It’s been quite a week. I’m guessing, like me, you saw a connective thread in the headlines: Accountability rarely arrives on its own. It comes because people refuse to stay silent.
Justice & Law
Women’s Sports Were Built by Letting Girls In
When the Supreme Court upheld West Virginia’s ban on transgender girls participating in girls’ school sports in West Virginia v. B.P.J., it said the ruling was about protecting the safety and fairness of women’s and girls’ sports. I hear that claim against everything I actually lived.
Thirty years ago, in United States v. Virginia, the Supreme Court held that generalizations about “the way women are” cannot justify denying opportunity to women whose talent and capacity place them outside the average description. That principle didn’t just build my generation of athletes. It built a generation of women: the litigators and judges, the surgeons, the CEOs and entrepreneurs, the senators and governors, the police officers and firefighters and fighter pilots, the women who were the first of everything. Every one of those doors was held shut by the same argument Virginia made: Most women wouldn’t want this, most women couldn’t do it.
Women of my generation didn’t fight to be seen as individuals—as athletes, as leaders, as whatever they had it in them to be—only to watch that principle eroded now, in their name and over their objection.
More than half a century ago, this country decided that girls who had been told they didn’t belong on the field belonged there after all. I got to live the proof of that promise. The work now is to keep that promise for every kid who wants to play.
Making Americans Smokers Again: Trump Administration Cuts Anti-Tobacco Programs
In May, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported one of the greatest public health victories of the past 50 years. A government survey found that cigarette smoking among U.S. adults dropped to an all-time low of 9 percent in 2025, the first time the smoking rate hit single digits. In the 1970s some 40 percent of U.S. adults smoked daily, as well as 16 percent of teenagers, but a culmination of tobacco taxes, smoking bans and remarkably successful public education campaigns turned around what is still the nation’s largest cause of preventable death.
Which is why it is so astounding that the Trump administration, despite its stated goal to “make America healthy again,” is rolling back its smoking cessation efforts.
Can You Believe They Put This in Writing? The Wildest Quotes From Heritage’s ‘Project 2026’
The Heritage Foundation has once again taken it upon itself to craft a plan for how to supposedly save America. The report—”Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years”—focuses on marriage, family and the American Dream, and has become widely known as “Project 2026,” a follow-up to Heritage’s infamous Project 2025 blueprint.
Project 2025 clocked in at 900 pages; the sequel is around 150. We read the whole thing and pulled out the passages that gave us chills, made us laugh out loud, compelled us to suddenly need to take a long walk and hug our dogs, or inspired another donation to our local abortion fund.
This isn’t intended to be a fact-check or a line-by-line rebuttal. It’s intended to show you how some of the country’s most influential conservative thinkers are talking about feminism, contraception, abortion, LGBTQ+ people, higher education, marriage, motherhood and the role government should play in all of it—because you’re probably too busy to read hundreds of pages of anti-feminist slop.
And because, as former Vice President Kamala Harris famously said about Project 2025: “Can you believe they put that thing in writing?” They did—twice now!
This is the roadmap they’re offering. These documents tell us how their authors understand the country, the family and women’s place in both. We should know what it says.
‘Hands Off Ohio!’: FBI Raid of Voting Rights Group Raises Alarms Over Voter Intimidation
On the morning of June 11, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation raided the Cleveland offices of the Ohio Organizing Collaborative (OOC), a grassroots pro-democracy organization focused on registration, civic engagement and community organizing for marginalized communities.
According to reports, agents seized documents and computer files and questioned staff members for several hours. Investigators also contacted employees and community leaders at their homes, workplaces and schools. While some agents reportedly carried subpoenas and asked questions related to voter fraud, officials have not publicly explained the specific focus of the investigation.
The mission of the OOC is to build power among everyday Ohioans through racial, social and economic justice organizing. In the aftermath of the raid, many local leaders and voting rights advocates expressed concern that the investigation could discourage voter registration and civic participation ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
Republicans Are Betting the Fifth Time’s the Charm for the SAVE Act
After failing to advance in the Senate four separate times in two years and drawing opposition from members of their own party, Republicans are once again attempting to resurrect the SAVE America Act (an even more extreme version of the original SAVE Act)—legislation that would require Americans to provide proof of citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote.
More than 21 million Americans don’t have ready access to those documents, and married women who have changed their names will face additional hurdles if their birth certificates no longer match their legal names. And all of it is aimed at combating a problem—widespread noncitizen voting—that election officials and researchers have repeatedly debunked.
The renewed push comes at the insistence of President Donald Trump, who has made the legislation one of his top priorities.
Now, at Trump’s insistence, desperate House Republicans are searching for yet another legislative vehicle to move the measure. “The president has [the SAVE America] as a top priority, and so do I,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) told Fox News on Sunday. “We’re going to try one more time on a budget reconciliation bill, and I think that will be the way to get it through the Senate, and finally, to the president’s desk.”
Johnson claims he plans to tack SAVE onto the budget reconciliation package, in which Congress sets overall spending and revenue targets for the year—despite the Senate parliamentarian already having blocked this exact move last month: During the “vote-a-rama” on a different reconciliation bill, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) offered the SAVE Act as an amendment. The parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough determined the legislation could not be included because it violated the Byrd Rule, which limits the reconciliation process (which only requires a simple majority to pass) to provisions primarily related to federal spending and revenue. MacDonough deemed the bill’s core provisions—requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote and imposing new voter registration requirements—as election policy, not budget policy.
Walking Through the Door Dobbs Left Open: A Groundbreaking Idaho Case Tests Whether the Constitution Protects a Pregnant Woman’s Right to Self-Preservation
When most people think about post-Dobbs abortion litigation, they assume every lawsuit is trying to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision. But a groundbreaking case in Idaho charts a different course. Brought by maternal-fetal medicine specialist Dr. Stacy Seyb, the lawsuit argues that medically necessary abortion care is protected by a constitutional right Dobbs never addressed: the fundamental right to self-preservation.
To understand this novel legal strategy, I spoke with Wendy Heipt, a senior attorney at Legal Voice and a member of Seyb’s legal team. Rather than asking the courts to revive Roe, Heipt argues that no state can force a pregnant person to sacrifice their life or health by denying medically necessary care.
“This case isn’t about abortion,” she told me. “It’s about self-defense.”
If the courts agree, the case could establish a new constitutional framework for protecting pregnant women facing medical emergencies—even under the legal landscape created by Dobbs.
It is a reminder that some of the most consequential battles over reproductive freedom may turn not on revisiting old precedents, but on recognizing constitutional protections the Supreme Court never considered.
A Rape-Survivor-Turned-Prosecutor Is Teaching Women How to Heal
One of us is a doctor, the other a lawyer. We’re also members of a club that no woman ever asks to join, but too many are forced into, often by men they loved and trusted.
JoDee Neil, a Texas attorney and former prosecutor, has spent her career seeking justice for survivors of sexual violence. Now, in her new book Outcry Witness, she tells her own story—one shaped by rape, trauma and the long, uneven path toward healing. As survivors ourselves, we recognized something familiar in each other: the understanding that comes without explanation, and the belief that when institutions fail us, women often become each other’s lifeline.
An “outcry witness” is the first person a survivor tells about their abuse, and that response can shape the course of healing. Neil argues that being believed is not a small act of compassion—it is the foundation on which survivors rebuild their lives.
In an era when powerful men continue to evade accountability, Outcry Witness offers something the legal system too often cannot: validation, community and hope.
Our conversation became more than an interview. It became a reminder that storytelling is itself an act of resistance—that women speaking honestly to one another can challenge shame, expose violence and create the conditions for healing.
“We are at the precipice of the dam breaking,” Neil told me. “We’ve never been able to communicate in real time with each other, to really put the pieces together. … I am so full of excitement to be a part of this movement for humanity.”
Her book is an invitation for survivors to do exactly that.
Looking to Black and Indigenous Foremothers to Resist Erasure
Free Black women and Indigenous women are the foremothers of generations of African Americans. Yet they remain largely absent from the official story of American freedom. Their lives, contributions and descendants have been systematically erased—from colonial records and legal classifications to public memory itself.
That erasure began in the earliest colonial records. The 1620 Virginia census recorded “four Indians in the service of several planters,” alongside 15 Negro men and 17 Negro women, reducing people to categories that obscured their identities, families and histories. Over the centuries, laws, court decisions and public institutions repeatedly reinforced that disappearance.
The best celebration of 250 years of American freedom—after the fireworks and celebrations by a newly blue-painted Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool are over—could be a visit to a cool, air-conditioned archive. In the quiet, anyone can search the records for the full story, of the enslaved and freeborn, Indian and African. Anyone can defy censorship and erasure with an open mind and a pencil, no fees required.
War on Women Report: Trump Administration Defines Embryos as ‘Children,’ Eliminates LGBTQ Veteran Healthcare *and* Guts Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs
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:
—This month marked the fourth anniversary of Dobbs. Today, 41 states have some form of abortion restrictions in place, including 13 states that ban abortion entirely.
—HHS has terminated 53 of its 67 grants for the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, totaling about $68 million and affecting grantees in two dozen states.
—Two family planning programs sued the Trump administration for curtailing the Title X grant program, which funded clinics providing reproductive healthcare services to low-income patients.
… and more.