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Mifepristone, Mail-In Voting and the Midterms Are All on the Line
Trump has officially nominated Dr. Heidi Overton as the FDA commissioner. Overton previously called the abortion pill “telebortion,” and called on Congress to strictly regulate it.
With the FDA currently reevaluating its approval of mifepristone and its regulations permitting providers to mail the medication, Overton’s nomination represents yet another challenge to mifepristone’s widespread usage—accounting for over two-thirds of all abortions, including in states with bans. Not to mention the fact that Overton also recently appeared next to Trump during a press conference in which he spouted dangerous misinformation about childhood vaccines.
Asking for a friend: Will the physician in the Senate who holds a key vote on the Health Committee cave again?
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court might be on summer break—but its shadow docket is still up and running. And nothing is certain before this Supreme Court, which has committed itself to expanding Trump’s executive powers.
Thanks to SCOTUS and state legislators’ rollback of many fundamental rights, state supreme court races have been receiving increased attention, and attracted significant outside spending.
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I Want an Oura Ring. As a Reproductive Health Lawyer, I Know Better.
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Back to School Means Back to Sex Ed. Fathers Need to Be Part of the Conversation.
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Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize: Building a Future Beyond Roe
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What the Lindsay Clancy Trial Reveals About America’s Failure to Support Mothers in Crisis
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‘It’s Killing the Women You Represent’: Texas Widower’s Plea to Lawmakers to End Abortion Ban
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- Trump’s FDA Pick Raises Concerns Over Science, Abortion Access, and Food Safety
- Idaho Abortion Ban Blocked When Pregnancy Threatens Patient’s Health
- UN Experts: Five Years On, the World Must Not Normalize Taliban Rule
- North Carolina State Legislature Advances New Restrictions on Voting
- Massachusetts Expands Later Term Abortion Access
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Skye Perryman on How We Turn ‘Anger and Sorrow’ Into ‘Action’
“I know how you feel—because I’ve been there there too. On a bad day, and there are many bad days, our nation’s backslide from democracy into autocracy accelerates … Untrained, masked federal agents are running roughshod in our streets, terrorizing communities. Peaceful protesters have been killed. The government has been weaponized, and the Supreme Court feels stacked … It’s almost impossible to keep up; even harder to know what to do.”
So begins Skye Perryman’s sobering but hopeful and practical new book, Ordinary People, Extraordinary Times. Though this handbook for hard times is elevated by a we’re-all-in-it-together spirit, Perryman, an attorney and president and CEO of Democracy Forward, doesn’t sugarcoat what we’re all facing.
“We have to acknowledge that there is no cavalry coming to protect us,” she writes. “No knight in shining armor to save us from the situation we are in. It’s up to us. We are the people who decide what happens next.” And while daunting, she says “it can also be empowering to know how essential we are in the fight for freedom and our democracy.”
Perryman fervently believes that action is antidote. By “reclaiming our collective power,” and by using the “tools that ordinary people have used in extraordinary times before us,” she insists that together we can “fight for freedom today, build for a better tomorrow.”
Matilda Joslyn Gage: The Most Radical Suffragist Written Out of History Is Still Urgently Relevant
Matilda Joslyn Gage was one of the most radical voices of the 19th-century women’s rights movement—and one of the most deliberately forgotten. Alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, she helped build the suffrage movement, but Gage pushed further, challenging not only women’s political exclusion but also patriarchal religion, sexual violence, economic inequality and the erasure of women’s accomplishments from history.
Gage paired those radical ideas with bold action. She protested the 1886 unveiling of the Statue of Liberty because women themselves had no political liberty; refused to pay taxes without representation; and wrote Woman, Church and State, a blistering critique of Christianity’s role in legitimizing women’s subordination. Her willingness to confront institutions other suffragists feared alienating ultimately helped push her out of the movement’s mainstream history.
A century later, Gage’s warnings feel strikingly current. As voting rights, bodily autonomy and the separation of church and state once again come under attack, her insistence that women understand their own history—and see themselves as part of a struggle extending across generations—offers both a warning and a call to action.
