More Than A Magazine, A Movement
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.
Beth Osborne, a Las Vegas writer and activist, had an abortion as a teenager. Now, she is working to convince Nevadans to approve Question 6 on their November ballots, which would enshrine abortion rights in the state constitution and preserve safe, legal abortion in the state.
Search Yelp for “pregnancy care” and you may encounter a crisis pregnancy center (CPC)—an organization that may advertise as a full-service clinic but does not provide abortions or referrals to abortion providers. Yelp labels these listings accordingly.
Now, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton is weaponizing its consumer protection law to sue the company over an earlier, since-withdrawn nationwide notice that said crisis pregnancy centers “typically provide limited medical services and may not have licensed medical professionals onsite.”
This under-the-radar case will test how far a state may reach when a national platform posts information that disagrees with state officials.
In the fall of 1977, Rosie Jimenez, a 27-year-old single mother in McAllen, Texas, needed an abortion. Just months earlier Medicaid would have covered the procedure. But the Hyde Amendment, a new rule banning Medicaid coverage for abortion, had just taken effect. Unable to afford the more than $200 cost of an abortion from a licensed clinician, she turned to a midwife who was technically unlicensed to preform abortions.
Jimenez died from that unsafe procedure. She is widely known as the first documented death from the Hyde Amendment.
Fifty years later, countless women across the U.S. have had their lives forever changed by this archaic, racist, sexist and classist amendment.
What’s your reproductive freedom story? As part of Ms.’ The Majority campaign, five staff members at Power to Decide share theirs. The nonprofit works to expand access to sexual and reproductive health information and care; its programs include Bedsider and AbortionFinder.
“Until [the Supreme Court ruled married couples had a right to contraception], [my grandmother, Ruth’s] adult life was pregnancy and postpartum, on repeat.”
The U.S. Postal Service (USPS) issued a new stamp late last month honoring 19th-century writer Sarah Orne Jewett—putting a woman whose work centered on female independence and unconventional lives, into mailboxes and collection books across the country.
The stamp, the 35th in USPS’ Literary Arts series, was unveiled in Jewett’s hometown of South Berwick, Maine. Its portrait of Jewett appears against the Maine coast, a reference to her best-known work, The Country of the Pointed Firs. USPS says renewed interest in Jewett’s writing has been driven partly by her strong female characters.
In 2025, Ms. selected Abortion Stories: American Literature Before Roe v. Wade, edited by Karen Weingarten, as one of the most anticipated feminist books of the year. The published collection brings together literature documenting abortion before Roe v. Wade, including an excerpt from Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs.
Jewett never explicitly writes the word “abortion” in the published passage. Instead, one of the novel’s central characters, Mrs. Todd, is an herbalist who gathers plants and receives women who arrive privately at her door seeking remedies and whispered instructions. Weingarten said she included the passage because abortion exists in its subtext, reflecting a period when reproductive knowledge could be encoded in language about women’s networks of care.
That history makes the timing of Jewett’s stamp particularly striking. More than four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, abortion remains banned outright in 13 states, with additional states enforcing early gestational limits. Battles over reproductive healthcare continue at both the state and federal levels—from access to medication abortion, to funding for family-planning services.
Jewett’s face is now traveling through a postal system caught up in that debate, across a country still contesting reproductive freedom. The stamp itself makes no claim about voting or reproductive rights. But there is something notable about a federal institution commemorating a woman whose work has become part of the literary history of abortion at the same moment reproductive autonomy is again being fiercely contested.
As we grieve the passing of Gloria Steinem, Ms. founder and feminist visionary, we’re looking back at some of our favorite quotes from Steinem’s 50+ years of speaking and activism across the U.S. and throughout the world. She was sharp, funny and infinitely quotable, and many of her interviews from over the years combine deep feminist insight with some snappy one-liners.
The two most famous quotes attributed to Steinem are possibly, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and, “If men could get pregnant, then abortion would be a sacrament.” However, while Steinem said and popularized both, she made it clear that neither quote originated with her; the first is attributed to Australian writer and activist Irina Dunn, and the second, according to Steinem, was originally said by her speaking partner Florynce Kennedy.
Steinem still had no end of wise, funny, inspiring sayings of her own that other feminists will keep quoting for years after her death. Below are some of our favorites.
Massachusetts law no longer imposes a gestational-age limit on abortion—meaning for the first time, a woman in the state can choose to end her pregnancy at any point, without a prosecutor looking over her doctor’s shoulder.
Gov. Maura Healey (D) last month signed the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act, joining nine other states—Alaska, Colorado, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon and Vermon, plus D.C.—in trusting patients and medical professionals to make abortion decisions throughout pregnancy, rather than politicians, police and prosecutors.
In Massachusetts, the legislative hearings focused on women who experienced a severe fetal diagnosis or a threat to their own health and had to travel out of state for medical care, which are very sympathetic stories that were able to win over many supporters.
While it’s certainly important that states like Massachusetts have made later abortion more accessible to people experiencing health emergencies, the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act is important for everyone seeking later abortion care, whatever the reason.
Few decisions carry more weight than whether or when to have a child. Women who decide to end a pregnancy are making an intensely personal, at times deeply emotional, decision. They deserve quality care, compassion and respect. Instead, under the Trump administration, abortion restrictions are expanding and options for care are disappearing.
Four years after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling, abortion care comes with a maze of logistical and financial hurdles.
A new study from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) concluded Widespread abortion restrictions across numerous states and the rollback of federal funding and protections costs our country $140 billion annually. And the 16 states with the most restrictive abortion policies cost the national economy nearly $68 billion annually in lost earnings.
In the U.S. today, abortion is increasingly reserved for those who can find and pay for it.
We urge new thinking: Instead of a return to the Roe v. Wade era ripe with restrictions and hurdles, let’s govern expansively. We envision a supportive government that makes abortion accessible to anyone who needs it.
Nearly 50 years after Roe came, it went.
The Dobbs decision brought a devastating reversal—but it simultaneously ushered in a moment akin to 1972 … the opportunity to reimagine bodily autonomy and build something better.
And now, in 2026, we have begun to see glimmers of such vision emerge in the law by way of more expansive court rulings and bolder legislation.
After his 35-year-old wife bled to death from a miscarriage in a Houston-area hospital, a Texas father is suing—and taking her story to Capitol Hill.
“Choosing to bring new life into the world shouldn’t be a death sentence,” insisted Michelle Maloney, the San Antonio attorney working to bring justice to Texas widower Hope Ngumezi and his two young sons.
Three years ago, in June 2023, Hope’s beloved wife Porsha was happily expecting the couple’s third child until she began to miscarry at 11 weeks pregnant. The healthy 35-year-old finance manager for a charter school went to the emergency room at Houston Methodist Sugar Land Hospital, just 10 minutes from her home in suburban Houston.
Both she and Hope were certain that she would receive the safe and critical medical care that she needed as she passed fetal tissue and blood clots the size of grapefruits at the hospital. An ultrasound confirmed that she had partially miscarried and that her fetus no longer had a heartbeat. But the heavy bleeding didn’t stop.
Still, the hospital’s OB-GYN, who examined her just once, moved Porsha from the ER—where staff were equipped to respond to emergencies—to a regular floor, where she received less monitoring. Porsha arrived at the hospital at 3:37 p.m. By 2 a.m., she began gasping for air and within minutes, she had died of hemorrhage.
A dozen doctors who reviewed her medical records for ProPublica, which broke the story about her death, said that Porsha should have urgently received a very simple and standard procedure for a miscarriage—a D&C (dilation and curettage). The 10-15 minute D&C would have removed all remaining fetal tissue in her womb, which her uterus was trying to expel with heavy contractions and bleeding. The procedure would have stopped the bleeding.
“The poor thing bled to death for lack of a D&C. It’s atrocious,” Austin OB-GYN Nancy Binford told Courier Texas.