More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Student activists in the “Free The Period” coalition have worked to introduce California Assembly Bill 367, the Menstrual Equity for All Act of 2021.
Until menstrual products are as ubiquitous as toilet paper and talking about periods is normalized—the fight to #FreeThePeriod continues.
For many, Texas has a lot to offer. It’s no wonder then that more than half a million people relocated to Texas from other states over the last few years.
Then along came Senate Bill 8—one of the nation’s most extreme abortion bans that criminalizes abortions after just six weeks and deputizes private citizens to enforce the law. The brain drain has already begun, and is likely to continue, as a result.
“When you’re looking at the accumulation of anti-constitutional rights legislation being passed over and over again here, it’s got to have a chilling effect on people’s willingness to consider Texas as a place to come,” Texas state Rep. Donna Howard told Ms.
There’s a reason most people don’t know about the underground network of nonmedical women in New York City who are volunteering their homes to help women living in states where access to abortion is severely restricted.
It’s the same reason most people living didn’t know about Jane, a group women who in the years before Roe v. Wade used code names and street-corner pickups to arrange as many as 11,000 abortions.
In Nagorno Karabakh, Armenians are beginning to rebuild their democracy after military attacks from Azerbaijan and decades of political instability.
“I feel more responsible for my relatives, for people around me, for my homeland. I’m not just a woman, I’m an Armenian woman. I am a woman of Artsakh.”
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: Texas implements unprecedented pre-viability abortion ban; Biden’s Education Department forgives $5.8 billion in student loan debt for disabled borrowers; Supreme Court order maintain’s Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” policy; North Carolina bans child marriage under age 16; and more.
Vigilante action in the form of policing, surveillance and violence has long endangered people of color. That reality worries some experts who fear Texas’s latest anti-abortion law—which empowers private citizens to sue anyone they suspect of providing, or aiding and abetting an abortion—will disproportionately target people of color.
According to the Public Policy Institute of California, a full two thirds of women voters (66 percent) are against the recall — a wide margin, compared to just 48 percent of men who are against it. Women are also much more approving of Newsom’s performance as governor — with 62 percent expressing approval, compared to just 43 percent of men.
The Biden administration renewed a Trump-era ban on Americans traveling to North Korea, preventing humanitarian assistance to vulnerable populations.
The ban freezes the work many are doing to improve the situation on the ground in North Korea, and, like abstinence-only sexual education, ignores real solutions that have been proven to work.
Too often, aid has been delivered on behalf of women and girls. They have been boxes to be checked off and their rights used as tools of trade between men in power. This must end now.
Feminist funders have been supporting local Afghan feminist groups for decades with long-term flexible funds toward urgent community needs and long-term rebuilding. We need to vastly increase this feminist funding that goes directly to local grassroots groups to use how they wish. We know this feminist funding model works, even under repressive regimes, and even in Afghanistan.
Two weeks ago, Texas passed a law banning access to abortion, with the Supreme Court’s failure to block the legislation signaling a dark future for Roe v Wade. One viral Twitter thread gave a number of powerful examples of people who had sought abortions.
But what is often missing in discourse about reproductive rights are the “average” abortion stories—those in which people tell of their choices to exercise reproductive rights simply because right now was not the right time.
