More Than A Magazine, A Movement
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.
Texas has one of the nation’s highest rape rates. Shockingly, its newest near-total abortion ban contains no exceptions for rape or incest. When asked about this, Gov. Greg Abbott said, “Texas will work tirelessly to make sure that we eliminate all rapists from the streets of Texas.”
Abbott’s disturbing pledge fits in line with a tried-and-true political strategy: claim to address a public health issue by pivoting to crime control. But as history has taught us, public health crises will not be solved in the prosecutor’s office or by claiming to be tough on crime.
Reproductive rights—once perceived to be a hallmark of late 20th-century American democracy—may soon give way to conservative states enacting unconstitutional anti-abortion provisions with procedural barriers so thickly and cleverly intertwined that the ability to challenge them may be unattainable, including at the Supreme Court.
The result of the Court’s shadow docket opinion is not just an end, essentially, to the legal right to an abortion in Texas—it sets in motion a workable blueprint for all other conservative state legislatures bent on stripping away abortion rights.
Aspects of Texas’s new six-week abortion law are eerily reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Acts, which traumatized Black people for fear of being tracked, stalked and charged with violating the codes of slavery.
Texas has stepped into a dangerous zone that not only undermines the constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy—but now calls for the worst in citizen action.