More Than A Magazine, A Movement
As Republicans create ever higher barriers to abortion that push abortion seekers later into pregnancy, U.S.-based activists are learning from Latin American feminists who have developed protocols to make second-trimester medication abortion easier and safer.
“One in three Americans are under-babied,” declared Trump’s Medicare and Medicaid chief Dr. Mehmet Oz last week, echoing JD Vance’s contempt for “childless cat ladies.”
Guided by evangelical supporters, the Trump administration is eroding longstanding civil rights protections, restricting access to contraception and abortion, and weakening support systems for single mothers and their children. The goal is clear: to pressure women into marriage and motherhood while making the patriarchal family the center of American life.
The administration’s policies closely track the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, which seeks to incentivize what it calls “natural marriage”—a heterosexual household with a breadwinner father, stay-at-home mother and biologically related children.
Meanwhile, the administration’s new Moms.Gov website directs pregnant women to antiabortion organizations that that have been widely criticized for their misleading information about options and for their collection of patients’ sensitive personal information.
Taxpayer dollars are increasingly being used to advance a vision of society rooted in patriarchal family structures and reproductive coercion.
Thursday, May 14, at 5 p.m. ET, the Supreme Court’s temporary stay in the mifepristone case is set to expire, once again leaving abortion providers, patients and advocates waiting to see whether the Court will extend the pause, or allow the Fifth Circuit’s restrictions on mifepristone to take effect.
If the Court does nothing, the lower-court ruling could snap back into place, threatening mail-order and telemedicine access to mifepristone, one of the two drugs commonly used in medication abortion.
But abortion rights advocates say the story does not end there. Telemedicine abortion networks, shield-law protections, advance provision and community-based access have already reshaped abortion care in the post-Dobbs landscape—and those systems are continuing to evolve.
Julie F. Kay, a human rights lawyer and founder and executive director of Reproductive Futures, has spent years working at the intersection of reproductive rights, telemedicine abortion and shield-law protections. She co-founded the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine, challenged Ireland’s abortion ban before the European Court of Human Rights, and co-authored Controlling Women: What We Must Do Now to Save Reproductive Freedom.
On May 1, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a sweeping ruling seeking to prohibit telehealth prescribing of mifepristone, forcing women to see a provider in-person to acquire the first pill in the standard two-drug medication abortion regimen. The decision would have blocked U.S. clinicians from mailing abortion pills after telehealth consultations nationwide.
On May 4, however, the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily paused that ruling, preserving current telehealth and mail access while the justices consider next steps. The Court’s temporary ruling was set to last until 5 p.m. ET on Monday, May 11, giving the justices time to decide whether to extend the pause or let the lower-court ruling take effect.
Then, on Monday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court briefly extended its temporary order preserving telehealth and mail access to mifepristone while the justices continue deliberating over the emergency appeal. Justice Samuel Alito extended the Court’s administrative stay through Thursday, May 14, at 5 p.m. ET, keeping on hold the Fifth Circuit’s May 1 ruling that would have required patients nationwide to obtain the medication through in-person visits. The order means that, for now, people can still access mifepristone through telehealth consultations and mail delivery under the current FDA rules.
National Institute for Reproductive Health president Christian LoBue said the Supreme Court’s decision “preserves telehealth access to mifepristone for now,” but warned it also “prolongs an untenable state of uncertainty for patients and providers nationwide.” Antiabortion forces are “focused on creating chaos and fear, not improving health outcomes,” she said, urging states to instead focus on strengthening protections for providers, patient privacy and access to medication abortion.
Regardless of what the courts ultimately decide, abortion access advocates, international telehealth providers and community networks say they are prepared to continue helping people access abortion pills.
Either way, the infrastructure for medication abortion access already exists—and it is not disappearing.
The Trump administration claims its investigation into Smith College is about defending women. In reality, it is an attack on the rights of women at Smith to define their own community, values and mission without political interference from Washington.
The Department of Education argues that by admitting transgender women and allowing them access to campus housing and facilities, Smith may have violated Title IX. But that argument collapses under even a basic reading of the law. Title IX simply does not apply to admissions at private undergraduate colleges like Smith.
The administration’s complaint is also striking because it is not based on evidence that Smith students have been harmed or excluded from campus life. There is no public record of students filing complaints about the college’s housing, bathrooms or locker rooms policies. Instead, this investigation grew out of pressure from a conservative advocacy group determined to use federal power to impose its ideological agenda on colleges and universities.
Smith’s campus policies were shaped over years by students, faculty and administrators themselves—including cisgender women students who pushed the college to open admissions to transgender women more than a decade ago.
At its core, this investigation is about far more than one women’s college. It reflects the Trump administration’s broader campaign against trans rights, higher education and liberal arts institutions that encourage critical thought, inclusion and intellectual independence.
Congress passed Title IX to expand educational opportunities for women. Now, the administration is attempting to weaponize that same civil rights law to undermine women’s education and bully colleges into abandoning their own principles.
As a professor at Smith College and chair of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality, I have closely followed the Trump administration’s attacks on higher education—and on my field in particular.
This week, those attacks landed squarely on my own campus: The Department of Education has opened a civil rights investigation into Smith’s policy of admitting transgender women, arguing the college may be violating Title IX by recognizing gender identity rather than “biological sex.” The probe—prompted by a complaint from a conservative advocacy group—questions whether a women’s college can remain legally “single sex” while including trans women, and raises the possibility of federal penalties or loss of status.
This move is not an isolated action. It is part of a broader campaign to redefine civil rights protections in ways that exclude transgender people, and to pressure colleges and universities into compliance with that vision.
It is also one of many recent attacks on higher education—especially liberal arts institutions—by Republican lawmakers and the Trump administration, aimed at universities they view as out of step with a conservative, anti-feminist agenda. In a 2021 speech titled “Universities Are the Enemy,” JD Vance declared, “We must aggressively attack the universities in this country. … Maybe it’s time to seize the endowments, penalize them for being on the wrong side of some of these culture war issues.”
Women’s, gender and sexuality studies teaches students to think critically, to question the status quo and to understand how power shapes our lives across gender, race, class, sexuality and more. These are precisely the kinds of questions that have made the field a target. Rather than engage with this work, critics have increasingly sought to discredit or dismantle it altogether. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 provides a roadmap for doing just that—but many of these strategies have already been tested at the state level.
The U.S. Supreme Court has temporarily paused the Fifth Circuit’s Friday ruling that would have tightened access to mifepristone, preserving the current status quo while the justices consider the emergency appeal. The order keeps telehealth and mail access in place for now.
The Monday morning emergency action from the Court—which orders the Trump administration to answer by May 7—follows an urgent intervention from the manufacturers of mifepristone, GenBioPro and Danco.
Regardless of what the courts decide, international telehealth providers, community networks and websites selling pills are ready to ramp up services to fill the needs of Americans.
Decentralized community networks have mushroomed across the country. Existing outside of the formal medical system, community providers mail free abortion pills (mifepristone and misoprostol) to tens of thousands of pregnant women and people each year and support them to self-manage their abortions.
Staffed by volunteers, many of these community networks offer highly-trained abortion doulas to provide emotional and informational support to all those with whom the groups share abortion pills, and offer specially trained doulas for survivors of sexual and domestic violence.
“Pregnancy is one of the most dangerous times for someone experiencing domestic violence,” one doula told Ms., and “one of the top three reasons that people seek abortion is due to abuse in their relationship.”
We know the names of nine women who have died after doctors denied them life-saving care because of fears they would be criminally prosecuted under abortion bans: Josseli Barnica, Yeniifer Alvarez-Estrada Glick, Amber Nicole Thurman, Candi Miller, Porsha Ngumezi, Taysha Wilkinson-Sobieski, Nevaeh Crain, Tierra Walker and Ciji Graham.
At least three least three more women—all unnamed at this time—died between October 2022 and July 2024 as a result of denied or delayed emergency abortion care, according to a March 2025 study released in academic journal CHEST.
In all, public health experts estimate that abortion bans have led to the deaths of at least 59 women—but we may never know their names.
In a lawsuit involving denial of emergency care to pregnant women, the National Women’s Law Center filed a brief documenting more than 100 cases of women almost dying when hospitals denied emergency medical care because of abortion bans—though “the true number [of cases] is likely significantly higher,” according to the brief.
Congress should move to pass two critical protections: The Women’s Health Protection Act, which would establish a statutory right for healthcare providers to offer abortion services and for patients to receive them; and the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH) Act, which would ensure that every person who receives healthcare or insurance through the federal government will have coverage for abortion services.
As Republicans ever more relentlessly attack abortion rights in states across the country, women’s rights advocates are rediscovering underutilized state equal rights amendments (ERAs) and using newly passed abortion rights amendments to state constitutions to challenge longstanding barriers to abortion in blue states.
Colorado is now ground zero for that fight, where Dr. Rebecca Cohen is challenging a state law requiring young women under the age of 18 to notify a parent 48 hours before accessing an abortion or navigate the courts to obtain permission to access this basic care.
Some legislators who voted for the Colorado parental notification law explicitly said they hoped it would be a deterrent to young women engaging in sexual activity—“but nobody seems very invested in their partners paying a price for it,” said Rupali Sharma, litigation co-director of The Lawyering Project, which represents Cohen.
“Not only is the state trying to coerce you to carry your pregnancy to term, but it’s treating you fundamentally differently than your male partner, who has also participated in bringing this pregnancy along,” said Sharma.