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.
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.
“My husband and I chose the safety and stability of our family over the risks of another pregnancy. We wanted to ensure that my daughter had a mother, and I wanted my husband to have a wife. … As we brace and prepare for potential shifts this year, the power of telling our personal reproductive stories can be a catalyst for change and a beacon of solidarity. I hope that by telling my full story, others will be encouraged to do the same by knowing that they are not alone. ”
Share your abortion story by emailing myabortionstory@msmagazine.com.
Two developments are significantly increasing access to abortion pills, which have been available for over two decades but highly restricted until recently:
(1.) On March 1, CVS and Walgreens announced they will begin dispensing abortion pills at brick-and-mortar pharmacies in some states, with a promise to expand to more states soon.
(2.) Meanwhile, the Society of Family Planning released its #WeCount report showing that telehealth abortion—where patients consult remotely with a provider, who then mails abortion pills to them—has increased to 16 percent of all abortions.
The Alabama Supreme Court recently shocked the nation when it held that the word “child” includes frozen embryos. Treating an embryo as the equivalent of a child upends the fertility industry, as it threatens to end in vitro fertilization (IVF) services and puts the status of embryos already in storage in serious question.
While these implications are important to untangle, the brunt of the effects of fetal personhood will fall not upon families with the resources to undergo IVF, but rather on poor and non-white women. Every decision made by a pregnant person could be second-guessed by the government. Every step outside of the most risk-averse approach to pregnancy puts the pregnant person under the microscope of the state.
Anti-Black sentiments decrease the number of underrepresented minorities working in medicine, resulting in poorer outcomes for underrepresented minority patients. It’s time for medical educators, administrators, and hospital leadership to utilize their power in the right way.
For over a decade, I have been faced with constant reminders of the long and winding road it took for me to become a mother.
In the wake of last week’s Alabama Supreme Court ruling, there are very obvious places along the way where the whims of a judge who would like a Christian theocracy would supersede the wishes of myself, my husband and the suggestions of my doctors—well-educated and well-known experts in their field.
Dr. Austin Dennard is an OB-GYN in Dallas. After Texas banned abortions after six weeks’ gestation (before many women even know they’re pregnant), Dennard’s patients began coming to her with concerns. Then, in 2022, she became a patient who needed an abortion. Now, she is fighting back against the state that’s become a hell on earth for pregnant women—and the extreme Republicans working to make it a reality for every state in the nation.
“There are patients who will choose to continue a pregnancy with anencephaly, and that is okay. But in the state of Texas, there is no choice but to continue. … It didn’t matter in my state that we found this diagnosis early. It did not matter that this baby was never going to survive outside my womb. It didn’t matter that I was a doctor. It didn’t matter that I was a sixth-generation Texan.”
We live in a society obsessed with fatness. Or, perhaps more accurately, obsessed with fighting it. Fatness has been rendered a disease, and we are inundated with “cures,” which particularly haunt women’s bodies—and their wallets.
Questioning the devotion to anti-fatness usually prompts a “well, being fat is unhealthy!” But according to Kate Manne, feminist philosopher and author of the recently released Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, the connection between weight and health is not so clear cut. What is clear, Manne brilliantly reveals, is that fatphobia, not fatness, is the problem.
As enticing as the idea of the “strong Black woman” sounds, this myth of fierceness, fearlessness and resilience doesn’t hold up under the weight of the racism and sexism Black women face in trying to thrive daily.
Enter the “soft life.” Soft life intentionally pursues an easy and peaceful life. A soft life is a lifestyle of comfort and relaxation with minimal challenges and stress. Black women rarely get to experience that and often are expected to be the backbone of their families. The ultimate goal is to thrive and enjoy life without having to endure hardships, pain or burdens.
