As our tech overlords continue pumping more resources into AI development and innovation—responsibly, of course—they’re facing a massive trust gap: the people they want to use the tech keep asking who the technology is actually for. Is it for those who clamor for a surveillance state? Is it meant to help us compete with other nations? Or is it for replacing employees—and deciding which ones should lose their job? A vast majority of these decisions are made by wealthy men in government and industry.  According to a study released Wednesday by Harvard University researchers, which included a survey of more than 5,000 US adults, women reported that they are habitually excluded from those conversations—let alone the decision-making—compared to men. Women are disproportionately concentrated in jobs most vulnerable to automation by AI tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini—more than 80 percent of women face such risks, according to the National Partnership of Women and Families—and were more likely to say they didn’t have sufficient access to information and training about how the tools are used in their workplaces. It’s therefore no surprise that the study found women less likely to trust AI tools, and the information they did get about them, than men. (The researchers note that most respondents identified as men or women, and that the analysis therefore “centers on these two groups, though we recognize that not everyone identifies within a gender binary.”) “Independent researchers rank among our respondents’ most trusted sources on AI, and caution is part of what they offer,” Laura Manley, the executive director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center told me. The US employment landscape offers little government or industry regulation on how employers incorporate AI technology into the workplace, or what specific products are promoted to the public. But women are “rarely quoted as experts,” Manley continued—according to data the researchers collected from July 2025 to June 2026, among the well over 100,000 experts cited in domestic news coverage of AI, men appeared 4.3 times more often than women. AI tools, the study found, were disproportionately seen as by and for men—women weren’t seen to have the same level of authority or perceived expertise on the technology, and male and female respondents in the study agreed that “men’s needs and perspectives are better represented in AI development and AI-generated content.” Women, meanwhile, were more likely to report concern and skepticism around AI: a sentiment many leading figures at the world’s largest AI firms do not want to hear, and an especially unwelcome perspective in a sector where a leading AI CEO—and the world’s richest man—already loves to complain about feminism. > Feminism and lack of children has killed the happiness of so many women > > — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 29, 2026 AI, in other words, is a boys’ club—and some of its leading figures like it that way.

In 2017, at the height of the #MeToo movement, six actresses told the Los Angeles Times that a prominent Hollywood director was sexually violent toward them.  Natasha Henstridge said he forced her to give him oral sex. Olivia Munn said that he masturbated in front of her, then lied to others that they’d had sex. Jaime Ray Newman shared that he’d sexually harassed her on a flight. According to Katharine Towne, the director followed her into the bathroom at a party after making unwanted advances. Jorina King detailed hiding from him in the bathroom; seemingly in exchange for a speaking part in a film, she said that he went into her trailer and asked to see her breasts. Eri Sasaki said that, on set, he repeatedly asked her to enter a bathroom with him, and when she declined, he allegedly said: “Don’t you want to be famous?” They were talking about Brett Ratner, who on Thursday will stand next to Melania Trump to celebrate the premiere of Melania, his eponymous documentary about the First Lady. In a 2018 interview about the #MeToo movement, the First Lady told ABC News, “I support the women—they need to be heard. We need to support them. And also men, not just women,” adding that accusers “cannot just say to somebody … ‘I was sexually assaulted’ or ‘You did that to me.’ Because sometimes the media goes too far and the way they portray some stories, it’s not correct. It’s not right.” Ratner, who was ushered out of Hollywood following the allegations, returns to the industry as the film’s director. He denies all sexual violence allegations against him and has not been charged or held liable in court.  Melania: 20 Days to History details the weeks leading up to the 2025 inauguration. Its Thursday premiere at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—to which President Donald Trump recently affixed his name—follows a black-tie White House screening for around 70 people—including Mike Tyson, Queen Rania of Jordan, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan, Apple CEO Tim Cook, New York Stock Exchange CEO Lynn Martin, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Jassy, according to the Hollywood Reporter, personally greenlighted Amazon spending $40 million to acquire the doc. The company is reportedly spending another $35 million on marketing.  Thursday’s event is the culmination of a yearlong re-integration into directing for Ratner, who directed the Rush Hour franchise and produced Horrible Bosses, among many other credits. His return is thanks in large part to President Trump—who, according to reporting from Semafor, personally pressured Paramount head and close ally Larry Ellison to revive Rush Hour 4—and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is reportedly friendly with the director and brought him as a guest to the United Nations. (Ratner emigrated to Israel in 2023.) With Trump and Netanyahu’s support, Ratner is now set to direct another documentary—this one on the Abraham Accords, a diplomatic agreement from Trump’s first term involving normalization of relations between Israel and several Arab countries. After the 2017 allegations, Ratner was dropped by Warner Bros., which had a $450-million co-financing deal with his production company. Biopics he had in the works on Hugh Hefner and Milli Vanilli were put on hold and dropped, respectively. The fourth installment of Rush Hour, now once again moving ahead, was also halted.  His directing and producing career had been snuffed out—until the Trump family stepped in. Less than a month after Trump, who has been held liable in court for sexual abuse and has been accused of sexual misconduct by dozens of women, returned to office, Ratner was granted the director role on Melania’s documentary.  An advertisement for “Melania” in Times Square. Richard B. Levine/ZUMA Ratner, like the president, was also captured in a photograph in the portion of the Epstein files that has been released. The undated image shows him hugging a shirtless Jean-Luc Brunel, the French modeling agent and close Epstein associate who died by suicide in a prison in France in 2022.  “As millions of Americans and thousands of Epstein survivors continue to demand the full release of the Epstein files, Trump and his abuser buddies have instead chosen to release a vanity project wanted by no one,” said Elisa Batista of survivor advocacy group UltraViolet Action in a statement about Melania. In his return to directing, Rolling Stone reports, Ratner has been difficult to work with, according to some workers involved in producing Melania. While no new sexual misconduct allegations have come out, one crew member put it like this: “I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this…but Brett Ratner was the worst part.”

Editor’s note: This article first appeared in Ms. Magazine. The brutality we are witnessing in Minnesota, at the hands of thousands of poorly trained, heavily armed and trigger-happy men who have full reign to hunt and harass anyone who is non-white, is nothing short of state-sponsored terror. It is a horrific illustration of what unfettered power does in the hands of leadership that celebrates and demands violence, especially from men.  Make no mistake: The thousands of new recruits to ICE, driven by a $100 million “wartime recruitment” push, were selected with violence in mind. Recruitment ads targeted male-dominated places and spaces where violence is either required or valorized: gun shows, military bases and local law enforcement, along with UFC fight attendees and people who spent time browsing for tactical gear and weapons. > Recruitment ads make it clear that ICE is the place to scratch the violent > itch. The content of those ads makes it clear that ICE is the place to scratch the violent itch. Recruitment posters and slogans focus on ideas of national defense and sacred duty, positioning immigrants as an existential threat by imploring applicants to “defend the homeland” against an incursion of “foreign invaders.” Veterans get a special nod with phrasing like “your nation calls once more.” The work of detaining immigrants is depicted as an epic, heroic quest, with frontier imagery and cowboy-hat clad horsemen alongside language like “one homeland, one people, one heritage.” The ads also dehumanize and fearmonger with racist dog whistles, warning that “the enemies are at the gates” or telling applicants to join ICE to “destroy the flood.” One DHS ad uses the phrase “we’ll have our home again,” which is a lyric from a white supremacist song. Much of this rhetoric evokes the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which mobilized white supremacist terrorist attacks in El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo in recent years with false claims of an orchestrated effort by Jews and feminists to promote immigration, reduce white birthrates, and eliminate white majority societies. It’s not only the homeland that’s being defended in this framing. It’s also the nation’s white women, who the administration has continually depicted as the victims of unfettered crime at the hands of undocumented immigrants. This is why we see Trump administration officials constantly invoking the names of a handful of young white women, like Laken Riley or Jocelyn Nungaray, who were killed by immigrants—even though thousands more women have died at the hands of their lovers, partners or strangers who are citizens. Last week, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt railed in response to a journalist’s question about ICE, describing the “brave men and women of ICE” as “doing everything in their power to remove those heinous individuals and make our communities safer.”  False crime statistics about sexual violence have always mobilized white supremacist violence from the extremist fringe, from the KKK’s campaign of racial terror, to recent mass shootings. During his attack, the terrorist who killed nine Black worshippers in 2015 in a Charleston church told his victims he was doing this because “y’all are raping our women.” Now, we are seeing those same false claims mobilize state-sponsored violence. The administration is recruiting, training and deploying federal agents who believe they are on some sort of noble, patriotic and manly quest, flying on horseback across the open land to rescue white women and restore the nation to its righteous place. > Protection isn’t the only way that gendered narratives mobilize violence. What > we are seeing in Minnesota is also about punishment. But protection isn’t the only way that gendered narratives mobilize violence. What we are seeing in Minnesota is also about punishment. Replacement conspiracies frame women—especially feminists—as the problem, arguing they are conspiring to have fewer babies, promote abortion, reduce white birth rates and accelerate demographic change. Women who refuse to submit to male authority, refuse God-given heterosexual relationships or reject their ‘natural’ roles as reproducers of the nation are seen as the enemy.  This is why, after an ICE agent shot Renee Nicole Good in the face after she dared to protest his authority, he lobbed the phrase “fucking bitch” as she was dying. In the days following Good’s killing, a local protester reported that another ICE agent sneered at her, “Have you not learned? This is why we killed that lesbian bitch.” Another woman was warned to stop obstructing agents because “that’s why that lesbian bitch is dead.” This is how men who cannot tolerate a woman’s disrespect put her in her place: with violence or the threat of it. The shootings of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent and Alex Pretti by CBP agents—coming on the heels of numerous deaths of ICE detainees in recent months—are a predictable outcome of the institutional norms and social hierarchies the administration is valorizing.  As thousands of amped up men are deployed in the streets and taught there are no consequences for killing anyone who refuses to submit to their authority, we should anticipate more violence to come. After all: The violence is the point. Cynthia Miller-Idriss is a scholar at American University, where she is the founding director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL). She is the author of several books including, Man Up: The New Misogyny and the Rise of Violent Extremism.

During an NCAA women’s swimming championship in March 2022, two seniors tied for fifth place. The race was unremarkable except for one fact: One of the swimmers, Lia Thomas, was a transgender woman. The swimmer she tied with, Riley Gaines, believed the NCAA never should have allowed her to participate. The matchup, and Gaines’ subsequent transformation into a leading anti-trans activist, has fueled a growing movement to “save women’s sports” from trans women—and a conservative crusade against trans rights more broadly.  Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app. This week on Reveal, we examine Gaines’ rise and radicalization, as her rhetoric shifts from calling out NCAA policy to calling trans women sexual predators. Over the last year, the anti-trans movement has reached a tipping point. Trans girls are banned from girls’ school sports in the majority of states. The NCAA and US Olympic and Paralympic committees have banned trans women from women’s competitions. The Supreme Court is currently considering the issue, too. Then we dive into the science to understand how gender-affirming hormone therapy affects trans women’s performance—and what questions science still has not answered around fairness in women’s sports. Finally, we return to the swimming pool, as reporter Imogen Sayers speaks with Meghan Cortez-Fields, one of the last transgender swimmers to compete as a woman in the NCAA.

Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) decried Republican efforts to discredit medication abortion in an interview Wednesday with Mother Jones, saying that “the only reason they’re going after mifepristone is because it is the way most women get their abortive care.” Mifepristone is one of the pills used in medication abortion, which in 2023 accounted for 63 percent of all terminations in the United States.  On Wednesday morning, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions held a hearing on “protecting women” from the “dangers of chemical abortion drugs.” Chaired by Louisiana Republican Sen. Bill Cassidy, the hearing centered on conservative demands for further regulation of abortion medication; two of its three witnesses were medication abortion opponents, including Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who on Tuesday pushed to extradite a California abortion provider on felony charges, accusing him of sending abortion pills into her state. Democrats taking part, including Sen. Murray, argued that the hearing wasn’t geared toward protecting women but discrediting settled science. In November, Murray led the Senate Democratic Caucus in sending a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and FDA Commissioner Martin Makary expressing concern over the Trump administration’s review of mifepristone. “Republicans are holding this hearing to peddle debunked junk ‘studies’ by anti-abortion organizations which have no credibility and have been forcefully condemned by actual medical organizations,” Murray said in her opening statement. The hearing, she continued, was “really about the fact that Trump and his anti-abortion allies want to ban abortion nationwide.” According to a New York Times review of more than 100 studies spanning 30 years, abortion medication is safe and effective; mifepristone, used both in medication abortion and to treat miscarriage, has had FDA approval for more than 25 years. In October, the FDA approved another generic version of the pill. “You can see that they’re just pulling straws from absolutely everywhere, because they want to obscure the whole goal” to “ban abortion nationwide,” Murray said to me. Republican officials insisted that medication abortion is too easy to get. Yet in 13 states, abortion is banned in nearly all circumstances. Another seven states have enacted time restrictions earlier than what was outlined in Roe v. Wade. At the same time, maternity care deserts are expanding across the nation. According to a 2024 report by infant and maternal health nonprofit March of Dimes, more than a thousand US counties—together home to more than 2.3 million women of reproductive age—lack a single birthing facility or obstetric clinician. Since 2020, 117 rural hospitals have stopped delivering babies, or announced that they would stop before the end of 2025, according to a December report from the Center for Healthcare Quality and Payment Reform. A National Partnership for Women & Families analysis from June warned that 131 rural hospitals with labor and delivery units are at risk of closing altogether due to Republican-led cuts to Medicaid through President Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.” I asked Sen. Murray about requiring consultations for medication abortion—and why pregnant people aren’t going in person to seek out that route.  “It’s pretty stunning to watch these Republicans talk about this with a straight face,” she told me. “The reason many women don’t,” Murray continued, “is the abortion bans that in Republican states don’t give women the option to see a provider.” Murray expressed concern, “especially after we have a hearing like this, where we heard so much misinformation,” that an already confusing landscape for those seeking abortion could be further obscured. And a new study, published Monday in the leading medical journal JAMA, found that the FDA has repeatedly reviewed new evidence about mifepristone and reaffirmed its safety. Abortion medication, Murray pointed out, is less deadly than both penicillin and Viagra. “We didn’t have a hearing today on Viagra,” she told me. “We had a hearing on mifepristone, so their whole thing about safety and all this is just hogwash.”

Despite years of voter suppression efforts by the state’s Republican Party, Virginians have spoken: It’s time for GOP gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears to “go somewhere and sit down.” Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who represented the state’s 7th District in Congress until this year, defeated Earle-Sears in a highly anticipated race to become the first female governor in the Commonwealth’s centuries-long history. > VA Voter: Spanberger. She out there doing what she's supposed to do. That > other lady? She needs to go somewhere and sit down. pic.twitter.com/72dNcvPWCT > > — Acyn (@Acyn) November 4, 2025 Spanberger beat Earle-Sears by a staggering 12-point margin with close to 80 percent of votes counted, according to Associated Press projections. The 56-44 win—representing well over 300,000 votes—comes at a precarious time for the Democratic Party, with Virginia serving as a critical bellwether for the country’s feelings on President Donald Trump before national midterm elections next year. For years, Virginia Republicans have been working overtime to suppress the state’s Democratic voters, including a blatantly illegal voter roll purge in 2023 orchestrated by then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin. In 2024, the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc ruled in Youngkin’s favor, forcing nearly 1,600 voters to fight for their registration to be reinstated. A year later, shortly after Trump’s re-election, the Justice Department voluntarily dismissed a lawsuit originally brought forth by the Biden administration that once again challenged the purge. Spanberger’s victory is a promising sign for Virginia’s effort, alongside other Democratic-led legislatures, to redraw district lines after states like North Carolina and Texas were subjected to extreme gerrymandering by Republican legislators that functionally disenfranchised a huge swath of their voters. Alongside the governorship, all 100 seats in Virginia’s House of Delegates, the lower chamber of its state legislature, are also up for reelection—which will determine the GOP’s chances of leaving Democratic redistricting dead in the water.

Women are the fast-growing population of incarcerated people. And if Republicans get their way, more pregnant women will be joining their ranks. That’s because conservatives are behind a growing push to criminalize pregnancy outcomes nationwide, in part by giving full rights to fetuses. And while abortion opponents have long claimed they do not want to criminalize abortion-seekers themselves, since the Supreme Court’s 2022 overruling of Roe v. Wade, a growing number of conservative lawmakers have begun introducing bills that would treat abortion as homicide and criminalize abortion-seekers. These laws will likely put more Black and Latina women behind bars, who are already imprisoned at higher rates than white women.  President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown is also ensnaring pregnant immigrant women: A report issued last month by the office of Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) alleged that officials identified more than a dozen credible reports of the mistreatment of pregnant women in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, which included not receiving adequate, or even urgent, medical care and being denied food. The Department of Homeland Security has disputed those allegations, saying in part, “Detention of pregnant women is rare and has elevated oversight and review.” These recent events make Rebecca Rodriguez Carey’s new book, Birth Behind Bars: The Carceral Control of Pregnant Women in Prisons, incredibly timely. Based on in-depth interviews with nearly three dozen women who were incarcerated in prisons throughout the Midwest while pregnant, the book provides rare insight into the experiences of pregnant women behind bars—an issue that lacked federal data until the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) issued its first report on the state of pregnant women in prisons earlier this year. But even the exact number of pregnant women in prisons remains unclear, in part because incarcerated women do not always have access to pregnancy tests: The BJS report, for example, cites more than 320 in state and federal custody in 2023, but past research from scholars and advocates has estimated about 3,000 pregnant people are admitted to U.S. prisons annually. “This invisibility,” Rodrigeuz Carey told me, “really contributes to systemic neglect.” In her book, Rodriguez Carey, an associate professor of sociology and criminology at Emporia State University in Kansas, counters this historic invisibility by relaying women’s experiences being pregnant, laboring, and giving birth while in prison. Some stories convey the despair and desperation you may expect: Some women recounted purposefully committing crimes in order to be pregnant in prison rather than on the streets; others recalled falling into postpartum depression after being separated from their babies after giving birth while incarcerated. But the book also spotlights the surprising ways women managed to cultivate hope, by hosting makeshift baby showers and making plans for how they would make their children proud once released. I spoke with Rodriguez Carey via Zoom last month about the state of abortion access in prisons post-Roe, the persistent problem of shackling incarcerated people during childbirth, and what most surprised her during the course of her research. This interview has been lightly condensed and edited.  I was struck by the fact that some of the women you interviewed deliberately committed crimes in order to have their basic needs for food, shelter, and medical care met in prison during their pregnancies. What do these women’s experiences indicate about the state of pregnancy care in the US more broadly? Well it’s really, really bad care when you have women who are seeking refuge in a carceral system. And that’s not to say that that the care in prison is optimal care by any means, but for those who are living at the margins of society, who are in extreme poverty and don’t know where their next meal is coming from, don’t know where they are staying each night, for them the mark of being a good mother is to ensure that those basic needs are met. And so that means turning to our criminal legal system. It’s really interesting to me that the incarcerated population are the only group of people in the US that are constitutionally guaranteed health care—that really says something.  > “There’s an absence of a social safety net, and we have people turning to the > criminal legal system to ensure their basic needs are met. “ You have some prisons being more progressive with their efforts to provide wraparound services, but then you have other prisons where there’s not a lot of prenatal and postpartum care, and so there’s really just a wide variation of care there from state to state, and even from facility to facility. I think that speaks to the larger picture of inequalities in the US. There’s an absence of a social safety net, and we have people turning to the criminal legal system to ensure their basic needs are met. Even before the Dobbs decision that revoked the constitutional right to abortion, accessing it in prison was difficult. Only two percent of participants in the BJS report had abortions; other research has found an even lower rate. What sort of barriers did incarcerated people face when Roe was still the law of the land? Many states have laws that prohibit any sort of state funding to go toward abortion. That includes travel—so if an incarcerated woman is looking to access an abortion out of state, typically you have to have a correctional officer accompany that woman. That would require state funding, to be in a correctional van for transportation and to provide the salary for the accompanying correctional officer. Many women who are incarcerated may not know that they are even pregnant until they come to prison, if they are living on the streets, for example, and haven’t had access to routine health care in some time. And so by the time they learn of their pregnancy, it’s often too late, because many states have laws that regulate the number of weeks that an abortion can be performed. Many pregnant women in custody remain shackled while laboring and giving birth despite the fact that leading medical groups have denounced this practice. What did your interviewees say this experience was like for them?  They felt like they were caged animals. When you are in the state of giving birth, you are extremely vulnerable. You’re not necessarily at a risk of fleeing; there have been no documented cases to date of a woman trying to escape while in labor. Many of the women that I interviewed had cesarean sections, so they were on the operating table, numb from the waist down—you are not going anywhere at that moment. Most women who are incarcerated are there on non-violent crimes, and even if a woman is pregnant who committed a violent crime, she’s not necessarily posing a risk to society while you’re in that vulnerable state of childbirth, where your legs are in stirrups and you have a correctional officer often in the room. Many of these correctional officers are men, and a lot of the women I interviewed talked about how they had experienced sexual abuse growing up, so that adds just another layer of harm when you’re in this very vulnerable state, often in layers of undress or completely naked. Most states have laws on the books now restricting shackling during delivery. But how widespread of a problem does this remain?  It’s really hard to say. A state may have a policy, but then we know that the policy is often different from the reality of what takes place. Many states that have issued restrictions on shackling still leave it up to correctional officers if there is a point of threat or perceived harm. And I think when we look at the different layers here, of who is more likely to be considered harmful or posing a risk to society, that’s women of color. So you still have these tropes that are persisting behind bars. What about prison nursery programs that allow mothers to parent their newborns in prison—what benefits do they offer and why aren’t they more common? [Editor’s note: There are currently eleven state-run prison nursery programs, plus two more operated by the federal Bureau of Prisons.] The first prison nursery program has actually been in place since 1901, so this is not necessarily new. Women who go through a prison nursery program and have access to that oftentimes there are reduced recidivism rates, there’s improved maternal mental health and fetal health outcomes. Otherwise they’re meeting their children, and they’re saying goodbye all in a span of 24 hours, and so that’s going to have negative health implications for years to come.  There are no national mandates or standardized policies governing the incarceration of pregnant women. As a result, it’s up to individual states—and even specific correctional facilities—to decide whether to invest in such programs. Unfortunately, awareness among policymakers remains limited. Prior to the 1900s, reformatories often emphasized family bonds, allowing incarcerated women to live with their newborns—much like today’s prison nursery programs. But by the 1970s, most states moved toward a more punitive approach, passing legislation that effectively eliminated many of these programs. Some of your interviewees used their incarcerations during pregnancy as a “transformative period” and sought to “optimize pregnancy and birth outcomes” despite their circumstances. Can you say more about how they did so?  Many of the women that I interviewed had been pregnant before. Some of them had also been incarcerated before, but this was the first time they were both pregnant and incarcerated. Many of them talked about how being pregnant and incarcerated was rock bottom, and that this was very much a wake up call to do right by their unborn child. Many of the women interviewed talked about how during previous pregnancies they were out on the streets, doing drugs, getting into trouble left and right. And so when they were in prison, it was really this time where they could focus on their pregnancy. So that was really special for them, and it was a time where they were doing their best to take advantage of different programs and initiatives that they maybe had access to in their prisons, like pregnancy support groups, for example, reading all the books and trying their best to implement that advice. The women talked about how when you’re incarcerated, all you have is time to think and make the best choices for your unborn child. Is there anything that surprised you in doing this research? I think one of the biggest takeaways from me was how much hope is found inside prisons, where you have women coming together, given the absence of maternal healthcare, given the absence of institutional resources and support, creating their own networks of community and care. Food was a huge topic; pregnant women in prison don’t have access all the time to regular and nutritious foods. So you have other women who are incarcerated helping them out and coming together and saying, “Hey, I don’t want my baked potato, you can have it because I know you’re pregnant and you need these calories.” Women are also taking pregnant women, especially the younger ones, under their wings, and saying, “be sure to get a job in the kitchen while you’re incarcerated, because that way you have regular access to food.” So you see these informal networks of support. After a woman gives birth, she’s sent back to prison, often within 24 to 48 hours of giving birth and asked to fall back in line as if nothing has happened, even though her world has just been rocked. So you have women who are incarcerated really coming together and rallying around the pregnant women to provide that support and care. What gives you hope for pregnant people in prisons and their newborns?  The Kansas Children’s Discovery Center in Topeka has a program called Play Free, which allows incarcerated mothers and grandmothers to spend a day at the children’s museum playing with their kiddo, free of these cages and environments that are not child- and family-friendly at all. It’s been really great to see the transformation, where it started just as a partnership with the Topeka Correctional Facility, and has since expanded to the men’s facilities in Kansas. You have incarcerated fathers as well, and centering the children in all of this is important.

Speaking at the Museum of the Bible on Monday, President Donald Trump repeated one of his favorite falsehoods as of late: That his deployment of the National Guard in Washington, DC has virtually eliminated crime in the nation’s capital. That is, of course, not true. But if that outright falsehood was not egregious enough, consider that Trump also complained that reports of domestic violence are inflating crime statistics and implied they should not be considered “crimes” at all. “Things that take place in the home, they call crime,” Trump said. “They’ll do anything they can to find something. If a man has a little fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see? So now I can’t claim 100 percent.” > Trump minimizes domestic abuse during a talk at the Museum of the Bible: > "Things that take place in the home, they call crime … If a man has a little > fight with the wife, they say this was a crime, see?" > > — Phil Lewis (@phillewis.bsky.social) 2025-09-08T15:44:26.977Z Dawn Dalton, executive director of the DC Coalition of Domestic Violence, told me on Monday: “We don’t agree with what the president is saying.” Nearly half of women in DC, and more than 40 percent of men, have experienced intimate partner violence or stalking in their lifetimes, according to statistics the coalition compiled last year. Nationwide, an average of two dozen people per minute are victims of rape, physical violence, or stalking by an intimate partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. “There have been federal and local statutes in place for decades that does name domestic violence as a crime,” Dalton added, “and we know that domestic violence is often a precursor to other crimes, including domestic violence homicides as well as mass shootings.” Indeed, research has found that in nearly 70 percent of mass shootings, perpetrators had a history of domestic violence or had killed at least one partner or family member. “The frequency and the harm [of domestic violence] is not paid enough attention to, and remarks such as the president’s certainly underscore that truth,” Dalton added. Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, said in a statement provided to Mother Jones: “Of course the President wasn’t talking about or downplaying domestic violence—and any Fake News hacks trying to use this as a political cudgel against the President are doing a great service to actual domestic abusers and criminals around the country.” In fact, Trump has not only downplayed domestic violence through his speech, but also through his actions: His administration has cut millions of dollars in grants earmarked for victims of crime, including domestic violence, and has tried to force domestic violence service providers to agree to hand crime victims over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in order to receive federal dollars. A statement like the one Trump made is also not surprising when you consider the man that uttered it has himself been accused of rape by his ex-wife, Ivana Trump. She later claimed she did not mean it “in a literal or criminal sense,” adding that she “felt violated.” (Trump denied the allegation.) Trump has also stacked his cabinet and surrounded himself with men who have faced similar accusations. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s own mother called him “an abuser of women,” in a 2018 email, though she told the New York Times last year that she subsequently recanted and apologized for it. Hegseth has also been accused of rape and sexually inappropriate behavior, charges which he denies. (Hegseth paid the woman who made the rape accusation, the Washington Post reported, but he alleges the interaction was consensual.) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was accused of groping a babysitter in the late 1990s. While running for president last year, he texted her to apologize and said he had no memory of the incident. Ex-Department of Government Efficiency head and Trump frenemy Elon Musk was accused of sexual misconduct by a SpaceX flight attendant in 2016, but he denied the claim—after Business Insider reported that the company paid her $250,000 in 2018 to keep her from filing a lawsuit. And Rob Porter, a top White House aide, abruptly resigned during Trump’s first term after two of his ex-wives came forward with domestic abuse allegations, which Trump himself cast doubt on. While there is ample evidence that the police do not always protect domestic violence victims or respond adequately to domestic abuse, it seems very unlikely that this is what Trump was referring to. The man is, after all, about the furthest thing from an abolitionist: His so-called One Big Beautiful Bill allocated more than $100 billion to ICE—the same agency that has created a chilling effect for immigrant survivors of domestic violence seeking help, as I previously reported. And the president has repeatedly threatened to send the National Guard to take over other cities after doing so in DC and Los Angeles. Instead, his latest comments are a throwback to the infamous Access Hollywood tape. Trump seems to believe that, if you’re a man, “you can do anything” to women—and that you deserve to get away with it.

A COALITION OF FEMINIST, MIGRANT AND LEFT GROUPS IS PREPARING TO OPPOSE THE ANNUAL CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALIST MARCH IN LONDON ~ Blade Runner ~ This Saturday, 6 September, the annual anti-abortion March for Life UK will once again take place in central London. The event began in Birmingham in 2013, moved to London in 2018, and now attracts thousands. It is backed by US-linked groups such as ADF UK—the British arm of the US-based rightwing hate group Alliance Defending Freedom—which in 2024 spent over £1 million on legal cases and lobbying. March for Life is part of an international Christian fundamentalist project that grew in confidence after the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the US, and is increasingly tied to the wider far right in Britain. A coalition of feminist, migrant, and left groups is organising a joyful counter-demo. We asked one of the organisers four quick questions. What is happening? “March for Life is part of a global and organised attempt to change the political environment to become more right-wing and socially conservative, which we have seen the results of around the world. The campaign to end abortion in the US took many years, but now they have achieved their goal of obstructing access to abortion in America, and that funding is now freed up to focus on other countries, including the UK.    “Each year, they organise a big anti-abortion political church service in the Emmanuel Centre followed by a conference and then march to Parliament Square, where they have a stage with Christian rock bands, a huge sound system, and hate speeches. “March for Life is part of a broader far right, including anti-trans, pro-Israel, incel/alt-right, and anti-migrant ideas. In the US, they brought Trump to power; they are now trying to emulate this in the UK with Reform and neo-Nazi groups.   “We plan to hold a fun and joyful counter-demo with drumming, dancing, and generally making noise and having fun”.   Who is taking part? “The counter-demo is organised by feminist, migrant, and left groups, including Feminist Fightback, Feminist Assembly of Latin Americans (FALA), Brazil Matters, Razem, Anti-capitalist Resistance, RS21, Socialist Women’s Union (SKB), Young Struggle, and Hackney Anarchists.  “We have also been working with the wider antifascist movement, who will be supporting with their presence. We need as many numbers as possible on the counter-demo to keep one another safe, and we also think this is an important part of getting together as a broad movement to counter fascism in the coming year”.  What happened in the past?  “March for Life has been going on for several years. In the past, the demonstrators were made up of nuns and older people, but in the last two years, we have noticed more young people and alt-right streamers getting involved, spreading their hateful message online and across generations. This increases the threat to younger women, girls, and queer/trans people.  “Two years ago, it was pretty big, and we managed to block them. They were aggressive, violent, and scary, but we held our place. We performed ‘A Rapist in Your Path’, a Chilean feminist dance. The lyrics address the structural and state-based nature of sexual violence”.  Why is it important? “The movement is part of the dangerous, growing fascist coalition. In the UK, we are seeing an emboldened far-right, with St George’s crosses across towns and cities, and racist assaults against migrants on the rise. Mainstream fascists are expected to attend, in coalition with the fundamentalist Christians. It’s critical we hold our ground and stop them dictating the narrative.  “The narrative from the far right is about protecting children and even foetuses. However, patriarchal violence against women and children is endemic, and by bringing their kids along to March for Life, they are exposing them to the violence they perpetrate against migrants, queer people, and women, encouraging their kids to grow up and do the same”.  The post Countering the far-right ‘March for Life’ appeared first on Freedom News.

You could say that Taylor Swift and NFL player Travis Kelce’s engagement, announced Tuesday in an Instagram post that has 17 million likes and counting, broke the internet. And right-wingers immediately started talking rings and talking cradles. News outlets sent push alerts. Celebrities and politicians sent their congratulations. “Taylor Swift engaged” was the number one trending search topic on Google, with more than two million searches by early afternoon. The news also ricocheted around right-wing corners of the internet, where leading conservatives said they hoped Swift’s engagement would help achieve some of their top goals, now backed by the Trump-administration: Inspire a nationwide boost in (heterosexual) marriage and birth rates. Ben Shapiro, co-founder of the right-wing Daily Wire news site, called Swift and Kelce’s engagement “unironically an excellent thing” in post on X to his nearly eight million followers. “I hope many other single people follow their example,” he added. Charlie Kirk, founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, said he hopes Swift and Kelce “have lots of kids and end up very happy!” in a post to his five million followers. On his podcast Tuesday, Kirk said he hoped that marriage might make Swift more conservative: “Taylor Swift might go from a cat lady to a JD Vance supporter, and we should celebrate that…she should have more children than she has houses.” > Congratulations @taylorswift13 > > I can't wait to go see a Taylor Kelce Concert! > > To listen to the full podcast — and for daily drops, subscribe to The Charlie > Kirk Podcast on Apple or Spotify! > > LINK https://t.co/Xi9hTbH4hv pic.twitter.com/Do8zmyIV0Q > > — Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) August 26, 2025 Kristan Hawkins, president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life, wrote to her more than 92,000 X followers that she hopes Swift’s engagement “inspires young women to see the joy and purpose in getting married, starting a family, and committing to one person for the rest of their lives.” A bit later, Hawkins followed up with another take, claiming, “America is heading into its “get married & have babies” era.” Lila Rose, a fellow leading anti-abortion activist and founder of the group Live Action, told her more than 394,000 X followers: “Marriage is the best and tons of women look up to Taylor. So happy to see her embracing it.” Brad Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia and author of Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, said to “expect a spike in marriage” following the news. That MAGA would rush to claim this news as a win is not surprising when you consider how hard they have been pushing for more marriage and babies in the second Trump…era (see what I did there?). The Trump administration—and particularly Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk—are obsessed with boosting the declining birth rate, as my colleague Kiera Butler has chronicled. (The president’s promise to make IVF more widely available as part of this, on the other hand, has pretty much gone nowhere.) In the Christian nationalist worldview that shapes many of these right-wing thought leaders, marriage is, of course, a necessary precursor to procreation. A new generation of so-called trad (short for “traditional”) wives are thriving online, extolling the virtues of marriage and motherhood and calling for a return to more traditional gender roles. And federal officials have also signaled their desires to boost marriage rates: Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who is married with nine kids of his own, signed a memo in February recommending that his department prioritize “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Vance has also decried the decline in marriage among young people in a May interview with the New York Times. But, seriously, do the right-wingers who hope Swift will inspire a new army of trad wives know anything about the pop superstar? Even I, an avowed non-Swiftie, know all too well that Swift does not aspire to the MAGA model of marriage and motherhood that they’re hoping for. First, Swift endorsed then-Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over Trump in the election, in an Instagram post featuring a photo of her with a cat—an obvious dig at Vice President JD Vance’s derision of so-called “childless cat ladies.” Secondly, while Swift has talked about wanting marriage and children, she has also spoken out against the pressure for women to think about having children once they turn 30. And perhaps most significantly, Swift has sung at length about resisting the double standards and traditional pressures women face. I mean…have they ever listened to “Lavender Haze“? > All they keep askin’ me (all they keep askin’ me) > Is if I’m gonna be your bride > The only kind of girl they see (only kind of girl they see) > Is a one-night or a wife > > […] > > Surreal, I’m damned if I do give a damn what people say > No deal, the 1950s shit they want from me Or “Bejeweled“? > They ask, “Do you have a man?” > I can still say, “I don’t remember” As Sam Van Pykeren, one of Mother Jones‘ resident Swifties, pointed out, the right-wing discourse around this proves that even Swift—one of the most famous and wealthy women in the world—can’t escape MAGA logic: Women only achieve their full value when they’re wifed up. Ruth Murai, Anna Yeo, and Sam Van Pykeren contributed reporting.