Keeping Score: ‘The Dominoes Have Started to Fall, and They Won’t Just Stop at One’

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: Activists fear the Supreme Court will come after same-sex and interracial marriage next; House passes bill protecting same-sex marriage, requests testimony from major gun manufacturers; Biden administration challenges states on enforcement of abortion bans; women participate in the Tour de France after 33 years; and more.

Preserving Our Legacy: ‘An Important Piece of Feminist History Is at Risk of Being Lost’

In the early ’80s, Martha Albertson Fineman launched the Feminism and Legal Theory Project at University of Wisconsin Law School. For decades, the project has brought together scholars and activists from the U.S. and abroad to explore the most pressing contemporary legal issues affecting women. In multiple-day sessions, organized around specific, evolving sets of issues, feminists presented working papers and debated women’s legal rights.

Fineman recorded and preserved these groundbreaking conversations, as well as the working papers and other written material prepared for these sessions. But she is now struggling to find a home for this invaluable archive of the first generation of feminist legal thinkers.

Young Women Vow to Carry the Equal Rights Amendment Across the Finish Line

After realizing that gender equality wasn’t a right guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, Rosie Couture and her friend Belan Yeshigeta founded Generation Ratify, an organization dedicated to adding the ERA to the Constitution. Other women-led organizations, such as The Feminist Front and The Ruth Project, joined the fight.

“Advocating for the ERA means advocating for a fight that began with many of our grandmothers.”

40 Percent of Single Moms Face Food Insecurity. The Fall of Roe Will Plunge Them Deeper Into Poverty

The landscape of “abortion deserts” in this country now glaringly resembles the map of where we see the highest rates of food insecurity. The people forced to seek abortion care hundreds of miles away from their homes are the same parents skipping meals so their kids can eat, scrambling to fulfill SNAP work requirements and grocery shopping with calculators to stretch their government benefits as much as possible.

Her Ex-Husband Is Suing a Clinic Over the Abortion She Had Four Years Ago

Nearly four years after a woman ended an unwanted pregnancy with abortion pills obtained at a Phoenix clinic, she finds herself mired in an ongoing lawsuit over that decision. A judge allowed the woman’s ex-husband to establish an estate for the embryo, which had been aborted in its seventh week of development. The ex-husband filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the clinic and its doctors in 2020.

Experts said this rare tactic could become more common, as anti-abortion groups have signaled their desire to further limit reproductive rights. The Arizona lawsuit and others that may follow could also be an attempt to discourage and intimidate providers and harass plaintiffs’ former romantic partners.

Want to Protect Abortion? Look to Kansas

On Aug. 2, Kansas voters will decide whether or not to amend the Kansas Constitution to explicitly state that nothing in it creates a right to abortion. If passed, the amendment would allow the state legislature to pass laws banning and restricting abortion. The activists behind the amendment are attempting to overturn a 2019 Kansas Supreme Court decision that protected a woman’s access to abortion.

If anti-abortion extremists are successful in passing the constitutional amendment in Kansas, millions of Americans will be left in an abortion desert.

Mexican Telehealth Abortion Provider Now Serves U.S. Women: ‘We Are Here for You!’

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In the wake of Dobbs, people living in states with abortion bans are finding creative ways to access abortion healthcare. For people living along the U.S. southern border, there’s a new option: Telefem—a telehealth abortion provider based in Mexico City that mails abortion pills to secure pickup locations along the U.S.–Mexico border for $150. Ms. magazine spoke with Telefem director and midwife Paula Rita Rivera about how Telefem works and why they began offering services to people from the United States.

“I want to say to the women out there: We are here for you! Don’t be afraid. We are with you till the end.”

Kansas Voters Are About To Decide if the State Legislature Can Ban Abortion

If passed, a proposed constitutional amendment on Kansas’ primary ballot in August would allow more than 20 laws restricting abortion to stay in effect, including mandatory ultrasounds and biased counseling to discourage abortion, a 24-hour waiting period, parental consent for minors, a 20-week abortion ban, a ban on telemedicine abortion and limitations on public funding and insurance coverage for abortion.

Feminist and equity-focused groups urge Kansas voters to vote “no” on the amendment.

Comprehensive Sex Ed

Combating Sexual Violence and Upending Genders Norms Through Comprehensives Sex Ed

In Bangladesh, the first time my mother heard about sexual intercourse was on her wedding night. When I attended high school in New York City, my sex education teacher referred to sex as the “s-word”.

Though they happened over 24 years and 7,000 miles apart, my mom’s and my experiences with inadequate sexuality education are not unique.

Our Abortion Stories: Shamed Into Silence, ‘We Weren’t Fit To Become Mothers’

I was forced to give my son up for adoption, moments after giving birth. Boom. Gone. Just like that. I had no hope of ever seeing him again.

This shameful secret—my pregnancy and loss of my child—festered inside for more than 50 years. Decades later, my middle-aged son reached out by email and we met, a longed-for experience that soon turned into a nightmare. I had no idea that reunion in adoption is often shattering. The pain and anguish I wasn’t allowed to feel when I gave him away exploded inside me.