More Than A Magazine, A Movement
In the middle of the night on April 2, 2020, buried in a 400-page state budget, a provision to make commercial surrogacy legal in New York was adopted despite a campaign against the move by leading advocates of women’s reproductive health and rights.
There is perhaps no better (or eerier) reminder of the insidious, underlying idea that women are destined to be mothers than the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to fill RBG’s spot on the Supreme Court.
Barrett is not “the new face of feminism”; this is a repackaged misogyny guised behind a smiling mother—a mother that values this identity so much, she wants to create a world where giving birth is no longer a choice, but a legal mandate.
As the value of essential work is increasingly appreciated, parental leave needs to be expanded to all workers as the country rebuilds from this crisis.
Both Aimee Liu and I now find ourselves sheltering at home and woefully contemplating a social and commercial landscape that is forcing booksellers, publishers and authors to reinvent the very definition of a book launch.
The World Health Organization recently reported a global decline in the maternal mortality rate over the past 20 years—but pregnancy related deaths in the United States more than doubled across the same two decades. Why is motherhood such a precarious state in a prosperous country like ours?
“Tully” grounds anxiety around motherhood in a reality that we can’t leave behind when we walk out of a movie theater.