Category: Uncategorized

Four years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, some abortion opponents are unhappy. Though 19 states have abortion bans early in pregnancy, the number of abortions has actually increased since the Dobbs decision, due in part to the availability of medication abortion. Eight states passed so-called shield laws, which protect providers from criminal or civil investigations if they prescribe abortion pills to people in states with bans, and now nearly 15,000 medication abortions per month are provided under those laws.

A faction of the anti-abortion movement argues that criminal bans for abortion providers aren’t enough. The only way to actually stop abortions in states where they’re banned, these activists argue, is to prosecute women for homicide. This faction, though small, is vocal and gaining influence. On the anniversary of Roe’s fall, a group of more than 60 conservatives shared a resolution calling on lawmakers to “remove legal immunities” for women who have abortions. They said laws to protect life from the moment of fertilization would put fertilized eggs on the same legal plane as the person carrying them. 

But there’s a telling aspect to the list: Of the 24 signatories who lead anti-abortion organizations, just four are women. It appears that, to get more women signatories, they had to branch out to conservative influencers, including anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines and podcast host Allie Beth Stuckey. The gender dynamics at play cannot be ignored when under this framework, pregnant women could be prosecuted for ending their pregnancies or even having a miscarriage.

Prosecuting abortion seekers used to be a third rail in the anti-abortion movement. In 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump had to backtrack after saying that “there has to be some form of punishment” for women who have abortions. Anti-abortion groups, whose endorsement Trump was seeking, condemned his comments and his campaign clarified it was providers, not patients, who should be criminalized. But now, mostly male anti-abortion accelerationists are deeply frustrated that women can still access pills and are pursuing the nuclear option. 

It’s fairly ironic that anti-abortion women oppose the logical endgame of their policies. If conservative women truly believe that abortion should be banned because it is murder, it follows that abortion patients are murderers. The movement they helped build is based on patriarchy and violence and now misogynists are openly plotting how to throw women in jail — no matter how they vote.

Play

‘Very traumatic,’: Texas women denied treatment for miscarriage under state abortion ban

June 27, 2026 / 08:23

The “equal protection” petition goes so far as to say the right to life must be protected regardless of the “location” of the human being. That’s a reference to ectopic pregnancies that implant somewhere other than the uterine lining; not only are ectopics never viable, but they can be life-threatening if not treated. Early treatment is an injection of medication that ends the pregnancy, but anti-abortion activists oppose that care in favor of forced surgery to remove the embryo or even the entire fallopian tube. They jump through logical hoops to claim this far more invasive route is morally superior because it does not directly terminate the pregnancy.

In The New York Times’ coverage of the petition, the conservatives opposed to equal protection laws were women, including the communications director of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America and the head of a crisis pregnancy center in Texas.  While Vice President JD Vance recently suggested that he disagreed with criminal charges for women, he said it was a matter of political realities, not substance. It’s also noteworthy that Kristan Hawkins, the head of Students for Life, told the Times, “My message is, ‘not now,’ but I’m not saying ‘not ever.’” Just four years ago, Hawkins co-wrote a Fox News op-ed with the president of SBA Pro-Life America in which they said they were “emphatically” opposed to arresting women.

Of all the mainstream anti-abortion organizations — meaning, groups that Republican members of Congress will meet — Students for Life is the most aggressive. It supports enforcing the 19th-century Comstock Act to ban mailing abortion pills and wants the Environmental Protection Agency to test water for mifepristone. It even claims that hormonal birth control causes abortions by preventing implantation of fertilized eggs, so if life legally begins at fertilization under “equal protection” bills, Hawkins’ group could then target such birth control. So it’s no surprise that Hawkins won’t say “not ever,” but it’s more telling that her current thinking is “not now.”

Importantly, advocates of “equal protection” seek to end abortion nationwide: They cite the Fourteenth Amendment as granting equal protection to all people, and they happen to believe that life begins at fertilization. These activists often refer to themselves as “abortion abolitionists,” an offensive use of the word abolition, which twists the Reconstruction-era amendments that scholars say intentionally protected bodily autonomy. 

While the Trump administration has shown worrying openness to fetal personhood, it’s more likely that GOP-run states will try to force the issue.

Earlier this month, delegates at the Texas Republican Party convention voted to add to the platform that lawmakers should repeal penal code exemptions that protect women from criminal charges if they have abortions. The platform also opposes in vitro fertilization, calling it “destructive” and urging regulation to prevent “embryo discarding, eugenic practices and commodification of human life.” Texas does have a history of innovations in anti-abortion cruelty. More than nine months before the Dobbs decision, it was the first state to functionally ban abortion with a bounty hunter ban that allowed civil lawsuits against anyone who performed the procedure. Lawmakers in other states have introduced similar “prenatal equal protection” bills that would allow prosecuting women and restrictions on IVF.  

Play

New studies show miscarriage patients living under abortion bans pay a price

May 24, 2026 / 09:51

None have passed — so far. But the debate over prosecuting women will remain a top issue in the anti-abortion movement. At the same time as the Texas GOP convention, the National Right to Life Committee held its 55th annual conference. NRLC President Carol Tobias said in her opening remarks that equal protection laws were problematic for many reasons, not least of which is that it’s almost impossible for healthcare providers to tell if someone is having a miscarriage or if they took abortion pills. 

Tobias further suggested that if abolitionists pass such laws, “​​the pro-life movement will be destroyed.” She said, “I assure you, if the effort is to punish women who get an abortion—to put women in jail, and go so far as to suggest the death penalty—this country won’t just turn blue, it will be deep, dark, forever, blue.”

Meanwhile, SBA Pro-Life, the group that co-authored the 2022 op-ed with Students for Life, told the Times that its position on criminal penalties for women had not changed.

“No state pro-life law does this and that’s not changing, as not a single one of these bills has passed out of a state legislature,” spokesperson Kelsey Pritchard said.

But that’s only true until the day it isn’t.

The post The anti-abortion movement’s growing support for throwing women in jail appeared first on MS NOW.

Helga Monson de Kansky was once predicted to become ballet’s next star. Instead, she chose a life with her family and a career as a dance instructor.

Here are the best shoes for beach wedding guests, from metallic sandals to sparkly ballet flats, from brands like Alaïa, Aeyde, and more.

Democracy is in crisis. But writers such as Young Jean Lee, Tarell Alvin McCraney and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, are stepping up, dramatizing the complexities of what it means to be an American.

Staying domestic this summer? Book an Airbnb in New Mexico for a design-forward retreat in the desert.

From classic dramas like ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ and ‘Nashville’ to a John Carpenter sci-fi nightmare, these movies articulate a shifting national mood.

America in the summer of 1976 was not in a good place. 

The president who presided over the country’s Bicentennial, President Gerald Ford, only had the job because the previous president and vice president had resigned in disgrace, making him the sole US president who was never actually elected. The Vietnam War had ended in defeat and disgrace when Saigon fell the year before, after the deaths of nearly 60,000 American servicemembers. Inflation hit double digits in 1974 and stayed ugly, unemployment sat near 8 percent, and economists had to invent a word — stagflation — for an economy that seemed to encompass the worst of both worlds.

Given all that, you might assume the national mood leading up to the 200th anniversary was grim. And, yet, on July 4, 1976, something strange happened: Americans threw themselves a hell of a party. 

In New York Harbor, more than 200 tall ships sailed up the Hudson for Operation Sail, drawing an estimated six million spectators — the largest crowd in the city’s history. President Ford reviewed the fleet from the deck of the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal. It was the same scene up and down the country that day: parades in small towns, fireworks over the National Mall, church bells ringing in unison at 2 o’clock. It was one cathartic day of celebration after a decade that had offered little reason for it.

And when pollsters asked people how they felt about the country’s future that year, the mood was, improbably, sunny. A Roper survey found more Americans were optimistic than pessimistic about the future by a nearly three to one ratio. More than three-quarters told Gallup the nation had already achieved at least a fair amount of its founding ideals. Somehow, a nation that was in the middle of a genuinely miserable decade looked in the mirror and liked what it saw.

Jump forward 50 years, to this year’s 250th anniversary, and you’ll find the vibes flipped. Roughly 60 percent of Americans tell pollsters the nation is on the wrong track. A majority say its best years are behind it. About three-quarters think today’s children will end up worse off than their parents. Asked a version of that same founding-ideals question from 1976, 77 percent now say the founders would be disappointed in what we’ve become.

But just as they were in 1976, the vibes don’t match reality. Set the mood aside and look only at the numbers, and the country that felt so good in 1976 was, by the most important measures, a worse place to be alive than the country that now feels so terrible on its 250th birthday.

Start with whether you’re alive

Let’s start with the most basic test of how a society is doing: how long its people live.

Life expectancy at birth in the US was 72.6 years in 1976. In 2024, it reached a record high of 79 years — an extra six and a half years of life. At the start of life, a baby born now is far more likely to survive its first year than one born during the Bicentennial, while cancer, once nearly a synonym for a death sentence, now kills a much smaller share of the people it strikes. 

The US made those gains by stopping some of its worst habits, things that were commonplace in 1976 . You might have seen the Bicentennial celebrations through a cloud of smoke, as cigarettes were woven into ordinary life — on airplanes, in offices, in hospital wards — and roughly 37 percent of adults smoked. Today, it is closer to one in 10, and it keeps falling. 

The heart disease and lung cancer that were connected to all that tobacco have receded with it. Add seatbelts and airbags, better trauma care, and cheap drugs that lower cholesterol and blood pressure, and the result is a country where the things that were most likely to kill an American in 1976 are less deadly now.

The America of 1976 sat at the leading edge of a brutal crime wave; the murder rate would peak in 1980 and stay high for more than a decade. By the early 2020s, however, violent crime had fallen back to roughly a 50-year low, and homicide rates this year may end up at a record low. And the single most dangerous thing most Americans do — get behind the wheel of a car — is far less likely to kill them, with the death rate per mile driven now a fraction of what it was at the Bicentennial.

The country got cleaner, and richer, and fairer

In 1976, the air in American cities carried lead, an honest-to-God neurotoxin that was pumped out of every tailpipe of the more than 90 percent of American vehicles that used leaded gasoline. 

Rivers literally caught fire: The Cuyahoga in Cleveland had burned so many times it became a national joke, and Lake Erie was widely written off as dead. And things were bad outside Ohio, too. In Los Angeles, the smog got thick enough to keep kids inside at recess and erase the nearby mountains from view.

Since 1970, however, the combined emissions of the six main air pollutants the EPA tracks have fallen 78 percent — even as the economy nearly quadrupled in real terms, the population grew by tens of millions, and Americans drove far more miles. That split, with growth going one way and pollution the other, is one of the least celebrated but most consequential triumphs of the past half-century, the product of legislative efforts and technological response. And lead? It’s essentially disappeared from the air. 

And it’s not just economic or environmental statistics that have improved; society advanced, as well. Women now earn the majority of college degrees. The Black poverty rate sits near a record low. Support for same-sex marriage is now the norm — maybe the single biggest social change from 1976, when homosexuality was criminalized in most states. Pick a metric more or less at random, and the line usually runs the right way.

This is not a matter of cherry-picking a few flattering numbers. It is the overwhelming direction of the evidence, across health, wealth, safety, rights, even the basic cleanliness of the physical world an American walks through every day. Measured against its own recent past, the US is in some of the best shape it has ever been.

So what’s with the bad vibes?

A more perfect union doesn’t mean perfect

Well, some things genuinely got worse, and they are not insignificant. 

Americans’ faith in their government has collapsed; fewer than one in five now trust Washington to do the right thing, down from solid majorities in the 1960s — and the country is more polarized than it was in 1976. Democratic decline and even collapse is a live threat. Those economic gains I highlighted above have flowed disproportionately upward. The top 1 percent’s share of income, near a historic low in 1976, has since roughly doubled.

Climate change barely registered in 1976. The carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has since climbed from around 330 parts per million to about 427, and warming will only get worse in the future. And buying a home increasingly feels out of reach for many. By 2024, a record share of households spent more than a third of their income on housing. (Notably, though, the percentage of Americans who own a home is slightly higher than it was in 1976, and those homes are much larger on average.) 

These are real problems, but they remain exceptions to a broader half-century trend of improvement. And a country that scrubbed the lead from its air and put out smoking can overcome new challenges, as well. 

Which brings us back to a tale of two birthdays. In 1976, Americans had less of nearly everything you can count, and, yet, they reported feeling good about the future anyway. In 2026, we have more, and we don’t. 

Just as it can be for a person, a country’s mood is a poor instrument; it measures the story we are telling ourselves more than the lives we are actually living. For all our pessimism about the state of the nation, more than three-quarters of Americans say they are satisfied with their own lives.

The Americans crowding New York Harbor in 1976 were cheering a country that was sicker, dirtier, more dangerous, and less free than the one we live in now. But they were right to cheer; the line was already bending the right way, and it kept bending. It turns out a nation can travel a long way, even while it is convinced it is going nowhere.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

After the Brooklyn Mirage—a popular but troubled music venue—was torn down, a glitzy Ibiza institution took its place.

How the human countenance became something to study, edit, optimize, and scan.

A new book argues that many of the world’s oldest people aren’t so old after all.

“The Infinity Machine,” “If This Be Magic,” “While We Were Waiting,” and “Coyoteland.”

From its new galleries off the museum’s Great Hall, the Costume Institute seeks to put clothing at the center of art history.