Justice & Law

Texas May Eliminate a Critical Tool for Preventing Maternal Deaths

PUBLISHED 6/11/2026 by and

Texas is considering whether to continue one of its most important tools for preventing maternal deaths.

The state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC), which investigates pregnancy-related deaths and identifies ways to prevent them, is currently undergoing Sunset review—a routine process that determines whether state programs will continue operating. If lawmakers fail to reauthorize the committee, Texas will lose a critical source of information about why mothers are dying and what can be done to save lives.

The stakes are especially high for Black women. In Texas, Black women are nearly four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes. Texas’ maternal mortality rate also exceeds the national average, and approximately 80 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are considered preventable.

As public health researchers who have studied women’s health and health disparities in Texas for decades, we know that meaningful progress depends on understanding what is driving these deaths and holding systems accountable for addressing them.

Maternal mortality review committees are one of the most effective tools states have for doing exactly that.

Keeping Score: Threats Against Abortion Clinics Doubled in 2025; Sounding the Alarm on ‘Horrible Conditions’ of Delaney Immigration Center; Pride Celebrations Around the U.S.

PUBLISHED 6/10/2026 by

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:
—”Trump only seems to have the capability to fire female secretaries,” observes AOC.
—Two-thirds of abortion clinics reported violence or harassment in 2025.
—The TAKE IT DOWN Act (Tools to Address Known Exploitation by Immobilizing Technological Deepfakes on Websites and Networks Act) took effect last month. It requires social media sites to take down non-consensual sexual imagery within 48 hours.
—Members of Congress visited the Delaney Hall Immigration Detention Center after detainees started a hunger strike to protest inhumane conditions.
—The Trump administration announced an investigation into E. Jean Carroll, who Trump sexually abused and defamed.
—Harvey Weinstein’s New York rape trial resulted in another mistrial.
—A North Carolina bill would allow deadly force against patients seeking abortion care.
—Healthcare premiums have skyrocketed, forcing 21 percent of HealthCare.gov enrollees to lose coverage.
—Women freelancers charge an average of 19 percent less per hour than men.
—Americans are struggling to access disability benefits after cuts to the Social Security Administration.
—Social media platforms are enabling anti-LGBTQ hate and censorship.
—Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) and Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) reintroduced the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act to ban the death penalty at the federal level. Last month, the DOJ announced they would bring back firing squads and potentially electrocution and lethal gas for executions.
—A comprehensive calendar shows all the Pride parades this month, across the country and globe.

… and more.

Feminist Lessons from 2020 to Present: The Fight for Democracy Is Far From Over

PUBLISHED 6/9/2026 by

The decade opened amid a pandemic, economic upheaval and a reckoning over democracy itself.

In early 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, seemingly bringing a nearly 50-year constitutional struggle to a historic milestone.

Yet within months, COVID-19 exposed the deep inequalities that feminists had long warned about. Millions of women—especially women of color—lost jobs, left the workforce to shoulder caregiving responsibilities or found themselves on the front lines of a public health crisis. As the country debated recovery, feminists argued that the economy itself was built on the underpaid and often invisible labor of women.

At the same time, Kamala Harris became the first woman and first woman of color elected vice president, while President Joe Biden assembled the first gender-balanced Cabinet and later appointed Ketanji Brown Jackson as the first Black woman justice on the Supreme Court.

Then came Dobbs. In June 2022, nearly 50 years after Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion, triggering bans and severe restrictions across much of the country. Clinics closed, patients traveled hundreds of miles for care, and pregnancy criminalization accelerated.

The decision was not an isolated event but part of a broader wave of attacks on reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, voting rights and democratic institutions themselves. As Ms. observed throughout the decade, the same forces seeking to control women’s bodies were also working to restrict participation in a multiracial democracy.

Yet even as rights were rolled back, women continued to build political power. The number of women serving in Congress and state legislatures reached record highs, the gender gap remained a decisive force in elections, and support for feminist priorities—including abortion rights and the ERA—continued to grow.

The lesson of the 2020s is both sobering and hopeful: Progress is never permanent, but neither is backlash. Every generation inherits unfinished struggles, and the future of democracy depends on whether people are willing to organize, participate and fight for the freedoms they refuse to lose.

This essay is part of Feminist Lessons—part 2 of Ms.’ our three-part FEMINIST 250 project—which explores what each decade of modern feminist history can teach us about power, democracy, backlash and social change.

Feminist Lessons from the 2010s: When Millions Refused to Go Back, Feminists Turned Backlash Into Power

PUBLISHED 6/9/2026 by

The 2010s began with a burst of feminist victories that seemed to signal a new era.

Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, appointed Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court, and signed the Affordable Care Act into law. For millions of women, the ACA transformed healthcare almost overnight: Insurers could no longer charge women more than men, deny coverage because of a previous C-section or experience of domestic violence, or exclude maternity care. Contraception, well-woman visits, breastfeeding support and other preventive services became available without out-of-pocket costs, saving women billions of dollars.

Meanwhile, the administration strengthened protections for survivors of sexual assault, expanded support for Indigenous, immigrant and LGBTQ survivors of violence, and advanced women’s rights globally.

But beneath those gains, another story was unfolding. State lawmakers introduced hundreds of abortion restrictions, anti-choice politicians targeted contraception and family planning programs, and Republicans repeatedly attacked the very policies feminists had fought to secure.

Then came the political earthquake of 2016. Hillary Clinton became the first woman nominated for president by a major political party, only to lose to Donald Trump after one of the most openly misogynistic campaigns in modern history.

Within months, Trump reinstated the global gag rule, undermined reproductive healthcare programs, rolled back Title IX protections and began reshaping the federal judiciary with far-right judges whose influence would last for decades.

Yet the defining story of the decade was not the backlash itself—it was the response. Nearly 6 million people joined Women’s Marches in 2017, making them the largest single-day protest in U.S. history at the time. Survivors launched the #MeToo movement into a global reckoning over sexual harassment and abuse. Women flipped 40 House seats in the 2018 midterms, revived the Equal Rights Amendment campaign and elected record numbers of women to office.

The lesson of the 2010s is that backlash can become fuel. Faced with escalating attacks on their rights, millions of feminists refused to go back—and instead transformed resistance into political power.

This essay is part of Feminist Lessons—part 2 of Ms.’ our three-part FEMINIST 250 project—which explores what each decade of modern feminist history can teach us about power, democracy, backlash and social change.

Trump and Hegseth’s Anti-Trans Military Policy Is Based on Unconstitutional Animus, D.C. Circuit Rules

PUBLISHED 6/8/2026 by

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held on a 2-1 vote last week that unconstitutional “animus-filled reasons” motivated the Trump administration’s policy barring transgender people from the military.

“Unless we are going to fall for the old Groucho Marx line—’who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’—we have direct evidence in this case that animus motivated the classifications in the [Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth Policy,” Wilkins, an Obama appointee, wrote in a portion of his opinion joined by Judge Judith Rogers.

What Do Most Female Prisoners Have in Common? They Are Actually Victims.

PUBLISHED 6/8/2026 by

When I first began reporting on incarcerated women, I was fascinated by studies that showed that showed that upwards of 70 percent of women in jails and prisons were subjected to intimate partner violence before they were incarcerated.

But as I covered more stories on the topic, I started to see that, more disturbingly, many women I interviewed had been incarcerated because they responded to violence perpetuated against them.

Again and again in my research, I came upon cases in which a woman claimed that she had acted in self-defense, or had followed orders from an abuser because she didn’t want to die, or had protected a loved one — and she was subsequently charged with murder, convicted, and locked away, sometimes for life. This is the little-known phenomenon termed “criminalized survival.” I wanted to understand how common it was.

Of Course Trump Is Going After E. Jean Carroll

PUBLISHED 6/5/2026 by

Last week, multiple outlets reported that the Justice Department would be opening a criminal investigation into E. Jean Carroll, the 82-year-old iconic journalist who successfully sued Donald Trump—twice.

It has been more than two years since she prevailed in back-to-back civil lawsuits against him, winning a $5 million verdict in May 2023, followed by another $83.3 million in January 2024. The first jury found Trump liable for committing sexual abuse in a department store dressing room in 1996, as well as defamation for saying Carroll lied about it. The second case, brought because he just wouldn’t stop with the defamation, multiplied the damages exponentially.

The timing of the DOJ announcement should come as no surprise, at least from a public relations point of view. Ask E. Jean, the new documentary about Carroll’s life, including the court cases, premiered days prior. After debuting at the Telluride Film Festival last year without much fanfare, the film is now selling out theaters, garnering high-profile coverage and reviews, and likely embarrassing the president even more than his colossal legal defeat.

Meanwhile, among legal analysts, there is widespread agreement that the DOJ has no legitimate basis for investigating Carroll. But that is hardly the point when it comes to this administration, especially the weaponization of the Justice Department now led by acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, who represented Trump personally in the Carroll case (and supposedly is recused from this investigation).

The Growing Acceptance of a Movement That Wants to Punish Women for Abortion

PUBLISHED 6/4/2026 by

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?

PUBLISHED 6/2/2026 by

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.”