Death Penalty

War on Women Report: Kentucky Woman Arrested for Miscarriage; Kansas Anti-Trans Bill Takes Effect; Polls Show Most U.S. Women Disapprove of Trump

PUBLISHED 2/27/2026 by and

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:
—Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is suing Delaware abortion provider Debra Lynch, who operates the organization Her Safe Harbor, for allegedly mailing abortion pills into Texas.
—More than a year after seeking medical help for a miscarriage, Deann and Charles Bennett, a young couple in Booneville, Ky., have been arrested for alleged “reckless homicide.”
—Trump’s Department of Justice used the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act, intended to protect abortion clinics from harassment, to prosecute journalist Don Lemon for attending an anti-ICE protest.
—The Trump administration withdrew a Biden-era rule that required pharmacies receiving federal funding to carry and dispense mifepristone, misoprostol and methotrexate.
—Arkansas’ near-total abortion ban is facing its first legal challenge since Dobbs. 
—Some good news from Cleveland: The Cleveland City Council passed Tanisha’s Law, creating a Community Crisis Response department to respond to non-violent mental health emergencies with trained, unarmed crisis teams.
—In a landmark victory for survivor accountability, an Arizona jury in Phoenix has ordered Uber to pay $8.5 million to Jaylynn Dean.
—Also in Arizona: Judge Gregory Como struck down several abortion restrictions, ruling them unconstitutional.

… and more.

Josh and Erin Hawley’s ‘Love Life Initiative’ Signals a New Phase of the Antiabortion Fight

PUBLISHED 2/18/2026 by | UPDATED 2/20/2026 at 7:34 A.M. PT

Erin and Josh Hawley’s new dark-money group, the Love Life Initiative, arrives at a moment when abortion opponents are shifting tactics. With Roe overturned and sweeping bans already in place across much of the country, the focus is now on cutting off the remaining paths to care—through ballot measures, advertising campaigns and state-level policy fights designed to reshape public opinion and law from the ground up. The Hawleys frame this effort as a moral crusade to restore a national “culture of life.”

But in practice, it is an escalation of a post-Dobbs strategy that has already restricted access across wide swaths of the United States.

The consequences of that strategy are increasingly stark. Pregnant women in states with abortion bans are dying after being denied care, and people living in those states face significantly higher risks during pregnancy, with women of color bearing the brunt.

At the same time, public support for abortion rights has grown, and abortion-protective states have moved to shield providers and patients from out-of-state enforcement.

The Love Life Initiative reflects a movement determined not only to defend its legal victories but to reverse that growing acceptance—by reshaping the political and cultural terrain on which the abortion debate now unfolds.

We Can No Longer Tinker With the Machinery of Death: New ACLU Report Exposes Fatal Flaws in Capital Punishment

PUBLISHED 11/26/2025 by

On the first day of his second term President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order entitled Restoring The Death Penalty And Protecting Public Safety. In doing so he chose to ignore the mounting and irrefutable evidence, recently highlighted in a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), that the death penalty is riddled with human error and poses the undeniable risk of executing innocent people.

At least 150 countries have abolished the death penalty, by law or by practice. Resisting the humanitarian trend around the world, the United States remains part of a gruesome club, along with China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

‘This Is About Life or Death’: Leading Feminists Discuss Women’s Rights in Post-Roe America

PUBLISHED 5/7/2025 by

Clara Bingham, Jamia Wilson and Jessica Valenti on the state of abortion access and the feminist resistance rising up in every state in the U.S.:

“The 14th Amendment is what antiabortion activists are using right now to fight for fetal personhood. Anytime you see the 14th Amendment mentioned, that’s what it’s about.”

“We are no longer first-class citizens in banned states.”

“There are countries in this world where the pro-life movement is the movement that is about choice. … They’re surprised when they hear the framing of pro-life being used to dominate and control women’s bodies.”

“As terrible as things are every single day, in every single community and in every single state, there are rooms full of women, and there are rooms full of activists who are working their asses off, who are using their time, their money, their energy to make sure that if someone needs care, they can get it, whether or not we see it.”

The 22 Scariest Lines We Found in Project 2025’s 900-Page ‘Mandate for Leadership’

PUBLISHED 7/16/2024 by , , , and

Project 2025, the extremist blueprint for the next Republican president, maps out the permanent reversal of more than 50 years of gains for American women and LGBTQ+ people. The authors of Project 2025—80 percent of whom served in the first Trump administration—paint a picture of a nation where women are fundamentally second class citizens.

Project 2025 contains an 887-page policy agenda. We read the whole thing, so you don’t have to. Here are the most terrifying things we found. 

From The Vault: Joan Little and The Dialectics of Rape (June 1975)

PUBLISHED 3/5/2024 by

“A little more than 100 years ago … rape served not only to further [the Black woman’s] oppression but also as a means of terrorizing the entire Black community. It placed brutal emphasis on the fact that Black slaves were indeed the property of the white master. … The social incentive given to rape is woven into the logic of the institutions of this society. It is an extremely efficient means of keeping women in a state of fear of rape, or of the possibility of it.”

( For more ground-breaking stories like this, order 50 YEARS OF Ms.: THE BEST OF THE PATHFINDING MAGAZINE THAT IGNITED A REVOLUTION (Alfred A. Knopf)—a collection of the most audacious, norm-breaking coverage Ms. has published.)

How Solitary Confinement Harms Women

PUBLISHED 8/10/2022 by

Every day in the U.S., women endure the torture of solitary confinement, kept in cells the size of small closets for over 22 hours a day, isolated and alone, wondering if the state will execute them. Women are uniquely affected by lengthy incarceration; at least 75 percent of the women currently serving death sentences are mothers.

Sabrina Butler-Smith spent six and a half years behind bars—almost three of them on death row—before she was exonerated and set free. She may have been proven innocent, but after being caged in a six by nine foot cell, Butler-Smith told Ms., “You’re never the same.”