It’s been quite a week. I’m guessing, like me, you saw a connective thread in the headlines: Accountability rarely arrives on its own. It comes because people refuse to stay silent.
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.
Can You Believe They Put This in Writing? The Wildest Quotes From Heritage’s ‘Project 2026’
The Heritage Foundation has once again taken it upon itself to craft a plan for how to supposedly save America. The report—”Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years”—focuses on marriage, family and the American Dream, and has become widely known as “Project 2026,” a follow-up to Heritage’s infamous Project 2025 blueprint.
Project 2025 clocked in at 900 pages; the sequel is around 150. We read the whole thing and pulled out the passages that gave us chills, made us laugh out loud, compelled us to suddenly need to take a long walk and hug our dogs, or inspired another donation to our local abortion fund.
This isn’t intended to be a fact-check or a line-by-line rebuttal. It’s intended to show you how some of the country’s most influential conservative thinkers are talking about feminism, contraception, abortion, LGBTQ+ people, higher education, marriage, motherhood and the role government should play in all of it—because you’re probably too busy to read hundreds of pages of anti-feminist slop.
And because, as former Vice President Kamala Harris famously said about Project 2025: “Can you believe they put that thing in writing?” They did—twice now!
This is the roadmap they’re offering. These documents tell us how their authors understand the country, the family and women’s place in both. We should know what it says.
A Single Abortion Clinic Closing Rarely Makes Headlines. What Happens When None Are Left?
Picture a map of the United States. It’s 2022, and in southern states like Texas and Tennessee, there are clusters of black dots that represent independent clinic closures. These are abortion care black holes: communities where it’s no longer possible to get an abortion at a nearby clinic.
Fast forward to present. It’s 2026, four years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and black dots have multiplied in states across the country. It no longer matters if the state is red or blue, governed by conservatives or progressives. None are immune to the increasing weight of political pressure, financial strain and operational difficulty that are forcing independent clinics to close or stop providing abortion care.
Each of these black dots is a community suffering a healthcare crisis, and they are proliferating across the United States at a rapid rate.
Independent clinics are often the only places to get clinical abortion care, unbiased information and support for pregnancy options. They are where people go to feel safe and respected, whether they are getting an abortion, continuing a pregnancy or getting gender-affirming care. In small towns and rural spaces, these clinics are often the only safe place for many people, especially those who are LGBTQIA+. If clinics close, there is often nowhere else to go.
And once abortion clinics close, it’s not as simple as reopening when they can, if they can. Even if a specific restriction is lifted, severe financial constraints, continued political hostility, threats of violence and legal uncertainty still stand.
What to Know About Later Abortions: Myths, Barriers and Patient Stories
Later abortion is one of the most stigmatized and least understood aspects of reproductive health, and yet some of the voices perpetuating that stigma come from inside the reproductive rights movement itself. Meanwhile, while most abortions happen in the first trimester, later abortions are increasing as restrictions and bans are delaying care and creating the very conditions that make them necessary.
To address these misconceptions, Erika Christensen and Garin Marschall created Patient Forward after Christensen experienced a later abortion in 2016. The organization is dedicated to eliminating later abortion stigma and barriers.
“We have a lot of folks in the media, including repro[ductive rights] advocates, saying, ‘Nobody wants to do this,’ or, ‘It’s not even available,’ or, ‘Nobody’s getting abortions that late.’ Yes, they are. They’re getting them in safe, modern, incredibly compassionate abortion clinics,” said Christensen. “We do a lot of destigmatizing work.”
Patient Forward emphasizes that most people who obtain a later abortion would have preferred to access an abortion earlier: “Contrary to popular rhetoric, patients do not wait. Rather, they are delayed.”
“We have found that young people are much later to recognize they’re pregnant because their periods are irregular anyway, because they may not be familiar with all the symptoms of pregnancy,” says Dr. Diana Foster Greene of University of California San Francisco. “People with chronic health conditions are also later to discover they’re pregnant because often chronic health conditions have the same symptoms of pregnancy.”
Walking Through the Door Dobbs Left Open: A Groundbreaking Idaho Case Tests Whether the Constitution Protects a Pregnant Woman’s Right to Self-Preservation
When most people think about post-Dobbs abortion litigation, they assume every lawsuit is trying to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision. But a groundbreaking case in Idaho charts a different course. Brought by maternal-fetal medicine specialist Dr. Stacy Seyb, the lawsuit argues that medically necessary abortion care is protected by a constitutional right Dobbs never addressed: the fundamental right to self-preservation.
To understand this novel legal strategy, I spoke with Wendy Heipt, a senior attorney at Legal Voice and a member of Seyb’s legal team. Rather than asking the courts to revive Roe, Heipt argues that no state can force a pregnant person to sacrifice their life or health by denying medically necessary care.
“This case isn’t about abortion,” she told me. “It’s about self-defense.”
If the courts agree, the case could establish a new constitutional framework for protecting pregnant women facing medical emergencies—even under the legal landscape created by Dobbs.
It is a reminder that some of the most consequential battles over reproductive freedom may turn not on revisiting old precedents, but on recognizing constitutional protections the Supreme Court never considered.
War on Women Report: Trump Administration Defines Embryos as ‘Children,’ Eliminates LGBTQ Veteran Healthcare *and* Guts Teen Pregnancy Prevention Programs
MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide: the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.”
We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.
Since our last report:
—This month marked the fourth anniversary of Dobbs. Today, 41 states have some form of abortion restrictions in place, including 13 states that ban abortion entirely.
—HHS has terminated 53 of its 67 grants for the federal Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, totaling about $68 million and affecting grantees in two dozen states.
—Two family planning programs sued the Trump administration for curtailing the Title X grant program, which funded clinics providing reproductive healthcare services to low-income patients.
… and more.
The Antiabortion Playbook Is Coming for Birth Control
The United States is on its way to banning or severely restricting birth control.
I know this statement will be met with incredulity—but I would refer you to the disbelief so many of us in the reproductive health field faced when we warned that the constitutional right to abortion was in danger. Nearly four years later, we are living in this reality that so many dismissed as alarmist fantasy.
If the anti-contraception tactics we see today look extremely familiar, it’s because they come straight from the antiabortion playbook: spreading mis- and disinformation, advancing incremental regressive policies, and denying problems with access—the same tactics that helped pave the way for the eventual overturning of Roe.
TV Still Has a Lot to Learn About Abortion
Four years after Dobbs, television has become more willing to acknowledge the legal and political barriers to abortion care—but too often, it still reinforces harmful myths.
While shows like Grey’s Anatomy have depicted the devastating consequences of abortion bans, others continue to fall back on familiar tropes. In And Just Like That, the show largely sidesteps abortion as a normal, legitimate choice—especially for an affluent married mother in New York. And recently, the critically acclaimed Margo’s Got Money Troubles builds its entire premise around a young woman rejecting abortion despite pressure from those around her.
Those storytelling choices matter. Research shows that accurate abortion storylines can increase public understanding, reduce stigma and even help people feel more confident in their own reproductive healthcare decisions.
Yet television still rarely reflects the reality of abortion today—from the fact that most abortion patients are already parents, to the widespread use of medication abortion.
In an era of widespread confusion and misinformation, TV has the power to inform millions of viewers, but only if it moves beyond outdated narratives and portrays abortion as the ordinary healthcare decision it is for so many people.
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Keeping Score: Abortion Bans Cost $140B Per Year; Federal Courts Protect Trans Youth and Incarcerated Trans Women; Feminists React to FBI Raid on Ohio Voting Rights Organization
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.
This week:
—Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) is working to get Republicans on the record on the Right to Contraception Act.
—ICE has already reported the deaths of 18 detainees this year, on pace to surpass the highest number of deaths in decades.
—Abortion restrictions could cost the U.S. economy $140 billion annually in lost earnings.
—”I love the inflation,” says Trump.
—The EEOC will no longer require federal agencies to report on race, ethnicity, sex or gender identity.
—83 percent of American voters agree that emergency contraception should be easily accessible.
—Abortion ban states are slowly losing a generation of women medical students and doctors.
—More than 770,000 children have already lost access to SNAP benefits after last year’s funding cuts.
—A new study found trans women athletes have no significant physical advantages over cis women.
—Missouri has restored access to medication abortions after a Jackson County judge struck down key state restrictions, allowing clinics to resume providing the service and marking the first time medication abortion has been available in Missouri since 2018.
—Republicans passed a reconciliation bill that provides roughly $70 billion for ICE and CBP, sending it to President Trump’s desk. (This is on top of more than $140 billion Republicans already provided for those agencies last year.)
… and more.
Four Years After Dobbs, Women’s Healthcare Is a Scarce Resource
This week marks four years since the Supreme Court revoked the federal right to abortion, catapulting the nation into an era of state-sanctioned deprivation of bodily autonomy for American women.
On this anniversary, we write to take stock of one of the underreported outcomes of Dobbs: the growing number of individuals and families for whom access to healthcare is diminishing because of a rise in medical deserts.
It’s common sense—there is no reason for highly mobile professionals to remain in places where they find themselves increasingly facing the prospect of personal risk for practicing medicine.
Not surprisingly, medical deserts are prevalent in conservative and rural states; the downstream pressure suggests it soon will become an issue for blue states, too.
The impact on America’s unconscionable maternal and infant mortality rates cannot be overstated. The United States has the highest maternal mortality rate of any wealthy country; as rates continue to drop worldwide, they climb higher here, with Black women more than three times more likely than white women to die in childbirth. Infant mortality has risen specifically in states that enacted abortion restrictions since 2022, again with impacts worse among Black infants.