More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Issues of the family, including childcare, welfare and family responsibilities, often directly impact women as mothers and primary caretakers.
In states around the U.S., families of transgender youth are battling anti-trans legislation blocking life-saving healthcare and transphobic ideas that permeate into their families and schools, and terrifying mental health statistics of trans youth who do not receive care.
Families share how they’re building safe and affirming homes for their children amidst such barriers.
Abortion is a critical component of reproductive healthcare, and young Louisianans will continue to need it.
As Louisianans, we must ask ourselves: How can our legislators claim teens are not mature enough to learn about how their reproductive bodies work, while presuming they can cope with forced parenthood? Abortion is a critical component of reproductive healthcare, and young Louisianans will continue to need it.
Dobbs sets a frightening precedent for the future of LGBTQ rights. Yet, we cannot lose sight that LGBTQ people—including women, transgender men, nonbinary people, and anyone able to become pregnant—are already in grave danger, right now.
Men’s bodies and women’s bodies behave differently in collisions due to differences in size, muscle structure and bone density. But the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which issues five-star safety ratings, does not crash test cars with dummies that accurately represent women. The tests strictly prioritize men’s safety and offer only hope that women may stand a chance. Too often, we don’t.
Crash test dummies that accurately represent women are available today, and other countries are already planning to require them in crash tests. The U.S. should do the same.
I was forced to give my son up for adoption, moments after giving birth. Boom. Gone. Just like that. I had no hope of ever seeing him again.
This shameful secret—my pregnancy and loss of my child—festered inside for more than 50 years. Decades later, my middle-aged son reached out by email and we met, a longed-for experience that soon turned into a nightmare. I had no idea that reunion in adoption is often shattering. The pain and anguish I wasn’t allowed to feel when I gave him away exploded inside me.
After researching princesses for five years and reading what feels like every book on the market about western women and royalty, Barbara Bourland could share what she discovered in one sentence: Princess stories are narratives of state control over women’s bodies.
It’s time we all stopped seeing them any differently.
On June 24, the Supreme Court overturned the longstanding precedents of Roe v. Wade, representing the largest blow to women’s constitutional rights in history. We’re chronicling readers’ experiences of abortion pre- and post-Roe.
“Even a medically safe abortion cannot be truly safe if it is illegal and shrouded in secrecy.”
Without the protections of Roe, we stand to see gross inequalities in fertility care and reproductive decision-making.
State laws defining ‘life’ as the moment an egg is fertilized will limit or prohibit the freezing or discarding of embryos—a process fundamental to successful fertility treatments. These practices could all but vanish in some places. These restrictions emerge at a moment where fertility technology is becoming ever more precise. Combined with existing anti-poor fertility policies, the reality is that poor women of color will have even less opportunity to determine the time and circumstance in which they decide to have a family.
Overturning Roe also casts a shadow over the right to contraception and family planning services. We must face up to how reproductive decisions threaten our common future. Empowering people to make them responsibly will protect future generations in ways that other approaches have failed to do.
There’ll be time enough for backyard barbeques once fathers take the lead in establishing “Dads Demand Action to Raise Healthy Boys,” following in the footsteps—a decade late—after “Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense,” launched the day following the mass murders at Sandy Hook.
Think about what it could mean to transform Father’s Day from a commercial holiday to a call to action centered on raising boys. To date, fathers and mentors, uncles and coaches have rarely been organized as a group; we’re an untapped force for good that could also become a new voting bloc. Call us say, soccer dads.
