The current Ebola outbreak in East Africa represents a critical test of the America First approach to global health security—and it is already failing.
Health
Latin American Feminists Train U.S.-Based Doulas on New Mifepristone Protocol for Second-Trimester Abortions
As Republicans create ever higher barriers to abortion that push abortion seekers later into pregnancy, U.S.-based activists are learning from Latin American feminists who have developed protocols to make second-trimester medication abortion easier and safe: using a double-dose mifepristone protocol for pregnancies 17 weeks of gestation and longer.
For second-trimester abortions, taking two mifepristone means needing less misoprostol, which eases painful contractions and shortens the time to uterine expulsion.
Whereas mifepristone’s side effects are mild—mainly headaches and some nausea that can be treated with medications—misoprostol causes diarrhea, chills and vomiting, which are much harder to experience. Using two mifepristone also significantly reduces the period of painful contractions—from 15 to 18 hours, to often less than six hours, which is critical for women who have to work or care for children or relatives.
Supported women have expressed great satisfaction with the process.
People seek abortion care later in pregnancy for the same reasons they do early in pregnancy, said Erika Christensen, cofounder of Patient Forward, which works to eliminate barriers to abortion care later in pregnancy and provides resources on how find later abortion care—but many are not able to access care as soon as they would like. “This could be because they learned a piece of new information later in their pregnancy, like a health threat to themselves or to the fetus, a new extenuating life circumstance, or it could be the new information could be that they’re pregnant.”
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.
91% of Voters Support a National Paid Leave Program. How Do We Make It Happen?
The United States is one of only seven countries lacking a federal mandate for paid maternal or family leave. Within the country, only 13 states and D.C. have paid family and medical leave programs, acting as a lifeline for families.
Often considered by lawmakers to be a program too expensive to start, it’s the cost of inaction that lawmakers should be concerned with, according to Dawn Huckelbridge, executive producer of a new short film Lifelines and founding director of Paid Leave for All.
“A lot of people miss their baby’s first smile. … They’re not there to hold their parent’s hand because they can’t get the time off work. … However it is funded in the long run, it is putting money back into the economy. It is saving jobs.”
War on Women Report: Abortion Access, Academic Freedom and Trans Rights Under Fire
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:
—President Trump lost his latest appeal effort against paying New York writer E. Jean Carroll an $83.3 million defamation judgment.
—The government is using family separation as an antiabortion tactic via Child Protective Services.
—The House passed HR 2616, the so-called Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act, with support from eight Democrats; if enacted, the bill would bar federally funded public elementary and middle schools from acknowledging transgender students and require educators to notify parents if a student identifies as transgender at school.
—A reminder: People can order abortion pills from all 50 states, no matter what the courts decide.
… and more.
Judge Stops Trump Administration From Funding Antiabortion Extremists, for Now
On Friday, in response to a lawsuit brought by Democracy Forward, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration’s “anti-weaponization” fund—which would have directly funded the work of antiabortion extremists. The $1.8 billon fund’s announcement explicitly identified antiabortion extremists convicted of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act as presumptive recipients—the same FACE Act violators Donald Trump pardoned in January 2025.
The restraining order against the fund is intended to make sure that no funds are distributed before the lawsuit brought on behalf of the National Abortion Federation; Andrew Floyd, a former Jan. 6 prosecutor; professor John Caravello of New Haven, Conn.; and Common Cause, a government accountability group, has a chance to play out. It will pause the fund’s establishment until at least June 12.
“President Trump wants to take your hard-earned tax dollars and hand them over to criminals, cronies, and insurrectionists,” said Common Cause president and CEO Virginia Kase Solomón in a statement announcing the lawsuit against the fund. “It’s unconscionable, and more importantly, it’s illegal.”
Your Tax Dollars Are Funding the Trump Administration’s Patriarchal Family Agenda
“One in three Americans are under-babied,” declared Trump’s Medicare and Medicaid chief Dr. Mehmet Oz last week, echoing JD Vance’s contempt for “childless cat ladies.”
Guided by evangelical supporters, the Trump administration is eroding longstanding civil rights protections, restricting access to contraception and abortion, and weakening support systems for single mothers and their children. The goal is clear: to pressure women into marriage and motherhood while making the patriarchal family the center of American life.
The administration’s policies closely track the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, which seeks to incentivize what it calls “natural marriage”—a heterosexual household with a breadwinner father, stay-at-home mother and biologically related children.
Meanwhile, the administration’s new Moms.Gov website directs pregnant women to antiabortion organizations that that have been widely criticized for their misleading information about options and for their collection of patients’ sensitive personal information.
Taxpayer dollars are increasingly being used to advance a vision of society rooted in patriarchal family structures and reproductive coercion.
Three Ways Trump’s Weird Fixation on DEI Is Hurting Women
The Trump administration’s obsession with diversity, equity and inclusion has moved far beyond rhetoric. It is now reshaping how women’s stories get told, whose health crises are allowed to be named, and what kinds of research are permitted to survive.
Across history, healthcare and science, women are watching decades of hard-fought progress become collateral damage in a culture war designed to erase people in real time.
That damage is already visible.
Republicans derailed long-awaited progress on the American Women’s History Museum by inserting provisions policing which women count as women and handing Trump appointees sweeping control over the museum itself.
Meanwhile, the newly reintroduced Momnibus legislation—created in response to the maternal mortality crisis devastating Black women and families—has been forced to strip much of the word “Black” from its language in order to survive politically under an administration openly hostile to DEI initiatives.
And the consequences are not abstract: NIH grants focused on women’s health have reportedly dropped by 30 percent, while words like “women” and “gender” themselves are becoming liabilities in funding proposals.
Women’s health was already chronically underfunded and misunderstood long before Trump returned to office. But the administration’s escalating war on DEI is accelerating that neglect—and making clear just how much is at stake when political ideology begins dictating whose lives deserve to be studied, protected and remembered.
After Historic SNAP Cuts, America’s Hunger Emergency Is Already Here—and Trump’s Proposed Budget Would Make It Worse
Even as communities across the country grapple with the fallout from last year’s devastating SNAP cuts, the White House’s proposed Fiscal Year 2027 budget threatens to deepen an already escalating hunger emergency.
The administration is pushing another $6 billion in cuts to SNAP, while also targeting WIC benefits, including proposals that would restrict access to fresh fruits and vegetables for women and children.
Rather than repairing the damage already done to America’s food assistance programs, the budget doubles down on policies that are pushing more families toward crisis.
The consequences are already unfolding nationwide. More than 4 million Americans have lost SNAP benefits over the past year, while states struggle under the unprecedented financial burdens shifted onto them by Republicans’ earlier cuts.
Some states are now considering whether they can continue participating in SNAP at all, raising the possibility that millions more people could lose food assistance simply because of where they live.
At the same time, congressional negotiations over the farm bill have largely failed to address the growing strain on hunger programs or the widening cracks in the nation’s social safety net.
(This essay is part of an ongoing Ms. series examining the real-world impact of President Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget. Across sectors—from healthcare and childcare to immigration enforcement and food assistance—the series explores what the administration’s funding priorities reveal about who government serves, and who it leaves behind.)
‘Ms. Book Club’ Miniseries: Four Must-Listen Conversations on Black Women, U.S. History and the Law
Our podcast platform Ms. Studios has launched a newly updated miniseries: Ms. Book Club, examining the last 250 years of U.S. history through a feminist lens and asking what the nation’s founding ideals have meant in practice for women, Black Americans and other historically marginalized communities.
Across the four-part series, Dr. Michele Goodwin—host of On the Issues and executive producer of Ms. Studios—speaks with four leading scholars and authors whose recent books explore how gender, race, law and power have shaped American life from 1776 to today: Keisha Blain, Dorothy Roberts, Khiara Bridges and Patricia Williams.
Each episode features an in-depth conversation between Goodwin and the author about how their work reframes dominant narratives of U.S. history—and challenges listeners to reconsider what, exactly, America is celebrating at its 250-year mark.