More Than A Magazine, A Movement
For years, anti-abortion groups have dominated the American landscape with billboards. Now abortion rights supporters are battling back with their own.
Shout Your Abortion recently posted six abortion rights billboards along interstate 55 through five states that have banned abortion—from Memphis, Tenn., to Carbondale, Ill. The billboards include messages like, “God’s Plan Includes Abortion” and “Abortion is Okay: You Know What’s Best for You.”
Last month, Celeste Burgess was sentenced to 90 days in prison because she took abortion pills when she was 17 years old. The story of Celeste and her mother—who helped her get the pills and will be sentenced in September—went national.
This case was seen as a harbinger of intimate privacy violations to come. But this case also exemplifies a disturbing phenomenon in the genesis of abortion prosecutions: friends and community members reporting on each other.
From the long-awaited Barbenheimer weekend to the kick-off of the Women’s World Cup, here’s what we’ve been loving on social media lately!
Last year, 12 women journalists were murdered, and the number of women journalists imprisoned rose by 64 percent. By continuing to award courageous journalists, the International Women’s Media Foundation is making it known that the threat of violence against women reporters is ever-present. Still, it also is a testament to the unwavering spirit of women journalists globally.
Over the next several months, Ms. and IWMF will collaborate monthly to highlight the works of these journalists, all of whom are nominees or winners of the Courage in Journalism award.
(This essay is part of the “Feminist Journalism is Essential to Democracy” project—Ms. magazine’s latest installment of Women & Democracy, presented in partnership with the International Women’s Media Foundation.)
Welcome back to Feminist Faves, a monthly roundup of our favorite feminist-forward content on social media.
As Pride month comes to a close, here’s a look at conversations we can keep going beyond June!
It’s about 1,500 miles from Austin to Sacramento, but Texas and California lawmakers are a million miles apart on how to treat private data related to reproductive health.
The goalposts are moving, what used to be legal is now illegal in many places, and online speech and personal data are the new battleground—with millions of people’s health and lives in the balance.
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on April 19 in a case that could have a sweeping impact on the ability of victims of stalking, verbal abuse and online harassment to be protected from their abusers.
In the case, Counterman v. Colorado, the Court appeared willing to increase the threshold for identifying speech that rises to the level of a “true threat” and ignore the collateral damage of protecting harassers—which will have devastating consequences for victims of abuse.
The conflicting responses to Halle Bailey’s casting in “The Little Mermaid” highlight the importance of representation as a tool for fighting white supremacy.
“In a society where everyone wants to forget race, and act as if racial discrimination does not exist, digital spaces of support become the space where marginalized groups can have conversations that center their bodies and lived experiences.”
The sources of misogyny and violence against women are complex, and it is critical to examine them—not just during National Sexual Assault Awareness Month, but always.
One such perpetrator of violence: incels, or “involuntary celibates.” The grievances of this group over their perceived sexual exclusion often takes the form of violence, especially violence against women. Society must come together to address the root causes of incel violence—or continue to face the deadly consequences.
Tens of thousands of students across the U.S. joined in a collective action on Wednesday, April 5, at noon local time, and walked out of their classes en masse to demand gun control legislation.
The student participants spanned geographical location—from Oregon, to Texas, to Massachusetts—and age, ranging from elementary school to high school and beyond. Some demonstrations were frantic and loud, with urgent chants directed to lawmakers and gun manufacturers: “Our blood, your hands.” “Books, not bullets.” “Hey, hey, NRA, how many kids did you kill today?” Others were silent and somber.
