Roe v. Wade

Roe v. Wade (1973) was a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case affirming the right to abortion and upholding the right to make personal decisions about their family, relationships and bodily autonomy. In a devastating 2022 decision, the Court reversed Roe v. Wade, abandoning almost 50 years of precedent on the fundamental right to privacy. Overturning Roe v. Wade has had catastrophic consequences for people across America, as over a dozen states issued trigger bans.

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 Feminist Case for Loving ‘Charlie’s Angels’

PUBLISHED 8/8/2026 by

I don’t remember how old I was when I first heard the term “jiggle TV,” but I know it was decades after I was a devoted, starry-eyed fangirl of the genre. And I do mean “girl”—Wonder Woman came into the world just a year after I did, Charlie’s Angels two years after, Three’s Company the year after that. I watched them all—first in weekly nighttime installments, later in endlessly imbibable reruns—as I was learning to walk, talk, dress, eat, interact with other girls and other boys, and understand how the world saw me and where I fit into it.

The term “jiggle TV” was coined in the mid-1970s by NBC exec Paul Klein to describe and deride rival network ABC’s successful lineup of shows starring women who wore excessively revealing clothing, with Charlie’s Angels as its prime example. Whatever age I was when I first heard the term, I was old enough to immediately grasp its demeaning, objectifying implications. I remember it hitting me like a ton of bricks: The fictional world I’d been gazing at with such awe and reverence was, in the eyes of others, somewhere between a turn-on and a joke.

Without making a big thing about it, I tucked my childhood obsession away in a remote-storage corner of my brain and, for decades, lived an Angels-free life.

Until this year, when Charlie’s Angels turned the big 5-0.

I decided to attempt a full-series rewatch. I wanted to see if immersing myself in the series again after all these years would pull my memories out of remote storage and give me a more detailed picture of how the show’s storylines and messages had affected my pliable young mind.

What had I picked up and taken away from the show besides starry-eyed fangirl devotion?

The answer was: plenty.

‘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.

Who Will Train the Next Generation of Abortion Providers?

PUBLISHED 8/3/2026 by

Reproductive health clinics have been closing at alarming rates since the Supreme Court ended federal abortion protections in 2022. Every time a clinic closes, patients lose access to care, but that’s not all: Whole communities lose their comprehensive care providers for future generations.

As a nurse, doula and the executive director of the reproductive health clinical training and advocacy group Repro TLC, I’ve seen firsthand how abortion restrictions and clinic closures are shrinking the pipeline of trained providers. This is happening even in the states where access to abortion care remains fairly robust. 

The result is a workforce crisis in the medical field that extends far beyond abortion access and threatens the future of reproductive health in communities nationwide. 

Community-based reproductive health centers—clinics that operate independently of hospitals, major medical centers or Planned Parenthood affiliates—serve as a safety net for patients. They provide 58 percent of abortion care nationwide. 

They also provide crucial training infrastructure for future healthcare providers. Most medical and nursing education programs do not teach abortion care; providers who want to provide abortions to patients often have to find, coordinate and fund their own training opportunities at independent clinics—like a self-organized medical rotation. And as more of these independent clinics close, these training opportunities dwindle.

Never Surrender: Empowered Wives Were Never the Problem

PUBLISHED 7/31/2026 by

Over the past year, several women-focused articles in the New York Times declared feminism has gone too far, and put the onus on women to fix what is broken.

An article asking if liberal feminism “ruined the workplace” broke the internet late last year.

An article last month featured a conversation with influential, right-wing columnist Louise Perry, about how women need to change, in order to close the growing gap between men and women. Perry’s position justifies re‑inscribing patriarchal control over women’s bodies and sexuality in the name of “protecting” us.

I feel a familiar sense of disappointment in the recent feature, “Women Are Too Controlling, She Wrote. Her Message Still Resonates,” about Laura Doyle, author of The Surrendered Wife, a 2001 self‑help book and the basis for a relationship “movement” that teaches women to relinquish control in their marriages, defer to their husbands’ decisions (including finances), and focus on their own “self‑care” and gratitude to restore intimacy and harmony.

Each article asks a version of the same question: How should women change?

Doyle’s message and the broader “surrendered wife” ideology, is troubling.

What struck me even more was that one of the country’s most influential newspapers presented it as a growing cultural trend, without examining the cultural forces and gender expectations that have long reinforced this ideology.

Women and feminism don’t need to surrender. They were never the problem.    

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.

Keeping Score: Feminists Denounce Supreme Court Anti-Trans Ruling; Trump Tries to Hijack America 250; Camp Mystic Will Not Reopen; Birthright Citizenship Safe for Now

PUBLISHED 7/16/2026 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:
—The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship, but also allowed discrimination against trans student athletes. “When politicians convince the public that any girl could be ‘the wrong kind of girl,’ they invite harassment, intimidation, invasive questioning or even an inspection of their body by a total stranger,” warns Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign.
—Feminists mark four years without Roe.
—Trump continues to push voter suppression tactics through any means necessary.
—Young women who receive the HPV vaccine are at almost zero risk of dying from cervical cancer.
—A weekend of action on voting rights will take place from July 17-19.
—Olivia Rodrigo launches all-women music festival to raise money for organizations centered on women and girls.
—Ninety-seven percent of single moms experienced housing hardships in the past year, and 85 percent reported food insecurity.
—Federal agents shot and killed Joan Sebastián Guerrero in Maine and Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas, during traffic stops by ICE. Both men had been living in the U.S. for years with their partners and children.
—Feminist Majority Foundation president and publisher of Ms. Ellie Smeal won the National Organization for Women Lifetime Achievement Award, honoring her decades of feminist activism and organizing.
—The inhumane “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention center has closed.
—Camp Mystic in central Texas won’t reopen this summer, a year after the tragic flood that killed 28 people, primarily young girls.
—Ahead of their wedding, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce donated a total of $26 million to 20 charities, including food banks, children’s hospitals, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library and other education nonprofits.
—Aviator Wally Funk died at age 87. She was the first female flight inspector for the Federal Aviation Administration and taught more than 3,000 people how to fly.

… and more.

The Antiabortion Movement Has a New Plan for a National Abortion Ban

PUBLISHED 7/14/2026 by | UPDATED 8/4/2026 at 10:13 A.M. PT

Judges, lawyers and sexual abuse survivors have raised very strong reasons why it would be reckless and unconscionable for the Senate to confirm Todd Blanche to the post of Attorney General of the United States. One of the under-reported issues, though, is Blanche’s backing from well-funded antiabortion groups.

If the Republican Congress confirms Blanche, he could weaponize the DOJ in service of the antiabortion machine’s wish list, increasing the potential for some of the biggest blows to abortion access since Dobbs. 

Blanche’s confirmation could mean the further decimation of access to abortion healthcare in the United States at the behest of the antiabortion machine, which has already successfully pressured the Trump administration to meet its demands by, for example, calling for FDA head Martin Mackary to be fired. Meanwhile, the antiabortion machine is ratcheting up the pressure to push its agenda at various levels across the U.S.

Reasonable members of Congress who believe in the independence of the DOJ from outside pressure, including that of the administration itself, will vote to oppose Blanche’s nomination for U.S. attorney general. 

A Single Abortion Clinic Closing Rarely Makes Headlines. What Happens When None Are Left?

PUBLISHED 7/8/2026 by

Picture a map of the United States. It’s 2022, and in southern states like Texas and Tennessee, there are clusters of black dots that represent independent clinic closures. These are abortion care black holes: communities where it’s no longer possible to get an abortion at a nearby clinic.

Fast forward to present. It’s 2026, four years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, and black dots have multiplied in states across the country. It no longer matters if the state is red or blue, governed by conservatives or progressives. None are immune to the increasing weight of political pressure, financial strain and operational difficulty that are forcing independent clinics to close or stop providing abortion care.

Each of these black dots is a community suffering a healthcare crisis, and they are proliferating across the United States at a rapid rate.

Independent clinics are often the only places to get clinical abortion care, unbiased information and support for pregnancy options. They are where people go to feel safe and respected, whether they are getting an abortion, continuing a pregnancy or getting gender-affirming care. In small towns and rural spaces, these clinics are often the only safe place for many people, especially those who are LGBTQIA+. If clinics close, there is often nowhere else to go.

And once abortion clinics close, it’s not as simple as reopening when they can, if they can. Even if a specific restriction is lifted, severe financial constraints, continued political hostility, threats of violence and legal uncertainty still stand.