Abortion Access

Abortion is an essential healthcare service. Abortion access is varied across the world and throughout the United States due to anti-abortion legislation. Access is often dependent on social factors such as income, race, geographic region and citizenship status.

‘When Power Curdles Into Violence’: Escaping the Tradwife Lifestyle

Brides shouldn’t be thinking about homework just before their wedding day. But when I entered into an arranged marriage with a 28-year-old stranger, I was still just a 17-year-old girl who loved her private British school and her books and cricket—and so I found myself thinking about a creative-writing assignment I had recently finished. I’d written a story about a young woman who wore jewelry in the shapes of snakes. I wrote that they suddenly came to life and they slithered up to her throat, strangling her. 

As someone who was forced into a life I never chose, I am appalled that women, who are more empowered than ever, are effectively choosing a life without choice—putting themselves in a prison of their own making.

Thought-Provoking, Policy-Changing and Narrative-Shifting: Ms. Magazine’s 10 Most Impactful Print Articles of 2024

Ms. spurred thought-provoking, policy-changing, narrative-shifting change in 2024—and created new feminist strategies and solutions for the year ahead. In a word: “impact.” Ms. commissioned high profile analysis and investigative journalism by some of feminism’s best journalists and thinkers, focusing on key issues impacting women and girls at a critical moment across the globe. Here are the Ms. editors’ top 10 impact articles in the past year, as seen in the print magazine.

(Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get the issues delivered straight to your mailbox.)

The Most-Read Stories of 2024

Every day of 2024, Ms. writers and editors set out to create content that empowered, informed and infuriated readers. We sought out the truth, sounded alarms, asked tough questions, mourned feminist losses (and feminists we lost), looked to gender justice advocates abroad, and handed the microphone over to experts. Dear reader: As we enter a new year and a new era of the movement, we promise you more of this.

Explore the 30 most popular articles published this year on MsMagazine.com—the articles feminists most clicked, shared, studied, bookmarked and passed out at marches.

Texas Is Coming for the Abortion Pill

A new battlefront in the war on women is being led by right-wing extremist Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who’s coming with guns blazing after a New York doctor who prescribed and sent abortion pills to a 20-year-old Texas woman who requested and used them. In the first-of-its-kind lawsuit, Paxton is suing Dr. Margaret Carpenter for $100,000 in a Collin County, Texas, court for enabling an abortion in Texas … even though Carpenter practices medicine in New York, and what she’s doing—providing abortion pills to women in all 50 states—is legal in New York as a result of the state’s shield law.

Trump’s Second Term Blueprint: Using the Helms Amendment to Enforce Total Global Abortion Bans

The Helms Amendment turns 51 years old on Dec. 17. As the second Trump administration gets underway, Project 2025 looks to Helms as a tool.

At the same time, there’s also a bill pending in Congress to repeal the Helms Amendment: the Abortion is Healthcare Everywhere Act—led in the House by Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and in the Senate by Cory Booker (D-N.J.)—which would remove Helms’ language from the Foreign Assistance Act and specify that U.S. foreign assistance funding can be used for the provision of abortion in countries where abortion is legal.

American Maternity Care Is in Crisis. Abortion Bans Are Making It Worse.

Since the Dobbs decision, antiabortion Republicans are putting their resources not into expanding care for the women they’re forcing into motherhood, but into enforcing abortion bans—including those that make women risk their lives and health in pregnancy, drive up maternal injury and mortality, and push healthcare providers out of the workforce or out of state.

State budgets are limited, and how lawmakers spend the money they have tells us a lot.

‘Significant Victory’: Ninth Circuit Court Mixed Ruling ‘Frees Idahoans to Talk With Pregnant Minors About Abortion’

In April of 2023, Idaho passed the nation’s first abortion “trafficking” law (travel ban) making it a crime to procure an abortion for a minor. The law was challenged by reproductive rights advocates, who argued that the legislature had created a statute that makes unclear when lawful mentoring support stops, and unlawful conduct begins. Agreeing with the plaintiffs, in November of 2023, a federal district court issued a preliminary injunction preventing the law from going into effect.

On Dec. 2, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a mixed decision in the case. Although not a complete win, as Wendy Heipt of Legal Voice, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs put it: The “decision is a significant victory … as it frees Idahoans to talk with pregnant minors about abortion healthcare.” 

“Encouragement, counseling, and emotional support are plainly protected speech under Supreme Court precedent,” wrote the Ninth Circuit Court last week, “including when offered in the difficult context of deciding whether to have an abortion.”

Mifepristone Access, and What Comes Next for the Medication Abortion Drug

The future of mifepristone access is up in the air on multiple fronts right now—just five months after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a challenge to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s treatment of the medication abortion drug.

Now, though, Donald Trump has won election to the presidency—and questions about what his new administration will do to federal policy surrounding the drug are front and center.

‘Project 2025 Is Tennessee 2024’: Dispatches From the Front Lines

With Donald Trump set to take over the White House next year, the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda for the next conservative president looms large. But what if Project 2025 has already arrived?
Republican state legislative supermajorities never needed Trump in power to begin enacting parts of the Heritage Foundation’s policy agenda. 

“Project 2025 is Tennessee 2024,” said Tennessee state Rep. Justin Jones, “because we have been the tip of the spear in experiencing some of these rollbacks that would be expanded nationally under this proposal.”

While Trump’s return to the White House is discouraging, we cannot afford to despair or stagnate. There are still spaces for collective action, particularly at the local level, and we must continue conversations across the aisle. 

Anti-Medicine, Anti-Science and Antiabortion: Preparing for Trump’s Incoming Cabinet

Since the election was decided in November, like many people, I have been paying close attention to the individuals selected for appointment by the incoming Trump administration. As an OB-GYN and abortion provider, I know firsthand that these appointees will have a direct and devastating impact on our community’s access to healthcare, public health and social safety net infrastructure and our ability to be well.

Collaboratively, these cabinet picks have gained popularity by way of anti-intellectualism, misinformation and scare tactics, ultimately preying on the most vulnerable members of our community. They are not just poorly qualified to lead this work—they are dangerous.