More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project—or “Project 2025,” for short—has “four pillars”:
After a narrow political victory in November, a second Trump administration is now threatening to reverse decades of hard-fought gains for women and girls. Luckily, a fierce feminist resistance is ready to defend women’s rights at the federal level—and creatively expand equality protections in the states.
This is the first in a four-part series on the steps activists are taking to fight for our rights amid Trump’s attacks on democracy.
Within the first few days of his second term, Donald Trump’s threat to the country’s health was evident. The Trump administration has already ordered federal health agencies to cease public communications, directed agencies to cancel meetings to review biomedical research, and pardoned 23 individuals who violently interfered with patients’ care at reproductive health clinics—all without a confirmed secretary for Health and Human Services (HHS). Trump has promised to let his HHS secretary nominee, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., “Go wild.” RFK Jr. faces his first of two confirmation hearings this week, on January 29, and a vote will follow sometime in the coming weeks.
Ms. spoke with Dr. Michele Goodwin, the co-faculty director of the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law at Georgetown University and executive producer of Ms. Studios, to understand the devastating health consequences of a Trump-RFK Jr. team, where we can focus our energy in response, and how to hold on to hope over the next four years.
In recent years, the use of abortion pills has skyrocketed and now accounts for an estimated 65 percent of all abortions performed in medical settings, including through both brick-and-mortar clinics and telehealth providers.
Carrie N. Baker’s fascinating new book, Abortion Pills: U.S. History and Policy, tells the story of a decades-long struggle for acceptance of this safe, secure and private method of ending an early pregnancy. It’s also a story of antiabortion attempts to suppress abortion pills.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Friday reinstating the global gag rule, known as the “Mexico City policy,” which prohibits overseas groups from collecting U.S. aid if they provide abortion, counsel on abortion or advocate for abortion rights.
During his first presidential term, one of Trump’s earliest actions was the reinstatement of the global gag rule—a wholly expected move from a Republican president. But he also inaugurated an unprecedented expansion of the rule’s reach … red-flagging what likely lies ahead.
Fueling the sense of urgency, Project 2025 calls for the further expansion of the gag rule beyond foreign health aid to include “all foreign assistance, including humanitarian aid.” This expansion would increase the affected funding from about $7.3 billion to about $51 billion. Project 2025’s vision of an expanded global gag rule would also, for the first time, include foreign governments in addition to NGOs within its prohibitive sweep.
Only the permanent rescission of the global gag rule will jettison this impending threat to the sexual and reproductive rights and well-being of women around the globe.
During the presidential campaign, Trump forcefully avowed he did not support a national abortion ban—a position consistent with two-thirds of the electorate—gloating instead that he was responsible for sending the issue back to the states where it belongs. He also distanced himself from the “virally unpopular” Project 2025—the far-right playbook for the next conservative administration.
However, warning signs suggest that Trump may have been pandering to the electorate on both scores. Notably, when his remarks on the campaign trail about a national ban are considered alongside his existing ties to Project 2025, his boast about returning control over abortion to the states may well prove to have been stopgap measure en route to a blanket ban, although perhaps by way of a back-channel strategy.
A former Trump official chillingly predicted that Trump’s track record of having “adopted the most pro-life policies of any administration in history … is the best evidence … you could have of what a second term might look like.’”
While serial attacks on abortion rights seize the headlines, the anti-choice movement has quietly built an on-the-ground network of unregulated pregnancy clinics—also known as crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) and antiabortion centers (AACs)—that is eroding access to comprehensive reproductive healthcare and electioneering against abortion rights, mostly under the radar and increasingly on the public dime.
Ms. spurred thought-provoking, policy-changing, narrative-shifting change in 2024—and created new feminist strategies and solutions for the year ahead. In a word: “impact.” Ms. commissioned high profile analysis and investigative journalism by some of feminism’s best journalists and thinkers, focusing on key issues impacting women and girls at a critical moment across the globe. Here are the Ms. editors’ top 10 impact articles in the past year, as seen in the print magazine.
(Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get the issues delivered straight to your mailbox.)
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.
The Helms Amendment turns 51 years old on Dec. 17. As the second Trump administration gets underway, Project 2025 looks to Helms as a tool.
At the same time, there’s also a bill pending in Congress to repeal the Helms Amendment: the Abortion is Healthcare Everywhere Act—led in the House by Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and in the Senate by Cory Booker (D-N.J.)—which would remove Helms’ language from the Foreign Assistance Act and specify that U.S. foreign assistance funding can be used for the provision of abortion in countries where abortion is legal.
Now what? That’s what feminists have been wondering since we lost the bright promise of a Kamala Harris presidency on Nov. 5.
We asked Ms. contributing editor Carrie Baker to point the way. For the upcoming issue, she spoke to some of the many leaders and organizations preparing to safeguard decades of hard-fought gains for women and girls, now threatened by the Trump administration and its Project 2025. What she uncovered is a fierce resistance ready to defend our rights at the federal level—and creatively expand equality protections in the states.
All this and so much more awaits you in the Ms. Winter 2025 issue. And, for a limited time, you can get a year of Ms. for just $20—a 43 percent discount from our usual price!