The Contrarian

Dissecting Trump’s (Short) Women’s History Month Statement, Line by Line

PUBLISHED 3/12/2026 by

When the White House issued a presidential message to kick off Women’s History Month, my first reaction was genuine surprise. Honestly, I did not think WHM was still recognized by the federal government.

President Donald Trump’s brief (four paragraphs) public statement doubled down on the administration’s regressive societal vision, casting women primarily as caretakers and pillars of the “American family,” while pointing to a slate of policies he claims empower them.

But a closer look at the statement reveals a familiar mix of culture-war signaling, selective policy claims, and omissions that obscure the real impacts of the administration’s agenda on women and families.

I think often about the role of the media at this moment—an obligation intrinsically greater than reporting the verbiage that comes out of the White House. It is on all of us to explicitly counter double-speak and lies and to leave a paper trail of truth for posterity. This week’s column does just that: It dissects Trump’s WHM proclamation line by line and tests each claimed reform against the record.

Reproductive Justice Demands We Call In, Not Just Call Out

PUBLISHED 3/9/2026 by and

Reproductive justice is not simply about the right to abortion or access to contraception; it is about the right to have a child, to not have a child, and to raise families in safe and sustainable communities. This framework, created by Black women in the 1990s, recognizes that race, class, gender and immigration status all intersect with reproductive health and freedom. At its core, reproductive justice is about dignity and self-determination.

We must call out systems of oppression. We must call out elected officials who use the law to control our bodies and futures. But we must also call in those who are silent, those who are uncertain, and those who are still learning. Not everyone understands the full weight of these attacks. Not everyone sees how racism, poverty and patriarchy are connected to abortion bans. That is where our movement’s compassion must meet its courage.

It’s about helping a young person in a conservative home understand that their freedom to plan their life is a human right. It’s about showing a voter in a swing state that abortion bans are government overreach and economic violence. It’s about connecting the dots between forced pregnancy and the erosion of democracy itself.

Let us call in, where we can, those around us to join the work. Let us call on our government to honor its duty to protect, not control, our bodies—because true justice cannot wait.

Oscar-Nominated Documentary ‘The Devil Is Busy’ Shows What It Takes to Keep an Abortion Clinic Safe

PUBLISHED 3/9/2026 by

Tracii’s day begins early—before dawn. She arrives at work, turns on the lights and thoroughly searches the building for intruders. Then she checks outside, where it’s still dark, making sure no one is hiding in the woods or behind a dumpster.

Tracii is the head of security at an abortion clinic in Atlanta, and is also the subject of the Oscar-nominated documentary short, The Devil Is Busy. Directed by Christalyn Hampton and Geeta Gandbhir, the film follows Tracii over the course of a long, stressful day at the clinic, as she works tirelessly to ensure not just the safety but the comfort of the women seeking care. (Neither her last name, nor the name of the clinic, gets mentioned in the film.)

Available to stream on HBO Max, The Devil Is Busy is a compelling portrait of a deeply compassionate woman on the frontlines of the abortion war. It packs a lot into 31 minutes, exploring not just the precarious status of abortion care post-Roe v. Wade, but also the fraught intersection of race, religion and women’s health.

The film arrives just as advocates mark Abortion Provider Appreciation Day, observed each year on March 10. The date honors Dr. David Gunn, an abortion provider murdered by a white supremacist anti-abortion extremist in 1993. Since 1996, supporters have used the day to recognize the courage and compassion of abortion providers—people like Tracii—whose work continues despite harassment, threats and political attacks.

A State of the State for Women: Taking Stock of the Fight for Democracy at Home and Abroad

PUBLISHED 3/5/2026 by

March’s Women’s History Month arrives at a moment when our rights, and democracy itself, feel newly precarious.

From feminist perspectives on the war in Iran, where women and girls remain at the forefront of resistance, to the troubling parallels between authoritarian crackdowns abroad and the rollback of reproductive rights here in the United States, the throughline is hard to ignore: Democracy rises and falls with women’s movements and mobilization.

Taking stock of the moment, I’m highlighting reporting and analysis that help make sense of where we are now—from the criminalization of pregnancy outcomes in places like El Salvador, to new data revealing stark disparities in women’s well-being across U.S. states.

At the same time, as the country approaches its 250th anniversary, initiatives like Ms.’ FEMINIST 250: Founding Feminists remind us that women’s ideas, resistance and organizing have always been central to the project of democracy—and remain essential to its future.

Immigration Detention Is Failing Women and Children—By Design

PUBLISHED 2/26/2026 by

The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley has been the subject of an onslaught of headlines in recent weeks, but the truth is, it’s been routinely criticized for inhumane conditions for years. But what we are seeing now, as Trudy Taylor Smith put it to me, is horror “on a shocking scale.” Children describe being served worm-infested food and dirty water, getting little or no classroom time and being perpetually sick. A toddler nearly dies because of medical neglect. A teenage boy with symptoms consistent with appendicitis is turned away by a nurse. There is no better way to describe it than state-sponsored child abuse.

If this isn’t stomach-churning enough, consider what is happening a few hours south, where girls’ reproductive healthcare and freedom is also in grave crisis. Pregnant and unaccompanied migrant children are being sent to San Benito, Texas.

Why Texas? Why else? … Because it is a place where abortion is illegal and high-risk pregnancy care is unavailable.

“Putting pregnant kids in San Benito is not a decision you make when you care about children’s safety,” one source said plainly.

This is entirely by design, pulled straight from the Project 2025 playbook. The constant split-screen scene in Texas is representative of the nation MAGA wants us to be, “where the cruelty is the point” and where the anti-immigrant, anti-woman, anti-freedom banner is flown.

We have to keep these stories—and all the women and girls in this state, willingly or not—front and center in the democracy movement. Their humanity is at the heart of all of ours.

Midlife Women Are a Sleeping Giant Voter Bloc in 2026—Even as the SAVE Act Puts Them at Risk

PUBLISHED 2/20/2026 by

Since 2024, there has been handwringing among politicos about the rightward shift of young male voters in the United States. And now, a new report from the centrist think tank Third Way predicts many of the “swingy, moderate, low-propensity young men” who support Donald Trump will sit out the midterms this year.

At the same time, it’s crickets when it comes to understanding the political engagement of midlife and older women. Even as “organized gangs of wine moms” dominated headlines in recent weeks, I’ve found vanishingly little interest in analyzing how that demographic energy might translate to electoral clout.

The Pathetic Price of Entry to Epstein’s World

PUBLISHED 2/12/2026 by

The latest batch of Epstein files—over 3 million documents, only around half of what the Department of Justice reports to have amassed—has unleashed a new cast of characters, a list that includes tech titans, health influencers, litigation rainmakers, university leaders, sports executives, Hollywood moguls and international royalty. None of the those named in the latest tranche of Epstein files strike me as people I ever assumed possessed particularly stellar moral character, and their collective fall from grace doesn’t shock me.

But what does turn my stomach is how pathetically small the price of entry into Epstein’s world appears to have been.

The expressions of regret now surfacing—I am ashamed, this is not who I am!—read less like moral reckonings and more like the lament of those who simply got caught.

The emails reveal a tawdry economy of access: absurd favors, crude jokes, dating advice, shared handwringing about #MeToo, and giddy acceptance of gifts—Apple Watches, Prada bags, monogrammed sweatshirts—that these already powerful figures could easily have bought themselves.

Whether any individual named in the files participated in or witnessed Epstein’s crimes is only part of the story. Just as telling is the desperate desire to remain in his orbit—often long after his 2008 guilty plea for soliciting prostitution from girls.

That eagerness to maintain proximity, for so little in return, speaks volumes about how power protects itself—and what too many were willing to overlook to stay connected to it.

Misogyny Isn’t Just About Women—and the Killing of Alex Pretti Proves It

PUBLISHED 1/29/2026 by

The Trump administration has made misogyny a governing principle, deploying it not only to control women but to enforce a rigid hierarchy of power that punishes anyone who disrupts it. The killing of Alex Pretti makes that unmistakably clear.

Pretti—a 37-year-old ICU nurse—was not threatening law enforcement. He was doing what the administration endlessly romanticizes and selectively rewards: stepping in to protect a woman who was being shoved and pepper-sprayed by federal agents. For that, he was tackled, disarmed and shot 10 times. The violence that ended his life did not contradict the administration’s worldview—it followed it to its logical conclusion.

Misogyny functions as a system, not a personality trait. It relies on domination masquerading as protection, and it turns lethal when its myths are exposed. Pretti shattered two of them at once: the fantasy of the “good guy with a gun” and the claim that this administration acts as a protector of women. His calm, visible effort to shield someone else left no room for reinterpretation, only denial. When authoritarian power cannot reconcile what we have seen with what it insists we believe, it chooses force. We know what happened in Minneapolis. We know who tried to protect whom. And we should be clear about what kind of politics requires us to look away.

Move Over, Childless Cat Ladies—The Right Has a New Woman to Hate

PUBLISHED 1/22/2026 by

The right-wing manosphere has quickly absorbed the lexicon of AWFUL: “Affluent White Female Urban Liberals.” Move over childless cat ladies, there is a new broad in town.

The movement hell-bent on extolling the virtues of tradwife life has now set its sights on “organized gangs of wine moms us[ing] Antifa tactics to harass and impede” ICE, according to the talking heads at Fox News.

Sigh, MAGA. There you go again, mangling the plotline. Don’t you know? Motherhood has always been political, embedded in acts of resistance, from Reconstruction to women’s suffrage through the rise of the Civil Rights Movement.