Author: Morgan Carmen

Morgan Carmen recently graduated from Harvard Law School, where she was the president of the Alliance for Reproductive Justice and a selections and content editor for the Journal of Law and Gender. She is a producer with Ms. Studios and is based in Cambridge, Mass. Find her on Bluesky at @morgancarmen.bsky.social.

Entitlement, Harassment and Retaliation: The Justin Baldoni Story

The legal battle between Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni has been messy. There are several players, including multi-billionaire Steve Sarowitz, who is furnishing near-unlimited resources for Baldoni’s legal and PR crusades, a variety of complaints in several courts, and misinformation spreaders all over social media. Coverage has been rife with misogynistic and confusing storytelling. Baldoni and Jamey Heath (the CEO of Baldoni’s studio) have made (profitable) careers out of being male feminists, and this battle endangers their carefully crafted public personas.

This piece aims to add context at a time when Baldoni continues to play his cases out in the press. It is for a court to decide whose claims are most legally compelling, but I am going to sketch out Baldoni’s feminism, the movie release and controversy, ongoing court cases, and Lively’s allegations and Baldoni’s meager responses—so that readers might find, as I do, that this battle actually looks quite similar to what happens any time a woman stands up for herself against a well-resourced man. 

Trump’s Speech to Congress Shows the Working Class Is on Their Own 

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President Trump’s first seven weeks back in office have been spent abandoning the American people—tearing apart vital programs, withholding funds that save lives and purging the federal workforce. Last Tuesday, he addressed a joint session of Congress for the first time in his second term. Throughout the speech, he boasted about abandoning international agreements, expediting environmental deregulation and gutting federal resources.

People with Albinism Face a Double Threat: Climate Change and Discrimination

The impact of climate change exacerbates health risks and discrimination for people with albinism, particularly women, who face unique challenges in healthcare and education.

“This larger fight is really a global fight and continental fight against the dominance of ableism,” said Sarah Bosha, lawyer and co-author of a new study, “The Forgotten Ones: The Impact of Climate Change on the Health and Well-being of Persons with Albinism.”

The Dangers of Weaponizing Health and Science: The Ms. Q&A with Dr. Michele Goodwin

Within the first few days of his second term, Donald Trump’s threat to the country’s health was evident. The Trump administration has already ordered federal health agencies to cease public communications, directed agencies to cancel meetings to review biomedical research, and pardoned 23 individuals who violently interfered with patients’ care at reproductive health clinics—all without a confirmed secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS). Trump has promised to let his HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “Go wild.” RFK Jr. faces his first of two confirmation hearings this week, on January 29, and a vote will follow sometime in the coming weeks.

Ms. spoke with Dr. Michele Goodwin, the co-faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University and executive producer of Ms. Studios, to understand the devastating health consequences of a Trump-RFK Jr. team, where we can focus our energy in response, and how to hold on to hope over the next four years.

Music as Medicine: The Ms. Q&A with Renée Fleming and Dr. Francis Collins

Music feels healing, but can it actually heal us? The answer is a resounding yes—according to Sound Health, a collaborative project run by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

The Sound Health Network began in 2016 after a chance meeting of Dr. Francis Collins, the former NIH director, and Renée Fleming, the globally renowned and five-time-Grammy-award-winning American soprano. Over the past eight years, the partnership, in association with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), has raised awareness about the healing benefits of music and advanced research at the intersection of arts and wellness. 

Ms. recently spoke with Fleming and Collins about their journeys to connecting music with health, what we know so far about music’s effect on the brain, and how we can use that knowledge to heal ourselves.

A Comedian in the War on Abortion: The Ms. Q&A with Lizz Winstead and Ruth Leitman

Lizz Winstead, comedian and founder of Abortion Access Front, teamed up with director Ruth Leitman to create the hilarious, heart-filled documentary No One Asked You.

“There’s nothing shameful about needing to have an abortion,” Winstead told Ms.

“It’s a medical procedure that people need to help them achieve their life goals, and to help them have the life that they want to have,” said Leitman.

In Hawai‘i, Where Traditional Midwives Can’t Practice

Two days after Alia Louise Stenback survived the Aug. 8 wildfire in Lāhainā, Maui—the deadliest wildfire the United States has seen in over 100 years—she parked herself at a medical tent. One month later, with no ambulances around to provide transport to a hospital, her grandson was born. With a donated birthing kit and the support of traditional midwives, Stenback “caught [her] grandson.”

Stenback grants herself “outlaw” status because she provided care during labor without a midwifery license in assumed violation of Hawaii’s HRS §457J, otherwise known as the Midwifery Restriction Law. Originally passed in the name of maternal and infant safety, the law is the subject of impassioned protests, new legislative proposals and a lawsuit filed by the Center for Reproductive Rights and the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation.

Fighting Fatphobia and Embracing ‘Unshrinking’: The Ms. Q&A With Kate Manne

We live in a society obsessed with fatness. Or, perhaps more accurately, obsessed with fighting it.  Fatness has been rendered a disease, and we are inundated with “cures,” which particularly haunt women’s bodies—and their wallets.

Questioning the devotion to anti-fatness usually prompts a “well, being fat is unhealthy!” But according to Kate Manne, feminist philosopher and author of the recently released Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, the connection between weight and health is not so clear cut. What is clear, Manne brilliantly reveals, is that fatphobia, not fatness, is the problem.

Reproductive Healthcare 51 Years After Roe: Unreachable Abortion Clinics, Chaos and Countrywide Confusion

Reproductive healthcare experts say the post-Dobbs period will feature tens of thousands of forced births purely because of clinic closures—many abortion seekers will be too far away from the ones that remain open. Access is further interrupted, they said, by court decisions so confusing that providers do not know if and when they can legally dispense abortion medication or intervene with abortion care to save lives.

‘United Bodies’: New Ms. Studios Podcast Explores Health and Disability Justice In An Inhospitable World

This Monday, Jan. 8, Ms. Studios dropped the first episode of United Bodies, a new podcast about the lived experience of health. Hosted and co-produced by Kendall Ciesemier, an acclaimed health and disability advocate and writer, United Bodies will examine how physical, mental, spiritual and social health impacts how we understand ourselves, how we interact with the world and how we may fight for a better one.