Women’s Health

Women everywhere deserve accessible, affordable and comprehensive healthcare. This includes reproductive healthcare like contraception, abortion, sex and relationship education, STI prevention and treatment, cancer screenings and counseling. However, lawmakers have long attempted to restrict or reduce this care in ways that harm women.

Defunding and Refunding the Women’s Health Initiative: Why States Must Focus on Menopausal Women’s Health

The ongoing decimation of the federal funding landscape brings some good(ish) news for women: the role of state legislatures in stepping up to help improve and advance the health of menopausal women.

Thus far, 13 states—a record one in four—have introduced more than 20 bills focused on menopause care, proposing changes that could permanently reshape insurance coverage and educational and health care resources. Public officials in Michigan, Illinois and West Virginia announced support for menopause reforms. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer recently hosted a roundtable for leaders and a statewide listening tour. The latest slate of bills—introduced in red and blue states alike—would bolster workplace supports and dedicate resources to public education. The bills are being proposed at such a fast clip that menopause was named on a “Ones To Watch: Legislation Landscape for 2025” list.

Texas Women Face Prosecution for Abortions if New Bill Becomes Law

In Texas, the state Senate just opened yet another door to women being criminally prosecuted for obtaining an abortion … even in a different state. Authored by Sen. Bryan Hughes, Senate Bill 2880—titled the “Women and Child Protection Act”—just passed in the Senate. It ushers in a currently dormant 1925 abortion ban and would be the first law in the country to allow pregnant women to be prosecuted for receiving abortion care.

“The most egregious point of SB 2880 is that it quietly revives Texas’ pre-Roe abortion ban by explicitly incorporating the 1925 law into the bill’s definition of criminal abortion law,” said Sen. Carol Alvarado, a Houston Democrat.

‘Mama’s in the Hole’: How Solitary Confinement Tries to Break Family Bonds

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In this powerful mother-daughter exchange, Summer Knight and Kwaneta Harris reveal how nearly a decade of forced silence through solitary confinement shattered their bond—and how they’re fighting to rebuild it, piece by piece.

“Everything I did in my daily life, I’d wonder how Mama was doing the same thing in that hole. Was she cold? Could she see the sky?”

“How do you compress motherhood into five minutes at midnight? How do you explain to a child why you’re not calling on her birthday, her graduation, after her father died? … Without communication, we became strangers. She grew up with a ghost for a mother, and I mothered a memory.”

Critical Programs for Women and Families Face Deep Cuts in House Budget Bill

A sweeping budget bill moving quickly through the House threatens to make draconian cuts to Medicaid and SNAP—two of the nation’s most vital programs for women and children.

The bill is being framed as “all or nothing” legislation by Republican leadership—a vehicle designed to pass the entire Trump agenda without needing Democratic votes. And the changes are being presented as necessary for fiscal responsibility—but here is what they won’t say out loud.

The Casualties of Title X Cuts: Cancer Screenings, Fertility Treatments and Sex Ed

The Trump administration earlier this month cut more than $65 million in federal funding for family planning under Title X, the program signed into law by President Richard Nixon that has supported comprehensive family planning and related preventive health services—including contraception, cancer screenings, infertility treatments, pregnancy care and STI testing—for low-income Americans since 1970. The cuts will impact dozens of clinics nationwide, including nine Planned Parenthood affiliates, and leave seven states without any Title X funding—to say nothing of other funding cuts and freezes to social services like Social Security and Medicaid.

In March, Nourbese Flint, president of the national abortion justice organization All* Above All, wrote a piece for Ms. about Republicans’ proposed cuts to Medicaid, which would strip healthcare from millions of Americans, including 40 percent of all pregnant women in the United States. Last week, I spoke with her about the Title X freeze on reproductive healthcare and the long-term effects of these funding cuts, which will put infant and maternal healthcare even more in jeopardy.

These Women Couldn’t Get Life-Saving Care. Now They’re Changing the Law.

A group of Texas women denied life-saving healthcare during their wanted pregnancies are feeling “cautiously optimistic” and “hopeful” after meeting with state legislators and urging changes to an abortion-related bill currently working its way through the legislature.

These women have been telling their devastating stories of life and loss for years. So why are they just starting to break through and spur legislative action from Republican lawmakers now?

“You have to keep repeating it. And so as painful as it is for me to relive those days and to relive my story, I will continue to do it for my daughter.”

Democracy, Divestment and the Power to Choose Liberation: On Cultivating ‘the Menopausal Multiverse’

It’s time we reimagine menopause as an expansive, intersectional journey through radical divestment and collective empowerment for all marginalized voices.

Ultimately, our goal is to ensure that nobody’s menopause experience is overlooked or left behind, and that requires us to break from the mainstream “landscape” and forge an empowering community of our own.

(This essay is part of a collection presented by Ms. and the Groundswell Fund.)

Our Baby Was Bleeding. I Was Jobless. Medicaid Was Our Lifeline.

When I lost my job while on maternity leave, I never expected I’d soon be in a hospital while my infant underwent emergency surgery. As my life became a highwire act, Medicaid became a safety net for my family.

Our Medicaid plan provided 100 percent coverage for what would’ve been thousands of dollars in hospital and surgical bills. It covered my baby’s follow-up appointments with specialists and his prescription formula. It covered all of our basic health needs. It covered my therapy.

‘Make Motherhood Great Again’: Pronatalism Finds a Comfortable Home in the Trump Administration

Once dismissed as fringe, pronatalism has moved into the mainstream—finding powerful champions in Trump, Vance and Musk, and gaining policy traction within the administration. Rooted in eugenics, antifeminism, and anti-immigrant sentiment, this ideology casts high birthrates as a patriotic duty and low fertility as a national threat.

Now, federal policies are beginning to reflect this dangerous worldview—one that sees women’s bodies as tools of the state and reproductive freedom as collateral damage.