Hyde Amendment

Within the U.S., the Hyde Amendment essentially bars federal abortion coverage through Medicaid. Proposed as a response to Roe v. Wade, Hyde is known for its devastating impact on millions of low-income women and families.

A Groundbreaking U.N. Resolution Calls Forced Pregnancy What It Is: Reproductive Violence

PUBLISHED 7/25/2026 by

It took until July 7, 2026, for the world’s leading human rights body to call forcing someone to be pregnant—or forcing them not to be—what it is: reproductive violence. In a landmark resolution adopted unanimously, the U.N. Human Rights Council formally recognized “reproductive violence” as a specific, systemic form of gender-based violence. 

This historic U.N. declaration has implications for the United States, where 41 states ban abortion at some point during pregnancy. These bans block medical providers from offering needed care, and enable police and state attorneys to arrest and criminally prosecute pregnant women whose reproductive decision-making they oppose.

Any law or government action that requires a person to carry a pregnancy to term against their will is a form of bodily assault. The dynamics mirror domestic violence and sexual assault. The core of rape is the violation of consent—taking control of another person’s body and forcing them to submit. Abortion bans likewise hijack a person’s body, stripping them of their bodily integrity and self-determination.

As anti-violence advocate Irene Weiser once asked: “How can we ever begin to end violence against women if the laws of our society will not even guarantee the most fundamental of human right to women—to say at all times, under all circumstances, what we allow to happen to our bodies?”

Why Attacks on Immigrant Communities Are Reproductive Justice Issues

PUBLISHED 7/22/2026 by , and

“It’s hell.”

That’s how our colleague, Miri, described her months-long detention in the Rio Grande Valley, Texas, last year, separated from her husband and four children. Food was inedible, medications were inaccessible and women were forced to share beds and blankets due to overcrowding. She witnessed guards sexually assault women and conduct invasive strip searches. Pregnant and breastfeeding people were neglected: One new mother suffered from mastitis, while another woman in labor was ignored for hours before being taken to a hospital. 

These horrors, perpetrated by immigration enforcement officers, are exactly what the federal government approved billions to fund this summer. 

Reproductive justice is often reduced to abortion rights. But the movement has always taken a broader view. Created by 12 Black women organizers, the reproductive justice framework is about the right to have—or to not have—children and the right to raise them in safe, healthy communities. Detentions, deportations and disruption of care are part of a broader effort to limit who can fully belong, safely build a family and have rights in the United States. 

So who deserves safety and belonging in the U.S.? 

The Blueprint to Save America’s Moms 

PUBLISHED 7/13/2026 by and

American healthcare was fundamentally reshaped a year ago with the passage of H.R. 1. The sweeping federal budget reconciliation bill President Donald Trump called the One Big Beautiful Bill was signed into law on July 4, 2025.

One year later, the country’s sexual and reproductive health system is in crisis, and we are at a devastating inflection point, leading all high-income countries in a statistic that should shame every lawmaker: maternal mortality. 

To truly save the lives of American moms, we must adopt a policy framework rooted in medical expertise, research and human rights. Here’s what we propose.

Feminist Lessons From the 1980s: Why Every Movement Faces Backlash

PUBLISHED 6/9/2026 by

The 1980s opened with a sense of uncertainty for feminists. Just years after the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, the passage of Title IX and the near-ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, Ronald Reagan swept into office backed by a newly energized religious right determined to reverse many of the gains women had won in the previous decade.

Across the country, antiabortion activists organized at the state level, the ERA’s ratification deadline expired, and conservative leaders framed feminism itself as a threat to American values. What had felt like a period of rapid progress in the 1970s suddenly gave way to a fierce political and cultural backlash.

The decade was marked by escalating attacks on reproductive freedom. Reagan expanded antiabortion policies, implemented the global gag rule and sought to further entrench the Hyde Amendment’s restrictions on abortion funding. Meanwhile, antiabortion extremists targeted clinics and providers with bombings, assaults and intimidation campaigns.

Throughout the decade, Ms. documented the real-world consequences of these policies, particularly for poor women and women of color, while warning that the fight over abortion was fundamentally about women’s autonomy, equality and power.

Yet the 1980s were also a decade of feminist resilience. Women identified an emerging gender gap in voting patterns, rallied behind Geraldine Ferraro’s historic vice presidential campaign and reintroduced the Equal Rights Amendment year after year.

By the decade’s end, a majority of women—and two-thirds of younger women—identified as feminists.

The lesson of the 1980s is that backlash is often a sign of a movement’s success. Faced with powerful opposition, feminists did not retreat. They adapted, organized and laid the groundwork for the political breakthroughs that would follow in the decades ahead.

This essay is part of Feminist Lessons—part 2 of Ms.’ our three-part FEMINIST 250 project—which explores what each decade of modern feminist history can teach us about power, democracy, backlash and social change.

Trump Considers Blocking Abortion Access for Unaccompanied Immigrant Minors in Federal Custody (Again)

PUBLISHED 4/4/2026 by and

A looming policy change threatens to undo existing protections and leave pregnant immigrant teens in federal custody without meaningful access to abortion care.

We won’t know what direction the rule will take until the proposed rule is released, but if the Trump administration’s antiabortion policies—such as the reinstatement of the Veterans Administration’s ban on abortion and abortion counseling, the defunding of Planned Parenthood and the reinstatement of an expanded global gag rule—are any indication, the rights of this marginalized population are at great risk.

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.”

Republicans Are Holding Women’s Health Hostage

PUBLISHED 10/6/2025 by

As the government shutdown drags into another week, women and their families have the most to lose. The Republican budget that triggered this fight guts Medicaid and rolls back ACA tax credits that make health insurance affordable for millions—what experts are calling a “quiet repeal” of the Affordable Care Act. Nearly 50 years after Rosie Jiménez died because she was denied Medicaid coverage for abortion, we’re watching the same systems endanger women’s lives all over again.

And yet, there’s reason for hope: The FDA just approved a new generic version of mifepristone, expanding access to medication abortion at a moment when it’s most under attack.

Medicaid Funding Restored to Planned Parenthood After One-Year Defunding

PUBLISHED 9/24/2025 by

Republicans have finally achieved a decades-long goal: defunding Planned Parenthood. In July, President Trump signed a spending bill that blocks Medicaid reimbursements and federal grants for nonprofit health centers that provide abortions—including Planned Parenthood—even though federal law already prohibits Medicaid from covering abortion. The result is that more than a million low-income and disabled patients who rely on Planned Parenthood for contraception, STI testing, and cancer screenings can no longer use their insurance there. Hundreds of clinics across the country are expected to close, and in many communities, there are no alternatives waiting to replace them.

What does this mean in practice?

It means people like Colleen—who discovered she had breast cancer because of an affordable visit to Planned Parenthood—will face new barriers to care.

It means patients who already struggle to cover basic expenses will be asked to pay out-of-pocket for lifesaving services.

And it means thousands of people living in rural or medically underserved areas may have no nearby provider at all.

The political fight over Planned Parenthood has always been framed as a battle about abortion, but the immediate impact is much broader: fewer clinics, fewer screenings, and fewer chances to catch disease before it’s too late.

Trump’s Republican Trifecta Sets Up Massive Transfer of Tax Dollars from Reproductive Health Clinics to Unregulated Crisis Pregnancy Clinics

PUBLISHED 8/18/2025 by | UPDATED 2/17/2026 at 2:00 P.M. PT

The Trump administration, 119th Congress and John Roberts-led Supreme Court are redirecting federal tax dollars from Planned Parenthood and Title X to bankroll the $2 billion unregulated pregnancy clinic industry—crisis pregnancy centers—positioning it to replace reproductive health clinics nationwide.

The antiabortion industry has long aimed to “replace” Planned Parenthood, and since Roe‘s fall, so-called pro-life operatives claim these clinics fill gaps in prenatal and postpartum care and address maternal and infant mortality. These claims are false. Their mission—to block abortion—directly conflicts with providing actual, lifesaving healthcare.

Project 2025 seeks to disqualify Planned Parenthood from Medicaid and end “religious discrimination in grant selections”—code for funneling federal dollars to crisis pregnancy centers.

“Let’s call this what it is: a calculated, coordinated attack on poor women and families,” says Debra Rosen, executive director of Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch. Low-income women are being denied care at real health centers and funneled into ideological storefronts. The hypocrisy is breathtaking, and the consequences will be deadly—a manufactured, avoidable public health crisis.