Black Women

Black women experience a unique intersection of patriarchal and white supremacist oppression, leading to statistics like disproportionate maternal mortality in the U.S. and foundational feminist theory like the writing of Audre Lorde. Black women are not a monolith, however, and include women from all around the world who are a part of the African diaspora. They have often led social movements for a wide variety of causes because of the intersectional oppressive structures on their lives.

‘Everybody Needs Somebody’: A Single Mother on Guaranteed Income, Community and Making It Work

PUBLISHED 8/27/2026 by

Front & Center, a series from Ms. magazine and Springboard to Opportunities, puts the voices of Black women most affected by today’s policy debates at the center of the conversation. The series highlights the Magnolia Mother’s Trust, which provides Black mothers living in federally subsidized housing with $1,000 per month for one year.

Candace, a 33-year-old mother of three from Jackson, Miss., received one year of guaranteed income through the trust. She is working toward her life insurance license and dreams of starting a business helping people with cancer find high-quality wigs—all while building a more secure future for her children.

“Motherhood is hardest when you’re doing it by yourself, period,” Candace writes. “I want people to understand that the only way this works is if we help each other. There is no way around it. Everybody needs a community. Everybody needs somebody.

“Everything I do is based around my kids. Don’t invite me if my kids can’t come.

“The help that is supposed to be available for working mothers through government programs can be iffy. Unless you are completely unemployed, it can feel like you do not receive anything. But we are still struggling. We still live paycheck to paycheck, and people expect us to provide food out of that too. It is not realistic.”

Rest in Power, Dolly Parton: Feminist Country Icon, Advocate for Women and Children, Philanthropist and Gifted Songwriter

PUBLISHED 8/27/2026 by

Dolly Parton understood the power of being underestimated. Beneath the rhinestones, towering blond hair and self-deprecating jokes was a gifted songwriter, a shrewd businesswoman and a philanthropist whose work transformed the lives of millions of children and families.

Parton left behind a body of work that stretches far beyond the songs and films that made her one of the most beloved performers in American life. She sang about the dignity of working women. She placed hundreds of millions of books in the hands of children. She supported healthcare, disaster relief and lifesaving medical research. And she repeatedly used her enormous cultural influence to affirm the humanity of people who were too often marginalized, including Black and LGBTQ+ Americans.

Parton’s concern for women and children was expressed not only through her art, but in what she did with the wealth and influence her art created. We heard her legacy in the songs that made working women feel seen. We saw it in the books delivered to children, the families supported after disaster and the medical research that saved lives.

May Dolly Parton rest in power. May her legacy live on in every child who discovers a new world inside a book, every woman who demands dignity in the workplace and every person who chooses compassion when indifference would be easier.

Beyond Abortion: How the ERA Could Transform Pregnancy, Work and Family Life

PUBLISHED 8/26/2026 by

On March 31, 1776, Abigail Adams wrote a letter to her husband, John, beseeching him to “remember the ladies” as he and his peers were drafting the Declaration of Independence. She warned, “All Men would be tyrants if they could” and urged him to “not put such unlimited power into the hands of the Husbands.”

He ignored her warning when she wrote: “If particular care and attention is not paid to the Ladies we are determined to foment a Rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.”

Now, 250 years later, women are still fighting for inclusion.

The potential for state ERAs to advance the rights of women and girls is tremendous, but only if we have the will—and the resources—to push for favorable state supreme courts and to use ERAs to challenge discriminatory government policies.

While we fight for a Congress that will publish the federal ERA and a U.S. Supreme Court that will robustly interpret it, feminists are building an ERA jurisprudence that will one day achieve Abigail Adams’ dream: for women to finally, truly, be equal citizens and live freely, safely and empowered throughout the United States.

How Abortion Restrictions Exacerbate America’s Affordability Crisis

PUBLISHED 8/25/2026 by and

Few decisions carry more weight than whether or when to have a child. Women who decide to end a pregnancy are making an intensely personal, at times deeply emotional, decision. They deserve quality care, compassion and respect. Instead, under the Trump administration, abortion restrictions are expanding and options for care are disappearing.

Four years after the Supreme Court’s  Dobbs ruling, abortion care comes with a maze of logistical and financial hurdles.

A new study from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) concluded Widespread abortion restrictions across numerous states and the rollback of federal funding and protections costs our country $140 billion annually. And the 16 states with the most restrictive abortion policies cost the national economy nearly $68 billion annually in lost earnings.

In the U.S. today, abortion is increasingly reserved for those who can find and pay for it.

We urge new thinking: Instead of a return to the  Roe v. Wade era ripe with restrictions and hurdles, let’s govern expansively. We envision a supportive government that makes abortion accessible to anyone who needs it.

Mifepristone, Mail-In Voting and the Midterms Are All on the Line

PUBLISHED 8/22/2026 by

Trump has officially nominated Dr. Heidi Overton as the FDA commissioner. Overton previously called the abortion pill “telebortion,” and called on Congress to strictly regulate it.

With the FDA currently reevaluating its approval of mifepristone and its regulations permitting providers to mail the medication, Overton’s nomination represents yet another challenge to mifepristone’s widespread usage—accounting for over two-thirds of all abortions, including in states with bans. Not to mention the fact that Overton also recently appeared next to Trump during a press conference in which he spouted dangerous misinformation about childhood vaccines.

Asking for a friend: Will the physician in the Senate who holds a key vote on the Health Committee cave again?

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court might be on summer break—but its shadow docket is still up and running. And nothing is certain before this Supreme Court, which has committed itself to expanding Trump’s executive powers.

Thanks to SCOTUS and state legislators’ rollback of many fundamental rights, state supreme court races have been receiving increased attention, and attracted significant outside spending.

What the Lindsay Clancy Trial Reveals About America’s Failure to Support Mothers in Crisis

PUBLISHED 8/21/2026 by

News of Lindsay Clancy’s triple-murder trial is flooding the Internet, and with it, conversations about postpartum depression. In January 2023, Lindsay Clancy killed her 5-year-old, 3-year-old and 8-month-old children before attempting suicide, which left her paralyzed from the waist down. The facts of their deaths are not up for debate in this Plymouth trial, but whether or not the severe postpartum psychosis, clinical depression and bipolar disorder Clancy was experiencing meant she was criminally insane. 

Clancy’s mother-in-law explained Clancy was “begging for help” right before she killed her children. In December, just weeks before, she told her mother and then-husband Patrick (the couple are now divorced) that “she had thoughts of harming the children.”

The case has laid bare the failures of a U.S. mental healthcare system that did not protect Clancy or her children, and still leaves countless new mothers without adequate care.

While Clancy stands trial, people are mourning the loss of Hayden Panettiere, a child star who had long struggled with postpartum depression following the 2014 birth of her daughter, Kaya, and experienced domestic violence from her ex-boyfriend Brian Hickerson. This week, news outlets revisited Panettiere’s allegation that Neutrogena (one of her long-time partners) attempted to end her contract after she spoke honestly about her postpartum depression.

‘It’s Killing the Women You Represent’: Texas Widower’s Plea to Lawmakers to End Abortion Ban

PUBLISHED 8/21/2026 by

After his 35-year-old wife bled to death from a miscarriage in a Houston-area hospital, a Texas father is suing—and taking her story to Capitol Hill.

“Choosing to bring new life into the world shouldn’t be a death sentence,” insisted Michelle Maloney, the San Antonio attorney working to bring justice to Texas widower Hope Ngumezi and his two young sons.

Three years ago, in June 2023, Hope’s beloved wife Porsha was happily expecting the couple’s third child until she began to miscarry at 11 weeks pregnant. The healthy 35-year-old finance manager for a charter school went to the emergency room at Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital, just 10 minutes from her home in suburban Houston.

Both she and Hope were certain that she would receive the safe and critical medical care that she needed as she passed fetal tissue and blood clots the size of grapefruits at the hospital. An ultrasound confirmed that she had partially miscarried and that her fetus no longer had a heartbeat. But the heavy bleeding didn’t stop.

Still, the hospital’s OB-GYN, who examined her just once, moved Porsha from the ER—where staff were equipped to respond to emergencies—to a regular floor, where she received less monitoring. Porsha arrived at the hospital at 3:37 p.m. By 2 a.m., she began gasping for air and within minutes, she had died of hemorrhage.

A dozen doctors who reviewed her medical records for ProPublica, which broke the story about her death, said that Porsha should have urgently received a very simple and standard procedure for a miscarriage—a D&C (dilation and curettage). The 10-15 minute D&C would have removed all remaining fetal tissue in her womb, which her uterus was trying to expel with heavy contractions and bleeding. The procedure would have stopped the bleeding.

“The poor thing bled to death for lack of a D&C. It’s atrocious,” Austin OB-GYN Nancy Binford told Courier Texas.

Don’t Let AI Become the New Sex Educator for Adolescents

PUBLISHED 8/20/2026 by

“Why would I Google it when I can just ask ChatGPT for exactly what I am looking for?” 

A 16-year-old asked me this during a recent conversation with Black adolescents about where they turn for health information. Her answer was striking, but hardly surprising.

As traditional sex education faces cuts in schools and reproductive health services become harder to access—particularly for young people of color in underserved communities—adolescents are increasingly looking elsewhere for answers. AI chatbots offer something schools, clinics and even trusted adults often do not: information that feels immediate, private and judgment-free.

Nine Books by Black Women About Travel, Belonging and the Search for Home

PUBLISHED 8/19/2026 by

Over the years, I’ve immersed myself in the stories of other Black women, not only as literary models, but as encouragement that the world might actually want to hear my story, my lessons and my truth. These books reminded me I am part of a long lineage of brave Black women who decided to leave home in search of adventure and themselves. The following memoirs, anthologies and novels explore movement across borders while grappling with history, race, identity, belonging, faith, joy and ultimately, home.

Hope Ngumezi Took His Wife Porsha to a Texas Hospital for a Miscarriage. She Left in a Body Bag.

PUBLISHED 8/18/2026 by

When Hope Negumezi took his pregnant wife, Porsha, to a Texas hospital for a miscarriage, he expected routine emergency care. Ten hours later, she bled to death.

Hope Ngumezi shares with journalist Bonnie Fuller how his pregnant wife, Porsha, bled to death while waiting in agony for hours for medical care. In this harrowing personal account, Hope recounts Porsha’s final hours—and the dangerous legal “gray area” that kept doctors from saving her life.

“Why did this nightmare happen?

“Our first meeting was at my 21st birthday party. … As soon as I saw her, it was like in the movies, when everything stops. There seemed to be an aura around her. I went to the bathroom to splash water on my face to sober up and to figure out how I was going to talk to her.

“She was a great mother. She just loved her boys so much and they loved her, too. They were both mama’s boys and were always hanging around her, which I loved.”