More Than A Magazine, A Movement
By upholding a South Carolina order that strips Medicaid funding from abortion providers, the Supreme Court abandoned both patient choice and the original civil rights vision behind Medicaid.
Medicaid funding is crucial for low-income Americans—it’s the vital thread that connects them with healthcare in a society where universal healthcare does not exist.
Sixty years after the Selma to Montgomery marches, the lessons of Bloody Sunday remain urgent. The brutal attack on marchers fighting for voting rights in 1965 exposed how laws can be weaponized to uphold inequality—a reality that persists today. From efforts to suppress voting rights to attacks on academic freedom, the struggle for justice continues. As history warns, democracy and the rule of law must be actively defended, not just written on paper.
Mere years after the Civil War, in United States v. Lee, the Court recognized that “[n]o man in this country is so high that he is above the law. No officer of the law may set that law at defiance with impunity. All the officers of the government, from the highest to the lowest, are creatures of the law, and are bound to obey it.”
One week into the Trump administration, this wisdom rings hollow.
Cecile Richards, the former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA) died memorably on the holiday celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States. A day of light and darkness for the United States.
The thread of social stigmatizing and racism has long woven through the fabrics of science and medicine. Sarah Baartman, an indigenous South African woman born in 1789, was subjected to profound cruelties, specifically associated with her body size and shape—placed at first in a cage alongside a rhinoceros, and later in circuses and so-called “freak-shows” throughout Europe under the name Hottentot Venus.
To this day, women experience weight discrimination at significantly higher rates than male peers.
The Supreme Court’s latest term—with blockbuster decisions on abortion, the Second Amendment, presidential immunity and more—highlights a looming crisis of legitimacy.
(This article originally appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox!)
At the 1964 Democratic National Convention, civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer gave an impassioned account of the violence she and others suffered while attempting to register to vote.
In August, 60 years after Hamer’s famous appeal, the delegates assembled will vote and name Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee for president. Harris will be standing on Hamer’s shoulders.
The Supreme Court of Texas notched itself into a troubling tapestry of U.S. legal history when it overturned a district court ruling that allowed Kate Cox, a 31-year-old Texas woman, to end her nonviable pregnancy. The state is committed to forcing Cox to remain pregnant, against her will and medical recommendations.
Women in Texas are living in a new Jane Crow.
Seats are up for grabs in Congress and in state houses that may determine the future of reproductive freedom in the United States. Local candidates have their sights on banning contraception and rolling back LGBTQ protections.
Much is at stake in our state courts, with the election of judges who will determine the fate of state abortion bans.
When states coerce and force women, girls and people with the capacity for pregnancy to remain pregnant against their will, they create human chattel and incubators of them. Today, Texas, Mississippi and other states with ‘trigger’ bans make clear that the essences of chattel bondage and the draft have returned, but only for women, girls and pregnant-capable people.