More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The United Nations is an intergovernmental organization aimed at promoting peace between nations and protecting human rights across the globe.
The first time Donald Trump was president, he imposed a strict, overseas antiabortion policy that caused 108,000 women and children to die and 360,000 people to contract HIV/AIDS, according to a journal of the National Academy of Sciences. If voters send him back to the White House, those numbers, staggering as they may be, would be dwarfed by what comes next, reproductive rights advocates contend.
Weekend Reading for Women’s Representation is a compilation of stories about women’s representation.
This week: At current rates, it will take 137 years to lift all women and girls out of poverty; Fannie Lou Hamer’s legacy; women make up 53 percent of voters, yet their rights remain vulnerable without the Equal Rights Amendment; and more.
Afghanistan has plummeted to last in global rankings of gender equity and women’s security since the withdrawal of international forces in 2021. A second Taliban regime has issued increasingly harsh decrees entrapping millions of women and girls in a system of repression that violates their basic human rights, segregates them from broader society and keeps opportunities and independence out of reach.
But even as the situation for Afghan women grows more dire, the international community is inching closer to recognizing the Taliban as the legitimate leaders in Afghanistan, leaving Afghan women with diminishing hopes that their oppression will end.
(This article originally appears in the Fall 2024 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox!)
Monday, Sept. 16, marks two years since the murder of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini made international headlines and sparked an uprising in Iran. Her death triggered the longest citizen-led rebellion in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Nasrin Sotoudeh and her husband Reza Khandan are no strangers to brutal and violent government suppression. The two Iranian activists and attorneys have faced harassment, violence and imprisonment from a government that will do virtually anything to crush women’s rights and freedom of expression.
As abortion access is increasingly being decided by state and federal courts, two reproductive rights attorneys make sense of past rulings and the ongoing fight for reproductive healthcare.
Afghan women’s voices and bodies are deemed ‘intimate’ by the Taliban and banned from public.
While the international community condemns these brutal and oppressive restrictions, it now faces a critical challenge: how to effectively respond to the Taliban’s gender apartheid policies and increasing human rights abuses. The need for the international community to codify gender apartheid as a crime against humanity grows more urgent.
It’s been 45 years since the United Nations adopted the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, often described as an international bill of rights for women. Yet some younger feminists haven’t even heard of it.
The vast majority of the world’s nations—96 percent—have ratified CEDAW. The U.S. is not a signatory because it has never made it to the Senate floor for a ratifying vote—making it only industrialized democracy in the world that has yet to ratify it.
(This article originally appears in the Summer 2024 issue of Ms. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get issues delivered straight to your mailbox!)
The situation in Afghanistan today is dire, but many are unaware of the full extent of the tragedy for women and everyone in the country. It’s easy to recall Afghanistan as a country which has long faced war and destruction, but before the Taliban took power in 1996 and then again in August 2021, Afghanistan was progressive.
The climate crisis is already quietly killing millions. It, along with other ecological crises, is set to potentially kill a billion humans and countless nonhumans—those least responsible for causing it. But here is a truth you will rarely hear: The death count predictions are premised on the current reproductive rights models, the ones that caused the crisis to begin with.
Gender apartheid, the most extreme form of gender discrimination, has left Afghan women feeling like the walls are closing in.
At the center of this issue is the question of justice. Because the spaces for women are so slender and the oppression of women so pervasive and institutionalized, almost any act can be characterized as an act of resistance in Afghanistan today.