Chronic Fatigue and Illness

The War on Children

PUBLISHED 9/5/2025 by

American children die at stunning rates because of policy choices, and mostly because of policy choices made by the “pro-life” right.

The Republican Party has long claimed the mantle of defending life. The new Republican Party has promised to make America healthy again. Instead, they’re leaving kids sick and dead.

This is a war on children. It is also a war on women. The “women and children” framing can feel incredibly condescending, but the truth is that women’s and children’s lives and wellbeing are indelibly intertwined. Women make children with our bodies; if we are not well, they are not well. Women still do most of the work of raising and nurturing children; if they are not well, we are not well. This does not apply to every single woman on earth. But it applies to women as a class, and to children as a class.

‘The Future Is Disabled’: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha on Creating a More Humane Social Order

PUBLISHED 10/5/2022 by

Writer, disability-justice activist and performance artist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha knows that it’s possible for society to become more equitable. Piepzna-Samarasinha’s latest book, The Future Is Disabled: Prophesies, Love Notes and Mourning Songs, lays out a bare-bones agenda for what is needed to make the U.S. more socially just.

Piepzna-Samarasinha and Ms. contributor Eleanor J. Bader communicated about the book, the disability justice movement and the ways that activists can support each other in the fight for a more ecologically sustainable and humane social order.      

‘Vagina Obscura’ Author Rachel E. Gross Takes Us on a Daring Anatomical Voyage

PUBLISHED 4/26/2022 by

Rachel E. Gross, in her debut book Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage, takes us on a journey around “the organs traditionally bound up in baby-making―the uterus, ovaries and vagina,” elaborating both on what science knows, and what it doesn’t. (Did you know it wasn’t until 1993 that a federal mandate required researchers to include women and minorities in clinical research?)

Gross recently spoke to Carli Cutchin by phone from her home in Brooklyn. Thoughtful and erudite, she talked about the female and LGBT researchers who’ve made scientific inroads against the odds, the myth that the “clitoral” and “vaginal” orgasms are distinct from each other, a princess who relocated her clitoris, koala vaginas and much more.

To Lose My Chronic Pain, I Had to Find My Rage

PUBLISHED 2/12/2022 by

A personal story on chronic pain and repressed emotions—and why this disproportionally affects women:

“When our culture hits the ‘mute’ button on women’s anger, it isn’t just silencing us; it is also torturing us, disabling us and killing us.”

A Woman Who Dared—With ME

PUBLISHED 11/7/2017 by

It was late afternoon, and I could barely get my body out of bed. In fact, I had been in bed most of the last few days—or was it weeks? Even with all that rest, my legs were still too weak to stand up.