‘Significant Victory’: Ninth Circuit Court Mixed Ruling ‘Frees Idahoans to Talk With Pregnant Minors About Abortion’

In April of 2023, Idaho passed the nation’s first abortion “trafficking” law (travel ban) making it a crime to procure an abortion for a minor. The law was challenged by reproductive rights advocates, who argued that the legislature had created a statute that makes unclear when lawful mentoring support stops, and unlawful conduct begins. Agreeing with the plaintiffs, in November of 2023, a federal district court issued a preliminary injunction preventing the law from going into effect.

On Dec. 2, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a mixed decision in the case. Although not a complete win, as Wendy Heipt of Legal Voice, one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs put it: The “decision is a significant victory … as it frees Idahoans to talk with pregnant minors about abortion healthcare.” 

“Encouragement, counseling, and emotional support are plainly protected speech under Supreme Court precedent,” wrote the Ninth Circuit Court last week, “including when offered in the difficult context of deciding whether to have an abortion.”

Not Your Mother’s Activism: Young Women’s Political Expression on Social Media

Young women are the avant-garde of political expression online, developing expressive forms of political communication that collapse traditional distinctions between personal and political, aesthetic and substantive, emotional and analytical. Their approaches suggest new possibilities for political discourse that acknowledges rather than suppresses the role of affect, identity, and visual rhetoric in political mobilization. This piece draws from research presented in the authors’ new book, Not Your Parents’ Politics: Understanding Young People’s Political Expression on Social Media (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Conservative Supreme Court to Rule on Right to Be Trans, Medical Care, Parents’ Rights, Constitutional Sex Discrimination—and the Right to Be Different

“I’m here to stand up for my kid,” Brian Williams told me outside the Supreme Court on Dec. 4. Williams and his wife Samantha have been fighting for their daughter—known as L.W. in the legal papers the ACLU filed to challenge Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming medical care for minors—for years.

Though difficult to sit through, the two-plus hours of argument in United States v. Skrmetti—a challenge by trans youth, their families, the ACLU, Lambda Legal and the Biden administration to Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors—was a nearly perfect distillation of this moment in our gender politics.

When Protecting Girls Is Twisted Into Attacking Trans Youth: FGM/C Survivors Fight Back Against Transphobic Right-Wing Narratives

Efforts are underway around the world to ban female genital mutilation/cutting, and 41 U.S. states have laws on the books to address it. 

But the efforts of survivors and activists—and I’m both—have been hamstrung by the current wave of conservative opposition to medical care for trans youth, yet another ugly consequence of the crackdown on rights for transgender Americans. As we try to make sure that girls who are at risk of FGM/C, or who are dealing with the consequences of it, have the protections they need, those who oppose rights for trans people are weaponizing the laws we advocated for to deny trans youth the gender-affirming care they need.

War Profiteering: Children Bear the Brunt of Wars They Don’t Start

I was a refugee during the Cold War, displaced by the geopolitical struggle between the U.S. and the USSR. Like millions of other children from that time, I carried the heavy weight of that war. My family fled Afghanistan, and in the process, I lost years of regular schooling—years that were supposed to form the foundation of my childhood.

The weight of this suffering has always fallen on children. And just as the world once turned away from the children of Auschwitz, Nagasaki and Trảng Bàng, it turns away from children in Gaza, Afghanistan, Sudan and many other places today. We revisit those historical images as if they were warnings, as if by remembering them we could prevent history from repeating itself. But we haven’t learned. The children of today are still carrying the same burdens—only the names and places have changed.

Gen Z Rep. Justin J. Pearson on Gun Violence, Activism and Being a Young Legislator

Generation Z—born between the mid 1990s and the early 2010s—is the most diverse generation in American history, with nearly half of the Gen Z electorate in 2024 identifying as people of color. Gen Z has also come of age during the rise of school shootings, the COVID-19 pandemic and the first Trump presidency’s legislative attacks on reproductive freedom.

While 41 million Gen Z members voted in the Nov. 5 election, some Gen Z voters are old enough now to run for office themselves. In The Z Factor’s second episode, Chander interviewed 29-year-old Tennessee State House Rep. Justin J. Pearson, who serves Memphis. In 2023, he was the second youngest person to serve in the Tennessee legislature. Since then, he’s advocated for climate and racial justice and gun violence prevention, introducing more than a dozen gun safety bills over the last year.

‘Take Beauty From Ashes’: Advocating for Felony Murder Law Reform

In 2017, Briana Martinson, then 20, and Megan Cater, 19, went to the apartment of a man whom they believed had stolen medication from Martinson, with the intent to steal it back. By the time they arrived at the apartment, Martinson and Cater were joined by several other individuals, two of whom were older men that the women did not know. According to Martinson, one of the men threatened them with a gun before entering, at which point she realized, “Okay, there’s no turning back.”

In the end, they were each sentenced to 13 and a half years in prison for aiding and abetting second-degree unintentional felony murder.

Was this a case of wrongful conviction? It’s complicated.

‘Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves’ Brings Joy Into Its ‘Queer Kinda’ Adaptation at NYC Theater

Boomerang Theatre Company’s premiere production of Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves by Gina Femia is keenly, tenderly aware of the pain of high school theater and being a teenage girl.

Directed by Scott Ebersold, the play is “a new queer kinda adaptation of Romeo and Juliet,” according to Boomerang’s online program, marking the first-ever production of Femia’s new play.

Mercutio Loves Romeo Loves Juliet Loves is running at The Jeffrey and Paula Gural Theatre at ART/New York until Nov. 24, 2024.

In the Wake of Abortion Bans, Meet the College Students Fighting for Medication Abortion on Campus

Even in states where abortion is still legal, abortion is not necessarily available through college health services, leaving students to find their own care. In New York City, students at Barnard College—the historically women’s college affiliated with Columbia University just across the street—are working to help their peers access abortions. Because Barnard does not currently offer abortion, finding care is still a struggle even for students in New York—a state that’s become a haven for out-of-state abortion patients—even at a women’s college that was one of the Seven Sisters.