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

Graham Platner dropped out of the race for Maine senator following allegations of sexual assault and misconduct.

Planned Parenthood’s Medicaid funding for non-abortion services was restored after a one year freeze by the federal government. However, the damage has been irreparable to many clinics.

A report by UN Women found that at least one million women and girls lost access to critical services as a result of aid cuts, mainly by the US.

Kelsey Pfendler became the first woman in the US to solo row from California to Hawaii.

Kenya’s Parliament appealed a Supreme Court ruling that declared the president’s cabinet unconstitutional for not complying with a gender quota 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.

There is not much to say about the Graham Platner debacle that hasn’t already been said. In Slate this week, I argue that the problem wasn’t just Platner; it was the fetishization of a certain white working-class guy stereotype, and the conflation of misogyny with that man. And it was the way that a certain kind of progressive — usually a man, but not always — clearly enjoys the transgression of misogyny at least as much as leftist politics. Democrats and progressives have largely rejected the Michelle Obama “we go high” ethos. But we probably shouldn’t go quite so low.

And yet, there are still too many prominent and influential left-wing writers, thinkers, politicos and activists who would take us even lower.

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If you’ve been living under a rock for the last 48 hours, Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner was credibly accused of rape by an ex, who says he came to her house despite her asking him not to, and had sex with her against her will. Platner, for some reason, has not yet dropped out — proof to me that this entire disaster is at least partly the fault of a person with extreme narcissistic tendencies and tremendously bad judgment. Maine is winnable for Democrats. If Platner actually cared to unseat Susan Collins, he would have already tendered his resignation. He has not, and I think that tell us quite a bit. It’s not even party over country; it’s Graham Platner over country.

More than Platner’s stubbornness, though, I am shocked to see a number of leftists defending him.

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

The Beacon of Democracy Goes Dark by Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic

America Needs to Grow the Fuck Up by Karen Attiah in the Golden Hour (Substack)

Trump’s War on History by Dan Friedman and Amanda Moore in Mother Jones

The War Forgotten by the World Is an Apocalypse Now by Hannah Beech in the New York Times

“That Guy Is Still Out There” by Joaquin Sapien

Looking to Black and Indigenous Foremothers to Resist Erasure by Arnetta C. Girardeau in Ms. Magazine

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From here and there:

The “Pro-Life” Movement Wants to Execute Women Who Have Abortions

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 upheld a ban on transgender athletes in women’s and girls’ sports.

The Trump Administration cancelled the majority of its teen pregnancy prevention grants, impacting programs in almost half the states.

The Supreme Court rejected Trump’s attempt to overturn a 2023 verdict that he sexually abused and defamed E. Jean Carroll. She is demanding the president immediately pay her millions in damages.

Kenya’s Supreme Court ordered the President to fix the gender imbalance in his cabinet, ruling it violated the constitution’s gender quota.

…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.

It really was only a matter of time before the anti-abortion movement pulled down its “we care about women” facade and began demanding that women be prosecuted for ending their pregnancies. Caroline Kitchener, the best abortion rights reporter around, has a piece in the Times about the rise of the carceral pro-lifer — that is, the willingness of more and more abortion opponents to come out and say they want to jail or even execute women for abortions.

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Some of these people are fringe figures. But many are in the mainstream. And, perhaps most troublingly, some heads of the nation’s largest and most effective anti-abortion groups are shifting from “we would never put women in jail for abortion” to something squishier — we don’t want to put women in jail for abortion right now, but we might consider it should it become more politically palatable. And they are working hard to make it politically palatable.

I say it was only a matter of time before abortion opponents began pushing to jail women for abortion because it’s baked into their claims that life begins at conception and that a fertilized egg is the moral equivalent of a born child. Many people, myself included, believe that human life begins at conception. And many people, myself included, do not believe that this makes a fertilized egg the moral equivalent of an infant — or a 38-week-old fetus.

If this is the claim — that a fertilized egg is a person and should be imbued with the same rights as any other person — there is still a case for abortion (in no other circumstance are you required to donate your organs, blood, and so on so that someone else might live; we don’t even mandate organ donation from dead bodies). But that is not the path the anti-abortion movement is following. They claim that women have a unique obligation to any egg fertilized in their body. And that to remove an embryo or a fetus is akin to killing a child — and should be treated legally as such.

They call this “equal protection,” a perverse use of a phrase originally meant to make African-Americans full citizens under the law. The anti-abortion movement enjoys doing this, stealing from equality movements of the past in order to force profound inequality on women. They accuse Black women of being genocidaires of their own children. They minimize horrific Nazi crimes by calling abortion a “Holocaust.” They call the movement to jail or execute women who have had abortions “abolition.”

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The anti-abortion “equal protection” scheme is not worried about protecting women equally, or at all. Instead, the entity being “equally” protected is a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus. And indeed, “equal protection” is a breathtakingly inaccurate term here — if my kidneys are failing, I do not have a right to affix myself to you and borrow yours for the better part of a year. But they are giving fertilized eggs the same “rights” as born people, insofar as they are insisting that anyone who causes the death of a fertilized egg, embryo, or fetus is a murderer and can be tried as such. In one group’s info page, they claim that they are not calling for the death penalty for women who have abortions. “Equal rights protection answers who the law protects, it does not prescribe any particular penalty,” they say. “It seeks to bring the same legal protections to preborn children that currently apply to born children.” Except, of course, there are more than 2,000 people currently on Death Row in the US, largely for murder. If women who have abortions face the same legal penalties as murderers, well — some women will be sentenced to death for abortion.

Some of the most influential abortion opponents, Kitchener writes, are starting to push the envelope on punishment and accountability for women:

“In the last four years, our attitude has lightened a little bit because we are looking at the scope of the problem,” John Seago, the president of Texas Right to Life and a major force behind Texas’s abortion bans, told her. “I want for it not to be taboo to ask, ‘What is the accountability for these women?’”

Seago was talking about one novel idea: Stripping the medical licenses from any woman who practices medicine and has an abortion. But on the question of whether he would support prosecuting women for abortion, well, he was unwilling to answer.

“We want to have a conversation to talk about what is the proper approach,” he told Kitchener. “By answering yes or no, it shortcuts a discussion.”

This is a change. In 2021, he was telling the Atlantic, “There’s a question of morality: Is it ethical to penalize women seeking abortions in Texas? We have categorically argued that women need to be treated differently than abortionists. Even with civil liability, we say that women cannot be the defendants. That’s not the goal.” Apparently Seago’s morality has shifted.

This kind of chipping away is how the anti-abortion movement has long worked. There were the extremists — the clinic bombers and those who overtly supported them — and then there were the savvier lawyers and activists who penned legislation, clogged up the courts, and slowly acclimated the American public to the idea that abortion was “controversial” (despite significant majorities of Americans supporting abortion rights), that a moderate position was for abortion to be tightly regulated, and that Roe was wrongly decided. This chipping-away strategy made abortions harder and harder to get, and cemented into the American mind that the issue was morally complex and horribly divisive, and might be solved if we just sent it back to the states to decide. Now that that’s happened — that abortion rights are in the hands of state legislatures — it’s not enough for the anti-abortion movement, which wants to ban abortion for every person in America (and outside of it). But they are on the back foot in terms of public opinion. Their abortion bans are unpopular. Jailing or executing women for abortion will be less popular still. So they are doing the slow and steady work of turning the dial of public opinion — getting us used to the idea that women might go to jail for abortion.

You can see this evolution among some of the movement’s most prominent leaders. Kristan Hawkins of Students For Life, one of the leading anti-abortion organizations in the country, wrote along with anti-abortion leader Marjorie Dannenfelser that “we state again emphatically that we oppose prosecuting women for abortion.” But here’s what she said to Kitchener just a few weeks ago:

“My message is, ‘not now,’ but I’m not saying ‘not ever,’” said Ms. Hawkins, who emphasized that culture would have to undergo a major shift before she would seriously entertain a law that puts abortion patients in jail. “You have to make abortion unthinkable before you get to that point when you ask, how are you going to prosecute?”

If abortion is unthinkable, though, then there would be no one to prosecute because no one would have thought about it. Hawkins, obviously, is thinking about it — and knows that there is no universe in which no woman ever will choose to terminate.

This is what’s coming. And the US would not be the first or only country to throw women who have abortions in jail. Right now, there are several women across Central America sitting in prison, many of them because, they say, they had miscarriages. It’s nearly impossible to tell the difference between a spontaneous abortion (a miscarriage) and an abortion caused by abortion pills, which is now the vast majority of women now have abortions in states where the procedure is banned. Criminalizing abortion, and certainly criminalizing women who have abortions, turns every woman’s body into a potential crime scene: Is a miscarriage really just a miscarriage? It means any woman seeking medical help for a miscarriage would be treated as a murder suspect.

Laws jailing women for abortion will not pass tomorrow (although some legislators are indeed trying). But understand that this is where the anti-abortion movement is headed — and unless abortion rights proponents and normal people who don’t hate women can get it together (or at least pay attention), it’s where we may all end up.

xx Jill

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

Abortion Has Always Been an American Tradition by Regina Mahone in the Nation

A Mayor Is Taking Maternity Leave in Japan. Some Men Are Furious. by Javier C. Hernández and Kiuko Notoya in the New York Times

Why The World Ignores Genocide in Sudan by Janine di Giovanni in Vanity Fair

A Terrible Thing Happened to My Family by Pete Buttigieg on Substack

The Right Doesn’t Have to Revoke the 19th to Undermine Women’s Citizenship by Soraya Chemaly in Unmanned (Substack)

Preparing for the unthinkable by Erica Hellerstein in El Tímpano

The Billionaires’ Vagina Club by Melanie Thernstrom in the New Yorker

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From here and there:

Rage Against the Machine

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.

Pop star Olivia Rodrigo launched an all-women music festival that will donate all of its proceeds to groups advocating for women and girls.

Harvey Weinstein’s rape charge was dropped in Manhattan after the case was declared a mistrial.

Planned Parenthood began prescribing medication abortion in Missouri for the first time since 2018, after a court overturned the restriction.

A Pakistani court sentenced the father and uncle of a 14 year old girl from New York to life in prison for murdering her over her “Western lifestyle.”

A federal judge ordered the Justice Department to stop seeking medical records of transgender youth who received care at New York City hospitals.

The Vatican rejected a proposal to allow Catholic women to give sermons.

Two family planning groups sued the Trump Administration over changes in Title X program funding.

…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.

New York City’s primary election results tell one fundamental story: A total rebuke of the Democratic Party, and a desire for radical — if somewhat ideologically amorphous — change.

A record number of Democratic Socialists won, backed by mayor Zohran Mamdani and the DSA. The word “Palestine” must have been uttered more in these primary elections than any others in New York State history. The socialist candidates ran against Democrats and AIPAC as much as they ran against Republicans and Donald Trump. They are a near-universally young bunch, and their message is that things are fundamentally broken for most Americans; that big change is necessary, and the mainstream Democratic Party is not delivering it.

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I will be honest: I am not a revolutionary. I do not, as the DSA platform demands, want to rewrite the Constitution of the United States. I have mixed feelings about some of the primary winners. I think several of them are smart and interesting and I’m glad to see them push the party to the left; there are a small number of others who I think are genuine lunatics. I also think Mamdani has been a very good mayor, largely forgoing pointless ideological fight-picking in favor of delivering tangible services for New Yorkers. He is also an excellent mayor-as-figurehead: People want to follow a leader, and Mamdani is an inspiring speaker with nearly contagious positivity; he clearly loves New York, and he invites everyone in the city to be as invested in and excited by the city as he is. Technocratic liberals like me tend to prefer uninspiring but competent leaders; Mamdani is an important reminder that if you want to actually persuade people to get your agenda accomplished, having an enthusiastic broader public behind you really helps.

It’s also not a coincidence that this emergent crop of socialist electeds are young, or that many of them came from the pro-Palestine movement. The mainstream Democratic Party has utterly failed to make room for young leaders. It has utterly failed to cultivate young talent. And it has certainly failed to foster the kinds of ideological communities that excite and engage the young and idealistic.

In conservative circles, there has been a decades-long effort to inculcate conservative ideology in universities and law schools via the Federalist Society and other groups, and more recently various young conservative groups (Turning Points USA, American Moment, and so on) have created spaces for intra-conservative discussion, debate, and philosophical exchange. It’s hard to overstate how much young and politically-engaged people want these spaces: One hallmark of youth is engaging with new and sometimes provocative ideas. As the staid old Republican Party turned MAGA, it became provocative indeed, and the far right movement benefited from its air of transgression. The Democratic Party and mainstream liberalism offered the exact opposite: censoriousness, a culture of call-outs and cancellations, little space for new ideas once the politics of identity had exhausted themselves.

The DSA and the broader socialist left filled the void.

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

Tulsi Gabbard, her guru and the mysterious messages that helped shape her political career by Jon Swaine in the Washington Post

A Coast Guard Commander Miscarried. She Nearly Died After Being Denied Care. by Erin Edwards and Robin Fields in ProPublica

The Death of the Starter Home by Jackie Cooperman in Wired

Inside the Conference Recruiting Young Women to be Tradwives by Madeline Peltz in Abortion, Every Day (Substack)

RFK’s Answer to the Maternal Health Crisis: Hide the Data by Chasity Hale in Mother Jones

Trump and MAGA Are Getting Crushed by Jennifer Rubin in the Contrarian (Substack)

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From here and there:

What Is Liberal Patriotism? Tell Me.

Is It Wrong to End a Down Syndrome Pregnancy?

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

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

Two people were killed in Afghanistan in a street demonstration over women’s rights.

The FTC sued a group that provides guidelines on medical treatment of transgender patients, alleging it used questionable evidence.

A Wyoming judge struck down three anti-abortion laws, ruling they violated the state’s constitution.

Iranian singer, Parastoo Ahmadi, was sentenced to 74 lashes for performing a song on YouTube without a hijab.

The first female Archbishop of Canterbury apologized for the Church of England’s role in forced adoptions of unmarried women’s children in the 20th century.

A federal judge blocked an Idaho law that criminalized transgender bathroom use from going into effect.

The stepson of Norway’s crown prince was convicted of rape and sentenced to four years in prison.

…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.

I’ve been feeling oddly patriotic this week.

This is… unfamiliar. And it’s not because of the US government, the executive of which is toggling between losing a disastrous war of choice and throwing combination motocross / UFC fight / audience fist-fight 80th birthday parties on the White House lawn. It’s not because of the ongoing primary elections, where there are few candidates who genuinely excite me and where the Democratic Party seems to have no coherent case, let alone strategy. It’s definitely not because I’m watching billionaires (and now a trillionaire) reap the benefits of American generosity and innovation, and then use their largesse and influence to take food and medicine away from the poorest children in the world. It’s not because America is turning 250, and certainly not because Trump’s GOP has decided to polarize that, too. It’s not even because I am missing my New York City more than usual this week, although I am, and the vibes truly do seem immaculate.

It’s because of the World Cup.

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Yeah sure there are Europeans eating American gas station nuggets and seeing their lives (and cholesterol) change. There has been the usual American cruelty and xenophobia, most notably in barring a Somali ref from coming to work a game. But there has largely been broad national hospitality — not just welcoming the stranger, but wearing his flag and inviting him to sleep on the cot in your basement if he’s in a pinch. There has been a pride in America’s diversity, our openness, our unpretentiousness.

Since Trump took office for the second time, conservatives, largely led by JD Vance, have made the case that America is not an idea but a homeland for a people. In their telling, “heritage Americans” — those who can trace their lineage back to America’s earliest settlers — are fundamentally more American than the rest of us. The implication is that others — immigrants, people who are not white, people who are not Christian — may be welcome in small numbers, but they should know their place, and they will always only be America-adjacent. I find this not just ideologically repugnant, but profoundly anti-American.

Liberals and leftists, though, have long struggled with the concept of patriotism (the opening scene in this Yoni Applebaum piece is a powerful example). And I also cringe at the word. But living abroad has also in so many ways made me feel more like an American than I ever did living in America (although to be honest I still identify as a New Yorker first). I can tell you all more about that later. But America the idea is particularly powerful when you understand that the ideas that make up America are not exactly globally embraced, and you find yourself living according to a different set of rules. My politics revolve around making America a better place. But I wouldn’t be so invested in doing that if I didn’t think the many good things about America make improvement possible.

So we don’t have to embrace “patriotism” the word, but I am curious about America the idea — your idea of what America is, and what America could be.

So: This is an open call for submissions from all of you, who I know are a thoughtful bunch (I also know many of you are writers, given how popular our annual Writing Practice is). If you’d like, send me your short essays on what actually makes America good. I’m not necessarily interested in big lofty ideological sweeps, but in specifics. When have you felt like your idea of America was illustrated or encapsulated? Tell me about details and particulars: an interaction with a stranger, a play you saw, a concert you attended, a trip you took, a book you read. A thing, a moment, an event.

To submit, just hit reply to this email, or send a note to jill@substack.com. I’ll pick a few to publish over the coming weeks. I look forward to hearing from you.

xx Jill

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Earlier this month, YouTuber Jesse Ridgeway went viral for tweeting about his wife’s abortion. The couple were expecting a baby, but genetic testing indicated the fetus had trisomy-21, or Down syndrome. They terminated the pregnancy, he wrote, in a difficult decision they did not make lightly.

The internet exploded.

The Ridgeways were called Satan-worshiping eugenicists who killed their own child. They were compared to Hitler. Everyone from Meghan McCain to House Speaker Mike Johnson branded them “evil.”

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In reality, most people who get a fetal diagnosis of Down syndrome do exactly as the Ridgeways did — roughly 74% of Down syndrome pregnancies are terminated. And pregnancies where the fetus has Down syndrome see astounding miscarriage and stillbirth rates, which some research puts at roughly 50%, but others list as high as 80%. The Ridgeways listed this high miscarriage risk as one reason for their decision. All of this — the miscarriage rate, the abortion rate — adds up to a reality in which the overwhelming majority of fetuses with Down syndrome are never born.

To me, the legal framework around this is simple: Women should get to choose if they bring pregnancies to term or not. I’m comfortable with more restrictions attaching at the point of fetal viability, but before that, women should be the ones to decide whether or not to stay pregnant for whatever reason — including if they find out they are carrying a fetus with Down syndrome. No other legal structure fairly balances the interests of the pregnant woman and the fetus. There are all kinds of reasons women may have abortions that I think are questionable or even immoral, but there’s just no good way to regulate people’s motivations, and big downsides to doing so.

One of my growing frustrations with American political discourse, though, is the retreat to the law as a stopping point of the conversation. This happens on both the left and the right, but because I am a person on the political left, I find it particularly frustrating when discussing issues among fellow political travelers. And questions like the morality — not the legality — of terminating pregnancies for genetic defects or the related and growing field of choosing embryos for their genetic assets going under-discussed on the left, and we cede more difficult moral debates to the right. I wish we had more of a collective interest not just in discussing what should be legal, but what is good and right, or how to think about goodness and rightness.

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One of the best pieces I’ve ever read about the moral, ethical, and social complications of Down syndrome terminations is this one in the Atlantic, which mostly looks at Nordic countries, where 95% of of Down syndrome pregnancies are terminated. The Down syndrome debate is particularly interesting to me because it is difficult. The religious right has a clear position: Abortion is wrong more or less always, and so ending Down syndrome pregnancies is wrong. The left generally, again, falls back on the law: Women should be legally allowed to end their pregnancies for whatever reasons they see fit, including chromosomal abnormalities or birth defects. And of course I agree with that.

But much of the rest of the conversation either feels like emotional blackmail (claiming that if you support the right to terminate a Down syndrome pregnancy you are saying that people with Down syndrome shouldn’t exist) or some bloodless attempt at moral math (ticking off a list of Down syndrome complications) or flat-out disgust toward people with disabilities (arguing that of course anyone in their right mind would end a Down syndrome pregnancy / that disabled people are a burden and disabled children ruin their parents’ and siblings’ lives ) or a kind of gauzy glorification of Down syndrome (posting photos of adorable children and adults with Down’s as if to claim that Down’s kids are actually a kind of extra-cute version of a person and any concerns are silly).

In reality, nearly all of us believe that there are some situations in which it is more moral to not being a person into the world — such is the case with genetic disorders that guarantee not just that an infant will die, but that their short time on earth will be excruciatingly painful. But I don’t think this is as simple as reproductive “choice” being the governing principle here: I also personally believe that some emerging reproductive technologies are dangerously immoral and should not be legal — giving people the ability to maximize for intelligence, height, hair or eye color, and so on. Genetic testing for serious health risks strikes me as one thing; genetic maximizing is a very different other.

Down syndrome falls into a more complex middle. Many people with Down syndrome live happy lives; many will also never be able to live independently, a fact that does not necessarily invalidate personal happiness. It’s been disturbing to see so many people respond to the Ridgeways story by arguing that it’s best, actually, to end Down syndrome pregnancies in all cases; the universe of human experience just doesn’t and shouldn’t work according to such clear-and-fast rules. But it’s also been jaw-dropping to see such vitriol thrown at a couple who was simply honest about a choice that most people in their situation make. It was almost as though the objection wasn’t the act itself, but the lack of shame about it.

And maybe that’s the actual stance many Americans hold: The choice to end a Down syndrome pregnancy should be legal, but it should be shrouded in shame and kept quiet.

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This topic is always a fraught one for those of us who are both feminists and supporters of the disability rights movement, in part because the more recent iteration of social justice movements have had demands for moral clarity at their core. And to me, the stance that a woman should have the legal right to decide for herself whether or not to continue a pregnancy is among the clearest of moral positions. But I can also see how the conditions under which women tend to end pregnancies can signal more complex morals and norms. For many years, women in various parts of the world were much more likely to abort female fetuses than male ones. I still believe that women should have a legal right to abortion. But I believe that misogyny is morally wrong, and the mass aborting of female fetuses was a symptom of a culture-wide moral disease. For some in the disability rights movement, the fact that most people choose to abort fetuses with Down syndrome is a similar symptom of a moral failure.

(Just for the record, or in case you’re curious, I don’t believe that ending a Down syndrome pregnancy is morally wrong, but I would like to see more people feel they have a full set of options — and options are certainly constrained if you do not feel confident that a child with Down syndrome will be well cared-for as an adult).

It is true that the US is an extremely difficult place to raise a child with disabilities, or to be a person with disabilities. There are not enough resources. People with disabilities, especially serious ones that mean they are not verbal or cannot easily communicate their experiences or needs, are at significantly higher risk than the general population for abuse, poverty, and neglect. Couples staring at a genetic test and staring down a future where they are dead and their grown child is in the world without the care he or she needs to function are making the kind of calculus for which there is no possible calculator, no solvable equation.

It is also true, though, that abortion rates for fetuses with Down syndrome are even higher in many nations where support for people with disabilities are far more robust (in Iceland, Denmark, and other extremely generous social welfare states, upwards of 90% of Down syndrome pregnancies are terminated). It is true that humans have gone to great lengths to make ourselves healthier and to avoid the kinds of conditions and complications that are not just different but decrease any individual’s ability to participate in society, decrease their ability to experience the fullness of life, and increase their suffering. I’ve heard some in the disability rights movement argue that the problems are not disabilities themselves, but an ableist society that does not create accommodations and other ways for people with disabilities to thrive. And the second part is true — we should have greater accommodations and ways for people with disabilities to thrive. But we also do, and should, go to great lengths to avoid disabilities from occurring in the first place, from telling pregnant women to take folic acid supplements to spending millions on medical research to help paralyzed people walk. None of this indicates that people with disabilities are less worthy as people. Many Down syndrome fetuses don’t survive until birth because the condition really does create serious physical problems, and people with Down syndrome tend to live shorter lives that are rife with medical problems. None of this means people with Down syndrome are less worthy as people.

But I would imagine that most of us, apart from a small minority who hold very particular religious views, have some circumstances under which we would end a pregnancy because of fetal abnormality. So the question is not really one of whether to draw a line, but where to draw it.

Which of course gets us back to the legalism: Given all of these complexities, these lines should be drawn liberally, giving individuals maximal freedoms to make their own moral calculations. But liberals should resist the urge to cede all other moral grappling to the right.

xx Jill

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

The World’s Leading Deepfake Expert No Longer Trusts His Own Eyes by Eli Saslow in the New York Times

The unspoken reason it is so hard to be on the left and promote masculinity by Celeste Davis in Matriarchal Blessing (Substack)

Andrew Tate’s Empire of Abuse by Heidi Blake in the New Yorker

So Much for Leaving Abortion Up to the States by Adam Serwer in the Atlantic

Meet the women leading the people-powered push against data centers by Jessica Kutz, Jasmine Mithani, and Gabriella Gladney in the 19th

The Life and Labor of American Grocery Stores by Ann Larson in the Nation

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From here and there:

There’s a Terrible Reason Why This Ebola Outbreak Is Different (Slate)

Theocracy is Bad, Actually

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.

Southern Baptists voted to enact a formal ban on women pastors.

Defense Secretary Hegseth cut all women Navy officers from a promotion list.

The Taliban arrested at least 30 women for violating hijab laws in western Afghanistan.

Choo Mi-ae was elected as the first female provincial governor in South Korea.

Graham Platner won the Maine Democratic Senate primary, despite controversies around inappropriate relationships with women.

A woman sued an Illinois hospital and OBGYN after allegedly being denied care for an ectopic pregnancy.

Bhutan will offer monthly cash incentives to families to have more children in response to its declining population.

French singer Patrick Bruel was taken into custody in France over sexual assault claims by 13 women.

…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.

Last week, Persepolis author Marjane Satrapi died at age 56. Her graphic novel, mostly memoir, tells the story of a girl named Marji who lives through the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, a brutal war with Iraq, and the rise of theocratic rule before escaping to Europe. In 2024, Satrapi published “Women, Life, Freedom,” another graphic nonfiction book documenting the massive protest movement that emerged after the Iranian regime murdered 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, with women removing their veils and demanding an end to the terror of the morality police.

And so of course she’s being smeared as “orientalist,” “racist,” and “Islamophobic,” and accused of spreading anti-Iranian “propaganda.”

But, plot twist: Those smearing her aren’t right-wing Iranians who support their despotic and murderous government. They’re largely American and European leftists.

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Happy Monday and welcome to Monday Reads!

From around the web:

Women, We Deserve Better Than This by Melinda French Gates in the New York Times

The World Cup in an Age of Strongmen by Andre Pagliarini in the New Republic

IUD Insertions Are Notoriously Painful. It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way. by Helen Santoro in Slate

Why Do Men Never Have to Reckon With Their Ambition? by Stefanie O’Connell in Too Ambitious (Substack)

The Data-Center Divide by Andrew Cockburn in Harper’s Magazine

These Republican Lawmakers Challenged Abortion Bans. Then They Faced Backlash. by Cassandra Jaramillo in ProPublica

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From here and there:

What Principles Should Liberals Hold?

Texas Tells You Everything You Need to Know

Happy reading!

xx Jill + Tamar

“Graham Platner during an interview with Lauren Egan” by The Bulwark, CC BY-NC 4.0

Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that the presumptive Democratic nominee for a Maine senate seat, Graham Platner, had sent sexually explicit texts to a half-dozen women on the app Kik early in his marriage. Platner and his wife married in 2023, so “early in their marriage” means very recently.

This may not have been much of a scandal, except that Platner is a largely unknown quantity, and his campaign has been hit again and again by stories that show, at the very least, a real lack of judgment: A tattoo he got while in the marines that he says he thought was just a skull and crossbones but turned out to be a totenkopf, strongly associated with Nazis and the SS; Reddit posts that said rape victims should “take some responsibility,” that political violence may be necessary, and that included crude musings on Latin American hookers; working for Blackwater; and so on. Platner’s defense against the earlier scandals was that he was young and foolish, and that he was a combat veteran with PTSD; he worked hard to come through many tough years, and had emerged a different man.

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The sexting scandal is landing in part because it suggests his redemption arc hasn’t quite bent toward its end — “I’m a changed man” is a harder case to make when you were behaving quite badly just two years ago. It makes voters nervous about what might drop next. And after the John Fetterman fiasco, many Democrats are understandably skittish about untested populist candidates with complex mental health histories who take on the trappings of the white working class but who may wind up being extremely loose cannons. And so this story, which by itself would probably not be much of a story, is a story.

It’s also turning into a bizarro gotcha for Republicans and even some moderates, who claim that voting for Platner despite these scandals is hypocrisy — that deciding Democratic power is more important than decency is the same calculus Republicans make when voting for people like Ken Paxton in Texas or Donald Trump. And I think they have a theoretical point: It would indeed be bad if Democrats put party before country or power before decency. But is that what’s happening here?

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The Platner story is a good moment to clarify what, exactly, liberal and / or leftist values should be when it comes to electing flawed human beings. We can think that some behavior is personally offensive without it being electorally disqualifying, and that’s where I put the sexting scandal. Do I like it? No. Do I think it shows a lack of judgment? Yes. In an election where there are only two real choices, do the concerns about a lack of judgment outweigh the concerns about a politician who often backs Trump’s agenda and voted to confirm Brett Kavanaugh (talk about a lack of judgment!)? For me, no.

There are and should be lines. Those include things like committing crimes. Corruption. Multiple credible allegations of sexual assault or harassment. Abuse of power.

I can hear the critics: “Uh, what about ‘Nazi tattoo’?” And, yeah — Nazi tattoo should be on that list. But I do think we can take context and common sense into account. I’ll be honest, if I had seen Platner’s tattoo in the wild, I would not have thought “Nazi tattoo.” I would have thought “skull and crossbones.” I can absolutely see how a marine on shore leave would have wound up with a tattoo that has connotations the vast majority of Americans do not understand. I agree he should have gotten it removed sooner. But I do not actually believe that Platner is a secret Nazi.

If you do believe Platner is a secret Nazi (or, I think more commonly, that he’s an antisemite and an avatar for the rise of dangerous antisemitism on the left), then I can see why you wouldn’t vote for Platner. There are people who sincerely believe this, and surely think I am either pitifully naive or dangerously stupid for giving him the benefit of the doubt on this one. I can respect that difference and that moral line-drawing. I think it represents a genuine difference of interpretation of the facts, not a difference in fundamental morality.

This is not a defense of Graham Platner, who I frankly don’t care to defend, even if I would in fact vote for him were I a Maine resident. I also get Fetterman vibes from him; I am eternally skeptical of men who spend much of their lives screwing around and then one day wake up and decide they should hold one of the most powerful positions in the country. I don’t trust them. I don’t think they tend to be very effective leaders, because they don’t tend to be particularly conscientious, prudent, or willing to work behind the scenes and build relationships in order to get things done. I do not think Graham Platner exemplifies the best of what America has to offer. I have my concerns, in other words. I think there are some very valuable lessons for Democrats to learn here.

But again, binary choice. And my question is which core values voting for Platner would violate. Which standards are we implementing here, and are we comfortable applying those to all Democratic candidates going forward? I’m perfectly comfortable with the “no sexual harassers / no sexual assailants / no corrupt criminals” standard. I am less so with a standard that holds consensual sexting should end a campaign.

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Liberal, moderate, and leftist standards are being tested elsewhere this week, too. Yesterday the news broke that leftist streamer Hasan Piker and Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur were banned from the UK, where both had been set to speak, “on the grounds that their presence in the U.K. may not be conducive to the public good.” The ban, according to the government, was “based solely on an assessment of the potential risk an individual may pose to U.K. society.” Piker and Uygur both say that the ban is based on their anti-Israel comments, which many critics say have veered into the anti-Semitic.

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Hi readers - I am so sorry about the glitchy email that went out earlier. I’m not sure what happened (I was posting in a rush from a small airport, so it was almost surely my error combined with technological challenges), but the piece was randomly cut and repeated. The version below should be corrected. Thank you for your patience.

Texas held a series of primary elections on Tuesday, the most important of which was for the Republican senate candidate. John Cornyn, the long-standing Texas senator, squared off with Ken Paxton, Texas’s notoriously corrupt and cruel attorney general.

Paxton won.

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Separately, Democrats in Texas’s 35^th congressional district were voting in a race that usually wouldn’t garner much attention, but broke into the national conversation because of how utterly batshit one of the candidates was. That candidate, Maureen Galindo, is a sex therapist who began using her social media platforms to post that “ZIOS=GENOCIDAL EUROPEAN COLONIZER FREAKS” and said that an ICE center should be repurposed into “a prison for American Zionists.” Galindo seemed to have very little authentic support, and her candidacy was almost entirely funded by a dark-money group that is pretty clearly run by Republican spoilers. Not a single Democrat got behind Galindo’s campaign. Many, from the center to the far left, condemned her and urged Texans to vote against her. They did, and the moderate candidate, Johnny Garcia, won by more than 60 percent of the vote.

Ken Paxton also won by more than 60% of the vote.

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Texas held a series of primary elections on Tuesday, the most important of which was for the Republican senate candidate. John Cornyn, the long-standing Texas senator, squared off with Ken Paxton, Texas’s notoriously corrupt and cruel attorney general.

Paxton won.Texas held a series of primary elections on Tuesday, the most important of which was for the Republican senate candidate. John Cornyn, the long-standing Texas senator, squared off with Ken Paxton, Texas’s notoriously corrupt and cruel attorney general.

Paxton won.

Subscribe now

Separately, Democrats in Texas’s 35^th congressional district were voting in a race that usually wouldn’t garner much attention, but broke into the national conversation because of how utterly batshit one of the candidates was. That candidate, Maureen Galindo, is a sex therapist who began using her social media platforms to post that “ZIOS=GENOCIDAL EUROPEAN COLONIZER FREAKS” and said that an ICE center should be repurposed into “a prison for American Zionists.” Galindo seemed to have very little authentic support, and her candidacy was almost entirely funded by a dark-money group that is pretty clearly run by Republican spoilers. Not a single Democrat got behind Galindo’s campaign. Many, from the center to the far left, condemned her and urged Texans to vote against her. They did, and the moderate candidate, Johnny Garcia, won by more than 60 percent of the vote.

Ken Paxton also win by more than 60% of the vote.

Paxton had the endorsement of Donald Trump, the most powerful Republican in the country. Much of the party rallied around his candidacy, and even those who didn’t largely stayed silent – there was no avalanche of criticism, and what did exist centered on electability, not character or decency.

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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.