Barack Obama and the Obama Administration

Fifth Circuit Judges Seem Skeptical of Louisiana’s Challenge to Telehealth Abortion

PUBLISHED 9/10/2026 by

On Wednesday, Sep. 9, a three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans heard oral arguments in Louisiana v. FDA, a lawsuit filed by the Louisiana attorney general seeking to end telehealth abortion nationwide, even in states that protect abortion access.

Since the fall of Roe and a national snapback of abortion rights in a majority of U.S. states, the antiabortion movement has been laser focused on trying to restrict telehealth abortion because it’s increasing in both awareness and popularity, and it allows patients to circumvent state bans.

The 5th Circuit is considered one of the most conservative appeals courts in the country. But the three-judge panel randomly selected to hear Wednesday’s case included two judges appointed by Democratic presidents: Judge Stephen Higginson, appointed by former President Barack Obama; and Judge Dana Douglas, by former President Joe Biden. The third judge, Judy Richman, was appointed by George W. Bush.

During oral arguments, all three judges indicated skepticism about Louisiana’s arguments, starting with Louisiana’s right to bring the case.

While the recent 5th Circuit hearing offers hope that efforts to restrict mifepristone through the courts will not succeed anytime soon, two greater threats remain: Trump’s antiabortion nominee to lead the FDA, Heidi Overton, and Attorney General Todd Blanche’s promise to restrict the mailing of mifepristone under the Comstock Act. (This move would spur immediate lawsuits by Democratic states and manufacturers of mifepristone.)

Meanwhile, abortion rights advocates will never give up in finding new ways to put abortion pills in women’s hands.

Gloria Steinem Lit a Revolution. The Torch Is Ours Now.

PUBLISHED 9/5/2026 by

This week, Gloria Steinem died at the age of 92, peacefully at her home in New York City and surrounded by people who loved her.

We will miss her at Ms. I will miss her personally.

There were parts of Gloria’s childhood that mirrored my own. For a period of time, Gloria did not attend school because she was tending to her mother. She later said that she chose not to have children because she had already had a mother to take care of.

We do not talk enough about stories like that: the sensitivity that came from her own childhood. Pronatalism in the United States still insists that all women should want children, care for those children, stay home and find satisfaction within the narrow boundaries others have drawn for them. Even education has historically been framed not as a path toward women’s intellectual or economic freedom, but as a place to find a husband.

To want something more—and to care about something larger than the life prescribed for you—has always carried challenging consequences for women. Gloria understood that deeply. She also understood that the freedom to shape one’s life begins with the ability to govern one’s own body.

In 2017, standing before the Women’s March in Washington, D.C., Gloria called for “a deep democracy” in which people would refuse to be quiet or controlled. “We are at one with each other,” she said. “We are looking at each other, not up. No more asking Daddy.”

Those words carry a special weight today. Democracy has never been a gift delivered from above. Equality has never arrived because people in power suddenly found it convenient. Both are built by people who recognize one another, tell the truth about their lives and refuse to accept that injustice is inevitable.

As Thousands of Migrant Children Lose Legal Representation, Trump’s ‘Lost Children’ Myth Lives On

PUBLISHED 7/29/2026 by

The Trump administration’s ceaseless attacks on immigrant communities continue to bring tragedy and death to people who are simply in the wrong place at the wrong time: After ICE agents shot into the cars of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Houston and Joan Sebastián Durán Guerrero in Biddeford, Maine, killing both men—neither of whom was even a target of that day’s raid—the Department of Homeland Security agreed to pause its use of traffic stops.

The pause lasted only a few hours: President Trump took to social media to rant against the DHS decision, and it was reversed—signaling that another round of violent deportation efforts are going to be pushed and applauded by this White House.  

Trump’s insistence that traffic stops by ICE agents are a vital mechanism for fighting crime shows how seamlessly he has blurred the lines between being in the country without authorization and committing crimes.

The same thing is happening in the world of unaccompanied children—and I suspect one of the next waves of deportation efforts will be aimed at the sponsors of those children. The Trump administration has spun an elaborate web of lies to paint parents and family members as criminals, participating in trafficking and child exploitation.  

Revisiting the Speech That Made America See Farmworkers: Dolores Huerta and the Power of Saying, ‘We Exist’

PUBLISHED 7/2/2026 by

In 1965, the National Farm Workers Association announced their decision to join the striking Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee on Sept. 16—Mexican Independence Day. The choice of date reflected the hybrid identity of Chicanos: straddling Mexican and American cultures, Spanish and English, rooted in the old country but with branches fully extended into the new one.

This was the identity Huerta embodied.

Huerta maintained a heavy bilingual speaking schedule to keep up mo­rale. In addition to the typical challenges of organizing, the farmworkers were standing up against bigotry and asserting their American identity—attaching their cause to the Civil Rights Movement.

“Abajo con racism! Down with rac­ism!” Huerta sometimes ended her speeches. “Viva la union! Viva la causa!”

The people in power, the ones who owned the companies that sold the food or wrote laws in the statehouse, had been able to ignore people like the farmworkers—the people who toiled out of sight to keep the system going.

Now, a crowd of people had walked across the state to watch Huerta declare: “We are here and we embody our needs for you.”

(Excerpted from the book ALL WE SAY: The Battle for American Identity: A History in 15 Speeches by Ben Rhodes.)

A (Brief) History of Women’s Rights, 1600 to Present

PUBLISHED 6/3/2026 by and

From the Haudenosaunee women who successfully challenged warfare in the 17th century, to today’s feminist organizers defending democracy, reproductive freedom and civil rights, the struggle for women’s equality has never been a straight line. It is a story of persistence, resistance and collective action spanning centuries.

Compiled by editors at Ms. and researchers from the National Women’s History Alliance, this women’s history timeline traces the interconnected histories of feminism, abolition, labor organizing, civil rights, reproductive justice, LGBTQ+ liberation and democratic participation.

No timeline can fully capture more than 400 years of feminist history, let alone every movement, leader, victory and setback that has shaped the ongoing fight for equality. Rather than offering a comprehensive account, this chronology highlights pivotal moments and turning points that help tell the story of how women have expanded the boundaries of freedom, democracy and human rights in the United States and beyond.

The timeline is part of Ms. magazine’s FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists project, a multimedia essay series marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence by examining the women and feminist movements that have worked to make the nation’s founding promises more fully realized. Through reported features, essays, interviews and historical analysis, FEMINIST 250 explores not only where we have been, but where we must go next to achieve true equality.

FEMINIST 250’s Parts 2 and 3—Feminist Lessons and Feminist Futures—drop this month on MsMagazine.com.

Immigration Detention Is Failing Women and Children—By Design

PUBLISHED 2/26/2026 by

The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley has been the subject of an onslaught of headlines in recent weeks, but the truth is, it’s been routinely criticized for inhumane conditions for years. But what we are seeing now, as Trudy Taylor Smith put it to me, is horror “on a shocking scale.” Children describe being served worm-infested food and dirty water, getting little or no classroom time and being perpetually sick. A toddler nearly dies because of medical neglect. A teenage boy with symptoms consistent with appendicitis is turned away by a nurse. There is no better way to describe it than state-sponsored child abuse.

If this isn’t stomach-churning enough, consider what is happening a few hours south, where girls’ reproductive healthcare and freedom is also in grave crisis. Pregnant and unaccompanied migrant children are being sent to San Benito, Texas.

Why Texas? Why else? … Because it is a place where abortion is illegal and high-risk pregnancy care is unavailable.

“Putting pregnant kids in San Benito is not a decision you make when you care about children’s safety,” one source said plainly.

This is entirely by design, pulled straight from the Project 2025 playbook. The constant split-screen scene in Texas is representative of the nation MAGA wants us to be, “where the cruelty is the point” and where the anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-freedom banner is flown.

We have to keep these stories—and all the women and girls in this state, willingly or not—front and center in the democracy movement. Their humanity is at the heart of all of ours.

The ACA Promised Access to Birth Control. The System Still Says No.

PUBLISHED 9/21/2025 by

Everyone has a defining memory that shapes how they come to see the world. For me, a Gen Z born in 2007, it was kneeling in front of the television, eyes fixed on the screen, watching Barack Obama take the oath of office.

However, more than a decade after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) promised access to birth control, I found myself at the pharmacy counter, forced to walk away without it. My insurance refused to cover the pills I need to regulate my hormones, to prevent a third surgery for cystic breasts, and to alleviate excruciating period pain. That was my first confrontation with a false promise—but hardly the first loss of what I considered a secure right.

In theory, the ACA requires most health insurance plans to cover all FDA-approved contraceptive methods without any cost-sharing. In reality, that promise breaks down at the pharmacy counter—whether on account of delays, rejections, cost-sharing and a host of exceptions. In addition, states are eagerly stepping in to empower pharmacists to decide who does not get contraception.

A Houston Mother Held by ICE Must Choose: Indefinite Detention or Be Deported Without Her Family

PUBLISHED 9/8/2025 by

Margarita Avila, a Houston mother of nine, was detained by ICE after an altercation that led to no charges. Her close-knit family weigh their futures if she is deported.

Margarita requested asylum in the U.S. more than a decade ago, and her case has been pending ever since. Meanwhile, she and José have grown their family in Texas, and like many other immigrants, they have put down deep roots. They bought a house in Houston’s Independence Heights neighborhood, started a landscaping business that grew to hundreds of customers and had five U.S.-born sons who are American citizens.

Because of their various immigration statuses (some undocumented, some pending asylum, some U.S. citizens) Margarita’s deportation would make it difficult and in some cases impossible to see her close-knit family. Her husband would have to decide whether to stay in the U.S. with their two youngest children or follow his wife to Belize so they can raise the boys together in a country Isaac and Jeremiah have never known. For the oldest children born in Belize, it could mean not seeing their mother for years because they don’t have permanent legal status.

Margarita Avila, 50, is among the tens of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. targeted for deportation in President Donald Trump’s second term. Trump has said his administration is going after “the worst of the worst” in an attempt to deport 1 million immigrants annually. But six months into Trump’s second administration, at least 70 percent of the more than 56,000 immigrants detained across the country didn’t have a criminal record.

Over a Million Women Are at Risk of a Pay Cut Under a New Trump Rule

PUBLISHED 8/20/2025 by

The Trump administration’s Department of Labor recently proposed a new rule that would directly take earnings away from the more than 1.5 million home care workers in the United States, more than 80 percent women, and their families.

Between 2019 and 2040, the population of adults ages 65 and older is expected to balloon from 54 million people to nearly 81 million people, comprising an estimated 22 percent of the U.S. population. That means that the direct care workforce is projected to grow at a faster rate than any other occupation over the next decade.

‘Care Is Baked Into a Healthy, Functioning Economy’: Economists Lenore Palladino and Rakeen Mabud on How to Advance Economic Justice

PUBLISHED 8/12/2025 by

The experts and Ms. contributors assessed the state of the U.S. care crisis and women’s economic inequality in the latest episode of the Ms. podcast Looking Back, Moving Forward—and broke down why investing in women and care workers is good policy. 

Rakeen Mabud: “We’re at a really pivotal moment and a really complicated moment. We have conservative, pronatalist voices, with more institutional power than they have ever had, at least in modern times. They are advancing an agenda of deep progressive patriarchy, whiteness—and wealth, frankly, is the third prong of that. And they are co-opting progressive policy ideas to do it.”

Lenore Palladino: “There are schools, and there are childcare centers, and there are hospitals being shut down right now. Investing in those would be a really important way to move this whole conversation forward. … Within economic policy, there’s such bifurcation. There’s tax policy over here. There’s care over here. It’s still a women’s issue.”

“Economics is still seen as a man’s game. Women actually make most financial decisions in households, but men are the ones who are seen as the experts, and our financial system is shaped around their life cycles.”

Listen to the latest episode of Looking Back, Moving Forward, “Women Can’t Afford to Wait for a Feminist Economic Future (with Premilla Nadasen, Rakeen Mabud and Lenore Palladino, Aisha Nyandoro, Gaylynn Burroughs, and Dolores Huerta)” on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.