More Than A Magazine, A Movement
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.
A federal court blocks Alabama’s attempt to punish those who help residents obtain legal abortions elsewhere—affirming core constitutional rights to travel, speak freely and support reproductive autonomy.
“The right to interstate travel includes both the right to move physically between two States and to do what is legal in the destination State—otherwise, our freedom of action is tied to our place of origin [and] the right to travel becomes a hollow shell.”
Diana Greene Foster is responsible for landmark research on the effects of abortion access—a massive 10-year study that tracked thousands of people who had an abortion or were denied one. But funding for a follow-up to her seminal Turnaway Study has just been cut as part of a wave of canceled health policy research.
Foster received a MacArthur “genius grant” for the Turnaway Study. That piece of research, which examined the impact of restrictions even before the fall of Roe v. Wade, helped shape public understanding of how abortion access can affect people’s health and economic well-being by finding that people who were denied abortions were more likely to experience years of poverty compared to those who could terminate their unplanned pregnancies.
Once dismissed as fringe, pronatalism has moved into the mainstream—finding powerful champions in Trump, Vance and Musk, and gaining policy traction within the administration. Rooted in eugenics, antifeminism, and anti-immigrant sentiment, this ideology casts high birthrates as a patriotic duty and low fertility as a national threat.
Now, federal policies are beginning to reflect this dangerous worldview—one that sees women’s bodies as tools of the state and reproductive freedom as collateral damage.
Ever since middle school, Jennefer Russo wanted to be a doctor—by the time she entered college she knew she wanted to be one who performed abortions. The reason was simple. As she told Ms., “I grew up watching the impact that abortion had on the women in my life, and I saw that it allowed them to have autonomy and relative control over their lives.”
Early in summer 2022 (right around the time the Supreme Court issued its Dobbs decision), Russo learned that a suite in a medical building located at 8920 Wilshire Blvd. in Beverly Hills was available. She began negotiations with the owner, the real estate investment trust Douglas Emmett, and on June 30, DuPont sent a letter of intent to the company to lease a suite there. It read: “Use: The DuPont Clinic is a private referral center for all-trimester abortion care.”
It would take only two months to stop the DuPont Clinic from opening.
(This article originally appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox.)
In a terrifying escalation of the post-Roe crackdown, Republican lawmakers in multiple states are pushing laws that would allow women to be charged with murder—and even face the death penalty—for having an abortion.
In a record-breaking election, Wisconsin voters elected liberal judge Susan Crawford to the state Supreme Court, defeating right-wing candidate Brad Schimel in what became the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history. With over $100 million spent, the race became a referendum not just on abortion rights and union protections, but on billionaires like Elon Musk attempting to buy political power.
Crawford’s win is more than just a victory for Democrats. It is a rebuke of President Trump, aggressive masculinity and right-wing efforts to strip away reproductive freedom. It also marks a turning point in organizing, as voters turned out in force to defend their rights and shape the future of the court.
With far-right agendas gaining traction, anti-rights movements growing and attacks on women’s rights intensifying, the escalating use of the law as a weapon against women—such as through the criminalization of abortion—serves as a stark call for collective action.
Menstrual regulation, or bringing back a missed or late period, is a common cultural practice across the globe, including the United States. It typically involves “period pills” to induce a period, such as mifepristone and misoprostol, and can be practiced legally in countries where abortion is illegal, like Bangladesh and Cuba. Offering a method to manage menstrual cycles openly grants reproductive autonomy, without shame or taboo. Critically, menstrual regulation is not viewed as an abortion, even though mifepristone and misoprostol are involved.
The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, a case that could determine whether Medicaid patients have the right to sue when states deny them access to qualified healthcare providers like Planned Parenthood.
While the legal question is narrow, a ruling in favor of South Carolina could embolden other states to cut off Medicaid funding for reproductive healthcare, disproportionately impacting low-income patients and people of color.
We don’t have the full picture of what abortion bans have wrought. We might never know the full scope of the damage, because the same people leveling these brutalities are the ones in charge of tracking them.
Instead, what we have are snapshots: data pulled by intrepid reporters. Women and their families brave enough to speak to the press. Doctors willing to speak anonymously with careful researchers.