Women

Subterms

    Latest story

    250 Shares45 Views

    Maga star Katie Miller’s new podcast reeks of toxic femininity. I listened so you don’t have to | Arwa Mahdawi

    by

    Want to hear a cute little story about JD Vance and a Dutch baby? Don’t worry, he didn’t deport it, he cooked one for breakfast. Then he sat down with Katie Miller to tell her all about his baking skills in the very first episode of her brand-new podcast. Which, by the way, I have heroically listened to all 44 excruciating minutes of so that you don’t have to.Miller, for the uninitiated, is a Maga bigwig and married to Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s far-right chief of staff and a man so odious his own uncle once wrote an article calling him a “hypocrite”.A Trump loyalist, Miller has form when it comes to surrounding herself with odious men: she held top communications jobs during Trump’s first term and, earlier this year, became a spokesperson for Elon Musk’s pet project, the so-called “department of government efficiency” (Doge).In May, she absconded to a mysterious role at Musk’s private ventures. I imagine that she was attracted to Musk’s views on free speech (summed up as: I can say whatever I fancy but you can’t) because it’s been reported that when Miller was in university she once stole and threw away student newspapers because she didn’t like the politician they endorsed.Now, she’s launched the Katie Miller Podcast, the first episode of which came out on Monday. Why jump from the highest echelons of government into podcasting? According to Miller, it’s because “as a mom of three young kids, who eats healthy, goes to the gym, works full-time, I know there isn’t a podcast for women like myself”.In a promo video, in which she sits cross-legged on an armchair (with shoes on!) in front of a bookshelf with three books on it, including The Great Gatsby and To Kill a Mockingbird, she explains that “there isn’t a place for conservative women to gather online” and she wanted to create a space to have “real honest conversations” about what matters to women.Apparently what matters to women is the minutiae of vice-president Vance’s life: the first 44-minute episode, which I suggest she rename Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, was devoted to fawning over a man who has said professional women “choose a path to misery” when they prioritize careers over children.Miller, who is not a natural host, awkwardly serves softball questions (“is a hotdog a sandwich?”) while Vance drones on about what a great daddy and vice-president he is and how much he loves ice-cream and joking around with Marco Rubio. The closest they get to a controversial topic is Vance talking about all the memes he’s inspired and saying that one of his favourites features the pope, Usha Vance and a couch. (There have been online jokes that Vance was intimate with a couch and that he killed the pope.) There is also light mockery of Late Show host Stephen Colbert, whose show recently got cancelled.Other than the memes, the most memorable moment of the episode is when Miller seems to imply that her husband subsists entirely on a diet of mayonnaise, like some sort of anaemic vampire. Stephen Miller also apparently runs around his house with his shoes on, as does JD. Usha, sensibly, takes her shoes off at the front door. All of this is exactly the sort of content I’m sure the busy mums are desperate for.Miller has said she thinks there is a gap in the market for podcasts aimed at conservative women, but the market says otherwise. While young women in the US tend to be progressive, there is a thriving “womanosphere” of anti-feminist media aimed at conservatives. Some of these outlets don’t explicitly cater to young conservative mums in the way that the Katie Miller Podcast says it does, but they’re still aiming for the same general demographic.Gen Z commentator Brett Cooper, for example, who has 1.6 million YouTube subscribers, looks at pop culture with a rightwing slant and her show attracts conservative female listeners. In between hot takes on Justin Bieber, Cooper argues that feminism’s goal is to “make men angry and dominate them”, a worldview that recently got her a gig at Fox News. Then there’s Candace Owens, a conservative conspiracy theorist who recently turned on Maga over the Jeffrey Epstein files fiasco. Owens has 4.57 million subscribers on YouTube and her streams get millions of views. Bari Weiss also has a successful podcast and is currently in talks to sell her “anti-woke” media startup The Free Press for more than $200m to CBS News. The Financial Times recently reported: “Weiss has won over [CBS owner David Ellison] partly by taking a pro-Israel stance … as well as her ability to build a younger, digitally savvy audience.”Then, of course, you’ve got all the trending “tradwife” content on TikTok, where creators such as Estee Williams and Gwen the Milkmaid glorify traditional gender roles. Beyond tradwives, there’s an ecosystem of lifestyle content aimed at young women that camouflages rightwing messages. Think: makeup tutorials with a running commentary about how feminism will make you miserable. Canadian media outlet Global News recently obtained a report prepared by Canada’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre that warns female “extremist influencers” are using popular online platforms to radicalize and recruit women.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“A body of open-source research shows that women in extremist communities are taking on an active role by creating content specifically on image-based platforms with live streaming capabilities,” the report says. “These women foster a sense of community and create spaces that put their followers at ease, thereby normalizing and mainstreaming extremist rhetoric.”While Miller’s podcast may not exactly be revolutionary, it is yet another reminder that Republicans are doing a far better job of spreading their talking points on new media than the Democrats. Sure, the Katie Miller Podcast isn’t an “official” White House podcast, but the humanizing interview with Vance, along with Miller’s deep Maga ties, suggest it is very much Trump-approved. In an interview with the Washington Post published on Tuesday, Miller also insinuated that her podcast is a voter recruitment drive for 2028. “In order to cultivate the future of Maga, we have to talk to women,” she said.As the Republicans stretch their tentacles further into the world of podcasting and TikTok, Democrats are still desperately jumping on cringe memes to appeal to a younger audience while flailing around writing long policy documents about how they can spend millions of dollars manufacturing a “Joe Rogan of the left”. The Katie Miller Podcast may not end up being a hit, but it’s just one small part of a very effective Republican messaging strategy.Of course, the really important issue here – the question I’m sure you’re pondering right now – is whether the veep thinks a hotdog is a sandwich? The answer is: definitely not. Which, coincidentally, is also my answer to the question: will you ever voluntarily listen to the Katie Miller Podcast again? More

    More stories

    • 150 Shares60 Views

      in US Politics

      Pete Hegseth reposts video that says women shouldn’t be allowed to vote

      by

      The US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, recently shared a video in which several pastors say women should no longer be allowed to vote, prompting one progressive evangelical organization to express concern.Hegseth reposted a CNN segment on X on Thursday that focuses on pastor Doug Wilson, a Christian nationalist who co-founded the Idaho-based Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), In the segment, he raises the idea of women not voting.“I would like to see this nation being a Christian nation, and I would like this world to be a Christian world,” Wilson said.Another pastor interview by CNN for its segment, Toby Sumpter, said: “In my ideal society, we would vote as households. I would ordinarily be the one to cast the vote, but I would cast the vote having discussed it with my household.”A congregant interviewed for the segment remarked that she considers her husband as the head their household, and added: “I do submit to him.”Hegseth reposted the nearly seven-minute report with the caption: “All of Christ for All of Life.”Later in the video, Wilson says he does not believe women should hold leadership positions in the military or be able to fill high-profile combat roles.A statement from Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell on Saturday said Hegseth “is a proud member of a church affiliated with” the CREC.“The secretary very much appreciates many of Mr Wilson’s writings and teachings.”Hegseth and his family were in attendance at the Wilson church’s inaugural service in Washington in July, according to CNN.Doug Pagitt, a pastor and the executive director of the progressive evangelical organization Vote Common Good, told the Associated Press that the ideas in the video are views that “small fringes of Christians keep” and said it was “very disturbing” that Hegseth would amplify them.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHegseth’s repost on Thursday came as the Trump administration ramps up efforts to promote Christian nationalism. The push follows Donald Trump’s renewed alliance with the Christian right in his second presidential term, whose moves have included an executive order creating a federal taskforce to investigate what he calls “anti-Christian bias” in government agencies.The president also created a White House faith office in February, saying it would make recommendations to him “regarding changes to policies, programs and practices” and consult with outside experts in “combating antisemitic, anti-Christian and additional forms of anti-religious bias”.In May, Hegseth invited his personal pastor, Brooks Potteiger, to the Pentagon to lead the first of several Christian prayer services that the defense secretary has held inside the government building during working hours. Defense department employees and service members said they received invitations to the event in their government emails.The US constitution’s first amendment prohibits the government from establishing a state religion. But the US courts’ administrative office says the precise definition of “establishment” in that context historically has been unclear, especially with the constitution also protecting all citizens’ right to practice their religion generally as they please. More

    • 163 Shares111 Views

      in US Politics

      Why the US is burning $10m worth of birth control | Moira Donegan

      by

      There are few better metaphors for the receding status of American women than one offered up by the Trump administration at a medical waste disposal facility outside Paris this week: rather than distribute nearly $10m worth of birth control, which had been purchased by USAID and was destined to be given to women in low-income countries, primarily in Africa, the Americans decided to burn it.The incinerated contraceptives included 900,000 birth control implants, 2m doses of injectable long-acting birth control, 2m packs of contraceptive pills and 50,000 IUDs. The medicine is just the latest in the far-reaching fallout from cuts made by the so-called “department of government efficiency,” or Doge, a project in which Elon Musk and a group of his very young, overwhelmingly male acolytes unilaterally slashed congressionally appropriated funding to government programs they did not like. The cuts have been devastating for non-profits that work to improve women’s health and safety worldwide. Sarah Shaw, an associate director at the global family planning group MSI Reproductive Choices, says that the cuts will put women at risk as they strain their health with unplanned pregnancies and seek out illegal abortions; other women who are denied access to birth control will lose out on the opportunities for education, professional development or remunerative work that can help them escape abuse, rise out of poverty, pursue their talents and ambitions and better provide for the children they already have.When MSI attempted to buy the contraceptives, the administration would only accept full price, which the organization couldn’t afford, she said. Several non-profits, including MSI, had offered to pay to ship and repackage the supplies, according to another representative. But the Trump administration refused, partially due to federal rules the prohibit the US from providing such goods to groups that perform, provide referrals for or offer education about abortions. In addition to the cost of purchasing the contraceptives, American taxpayers will now be on the hook for about $167,000 for the cost of burning them.It’s just the latest in a series of signs that the Trump administration is turning against the provision of birth control, particularly the safe, effective and woman-controlled hormonal methods that have been a cornerstone of healthcare policy for decades and which were a precondition of women’s advancement in work and education over the past 60 years.In April, the Trump administration abruptly announced that it was suspending a large swath of the domestic service grants distributed under Title X, the program meant to help low-income Americans access birth control, STD treatment and other sexual and reproductive healthcare. Of the 86 Title X grants awarded for fiscal year 2024, nearly 25% were “temporarily withheld”, mostly based on highly suspect allegations that the grant-receiving institutions – including 13 Planned Parenthood affiliates – had failed to comply with Trump executive orders banning things like DEI programs. Eight states now receive zero Title X dollars: California, Hawaii, Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee and Utah. Alaska, Minnesota and Pennsylvania have also lost most of their contraception funding.The domestic cuts – along with the exclusion of Planned Parenthood clinics from Medicaid reimbursements – mean that American women, too, are now facing dramatically greater obstacles to accessing birth control. Clinics that relied on Title X funding are now set to close: 11 Planned Parenthood clinics already have, including in Democratically controlled states like California. Planned Parenthood says that cumulatively, the cuts could lead the organization to close about 200 of its 600 clinics nationwide – a devastating cut to abortion providers in particular that will make a wide range of reproductive services inaccessible to women regardless of where they live.But the Trump administration is not merely forcing these programs for women’s health and dignity go up in flames. They are redirecting them to better suit their preferred cultural outcome: one in which women’s lives, ambitions and talents are all subordinated to the task of childbearing. The New York Times reported last month that the White House is redirecting Title X funds that once went to birth control to instead fund an “infertility training center” and programs in something called “restorative reproductive medicine”. If Title X’s original aim was to help American women control their fertility so as to build healthier families and to enable them to pursue other aims – like learning or work – in the new administration’s version, the program exists mainly to encourage women to have more children. But the switch should not be seen as a genuine investment in infertility, an often devastating condition with which many Americans struggle. Because the new Title X priorities do not, by and large, direct more money to IVF. Trump promised, on the campaign trail, to make IVF free. But the procedure, which has opponents on the Christian right, is not included in the administration’s new priority of “restorative” reproductive medicine, a practice that avoids controversial fertility treatments; instead, doctors seek the “root cause” of a woman’s infertility, which may involve telling them they can conceive with proper diet and exercise.In government, money allocation is a statement of values. With its dramatic cuts to contraceptive funding at home and abroad, the Trump administration is making its values clear. It does not value women’s health; it does not value their dignity, their control over their own lives, their aspirations, their earning potential, their desire to be freed from ignorance, or poverty, or the abuse they suffer under the hands of husbands and fathers. It does not value their ability to control their own bodies, and by extension, it does not value their ability to enter the public sphere. It does not value their dreams, their gifts, their hard work or invention or aspiration to anything other than making babies. American women, like women everywhere, depend on birth control to live lives of freedom and to pursue their dreams. But because of the Trump administration, those dreams are going up in smoke.

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 138 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      Trump administration to destroy nearly $10m of contraceptives for women overseas

      by

      The Trump administration has decided to destroy $9.7m worth of contraceptives rather than send them abroad to women in need.A state department spokesperson confirmed that the decision had been made – a move that will cost US taxpayers $167,000. The contraceptives are primarily long-acting, such as IUDs and birth control implants, and were almost certainly intended for women in Africa, according to two senior congressional aides, one of whom visited a warehouse in Belgium that housed the contraceptives. It is not clear to the aides whether the destruction has already been carried out, but said they had been told that it was set to occur by the end of July.“It is unacceptable that the State Department would move forward with the destruction of more than $9m in taxpayer-funded family planning commodities purchased to support women in crisis settings, including war zones and refugee camps,” Jeanne Shaheen, a Democratic senator from New Hampshire, said in a statement. Shaheen and Brian Schatz, a Democratic senator from Hawaii, have introduced legislation to stop the destruction.“This is a waste of US taxpayer dollars and an abdication of US global leadership in preventing unintended pregnancies, unsafe abortions and maternal deaths,” added Shaheen, who in June sent a letter to the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, about the matter.The department decided to destroy the contraceptives because it could not sell them to any “eligible buyers”, in part because of US laws and rules that prohibit sending US aid to organizations that provide abortion services, counsel people about the procedure or advocate for the right to it overseas, according to the state department spokesperson.Most of the contraceptives have less than 70% of their shelf life left before they expire, the spokesperson said, and rebranding and selling the contraceptives could cost several million dollars. However, the aide who visited the warehouse said that the earliest expiration date they saw on the contraceptives was 2027, and that two-thirds of the contraceptives did not have any USAID labels that would need to be rebranded.The eradication of the contraceptives is part of the Trump administration’s months-long demolition of the Agency for International Development (USAID), the largest funding agency for humanitarian and development aid in the world. After the unofficial “department of government efficiency” (Doge) erased 83% of USAID’s programs, Rubio announced in June that USAID’s entire international workforce would be abolished and its foreign assistance programs would be moved to the state department. The agency will be replaced by an organization called America First.In total, the funding cuts to USAID could lead to more than 14m additional deaths by 2030, according to a recent study published in the journal the Lancet. A third of those deaths could be children.“If you have an unintended pregnancy and you end up having to seek unsafe abortion, it’s quite likely that you will die,” said Sarah Shaw, the associate director of advocacy at MSI Reproductive Choices, a global family planning organization that works in nearly 40 countries. “If you’re not given the means to space or limit your births, you’re putting your life at risk or your child’s life at risk.”MSI tried to purchase the contraceptives from the US government, Shaw said. But the government would only accept full price – which Shaw said the agency could not afford, given that MSI would also have to shoulder the expense of transportingthe contraceptives and the fact that they are inching closer to their expiration date, which could affect MSI’s ability to distribute them.The state department spokesperson did not specifically respond to a request for comment on Shaw’s allegation, but MSI does provide abortions as part of its global work, which may have led the department to rule it out as an “eligible buyer”.In an internal survey, MSI programs in 10 countries reported that, within the next month, they expect to be out of stock or be on the brink of being out of stock of at least one contraceptive method. The countries include Burkina Faso, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mali, Ethiopia, Nigeria, Tanzania, Timor-Leste, Senegal, Kenya and Sierra Leone.Shaw expects the stock to be incinerated. “The fact that the contraceptives are going to be burned when there’s so much need – it’s just egregious,” she said. “It’s disgusting.” The Department of State spokesperson did not respond to a request for information on the planned method of destruction.The destruction of the contraceptives is, to Shaw, emblematic of the overall destruction of a system that once provided worldwide help to women and families. USAID funding is threaded through so much of the global supply chain of family planning aid that, without its money, the chain has come apart. In Mali, Shaw said, USAID helped pay for the gas used by the vehicles that transport contraceptives from a warehouse. Without the gas money, the vehicles were stuck – and so were the contraceptives.“I’ve worked in this sector for over 20 years and I’ve never seen anything on this scale,” Shaw said. “The speed at which they’ve managed to dismantle excellent work and really great progress – I mean, it’s just vanished in weeks.”Other kinds of assistance are also reportedly being wasted. This week, the Atlantic reported that almost 500 metric tons of emergency food were expiring and would be incinerated, rather than being used to feed about 1.5 million children in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Meanwhile, almost 800,000 Mpox vaccines that were supposed to be sent to Africa are now unusable because they are too close to their expiration date, according to Politico.The cuts to foreign aid are slated to deepen. Early on Friday morning, Congress passed a bill to claw back roughly $8bn that had been earmarked for foreign assistance.“It’s not just about an empty shelf,” Shaw said. “It’s about unfulfilled potential. It’s about a girl having to drop out of school. It’s about someone having to seek an unsafe abortion and risking their lives. That’s what it’s really about.” More

    • 188 Shares129 Views

      in US Politics

      Republicans wanted fewer abortions and more births. They are getting the opposite | Judith Levine

      by

      Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the US supreme court case that rescinded the constitutional right to abortion, is failing on its own terms. Since the ruling, in June 2022, the number of abortions in the US has risen. Support for reproductive rights is on the upswing. And the rate of voluntary sterilization among young women – a repudiation of Trumpian pronatalism, if a desperate one – jumped abruptly after Dobbs, and there’s no reason to believe it will drop off.Also rising at an alarming clip are preventable maternal deaths and criminal prosecutions of pregnant people.Yet the 21 state legislatures that have imposed total or near-total bans are doing little or nothing to give doctors legal leeway to save the health and lives of pregnant women in medical distress, even if that means inducing abortion. In fact, rather than trying to save lives, they are prosecuting pregnant people who handle those emergencies on their own.The first three – more abortions, more pro-abortion sentiment, more contraception –have frustrated the anti-abortion crowd no end. They know they need stronger disincentives to abortion.Which brings us to the latter two: more punishment and more death. Was punishment the aim all along? And has the anti-abortion movement accepted pregnant people’s deaths as an unfortunate consequence of saving the pre-born?According to the Guttmacher Institute, abortions rose 1.5% in 2024 from 2023, on top of a 11.1% leap in the first year after Dobbs, compared with 2020, before the near-bans enacted in several states that presaged the ruling.It’s also probably an undercount. The statistics include only “clinician-provided abortions”, either surgical or medical (using abortion pills), performed in healthcare facilities or via telemedicine. Guttmacher does not estimate how many abortions are happening outside the formal healthcare system, with drugs obtained directly from suppliers or through feminist underground networks.Indeed, Plan C, the country’s biggest clearinghouse for pill access, reports 2m visits to its website and 500,000 click-throughs to resources and care in 2024, a 25% increase from the year before. How many of those people ended their pregnancies at home, with only a friend or lover in attendance? Anecdotal evidence gleaned from activists suggests they number in the tens of thousands.At the same time, rather than making abortion “unthinkable”, as the anti-abortion activists pledge, the bans may be having the opposite effect. An analysis of two restrictive states, Arizona and Wisconsin, and one with broad access, New Jersey, found that negative attitudes toward abortion are down and positive ones up, in both red and blue states.And if the goal of banning abortion is to produce more children, that’s not working either. Public health researchers saw “an abrupt increase in permanent contraception procedures” – sterilization – following Dobbs among adults in their prime reproductive years, ages 18 to 30. Unsurprisingly, the increase in procedures for women (tubal ligations) was twice that for men (vasectomies).The Trump administration is cheerleading for procreation. “I want more babies in the United States of America,” declared JD Vance in his first public appearance as vice-president, at the March for Life in Washington. He blamed the declining birth rate on “a culture of abortion on demand” and the failure “to help young parents achieve the ingredients they need to lead a happy and meaningful life”. The federal budget extends some of that help. It raises the annual child tax credit (CTC) from $2,000 to $2,200. It also creates “Trump accounts”, $1,000 per child, which parents or employers can add to.But only those with social security numbers are eligible for either program; the tax credit is available only to people who earn enough to pay taxes; and as with any investment, those able to sow more in the savings accounts reap more. It’s clear what sort of baby the administration wishes to be born: white babies with “American” parents, and not the poorest.The carrots are not appetizing enough. The stick is not effective enough. So red-state legislators and prosecutors are ramping up the punitive approach.This year, Republican lawmakers in at least 10 states introduced bills defining abortion as homicide, and, for the first time, criminalizing both the provider and the patient.No such bill has passed – yet – and anti-abortion organizations are usually quick to renounce them publicly, nervous about widespread opposition. But their passage might not be far off. The bills are based on fetal personhood – the concept of conferring full legal rights to a fetus from conception forward. The idea was introduced in 1884 and finally written into one state’s law in 1986. By 2024, 39 states had fetal homicide laws. Last year, there were three bills criminalizing the person who has an abortion; now there are 10. And though the federal courts rejected fetal personhood for a century, it is the bedrock of anti-abortion politics, and this US supreme court is looking much more friendly toward it.While they work toward straightforward criminalization of ending one’s own pregnancy, anti-abortion lawmakers and prosecutors are making creative use of existing law to punish miscarriage, an event indistinguishable from elective abortion, just in case the pregnant person induced the miscarriage. The most ghoulish is the prohibition on abusing corpses.For instance: last week a 31-year-old South Carolina woman who miscarried and disposed of the tissue in the trash was arrested for “desecration of human remains”, a crime carrying a 10-year sentence. In March, a woman found bleeding outside her Georgia apartment after a miscarriage was jailed for “concealing the death of another person” and “abandonment of a dead body” for placing the remains in the bin. A week before that, a Pennsylvania teenager was under investigation for corpse abuse after a self-managed pill abortion and burial of the fetus in her yard.In a grim sense, these are the lucky ones: they survived. Because Dobbs has indisputably been deadly.“Mothers living in states that banned abortion were nearly twice as likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth, or soon after giving birth” as mothers living in states where abortion was legal and accessible, reports the Gender Equity Policy Institute. Maternal mortality rose 56% in Texas after it enacted a six-week ban; a Texan’s risk was one and a half times that of a Californian’s.The future isn’t sunny. A study of 14 total-ban states predicts that in the four years beginning a year after Dobbs, up to 42 mothers will die and as many as 2,700 will be afflicted with “severe maternal morbidity”, defined by the CDC as “unexpected outcomes of labor and delivery that result in significant short-term or long-term [health] consequences”. In one analysis Black women represented 63% of the deaths.The anti-abortion movement is indefatigable. “We abolishioners will not rest until we have effected the abolishment of human abortion,” one leader told Oklahoma Voice. But this is an unattainable grail. Where abortion is illegal, people still have abortions. They just take more risks. Globally, more than 39,000 women die yearly from unsafe abortions.As they run out of options, red-state lawmakers will harden criminal penalties against people who refuse to give up their reproductive self-determination. It may grow less outré to endorse Trump’s opinion, expressed in an unguarded moment, that women who get illegal abortions “deserve some form of punishment”. Whether intentional or not, the sentence for some of those women will be death.

      Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism More

    • 200 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Childcare is a hellscape for most US families. Why isn’t there a bigger push for change?

      by

      In 2021, Bri Adams was pregnant with her first child and began signing up for waitlists for childcare – eight, to be exact. She was thrilled when she found a spot, but was quickly horrified when the childcare shut down abruptly.It “kind of broke my brain a bit”, said Adams, a 34-year-old tech director from Falls Church, Virginia. Scrambling again, she found a new location close to the family’s home.Like Adams’s household, two-thirds of US families with young children – including middle- and upper-middle-class families who frequently command politicians’ attention – have had all available parents in the workforce since the late 1990s. Yet parents still struggle mightily to access quality childcare; large majorities say it is hard to find and afford care, and the cost of care continues to rise at a faster rate than inflation.As near-universal as these challenges are, there is a persistent and surprising lack of a mass movement demanding major childcare reforms. US parents are basically on their own to figure out solutions for their families. Adams “considers herself lucky” that she and her husband, who take home $11,000 each month after taxes, can spend more than $50,000 a year on their two kids’ childcare. Childcare remains their biggest expense, costing a whopping $4,300 a month – $800 more than their mortgage. As Adams asked: “If I am feeling such intense financial stress when we make $300,000 a year, how on earth are people managing who make so much less and have zero safety net?”View image in fullscreenOther countries like Canada, Germany and Ireland have made transformative changes to their previously inadequate systems, partly spurred on by parents like Adams. In February 2020, for instance, more than 30,000 parents and childcare providers flooded the streets of Dublin, an event credited with elevating childcare to a top-tier political issue and securing more public funding. Despite the long-broken American childcare system, there has never been a successful and sustained mass mobilization demanding the government do something to fix the problem.So what has held the US back from achieving such a program, even though polling suggests it would be widely popular for families, and a boon to our communities and economy?The historical divide in childcareThe US has long had a fraught and contradictory relationship with childcare, one wrapped up in clashes over the role of the family versus the state and tainted by sexism and racism. These tensions culminated with an epic failure in the 1970s, the consequences of which still reverberate today.For most of the 19th century, working- and middle-class families lived on self-contained farms or ran small family businesses. Young children worked on those farms or in those businesses, and childcare responsibilities were shared among family members. For families of means, beginning with slavery and continuing well into the present day, women of color have provided unpaid or undercompensated care for upper-class families, even while frequently being unable to care for their own families.During the second world war, with men at war and women taking on the manufacturing jobs at home, the US briefly created a successful, publicly supported childcare system. However, many workplaces restricted mothers from the workplace when the men returned.But by the late 1960s, mothers were entering the paid labor force in droves, representing one of the largest labor market shifts in modern American history. Organizing efforts came together in 1971 to help Congress pass the Comprehensive Child Development Act, a bipartisan bill that would have begun creating a nationally funded, locally run network of childcare centers.View image in fullscreenBy this time, however, the progressive New Deal coalition of the 1930s – riven both by the disaster in Vietnam and cultural conflicts at home – was giving way to a free-market order marked by a distrust of government intervention. The act was subsequently vetoed by Richard Nixon on the grounds that it would assert the government’s authority “against the family-centered approach”.In a span of only 30 years, while the US’s European counterparts began investing in broad-based childcare systems as they needed women to work and rebuild countries devastated by war, the United States went from considering the idea of a federally funded childcare system to entrenched opposition.Childcare as a ‘private family issue’Access to childcare has deep economic implications, and it’s also a social issue mired in cultural policies that ask: who gets to work and who should be at home watching kids? Through the 1950s, many companies explicitly discriminated against married women or mothers in hiring or retention. Popular TV shows of the era, from Father Knows Best to The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, reinforced a traditionalist view of gender dynamics around care. Even today, many parents continue to say that it is primarily parents’ responsibility to figure out how to make childcare work.Sandra Levitsky, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who has studied US care movements, explained that deep-seated ideologies were “hard to shift” and believes the leap from being seen as a private issue to a public one is “at the heart” of what needs to change for the movement to expand. “If it couldn’t happen [during Covid] – when women were literally quitting their jobs to care for their kids – what is going to happen now?” she said.On a national level, childcare has what political science calls a “salience” problem. Today’s voters say they support childcare measures, even regularly approving measures on state and local ballots. Yet very few politicians are elected or defeated due to their childcare stance.When parents get politicalHistory has shown that parents can, however, be a remarkably effective and galvanized voting bloc: parents led organizing efforts following the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre by launching Moms Demand Action, and conservative parents concerned about Covid school restrictions responded by forming Moms for Liberty. It was a bereaved parent who started Mothers Against Drunk Driving, while in an earlier era, mothers’ groups were instrumental in the fight against child labor through pamphleteering, hosting public lectures and pressuring legislators.Since the pandemic, multiple major parent organizing efforts with childcare as a main pillar have launched or scaled up, and more philanthropic dollars have flowed to the movement. The increase in childcare advocacy funding is consequential: for decades, childcare organizers have scraped by with limited resources, the equivalent of bringing a horse-and-buggy to the political racetrack.Chamber of Mothers, of which Bri Adams is a part, was formed in 2021 by a group of social media-savvy mothers incensed after $400bn in childcare funding was dropped from the Build Back Better legislation. The chamber now has dozens of chapters across the nation where mothers come together to build community, learn about public policy issues and organize politically. Another group, Moms First, developed out of an effort to create a “Marshall plan for moms” in the midst of the pandemic, and founder Reshma Saujani was the one who asked then candidate Donald Trump a childcare question during the presidential campaign; Trump’s rambling response about how “the childcare is childcare” went viral. Additionally, several philanthropic entities in 2018 created the Raising Child Care Fund, which provides funding to 20 social justice-focused childcare organizing groups. Collectively, these initiatives point to the type of energy and infrastructure that can help issues leap from private matter to public concern.The final piece that is missing is a shared vision.View image in fullscreen“We don’t have a clear definition of what the what is,” said Natalie Renew, executive director of Home Grown, a philanthropic collaborative focused on strengthening home-based childcare options. “We don’t have a shared consensus to define what childcare is and who benefits from it, and what those benefits and outcomes look like.” Renew points to the divide between groups that organize for childcare using economic arguments to support parents doing wage labor, and groups that organize for childcare using kindergarten readiness as a means to support pre-kindergarten. “But pre-K is not childcare,” Renew said. “It can be part of a childcare solution, but it’s not childcare.”For all of the challenges, we know change is possible – even on long-held social beliefs – in a relatively compressed period of time. In the past two decades, the US has normalized and enshrined into law the rights of gay people to marry and participate fully in society. We’ve also changed paternity leave from a rare fringe benefit to an increasingly expected workplace leave policy. We may have deeply held beliefs about who takes care of children, but as more generations with different expectations about who can care for their children become parents – and after the wake-up call of the Covid pandemic – we can see a shift potentially beginning to take hold.Renew, too, is heartened by the changes she has seen in childcare policies and structures at the local and state levels, advances that arguably provide a proof of concept. Buoyed by Covid relief funds, localities had a chance to invest in childcare. “We saw cities and towns putting their flexible dollars to childcare, and they became stakeholders in the conversation,” she said. And as states begin to invest more in childcare systems locally notably in Vermont and New Mexico – more localities are beginning to take notice and have seen how such efforts boost their local economies and families’ wellbeing.America’s history, prevailing cultural attitudes and an underpowered advocacy ecosystem have all contributed to the current childcare hellscape. But it’s possible that enough parents have begun to look around and ask: why is the United States making this harder than it needs to be? Real change will come when it’s no longer just parents asking that question. More

    • 188 Shares179 Views

      in US Politics

      Planned Parenthood CEO warns Trump bill will lead to $700m loss and ‘backdoor abortion ban’

      by

      Planned Parenthood stands to lose roughly $700m in federal funding if the US House passes Republicans’ massive spending-and-tax bill, the organization’s CEO said on Wednesday, amounting to what abortion rights supporters and opponents alike have called a “backdoor abortion ban”.“We are facing down the reality that nearly 200 health centers are at risk of closure. We’re facing a reality of the impact on shutting down almost half of abortion-providing health centers,” Alexis McGill Johnson, Planned Parenthood Federation of Americas’s CEO, said in an interview Wednesday morning. “It does feel existential. Not just for Planned Parenthood, but for communities that are relying on access to this care.”Anti-abortion activists have longed to “defund” Planned Parenthood for decades. They are closer than ever to achieving their goal.That $700m figure represents the loss that Planned Parenthood would face from a provision in the spending bill that would impose a one-year Medicaid ban on healthcare non-profits that offer abortions and that received more than $800,000 in federal funding in 2023, as well as the funding that Planned Parenthood could lose from Title X, the nation’s largest family-planning program. In late March, the Trump administration froze tens of millions of dollars of Title X funding that had been set aside for some Planned Parenthood and other family-planning clinics.“Essentially what you are seeing is a gutting of a safety net,” said McGill Johnson, who characterized the bill as a “backdoor abortion ban” in a statement.Medicaid is the US government’s insurance program for low-income people, and about 80 million people use it. If the latest version of the spending-and-tax bill passes, nearly 12 million people are expected to lose their Medicaid coverage.Donald Trump has said that he would like the bill to be on his desk, ready for a signature, by 4 July.The provision attacking Planned Parenthood would primarily target clinics in blue states that have protected abortion rights since the overturning of Roe v Wade three years ago, because those blue states have larger numbers of people on Medicaid. Although not all Planned Parenthood clinics perform abortions, the reproductive healthcare giant provides 38% of US abortions, according to the latest data from Abortion Care Network, a membership group for independent abortion clinics.Among the clinics at risk of closure, Planned Parenthood estimated, more than 90% are in states that permit abortion. Sixty percent are located in areas that have been deemed “medically underserved”.In total, more than 1.1 million Planned Parenthood patients could lose access to care.“There’s nowhere else for folks” to go, McGill Johnson said. “The community health centers have said they cannot absorb the patients that Planned Parenthood sees. So I think that we do need to just call it a targeted attack because that’s exactly how it is.”Nationally, 11% of female Medicaid beneficiaries between the ages of 15 and 49 and who receive family-planning services go to Planned Parenthood for a range of services, according to an analysis by the non-profit KFF, which tracks healthcare policy. Those numbers rise in blue states like Washington, Oregon and Connecticut.In California, that number soars to 29%. The impact on the state would be so devastating that Nichole Ramirez, senior vice-president of communication and donor relations at Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties, called the tax-and-spending package’s provision “a direct attack on us, really”.“They haven’t been able to figure out how to ban abortion nationwide and they haven’t been able to figure out how to ban abortion in California specifically,” said Ramirez, who estimated that Planned Parenthood of Orange and San Bernardino counties stands to lose between $40m and $60m. Ramirez continued: “This is their way to go about banning abortion. That is the entire goal here.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn a post on X, the prominent anti-abortion group Live Action reposted an image of a Planned Parenthood graphic calling the provision “backdoor abortion ban”. “They might be onto us,” Live Action wrote.The Planned Parenthood network is overseen by Planned Parenthood Federation of America, but it also consists of dozens of independent regional affiliates that operate nearly 600 clinics across the country. In June, as the spending-and-tax bill moved through Congress, Autonomy News, an outlet that focuses on threats to bodily autonomy, reported that Planned Parenthood Federation of America’s accreditation board had sent waivers out to affiliates to apply for approval to cease providing abortions in order to preserve access to Medicaid funding. On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that a memo sent to the leadership of one California affiliate suggests that leaders there had considered ending abortion services.McGill Johnson said that there have been discussions within Planned Parenthood’s network about what it would mean to stop offering abortions. But no affiliates, to her knowledge, are moving forward with plans to stop performing the procedure.“Educating our volunteers and teams around hard decisions to stand and understand the impact of that is different than weighing and considering a stoppage of abortion,” McGill Johnson said.The budget bill and Title X funding freeze aren’t the only sources of pressure on the group. The US supreme court last week ruled in favor of South Carolina in a case involving the state’s attempt to kick Planned Parenthood out of its state Medicaid reimbursement program – a ruling that will likely give a green light to other states that also want to defund Planned Parenthood.At least one other organization that provides abortion and family-planning services, Maine Family Planning, will be affected by the provision, according to the organization’s CEO, George Hill. Maine Family Planning directly operates 18 clinics, including several that provide primary care or are in rural, medically underserved areas. If the provision takes effect, Hill estimates, the organization would lose 20% of its operating budget.“It’s dressed up as a budget provision, but it’s not,” Hill said. “They’re basically taking the rug out from under our feet.” More

    • 175 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      As Trump targets birthright citizenship, the terrain is once again ‘women’s bodies and sexuality’

      by

      One day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, five pregnant immigrant women – led by an asylum seeker from Venezuela – sued over the president’s executive order limiting automatic birthright citizenship, out of fear that their unborn children would be left stateless.The case went before the supreme court, which sided with the Trump administration Friday by restricting the ability of federal judges to block the order.The legal drama recalls a scene a century and a half earlier, when a different cohort of immigrant women went to the country’s highest court to challenge a restrictive California law. In 1874, San Francisco officials detained 22 Chinese women at the port after declaring them “lewd and debauched” – a condition that allowed for denial of entry.The supreme court sided with the women and struck down the law, delivering the first victory to a Chinese litigant in the US. But its ruling also established the federal government’s exclusive authority over immigration, paving the way for the passage of the Page Act of 1875, the first piece of federal legislation restricting immigration.Trump’s hardline immigration-enforcement strategy, which has focused on birthright citizenship and sparked a family-separation crisis, bears resemblance to the restrictive laws against Chinese women in the late 19th century, which historians say led to lasting demographic changes in Chinese American communities. Political campaigns of both eras, experts say, sought to stem the growth of immigrant populations by targeting women’s bodies.“What the Page Act, the Chinese Exclusion Act and birthright citizenship all have in common is the battle over who we deem admissible, as having a right to be here,” said Catherine Lee, an associate professor of sociology at Rutgers University whose research focuses on family reunification in American immigration. “And the terrain on which we’re having these discussions is women’s bodies and women’s sexuality.”The Page Act denied entry of “lewd” and “immoral” women, ostensibly to curb prostitution. While sex workers of many nationalities immigrated to the US, experts say local authorities almost exclusively enforced the law against women of Chinese descent. More than curbing immigration, Lee said, the legislation set a standard for determining who was eligible for citizenship and for birthing future generations of Americans.The law placed the burden of proof on Chinese women themselves, research shows. Before boarding a ship to the US, the women had to produce evidence of “respectable” character by submitting a declaration of morality and undergoing extensive interrogations, character assessments and family background checks.At the same time, doctors and health professionals smeared Chinese women as carriers of venereal diseases, Lee said. J Marion Sims, a prominent gynecologist who led the American Medical Association at the time, falsely declared that the arrival of Chinese women had caused a “Chinese syphilis” epidemic.Bill Hing, a law and migration studies professor at the University of San Francisco and author of Making and Remaking Asian America, said the Page Act was “an evil way at controlling the population” to ensure that the Chinese American community wouldn’t grow.The law did drastically alter the demographics of the Chinese population. In 1870, Chinese men in the US outnumbered Chinese women by a ratio of 13 to 1. By 1880, just a half decade after the law’s passage, that gap had nearly doubled, to 21 to 1.One legacy of the Page Act, Hing said, was the formation of “bachelor societies”. The de facto immigration ban against Chinese women made it virtually impossible for Chinese men to form families in the US, as anti-miscegenation laws forbade them from marrying women outside their race.Today, Hing said, attempts to repeal birthright citizenship is another way of suppressing the development of immigrant populations. “It falls right into the same intent of eliminating the ability of communities of color to expand,” he said.View image in fullscreenTrump’s January executive order, which would deny citizenship to US-born babies whose parents aren’t citizens or green-card holders, employs a gendered line of argument similar to that of the Page Act, Lee said. (The government has lost every case so far about the executive order, as it directly contradicts the 14th amendment.)In a 6-3 vote Friday, the supreme court ruled that lower courts could not impose nationwide bans against Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship. The ruling, which immigrant rights advocates say opens the door for a partial enforcement of the order, doesn’t address the constitutionality of the order itself.“Birthright citizenship assumes that women are having sex,” Lee said, “and whether she’s having sex with a lawful permanent resident or a citizen determines the status of her child.”Congressional Republicans continue to employ gendered and racialized rhetoric in their attacks on birthright citizenship and so-called “birth tourism”, the practice of pregnant women traveling to the US specifically to give birth and secure citizenship for their children. Political and media attention on the latter issue has been disproportionately focused on Chinese nationals.Last month, the Republican senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee introduced a bill that bans foreign nationals from “buying” American citizenship. She called “birth tourism” a “multimillion-dollar industry” exploited by pregnant women from “adversaries like communist China and Russia”.Although the extent of “birth tourism” is unknown, studies have shown that it comprises just a small portion of US-born Chinese infants. Many are born to US citizens or permanent residents, who form more than a majority of the foreign-born Chinese population. (A decade ago, Chinese “birth tourists” accounted for just 1% of all Chinese tourists visiting the US.)Virginia Loh-Hagan, co-executive director of the Asian American Education Project, said a long-lasting ramification of the Page Act is the “exploitation, fetishization and dehumanization” of Asian women that has led to deadly hate crimes, such as the spree of shootings at three Asian-owned Atlanta spas in 2021.“If immigrants in this country were denied the opportunity to build families and communities,” Loh-Hagan said, “then they have less community strength, less voice and power in politics and governance of this country.” More

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      US supreme court to hear case involving anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center

      by

      The US supreme court agreed on Monday to consider reviving a New Jersey anti-abortion crisis pregnancy center operator’s bid to block the Democratic-led state’s attorney general from investigating whether it deceived women into believing it offered abortions.The justices took up an appeal by First Choice Women’s Resource Centers of a lower court’s ruling that the Christian faith-based organization must first contest Attorney General Matthew Platkin’s subpoena in state court before bringing a federal lawsuit challenging it.The justices are expected to hear the case in their next term, which begins in October.Crisis pregnancy centers provide services to pregnant women with the goal of preventing them from having abortions. Such centers do not advertise their anti-abortion stance, and abortion rights advocates have called them deceptive. The case provides a test of the ability of state authorities to regulate these businesses.First Choice, which has five locations in New Jersey, has argued that it has a right to bring its case in federal court because it was alleging a violation of its federal rights to free speech and free association under the first amendment of the US constitution. First Choice is represented by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal group that has brought other cases on behalf of anti-abortion plaintiffs including an effort to restrict distribution of the abortion pill that has since been taken over by Republican states.New Jersey is targeting First Choice because of its views, Alliance Defending Freedom lawyer Erin Hawley said.“We are looking forward to presenting our case to the supreme court and urging it to hold that First Choice has the same right to federal court as any other civil rights plaintiff,” Hawley said in a statement.Platkin said that his office may investigate to ensure nonprofits are not deceiving residents and that First Choice has for years refused to answer questions about “potential misrepresentations they have been making, including about reproductive healthcare”.“First Choice is looking for a special exception from the usual procedural rules as it tries to avoid complying with an entirely lawful state subpoena, something the US Constitution does not permit it to do. No industry is entitled to that type of special treatment – period,” Platkin added.First Choice sued Platkin in New Jersey federal court in 2023 after the attorney general issued a subpoena seeking internal records including the names of its doctors and donors as part of an investigation into potentially unlawful practices. First Choice argued that there was no good cause for the subpoena, which it said chilled its first amendment rights.Platkin moved to enforce the subpoena in state court. Essex county superior court Judge Lisa Adubato granted that motion, finding that First Choice had not shown that the subpoena should be quashed at the outset of the investigation, but ordered the parties to negotiate a narrower subpoena and said that the constitutional issues could be litigated further going forward.The US district judge Michael Shipp then dismissed the federal case, finding that First Choice’s federal claim was not ripe because it could continue to make its constitutional claims in the state court and did not face any immediate threat of contempt.The Philadelphia-based third circuit court of appeals in a 2-1 ruling in December 2024 upheld Shipp’s ruling, prompting First Choice to appeal to the justices.In asking the supreme court to hear the case, First Choice argued that federal civil rights law is intended to guarantee parties a federal forum to assert their constitutional rights. It said that forcing it to litigate in state court would effectively deny it that forum, since the constitutional claims would be decided before a federal court could ever hear them.Crisis pregnancy centers have also drawn the attention of the New York attorney general, Letitia James, who in 2024 sued 11 centers for advertising abortion pill reversal, a treatment whose safety and effectiveness is unproven. That case remains pending. Several New York crisis pregnancy centers sued James and in August won an order allowing them to continue touting abortion pill reversal. More