Health

Where ACA Premiums Could Spike Most in 2026 if Congress Lets Enhanced Tax Credits Expire

PUBLISHED 12/4/2025 by , , , , and

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) offers premium tax credits to help make health insurance more affordable. Under original Affordable Care Act provisions, an income cap for premium tax credits was set at 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Above that threshold, federal financial assistance was not available, creating a “subsidy cliff.”

Enhanced premium tax credits expire at the end of this year. Enrollees currently receiving premium tax credits at any level of income will see their federal assistance decrease or disappear if enhanced premium tax credits expire, with an average increase of 114 percent to what enrollees pay in premiums net of tax credits.

The impact will be greatest for those whose unsubsidized premiums are highest: older Marketplace enrollees and those living in higher-premium locales.

Trump’s Silence on World AIDS Day Revives a New Lavender Scare

PUBLISHED 12/3/2025 by

Last month, the State Department warned employees not to commemorate World AIDS Day through official work accounts, including social media, nor should they use government funds to mark Tuesday, Dec. 2, as World AIDS Day. The day came and went in a quiet, cold Washington, D.C., without the president marking what it represented—the more than 700,000 Americans who died from HIV/AIDS-related causes in the United States since 1981. 

If his intentions were unclear, Trump’s budget proposed ending all CDC HIV prevention programs this past June, and Congress continues to negotiate next year’s budget, proposing massive cuts to HIV programs. 

For many young people who never lost friends or family, there may be the misconception that the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 1980s was localized and small, but nearly 300,000 men who have sex with men have died from AIDS-related complications, with over 6,000 deaths in 2019 alone. To put this in perspective, this would be as if over half of Wyoming’s population disappeared, or if everyone in Pittsburgh, Penn., vanished overnight. 

Even Madonna criticized Trump’s move, posting on Instagram, “It’s one thing to order federal agents to refrain from commemorating this day, but to ask the general public to pretend it never happened is ridiculous, it’s absurd, it’s unthinkable. I bet he’s never watched his best friend die of AIDS, held their hand, and watched the blood drain from their face as they took their last breath at the age of 23.” 

Shout Your Abortion Short Films Seek to Normalize Keeping Abortion Pills at Home: ‘You Always Have Options’

PUBLISHED 12/2/2025 by

The grassroots abortion-stigma-busting juggernaut Shout Your Abortion has released two new powerful public service announcements urging people across the U.S. to order abortion pills in advance to have on hand, in case they have an unwanted pregnancy.

Made by Detroit-based filmmaker Na Forest Lim, the short films follow two women—a teenager named Dani and a single mother in her 30s named Poppy—who find out they are pregnant and use abortion pills at home, supported by friends and family.

Both of the main characters have easy access to abortion pills: Dani’s friend arrives with pills in her backpack, and Poppy keeps a pack tucked away in her top dresser drawer.

Building on that vision of easy access, the Dani PSA shows what it looks like when abortion pills are already part of teenagers’ lives and a pregnancy never has the chance to become a crisis.

War on Women Report: Antiabortion Extremist Charged in S.C. Shooting; Army OB-GYN Accused of Abusing Over 85 Women Patients

PUBLISHED 12/1/2025 by and | UPDATED 12/4/2025 at 9:06 A.M. PT

MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide—the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.” We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.

Since our last report:
—North Dakota’s Supreme Court reinstated a total abortion ban, making it the 13th state with a near-total ban on abortion.
—Trump ordered Catherine Lucey, a woman reporter for Bloomberg, to be “quiet, piggy.”
—The U.S. moved to categorize countries with state-sponsored abortion and DEI policies as violators of human rights.
—Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier has sued Planned Parenthood over allegedly “misrepresenting the safety” of abortion pills.
—On Thursday, Dec. 4, an unprecedented law banning doctors from shipping abortion pills takes effect in Texas.
—”The country’s most respected newspaper hosted a conversation about whether women’s equality and freedom was a mistake.”
—Doctor Maj. Blaine McGraw, an OB-GYN at Fort Hood military base in Texas, the third-largest base in the country, is under investigation for sexual abuse against patients. As of Monday, 85 victims have come forward.
—With Jeffrey Epstein survivors watching from the gallery above, the House agreed in a near-unanimous vote to force the release of all files related to the investigation of the convicted sex offender.

… and more.

Twenty Thousand Stillbirths a Year, and No Federal Plan to Prevent Them

PUBLISHED 11/28/2025 by and

The U.S. loses over 20,000 babies to stillbirth each year, with many preventable. Across the country, pregnant women say their concerns are dismissed, with devastating consequences for maternal and fetal health. Yet stillbirth remains largely invisible in policy and public discourse, and families are left to deal with these tragic and costly losses with little support.

A new documentary from ProPublica, Before a Breath—based on the outlet’s Pulitzer Prize finalist reporting—follows three mothers who turn their grief from stillbirth into advocacy for safer pregnancies and better outcomes for expecting parents.

Inside the Global Network of Abortion Doulas Supporting Self-Managed Care

PUBLISHED 11/26/2025 by

As barriers to clinic-based abortion care have increased in recent years, an increasing number of women are self-managing their abortions: finding and using abortion pills independently of the formal medical system. They are obtaining abortion pills through online abortion pill services, community networks sharing pills for free and websites selling pills.

To support self-managed abortion, feminists are creating a global network of online abortion doulas—trained companions who offer one-on-one support by phone, email and text to people using abortion pills. A leader in this effort is the organization Rouge Doulas, which runs the Rouge Abortion Doula School.

Caregiving Is Extremely Difficult in America. It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way.

PUBLISHED 11/25/2025 by

For many Asian and immigrant families, caregiving is a way of life, with generations living and caring for one another under the same roof as part of daily life. My Iranian grandparents lived in a multi-unit dwelling in Tehran, where they cared for each other through illness and aging, cooking and sharing meals with their children and grandchildren in what seemed to me a seamless synchronicity. When my Pakistani grandmother emigrated from Karachi to the U.K. in the 1970s, she moved in with my uncle’s family, sharing a bedroom with her youngest grandson until she died. Now, that grandson lives in the same house with his own children and aging parents. 

However, here in the U.S., caregiving takes on a very different form, even for families raised on the belief that caring for another is simply what we do.

What to Know About the CDC’s Baseless New Guidance on Autism

PUBLISHED 11/24/2025 by

The rewriting of a page on the CDC’s website to assert the false claim that vaccines may cause autism sparked a torrent of anger and anguish from doctors, scientists and parents who say Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrecking the credibility of an agency they’ve long relied on for unbiased scientific evidence.

The revised CDC webpage will be used to support efforts to ditch most childhood vaccines, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine. “It will be cited as evidence, even though it’s completely invented,” she said.

A Bill Criminalizing Abortion Failed in the South Carolina Senate, But S.C. Prosecutors Have Long Treated Pregnancy as a Crime

PUBLISHED 11/24/2025 by

We have to talk about South Carolina.

Last week, what could have become the most punitive abortion law in the U.S., SB 323, failed in the South Carolina Senate. The bill proposed banning abortion in almost all circumstances, criminalizing people who sought abortion care, and removed any exceptions for rape, incest or fetal anomaly currently written into the state’s already strict six-week ban.

The defeat of SB 323 is a victory that was won by dedicated and fierce advocates from across the state and across the country. But South Carolina has been actively engaged in policing the bodies of pregnant women, and in criminalizing pregnancy, for decades.

The prosecutorial “hold my beer” approach to criminalizing abortion shows us not only just broken the criminal legal system is, but also, just how little regard they have for the humanity of people with the capacity for pregnancy. 

Novel ‘Truth Is’ Shows What It Really Takes for a Teen to Get an Abortion in 2025

PUBLISHED 11/22/2025 by

Truth Is is a pro-choice novel in every sense of the phrase. Truth’s choice to move forward with an abortion is made early on in the novel and the majority of the book focuses on her life and her choices after her decision.

I hope that years from now, a student picks up this book and reads about the challenges that the book’s main character Truth faces and goes, “Is that really how it was back then?”

For adults who engage with Truth’s story, I want us to consider the limitations we sometimes unknowingly put on young people. I want us to consider the heights young people could reach if they were granted opportunities and community support, the way Truth ultimately does in the novel.