Birth Control and Contraception

Birth control pills have been an essential tenet of reproductive healthcare since their popularization in the 1960s. The U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the landmark case Griswold v. Connecticut, which outlawed bans on contraception for married couples, contributed to the pill’s growing popularity in the second half of the 1960s. Today millions of women in the U.S. use birth control pills for a variety of reasons, including preventing pregnancy, managing menstrual symptoms and treating medical conditions like PCOS and endometriosis.

All contraceptive methods can be used to prevent pregnancy, but only some reduce the risk of STI transmission. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 65 percent of U.S. women aged 15-49 were using at least one form of contraception. Common contraceptive methods include condoms, IUDs, cervical caps, and permanent forms such as vasectomies and tubal ligation.

Access to contraceptives and birth control is under attack by Project 2025 and extremist groups trying to ban practices that promote sexual health and well-being. Many anti-contraceptive extremists seek to spread misinformation and employ scare tactics to intimidate those trying to access this essential form of healthcare. Reliable information about birth control pills and other forms of contraception can be found online via Planned Parenthood, Bedsider or Guttmacher. For medical advice, talk to your doctor about deciding the best contraceptive method for you.

Right-Wing ‘Tradwife’ Influencers Are Telling Young Women Lies About Birth Control

PUBLISHED 4/20/2026 by

Cancer. Infertility. Unintended abortion.

These are just a few of the fears young patients bring to Dr. Bayo Curry-Winchell, a family physician in Reno, Nevada.

Curry-Winchell, medical director for the Saint Mary’s Urgent Care Group, said the trend away from hormonal birth control has become pervasive in recent years among her patients between about 14 and 32 years old—the same age group most likely to say they get their health information from social media.

When she talks with young patients, Curry-Winchell hears concerns about sinister long-term impacts of hormonal birth control—and the language often echoes conservative influencers who have no medical training.

Doctors say what is at stake is not whether every patient chooses the pill or an IUD, but whether they can make evidence-based decisions about preventing pregnancy in a country with some of the highest maternal mortality rates among wealthy nations.

Fewer Teen Births Is Good, Unless You’re the Patriarchy

PUBLISHED 4/17/2026 by

How on-brand for the federal government to announce that U.S. birth rates are falling—just as The Testaments, the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, dropped on Hulu.

In the fictional nation of Gilead, first envisioned by Margaret Atwood in her 1985 dystopian novel and expanded on screen for nearly a decade now, declining fertility catalyzed a Christian nationalist revolution in modern-day America, spawning a society rooted in patriarchal dominance and state-sanctioned violence. The Testaments, now three episodes in, is making a deliberate appeal to Gen Z and young viewers, featuring the spectacularly savvy Chase Infiniti and Lucy Halliday among Gilead’s tradwife-in-training rebels.

Doubly fascinating then, that it is the real-life status of teen birth rates in particular now driving the news. In a drop considered “extraordinary” by statisticians, the number of babies born to mothers between the ages of 15 and 19 fell by 7 percent in 2025.

Nevertheless, many on the right jumped directly into the fray to publicly lament that teens are having fewer babies.

Keeping Score: Trump Attacks Iran, Pressures Senate Republicans to Pass ‘Show Your Papers’ Voter Registration Bill; States Expand Access to Childcare and Paid Leave

PUBLISHED 3/19/2026 by

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:
—Dolores Huerta breaks her silence at 96: “I have never identified myself as a victim, but I now understand that I am a survivor.”
—Trump pressures Senate Republicans to pass the SAVE America Act, a “show your papers” policy that would require U.S. citizens to show a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote.
—A performative personnel exchange at DHS: from Kristi Noem … to Markwayne Mullin?
—The U.S. and Israel launched strikes on Iran, killing at least 1,332 people.
—March 10 is Abortion Provider Appreciation Day.
—DHS Secretary Kristi Noem was fired, as ICE reports 32 deaths in detention facilities in 2025.
—Access to early prenatal care is declining in the U.S., especially in states with abortion bans.
—A record one-third of American workers not have access to government-mandated paid leave.
—The U.S. deported a gay woman to Morocco, where her sexuality is illegal and she faces violence from her family.
—Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton claimed gender-affirming mental healthcare for trans youth is “child abuse.”
—New Mexico and New York take steps towards free universal childcare.
—Jessie Buckley took home the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her role in Hamnet. The film was directed by Chloé Zhao, one of nine women to ever be nominated for the award of Best Director and the only woman nominated this year.

… and more.

‘Lone Star Three’: How Three UT Austin Students Paved the Way for Birth Control Access in 1960s Texas

PUBLISHED 3/5/2026 by and | UPDATED 3/10/2026 at 5:31 P.M. PT

In 1969 Victoria Foe, Judy Smith and Barbara Hines were students at the University of Texas in Austin when Smith invited Foe and Hines to attend women’s liberation meetings at her house. Their discussions led them to start a campus Birth Control Information Center and eventually evolved into an underground network that helped women access safe abortion at a time when it was illegal in Texas. 

Their activism would eventually extend far beyond their university campus, planting the seeds for Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court decision that would legalize abortion in the U.S. Not until 1965 did birth control in the U.S. become legal for married women. Not until 1972 did it become legal for anyone, married or unmarried, to access birth control.

A new documentary, Lone Star Three, directed by Karen Stirgwolt, tells the story of the women who formed the underground networks that allowed young women to access reproductive care in Texas in the days leading up to Roe v. Wade. Ms. recently spoke with Foe and Hines (Smith passed away in 2013), and archivist Alice Embree, about their activism from the 1960s to the present moment.

The Heritage Foundation’s Plan to Keep Women Uneducated, Pregnant and Subservient

PUBLISHED 2/20/2026 by

Since Trump’s re-ascendance to the White House, the reactionary conservative movement has become the most aggressive and unfettered it has been in my lifetime. And they are getting very, very clear on what they think an acceptable life looks like for women:

—Settle for any man who decides he wants you.
—Don’t go to college.
—Marry early.
—Have as many babies as possible.
—Quit your job (or don’t pursue one in the first place) to stay home full time and depend financially on your husband.
—Shoulder the blame if you wind up married to a jerk.
—Wind up impoverished if you divorce.
—Face social condemnation if you fail to follow the tradwife script.
—Contraception should be illegal or at least hard to get; same for IVF and other fertility treatments.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s a plan they wrote down and published: Last month, the Heritage Foundation published “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.” Think of it as Project 2275, a detailed plan that is mostly about how America can spend the next two and a half centuries undoing the feminist progress we’ve made.

The Next Phase of the Abortion Wars: Targeting Pills, Helpers and Patients

PUBLISHED 2/12/2026 by

The first year of Trump’s second term marked major blows for reproductive healthcare. Medicaid funding cuts forced about 50 Planned Parenthood clinics to close throughout the U.S. and blocked 1.1 million Planned Parenthood patients on Medicaid from using their insurance to pay for reproductive healthcare. Twenty-three independent abortion clinics throughout the country also shut down in 2025.

Now, at the start of 2026, there are only nine states where it is possible to get a legal abortion with no restrictions.

Four years after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision overturned Roe, here are some of the key ways states are pushing harder than ever to end any access to abortion.

Resistance, From the Red Carpet to the Courts: Grammy Winners Denounce ICE, Immigrant Families Challenge Trump’s Visa Ban

PUBLISHED 2/5/2026 by

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:
—For the first time, more Americans support than oppose abolishing ICE.
—Senate Democrats refused to pass a DHS bill that would fund ICE for this fiscal year. Instead they passed a two-week continuing resolution to give them time to negotiate reforms designed to prevent further brutality from ICE and CBP agents. 
—Artists use Grammy acceptance speeches to denounce Trump and ICE: “Our voices matter,” urged Billie Eilish. “We are humans and we are Americans,” said Bad Bunny.
—Organizations raise alarms about Grok AI spreading nonconsensual intimate images on Twitter.
—Virtual reality may be a tool to change opinions about catcalling.
—Access to IVF has led to more unmarried women in their 40s choosing to have babies.

… and more.

How Attacks on Immigrant Teens Helped Build the Post-Roe Playbook

PUBLISHED 2/5/2026 by

A conversation between legal scholar Shoshanna Ehrlich and Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project.

“In the first Trump administration, we still had Roe. By losing that underlying constitutional right to abortion at the federal level, the door has been opened for the second Trump administration to both compound the attacks and move in new directions,” Amiri told Ms.

“We were screaming from the rooftops that they were coming after Roe, and abortion was going to be banned, and we were not believed. … As with all rights, they’re tenuous and you have to continue to fight to enforce them.

“It’s always the most marginalized, as we’ve been talking about. It’s the people who have the fewest resources, people who live in rural areas, young people, people without documentation, people with limited language skills. That is who will feel the brunt the hardest of these policies.”

How Junk Science Is Driving Reproductive Health Policy: A Live Conversation With Guttmacher Institute, Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute and Ms. (Online; Tuesday, Feb. 17)

PUBLISHED 1/25/2026 by

As false claims and junk science increasingly distort public understanding of reproductive health, leading experts are coming together to confront the growing threat mis- and disinformation pose to access, policy and democracy itself.

On Feb. 17, the Guttmacher Institute, Ms. magazine and Georgetown University’s O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law will co-host a virtual webinar examining how misinformation is reshaping debates around contraception, abortion and sexual and reproductive health and rights in the United States.

Who Controls Mifepristone? The Politics Blocking a New Era of Contraception

PUBLISHED 1/22/2026 by

Mifepristone “works against endometriosis. It works against myoma [fibroids]. We are now involved in a study group that looks at whether it can prevent breast cancer,” says pioneering reproductive-health advocate Dr. Rebecca Gomperts. “It has so many potential uses, and it hasn’t been [developed].

“If we as women don’t make sure that it becomes available to meet our needs … then it won’t happen.”

This is the final installment of a new series, “The Moral Property of Women: How Antiabortion Politics Are Withholding Medical Care,” a serialized version of the Winter 2026 print feature article.