Religion

The world has hundreds of religions, and each impacts the culture and politics of certain regions differently. In the U.S., common Christian or Catholic understandings of religion have immensely impacted American culture and politics, though the Constitution attempts to keep separate the ideas of church and state.

Nine Books by Black Women About Travel, Belonging and the Search for Home

PUBLISHED 8/19/2026 by

Over the years, I’ve immersed myself in the stories of other Black women, not only as literary models, but as encouragement that the world might actually want to hear my story, my lessons and my truth. These books reminded me I am part of a long lineage of brave Black women who decided to leave home in search of adventure and themselves. The following memoirs, anthologies and novels explore movement across borders while grappling with history, race, identity, belonging, faith, joy and ultimately, home.

Keeping Score: Trump Disapproval Hits a New Low; Continued ICE Violence; AOC on Freezing Her Eggs: ‘Don’t Be Weird About This’

PUBLISHED 8/12/2026 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. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) is freezing her eggs and documenting the process on social media to normalize this facet of women’s reproductive healthcare.
—The top brands donating to members of Congress trying to expand ICE’s power include SpaceX, Home Depot, UPS and Walmart. 
—Organizations speak out after Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero were shot and killed by federal agents, and Jesús Manuel Arenas-Silva died in ICE custody.
—Epstein survivors warn the Senate not to confirm Todd Blanche as Attorney General.
—The Trump administration continues its attacks on immigrants, students, disabled people, gun control and more.
—Pete Hesgeth blocked the promotion of women Navy officers.
—Nicole Tung won the IWMF’s Anja Niedringhaus Courage in Photojournalism Award.
—Rep. Max Miller (R-Ohio) has been accused of abusing his ex-wife and their young daughter.
—President Trump finally paid E. Jean Carroll $5.6 million for sexually abusing and defaming her.
—84 percent of women’s organizations working in crisis-affected countries say the need for humanitarian services has increased since January 2025, but almost 90 percent don’t have the funding to meet those needs.
—The United States is unique among similar countries, with single mothers participating in the workforce more often than partnered mothers.

… and more.

‘To Be Forgotten Is to Die Twice’: The Fight to Protect the Graves at Ireland’s Bessborough Mother and Baby Home

PUBLISHED 8/6/2026 by

Survivors and advocates in Ireland are fighting to stop the construction of luxury apartments on the grounds of the former Bessborough Mother and Baby Institute, where hundreds of infants who died in state- and church-run custody are believed to remain buried in unmarked graves. 

At a national rally on July 18 outside the Cork City Library—the site of the former Bessborough Mother and Baby Institute—survivors and their families warned building over the site would erase one of Ireland’s darkest chapters. There, survivors and their families spoke about their experiences. Advocates held a banner with the names of infants who died at Bessborough and others marched with signs reading “to be forgotten is to die twice.”

Bessborough is part of a system of containment institutes first founded back in the 1760s as places to help sex workers pursue more “moral” forms of employment. 

By the 1800s, these institutions—called the Magdalene laundries, or mother and baby homes—effectively became prisons for “fallen” or “immoral” women who deviated from strict social norms. Run by Christian religious orders and institutions, mother and baby institutes kept unmarried pregnant women hidden from public view in a Catholic country where unmarried pregnant women and girls were and are deeply stigmatized.

Inside mother and baby institutes—which received public funding and were run by religious orders—unmarried pregnant women and girls were hidden away and faced intense violence. According to the Irish Mother and Baby Homes Commission of Investigation, 11.4 percent of the people incarcerated in these institutions were minors. After their children were born and babies at least partially weaned, these women were forcibly separated from their children who would be taken for adoption. But many children died in these institutes because of systemic neglect and abuse.

The Growing Acceptance of a Movement That Wants to Punish Women for Abortion

PUBLISHED 6/4/2026 by

When South Carolina’s abortion abolitionist bill, the Unborn Child Protection Act (S. 1095), was voted out of committee and onto the full Senate floor in late April—“an unprecedented move toward locking up women who have an abortion,” according to Dana Sussman in Slate—it raised a question: How much influence have abortion abolitionists gained within the broader antiabortion movement?

Abortion abolitionists, who seek to criminalize abortion without exceptions and punish women who obtain abortions as murderers, have long been considered the outer fringe of the antiabortion movement. Their roots can be traced to what Colleen Scerpella described in The Prospect as “a new generation of mostly white, male, conservative Baptists, Presbyterians and Christian Reconstructionists”—or what she calls “extreme Christian patriarchy.”

As I wrote in Ms. a little more than a year ago, the dramatic increase in abortion abolitionist bills filed by state lawmakers after Roe v. Wade fell, signaled the growing influence of this movement.

That extremism has not gone unnoticed: In 2024, the Southern Poverty Law Center identified four abolitionist organizations as “male supremacist hate groups.” Recent research has likewise found that the strongest supporters of arresting women who have abortions are Americans who endorse Christian nationalism, believe “true Americans are white,” and look to the state to enforce a particular ethnocultural social order.

The South Carolina bill, which makes the pregnant woman herself subject to misdemeanor liability, prompted me to revisit the question of whether abortion abolitionists have made more inroads into the mainstream antiabortion movement.

The evidence suggests they have.

How Punjabi Sikh Advocates Reimagined Domestic Violence Risk Assessment

PUBLISHED 5/29/2026 by and

As another domestic violence homicide-by-strangulation in the Punjabi Sikh community went largely unreported outside the community itself, we are reminded of how often opportunities for intervention are missed. Those misses stem not only from systemic biases, but also from a lack of community-specific knowledge and cultural humility among service providers. When domestic violence research and prevention efforts rely on broad assumptions or one-size-fits-all frameworks, they risk overlooking the complex realities of survivors whose experiences are shaped by family, community and systemic pressures.

At Sikh Family Center, we encountered these limitations firsthand while working with the widely used Danger Assessment tool and its later adaptation for immigrant women. Questions about who qualifies as an “immigrant,” differing scoring systems and the omission of key risk factors often created confusion rather than clarity. When a risk-assessment tool does not reflect survivors’ lived realities—or appears to make assumptions about their identities—it becomes less persuasive and less effective in helping them make life-changing decisions.

That experience led us to develop the Danger Assessment for Sikh Women, a tool created alongside Punjabi Sikh survivors and their families. By incorporating community-specific vulnerabilities, protective factors and culturally relevant questions, the assessment aims to improve safety planning while helping survivors recognize both the risks they face and the support systems available to them.

The lesson extends far beyond one community: Domestic violence prevention strategies must remain flexible, humble and responsive if they are to reach survivors whose experiences fall outside conventional assumptions.

Trump’s Budget Plunders Birth Control and Reproductive Health Programs—With Open Derision for Americans Who Need Them

PUBLISHED 4/30/2026 by

Title X is the federal program that funds family planning and reproductive health services nationwide—and under President Donald Trump’s proposed budget for 2027, it would be effectively eliminated, reshaping access to care for women across the country.

What is perhaps most jarring, on close reading, is not only what the budget proposes, but how it speaks. The language throughout the administration’s budget and HHS documents departs from traditional bureaucratic norms, adopting a tone that is at times openly mocking and vilifying. Programs serving women, LGBTQ people and marginalized communities are described in terms that signal not just opposition, but disdain. It is a stark reminder that federal budgets do more than allocate resources—they reflect who this government is for, and who it is not.

(This essay is part of an ongoing Ms. series examining the real-world impact of President Donald Trump’s proposed fiscal year 2027 budget. Across sectors—from healthcare and childcare to immigration enforcement and food assistance—the series explores what the administration’s funding priorities reveal about who government serves, and who it leaves behind.)

We Need a Word for What’s Happening to Jewish Women

PUBLISHED 3/27/2026 by

Ever since I’ve been writing about slut-shaming, I’ve been called a slut and a whore.

In the 1990s, the age of doorstopper phone books (the kind with white pages and yellow pages), I received alarming letters delivered to my mailbox. In the early 2000s, the letters morphed into emails. And when I began posting on Instagram, the insults followed me there, too.

Over three decades, the insults were consistent: I was called various synonyms for prostitute and vagina, and an ugly pedophile for good measure. The hatred was misogyny—targeted, specific and designed to put me back in my place.

Then Hamas brutally attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel retaliated in a devastating war in Gaza. The insults changed. I am no longer a regular slut and a whore; I am a “Jewish whore,” a “chosenite supporting the porn industry,” and a “whore” whom everyone could agree was bad apart from “tribes who hate Jesus.” 

I call it “misogynam” (mih-SAH-jih-NAHM)—the intertwined violence of anti-Semitism and misogyny directed at Jewish women.

Queer Possibilities in Revolutionary America

PUBLISHED 3/23/2026 by

The revolutionary era was one of surprising possibilities to express same-sex attraction and gender nonconformity.

At the time, gender was widely understood not as an inner truth but as a social practice: something one did, not something one was. That understanding made gender surprisingly flexible.

In a moment when LGBTQ+ people are again being told that they do not belong in the nation’s story, Revolutionary America offers a different lesson.

(This essay is part of the FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists series, marking the 250th anniversary of America by reclaiming the revolution through the women and gender-expansive people whose ideas, labor and resistance shaped U.S. democracy.)

The Heritage Foundation’s New Policy Guidebook Wants to Push Women Out of Public Life

PUBLISHED 3/13/2026 by

In honor of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the right-wing Heritage Foundation—developers of Project 2025, the policy guidebook written to influence the Trump administration’s legislative priorities—has issued a 168-page position paper, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.”

The document is intended to “restore the family,” by elevating a male-led, heterosexual model of social relations. 

The report is both absurd and terrifying—which is why the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC) is sounding an alarm about it. Emily Martin, the NWLC’s chief program officer and Amy Matsui, its vice president of childcare and income security, spoke to Ms. reporter Eleanor J. Bader about “Saving America by Saving the Family” in late February.

Teens Avoid Coercive Parental Involvement Laws by Using Telehealth Abortion Services 

PUBLISHED 3/10/2026 by and

The majority of U.S. teenagers live in states that require parental involvement in abortion healthcare decision-making. If parents are unavailable or teens under 18 do not want to involve their parents, they must go to court and convince a judge that they are mature enough to decide on their own or that the abortion is in their best interest.

To avoid this invasive and burdensome process, resourceful teens are now turning to abortion care from telehealth providers located outside their restrictive states.

Under the Reagan administration, parental involvement laws proliferated as an attempt to restrict minors’ access to reproductive healthcare.

One of the most well-known, devastating consequences of these laws was the 1988 death of Becky Bell in Indiana. When Bell became pregnant as a teenager, Indiana had a parental consent law. Bell was afraid to tell her parents about the pregnancy for fear of disappointing them, but she was also afraid to go before a local judge she heard was reluctant to grant waivers. Believing she had no other option, she turned to an unsafe, likely self-induced abortion. Several days later, Bell was rushed to the hospital with a massive infection and died. Her death became a poignant symbol of the lethal effects of restricting young people’s access to safe abortion.