Health

Teens Avoid Coercive Parental Involvement Laws by Using Telehealth Abortion Services 

PUBLISHED 3/10/2026 by and

The majority of U.S. teenagers live in states that require parental involvement in abortion healthcare decision-making. If parents are unavailable or teens under 18 do not want to involve their parents, they must go to court and convince a judge that they are mature enough to decide on their own or that the abortion is in their best interest.

To avoid this invasive and burdensome process, resourceful teens are now turning to abortion care from telehealth providers located outside their restrictive states.

Equity Cannot Wait: Confronting the Unequal Burden of HIV and AIDS on Women of Color

PUBLISHED 3/10/2026 by , and

Women have been part of the HIV/AIDS epidemic since the beginning, yet their experiences were long marginalized in research, surveillance and public narratives that focused primarily on white gay men.

As the United States marked National Women and Girls HIV/AIDS Awareness Day on Tuesday, the data tell a stark story: Black and Latina women continue to bear a disproportionate burden of HIV, shaped by systemic inequities that affect access to prevention, testing, treatment and long-term care.

Today, women account for more than one in five people living with HIV in the United States, but racial disparities remain severe. Black women represent about half of new HIV diagnoses among women despite making up only 13 percent of the U.S. female population, while Latina women experience diagnosis rates nearly six times higher than white women. These disparities are even more pronounced for transgender women—especially Black and Latina transgender women—underscoring that ending the epidemic requires confronting the structural inequities that continue to drive unequal risk and unequal access to care.

Reproductive Justice Demands We Call In, Not Just Call Out

PUBLISHED 3/9/2026 by and

Reproductive justice is not simply about the right to abortion or access to contraception; it is about the right to have a child, to not have a child, and to raise families in safe and sustainable communities. This framework, created by Black women in the 1990s, recognizes that race, class, gender and immigration status all intersect with reproductive health and freedom. At its core, reproductive justice is about dignity and self-determination.

We must call out systems of oppression. We must call out elected officials who use the law to control our bodies and futures. But we must also call in those who are silent, those who are uncertain, and those who are still learning. Not everyone understands the full weight of these attacks. Not everyone sees how racism, poverty and patriarchy are connected to abortion bans. That is where our movement’s compassion must meet its courage.

It’s about helping a young person in a conservative home understand that their freedom to plan their life is a human right. It’s about showing a voter in a swing state that abortion bans are government overreach and economic violence. It’s about connecting the dots between forced pregnancy and the erosion of democracy itself.

Let us call in, where we can, those around us to join the work. Let us call on our government to honor its duty to protect, not control, our bodies—because true justice cannot wait.

Oscar-Nominated Documentary ‘The Devil Is Busy’ Shows What It Takes to Keep an Abortion Clinic Safe

PUBLISHED 3/9/2026 by

Tracii’s day begins early—before dawn. She arrives at work, turns on the lights and thoroughly searches the building for intruders. Then she checks outside, where it’s still dark, making sure no one is hiding in the woods or behind a dumpster.

Tracii is the head of security at an abortion clinic in Atlanta, and is also the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary short, The Devil Is Busy. Directed by Christalyn Hampton and Geeta Gandbhir, the film follows Tracii over the course of a long, stressful day at the clinic, as she works tirelessly to ensure not just the safety but the comfort of the women seeking care. (Neither her last name, nor the name of the clinic, gets mentioned in the film.)

Available to stream on HBO Max, The Devil Is Busy is a compelling portrait of a deeply compassionate woman on the frontlines of the abortion war. It packs a lot into 31 minutes, exploring not just the precarious status of abortion care post-Roe v. Wade, but also the fraught intersection of race, religion and women’s health.

The film arrives just as advocates mark Abortion Provider Appreciation Day, observed each year on March 10. The date honors Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider murdered by a white supremacist anti-abortion extremist in 1993. Since 1996, supporters have used the day to recognize the courage and compassion of abortion providers—people like Tracii—whose work continues despite harassment, threats and political attacks.

Ms. Global: Iranian Girls’ School Hit in U.S.-Israeli Strikes, Taliban Legalize Domestic Violence, The Netherlands’ First Gay Prime Minister, and More

PUBLISHED 3/5/2026 by and | UPDATED 3/9/2026 at 7:12 A.M. PT

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 week: stories from Iran, Afghanistan, the Netherlands and more.

Aid Held Hostage: How Trump’s Expanded Global Gag Rule Weaponizes Foreign Assistance

PUBLISHED 3/5/2026 by , and

Global maternal and child health is already in crisis. Hundreds of thousands of preventable pregnancy-related deaths occur annually, and progress to address maternal mortality has stalled globally.

Now, the Trump administration’s expanded global gag rule—which took effect last week—will accelerate this already dangerous backslide.

The global gag rule, or Mexico City Policy, has long functioned as a financial chokehold, barring U.S. aid to international organizations that offer abortion counseling or referrals, even with non-U.S. sources. In its most sweeping expansion to date, the policy now extends to nearly all non-military foreign assistance.

A policy that accelerates a global maternal and child health crisis cannot credibly be described as pro-life. As care fragments and organizations are forced into silence, the fallout is predictable and permanent: Survivors will navigate trauma alone, and women will die.

‘Lone Star Three’: How Three UT Austin Students Paved the Way for Birth Control Access in 1960s Texas

PUBLISHED 3/5/2026 by and | UPDATED 3/10/2026 at 5:31 P.M. PT

In 1969 Victoria Foe, Judy Smith and Barbara Hines were students at the University of Texas in Austin when Smith invited Foe and Hines to attend women’s liberation meetings at her house. Their discussions led them to start a campus Birth Control Information Center and eventually evolved into an underground network that helped women access safe abortion at a time when it was illegal in Texas. 

Their activism would eventually extend far beyond their university campus, planting the seeds for Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that would legalize abortion in the U.S. Not until 1965 did birth control in the U.S. become legal for married women. Not until 1972 did it become legal for anyone, married or unmarried, to access birth control.

A new documentary, Lone Star Three, directed by Karen Stirgwolt, tells the story of the women who formed the underground networks that allowed young women to access reproductive care in Texas in the days leading up to Roe v. Wade. Ms. recently spoke with Foe and Hines (Smith passed away in 2013), and archivist Alice Embree, about their activism from the 1960s to the present moment.

From DM’s to I Do’s: Five Ways Social Media Is Reshaping Child Marriage

PUBLISHED 3/4/2026 by

As the world goes digital, so does the ancient practice of child marriage. 

More than half a billion women and girls living today are, or were, child brides. Among young adult women aged 20 to 24, one in five was married before age 18.

But that doesn’t mean that child marriage has stayed the same. There has been gradual progress in ending child marriage (around a decade ago, one in four women was married under 18). And technology is playing a growing role, both in cases where girls say “I do” and in cases where they say “I don’t.”

Immigration Detention Is Failing Women and Children—By Design

PUBLISHED 2/26/2026 by

The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley has been the subject of an onslaught of headlines in recent weeks, but the truth is, it’s been routinely criticized for inhumane conditions for years. But what we are seeing now, as Trudy Taylor Smith put it to me, is horror “on a shocking scale.” Children describe being served worm-infested food and dirty water, getting little or no classroom time and being perpetually sick. A toddler nearly dies because of medical neglect. A teenage boy with symptoms consistent with appendicitis is turned away by a nurse. There is no better way to describe it than state-sponsored child abuse.

If this isn’t stomach-churning enough, consider what is happening a few hours south, where girls’ reproductive healthcare and freedom is also in grave crisis. Pregnant and unaccompanied migrant children are being sent to San Benito, Texas.

Why Texas? Why else? … Because it is a place where abortion is illegal and high-risk pregnancy care is unavailable.

“Putting pregnant kids in San Benito is not a decision you make when you care about children’s safety,” one source said plainly.

This is entirely by design, pulled straight from the Project 2025 playbook. The constant split-screen scene in Texas is representative of the nation MAGA wants us to be, “where the cruelty is the point” and where the anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-freedom banner is flown.

We have to keep these stories—and all the women and girls in this state, willingly or not—front and center in the democracy movement. Their humanity is at the heart of all of ours.

Texas Sues California Doctor Over Abortion Pills in Escalating Interstate Fight

PUBLISHED 2/25/2026 by | UPDATED 3/4/2026 at 7:57 A.M. PT

Texas antiabortion politicians have made one thing clear: Their ban was never meant to stop at the Texas border.

On Feb. 1, Dr. Remy Coeytaux of California became the first person to be sued in federal court under Texas’ newly enacted House Bill 7, a bounty-hunter law that invites private citizens to file civil suits against anyone who manufactures, distributes, mails or provides abortion medication to women in Texas. The plaintiff in the lawsuit is Jerry Rodriguez, a private citizen who claims that Coeytaux prescribed and mailed abortion pills used by his former girlfriend to end her pregnancy.

The legal pressure on telehealth providers intensified this week: On Tuesday, Feb. 24, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton also filed suit against Aid Access, an Austria-based nonprofit that ships medication abortion internationally (including to all 50 states), along with its founders Rebecca Gomperts and Coeytaux. The complaint alleges the defendants violated Texas law by prescribing and mailing abortion medication to Texas patients and seeks an injunction preventing them from providing services to residents of the state.

Telehealth providers in states like California, New York and Massachusetts have been able to serve patients in banned states because of these shield laws: legal protections that prevent states with bans from prosecuting providers who are acting lawfully in the states where they work. So far, shield laws have withstood attacks from banned states.