Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

The Taliban passed a law effectively legalizing child marriage for girls as young as nine.

The House rejected to advance construction of the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum after Republicans added anti-trans restrictions to the bill.

A New York judge declared a mistrial in Harvey Weinstein’s rape trial after the jury was unable to reach a verdict.

The Colorado Supreme Court ordered hospitals in the state to resume gender affirming care for transgender minors.

Texas Children’s hospital will establish a “detransition clinic” in a settlement with the US Department of Justice.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

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The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

This week the internet lost its damn mind when Alex Cooper, the host of the hugely popular podcast Call Her Daddy, announced that she’s pregnant. Cooper is 31. She’s married (to a man). She is doing a thing that some 85% of American women will do before they reach the end of their childbearing years. And she’s doing it on nearly the exact timeline of the average American female college graduate.

But to hear too-online pro-family conservatives tell it, Cooper had spent her 20s convincing young women to live lives of libertine feminism, and now was, hypocritically, settling down.

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If this sounds bonkers it’s because it very much objectively is. But women in Cooper’s demographic — college-educated working women — have become something of a trigger for the broader right. The overt misogynists hate them because these women are (allegedly) stealing men’s jobs and then (justifiably) refusing to marry and procreate with men who despise them. But the pro-family conservatives seem to resent them, too, even though these women are, by pro-family measures, doing a lot right.

Women who go to college remain far more likely than their non-college peers to have children within a marriage, and to marry in the first place: A college-educated Millennial born in 1980 is just as likely to be married as a woman born in 1940; the steep decline in marriage has been almost entirely among people without college degrees. College-educated women are vastly unlikely to live in poverty. Even women who graduate from college and have children without being married are far less likely to be raising children in poverty than single moms who didn’t go to college (13 percent vs. 41 percent). College-educated married women are less likely to divorce than their non-college married counterparts. College-educated women have, in other words, generally followed the life script that pro-family conservatives want us to follow: We finished school, worked, chose partners wisely, had children when we were stable and ready, and largely stayed married.

And instead of seeing this as a great achievement, we’ve heard: “No, not like that!”

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The idea seems to be that affluent women like Alex Cooper are selling some Sex & the City fantasy to poorer women who are then duped into bad relationships, or maybe into forgoing relationships entirely. None of that seems to be borne out in anything resembling research, but to some significant chunk of the conservative commentariat, it feels true. Or perhaps the argument is that college-educated liberals hold “luxury beliefs” like it’s fine to opt out of college or be single parents but then don’t actually do those things ourselves — so we’re either too prescriptive (telling women to stay single and have fun until it’s too late) or we’re too broadminded (saying any life choice is ok), but either way, whatever is going wrong with marriage and childbearing is our fault, and certainly not that of the same conservative ideologies that are far more prominent in America’s working-class low-marriage enclaves than they are in, say, brownstone Brooklyn. And this is all getting tied up in what seems to be a never-ending Birthrate Discourse, in which there is a collective freakout over declining rates of baby-having.

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Of all the constituencies making up Donald Trump’s 2024 voter base, I had the highest hopes for MAHA.

Not because I liked RFK Jr. or the anti-vaccine quackery, but because it seemed to me that the MAHA movement opened up the potential for narrow bipartisan consensus on some issues Democrats had long championed, and others …

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

The Men Who Want Women to Be Quiet by Helen Lewis in the Atlantic

Is motherhood aspirational under patriarchy? by Lane Anderson in Matriarchy Report (Substack)

What the Dissents in the Mifepristone Case Tell Us About What’s to Come by Michele Goodwin in the Nation

The End of Refugee Resettlement by Annie Hylton in the New Yorker

The Feed is Fake by Lane Brown in Vulture

Trump’s new Moms.gov website is an anti-choice hub that misleads women by Moira Donegan in the Guardian

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From here and there:

The New Common Sense on Kids, Screens, and Social Media

The Systemic Sexual Abuse of Palestinians

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

The Supreme Court preserved telehealth and mail-order access to medication abortion while the lower court lawsuit continues.

The Trump Administration launched moms.gov, a maternal health page that links directly to unregulated, anti-abortion pregnancy centers and emphasizes pronatalism.

Researchers renamed PCOS, a condition that can impact women’s fertility and diabetes risk, to PMOS, in an effort to expand the definition to help more patients get care.

A New York City hospital was subpoenaed over its provision of gender affirming health care for trans youth.

A large scale study found that antidepressant use during pregnancy does not raise children’s risk for autism or other developmental disorders.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

Donate Subscriptions

The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

Anytime I open Instagram, I’m greeted by the faces of children I don’t know — children of parents I don’t know. And every time I wonder: Why are we doing this to our kids?

I don’t mean the kids of private citizens who post family photos to their private Instagram accounts — I see plenty of kids on Instagram who I’ve never met, but I know their parents, and I enjoy seeing what they’re up to. I’m talking about everyone else: The writers and photographers and cooks and various micro-celebrities who have tens or hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. These are not people sharing sweet photos with family and friends. These are people using their children to boost their brand.

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There’s a new book out by Fortesa Latifi about influencer families, and I can’t wait to read it. I can understand how, ten years ago, someone may have uploaded a cute family video to YouTube, seen it blow up, and head down a path of monetizing every aspect of one’s domestic life. I am less sympathetic to people who intend to monetize every aspect of their domestic life, even if that means monetizing their kids.

Since becoming a parent, I’ve thought a lot about how much to write for a public audience about motherhood and my child, and I’ve settled on “very little” (you may be surprised to learn, via this post, that I even have a child). That’s partly because I am not sure I have all that much of interest to say, but it’s largely because I don’t think it’s fair to tell my child’s story before he has a chance to craft his own version of it. All parents, I think, create narratives for our children — what they’re like, who they might be, how they are. Our parents created these narratives about us, too, and I suspect that most of us have had the experience of realizing that the stories our parents told themselves about us were maybe not quite right — that perhaps those stories were frozen in some version of a very young self, one that evolved but that our mothers and fathers kept crystalized in amber.

There’s not all that much harm there, except parental-filial relationship tensions. When those narratives get published, though, we make our stories about our children everyone’s stories about them. And when influencers put their children online for public consumption, they effectively put their child in a fishbowl in which the glass only goes one way — everyone looking in, the child having no ability to even comprehend just how much they’re being observed.

Until, of course, they’re old enough to understand, at which point they’ve been trained in the art of watching themselves be watched, of never actually living their lives but rather performing their lives for others.

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There is a big difference between the YouTube family influencer who posts her kids’ worst moments with baity headlines (“epic MELTDOWN over POTTY time” or whatever) and, say, the photographer I follow who sometimes posts dreamy and washed-out images of her family in beautiful places. One of these things is far, far morally worse. I don’t think we should be hiding children from public view. But I do wish more parents would consider why and to whom they’re posting images of their kids. I wish there were more protections for children whose parents treat them like YouTube piggybanks.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that as more parents have monetized their children online, parents are also letting their children spending tons of time online. The good news is that this all does seem to be shifting as the research on screens and our brains evolves. But still: The average American one-year-old gets more than a hour of screen time per day. Toddlers — those between the ages of two and four — are seeing more than two hours, while young elementary school kids are seeing almost four. It’s hard to overstate how bad this is for developing brains.

But all “screen time” is not created equal.

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A two-year-old spending five minutes video chatting with Grandma is a very different thing than handing a two-year-old your phone and letting them spend five minutes scrolling through short-form videos; a three-year-old joining the family for an hour of communal TV time, or watching 20 minutes of Daniel Tiger so dad can make dinner, is very different from handing a kid an iPad and unlimited access to YouTube kids alone for an hour. I’m fairly extreme on the no-screens thing: my child, who is still very young, has only seen a screen to FaceTime with his grandparents, and he’s only done that a handful of times; I usually don’t even have my phone in the room when I’m with him because I want to be distraction-free and to model living life in the actual world. While he knows what a phone is, he does not yet seem to find it an interesting or desirable object. I aim to keep it that way as long as possible.

But the collapse of all “screen time” into one giant to-be-avoided bucket doesn’t seem helpful. As I’m thinking about kids and screens, and also about how adults with kids use their screens, here are a few things I’m considering:

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For adults posting their children on social media:

• Who can see this? What are my social media settings? Is my account public or private? Am I comfortable with the viewing audience? No matter how private my account, do I understand that anything I post here might break containment — and would I be ok if this photo were available to the general public?

• What might this mean for my child later on? How might my kid feel about me posting this? Is it embarrassing for them? Does it tell a story they may prefer to keep private? Does it convey some narrative about them that might not actually be true?

• Whose story is this to tell? The difference can be subtle, but there is a difference between writing about one’s experience of parenthood, and telling a story that more fully belongs to your child — and is perhaps not yours to tell.

• Why do I want to share this? “So my family and close friends can see my sweet little baby” is a very good reason to share a photo of your sweet little baby on a private and carefully-cultivated account. “So I might get more brand sponsorships” or “so I can get a bunch of little hearts” is a less-good reason. “So I can make everyone laugh at my kid’s emotional distress” or “so I can gain sympathy through my child’s suffering” is a bad reason.

For children’s screen time:

• Is there a story with a plot that my child has to follow, and is there a meaningful moral lesson? Watching a movie or a television show that has a narrative arc and a meaningful message can be good for kids. Storytelling through visuals is incredible. But there needs to be a story. There needs to be a plot that requires the viewer pay attention and use their brain. There needs to be a purpose other than simply “attention capture.”

• Does it foster in-person or at least meaningful connection? Using a screen to FaceTime with Grandma — a person your child knows and loves — fosters an important relationship; using a screen to scroll through TikTok does not. Family movie night fosters connection; an iPad at the dinner table does not.

• Cast a skeptical eye on ed tech. Apps and other screen-based tools that advertise themselves as “educational” can be the hardest to parse. But ask yourself: What is this replacing, and does it actually seem better than the analog version? We know that our brains do not process information on screens the same way they do words on a page. If your kid is using an app that promises it will teach them how to read, that is a not in fact better than the analog version (a book). If it promises it will teach them math, that is not actually better than the analog version. These are moments in which these apps can be useful, and I think the people who make them genuinely believe they’re doing good. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that the benefit of many of these ed tech tools is primarily more money for ed tech companies; they are often trying to sell parents products more than they are actually teaching children.

• How is this training a child’s attention span? One of the most corrosive aspects of our increasingly screen-based world is that it’s depleted our attention. I don’t want a ton of short-form videos, but still, even when I’m reading a book or listening to a podcast I find myself picking up my phone to check my texts / email / social media / whatever ever twenty minutes or so. I don’t like the compulsive relationship I have with my phone, and I’m an adult who didn’t grow up with a smartphone. Kids, with their developing and very plastic brains, have far fewer cognitive guardrails. So ask: Is whatever screen-based thing you’re giving them encouraging them to extend their attention span? Or is it teaching them to avoid concentration (or boredom) by constantly scrolling to the next and the next and the next? If it’s a kids’ television show, does it include extended scenes shot from a single angle? That is, does the viewer have to watch Mr. Rogers play with the train set for a full three minutes, or Elmo have an extended stoop convo? Or is it cut-cut-cut-cut every two seconds with different colors and scenes and characters and sounds, training your child’s mind to always want next-next-next-next (i.e., Cocomelon, which I just watched for ten seconds before feeling like I might have an aneurism)?

• Is this a genuine pinch moment, or am I just afraid of letting my child be bored? If the entirely family has the stomach flu, maybe Miss Rachel comes out for longer than usual. If the toddler is screaming and there’s no other adult around and you need to get the baby to sleep, maybe that’s a call to Paw Patrol. But if it’s just that your kid might get bored or might even get fussy, what are they learning by being handed a screen to avoid discomfort? (How much are you avoiding boredom or discomfort by turning to a screen? I know I sure do that a lot).

• Am I living out my values, too? If you don’t want your kid constantly reaching for a screen, then you need to train yourself not to reach for a screen (this is hard). If you want your kid to read actual books, then you need to pick up an actual book. If you want your kid to be able to tolerate boredom, tolerate discomfort, and learn to exist in the real world, then you need to practice those skills too. This sounds very simple! It is very hard. It is still worth doing.

How else are you thinking about these questions, either for your kids or yourself or both?

xx Jill

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The systematic sexual abuse of Palestinians by prison guards, police officers, and settlers should come as no surprise, but I was glad to see New York Times columnist Nick Kristof cover it in a lengthy reported column this week. Stories of horrors visited in Palestinians, including children, are not new. But sexual violence has become a propagandized, weaponized accusation in the Israel-Palestine context, with both sides accusing the other of sexual atrocities, and both sides also claiming their men would never do such a thing. Hyper-partisans of the conflict — those who seem to believe that one side or other can do no wrong, while the other side is made up of people who are sub-human and unfathomably evil — are convinced that the only real sexual violence is that visited upon those they support, and equally as convinced that any accusations of sexual violence against those they support is nothing more than a rape hoax.

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As a feminist and as a journalist who has reported on sexual violence in conflict for more than a decade, this is a depressing, devastating turn. In every conflict or crisis where sexual violence is used as a weapon of war, those using it deny it — you might be celebrated if you say you killed people, but it often remains shameful to admit to rape. Usually, though, observers hear testimony of mass rape and realize that, yeah, of course in a context of unfettered brutality, rape and other acts of sexual sadism happen, too. From the conflicts that brought rape as a weapon of war into the general conversation — primarily the war in Yugoslavia, in which Serb forces systemically raped Bosnian women, but also the Rwanda genocide — to more recent ones I’ve covered (conflicts in eastern Congo, the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar), perpetrators have denied accusations of rape, but the international community put forward few doubts. I’ve never had anyone question the veracity of the rapes reported by women whose stories I’ve published when those women were Colombian or Honduran or Rohingya or Congolese or South Sudanese.

It’s a very different story when the sexual violence victims are either Palestinian or Israeli.

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I wrote about the evidence and many allegations of sexual violence against Israeli women on Oct. 7, and still get accused of spreading “atrocity propaganda” and manufacturing consent for a genocide. There are many, many people who say they are dedicated to the cause of Palestinian liberation who seem equally dedicated to denying that Hamas committed any criminal acts on Oct. 7, and who are particularly vitriolic in their denial that Hamas and other militants committed sexual crimes. There are others who seem to accept that ok maybe some acts of sexual violence happened, but talking about it too much is “weaponizing” an Israeli narrative and giving cover to a vicious government intent on brutal collective punishment of the Palestinian people.

Kristof is seeing similar backlash. This is despite the fact that Israeli human rights organizations have documented cases of rape and sexual abuse of Palestinians by Israeli soldiers, particularly in prisons. In one infamous 2024 case, five Israeli soldiers were charged with rape and other acts of violence against a Palestinian detainee at the Sde Teiman prison, a notorious torture site. Medical records confirmed serious abuse: Broken ribs, rectal damage, a punctured lung. But right-wing Israelis rioted, the right-wing government backed them, and the IDF dropped the charges. Netanyahu claimed the charges were “blood libel,” and said that “The State of Israel must persecute its enemies, not its heroic fighters.”

Kristof is also being accused of blood libel, the idea that non-Jews falsely accuse Jews of unspeakable acts (originally, killing and drinking the blood of Christian children), which foment the kind of antisemitism that culminates in pogroms and the Holocaust. I am sympathetic to concerns about antisemitism, which is clearly rising, often in terrifyingly violent form; my line of work has me talking to a lot of different kinds of people, and I hear more absolutely insane conspiracy theories about Jews and Israelis now than I ever have in the past. I am particularly worried about the antisemitism I see on the left, not because it’s worse than antisemitism on the right, but because too much of it comes from people I would otherwise consider ideological fellow travelers. I am regularly shocked by the level of conspiracy theorizing and blatant Jew-hate masquerading as anti-Zionism that I see on the left, and the straight-up embrace of Nazis that I see on the right. The years since Oct. 7 have been radicalizing and gutting for me in seeing just how antisemitic (and profoundly hypocritical) ostensible progressives and leftists can be.

But legitimate fears of antisemitism do not excuse a refusal to engage with the worst acts from the Israeli government, its agents, and those it protects. They don’t excuse using antisemitism as a tool for atrocity denial.

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

Why is being a mother so expensive in the United States? by Alia Chughtai and Marium Ali in Al Jazeera

No One Told Men the Floor Was Made of Women by Soraya Chemaly in Unmanned (Substack)

The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians by Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times

My Role as a ‘Complicit’ Journalist by Michael Scherer in the Atlantic

The New Jim Crow by Joyce Vance in Civil Discourse (Substack)

Mothers are stretching every dollar — and still finding ways to care for their families by Barbara Rodriguez in the 19th

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From here and there:

Abortion Access Is in Chaos. Blame the Supreme Court. (Slate)

“This is a time of get together, to think together, and to push from every angle”

The Promise and Peril of Abortion Pills

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

The Supreme Court temporarily restored access to medication abortion by mail after the Fifth Circuit ruled to reinstate in-person requirements for mifepristone.

Republicans introduced a bill banning a type of procedural abortion in the House.

The Trump Administration launched an investigation into Smith College, an all-women’s college, over its admission of transgender women.

Researchers found that TikTok’s promotion of femininity tied to consumerism erodes feminism’s potential for social justice.

A UN report found that online violence against women journalists and media professionals doubled since 2020 with the rise of AI.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

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The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

Reproductive rights are under extreme attack in the US. But the US is also attacking reproductive rights abroad. Last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling that made it suddenly illegal to ship mifepristone, part of the two-pill abortion regimen, to women across the US. The Supreme Court stayed that decision, but not permanently — we should be hearing more next week. I wrote in the New York Times about how this is the biggest blow to Americans’ abortion rights since Roe, and in Slate about how it’s only part of the much broader chaos that overturning Roe has wrought. But American abortion opponents aren’t just wreaking havoc within American borders; they’re taking their fight global.

The good news is that a whole lot of people are fighting back. One of them is Maria Antonieta Alcalde Castro, the new director general of the International Planned Parenthood Federation, or IPPF, a network of more than a hundred clinics and service providers worldwide. I spoke with Maria Antonieta about her new role, the organization’s work in the era of Trump, and why Americans who care about reproductive justice should care about it beyond our own borders. Our conversation is below; it has been edited for length and clarity.

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JILL FILIPOVIC: To start, can you talk a little bit about IPPF’s work? What does the organization do? What should readers know about it?

MARIA ANTONIETA ALCALDE CASTRO: IPPF is the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and we are a network of around 130 member associations. Our local organizations serve more than 150 countries because many of our member associations serve more than one country. We provide a series of public health services, and we also advocate for sexual and reproductive rights worldwide. I think that for the American audience, our brand is very well known in the US: Planned Parenthood. So we have Planned Parenthoods all over the world. For example, I just came from Kiribati, a small country. Well, not that small – it’s 33 little islands in the Pacific. There, our member association has a few clinics and does a lot of community reach. We are the biggest organization in the world that provides sexual and reproductive health services.

Jill: So with your member clinics, are you providing informational support, logistical support, or contraception tools and devices? What are you doing for the member groups?

Maria Antonieta : In most places, we have clinics where you can go and have access to contraceptives. That’s one of our main services, but also cervical cancer screens, pap smears, HIV treatment – we work a lot on HIV, offering testing, but also many of our member associations provide actual treatment. And we also have specific services for key populations: for young people, for LGBTQ community, for sex workers, for migrants. So we have clinics, actual clinics when you can get in, have an appointment, see a doctors. But a big part of our work is also to reach out to remote communities. So we have remote clinics. A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege to visit Mauritania. It’s a huge country, with an extended part of the country in the Sahara Desert. And I went with a caravan to provide services to a population that was two hours and a half from the capital, in the middle of the desert. And there, IPPF is the only organization that provides not only sexual and reproductive health services, but any type of services. We’re there once a month providing services, and it’s family planning to HIV. And many of our member associations actually have hospitals where they do deliveries. So the spectrum of sexual and reductive health services. And, as I was mentioning in the case of Mauritania, health in general, nutrition, all the elements of health.

Jill: And what’s your background? Where are you coming from? Tell us a little bit about you.

Maria Antonieta : Well, I’m very new in the post. I’ve been in director general of IPPF for a month and a half. I started working on sexual and reproductive health and rights more than 30 years ago as a young activist. I was a peer educator. I’m Mexican, and in Mexico, I was working at the grassroots and doing community organizing, and then peer education on sexual and reproductive and rights. And that’s where I found the reproductive justice movement. And that really changed my life. I founded an organization, a local organization in Mexico that has been working on this issue and specifically on access to abortion services. And then I worked for IPPF in New York. I was the director of the UN liaison office. So I did a lot of work with the UN and with multilateral spaces.

So my background is really within the movement. I’ve been working at the very, very local community organizing grassroots level, and with two international multilateral negotiations. I had the privilege of being part of organizing not only IPPF, but with the women’s movement during the Sustainable Development goals negotiations. And so I’ve been part of all the levels and now I’m back at IPPF as director general.

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Jill: As you come into the organization, what are your priorities?

Maria Antonieta : Well, I’m coming to IPPF in a very challenging time. And as you know, we are living in a world that is changing at a very rapid speed, and where we are seeing the rise of a very strong anti-choice movement. Without a doubt, US organizations and the US government play a very significant role in this attack to human rights, to women’s rights, to diversity and inclusion, and to sexual reproductive rights. So my priorities within this context is to ensure that we are able to keep serving the millions of people that we serve every year. I’m standing very strongly with the member associations to ensure that we find sources of resources, different ways, more effective ways to deliver the services that we deliver.

My second priority is to work as a movement. I think that this is a moment where we need to gather together. We cannot afford working in silos. So we’re joining forces with the HIV movement. We will see a huge peak on HIV infections, we will see setbacks, because it is a reality that the cuts in funding and the dismantling of the HIV infrastructure will have an impact. We’re working very closely with them, and also with the climate change movement, also with the human rights movement, also with the migrants movement. So that’s my second priority. And my third priority is innovation and technology. We are already advancing work on telemedicine, on self-managed health, on using AI to reach out populations that we won’t be able to reach with other means. So maintaining and persisting what we have, working in collaboration with other movements and organizations to advance our agenda all together, and thinking about technology and how to use technology to reach on the gaps that we have in access to services and human rights in general.

Jill: How has IPPF been impacted by the new Gag Rule, and by the demise of USAID? What has the Trump administration meant for your organization?

Maria Antonieta : IPPF decided not to take US funding several years ago exactly because we were seeing all of this back and forth of the Global Gag Rule. Every time that we had a Republican in power, then we had the Gag Rule, and we had to change for our models. But many, many of our member associations receive funding from the USAID, or used to receive funding from the US government. We did two surveys among our member associations, one in February and one in July of last year, and the funding loss has been around $87.2 million in contracts that were already signed, commitments that were already made between 2025 and 2029. And the most impacted regions are Africa and the Arab world. This means, for example, that our member associations have been forced to close around 1,400 clinics, and that means about 9.5 million people will lose services because of this.

So the impact is really significant and what we’re seeing is it’s not only the funding cuts from the US to sexual and reproductive health and right services. It is also this very well-orchestrated anti-choice movement. It is like the funding that the US used to use for supporting health systems is now being used as a political tool to force governments, even governments that have very progressive laws, to sign very opaque memoranda of understanding where they commit themselves to stop providing healthcare, especially for example, when it comes to abortion. So it’s not only the cutting services that impact directly and you have to close – to stop providing services – but on top of that, the political pressure and the use of these resources as a way to force governments and organizations to take an anti-rights agenda. So that combination with the additional funding for the anti-rights movement, it’s creating a scenario that will have devastating consequences for specific populations: increases in HIV/AIDS, increases in maternal mortality, increases in unwanted pregnancy, which is really a tragedy considering the advances that have been made in the past years.

Jill: So when it comes to IPPF’s ability to do its work now under this administration, where are you getting resources? How are you finding funding and support? And what should folks who are reading this interview in the newsletter do if they want to support IPPF’s work or want to see you supported by governments and philanthropies?

Maria Antonieta : We still receive support from the governments of Germany, Sweden, and most of the Nordic countries. But one of the things that we are seeing increasing more is support from individual donors. Millions of peoples in the United States despise the Trump’s policies and international policies. IPPF didn’t used to be an organization that did a lot of individual fundraising because we have, at the local level, our member associations, and they are the ones who do a lot of individual fundraising. But given the impact in international organizations and the impact of the Trump policies in other countries, in Africa, in Latin America and Asia, we are seeing that more and more people in the United States are interested in supporting and in trying to balance what its own government is doing. So we increased our individual donor program, and now we are receiving more and more donations. And that can really make the difference, especially because those funds are more flexible and allow us to work in countries where, for example, other governments have restrictions. We have a case study that we can share with you, for example, of our work in Sudan, and how given the restrictions that the US and the international community have imposed in Sudan, it has been very hard to use any resources. But with flexible resources, we have been able to ensure that our member association in Sudan has access to contraceptives, and that has made all the difference for our humanitarian work in a country that is in the middle of the war.

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Jill: This is backing up a little bit to something you said earlier about the anti-rights groups, but I’m curious how you are seeing them empowered and what is the role of the US is in redirecting resources away from healthcare and toward these more political organizations.

Maria Antonieta : These are groups that have been growing their reach. They used to be very US focused. There are groups like CPAC: they used to have their conferences every year in different parts of the US, but now we’re seeing CPAC Mexico, CPAC Poland, they are using the same narrative, the same structure, to bring resources to anti-choice organizations in the global South, but also to elevate the voices of anti-choice politicians at the national level. The US in the past was more cautious about intervention in the national politics of other countries. Now what we’re seeing is President Trump and the US administration very openly saying, “If this candidate wins, we’re going to give money to this country.” So that type of the use, not only of the financial power of the US government, but also its political power. That it has been really disrupting, not only to the sexual reproductive health and rights agenda, but to the democracy agenda at the national level.

All of this power has really validated voices that, of course, they were already there. It’s not that they are new, but it was something that was more in the shadows and now it’s very present in the political life of several countries. That that’s really changing the dynamics, and for the organizations like IPPF, we are one of the first targets. Sexual and reproductive rights are like the canary in the coal mine. For anti-choice groups, that’s the first thing they come for. They try to prohibit abortion, they try to criminalize LGBTQ people, they try to remove comprehensive sexuality education from the school. That’s always the first step. They’re coming for us first, but then they move to shrinking the civic space, they move to trying to restrict political and religious freedom. So yeah, we are seeing a huge increase in these narratives and these tactics that before existed, but not with the strength that they are right now.

Jill: On the ground level, what does that all mean for a woman, let’s say, I don’t know, in Zimbabwe. All of these pieces that come together, how do they actually impact individual people on the ground who don’t vote in US elections, who have no right and no ability to shape US politics? How are the decisions being made in Washington shaping their lives and opportunities?

Maria Antonieta : It has huge impact. And you are mentioning Zimbabwe, the US under Republican administrations or on the Democratic administrations used to be one of the most important donors on family planning. For the past 40 years, family planning was a priority for the US, understanding that this is a key element of development, that in order to support countries to advance on economic development, it was crucial to invest and ensure that women and couples could decide on their rights. So many governments depended on US funding to buy contraceptives. What is happening right now is like that with the dismantling of USAID, the US was holding contraceptives and even burning them. Those contraceptives that were burned were contraceptives that were supposed to reach the most marginalized and the populations in countries like Zimbabwe or Ethiopia. And so women that used to rely on contraceptives in their local clinics, in their government clinics, they are not finding it anymore. So we are already seeing stockouts of many contraceptives, stockouts especially of pills, but also implants that were central for women that needed to go to their clinic and find a range of options. So we are likely to see an increase on unwanted pregnancy, and we know that like with an increase of unwanted pregnancy, we see an increase of unsafe abortion, we will see an increase of maternal mortality.

In our case, IPPF was trying to reach the most vulnerable populations. We have been forced to close around 1,400 clinics. These are clinics that in many cases were the only access that population had to health services in general. So what we’re seeing is that it’s becoming harder and harder to provide services, and what that means for that women in Zimbabwe try to live it, that means that they will have to stop taking contraceptives or they will have to go to a different town to get their contraceptives or they will have to buy it themselves. And in many cases, neither of those are really options for them.

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Jill: Maria, that was my list of questions, but is there anything we haven’t talked about that you think is important that you want to add?

Maria Antonieta : Actually I saw your article in the New York Times on Title X and I think it is important to say that this is something that is affecting the US, too. Sometimes in the US there is this idea of separating domestic issues from international: these are our domestic issues and people are very involved in domestic issues, and not that much on international. But there is a connection here of the national agenda and the international agenda. It is very important for the US population to make these connections. We cannot afford to keep working in silos, to keep working separately. And the sexual and reproductive human rights movement in the US many times has been separated from the global with this idea of American exceptionalism, like we’re different. And we see that we are not different. And the challenges that you are facing – I was reading your article and I was like, those are exactly the same tactics that we’re seeing from the US overseas. So this is a time of get together, to think together, and to push from every angle and stop thinking that the challenges that we’re facing in Zimbabwe or in Ethiopia are very different from the ones that we are facing in the US.

xx Jill

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More than a decade ago, I was reporting in Brazil about the country’s strict abortion ban. I interviewed a doctor who had been excommunicated from the Catholic Church for providing an abortion to a nine-year-old rape victim — he was threatened and protested, and the girl herself had to be smuggled past vicious anti-abortion protesters to even get into the hospital. I talked to a young woman who, pregnant and desperate, told doctors she had been raped so that she could get a safe and legal abortion. While Brazil criminalizes abortion, the state also forced its will women who chose to have babies — for example, by forcing women into C-sections under threat of criminal penalty — and allowing for the widespread abuse of birthing women. “It's part of Catholic culture that this experience of childbirth should come with humiliation,” one doctor told me.

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The abortion rights legal landscape, like the landscape for reproductive rights more broadly, was pretty abysmal. But some one million women were still having abortions in Brazil every year. And they were doing so largely thanks to abortion pills.

This is true all over the world where abortion is banned. I’ve reported many times on the proliferation of abortion pills, which women manage to get on far-flung Indonesian islands, in conservative pockets of Pakistan, in Bangladeshi refugee camps, in rural Kenyan villages. Abortion pills have been legal in parts of Europe since the late 1980s. In Latin America, where abortion was long criminalized across most of the continent, women began noticing that the ulcer medicine Cytotec came in interesting packaging, with a little symbol of a pregnant woman with a red line drawn over her and a strongly-worded warning not to take while pregnant. Well. Lots of women began turning up at pharmacies complaining of ulcers.

Nothing has changed abortion access as profoundly as abortion pills, which in the US are typically a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol, and in places where abortion is banned are often misoprostol alone. Before misoprostol, abortion in countries where the procedure was outlawed mostly looked like it did in America’s pre-Roe days: The wealthiest and most well-connected women might be able to travel overseas to end a pregnancy; others might be lucky enough to find a kind and well-trained albeit illegal provider; but many went to scammers and dangerous charlatans, or tried to take mattes into their own hands. In America, the symbol of abortion’s Bad Old Days is the coat hanger. In sub-Saharan Africa, where I’ve reported for many years on abortion access, it might be the sharp stick.

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Predictably, this killed a lot of women. Some 70,000 women were dying every year from unsafe abortions, almost entirely in countries where the procedure was outlawed. Five million more were seriously injured year after year after year. And each year, roughly 220,000 children were left motherless. As you might imagine, unsafe abortion was one of the top drivers of maternal mortality worldwide.

Today, deaths from unsafe abortion number closer to 29,000, a nearly 60 percent decrease from 2009. This is still horrific, and these deaths would be near zero if all women worldwide had legal access to safe abortion care. But cutting unsafe abortion deaths by more than half is a huge achievement. It’s worth noting that the global maternal mortality rate has decreased by 40 percent from 2000. In other words, unsafe abortions decreased at a much faster pace, in a shorter period of time, than pregnancy-related deaths generally. Something about abortion changed.

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

The Biggest Attack on Abortion Since the End of Roe by Jessica Valenti in Abortion, Every Day (Substack)

For a Time, the U.S. Protected Democracy by Vann R. Newkirk II in the Atlantic

How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom by Shalini Ramachandran in the Wall Street Journal

Welcome to the Insecurity-Industrial Complex by Alissa Quart in Mother Jones

The Trump Administration Aims to Penalize Disabled Adults Who Live With Their Families by Eli Hager in ProPublica

Asian mothers, bad feelings: notes on an all-conquering stereotype by Rebecca Liu in the Guardian

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From here and there:

This Could Be the Biggest Blow to Abortion Rights Since Roe Fell (New York Times)

We Have to Get AI and Screens Out of Schools and Out of Kids’ Hands

Is it wrong to steal a painting from the Louve?

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

FIFA granted the Afghan women’s refugee soccer team eligibility for international tournaments, five years after fleeing the country from Taliban rule.

The Supreme Court sided with an anti-abortion clinic that was trying to impede New Jersey from investigating its donor records.

A Kenyan appeals court struck down a ruling that protected the right to abortion.

Staff at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission said they are being pressured to bring political cases with little evidence that serve Trump’s agenda.

Minnesota passed the country’s first ban on apps that allow for digital undressing through AI.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

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The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

If you are the parent of a child in American public school (and many private schools), your child — even your very young child — is probably looking at a screen for much of the day. This is the case even as many parents have limited screen time at home, strictly monitored how screens can be used, or agreed to wait until eighth grade to give their child a smartphone. Once your child is in the classroom, they are probably in screenland, from watching teachers pull up YouTube to playing games as a reward for completing assignments to completing assignments on an iPad to reading textbooks on a Chromebook. That’s tremendously bad for kids’ brains. It may also be creating the kind of attention deficits, apathy, and nihilism that characterize this particular political moment — that threaten democratic governance, have made our country worse, and threaten to make it worse still.

There is a blockbuster story in the Wall Street Journal this week about the proliferation of YouTube in schools, and another in the New Yorker about AI companies seeing schools as modern-day goldmines and rushing to wrest control of classrooms. The anecdotes are depressing and dystopian: Hands-on science experiments replaced by videos of other people doing science experiments. Kids with ADHD being required to use iPads, then watching 240 minutes of video per day and seeing their grades fall to failing. Kids without ADHD spending 40% of their educational time scrolling and clicking, with one student watching “more than 1,000 YouTube videos in about 50 days,” and another watching 13,000 in three months. “A second-grader in New York watched more than 700 videos in two months during school hours, including one featuring pole dancing,” Shalini Ramachandran of the Journal writes. “A tenth-grader in Oregon scrolled through more than 200 between 9 and 11:40 a.m. on March 6.” Kids assigned to use AI to make art, and winding up with pornographic Pippi Longstocking. Kids trying to type out essays and getting AI prompts: “Help me write.” “Help me edit.”

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Close to 90% of public schools now offer 1:1 devices for students. The vast majority of those are Google Chromebooks — onto which Google’s AI product, Gemini, can reach all of those kids.

And all of this is making it harder for children to learn, and interrupting their very ability to learn. A Harvard study found that AI in the classroom “may inadvertently contribute to cognitive atrophy,” but implored readers to please not discuss their findings using terms like “brain damage.”

Neuroscientist Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, who has co-written several studies on screen use and child brain development, said introducing digital tools too early to children may prevent basic neural networks related to executive functions and language abilities from building. Her research has shown that screen-based learning can interfere with children’s attention. “You know how to push buttons really fast but don’t have the attention level to focus on your teacher,” said Horowitz-Kraus, head of the educational neuroimaging group at Technion, an Israeli university.

A few facts from the WSJ story:

• “When a child reads a physical book with an adult, important brain regions fire up. Screen-based stories have the opposite effect.”

• “Shared book reading is linked to improved executive function, like faster processing and stronger attention

  …but on screen-based stories there’s lower brain activity.”

• “Shared book reading activates this area, suggesting that social processes foundational for language and literacy are occurring

  …but experiencing the same through a screen shows less activation.”

• “More reading time strengthens the neural bridges between this area, known as the brain’s “letter box,” and other important regions

  …but screen overuse is associated with decreased interconnectivity with this area.”

• “Shared reading is associated with stronger white matter tracts supporting language, literacy and executive functions

  …but high screen use is associated with lower organization of white matter tracts.”

AI offers outcome; learning requires a process that AI undermines. YouTube offers quick-hit entertainment; learning requires engagement. AI chatbots mimic emotional intimacy, but largely tell users what they want to hear; they don’t force young people into the messy work of navigating relationships with other people, of learning how to be a human in the world.

This is not to say that all tech is bad. You can learn a lot from YouTube. But it’s not a substitute for actual in-person teaching. Elementary and middle school kids can learn how to type without being issued personal Chromebooks or iPads. A high school student can research with Google and type papers on a word processor without being handed a device with unlimited access to whatever they might prefer to watch in class. And frankly I don’t think AI should be in the classroom at all; AI definitely shouldn’t be used to complete homework (and schools should teach kids early that using AI to write essays or complete assignments will result in a failing grade). Kids don’t need presentations beautified or their essays machine-edited; they need to make decisions on their own, take the time, practice the process, engage with actual people. They need to learn how to learn, not simply how to hand in a completed assignment.

As Jessica Winter asks in her New Yorker piece on AI in schools: “What do you want from this?” Technology has a place in schools. But we should be able to articulate a purpose beyond “it’s inevitable.” Are the technologies in question actually helping students be better thinkers? More creative? Better citizens? More thoughtful or empathetic or logical or curious? Or are they simply helping students do less work to create products that are more pleasing to the adults around them?

The more young people filter life through a screen — the more they can scroll past the boring stuff, use a robot to do the challenging stuff, and disassociate from the humans around them — the less human their lives become. That is a recipe for societal disaster. It is a straight path away from empathy, resilience, and curiosity and toward nihilism.

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Atlantic editor Adrienne LaFrance has a piece out today about the growing acceptance of political violence from the left and the right. Our society is already badly degraded. A large part of that is decades of bad policy that fueled inequality and left a great many people feeling vulnerable. A large part of it is the political polarization fueled by a truly out-of-control far right that has taken over and is driving America into the stone age. But I think it’s hard to deny that the broader social climate is shaped by the country’s media climate — and for most people, the “media climate” is found on the laptops on their desks and small computers in their pockets.

We just crossed a troubling tipping point where violent left-wing plots now outnumber right-wing ones, LaFrance writes. For decades, acts of right-wing violence far outnumbered acts of left-wing violence. That has changed — not hugely, but right-wing violence has decreased while left-wing violence has increased. The two lines finally crossed.

I have my own pet theory as to why right-wing violence is down, and it’s because right-wing extremists have won on many of the issues they committed violence over. They now have the full force of the state behind them, and instead of committing individual acts of violence, they can sit back watch their government behave with extreme cruelty and enact mass immiseration. The abortion clinics they used to bomb and shoot up have closed, leaving women scared and alone. The immigrants they detest are being deported or are in hiding. The African Americans they hate are being politically disenfranchised and the Jews they resent are now a target of some factions of the far left, too.

LaFrance points to broader social conditions that tend to fuel political violence: “highly visible wealth disparity, declining trust in civic institutions, a perceived sense of victimhood, intense partisan estrangement based on identity, rapid demographic change, flourishing conspiracy theories, violent and dehumanizing rhetoric against the ‘other,’ and a belief among those who flirt with violence that they can get away with it.” This seems right, too.

But I think something else is going on.

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Is it wrong to steal lemons from Whole Foods? To steal paintings from the Louvre? To kill health care executives?

Last week, the New York Times published an interview with writer Jia Tolentino and streamer Hasan Piker about the purpose and morality of petty and not-so-petty crimes in a country where the ultra-wealthy do not seem to play by the same rules as the rest of us. It’s worth a listen, because I think it illustrates a critical flaw in too much of today’s left (a group of which I still consider myself a member): In the pursuit of equality, we too often race to the bottom instead of creating conditions for more people to rise to the top.

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In the interview Tolentino (a writer whose work I admire) admits to occasionally swiping lemons or a loaf of bread from Whole Foods if she’s already gone through the checkout, paid for her groceries, and then realized she forgot one thing on her list (something she was getting for a neighbor who put the Whole Foods order in via a local mutual aid group). This admission has spurred an absolutely massive backlash, with a truly repulsive reporter from the Daily Mail showing up to her home to confront her and then publishing a piece that emphasizes the price of Tolentino’s brownstone and her “second home in the ritzy upstate New York town of Saugerties,” a cabin that she and her husband bought for… $200,000 (lol on several counts).

The lemon scandal feels very, very silly, especially since Tolentino repeats many times that collective action and reigning in exploitative companies is the path to change — the only viable path to a better, fairer society. But, she rightly notes, it’s hard to do.

The interviewer, Nadja Spiegelman, talks about shoplifting and says, “My friends and I have started calling this microlooting, because it has a slight political valence to theft, as opposed to just the thrill of getting away with something. Have you noticed this around you online? Have you noticed more people talking about stealing in this way?”

And Tolentino responds:

Microlooting — it feels akin to posting about something. As an atomized individual action, it’s useless. It’s much harder to get a job and accept $17.50 an hour and then to organize your colleagues, a process that takes years and is often unsuccessful.

The thing about actual collective, direct action — it’s so much harder. And it often doesn’t profit you whatsoever, such as, you know, me getting an extra 10 bucks by grabbing my extra loaf of bread for Miss Nancy.

We are also lazy as humans; we’re also selfish. We’ve lost not only the language and the union density and the structure to engage in things like this, but we have also lost the muscle that is built up to be able to engage in these sorts of things. We’ve lost the rooms in which these things are planned.

Tolentino and Piker are being lumped into the same category of “leftists who like stealing and murder,” but in reality they say very different things. It’s Piker who really seems to revel in the idea of individuals who engage in violence, thievery, and sabotage, even as he personally does not steal after being punished as a child for it by his dad. The one point in the interview where I paused, a bit stunned, is when they both agreed that’s it’s fine to steal from the Louvre. This was, to be fair, said in a jokey tone — a “more cool crimes please!” kind of thing. And I too like movies and podcasts about art heists. In reality, though, art museums are places where incredible works of human creation are made available to the public — stealing them for personal benefit and ensuring they will be hidden from public view and living in the private collection of some extremely rich person strikes me as the opposite of the socialist ideal. So it’s also been shocking to see other leftists genuinely coming to the defense of “steal from the Louvre,” not just because doing so is cool, but because they have more paintings in the basement.

There doesn’t seem to be much of a theory of change here. Tolentino provides one, but that’s largely ignored in both the interview and the discourse around it. Some leftists and socialists, like Piker and Spiegelman’s “micro-looting” friends, seem to believe that acts that feel transgressive are themselves political activism. It reminds me a bit of the cyclical feminist discourse about beauty culture (and a bunch of other things): If you’re wearing lipstick and high heels is that Feminist because you are a woman who is choosing her choice? If something feels good to you, and you are a woman, is that thing Feminist? My answer is no, of course not. That’s not an argument against feeling good, or against wearing high heels or red lipstick; I do all of those things. It is an argument against the self-flattery of believing actions one simply prefers to take have some political impact. We all comply with our culture’s expectations of us to some degree, and sometimes that feels good. Most of us will transgress those expectations too, and often that can feel good because it’s thrilling. But just as cheating on your husband is probably not a feminist action simply because marriage is a patriarchal institution, stealing from Whole Foods is not a socialist action simply because Whole Foods is a company in a capitalist nation. I personally find the idea of shoplifting to be so anxiety-producing that I cannot imagine doing it, and the one time I did do it (eighth grade) it was by accident — I walked out of a shop holding a Bush sticker I intended to buy, forgetting it was in my hand — and I went back and paid for it. But I can certainly comprehend how shoplifting is a little thrill for some people, and I generally feel like whatever — just be honest that it’s wrong, you know it’s wrong, and that’s why it feels fun. It’s not some great act of anti-capitalist transgression.

But it certainly might be fueled by a sense of frustration and bitterness at an unequal and exploitative system.

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It’s easy to understand how resentment over rank inequality — not just inequality in terms of wealth, but inequality in obligation and accountability — curdles into antisocial action. A great many benefits are handed to the wealthy, from lower-interest loans to fee-free banking; it really does pay to be rich, while it’s expensive to be poor. Many billionaires have a lower tax rate than I do. Over the last few decades, wealth has exploded at the very tippy-top, while life feels increasingly precarious for the vast bottom and even the middle. America is far behind many of our peer nations in benefits citizens of other developed countries take for granted: Universal healthcare, paid parental leave, affordable childcare. Many billionaires avoid paying the taxes that would support the broader society that has supported them in amassing spectacular wealth; worse, many use their spectacular wealth to put their thumbs on the political scales, buying greater political representation in a system that promises one person one vote.

But there’s something else particular about America: We’re a much more dangerous country than most of our economic peers. We have significantly higher murder rates, thanks to our unique proliferation of weapons designed to murder. And we have pretty middling rates of social trust — not as low as countries with astounding rates of crime, corruption, and violence (Brazil, Nigeria, and so on), but lower than the high-trust societies of Scandinavia, and lower than Australia, Canada, and the UK — and much lower than China, despite that country’s authoritarian government and aggressive surveillance state.

There’s a pretty clear pattern to the countries with high social trust. They tend to have low levels of corruption, low levels of inequality, and robust social safety net programs. The United States, interestingly, is an outlier: Given how unequal our country is, we should be less trusting than we are:

I would bet that social trust in the US will decline in the Trump era, as we watch the people in charge loot their way through office while half the country cheers them on. This is a shame, not just because social trust feels good, but because it also drives economic productivity and generally makes countries and communities more pleasant and prosperous places to live.

I have lived in very high-trust societies and very low-trust societies. In Hong Kong, I could leave my laptop on a coffee shop table and go to the bathroom without worrying it would be stolen. In Nairobi, I wouldn’t go to bed at night without locking two layers of doors, and wouldn’t walk most places during the day or anywhere after dark (Kenya has one of the lowest levels of social trust in the world). I loved living in Nairobi and would like to do so again — I would choose to live there over Hong Kong — but you can probably guess which city offered a lower-stress day-to-day. These vast differences in both perceived and actual safety didn’t come out of nowhere. Hong Kong is a a wealthy and well-resourced city where everyone is surveilled in public all of the time (and some people are surveilled in private, too); CCTV is everywhere, law enforcement is strict, and it’s part of a broader authoritarian nation. Kenya is a poorer country with high levels of corruption especially among the political elite but also among law enforcement, which isn’t weak, exactly, but is a combination of pay-to-play (or pay to get out of trouble), arbitrary, and brutal. Kenya was a freer country in terms of one’s ability to speak and advocate. But it was a more restrictive country in the sense that, in its largest city, one could not move through public space with near-total confidence that one would be physically safe, remain in possession of one’s property, and not get run over by a car.

Living in Hong Kong, I understood how authoritarian regimes that deprive people of many individual freedoms can nevertheless enjoy broad public support if they also offer widespread public safety and an endless array of consumer goods. People who enjoy things like free speech, personal privacy, and liberal democracy are almost definitely going to have to accept higher levels of petty (and probably serious) criminality in exchange for a freer society, and to me, that’s a fair enough trade. But people who enjoy things like free speech, personal privacy, and liberal democracy should also take note of the very basic human desire to feel safe and to be able to trust one’s fellow citizens — because when those things are lacking, people look around for someone to blame, and that’s usually not the conservatives promising to restore public order by any means necessary.

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Trust researchers define interpersonal trust more or less as “a person’s willingness to accept vulnerability to another conditioned on expectations regarding the other’s behavior.” The primary determinants of trust are ability, benevolence, and integrity: Do you believe that the person you’re considering trusting is competent to do whatever it is you’re trusting them to do; do you believe they demonstrate “caring, goodwill and empathy, responsibly fulfilling obligations, and goal commitment;” and do you see in them “objectivity, fairness, and accurate/honest communication.”

Billionaires who don’t pay their taxes and use their resources to undermine public goods for everyone else also undermine public trust. Politicians who enrich themselves and lie to the public definitely undermine public trust. But a politics of “they’re bad, so I will be bad, too” doesn’t exactly restore it.

I suspect the argument is that if the masses stop behaving, the powerful will either see an impending threat and start to enact the changes necessary to create a fairer society, or the badly-behaving masses will become so comfortable with disorder that they’ll bring about the revolution. I am skeptical that this theory is grounded in reality or history. Successful movements have required significant trust among participants, which is why one of the primary ways to undermine them is by infiltrating them and sowing distrust. Successful movements that didn’t turn authoritarian have also historically built trust with the broader public — the public has to believe that whatever movement is trying to change laws or norms or both is competent, has their best interests at heart, operates with integrity, tells the truth, and has strong principles. “Stealing is good because corporations are bad” does not exactly build trust, suggest a politics of honesty and integrity, or encourage people to believe you have their best interests at heart.

When public order and sense of communal obligation breaks down, what I have personally observe happen is not that the fearful wealthy begin to behave benevolently. What I have observed is that they secret themselves away more effectively: Hire more security, live in gated-off neighborhoods, privatize more spaces for themselves. The ultra-wealthy certainly believe themselves to be suffering in places where public trust is low, which tend to also be places where crime is high and inequality wide; they feel vulnerable and behave accordingly. The result, though, is not that they suffer in proportion to their wealth; the result is that the poorest and least-resourced are the ones who are hurt the most by social breakdown, while the wealthiest retreat further and further from it.

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In short: Tolentino is right that individual acts of theft or destruction are not the kind of collective action necessary to bring about real change. But I would take it a step further, and almost certainly further than she would: Individual acts of theft, destruction, and violence done in the name of progressive politics undermines those very politics.

And when progressives ignore or justify theft, destruction, and violence because of progressive politics, we also undermine those very politics — and hurt the people we’re trying to help.

This requires some judgment. You may have heard that diapers and baby formula are among the most-shoplifted items from grocery and drug stores. It makes sense for progressives to look at that piece of information and conclude that the state needs to do more to get diapers and baby formula into the hands of low-income mothers, and that a harsh law enforcement reaction is the exact wrong response. This is the Jean Valjean scenario, and it’s hard to be angrier at the woman swiping the baby formula than at the affluent society that doesn’t ensure every baby has enough to eat. But it’s also the case that criminal organizations began stealing diapers and baby formula in bulk because those items are always needed and have high resale value, and that’s part of the reason you now have to ask a CVS employee to unlock the case holding the deodorant you’d like to buy. That annoys everyone — and while the public gets mad at CVS about it (or, more often, at individual working-class CVS employees), I suspect that most people are also mad at the organized shoplifters who the stores are trying to keep from stealing. Every trip into an urban drug store is a stark visual reminder that the people around you can’t be trusted (not to mention a very annoying logistical reminder that everything just kind of sucks). That degrades not just public trust, but progressive politics. Conservatives inevitably blame public disorder on liberals, and while that’s untrue for serious violent crime — America’s absurd homicide rate is largely the fault of the lax gun laws conservatives demand — progressives don’t help ourselves when we deride or mock people who are troubled by mass shoplifting, urination on the subway, people in the throes of addiction sleeping on the sidewalk, and other signs that the system is not working. The lady stealing a pack of diapers isn’t the problem. Punitive punishment is often not the solution. But when organized thieves steal diapers en mass for resale and profit, that has downstream negative effects on the public and the lady who actually needs the diapers. One of those effects is the breakdown of trust, which, from what I’ve seen, is a conservatizing force.

This same impulse — make everyone more equal by lowering standards, thereby making things worse — has become a troublingly common left-wing solution in recent years, from education to public order. We can actually make things better and more equal by raising standards, enforcing existing laws, and creating a better policy landscape so that the average CEO no longer makes 281 times the average worker — and the average worker can feed her kids, diaper her baby, and get cancer treatment without bankrupting her family. Getting there requires taking the long view. It requires action and activism and the willingness to slog through the intentionally slow, vastly imperfect democratic process. It’s not as cool as stealing from the Louvre. But it definitely helps more people.

xx Jill

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

If I Tried to Escape, I Would Be Killed by Shelly Kittleson in the Atlantic

What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools? by Jessica Winter in the New Yorker

In abusive relationships, the end can be the most dangerous part by Barbara Rodriguez, Mariel Padilla, and Jasmine Mithani in the 19th

Eric Swalwell, Tony Gonzales and the Post-Post-#MeToo Era by Vivian Yee in the New York Times

How the Tech World Turned Evil by Timothy Noah in the New Republic

The Girls Are Opting Out and Everyone Is Losing Their Minds by Adesola Oni-Doings in yes, it is that deep (Substack)

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From here and there:

The Trump Administration Is Coming After Birth Control Access in a Terrifying New Way (The New York Times)

The Throughline Between Authoritarian Leaders the World Over? Patriarchy.

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

Welcome to The Week in Women, a rundown of this week’s major women’s rights stories from around the world.

India’s Parliament failed to pass a parliament expansion bill that would have reserved one third of seats for women.

A Pennsylvania court struck down a ban on the use of Medicaid funds for abortion.

A man killed eight children in Louisiana in a domestic violence dispute.

In two months, the Trump Administration has lost three women cabinet members.

New York’s Department of Education ruled that school districts’ restrictions on transgender students violated the law.

…and that’s it for now. Have a great week ahead!

xx Tamar + Jill

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The Week in Women comes to you thanks to research from Tamar Eisen (she/her/hers), an advocate for reproductive justice and gender equity.

I assume you are all already reading, watching, and listening to Jessica Yellin, because she is amazing, but if for some reason you’re behind the curve, you can subscribe to her substack News Not Noise here. I joined Jessica in conversation about the relationship between authoritarianism and anti-feminism, why ICE officers and US conservatives seemed so particularly enraged at the women protesting mass deportations, and how misogyny has animated regimes from Budapest to Tehran to today’s GOP.

We recorded this before the Iran war, but I think it’s more relevant than ever. I hope you’ll give it a watch:

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(You can also find it on YouTube here).

I cannot overstate how important it is to understand that what’s happening in the US right now under Trump is awful but not unique. The glorification of male violence, the overt hostility toward women, the ongoing efforts to strip us of our most fundamental rights — these are features of authoritarian governments the world over. They are the promises that help tyrants rise and the ideologies that keep them in power.

They also do not have to be permanent. Feminists may be on our collective back foot at the moment, but this pattern of progress and backlash is also a feature of movements that existed long before any of us were born and will persevere long after we’re gone.

Also, please excuse my bad camera angle, for reasons of noise and WiFi I relocated to a place that was not my office and clearly I needed to stack up some books or something…

xx Jill

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

ICE And The Absence Of Accountability by Joyce Vance in Civil Discourse (Substack)

3 Years After a Landmark Law, Some Pregnant Workers Still Don’t Get Basic Accommodations by Maggie Astor in the New York Times

Israel Moderates Are Losing the Democratic Party by Jonathan Chait in the Atlantic

Meet the Angry Young Women by Emily Lawford in the New Statesmen

The Return of Family Detention by Sarah Stillman in the New Yorker

There’s a Weird Myth About Plastic and Penis Size. Now It’s Made It to Netflix. by Sarah Hougen Poggi in Slate

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From here and there:

Is Trump Taking Taxpayer Dollars for Contraception and Spending it on Erectile Dysfunction, Porn Addiction, and Faster Sperm?

Consider the Dick Pic (Slate)

The Purpose Problem

Want More Babies? Make More Girlbosses.

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

I have a piece out today in the New York Times (gift link, enjoy!) about the Trump administration’s stunning attempts to quietly dismantle Title X, the federal program that has funded contraception for low-income women for nearly 60 years. The administration initially tried to simply end the program by not including it in the White House’s proposed budget. That failed. So now they seem to be wildly revamping their funding priorities — away from contraception and toward things like natural family planning, male sexual dysfunction, and pro-marriage programming.

Trump appointed an anti-abortion (and it seems anti-contraception) doctor to the Health and Human Services role in charge of Title X. And in guidance HHS just released, the department is clear that they aren’t particularly interested in funding the most effective methods of contraception. They want women to get pregnant — and they want to spend more on making men better able to get women pregnant.

I hope you’ll read the piece itself to understand exactly what this new guidance says and what it means. Here, I wanted to add a little more context about why this is happening. And the answer is mostly: The anti-abortion movement generally opposes contraception, and wants it to go the way of legal abortion in the United States.

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It may seem odd that a movement ostensibly dedicated to ending abortion would oppose the tools that are the most effective at ending abortion. But the anti-abortion movement is not, in fact, a movement dedicated to ending abortion. It is a movement dedicated to ending women’s equality.

To be clear, not every pro-life person opposes gender equality; America has lots of people who adopt political positions for lots of reasons, and there are millions of self-identified pro-lifers who just think abortion sounds wrong, but have no deep hostility to women’s rights.

The organized anti-abortion movement is a different thing, and I frankly hate the term “anti-abortion movement” because it really does not encompass what the movement is about. The anti-abortion movement wants to ban abortion, of course. But most of the movement is also intensely hostile to contraception. Most major “pro-life” groups in the US oppose not just abortion but contraception; even most of those who claim not to oppose contraception back court cases and policies that allow for the cutting-off of contraception access. Some groups are at least honest and say that they would like contraception outlawed. Others stay publicly quiet, while backing legal challenges to contraception access. None are enthusiastic advocates for contraception, despite contraception being the top driver for decreased abortion rates.

Still others do something more nefarious: They conflate contraception with abortion. They do this in the hopes that the public won’t notice and judges won’t understand. They do it so they can ban or curtail access to contraception without having to pass any new laws or get any kind of public buy-in.

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This strategy started with the “morning-after pill,” a contraceptive that prevents pregnancy after sex. And you can see how this would be low-hanging fruit: Americans are not exactly the most sexually literate bunch, and I think a lot of people assume that the order of things is “egg released / sex happens / sperm finds egg / girl you’re pregnant.” How, then, could a post-coital contraceptive even work? For the better-informed, we understand that the egg is often released after sex happens, and is fertilized by the sperm that are still hanging around. The morning-after pill works largely by preventing that egg from being released; it does not (and cannot) end an established pregnancy.

No matter. The anti-abortion movement spread the lie that emergency contraception as an “abortifacient” — which led to a spate of pharmacists refusing to fill emergency contraception prescriptions for rape victims.

They’ve done the same thing with IUDs and increasingly birth control pills: Claimed these tools are “abortifacients,” sowed doubt and fear around them, and gone to court to fight for the rights of health workers to turn women away. They succeeded at the Supreme Court in the Hobby Lobby decision, which allows private secular businesses to refuse to include certain forms of contraception in employee health plans if the company’s owner morally objects.

Some anti-abortion groups will at least just admit that they believe sex should always be for baby-making, or at least open to baby-making, and that closing the reproductive door is immoral. The more politically savvy among them realize this is not exactly a popular position in a country where roughly nine in 10 women will use contraception at some point in her life, and where the overwhelming majority of people believe birth control is a good thing. Those groups and individuals aren’t trying to make a moral argument in order to persuade people to choose as they do (that, to me, is fine — choose your choice); they are making wildly untrue scientific and factual arguments to confuse and hand-wave and ultimately remove contraception access without any democratic process.

I am strongly on the “more information + more choices” train when it comes to contraception. I am someone for whom hormonal contraception has not been ideal. I’ve used it for many years of my life, and thank god (and science) I was able to decide for myself when and whether to have children. Hormonal contraception is partly to credit for that. But I’ve also experienced not-great side effects — nothing awful, but I don’t like the way it makes me feel, and getting an IUD inserted and removed was among one of the most acutely painful experiences of my life. Women deserve lots of options! I wish I had more. I really wish men had more, and that they could take on more of the responsibility for preventing pregnancy in ways that weren’t less comfortable and pleasurable (condoms) or invasive and potentially permanent (vasectomy). So this is not an argument that health workers should ignore natural family planning and other non-hormonal options. It is an argument for accurate information and a plethora of options, all of which are accessible.

The truth is that the IUD fails less than one percent of the time; some women with IUDs get pregnant, but the numbers are absolutely tiny. By contrast, someone relying on natural family planning has between a 12 and 24 percent risk of getting pregnant in a year of typical use (other estimates put failure rates as high as 33 percent; the pull-out method is more effective). That isn’t to trash natural family planning — fertility tracking is a good way to maximize one’s chances of getting pregnant, and using it for pregnancy prevention can be helpful and does decrease the risk of pregnancy. But it doesn’t decrease it the way modern contraceptives do, and women deserve that information (and access to effective contraception methods).

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It’s also fine to deeply believe that sex should always be open to childbearing. That is not my personal belief, nor one I am ever going to adopt. But it’s a religious view held by millions and millions of people around the world. If they want to write books making that argument, teach their kids their own moral values, tweet about it, whatever, great — speak your mind, make your moral arguments, persuade who you can. But in the US, your religious view doesn’t get to dictate everyone else’s healthcare. And it’s particularly sneaky — and I would say immoral — to intentionally mislead the public about the facts and your intentions.

Stripping away access to contraception has been a multi-decade project of the anti-abortion movement. They have made common cause with some on the MAHA fringes, as the idea that contraception is unnatural and toxic to fertility has taken hold (there is no evidence that hormonal contraception damages future fertility; in fact, using contraception to space out pregnancies makes for healthier pregnancies, babies, and mothers). It’s these overlapping ideologies that we are now seeing take over HHS. And it’s the anti-abortion and MAHA movements that are taking money from contraception for poor women and suggesting it would be better spent on things like increasing sperm motility, treating erectile dysfunction, and fighting porn addiction.

Please do read the whole piece, and let me know what you think in the comments.

xx Jill

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