More Than A Magazine, A Movement
This has been a year of noise—misinformation, silencing, the old machinery of misogyny trying to drown out the truth. But still, the stories and the truth rose. They rose because you supported our Ms. community, because you shared them, and because you believed that women’s realities deserve a place at the center of public life and discussion.
On the first day of his second term President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order entitled Restoring The Death Penalty And Protecting Public Safety. In doing so he chose to ignore the mounting and irrefutable evidence, recently highlighted in a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), that the death penalty is riddled with human error and poses the undeniable risk of executing innocent people.
At least 150 countries have abolished the death penalty, by law or by practice. Resisting the humanitarian trend around the world, the United States remains part of a gruesome club, along with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.
As barriers to clinic-based abortion care have increased in recent years, an increasing number of women are self-managing their abortions: finding and using abortion pills independently of the formal medical system. They are obtaining abortion pills through online abortion pill services, community networks sharing pills for free and websites selling pills.
To support self-managed abortion, feminists are creating a global network of online abortion doulas—trained companions who offer one-on-one support by phone, email and text to people using abortion pills. A leader in this effort is the organization Rouge Doulas, which runs the Rouge Abortion Doula School.
Randall Terry, the founder of Operation Rescue, is trying to make a comeback by teaming up with antiabortion extremist group PAAU (the so-called “Progressive” Anti-Abortion Uprising group associated with dozens of clinic and pharmacy invasions), to kick off “Rescue Resurrection.” Their stated goal is to revive large-scale clinic blockades with a formal kick-off training and series of events starting Dec. 3 in Memphis, Tenn.
On Friday morning, Dec. 5, approximately 25 individuals participating in the Rescue Resurrection training blockaded the Planned Parenthood health center in Memphis, even though abortion is already banned in Tennessee. Fourteen individuals were arrested.
Terry was one of the leaders of mass clinic blockades that took antiabortion extremism to a new level in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Operation Rescue’s (OR’s) orchestrated blockades in Atlanta, Memphis and Wichita drew massive media coverage. During the sieges, accessing a targeted abortion clinic meant getting through a gauntlet of bodies blocking clinic doors and driveways. Antiabortion activists traveled state to state in order to participate, blockading clinics, going limp when arrested (to represent the “unborn”) and requiring three to four police officers to remove each protester arrested and carry them to waiting police buses.
For many Asian and immigrant families, caregiving is a way of life, with generations living and caring for one another under the same roof as part of daily life. My Iranian grandparents lived in a multi-unit dwelling in Tehran, where they cared for each other through illness and aging, cooking and sharing meals with their children and grandchildren in what seemed to me a seamless synchronicity. When my Pakistani grandmother emigrated from Karachi to the U.K. in the 1970s, she moved in with my uncle’s family, sharing a bedroom with her youngest grandson until she died. Now, that grandson lives in the same house with his own children and aging parents.
However, here in the U.S., caregiving takes on a very different form, even for families raised on the belief that caring for another is simply what we do.
A new public awareness campaign, “Out of Office for Care,” launched this week invites employees to set their “OOO” automated email replies to accurately reflect the array of care responsibilities that pull them away from work, and then share those messages publicly.
People across industries—artists, founders, caregivers, cultural influencers, nurses, educators, nonprofit leaders, small business owners and parents—can give the country an unfiltered look at why they step away from work, and what it costs to do so without paid leave.
OOO replies range from clever to catastrophic. Some name the person they are caring for; others reveal the exhaustion of trying to do it all. All together, they show a country exerting caring in every direction and a policy landscape that hasn’t caught up.
Among those making the rounds:
—”I’m OOO because inexplicably school ends at 3 and work ends at 5 at best. … I can’t keep up, I need sleep, I’m getting a cold, everything is expensive and unnecessarily hard, and the holidays are coming.”
—”I’m OOO because my parents are getting older and I can’t manage their RX and 500 unread emails at once. In-home care is $60K and I have limited PTO. WiIl get back to you ASAP!”
—“Hi, sorry to miss you! I’m OOO because I just gave birth, but like 1 in 4 women in the U.S. I’ll be back at work in a couple weeks.”
At the Feminist Majority Foundation (publisher of Ms.) Global Women’s Rights Awards on Nov. 18 in Los Angeles, FMF honored the team behind the Broadway smash hit Liberation: playwright Bess Wohl, director Whitney White and Lisa Cronin Wohl, an OG Ms. writer from the 1970s.
“Theater is made up of dialogue. Autocracy is a monologue. Theater is about community: We watch a play together. Autocracy seeks to isolate us. Theater is about curiosity: A good play asks a question. Autocracy is not interested in questions, only in control.
“So, thank you, because in honoring this play, you honor the role of dialogue, community and questions in creating social change.”
Many survivors have recognized Donald Trump’s abusive behavior for years. Now, remarkably, Marjorie Taylor Greene says she sees it too.
Her recent break with the president is a study in what it takes to leave an abusive relationship: recognizing the harm, planning for the fallout and relying on a network of support. Greene believed Trump’s promises, endured his public berating and faced an avalanche of threats when she dared to oppose him. Yet she left anyway—because her constituents told her they had her back. Survivors understand that moment well: the instant when the fear of staying finally outweighs the fear of leaving. And in this political season, their hard-won wisdom offers a roadmap not only for those trapped in abusive homes, but for a country grappling with a leader who uses the same tactics to consolidate power.
The rewriting of a page on the CDC’s website to assert the false claim that vaccines may cause autism sparked a torrent of anger and anguish from doctors, scientists and parents who say Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is wrecking the credibility of an agency they’ve long relied on for unbiased scientific evidence.
The revised CDC webpage will be used to support efforts to ditch most childhood vaccines, said Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan and co-editor-in-chief of the journal Vaccine. “It will be cited as evidence, even though it’s completely invented,” she said.
We have to talk about South Carolina.
Last week, what could have become the most punitive abortion law in the U.S., SB 323, failed in the South Carolina Senate. The bill proposed banning abortion in almost all circumstances, criminalizing people who sought abortion care, and removed any exceptions for rape, incest or fetal anomaly currently written into the state’s already strict six-week ban.
The defeat of SB 323 is a victory that was won by dedicated and fierce advocates from across the state and across the country. But South Carolina has been actively engaged in policing the bodies of pregnant women, and in criminalizing pregnancy, for decades.
The prosecutorial “hold my beer” approach to criminalizing abortion shows us not only just broken the criminal legal system is, but also, just how little regard they have for the humanity of people with the capacity for pregnancy.