More Than A Magazine, A Movement
Vice President Harris is no stranger to being the ‘first,’ and with every barrier she breaks, she ensures more women, people of color and women of color like me will follow.
I’ve watched Vice President Harris make masala dosas alongside Mindy Kaling, tell her mother’s story, and speak to leaders in the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities. I am proud to see her embrace her Indian roots on the national stage. It is a new and exciting feeling to see myself in a presidential candidate.
The anti-feminist Independent Women’s Voice/Forum (IWF/V), backed by billionaires and anti-abortion zealots, is poised to use its leaders’ identities as women to convince voters that the GOP will protect Americans’ rights and freedoms, like access to birth control and the ability to choose if and when to have children. IWF/V’s past positions, the known agendas of their funders and their membership to Project 2025 belie their true intentions.
Rowena Chiu began working for Harvey Weinstein in 1998, assisting in the London office with his European film productions. Later that year, at the Venice Film Festival, she found herself at a late-night meeting with the producer. There, she recalls, Weinstein told her “he’d never had a Chinese girl” before attempting to rape her.
After signing a nondisclosure agreement, Chiu spent nearly two decades in what she describes as “constant fear”—“fear of Harvey’s abuse, control and power; that the story would come back to haunt me; that I would inadvertently slip up on my promise to never speak of this.” She was finally inspired to speak out by the powerful testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, whose decision to “speak up” about Brett Kavanaugh in September 2018 made a lasting impression.
“I can briefly glory in the relief that I am no longer sitting on a sickening secret,” she wrote.
Immediately after the draft opinion in Dobbs leaked in May, Republican lawmakers and anti-abortion activists announced they were working on legislation to ban abortion nationwide. But Catholics For Life (CFL), impatient to achieve that goal sooner, have asked the Supreme Court to do just that in a petition filed on September 1. CFL is asking the Court to ban abortion nationwide by ruling that “unborn human beings” have full constitutional rights.
If the Court rules in their favor, they will undoubtedly also rule that these “persons” have rights greater than any born person has: namely the right to inhabit and use a woman’s body against her will.
When the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wade, the Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost moved quickly to enforce the state’s six-week abortion ban. Shortly after, a 10-year-old rape victim who was six weeks and three days pregnant was denied an abortion in Ohio, forcing the girl to travel out of state for necessary medical care to end the pregnancy.
Ohio Physicians for Reproductive Rights released an open letter signed by over 1,000 doctors in the state protesting the dangerous ban.
In late May, the GOP Study Committee, the largest group of right-wing lawmakers on the Hill, introduced a so-called “Women’s Bill of Rights” (WBOR) in the House. Far from a comprehensive plan to promote gender equity, the bill does not affirm any rights for women other than the “right” for cisgender women to exclude transgender women from gender-affirming spaces.
The WBOR’s co-sponsor is the 501(c)(3) Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and its 501(c)(4) action arm, the Independent Women’s Voice (IWV), which have long opposed the Equal Rights Amendment, paid family and medical leave, and countless other measures that would improve the lives of millions of American women and girls.
Brett Kavanaugh was nowhere to be seen last Saturday when his Yale classmates attending their 35th college reunion held a rally to express their anger and frustration with their former classmate—as Kavanaugh is likely to join with other conservatives on the Supreme Court to reverse Roe v. Wade and end constitutional protections for the right to abortion.
Supreme Court conservatives Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh all graduated from Yale Law School. “What the hell are we doing here? How are we producing people who are taking away our longstanding constitutional rights?”
Wednesday’s verdict in the defamation trial of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard marks the end of the legal proceedings. But the impact of the case will reverberate. The court of public opinion handed a decisive victory to Depp early on, spotlighting huge cultural blindspots that extend far beyond Heard—whatever you may think of her. Until we reckon with these blindspots, ordinary credibility judgments will be distorted in ways that disadvantage everyday accusers.
Late Monday night, shock waves could be felt across the U.S. after a leaked draft opinion signaled the Supreme Court’s majority decision to overturn Roe v. Wade in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case concerning a 15-week abortion ban out of Mississippi. The leaked opinion, if and when it takes effect at the end of the Supreme Court’s term (likely in June), represents the biggest blow to women’s constitutional rights in the last 50 years.
Reactions from feminists, lawmakers, reproductive rights advocates and legal scholars have been pouring in as America begins to grapple with the gravity of what abortion access will look like in a post-Roe world.
Their actions started relatively quietly. But then came the megaphones, the screaming, the death threats and the outright violence.
Bodies on the Line by Lauren Rankin examines the role of clinic escorts in America’s fight for abortion rights, and chronicles the history of anti-abortion extremism.
