throughout the United States.

After Dobbs, the ERA Offers a New Path to Abortion Rights

For 250 years, women have been fighting for inclusion in the nation’s founding promise of equality. The Equal Rights Amendment would finally guarantee that equality under the U.S. Constitution—and could give Congress and the courts powerful new tools to address discrimination in education, employment, healthcare and safety. It could also provide a constitutional basis for challenging abortion bans and restrictions as forms of sex discrimination.

But feminists do not have to wait for federal recognition of the ERA to put equality guarantees to work. State constitutions are already providing a path forward.

In Nevada, advocates successfully challenged the state’s ban on Medicaid funding for abortion under its Equal Rights Amendment; in Pennsylvania, courts have opened the door to treating restrictions on abortion funding as sex discrimination; and in Colorado, feminist lawyers are arguing that parental-notification requirements impose unequal burdens on young women while placing no comparable restrictions on young men.

At a moment when abortion rights no longer have federal constitutional protection, state ERAs offer feminists another constitutional path—not only to challenge abortion restrictions, but to confront the stereotypes and unequal burdens beneath them. Building strong interpretations of equality at the state level can protect women now while laying the groundwork for the expansive vision of sex equality a federal ERA could one day deliver nationwide.

(This essay is part of FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, a special series examining the next chapter of American democracy through a feminist lens. As the nation marks its 250th anniversary, the series taps the thought leaders of today to debut game-changing ideas for the next 250 years.)