More Than A Magazine, A Movement
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.
Dr. Michele Goodwin testified powerfully in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on the Constitution on the urgency of the Women’s Health Protection Act in addressing racial, gender, legal and health disparities.
“Reproductive justice requires every individual to have the right to make their own decisions about having children regardless of their circumstances and without interference and discrimination.”
Racism manifested by police stops, microaggressions at work, discriminatory and hostile treatment while shopping for groceries and doing other innocuous tasks, and systemic inequalities in housing and education take an enormous toll—both physically and psychologically.
![Policing In America: A Deadly Disease Rooted in Slavery [Who Killed George Floyd? Part II]](https://msmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Policing-In-America_-A-Deadly-Disease-Rooted-in-Slavery-Who-Killed-George-Floyd_-Part-II-270x145.png)
Policing is part of America’s origin story and its history of enslavement, kidnapping and trafficking of Black people.
This article is the second installment in a three-part series examining police violence as symptomatic of broader social and cultural injustice, racism and anti-Blackness—including in one of America’s most liberal communities.