Politics

War on Women Report: Trump Administration Defines Embryos as ‘Children,’ Eliminates LGBTQ Veteran Healthcare *and* Guts Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs

PUBLISHED 7/1/2026 by and

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.

The Ranked Ballot Is the Pro-Women, Pro-Voter, Pro-Democracy Reform America Needs

PUBLISHED 7/1/2026 by

For 250 years, the story of American democracy has been a story of expanding who holds power and who gets to decide who yields it.

The 15th Amendment, the 17th, the Voting Rights Act, the 19th Amendment and the 26th—each was a structural intervention, a deliberate redesign of the rules to bring more people into the democratic process. And at each iteration, a bet was made on the same proposition: Democracy works better when more people have real power within it.

We are overdue for the next chapter.

Women make up 51 percent of the American population and hold fewer than 29 percent of seats in Congress. That gap is not a product of insufficient ambition, inadequate candidates or a thin pipeline of viable women. It is the product of an electoral system that was designed before women could vote, and has never been fundamentally redesigned since.

Ranked-choice voting changes that. The ranked ballot is the single most powerful, best-documented structural reform available for advancing women’s political participation, and it serves every voter, at every level of government, on every ballot.

In a ranked-choice voting election, voters rank candidates in order of preference—first choice, second and third—and if no candidate wins a majority outright, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and their votes are redistributed until someone reaches a winning threshold.

Under this system, voters can express a genuine preference without fear of wasting their vote on a candidate who can’t win, and qualified women candidates can run without fearing splitting the vote.

(This is part of a new series FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, a special Ms. series examining the next chapter of U.S. democracy through a feminist lens. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the series explores how women and marginalized communities have shaped democratic progress, what lessons history offers for the challenges ahead, and how a more inclusive, representative and equitable democracy can be built for the next 250 years.)

Who Gets to Be a Citizen Today?

PUBLISHED 6/30/2026 by

In a highly anticipated decision, the Supreme Court rejected President Donald Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship, reaffirming that children born in the United States are citizens under the 14th Amendment, regardless of their parents’ immigration status. The ruling preserves one of the Constitution’s clearest guarantees, and averts what would have been one of the most sweeping assaults on American citizenship since Reconstruction.

The ruling was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson; Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch dissented in full, and Brett Kavanaugh in part.

The Court reached the correct result. But no constitutional democracy should take comfort in the fact that four justices were prepared to strip citizenship from children born on American soil, embracing Trump’s effort to narrow the Citizenship Clause and erase a constitutional promise that has defined U.S. democracy for more than 150 years. Their willingness to do so exposes just how vulnerable even our most fundamental constitutional commitments have become.

Read the Most Chilling Lines From Justice Sotomayor’s ‘Slaughter’ Dissent on Trump’s Expanding Power: ‘Chaos Will Follow’

PUBLISHED 6/30/2026 by

On the second-to-last day of its 2025-’26 term, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 along party lines President Donald Trump can fire Rebecca Slaughter, who served as commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) from 2018 until her dismissal in 2025. But the decision reaches far beyond one commissioner: By overturning nearly a century of precedent, the Court held that presidents may remove members of independent multimember agencies that Congress deliberately structured to operate with some distance from partisan politics. 

We read all 49 pages of Sotomayor’s urgent dissent and pulled out the most striking passages, so you don’t have to—though after reading them, you just might want to.

The Antiabortion Playbook Is Coming for Birth Control

PUBLISHED 6/29/2026 by

The United States is on its way to banning or severely restricting birth control.

I know this statement will be met with incredulity—but I would refer you to the disbelief so many of us in the reproductive health field faced when we warned that the constitutional right to abortion was in danger. Nearly four years later, we are living in this reality that so many dismissed as alarmist fantasy.

If the anti-contraception tactics we see today look extremely familiar, it’s because they come straight from the antiabortion playbook: spreading mis- and disinformation, advancing incremental regressive policies, and denying problems with access—the same tactics that helped pave the way for the eventual overturning of Roe.

Trump Holds Housing Aid Hostage to Force GOP Support for Voting Restrictions

PUBLISHED 6/27/2026 by

This week, Trump cancelled a planned signing ceremony for the bipartisan 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act—which would help address the worsening housing affordability crisis—and said he won’t sign it unless Republicans in the Senate vote to pass the SAVE America Act. If you recall, the SAVE Act would implement sweeping voting restrictions, including necessitating proof of citizenship to vote, and in doing so, make it much more difficult for millions of women who changed their name at marriage to vote.

His fixation on the SAVE America Act isn’t about safeguarding the elections for Americans—it’s about rigging the elections to ensure a Republican win, by suppressing the votes of those who disagree.

10 Must-Read Stories on Women in Politics This Week: Title IX Anniversary, AI’s Anti-Women Bias and Ranked-Choice Voting Victories

PUBLISHED 6/26/2026 by

Weekend Reading on Women’s Representation is a weekly compilation of stories about women’s representation in politics, on boards, in sports and entertainment, in judicial offices and in the private sector in the U.S. and around the world—with a little gardening and goodwill mixed in for refreshment! Published every Friday.

—This week marked the 54th anniversary of Title IX.
—As the Taliban approaches the five-year mark of its return to power this August, a rare protest in western Afghanistan last week laid bare both the brutality of its rule and the resilience of those living under it.
—A woman will replace Eric Swalwell in California … but for not two more months.
—A study of 133 AI systems found that 44 percent demonstrated gender bias, and more than a quarter showed both gender and racial bias.

… and more.

America’s Roman Holiday: Prime Day and the Price of Convenience

PUBLISHED 6/26/2026 by

Amazon Prime Day has become one of the biggest shopping events in the country, but its success tells a story far bigger than discounts.

In an economy where families are struggling with the cost of groceries, rent, healthcare and childcare, the appeal of lower prices is understandable. Yet the massive scale of Prime Day also raises a harder question: What does it mean when one of America’s defining consumer rituals depends on a labor system that workers, regulators and advocates have repeatedly described as dangerous, underpaid and deeply unequal?

Amazon’s influence extends far beyond its own warehouses. By normalizing ever-faster delivery, constant surveillance and relentless productivity, the company has helped reshape expectations across the retail economy.

As billionaire wealth continues to soar and labor protections face renewed political pressure, Prime Day reveals the growing divide between those who profit from convenience and those whose labor makes it possible.

Peace Without Women? Ongoing Peace Talks and War Negotiations Keep Leaving Women Behind

PUBLISHED 6/25/2026 by

As negotiations over conflicts across the Middle East continue, one pattern remains stubbornly familiar: women are largely absent from the room. From Gaza to Iran, women are bearing the costs of conflict, repression, displacement and economic collapse even as negotiations over security, governance, reconstruction and political transition move forward without their meaningful participation.

This exclusion has consequences far beyond representation. Decisions about who governs, who receives aid, who returns home and who is protected shape whether societies emerge from conflict more secure or more fragile. When women are kept outside these processes, transitions risk reinforcing the inequalities and grievances that helped drive conflict in the first place.

Public Health Under Fire: Military Flu Outbreak Illustrates the Danger of Politicizing Vaccine Policy

PUBLISHED 6/25/2026 by

Few medical advances have saved more lives than vaccines. Yet the Trump administration continues to undermine that success by politicizing public health and discrediting decades of scientific evidence. The recent flu outbreak at Lackland Air Force Base—which sickened nearly 300 service members after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ended the military’s longstanding flu vaccine requirement—offers a stark reminder of what happens when ideology replaces evidence.

This is not an isolated incident. From weakening federal vaccine recommendations under Robert F. Kennedy Jr., to fueling distrust in routine immunizations, the administration’s anti-science agenda is already contributing to preventable outbreaks and declining vaccination rates.

Public health should never be a partisan project, and the costs of treating it as one are measured in illness, lost readiness and lives put at unnecessary risk.