More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The end of the year brings a time to celebrate with family and friends. It feels cozy and carefree. Unfortunately, the holiday season is also a high-risk time for sexual abuse against children.
Finding a balance between having a restful and cheerful holiday season and creating a safe environment to protect the children around you is essential. So, what can you do to help prevent sexual violence against children during the holidays?
A legal system that recognizes fetal personhood punishes people for their pregnancy outcomes and strips them of their rights in the name of protecting the fetus. One striking recent example comes from Texas, where the state Supreme Court recently ruled that Kate Cox could not have an emergency, life-saving abortion. And in October, an Ohio woman was charged with a felony after her miscarriage.
Miscarriage is normal. Subjecting people who have miscarriages to criminal punishment is needlessly cruel, counterproductive, and relies on a legal understanding that pregnant people are a lesser class of person.
Abortion does not harm women’s mental health: Ninety-five percent of women who had an abortion say it was the right decision for them five years later, according to the Turnaway Study, groundbreaking research that documented the outcomes for women who received and were denied an abortion.
“Our failure as a society to acknowledge the sacrifice that pregnant people make when they have a baby is misogyny, ignorance and misogyny,” said Diana Greene Foster, the study’s lead researcher.
Awareness of the U.S. maternal health crisis has increased—but a parallel crisis of human rights violations against pregnant and postpartum people remains invisible or misunderstood. By convening two People’s Tribunals to End Obstetric Violence and Obstetric Racism before the end of the year, we aim to change that. The first will happen on Oct. 6 in New York City at the NYU Law School, and the second on Dec. 1 in Memphis, at BRIDGES USA.
We cannot fix the maternal mortality problem without fixing the human rights problem at its core.
Whether you’re a freshman moving into your college dorm for the first time or just about to start your senior year, it is essential to have the tools to advocate for your health, especially when it comes to sexual and reproductive health concerns.
Last summer, the Supreme Court overturned the longstanding precedents of Roe v. Wade, representing the largest blow to women’s constitutional rights in history. A series from Ms., Our Abortion Stories chronicles readers’ experiences of abortion pre- and post-Roe. Abortions are sought by a wide range of people for many different reasons. There is no single story. (Share your abortion story by emailing myabortionstory@msmagazine.com.)
“I wanted that baby, but it wasn’t meant to be.”
“The law was forcing this decision for me. I cried because I knew I needed to get an abortion but didn’t know how.”
“My life is better because of my decision.”
Anti-abortion activists and elected officials hope to keep abortion seekers walled in within the borders of their home states.
Today, Texas is home to approximately 50 sanctuary cities, and they have expanded into six other states, including the dreaded border state of New Mexico, which the Guttmacher Institute ranks as “very protective” of abortion rights, as well as the “protective” state of Illinois. If the campaign succeeds, those seeking cross-border abortion services may find their path out from under Texas’ draconian ban an increasingly risky one, especially if trafficking is defined to include the provision of financial assistance.
When we can identify gender equity at home, we’ll be able to recognize it in the paid workplace as well.
In Barbie, Greta Gerwig pushes her message of feminist disruption as far as she can for a mainstream movie. She is reckoning with Barbie’s legacy and literally rewriting the script through active questioning and engagement. It’s a huge start.
Today, disconnected from the resourcefulness we cultivated before institutionalized science, women have come to rely on surgery and Western pharmaceuticals to end pregnancies they don’t wish to continue.
As a writer who spent the last two years researching the herbal remedies of the granny midwives of Appalachia for my novel in progress, I began with the question of how “abortion” worked before modern medicine. It turns out this question is far too specific: Women didn’t always have that language for stopping pregnancy from advancing. The contemporary imagination that draws lines between fertility, conception, and personhood is relatively new. When doctors were unwilling to treat women, ancestral lore allowed them to care for themselves and each other.
