Author: Jill Filipovic

Jill Filipovic is a New York-based writer, lawyer and author of OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind and The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness. A weekly columnist for CNN and a 2019 New America Future of War fellow, she is also a former contributing opinion writer to The New York Times and a former columnist for The Guardian. She writes at jill.substack.com and holds writing workshops and retreats around the world.

The Heritage Foundation’s Plan to Keep Women Uneducated, Pregnant and Subservient

Since Trump’s re-ascendance to the White House, the reactionary conservative movement has become the most aggressive and unfettered it has been in my lifetime. And they are getting very, very clear on what they think an acceptable life looks like for women:

—Settle for any man who decides he wants you.
—Don’t go to college.
—Marry early.
—Have as many babies as possible.
—Quit your job (or don’t pursue one in the first place) to stay home full time and depend financially on your husband.
—Shoulder the blame if you wind up married to a jerk.
—Wind up impoverished if you divorce.
—Face social condemnation if you fail to follow the tradwife script.
—Contraception should be illegal or at least hard to get; same for IVF and other fertility treatments.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s a plan they wrote down and published: Last month, the Heritage Foundation published “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” Think of it as Project 2275, a detailed plan that is mostly about how America can spend the next two and a half centuries undoing the feminist progress we’ve made.

The White Supremacist Regime: How the Trump Administration Is Pushing Authoritarianism in the U.S.

It feels like things in the U.S. have finally tipped over an invisible edge. ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot an unarmed woman in the face, muttering “fucking bitch” as he walked away. The Trump regime has not only defended him, it has leveraged the full weight of the U.S. government to support its false narrative. The Department of Justice is investigating the victim, Renee Good, and her wife—not the officer who killed her. Various officials, including Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, have told the public demonstrable, flat-out lies about the incident, things that flatly contradict widely-available videos.

Seven Ways the Trump Administration Has Made Pregnancy More Dangerous

Trump has been in office for less than a year. The Supreme Court killed Roe v. Wade less than three years ago. And today, if you are a woman in the United States, your rights change when you cross state lines—men’s rights do not. 

It’s easy to lose sight of just how debilitating this administration has been for reproductive rights, because they are doing so much else so loudly. (Apologies to Greenland.) But this administration has quietly attacked abortion rights from just about every angle. A new report from the Center for Reproductive Rights makes clear just how aggressive they’ve been. 

Here are seven quiet moves from the Trump administration that are costing women and girls their lives.

Actually It’s Good That Fewer High Schoolers Want to Get Married

High schoolers, and especially high school girls, are less likely than ever to say that they want to get married someday, according to new research from Pew Research Center. While boys have stayed fairly stable in how many of them say they want to marry, girls have gone from overwhelmingly wanting marriage to being even less likely than boys to want to wed.

Conservative groups and writers have met this new survey with some panic. If 12th graders don’t want to get married, I guess the logic goes, then they won’t get married, and America’s declining rates of marriage and childbearing will continue and will eventually destroy society. To them, this new survey indicates a broader social shift away from marriage and childbearing, which is bad, because in their view, the nuclear family is the good and necessary backbone of any moral and functional culture. 

But actually, it’s great that far fewer high school girls are even thinking about marriage.

The teenage girls who are thinking about their weekends instead of their weddings? They’re doing something right. 

The War on Children

American children die at stunning rates because of policy choices, and mostly because of policy choices made by the “pro-life” right.

The Republican Party has long claimed the mantle of defending life. The new Republican Party has promised to make America healthy again. Instead, they’re leaving kids sick and dead.

This is a war on children. It is also a war on women. The “women and children” framing can feel incredibly condescending, but the truth is that women’s and children’s lives and wellbeing are indelibly intertwined. Women make children with our bodies; if we are not well, they are not well. Women still do most of the work of raising and nurturing children; if they are not well, we are not well. This does not apply to every single woman on earth. But it applies to women as a class, and to children as a class.

Why Is the Trump Administration Destroying Almost $10 Million of Contraceptives?

After the richest man in the world shuttered the U.S. agency that provides aid for the world’s poorest, the government is now going to spend money destroying the contraceptives, medications and food items it chose not to distribute.

This includes $9.7 million in contraceptives that were bound for crisis areas—places like refugee camps and war zones. It includes $800,000 worth of high-energy biscuits, a kind of emergency food aid for people in the direst of circumstances—and enough of it to feed 1.5 million children for a week.

To be clear, all of these items have already been paid for by U.S. tax dollars. The Trump administration is about to spend more money to destroy them.

White Plight: Trump’s Embrace of White South African ‘Refugees’ Is a Racist Bullhorn

This week, Afrikaner “refugees” began arriving in the U.S.—some of the only refugees welcomed by the Trump administration. These white South Africans claim they are being persecuted at home: That white farmers are being attacked; that South Africa is not a safe place for them to live.

Much of the criticism of Trump’s decision to end refugee resettlement from just about everywhere else on the planet while welcoming a group that really isn’t facing particularly severe persecution has been derided as “political.” And it certainly is a stunt intended to provoke liberal outrage. But we should just call it what it is. It’s not “political.” It’s not a dogwhistle.

It’s racist.

This obvious troll from Trump (by way, I suspect, of Elon Musk and Stephen Miller) shows that, if they have their way, all the power will be white power.

Yes, America Should Make It Easier to Have Kids—But Trump Wants to Punish Childless and Single Women

The Trump administration wants to juice the birthrate. This isn’t surprising: Vice President JD Vance is an ardent pronatalist. So is shadow president Elon Musk, who seems to be working on populating Mars with his own progeny.

Abortion opponents, who make up a solid chunk of Trump’s base, want to see women have more babies whether we like it or not. Republicans and the Christian conservatives who elect them have generally been on the “be fruitful and multiply” side of things.

What’s different this time around, though, is that the Trump team is looking at carrots, not just sticks, in their baby-boom strategy. While the old way was to restrict abortion and make contraception harder to get, some of the proposals now include things like cash for kids, mommy medals, reserving scholarship program spots for young people who are married with children and (somewhat bizarrely) menstrual cycle education so women can figure out when they’re fertile and a national medal for motherhood for women with six or more children.

The administration is also considering policies that would effectively punish people for being single.

Boys Will Be Boys, But Women Are Too Emotional for the Supreme Court

Elon Musk and Peter Navarro are having a public slap fight. And while any other administration or workplace would be embarrassed by public outbursts, the White House seems to think it’s fine—because “boys will be boys,” according to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

The thing with people who brush off male bad behavior, though, is that they rarely extend that patience to girls. While Leavitt was noting the White House would “let” Musk and Navarro’s “public sparring” continue, she—and the rest of the MAGA right—had no such forbearance for Amy Coney Barrett, who committed the cardinal sin of siding with the Constitution over the president in a recent Supreme Court decision, from which she dissented. The MAGA reaction was swift and ugly. Coney Barrett was a traitor—evidence that women are too empathetic to serve on the Supreme Court.

They Were Critically Ill. Abortion Could Have Saved Their Lives. They Weren’t Given the Option.

We don’t have the full picture of what abortion bans have wrought. We might never know the full scope of the damage, because the same people leveling these brutalities are the ones in charge of tracking them.

Instead, what we have are snapshots: data pulled by intrepid reporters. Women and their families brave enough to speak to the press. Doctors willing to speak anonymously with careful researchers.