More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Across the U.S., indie clinics are often the last line of defense. In 2022 alone, at least 42 independent abortion clinics have been forced to close or stop providing abortion care.
Despite ongoing challenges, we’ve seen the resilience of independent clinics and providers and heard the voices of voters and the public like never before. We need everyone in this fight to keep our clinics open.
Millions of troops and their families stationed on contaminated military installations were exposed to a deadly combination of toxins responsible for triggering fatal illnesses. North Carolina’s Camp Lejeune is perhaps the most notorious example of widespread contamination affecting U.S. army bases.
Congress passed the Honoring Our PACT Act in August to facilitate veterans’ access to improved benefits through the V.A. for service-connected toxic exposure. The bill recognizes 23 new diseases as presumptive conditions—but breast cancer still isn’t one of them.
“I’m pregnant,” I lied, sitting across from a staffer at a Crisis Pregnancy Center. “We’ll do everything we can to help,” she lied back.
For every one abortion clinic in the U.S., there are three crisis pregnancy centers. In the face of their anti-abortion disinformation, we must fight back—because lives depend on it.
The overwhelming focus on whether bans have exceptions and whether people can get abortions in extreme situations distorts our perception of what is actually happening in states that ban abortion—which is that abortion bans are extreme and harmful because they ban abortion, period.
As the focus shifts to the 2023 state legislative sessions, where we expect lawmakers to further restrict abortion care, correcting public narratives about abortion bans is an urgent priority. To do that, we need to reframe how we discuss exceptions in three critical ways: Exceptions are designed to be unworkable. Focusing on exceptions ignores the vast majority of people harmed by abortion bans. And the focus on exceptions creates a false hierarchy of who is deserving of care.
As a mom and a former teacher, I understand why parents and educators don’t want to hear about COVID-19 related learning loss. But it’s time we have an honest conversation—without blame or shame.
Ninety-two percent of parents believe their children are at or above grade level. This is despite a growing body of research telling a very different story. We can’t afford to wait for yet another reminder of how far our kids are behind.
In communities across America, the holidays inspire food drives, meals served to the unhoused and donations to food pantries. But by enacting a broad and thoughtful national strategy to end hunger, we can envision a future where the season’s holidays no longer require a tradition of well-meaning interventions by an overwhelmed charitable sector.
U.S. patriarchal authoritarianism is on the rise, and democracy is on the decline. But day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. The fight is far from over. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.
This month: Brittney Griner is released from a racist and homophobic penal colony; abortion access is still in shambles despite midterm victories; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi plans to step down; three high-profile mass shootings in a matter of weeks; 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 in this biweekly round-up.
This week: Associated Press tells writers not to use harmful term “later-term abortion,” instead “abortion later in pregnancy”; advocates condemn the announcement of Trump’s 2024 presidential bid; Georgia’s six-week abortion ban is back; Iranian security arrested two women actors for supporting national protests; Oregon governor pardons 45,000 convicted on marijuana charges; VP Kamala Harris to swear in Los Angeles mayor-elect Karen Bass; and more.
We have been left all alone, our bodies overlooked by the law and undermined by the courts. We’re left, quite literally, to save our own lives. But perhaps one silver lining of the overturning of Roe v. Wade has been creating space for women to openly and deliberately trace the arc of their reproductive lives—in public—from menstruation to menopause.
As advocates, scholars and providers now work to reimagine and rebuild what meaningful reproductive care looks like in this country, we have an opportunity to be more holistic in addressing the full continuum of women’s reproductive lives. Private sector interventions and public policy solutions must reflect those intersections. Period. Full stop.
President Biden’s American Rescue Plan included billions for the training of mental health professionals, and community-based programs. The proposals the Biden administration is enacting might seem like they were inevitable, but none of these changes would be possible without decades of work by those in the activist community.