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.

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.

‘Off the Spectrum’: How the Science of Autism Has Failed Women and Girls

An excerpt from Off the Spectrum: Why the Science of Autism Has Failed Women and Girls by Gina Rippon:

“Maybe we can (gently) deconstruct the elaborate camouflages that have allowed autistic girls to ‘fly beneath the radar,’ to ‘hide in plain sight.’ We must listen to these lost girls so that autism researchers, autism therapists, autism advocates, and the wider general population will have a much clearer idea of what we should be looking for, what we need to explain, so that we can better understand the autistic world.”

Amid Support from Doctors Group, Bill to Clarify Texas’ Abortion Ban Does Little to Save Lives, Critics Say

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A bipartisan bill to clarify exceptions to the state’s near-total abortion ban garnered widespread support Thursday from healthcare professionals and abortion opponents who said the bill would remove any hesitation doctors might have to save a pregnant woman’s life.

Critics, meanwhile, told lawmakers that Senate Bill 31 doesn’t go far enough to protect women facing pregnancy-related medical emergencies and even quietly resurrects 160-year-old laws that could be used to criminalize those who have undergone an abortion or have helped those who receive an out-of-state abortion.

Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Race Will Decide the Fate of IVF and Abortion Rights—Just Ask This OB-GYN

The possible return to a near total abortion ban in Wisconsin—which depends on the outcome of the April 1 state Supreme Court election—would gravely interfere with Dr. Anna Igler’s work as an OB-GYN near Green Bay.

“Terrible things happen in pregnancy,” said Anna Igler, an OB-GYN near Green Bay. “All babies aren’t healthy and all pregnancies are not healthy for the baby or the mother. That’s just biology.” 

She knows that firsthand.

Break Things and Leave Them Broken: The Next Stage for Fired Federal Workers

Federal judges ordered the reinstatement of workers terminated based on their probationary status—a blow to the Trump administration. But for many fired feds, this welcome news does not mean a return to work. For me and most of my colleagues in HHS’ Administration for Children and Families, for instance, we will continue to receive our pay and benefits, but we won’t be allowed to work. One might think that this is a pretty good deal—but only if you don’t know federal employees.

Some of my colleagues shared with me their stories of uncertainty, loss and an unfinished mission to serve the public.

—My first colleague, a change management specialist, was nervous about rumored changes to the federal workforce, but buoyed by the encouragement of his mentors who said, “This is your dream. The way you light up, this is the thing we want in federal employees. Roll the dice, go for it.”
—Another, a policy analyst specializing in children’s issues, said she was living out her dream job. When she found out she was fired, she was on bedrest for a high-risk pregnancy. In a cruel twist of fate, it was Valentine’s Day … and also the anniversary of her previous stillbirth.

Foreign Aid Cuts Will Lead to 34,000 More Pregnancy-Related Deaths in Just One Year 

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The freeze on U.S. foreign assistance funding and the subsequent stop work order has already taken an irreversible toll on global health programs, including family planning services, causing chaos across public health systems and forcing many sexual and reproductive health providers and programs to close doors permanently. Despite ongoing litigation to challenge these actions in court—including an important court victory that found this attack likely unconstitutional—most USAID partners are still waiting for government payments for work already completed. Adding to the upheaval, the administration gutted USAID staff and cancelled 83 percent of its aid contracts. 

Contrary to the Trump administration’s claims, cutting foreign aid for reproductive health is not a fiscal gain, but a significant step backward.