More Than A Magazine, A Movement
A cultural region of 20 countries and territories extending from South America to Central America, including Mexico and most Caribbean islands. Most have a history of Spanish or Portuguese colonialism and a large presence of Spanish, Portuguese or French languages.
With far-right agendas gaining traction, anti-rights movements growing and attacks on women’s rights intensifying, the escalating use of the law as a weapon against women—such as through the criminalization of abortion—serves as a stark call for collective action.
Menstrual regulation, or bringing back a missed or late period, is a common cultural practice across the globe, including the United States. It typically involves “period pills” to induce a period, such as mifepristone and misoprostol, and can be practiced legally in countries where abortion is illegal, like Bangladesh and Cuba. Offering a method to manage menstrual cycles openly grants reproductive autonomy, without shame or taboo. Critically, menstrual regulation is not viewed as an abortion, even though mifepristone and misoprostol are involved.
For the first time in its history, the United Nations Human Rights Committee recognized in a Jan. 20 ruling that denying an abortion to a child is not just a denial of choice but an imposition of pregnancy and forced motherhood that irreversibly disrupts their health, well-being and life trajectory.
This landmark decision represents a crucial shift in how the international community addresses the intersection of children’s rights, reproductive rights and gender justice.
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) issued a significant ruling on Dec. 20, with the potential to further transform the legal landscape of abortion rights in Latin America. In particular, IACHR ruled that El Salvador violated a series of rights by denying a 22-year-old woman an abortion in 2013, despite her health and life being at risk and the pregnancy being unviable. According to the court, the government violated her right to health, personal integrity, privacy, access to justice, and to live a life free of violence—rights stated in the Inter-American Convention of Human Rights and the Belém do Pará Convention to prevent, punish and eradicate violence against women.
The ruling was received as a triumph by Beatriz’s family and the activists that supported them in this case—but their work does not stop here. Activists are now committing to monitor the government’s compliance with the court’s ruling.
For millions of women, the new year rings in a commitment to dieting. With the recent headlines that three quarters of Americans are now overweight or obese, we can expect surging spending on diet products targeting women this holiday season—adding to the estimated $33 billion that Americans already spend on commercial weight loss products each year.
As an anthropologist who studies how people make sense of nutrition guidelines, I’d like to propose a feminist alternative. Forget dieting: Make a commitment to become involved in collective action—anything that involves joining others in your communities to work for change. It is by working with others that lasting health benefits will come about.
Every day of 2024, Ms. writers and editors set out to create content that empowered, informed and infuriated readers. We sought out the truth, sounded alarms, asked tough questions, mourned feminist losses (and feminists we lost), looked to gender justice advocates abroad, and handed the microphone over to experts. Dear reader: As we enter a new year and a new era of the movement, we promise you more of this.
Explore the 30 most popular articles published this year on MsMagazine.com—the articles feminists most clicked, shared, studied, bookmarked and passed out at marches.
There are three things the U.S. government must do to address immigration. None entails policing the U.S. border, and none are prioritized by U.S. politicians today.
Support of land sovereignty, reproductive autonomy and safe borders would do far more to address the problems accompanying U.S. immigration, than threatening expensive deportation and promising ineffective border walls.
Tuesday’s vice presidential debate brought exchanges over the question of asylum and border security, with Sen. JD Vance lying—without real-time fact-checking—about the ease of obtaining asylum. He offered a baseless assertion that people can be “granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand.”
Winning asylum is extremely difficult, and the horrific conditions forcing women to seek protection from gender-based violence in Central America and Mexico show no signs of abating.
Latina voters have become a dynamic force and a major voting bloc in recent elections, prioritizing grassroots organizing and building online communities in support of candidates such as Kamala Harris. Additionally, Latinas are the largest group of women of color affected by state abortion bans. Groups such as the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice and Voto Latino are galvanizing support for reproductive rights, workers’ rights and immigration reform—but candidates must recognize the importance of the Latina vote. Whoever captures this voting bloc will exponentially increase their chances of winning the presidency and down-ballot races this November.
Ms. spoke with Lupe M. Rodríguez, the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Justice, to discuss what’s motivating Latina voters in this year’s election.
Posing women’s leadership writ large as an open and unanswered question—and questioning the electability of a candidate who has made a career of supporting women’s lives and fundamental rights in an election largely defined by these issues—is nothing short of irresponsible journalism. Women lead politics around the world every single day.
Black women are electable if we elect them.