Pregnancy

These stories cover pregnancy in its relation to legislation and sex discrimination, abortion access, parenting and everything in between. Because of U.S. laws that put fetuses’ health above the fundamental human rights of pregnant people, they are often treated as second-class citizens.

Detaining Families, Policing Pregnancy: Trump’s Immigration Crackdown on Women and Children

PUBLISHED 8/12/2026 by

Trump’s latest attacks on birthright citizenship are part of a much broader effort to police American identity, punish migrant women for entering the U.S. and ultimately regulate their reproduction. Immigrant women and children remain particular targets of a hostile immigration system that seeks to control them through detention, family separation and deportation. The administration’s reinstatement of family detention has made it possible to incarcerate whole families while avoiding the political backlash generated by the “zero tolerance” separations of Trump’s first term.

But detaining families together does not make detention humane. Family residential facilities expose mothers and children to interrupted medical care, inadequate health screenings, poor living conditions and lasting physical and psychological harm. Women—particularly those who are pregnant, postpartum or caring for young children—also face heightened vulnerability to neglect and abuse inside a system where government officers and private contractors wield enormous power over their daily lives.

These policies are not simply about immigration enforcement. They are a means of penalizing pregnancy, motherhood and family formation in immigrant communities. From attacks on birthright citizenship to the detention of pregnant women and U.S.-citizen children, the administration is using the immigration system to make migration more painful and precarious—and to enact that punishment on the bodies and families of migrant women.

My Hysterectomy Was a Gift. Dr. Kemi Doll Shows Why Women Need to Share Our ‘Womb Stories’

PUBLISHED 8/8/2026 by

Determined to prevent uterine cancer deaths, Dr. Doll published A Terrible Strength: The Hidden Crisis of the Black Womb and Your Survival Guide to Healing in May. Both comprehensive and compassionate, the book focuses on individuals of African descent, showing how everyone will benefit.

Upon finishing A Terrible Strength, I took its message to heart: One need not have a womb to prioritize womb health. We can all join Kemi Doll’s Womb Sisterhood through the “deliberate telling and sharing” of “womb stories” with “our true friends.” 

Fortunately, women have already started talking. Personal testimonies changed health outcomes in the 1970s and ’80s—and they’re doing the same now. Earlier generations suffered through perimenopause in silence, but today, women in their 20s, 30s and 40s hear about not only hot flashes but also itchy ears and frozen shoulders. And, as a woman in my early 50s, I’m not completely in the dark about hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

Nevertheless, deadly silence remains.

I am childfree by choice, so pregnancy never fueled my concerns, but I became preoccupied with gynecology in 2017. Fibroids were wreaking havoc in my life, and I pursued a hysterectomy to end my suffering. As Doll puts it, this “definitive treatment” is “welcomed by some and mourned by others.” Though I very much welcomed a hysterectomy, I couldn’t secure one until May 2021, despite my best efforts. 

From now on, I will participate in the “deliberate telling and sharing” of “womb stories.” Doing so is difficult but necessary. As Doll explains, sharing our experience requires us to “shift away from a strength that withstands suffering, silence and pain.” It requires, in her words, “a strength that embraces our vulnerability and can demand better care from the larger world.”

The Myth of the ‘Perfect Birth’: What America Gets Wrong About Pregnancy, Birth and Maternal Care

PUBLISHED 7/26/2026 by

Project 2026’s pronatalist vision insists that America needs more babies—but largely ignores the conditions that make pregnancy and childbirth unnecessarily dangerous in the first place. In this interview with Ms., The Perfect Birth Myth co-authors Avital Norman Nathman and Deborah Wage argue that improving maternal health requires more than rhetoric about “family values.” It demands investments in midwives, doulas, paid family leave, prenatal and postpartum care, and policies that address the racial and economic inequities driving the nation’s maternal mortality crisis.

Drawing on surveys of nearly 3,000 parents and healthcare providers, Nathman and Wage dismantle persistent myths about birth while exposing the structural failures of the U.S. maternity care system—from hospital closures and Medicaid cuts to the medical establishment’s resistance to alternative models of care. They explain why Black women continue to face disproportionately poor outcomes regardless of income or education, why conservative pronatalist policies fall short, and what it would take to build a maternal healthcare system that truly supports families.

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.? 

Antiabortion Extremists Can’t Target Abortion Pill Prescribers If They Don’t Know Their Names

PUBLISHED 7/17/2026 by

Four years after the fall of Roe, telemedicine is not just a convenience. For thousands of women, it is the best or only option.

Telemedicine’s success means that antiabortion threats have grown more sophisticated and intense. Pregnancy is statistically the most dangerous time in a violent relationship. Patients seeking abortion care also risk harassment and violence from hostile partners, as well as abortion opponents, and in the worst cases, life-threatening violence. A pill bottle with your name on it is evidence that can be used with threats to expose you to your employer, your family, immigration authorities or a stranger on social media.

We have developed legislation that would better safeguard the privacy of people seeking abortion care by allowing patients and providers to choose not to have their names appear on pill packaging. Our organization is currently working to pass this legislation in several states.

As Dr. Mary Applegate, a public health physician who testified in favor of such a bill in New York, spelled out: Allowing the use of a pseudonym on prescription labels can be a matter of life and death.

What to Know About Later Abortions: Myths, Barriers and Patient Stories

PUBLISHED 7/7/2026 by

Later abortion is one of the most stigmatized and least understood aspects of reproductive health, and yet some of the voices perpetuating that stigma come from inside the reproductive rights movement itself. Meanwhile, while most abortions happen in the first trimester, later abortions are increasing as restrictions and bans are delaying care and creating the very conditions that make them necessary.

To address these misconceptions, Erika Christensen and Garin Marschall created Patient Forward after Christensen experienced a later abortion in 2016. The organization is dedicated to eliminating later abortion stigma and barriers.

“We have a lot of folks in the media, including repro[ductive rights] advocates, saying, ‘Nobody wants to do this,’ or, ‘It’s not even available,’ or, ‘Nobody’s getting abortions that late.’ Yes, they are. They’re getting them in safe, modern, incredibly compassionate abortion clinics,” said Christensen. “We do a lot of destigmatizing work.”

Patient Forward emphasizes that most people who obtain a later abortion would have preferred to access an abortion earlier: “Contrary to popular rhetoric, patients do not wait. Rather, they are delayed.”

“We have found that young people are much later to recognize they’re pregnant because their periods are irregular anyway, because they may not be familiar with all the symptoms of pregnancy,” says Dr. Diana Foster Greene of University of California San Francisco. “People with chronic health conditions are also later to discover they’re pregnant because often chronic health conditions have the same symptoms of pregnancy.”

Keeping Score: Abortion Bans Cost $140B Per Year; Federal Courts Protect Trans Youth and Incarcerated Trans Women; Feminists React to FBI Raid on Ohio Voting Rights Organization

PUBLISHED 6/24/2026 by

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-Texas) is working to get Republicans on the record on the Right to Contraception Act.
—ICE has already reported the deaths of 18 detainees this year, on pace to surpass the highest number of deaths in decades.
—Abortion restrictions could cost the U.S. economy $140 billion annually in lost earnings.
—”I love the inflation,” says Trump.
—The EEOC will no longer require federal agencies to report on race, ethnicity, sex or gender identity.
—83 percent of American voters agree that emergency contraception should be easily accessible.
—Abortion ban states are slowly losing a generation of women medical students and doctors.
—More than 770,000 children have already lost access to SNAP benefits after last year’s funding cuts.
—A new study found trans women athletes have no significant physical advantages over cis women.
—Missouri has restored access to medication abortions after a Jackson County judge struck down key state restrictions, allowing clinics to resume providing the service and marking the first time medication abortion has been available in Missouri since 2018.
—Republicans passed a reconciliation bill that provides roughly $70 billion for ICE and CBP, sending it to President Trump’s desk. (This is on top of more than $140 billion Republicans already provided for those agencies last year.)

… and more.

‘Nope, You’re Fine’: This Black Doctor Nearly Died After Giving Birth in Reno

PUBLISHED 6/16/2026 by

A first-person account from Dr. Bayo Curry-Winchell, a Black family physician and the medical director for Saint Mary’s Urgent Care Group in Reno, Nevada. Curry-Winchell nearly died after giving birth by C-section at her own hospital after repeated warnings that something was seriously wrong were dismissed. Her story—shared with writer Bonnie Fuller—underscores the stark realities of America’s maternal mortality crisis, which disproportionately endangers Black women regardless of education or income.

“I was 38 and had just delivered my second baby, a little girl, at the Reno hospital where I was a medical director at the time. …

“I remember holding my new daughter in the recovery room, then being wheeled into my hospital room. That’s when I started feeling like something wasn’t right. I didn’t feel like myself. I was having a hard time talking, and I was in a lot of pain. …

“I wasn’t capable of using my medical training in that moment. But I had to do something. I handed my phone to my husband, James, and told him to call my OB-GYN right away. … Dr. Jack believed him and came right back to the hospital. …

“It turned out that I still had retained products, including placenta and fetal tissue, in my uterus. Unfortunately, this can happen sometimes, especially after a prior C-section. I also was bleeding internally. I had lost so much blood, I had to have a transfusion. …

“American Black women have a very high maternal mortality rate, and I lived it myself. If my doctor had not believed my husband and me and returned to care for me, I would have been like other Black women you hear about passing away after giving birth.”

Texas May Eliminate a Critical Tool for Preventing Maternal Deaths

PUBLISHED 6/11/2026 by and

Texas is considering whether to continue one of its most important tools for preventing maternal deaths.

The state’s Maternal Mortality Review Committee (MMRC), which investigates pregnancy-related deaths and identifies ways to prevent them, is currently undergoing Sunset review—a routine process that determines whether state programs will continue operating. If lawmakers fail to reauthorize the committee, Texas will lose a critical source of information about why mothers are dying and what can be done to save lives.

The stakes are especially high for Black women. In Texas, Black women are nearly four times more likely than white women to die from pregnancy-related causes. Texas’ maternal mortality rate also exceeds the national average, and approximately 80 percent of pregnancy-related deaths are considered preventable.

As public health researchers who have studied women’s health and health disparities in Texas for decades, we know that meaningful progress depends on understanding what is driving these deaths and holding systems accountable for addressing them.

Maternal mortality review committees are one of the most effective tools states have for doing exactly that.

What if Women Really Went Back? Viral Thriller ‘Yesteryear’ Deconstructs the Dark Side of Tradwife Culture

PUBLISHED 6/5/2026 by

What if women really went back? That question sits at the center of Caro Claire Burke’s 2026 debut novel and viral summer read Yesteryear.

At a moment when tradwife influencers are building massive audiences by romanticizing domesticity, submission and “traditional” gender roles, Burke asks readers to imagine what life inside those arrangements actually looks like for the women who lived them—and what rights and freedoms were sacrificed along the way.

Yesteryear follows wealthy, polished (at least on the outside) tradwife influencer Natalie Heller Mills, who has built a carefully curated online brand around nostalgic femininity. But as the fantasy unravels, Burke exposes the gap between aestheticized womanhood and women’s lived experience.