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    Millions of Women Will Lose Access to Contraception as a Result of Trump Aid Cuts

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    The United States is ending its financial support for family planning programs in developing countries, cutting nearly 50 million women off from access to contraception.This policy change has attracted little attention amid the wholesale dismantling of American foreign aid, but it stands to have enormous implications, including more maternal deaths and an overall increase in poverty. It derails an effort that had brought long-acting contraceptives to women in some of the poorest and most isolated parts of the world in recent years.The United States provided about 40 percent of the funding governments contributed to family planning programs in 31 developing countries, some $600 million, in 2023, the last year for which data is available, according to KFF, a health research organization.That American funding provided contraceptive devices and the medical services to deliver them to more than 47 million women and couples, which is estimated to have averted 17.1 million unintended pregnancies and 5.2 million unsafe abortions, according to an analysis by the Guttmacher Institute, a sexual health research organization. Without this annual contribution, 34,000 women could die from preventable maternal deaths each year, the Guttmacher calculation concluded.“The magnitude of the impact is mind-boggling,” said Marie Ba, who leads the coordination team for the Ouagadougou Partnership, an initiative to accelerate investments and access to family planning in nine West African countries.The funding has been terminated as part of the Trump administration’s disassembling of the United States Agency for International Development. The State Department, into which the skeletal remains of U.S.A.I.D. was absorbed on Friday, did not reply to a request for comment on the decision to stop funding family planning. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has described the terminated aid projects as wasteful and not aligned with American strategic interest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hegseth Mandates Uniform Fitness Standards for Combat Roles

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      The Pentagon this week ordered the elimination of lower physical fitness standards for women in combat units, a move that is likely to hinder the recruitment and retention of women in particularly dangerous military jobs.An order by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, dated Sunday and announced on Monday, mandated that all physical fitness requirements for combat arms positions — units likely to see significant fighting in wartime — be “sex-neutral,” which is likely to significantly reduce the number of women who meet the requirements. The order directs military leadership to implement the new fitness standards by the end of October.The U.S. military has fiercely debated the issue of how to fairly grade women’s physical fitness in testing to determine their placement into physically demanding combat jobs and their advancement in leadership roles.After years of internal deliberation over new annual fitness tests, the Army eased the grading standards for women and older service members in 2022. A study by the RAND research corporation published that year found that women and older troops were failing the new test at significantly higher rates than men and younger troops.Other branches of the military have also had different fitness test standards for men and women. For example, the Marines have a strength test for all recruits: Men must complete three pull-ups or 34 push-ups in under two minutes. Women must complete one pull-up or 15 push-ups in the same time frame.Those gender-specific standards will remain for some military jobs, Mr. Hegseth said in a statement accompanying the order. But he argued that women should not be allowed in combat units if they could not meet the same fitness standards as men.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Tate-Pilled Boys Are a Problem for Schools

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      I watched the four hourlong episodes of the Netflix series “Adolescence” in one extended, horrifying gulp. The story follows an angel-faced 13-year-old British boy named Jamie who is accused of murdering his classmate, Katie, and lays out the effect on his family and peers. The show is fiction, though the creators say they were partly inspired by the shocking reality of violently misogynistic young men. “What’s happening in society where a boy stabs a girl to death? What’s the inciting incident here?” Stephen Graham, who is a writer of the series and also stars in it as Jamie’s bereft father, recalled thinking after one particular assault. “And then it happened again, and it happened again, and it happened again.”You know by the end of the first episode that Jamie is guilty; the police have video of Jamie stabbing Katie. So the central question becomes why did he do it, and the explanation rolls out over the next three episodes. His family is loving, if imperfect, like most families. Jamie’s father, a plumber, is disappointed in him for not being an athlete and doesn’t quite know how to relate to his sensitive, artistic son. Jamie is bullied in school and filled with self-loathing, and he turns to Andrew Tate and other purveyors of sexist online content to make himself feel big.In the third episode, a pretty, young psychologist, Briony, draws out the “inciting incident” for the murder. Katie sent a photo of herself topless to a classmate, who then circulated it without her consent — something all too common in the real world. Jamie subsequently asks her out, thinking she might be amenable because “she might be weak,” since “everyone was calling her slag, you know, or flat or whatever.”Katie turns him down, saying she’s not that desperate, and mocks him as an incel on Instagram. His entitlement and shame drive him to kill her. During the episode, Jamie mocks and menaces Briony, at one point standing over her, cursing at her and roaring in her face — it seems that every time she gets him to show his soft, vulnerable side, he turns on her, using undermining “negging” techniques that were often promoted in the online manosphere as far back as 20 years ago, before it was even called that, back when its levels of misogyny were quaint by today’s standards.Jamie’s treatment of Briony reflects an unfortunate reality: Female teachers in Britain have sounded the alarm about incel culture — in 2022, The Guardian reported that 70 percent said they have faced misogyny in schools, evidence that many red-pilled boys feel the need to reassert the power dynamic of male supremacy even to adult women. In 2024, Cosmopolitan U.K. reported on “school in the era of Andrew Tate.”Stephanie Wescott, a lecturer at the school of education, culture and society at Australia’s Monash University, was a primary-school teacher before she went into academia, and she told me she experienced “sexism, sexual harassment and misogyny just as a daily experience in the classroom,” from teenage boys. She started reading news reports of teachers experiencing “a wave of misogyny” after Tate became popular in Britain and she wanted to see if Australian teachers were dealing with the same problems.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Girls to the Front: Punk Pioneers Are Coming to Lincoln Center

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      The institution’s annual American Songbook series honors “singer outsiders” including Fanny and Poly Styrene in events curated by Kathleen Hanna and Tamar-kali.For more than 65 years, Lincoln Center has hosted virtuoso concert musicians, opera singers and ballet stars.But a noise queen with ripped tights and a screeching guitar?Enter Kathleen Hanna and Tamar-kali, musicians with big bootprints in the punk scene, and curators of the latest iteration of Lincoln Center’s venerable American Songbook series. Their version honors “singer outsiders,” which includes a series of concerts and tributes to acts like the Slits, Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex and more, this month and next. It’s the first time Lincoln Center has celebrated the raw, propulsive D.I.Y. genre of punk, let alone the women who kicked their way through.The idea was to introduce an uptown audience to “our canon,” as Hanna, the Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman, and riot grrrl originator, put it. They booked contemporary artists to showcase punk’s elasticity, and to highlight styles that have historically been overlooked.“As a songwriter, there’s a lot of delegitimizing of aggressive music,” Tamar-kali said. But curating for Lincoln Center offered validation: “It just feels like I’m real musician now,” Hanna said, and they both laughed.Tamar-kali, a Brooklyn singer and composer (born Tamar-kali Brown), helped found the New York collective Sista Grrrl Riot, an outlet for feminist Afropunk, in the late ’90s; she and Hanna met in the early aughts and have been seeking ways to work together since.“As a songwriter, there’s a lot of delegitimizing of aggressive music,” said Tamar-kali, one of the series’ curators.Jack Vartoogian/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Arlington Cemetery Website Loses Pages on Black Soldiers, Women in Military and Civil War

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      Materials on the Arlington National Cemetery website highlighting the graves of Black and female service members have vanished as the Trump administration purges government websites of references to diversity and inclusion.Among the obscured pages are cemetery guides focused on Black soldiers, women’s military service and Civil War veterans. Some of the materials were still online Friday, but they were no longer easily accessible through the cemetery’s website.A part of the site devoted to segregation and civil rights was largely scrubbed. That section once included a walking tour focused on Black soldiers and a lesson plan on reconstruction.The cemetery, which is operated by the Army, said in a statement on Friday that it remained committed to “sharing the stories of military service and sacrifice to the nation with transparency and professionalism” and that it was working to restore links to the content.“We are hopeful to begin republishing content next week,” Kerry Meeker, a cemetery spokeswoman, said in an email on Friday.On Friday, the cemetery’s website still had an active page describing Section 27, which includes the graves of thousands of African Americans freed from slavery. Another active page listed prominent African Americans — including Medgar Evers, Thurgood Marshall and Colin L. Powell — buried on the grounds.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Teenagers Say Girls Are Equal to Boys in School, or Are Ahead

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      Reflecting a generational change, two Pew surveys show boys tend to feel discouraged in the classroom, and are less likely than girls to pursue college.In the 1980s and 1990s, boys still dominated American classrooms. They outscored girls in math and science, they raised their hands more often and they got more attention from teachers, data showed.That’s not the reality for today’s students. More than half of teenagers say that boys and girls are now mostly equal in school. And significant shares say that girls have advantages over boys — that they get better grades, have more leadership roles and speak up more in class, according to a Pew Research Center survey of teens nationwide published Thursday.Boys are more likely to be disruptive, get into fights or have problems with drugs or alcohol, the teenagers said. And strikingly, boys said they’re much less likely to be college-bound: 46 percent of boys said they planned to attend a four-year college, compared with 60 percent of girls.“What happens to a society when there’s such disparity between men and women in educational outcomes?” a researcher said. Kendrick Brinson for The New York TimesTeenagers aren’t often surveyed by high-quality pollsters. Their responses in the Pew survey reflect other data on educational outcomes. Boys today have more challenges than girls in school as early as kindergarten. Girls have narrowed gaps with boys in math (though they have widened since pandemic school closures), and girls outperform boys in reading. Boys graduate from high school and attend college at lower rates.Boys’ struggles in school could have long-term consequences, researchers say. The share of men working has declined. Nearly half of Republican men say American society has negative views of men, beginning with their experiences as boys in school. Young men’s feelings of disconnection played a role in the election — this group swung toward President Trump, perhaps in part because he promised to restore their status in American society.

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      Selma Miriam, Founder of the Feminist Restaurant Bloodroot, Dies at 89

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      She and Noel Furie had just come out as lesbians when they opened an unusual gathering place for women in Connecticut. Nearly half a century later, it is still thriving.Selma Miriam and Noel Furie were unhappy housewives, as they put it, when they met at a gathering of the National Organization for Women in Connecticut in 1972. Soon after, they divorced their husbands, came out as lesbians and set about creating a place for women to congregate.Ms. Miriam was a talented and adventurous cook, and at first they held dinners at her house, charging $8 for a weekly buffet of lush vegetarian dishes — a culinary choice they made because a friend pointed out that a feminist food enterprise should not contribute to the suffering of animals.In 1977 they opened Bloodroot, a feminist restaurant and bookstore tucked into an industrial building on a dead-end street in Bridgeport. They had no waiters, no printed menu and no cash register, and they did not advertise. Against the odds, the business thrived.Ms. Miriam, center, with Samn Stockwell, left, and Betsey Beaven, two of the original members of the Bloodroot collective, in 1977, the year the restaurant opened.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“The people who need us, find us,” Ms. Miriam always said.Selma Miriam died on Feb. 6 at her home in Westport, Conn. She was 89.The cause was pneumonia, her longtime partner, Carolanne Curry, said.“We don’t just want a piece of the pie, we want a whole new recipe,” Ms. Miriam declared in “A Culinary Uprising: The Story of Bloodroot,” a feature-length 2024 documentary about the restaurant. (Another documentary, “Bloodroot,” came out in 2019.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      For Black Women, Adrienne Adams Is More Than Just Another Candidate

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      The New York City Council speaker, who officially launched her mayoral campaign on Saturday, would be the first woman to lead City Hall.As Adrienne Adams officially kicked off her mayoral campaign on Saturday, she urged potential voters at a rally in Jamaica, Queens, to view her as an alternative to the city’s two most recognizable candidates, Mayor Eric Adams and former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.But many of her supporters see her candidacy as something else: an opportunity for Democrats to elect a qualified Black woman to lead the country’s largest city, less than a year after the bruising loss of Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to lead a major party presidential ticket.Wearing a pink pantsuit, Ms. Adams entered to cheers at the Rochdale Village Shopping Center in southeast Queens and danced with supporters as “I’m Coming Out” by Diana Ross played.“No drama, no scandal, no nonsense, just competence and integrity,” Ms. Adams said at the rally, summing up her candidacy.Ms. Adams, the City Council speaker and a Queens native, faces a tough path to the mayor’s office amid a crowded primary field and her own considerable fund-raising lag. But to the city’s most steadfast Democratic voting bloc, Black women, Ms. Adams’s candidacy represents more than a litany of messaging and policy promises.Ms. Adams presenting the city budget alongside Mayor Eric Adams, left, in 2022.Benjamin Norman for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Shaming Child-Free People Doesn’t Raise the Birthrate

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      On Thursday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new data on fertility trends from 1990 to 2023, showing that the birthrate declined slightly in 2023 to 1.62 from 1.66 in 2022. The demographer Jennifer Sciubba summarized the statistics in her newsletter, noting that overall, fertility has declined 22 percent since 1990 in the United States but that “the real decline is much more recent, taking a turn around 2007, just before the Great Recession.”The biggest drop in fertility is among teenagers, Sciubba writes, and the birthrate among women over 30 has increased, with a particular surge in births among women over 40. Sciubba predicts that the birthrate overall will plateau, continuing to hover between 1.55 and 1.7 for the next decade.Being below replacement birthrate presents economic challenges, including to Social Security, though this may not yet be cause for immediate alarm. I don’t know how you can argue that fewer teenage parents is a bad thing, since very few teenagers are emotionally or financially equipped to raise children.I’m not worried that the United States is going to become South Korea. That country, which has the world’s lowest birthrate at 0.75, is the subject of a recent article by The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who does a good job describing what a truly anti-natal society looks like. A 20-something South Korean woman tells him: “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.”Governmental and societal pressure has not really worked to increase the birthrate in South Korea. It’s a society that enforces traditional gender roles and that blames feminists and working women for the decline in fertility. “The insinuation that women are at fault for the demographic crisis has turned gender friction into gender war,” Lewis-Kraus writes, with women swearing off men entirely with the 4B movement rather than become tradwives.In the United States, we see our own very muted version of this dynamic playing out. Religious conservatives slam “childless cat ladies,” and in return, some liberal young women are going “boy sober.” Again, I do not predict that this is going to greatly affect the birthrate in the near term; the United States is a much more gender-progressive and diverse country than South Korea is.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More