More Than A Magazine, A Movement
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.
On April 24, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Moyle v. U.S., a case that will determine whether individual states are allowed to exclude a single group from this basic protection: pregnant women.
The state of Idaho claims that it has the right to forbid pregnant women and girls—and only pregnant women and girls—from receiving emergency care that could save their lives.
On April 24, the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in two cases, Idaho v. United States and Moyle v. United States, about whether states can prohibit doctors from treating women with life-threatening pregnancies until a patient’s condition deteriorates to the point where they are about to die.
Reproductive rights and legal advocates are collecting stories from over 100 women who almost died—and at least one who did—after being denied emergency abortion care.
Menopause is gaining attention in the media and highest levels of government, including the White House—but we still have a long way to go to ensure women get the support they need. A recent series issued by a respected journal, The Lancet, proves this point.
The series claims to promote an “empowerment model for managing menopause.” To us—more than 250 obstetrician-gynecologists, family medicine physicians, cardiologists, internists, urologists, medical oncologists, psychiatrists, orthopedic surgeons, nurse practitioners and licensed therapists—this was an unexpected and welcome opportunity.
The series was awash with misstatements that do not reflect the lived experience of women in this stage of life or our clinical experience in treating them.
As a seemingly healthy 39-year-old mom of three young boys, five years after I first questioned what was happening to my body, I was diagnosed with rectal cancer—and it had advanced to stage 3. A lime-sized tumor had gone undetected. I realized something I knew the whole time: I am not crazy; I know my body better than anyone else. My gut was right, something was very wrong.
One doctor, a gastroenterologist at UCLA, finally saw me. She knew that new cases of colorectal cancer has nearly doubled, resulting in a new standard of care that required colonoscopies beginning at age 45. She knew this disease had become the leading cause of cancer deaths for Americans 20 to 49 years old.biopsies, CT and MRI scans.
So it is urgent: If you are experiencing even one of the symptoms—like bloody stool, stomach pain, urgency to go, and/or anemia causing fatigue—go straight to your doctor and ask to be screened. If the doctors push back or minimize your concerns, keep going.
On March 29, the Pennsylvania-based Women’s Law Project filed the first-ever amicus brief urging the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that reversed Roe v. Wade. The brief argued that Dobbs is “unworkable” because the decision has “subjected people in need of reproductive healthcare to immense suffering and grave danger” and has “ushered in an era of unprecedented legal and doctrinal chaos.”
“It is vitally important to challenge Dobbs at every turn and send a signal that it is not set in stone,” said David Cohen, a constitutional law professor at Drexel Kline School of Law and co-author of the brief. “We will not rest until this terrible decision is overturned.”
It’s no coincidence that fat commentaries revolve around female bodies: Even though women are statistically less likely than men to be overweight, feminists have long pointed out how twin fantasies of beauty and thinness torment us.
(For more ground-breaking stories like this, order 50 YEARS OF Ms.: THE BEST OF THE PATHFINDING MAGAZINE THAT IGNITED A REVOLUTION, Alfred A. Knopf—a collection of the most audacious, norm-breaking coverage Ms. has published.)
In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.
This week: the horrifying effects of Louisiana’s abortion ban; state lawmakers fight over access to contraception and IVF; Gloria Steinem turns 90; soccer players advocate for uniforms without white shorts; fighting against deepfake voter suppression efforts; West Texas A&M university bans drag shows; transphobia from healthcare providers; and more.
The lead plaintiff in the mifepristone case heard before the Supreme Court this week is a shadowy organization calling itself the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine (AHM). The group’s name is clearly intended to evoke the Hippocratic oath, popularly understood as the commitment of doctors to “first do no harm.”
To claim, as the Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine does, that forcing a woman or child to give birth against her will, even if childbirth will seriously injure or even kill her, honors the principle of “do no harm” is perverse, but also very revealing. It makes clear that the “harm” that AHM and other anti-abortion ideologues care about is wholly imaginary.
Not content with overturning Roe v. Wade, the anti-abortion movement now wants to restrict medication abortion—even in states where abortion remains legal.
But a decision to place more restrictions on medication abortion will not stop people from getting abortion pills—it will merely reshape, not extinguish, the landscape of access to abortion pills.
Since the escalation of hostilities in October 2023, around 1.7 million people have been displaced in Gaza, with an estimated 1.5 million crowded into Rafah. As food, fuel, clean water and medical supplies run desperately low, disease, illness, severe hunger and acute malnutrition are rife, particularly among the more than 155,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women and their newborns.
