More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The U.S. ranks as the 19th most dangerous country for women, 11th in maternal mortality, 30th in closing the gender pay gap, 75th in women’s political representation, and painfully lacks paid family leave and equal access to healthcare. But Ms. has always understood: Feminist movements around the world hold answers to some of the U.S.’s most intractable problems.
Ms. Global is taking note of feminists worldwide.
This month: news from Sudan, South Africa, Afghanistan and more.
Imagine being nine months pregnant with no clinic to give birth in and no skilled birth attendant anywhere within reach. This was the reality for 73,000 women who were weeks away from their due date in my native province of Sindh, Pakistan, when catastrophic floods submerged the region in 2022. At that moment, there were a total of 650,000 pregnant women living in the disaster zone. Those women were not a statistic to me; they were my community members. What happened to them is what happens to women everywhere when climate disasters strike, and most countries are not prepared for it.
Decades of working in women’s health and human rights have made one thing clear: Climate change is not gender neutral. Climate change accelerates violence against women. It accelerates poverty that disproportionately affects women and young people. And it puts women and girls at profound reproductive health risk, especially in communities where rights and resources are already fragile. Treating this as a footnote is not just a moral failure; it is a strategic one.
Policymakers and governments must ensure disaster response plans treat gender-based violence as a public health emergency. They need to ensure climate adaptation plans protect girls’ access to education, because when schools close after a disaster, it is the girls who don’t return. They need to ensure that when climate disasters strike, access to contraception and reproductive healthcare does not disappear overnight. And they need to make sure that when they talk about climate resilience, they are prioritizing the health and safety of women and girls.
The climate movement has fought hard and made strides. But a movement that does not center the people bearing the heaviest burden is an incomplete one. Climate leaders, negotiators and policymakers must do more than acknowledge that women are disproportionately affected; they must build solutions into every plan, every policy and every dollar spent. The infrastructure and the expertise exist. What is missing is the political will, and the funding, to match the scale of the crisis.
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.
This week:
—Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) is working to get Republicans on the record on the Right to Contraception Act.
—ICE has already reported the deaths of 18 detainees this year, on pace to surpass the highest number of deaths in decades.
—Abortion restrictions could cost the U.S. economy $140 billion annually in lost earnings.
—”I love the inflation,” says Trump.
—The EEOC will no longer require federal agencies to report on race, ethnicity, sex or gender identity.
—83 percent of American voters agree that emergency contraception should be easily accessible.
—Abortion ban states are slowly losing a generation of women medical students and doctors.
—More than 770,000 children have already lost access to SNAP benefits after last year’s funding cuts.
—A new study found trans women athletes have no significant physical advantages over cis women.
—Missouri has restored access to medication abortions after a Jackson County judge struck down key state restrictions, allowing clinics to resume providing the service and marking the first time medication abortion has been available in Missouri since 2018.
—Republicans passed a reconciliation bill that provides roughly $70 billion for ICE and CBP, sending it to President Trump’s desk. (This is on top of more than $140 billion Republicans already provided for those agencies last year.)
… and more.
Soccer is one of the most beloved sports in the world, and the 2026 FIFA World Cup—the largest in the tournament’s history—has drawn millions of fans across the globe. This year, for the first time, the event is being jointly hosted by the United States, Canada and Mexico, with matches and related events taking place across North America.
FIFA stands to earn billions of dollars from the tournament.
But as the organization reaps record revenues, many host communities are bearing significant costs. Soaring ticket prices, displacement, labor concerns and aggressive immigration enforcement have raised questions about who truly benefits from the World Cup. For many working-class residents—and even lifelong soccer fans—the tournament is out of reach.
To better understand those impacts, I spoke with Jennifer Li, co-director of the Center for Community Health Innovation at the O’Neill Institute and director of Dignity 2026, a coalition of labor and human rights organizations working to protect communities most at risk during the World Cup.
Soccer “is very much an immigrant sport, let’s face it,” said Li, “and by extension, a sport for people of color, diverse communities. It is a sport that’s not expensive to play, but very expensive to watch, apparently. So, the question then becomes: Who is this for?”
It was a balmy August morning in Lancashire, a county in North West England known for its sweeping landscapes and greenery. But back in 2014, their idyllic community was facing an outside threat: Cuadrilla, an oil and gas giant and the only company in the United Kingdom with a license to frack, was about to commence shale gas exploration. If the hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, went ahead, then the site beneath the nanas’ feet would soon become an industrial wasteland—and the county’s residents would be forced to live with the consequences, unless someone was able to stop it.
The nanas clambered over fences, quickly putting up signs and wrangling tent poles. By 6 a.m., the first tent was up. The women sat on the ground, drinking tea and watching the sun rise above the field that would be their home for the next three weeks. Technically, they weren’t all grandmothers, but before long, this group of anti-fracking activists from Lancashire would be known as the Nanas, both at home and abroad. They’d regularly stage demonstrations, roadside tea parties, and eventually, even a protest outside Buckingham Palace.
And they wouldn’t be alone: In other communities being torn apart by fracking, older people around the world have also been taking the fight into their own hands, spending their golden years in protest. But what makes someone dedicate their later life to activism? To give up the dream of pottering around the garden, pushing grandchildren on swings and enjoying long vacations and their long-awaited retirement?
As it turns out, many of them felt they didn’t have a choice.
The U.S. ranks as the 19th most dangerous country for women, 11th in maternal mortality, 30th in closing the gender pay gap, 75th in women’s political representation, and painfully lacks paid family leave and equal access to health care. But Ms. has always understood: Feminist movements around the world hold answers to some of the U.S.’s most intractable problems. Ms. Global is taking note of feminists worldwide.
This week: News from Iraq, Jamaica, the EU, Cambodia and Thailand, and more.
Abortion pills are a critical option for people seeking to end a pregnancy, especially those living in U.S. states with abortion bans who cannot travel out of state for care. In 2023, medication abortion accounted for 63 percent of all clinician-provided abortions in states without total bans.
Given the pivotal role of these medications in preserving abortion access, antiabortion policymakers and advocates are resorting to increasingly unscientific, unconventional tactics to spread mis- and disinformation about medication abortion and about mifepristone, one of two drugs used in most medication abortions in the United States.
In a disturbing new strategy, antiabortion policymakers are attempting to weaponize environmental laws and regulations, citing false claims that medication abortion pollutes U.S. waterways and drinking water.
The U.S. ranks as the 19th most dangerous country for women, 11th in maternal mortality, 30th in closing the gender pay gap, 75th in women’s political representation, and painfully lacks paid family leave and equal access to health care. But Ms. has always understood: Feminist movements around the world hold answers to some of the U.S.’s most intractable problems. Ms. Global is taking note of feminists worldwide.
This week: News from Nigeria, Afghanistan, Japan and more.
For three years running, artist and activist Tiffany Shlain has created calls to action around her feminist history tree ring sculpture in advance of U.S. elections where women’s voting rights, reproductive rights and long held democratic principles face historic setbacks. The milestones and tribulations of women’s history seared onto its surface are particularly resonant now, as many records of women’s presence and accomplishments are disappearing from public view.
For the last three years, Students for Life of America (SFLA) has sought to use environmental concerns to attack abortion rights, claiming—without scientific evidence—that the medication mifepristone contaminates U.S. water supplies and threatens wildlife, the environment and potentially human health.
A recent New York Times article amplified this antiabortion effort, presenting these claims without substantial context. The article does not include interviews with anyone informed about the politics behind the campaign or the science of mifepristone in wastewater. Only a brief mention—seven paragraphs in—notes that environmental experts have dismissed SFLA’s claims, before returning to treating the claims as a legitimate concern.
“There is absolutely no evidence that this is an environmental issue,” said Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Pharmaceutical waste can be a big issue when we’re talking about widely used drugs, but to somehow point to mifepristone as a bad actor here is completely disingenuous.”
Jack Vanden Heuvel, a molecular toxicologist at Pennsylvania State University, agreed: “Most wastewater treatment plants are very effective at getting rid of any mifepristone that is there.” He described SFLA’s position as “a pretty weakly supported argument.”