Young Women and Girls

You Will Hear These 10 False Narratives About Abortion. Here’s All You’ll Need to Fight Back

PUBLISHED 7/15/2026 by

Misinformation about abortion care is rampant and being weaponized at state and federal levels to justify wide-ranging restrictions across the United States.

Ensuring awareness of these narratives, and combatting them with rigorous data and evidence, is critical both for preventing them from becoming entrenched in law and for rolling back harmful policies rooted in misinformation.

This fact sheet offers evidence-based statements to counter 10 common but false narratives about abortion, and offers readers additional ways to dive deeper.

The Biggest Threat to Women’s Sports Isn’t Trans Athletes. It’s the Trump Administration’s Failure to Uphold Title IX’s Promise of Equal Opportunity.

PUBLISHED 7/13/2026 by

The politicians who have spent years claiming to “protect women’s sports” have been remarkably absent when it comes to enforcing the law that actually guarantees women equal athletic opportunities. W

hile the Trump administration has devoted enormous energy to policing transgender participation, Title IX complaints involving unequal opportunities, funding and treatment have languished. The result is a political performance that invokes women athletes while doing little to address the inequities they continue to face.

The real defenders of women’s sports are the athletes themselves.

This month alone, women at Christopher Newport University and California Lutheran University successfully used Title IX to force their schools to reverse decisions that eliminated athletic opportunities for women. Their victories are a reminder of what Title IX was designed to do: expand opportunity, not fuel culture wars.

If we truly care about women’s sports, we should celebrate the athletes and advocates who are making the law’s promise of equality a reality—not those who merely claim to speak in their name.

The Ranked Ballot Is the Pro-Women, Pro-Voter, Pro-Democracy Reform America Needs

PUBLISHED 7/1/2026 by

For 250 years, the story of American democracy has been a story of expanding who holds power and who gets to decide who yields it.

The 15th Amendment, the 17th, the Voting Rights Act, the 19th Amendment and the 26th—each was a structural intervention, a deliberate redesign of the rules to bring more people into the democratic process. And at each iteration, a bet was made on the same proposition: Democracy works better when more people have real power within it.

We are overdue for the next chapter.

Women make up 51 percent of the American population and hold fewer than 29 percent of seats in Congress. That gap is not a product of insufficient ambition, inadequate candidates or a thin pipeline of viable women. It is the product of an electoral system that was designed before women could vote, and has never been fundamentally redesigned since.

Ranked-choice voting changes that. The ranked ballot is the single most powerful, best-documented structural reform available for advancing women’s political participation, and it serves every voter, at every level of government, on every ballot.

In a ranked-choice voting election, voters rank candidates in order of preference—first choice, second and third—and if no candidate wins a majority outright, the candidates with the fewest votes are eliminated and their votes are redistributed until someone reaches a winning threshold.

Under this system, voters can express a genuine preference without fear of wasting their vote on a candidate who can’t win, and qualified women candidates can run without fearing splitting the vote.

(This is part of a new series FEMINIST 250: Democracy’s Feminist Future, a special Ms. series examining the next chapter of U.S. democracy through a feminist lens. As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the series explores how women and marginalized communities have shaped democratic progress, what lessons history offers for the challenges ahead, and how a more inclusive, representative and equitable democracy can be built for the next 250 years.)

The Tradwife Fantasy Isn’t Replacing Feminism

PUBLISHED 6/22/2026 by

As conservative organizations are carefully curating messaging about femininity, marriage and traditional values, the data tells a different story: Feminism remains remarkably popular, especially among young women.

That reality stands in sharp contrast to the messaging on display at gatherings like Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit, held earlier this month in San Antonio, Texas—part of a growing strategy among conservative organizers to attract young women through lifestyle content rather than traditional political organizing. The “pink pill pipeline” is a pathway that introduces conservative politics through wellness culture, dating advice and discussions about traditional gender roles. 

Yet while anti-feminist rhetoric has gained visibility online, research continues to show that young women remain one of the strongest constituencies for feminism. 

Resisting in Plain Sight: Six Everyday Acts of Resistance in the Age of Trump

PUBLISHED 6/18/2026 by

The Trump administration’s relentless assaults on anything that threatens its narrow vision of the status quo—one rooted firmly in patriarchy and racism—have made something unexpectedly clear: Authoritarians target culture because culture shapes how we understand ourselves.

Activities we once considered leisure, education or self-expression have become forms of resistance, simply because they affirm the people and communities this administration seeks to silence, exclude or erase.

Here are six examples.

War on Women Report: Abortion Access, Academic Freedom and Trans Rights Under Fire

PUBLISHED 5/31/2026 by

MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide—the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.” We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.

Since our last report:

—President Trump lost his latest appeal effort against paying New York writer E. Jean Carroll an $83.3 million defamation judgment.
—The government is using family separation as an antiabortion tactic via Child Protective Services.
—The House passed HR 2616, the so-called Stopping Indoctrination and Protecting Kids Act, with support from eight Democrats; if enacted, the bill would bar federally funded public elementary and middle schools from acknowledging transgender students and require educators to notify parents if a student identifies as transgender at school.
—A reminder: People can order abortion pills from all 50 states, no matter what the courts decide.

… and more.

Ms. Global: From Ukraine to Lebanon to Sudan, Women Are Bearing the Brunt of Escalating Global Conflict

PUBLISHED 5/21/2026 by

Around the world, escalating armed conflict, political repression and humanitarian collapse are reshaping daily life for women and girls—often with devastating consequences. From drone warfare in Sudan, to internet blackouts in Iran, to attacks on healthcare infrastructure in Lebanon and Gaza, women are navigating intensifying threats while also sustaining families, communities and survival networks under extraordinary strain. At the same time, women-led organizations and feminist movements confronting these crises increasingly face funding cuts, political repression and shrinking civic space even as demand for their work grows.

Globally, over 676 million women and girls live within 50 kilometers of armed conflict, representing about 17 percent of the female population. This staggering figure—a 74 percent increase since 2010—is tracked and analyzed by the Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace and Security in partnership with PRIO.

But we also know: Feminist movements around the world hold answers to some of the world’s most urgent crises. Ms. Global is taking note of feminists worldwide—and the gendered realities shaping conflict, displacement, political repression and survival.

Driving the Vote for Equality: ERA Dispatches From Arizona and California

PUBLISHED 5/18/2026 by

More than a century after suffragists Alice Burke and Nell Richardson launched their 1916 cross-country campaign for women’s voting rights, the modern Driving the Vote for Equality tour is again carrying the fight for constitutional equality across America.

This month, the Golden Flyer II traveled through Arizona and California—places shaped by immigration, labor struggles, border politics and widening political divides.

In Phoenix and Tucson, speakers emphasized that the ERA is not some abstract constitutional debate disconnected from everyday life, but something women and marginalized communities can rely on: equal protection under the law at a moment when hard-fought rights increasingly feel precarious.

When the Golden Flyer II rolled up to the offices of Ms. magazine in Los Angeles, advocates, lawmakers and supporters gathered around the bright yellow roadster to connect the unfinished work of suffrage to today’s political landscape. Carolyn Maloney warned that women’s rights are being “bulldozed over” through attacks on abortion access, voting rights and equal employment protections, while Rep. Maxine Waters urged activists to “keep pushing” Congress to recognize the ERA as the 28th Amendment.

Again and again, participants returned to the same conclusion: Progress has never arrived easily. It has always been built through years of grassroots organizing, coalition-building and persistence in the face of backlash.

The tour heads next to Chicago, South Bend and Lansing.

A New Playbook for College Athletes: Consent, Intervention and Prevention

PUBLISHED 5/5/2026 by

June 2026 will mark the 54th anniversary of Title IX, the 1972 federal law barring sex-based discrimination in education, ensuring equal participation in sports and prohibiting sexual violence in educational programs receiving federal funding.

But even though Title IX passed more than half a century ago, and significantly more women now go to college than men, gender-based violence is still rampant among college students. Thirteen percent of U.S. college students experience rape or sexual assault during their time on (or off) campus. For women, that number doubles: 26.4 percent of women (and 6.8 percent of men) undergraduates experience sexual violence. Young women are especially vulnerable, compared to older grad students, and women college students aged 18 to 24 are three times more likely to experience gender-based violence than women in general.

Most colleges and universities have standard anti-sexual violence training during freshman orientation (often just required videos or something students click through online), but this information is often quickly forgotten or not practical enough for students to easily apply to their own lives and interactions. The nonprofit sexual assault prevention organization It’s On Us is seeking to change that with the The Playbook 2.0, a research-based workshop series for college athletes.

Voices From Dilley: The Stolen Ordinary of Detained Children

PUBLISHED 4/30/2026 by

In 2026, the “ordinary” lives of immigrant children are being systematically dismantled.

After family detention was largely phased out in 2021, the second Trump administration has revived the practice, resulting in a tenfold increase in the number of children held in ICE custody.

From the high-security gates of the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, mothers and children report a harrowing reality of medical neglect, psychological trauma and the long confinement in these centers.

This is a look inside the “black box” of family immigration detention—and the brave voices breaking the silence.

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“We have been here for nine months. I really miss playing with my toys and my watch. Please get us out of here.”

“I have friends, school and family here in the United States. … To this day, I don’t know what we did wrong to be detained. … I feel like I’ll never get out of here. I just ask that you don’t forget about us.”

“In one minute our entire lives were changed and our plans and dreams were destroyed … This place broke something in us. Something that I don’t know if we will ever be able to fix.”