Author: Shoshanna Ehrlich

Shoshanna Ehrlich is professor emerita of women’s, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Her books include Who Decides: The Abortion Rights of Teens and the co-authored Abortion Regret: The New Attack on Reproductive Freedom. She is currently a legal consultant with Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts, with a particular focus on the reproductive rights of teens.

The Kids Really Are All Right—But Opponents of Marriage Equality Won’t Admit It

Within days of Donald Trump’s second inauguration, the administration began erasing LGBTQ+ people from federal websites, while Republican governors across the country rebranded Pride Month as celebrations of the “traditional” or “nuclear” family.

At the same time, public support for marriage equality has begun to slip, and conservative activists are seizing the moment to revive their campaign against Obergefell v. Hodges. Emboldened by the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, they are laying the groundwork for a new legal challenge—one designed to persuade the Court’s conservative majority to reconsider the constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

But this latest effort relies on a familiar myth dressed up as a new argument: that children are the “real victims” of marriage equality. The evidence tells a very different story. Decades of research—and a recent meta-analysis examining children’s developmental well-being—show that children raised by same-sex parents do just as well, and in some measures even better, than those raised by heterosexual parents. The real harm comes not from loving families, but from efforts to deny them equal dignity under the law.

Opponents of marriage equality are working hard to revive old attacks on marriage equality. We cannot allow this campaign of erasure to succeed.

A Federal Court Just Struck Down Idaho Abortion Restrictions. The Win Could Set the Stage for a Bigger Fight at the Ballot Box.

When most people think about post-Dobbs abortion litigation, they assume every lawsuit is trying to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision. But a groundbreaking case in Idaho charts a different course. Brought by maternal-fetal medicine specialist Dr. Stacy Seyb, the lawsuit argues that medically necessary abortion care is protected by a constitutional right Dobbs never addressed: the fundamental right to self-preservation.

To understand this novel legal strategy, I spoke with Wendy Heipt, a senior attorney at Legal Voice and a member of Seyb’s legal team. Rather than asking the courts to revive Roe, Heipt argues that no state can force a pregnant person to sacrifice their life or health by denying medically necessary care.

“This case isn’t about abortion,” she told me. “It’s about self-defense.”

If the courts agree, the case could establish a new constitutional framework for protecting pregnant women facing medical emergencies—even under the legal landscape created by Dobbs.

It is a reminder that some of the most consequential battles over reproductive freedom may turn not on revisiting old precedents, but on recognizing constitutional protections the Supreme Court never considered.

The Growing Acceptance of a Movement That Wants to Punish Women for Abortion

When South Carolina’s abortion abolitionist bill, the Unborn Child Protection Act (S. 1095), was voted out of committee and onto the full Senate floor in late April—“an unprecedented move toward locking up women who have an abortion,” according to Dana Sussman in Slate—it raised a question: How much influence have abortion abolitionists gained within the broader antiabortion movement?

Abortion abolitionists, who seek to criminalize abortion without exceptions and punish women who obtain abortions as murderers, have long been considered the outer fringe of the antiabortion movement. Their roots can be traced to what Colleen Scerpella described in The Prospect as “a new generation of mostly white, male, conservative Baptists, Presbyterians and Christian Reconstructionists”—or what she calls “extreme Christian patriarchy.”

As I wrote in Ms. a little more than a year ago, the dramatic increase in abortion abolitionist bills filed by state lawmakers after Roe v. Wade fell, signaled the growing influence of this movement.

That extremism has not gone unnoticed: In 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified four abolitionist organizations as “male supremacist hate groups.” Recent research has likewise found that the strongest supporters of arresting women who have abortions are Americans who endorse Christian nationalism, believe “true Americans are white,” and look to the state to enforce a particular ethnocultural social order.

The South Carolina bill, which makes the pregnant woman herself subject to misdemeanor liability, prompted me to revisit the question of whether abortion abolitionists have made more inroads into the mainstream antiabortion movement.

The evidence suggests they have.

Banned From Talking About Third-Trimester Abortion Care at a Texas Medical School: The Ms. Q&A with Dr. Shelley Sella

Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (TTUHSC) cancelled Dr. Shelley Sella’s scheduled campus talk in January about her recent book Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care, which she had been invited to give by the Texas Tech chapter of Medical Students for Choice (MSFC) in collaboration with MSFC’s Board of Directors. The administration told right-wing outlet Texas Scorecard that it decided hosting her was “not in the best interest of the university.” The decision to ban Sella from campus was made after days of coordinated activism by the Turning Point USA chapter at Texas Tech in conjunction with two antiabortion activists: Mark Lee Dickson and Jim Baxa. 

The cancellation of Sella’s talk was not “an anomaly,” as Jessica Valenti of Abortion, Every Day writes, but part and parcel of the “antiabortion snitch culture” on college campuses—”part of the broader conservative attack on academia that’s gained steam over the last few years.”

“And it’s not just impacting a few schools or professors,” Valenti continues. “Antiabortion groups are determined to eradicate any iota of pro-choice speech on college campuses. Now is the time for us to make as much noise as possible and not back off one single inch.”

Taking seriously Valenti’s call to “make noise” rather than retreat in the face of escalating efforts to suppress pro-abortion speech, Ms. sat down with both Sella and Claire Surkis, a medical student in Connecticut who serves on MSFC’s Board of Directors, to explore the impact and implications of the university’s actions.

Trump Considers Blocking Abortion Access for Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors in Federal Custody (Again)

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A looming policy change threatens to undo existing protections and leave pregnant immigrant teens in federal custody without meaningful access to abortion care.

We won’t know what direction the rule will take until the proposed rule is released, but if the Trump administration’s antiabortion policies—such as the reinstatement of the Veterans Administration’s ban on abortion and abortion counseling, the defunding of Planned Parenthood and the reinstatement of an expanded global gag rule—are any indication, the rights of this marginalized population are at great risk.

Three Women Veterans on the Devastating Reality of the VA Abortion Ban

The Trump administration is no longer providing abortion care for veterans relying on VA healthcare, even in instances of rape and incest.

Through firsthand accounts, veterans describe the fear, medical risk and loss of autonomy created by the policy.

“Abortion is my right, if that was what I deemed I needed.”

“No patient in America should have to go back and forth with their providers … and for damn sure not with no politicians about what medical care they are allowed to have.”

“We are all people who volunteered. We raised our hands and said, ‘yes send me.’ Healthcare is our right as veterans.”

Senate Blocks Effort to Restore Abortion Access for Veterans

In the final days of 2025, under the cover of the holidays, Trump’s Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) instated a total ban on abortion and abortion counseling.

The new policy applies to all VA healthcare facilities across the U.S., including in states where abortion remains legal. As a result, the VA now has “one of the strictest abortion bans in the country,” according to the Center for Reproductive Rights.

In late January, Sens. Patty Murray, Richard Blumenthal, Chuck Schumer and Democratic members of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee introduced a joint Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution—an oversight tool through which Congress can overturn rules issued by federal agencies, by a simple majority—to nullify the administration’s abortion and abortion counseling exclusion.

Garnering a same-day endorsement by an array of veterans’, medical, women’s, and reproductive health and rights organizations, they urged “both chambers to act swiftly to overturn this extreme policy that puts veterans’ health and safety at risk.” 

Josh and Erin Hawley’s ‘Love Life Initiative’ Signals a New Phase of the Antiabortion Fight

Erin and Josh Hawley’s new dark-money group, the Love Life Initiative, arrives at a moment when abortion opponents are shifting tactics. With Roe overturned and sweeping bans already in place across much of the country, the focus is now on cutting off the remaining paths to care—through ballot measures, advertising campaigns and state-level policy fights designed to reshape public opinion and law from the ground up. The Hawleys frame this effort as a moral crusade to restore a national “culture of life.”

But in practice, it is an escalation of a post-Dobbs strategy that has already restricted access across wide swaths of the United States.

The consequences of that strategy are increasingly stark. Pregnant women in states with abortion bans are dying after being denied care, and people living in those states face significantly higher risks during pregnancy, with women of color bearing the brunt.

At the same time, public support for abortion rights has grown, and abortion-protective states have moved to shield providers and patients from out-of-state enforcement.

The Love Life Initiative reflects a movement determined not only to defend its legal victories but to reverse that growing acceptance—by reshaping the political and cultural terrain on which the abortion debate now unfolds.

How Attacks on Immigrant Teens Helped Build the Post-Roe Playbook

A conversation between legal scholar Shoshanna Ehrlich and Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

“In the first Trump administration, we still had Roe. By losing that underlying constitutional right to abortion at the federal level, the door has been opened for the second Trump administration to both compound the attacks and move in new directions,” Amiri told Ms.

“We were screaming from the rooftops that they were coming after Roe, and abortion was going to be banned, and we were not believed. … As with all rights, they’re tenuous and you have to continue to fight to enforce them.

“It’s always the most marginalized, as we’ve been talking about. It’s the people who have the fewest resources, people who live in rural areas, young people, people without documentation, people with limited language skills. That is who will feel the brunt the hardest of these policies.”

‘She Rubbed Me the Wrong Way’: Why Trump Punished a Woman Head of State for Saying No

Under the Jan. 21 headline “‘She Just Rubbed Me the Wrong Way’: Trump Suggests Swiss Tariffs Were Personal,’” The New York Times quotes Trump quoted as saying, she was “’so aggressive.”

Seeking to make sense of the existential anomie that flooded me after reading the article, it quickly became apparent that that much more was at play here than a clash of personalities, as suggested by Times’ headline. Accordingly, as I began envisioning the article I would write, my initial aim was to locate Trump’s remarks within the broader context of his administration’s attacks on women and the LGBTQ+ community.