In an excerpt from When in Menopause, lawyer and writer Jennifer Weiss-Wolf explains how to find an informed clinician, prepare for appointments and recognize when dismissal is a reason to move on.
Health
War on Women Report: ICE Lost Count of Detained Women’s Miscarriages; Sexual Assault Still Rampant on College Campuses; Post-Dobbs Ectopic Pregnancy Deaths on the Rise
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:
—On Wednesday, Sept. 2, Gloria Steinem, feminist, social activist and cofounder of Ms., died in her New York City home. She was 92.
—The family of Tierra Walker, who died in 2024 after she was refused a medically necessary abortion under Texas’ abortion ban, is suing Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio and several of Walker’s doctors and nurses in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit.
—House Republicans have formally censured Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) for his documented inappropriate conduct toward women staffers, including excessive unwanted attention and gifts ranging from flowers and purses to personalized handguns.
—Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr, spent a decade as part of a cult that trafficked and sexually exploited children and young women, former members allege.
—Almost 200 women have died in the U.S. due to an ectopic pregnancy between 2020 and 2025.
—“Jane Doe,” a former Cornell University student, has filed a lawsuit alleging she was coerced into taking incapacitating drugs, then gang-raped by seven Chi Phi fraternity brothers over a period of several hours at their fraternity house in October 2024. The plaintiff is suing Cornell University, several fraternity and sorority organizations and the seven Chi Phi members: Matthew Ingalls, Johnathan Newell, Winston Lee, Gillio Lopes, Diego Sarabia, Scott Norris and Scott Kretzschmar.
—A jury in Lima, Ohio, has indicted a 22-year-old woman for “abuse of a corpse” after she was arrested in February when she suffered a miscarriage and placed the fetal remains in the trash.
—The same month the details of the Cornell case emerged, a student at Louisiana State University is seeking criminal charges against a student football player for allegedly sexually assaulting her in October 2025. A Title IX investigation at the university level has found that the student-athlete is “responsible” for “sexual assault” and “forcible rape.” However, an appeals judge reduced his punishment from suspension to probation.
… and more.
After Her Near-Fatal Pregnancy Crisis, Amanda Zurawski Is Finally a Mom
In 2022, Amanda Zurawski became a national figure after she nearly died from pregnancy complications in Texas. Zurawski had conceived that pregnancy through intrauterine insemination (IUI), but when her water broke at 18 weeks, doctors delayed abortion care until she developed life-threatening sepsis. The infection left severe scarring in her reproductive organs, leading her and her husband, Josh, to pursue IVF and a surrogate, who gave birth to their son, August, on Sept. 13.
“August Mikel James Zurawski was born on Sep. 13, and he is happy and healthy. We are the happiest. … For the present, we hope to stay in Texas and fight. But now we have someone else to think about.”
Antiabortion Politics Blocks Research on Fibroids, Endometriosis and Breast Cancer. The Media Is Finally Paying Attention.
Mifepristone is known as the abortion pill, but it has other uses most Americans have never heard about. For more than three decades, scientists have known this medication could do far more than end a pregnancy. Research shows mifepristone and a similar drug ulipristal acetate (sold under the brand name ella) can shrink fibroids, treat endometriosis and may treat and even prevent breast cancer.
Despite this huge potential to improve women’s health and well-being, abortion opponents have obstructed research into these treatments for decades, fearing anything that could make mifepristone more available would weaken their fight against abortion.
The burden of this obstruction has fallen on women, left to suffer from years of painful fibroids and endometriosis, heavy bleeding and reduced fertility, or death from aggressive forms of breast cancer, while research that could help sits on the shelf.
For years, the fight to unlock mifepristone’s lifesaving potential was a story only feminist media would tell, but mainstream media is finally catching up.
Abortion Belongs in Pregnancy Care—And Your Insurance Should Cover It
In the fall of 1977, Rosie Jimenez, a 27-year-old single mother in McAllen, Texas, needed an abortion. Just months earlier Medicaid would have covered the procedure. But the Hyde Amendment, a new rule banning Medicaid coverage for abortion, had just taken effect. Unable to afford the more than $200 cost of an abortion from a licensed clinician, she turned to a midwife who was technically unlicensed to preform abortions.
Jimenez died from that unsafe procedure. She is widely known as the first documented death from the Hyde Amendment.
Fifty years later, countless women across the U.S. have had their lives forever changed by this archaic, racist, sexist and classist amendment.
Five Women, Five Different Stories of Reproductive Freedom
What’s your reproductive freedom story? As part of Ms.’ The Majority campaign, five staff members at Power to Decide share theirs. The nonprofit works to expand access to sexual and reproductive health information and care; its programs include Bedsider and AbortionFinder.
“Until [the Supreme Court ruled married couples had a right to contraception], [my grandmother, Ruth’s] adult life was pregnancy and postpartum, on repeat.”
Respectability Politics and the Making of a Menopause Justice Movement
After generations of silence, menopause has entered mainstream conversation with remarkable speed, thanks in part to Gen X’s insistence and the emergence of older millennials navigating perimenopause. People are finding language for once-isolating experiences, and researchers and clinicians are paying closer attention.
But this cultural reboot demands that we ask whose stories are treated as authoritative, whose leadership is recognized and resourced, and who can access the care and knowledge being produced. Paid memberships, subscription communities, influencer content, concierge care, exclusive events and information behind paywalls are rapidly turning menopause into a marketplace. Who gains power as the conversation grows?
What may once have operated as a strategy for surviving racial terror has hardened, in many contemporary institutions and marketplaces, into an entrance requirement: Prove you are polished, palatable, professionally credentialed, “properly” gendered, sufficiently resourced and nonthreatening before your suffering can be believed or your leadership affirmed.
We are therefore being asked to interrogate more than whose voices, stories and activism are championed and pushed to the forefront. We must also examine whose knowledge is treated as credible, whose testimony becomes evidence, and whose experiences are permitted to define the full breadth of menopause. If legitimacy still depends on proximity to whiteness, wealth, cisgender identity, able-bodiedness, professional status or institutional approval, then the table has not been transformed. It has simply diversified its guest list.
(This essay is part of the latest Women & Democracy installment, in partnership with Black Girls’ Guide to Surviving Menopause. Menopause is not only a physical transition—it is also cultural, social and political. Recognizing its full scope is essential to advancing true health and civic equity.)
Decades of Male-Focused Medical Research Could Bias Healthcare AI
Many people will learn CPR using a flat-chested manikin. A 2024 study of 20 models of CPR manikins sold worldwide found that three-quarters were described as male or had no sex specified. Of the 20, only one offered a breast overlay.
The manikins reflect a wider tendency in medical teaching and research to treat the male body as standard. The terms “male and female” and “men and women” in this article reflect the sources, which often fail to distinguish sex from gender or say whether gender-diverse people were included.
The lack of female representation can have consequences. In a U.S. study of 19,331 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests, 39 percent of women who collapsed in public received bystander CPR, compared with 45 percent of men.
Medical research is becoming more representative, but much of today’s evidence was collected when male bodies were more often treated as standard. Careful design could help AI identify patterns that older research missed.
As tomorrow’s healthcare is built from yesterday’s records, researchers must ask whether an apparent difference reflects biology or the way patients encountered healthcare. Otherwise old assumptions could become embedded in new technology.
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Keeping Score: Texas GOP Candidate Brandon Herrera’s Vile Attack on Mothers and Children; Rest in Power Gloria, Dolly, Robin Morgan, Annie Dillard and More
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:
—The Trump administration proposed a rule that would eliminate quality standards for the Head Start preschool program.
—Todd Blanche was confirmed as attorney general, after promising to remove abortion rights nationwide.
—Democrats in the Senate call out Trump administration’s attacks on Title IX and mark its 54th anniversary with a bicameral resolution: “They will fearmonger about trans kids until the sun comes up, but the fact is this administration has all but decimated the Office for Civil Rights at the Department of Education, leaving egregious instances of sexual harassment and assault, and so much else, totally unaddressed.”
—Kindergartener Liam Tadeo and his father, Victor Martinez Nieto, both Austin residents, were detained by ICE on their way to a soccer game and later deported together to Mexico after being held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center.
—The six recipients of the 2026 Goldman Environmental Prize are all women.
—Voters in battleground states say it’s important that lawmakers protect access to reproductive healthcare.
—At least 152 ICE or CBP agents have faced disciplinary action or criminal penalties for violent crimes.
—Women make up 35 percent of non-acting Emmy Awards, matching the record high.
—Actor Anne Hathaway, currently pregnant with her third child at age 43, faced social media hate and rumors that she faked her pregnancy, after showing her bump on a red carpet.
—Florida professor Vinita Prabhakar was fired for assigning a “political” short story in a freshman English class. The story “Bettering Myself” focuses on an alcoholic teacher at a Catholic school and is commonly taught at colleges across the country. Prabhakar is now suing to uphold her First Amendment rights.
—Aisha Wahab won the special election to replace former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), who resigned after sexual assault allegations. Wahab is the first Afghan American elected to Congress, and will be on the ballot for a full term in November.
… and more.
Public Health Begins With Listening: Lessons From Zambia and Malawi on Reducing Maternal Mortality
In the Zambian districts where it operated, the five-year Saving Mothers, Giving Life initiative helped reduce the maternal mortality ratio by 41 percent. Its success relied not only on expanding healthcare, but also on building trust and ensuring that interventions responded to the needs of local communities.
Charles B. Holmes, recently named dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, spent four years leading the Centre for Infectious Disease Research in Zambia. He credits women mentors, collaborators and successors with shaping his approach to maternal care, HIV prevention and sustainable public health systems.
As the United States faces its own maternal health crisis and the Trump administration sharply curtails foreign aid, the lessons from Zambia and Malawi are increasingly urgent: Effective public health requires local leadership, long-term investment and the voices of those most affected at the table.