More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Olympians—athletes at the top of their sport and in prime health—are idolized and often viewed as superhuman. These athletes spend their lives focusing on building physical strength through rigorous training and diets that are honed to provide the nutrients necessary to excel at their sport.
However, athletes are at considerable risk for eating disorders and having an unhealthy relationship with food and their bodies.
Erin and Josh Hawley’s new dark-money group, the Love Life Initiative, arrives at a moment when abortion opponents are shifting tactics. With Roe overturned and sweeping bans already in place across much of the country, the focus is now on cutting off the remaining paths to care—through ballot measures, advertising campaigns and state-level policy fights designed to reshape public opinion and law from the ground up. The Hawleys frame this effort as a moral crusade to restore a national “culture of life.”
But in practice, it is an escalation of a post-Dobbs strategy that has already restricted access across wide swaths of the United States.
The consequences of that strategy are increasingly stark. Pregnant women in states with abortion bans are dying after being denied care, and people living in those states face significantly higher risks during pregnancy, with women of color bearing the brunt.
At the same time, public support for abortion rights has grown, and abortion-protective states have moved to shield providers and patients from out-of-state enforcement.
The Love Life Initiative reflects a movement determined not only to defend its legal victories but to reverse that growing acceptance—by reshaping the political and cultural terrain on which the abortion debate now unfolds.
The first year of Trump’s second term marked major blows for reproductive healthcare. Medicaid funding cuts forced about 50 Planned Parenthood clinics to close throughout the U.S. and blocked 1.1 million Planned Parenthood patients on Medicaid from using their insurance to pay for reproductive healthcare. Twenty-three independent abortion clinics throughout the country also shut down in 2025.
Now, at the start of 2026, there are only nine states where it is possible to get a legal abortion with no restrictions.
Four years after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe, here are some of the key ways states are pushing harder than ever to end any access to abortion.
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: stories from Iran, Gaza, the International Olympic Committee, and more.
Tierra Walker was just 37 years old when her son JJ, 14, found her lying facedown and unresponsive on her bed. As he desperately called 911, he cried, “I need you, I need you,” and tried his best to bring her back to life with CPR, following the instructions of the emergency operator. It was too late. He lost his mother and best friend on his birthday.
Walker died at 20 weeks pregnant after multiple ER trips and hospitalizations. She had been examined by 90 doctors, including 21 OB-GYNs, during the previous months. Yet not one of those 90 medical experts Walker met with ever suggested that she do the only thing that could have definitively saved her life—undergo an abortion to end the pregnancy.
One doctor interviewed for this story sums up the chilling stakes Walker faced as she pleaded with dozens of doctors for care as her condition spiraled. “It’s unfortunate she didn’t come upon a physician who was willing to stick their neck out,” despite the legal risks. In Texas, that’s exactly what it takes to keep a patient like Tierra Walker alive.
The attorneys general of Louisiana, Idaho and Missouri filed a lawsuit in October 2025 in a Louisiana federal court, seeking to overturn the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 2023 decision to allow telehealth abortion. (The Louisiana lawsuit is one of three currently active lawsuits filed by state attorneys general pushing the FDA to roll back access to mifepristone.)
Now, mifepristone’s manufacturers are moving to join the lawsuit and defend access to medication abortion.
On Feb. 3, Danco Laboratories and GenBioPro—manufacturers of the brand-name and a generic of mifepristone—filed motions to intervene, opposing Louisiana’s request for a preliminary injunction and urging the court to dismiss the lawsuit. The drugmakers argue that mifepristone has a long-established safety record—proven safe beyond any doubt by over 100 peer-reviewed studies and 25 years of real-world use by more than 7.5 million women.
GenBioPro explained its reasons for filing the motion. “We are increasingly concerned by extremists’ complete disregard for the large body of scientific evidence supporting mifepristone’s use and safety,” said GenBioPro CEO Evan Masingill. “We will not stand by while politically motivated efforts put Americans’ access to medication abortion in jeopardy.”
The next hearing in the Louisiana et al. v FDA case is set for Feb. 24, when Judge David Joseph will hear arguments on Louisiana’s preliminary injunction motion to block telehealth abortion and pharmacy dispensing of mifepristone.
This essay is one of three “Letters to My Future Self” included in Flipping the Menopause Script Is Essential to Democracy. Through personal reflection, political memory and spiritual inquiry, these letters consider menopause and midlife as thresholds—moments of undoing, reckoning and renewal. They invite readers to see aging not as decline, but as a site of transformation, agency and hard-won power.
“Since we were born in 1967 … we were told, implicitly and explicitly, that we were the first generation of Black children born into the fullness of freedom promised by law. The first generation of Black women was meant to be fully protected by the government. Free to vote without obstruction. Free to be educated without limits. Free to open a bank account, hold a credit card and own property. Free to marry who we loved. Free to live without our rights being constantly renegotiated.
“That was the promise we inherited. …
“Menopause sharpened my understanding that rights, like bodies, require attending to and care. That neglect is a political choice. That erosion is not accidental. That what happens to aging bodies mirrors what happens to democracies that refuse to honor those most impacted by time, labor and sacrifice. So I am writing to you, Future Me, because I want us to meet each other awake.
“Who are we when I finally arrive?
“Are we softer without being smaller? Stronger without armor? Have we learned how to rest without apology? Have we let go of the belief that our worth must be proven through exhaustion? …
“If you are an ancestor now, please remind me of what mattered most. Not the accolades. Not the fear. Not the scarcity. Remind me that I belonged to myself. That I belonged to my people. That I trusted the wisdom of my changing body.”
(This essay is part of the latest Women & Democracy installment, published in the middle of Black History Month, 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.)
Elan Pratt writes toward her future self, exploring Black queer joy, intergenerational healing and the power of story to carry us forward.
“When I attended Iranti Ẹ̀jẹ̀, the writer and activist Rachel Cargle led a guided meditation enabling participants to interact with their future self.
“I closed my eyes and created a portal to my 48 year-old self’s house. She was making soup in her kitchen, her hair was long and loc’d, her chest was flat. …
“we were prompted to relay a statement to ourselves. I told myself, ‘The laughter is my favorite,’ to which my future self replied, ‘The laughter remains.’ And with all the madness in the world, it’s incredibly comforting that the laughter will remain. That joy will still be found through struggle, as it always has. As Black folks, it’s how we have always pushed through—not just to survive, but to thrive.”
(This essay is part of the latest Women & Democracy installment, published in the middle of Black History Month, 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.)
Like many of the women in my family, I had early menopause and had completed the process by the age of 50, the same as my mother.
The alarming truth is that we know more about reproductive organs in other species than we do our own. Our limited societal understanding of the lifespan of ovarian function is a casualty of the intersection of medical racism, patriarchy and white empiricism.
The story will remain incomplete until we have our research and clinical care guided by the menopausal experiences of those who experience it.
(This essay is part of the latest Women & Democracy installment, published in the middle of Black History Month, 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.)
One of three “Letters to My Future Self” featured in Flipping the Menopause Script Is Essential to Democracy. Blending poetry, spiritual reflection and lived experience, these letters explore menopause and midlife as sites of transformation, rest and reclamation.
“Let the cleavage of your wound smile out at the world from your unbuttoned dress. You know how to do it. This is an exercise in nerve. You need nerve to be free. (And you need freedom to fulfill your earthly mission.) …
“The liminality you are in is a temporary chrysalis. Your whole being is restructuring, and you’re shedding the parts of you that are no longer useful. When you emerge, you’ll soar.”
(This essay is part of the latest Women & Democracy installment, published in the middle of Black History Month, 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.)