Tag: women’s rights
How Trump’s Veto on Border Security Empowers Mexico
In early January, I drove along the Pan-American Highway in the scenic Mexican state of Oaxaca. On the opposite side of the road, the Mexican National Guard had erected a temporary roadblock. A line of cars heading north had halted. Uniformed officers walked down the line, questioning drivers. They were searching for migrants bound for the United States.
A few hours later, I returned by the same route. I braced myself for the obstruction and delay. There was none. The
What the Midterm Results Really Mean to Voters
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked readers to share their election thoughts.
Anna weighed in on her state’s governor:
Okay, true-confessions time from Florida: I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, and I voted straight Democrat this election and always have. But I don’t hate
Review: ‘The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family’
“Our family, Black and white.” For the slaveholding class of the old South, it was a familiar trope, one intended to convey both mastery and benevolence, to hide the reality of raw power and exploitation behind an ideology of paternalistic concern and natural racial hierarchy. There was profound irony in the white South’s choice of this image, for the words were far from simply figurative: They revealed the very truths they were designed to hide. One can see in the
The Return of Fascism in Italy
“The election of the first woman prime minister in a country always represents a break with the past, and that is certainly a good thing,” Hillary Clinton said to an Italian journalist at the Venice International Film Festival earlier this month. She was speaking of Giorgia Meloni, a member of the Chamber of Deputies, who could make history if the Brothers of Italy party does as well as expected in Sunday’s elections.
That would be one sort of break
The Last Abortion Clinic in North Dakota Gets Ready to Leave
Summers are precious in Fargo. The light lingers golden until almost ten at night; the clinic closes early on Fridays. After a morning of fielding phone calls from frantic patients, Kromenaker’s staff retreated to a nearby bar to process the news. Kromenaker had planned to spend the weekend readying her garden for the coming season. Instead, she stayed at the office, responding to reporters asking for comment. She sent a motivational e-mail to her staffers, reminding them that, as bad
Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion?
“In our society, there seems a general rule that, the more obviously one’s work benefits other people, the less one is likely to be paid for it,” the late anthropologist and activist David Graeber wrote, in 2018. That sentence rattled around in my head for most of seasons one through four of the pandemic, and, once, on a winter night in 2020, when I was struggling to nurse my five-month-old, the bald fact of it made me crumple in tears.
Mexico’s Historic Step Toward Legalizing Abortion
On September 6th, Laura Hernández turned on her TV and began to record an event that she had waited for years to witness: the Mexican Supreme Court’s ruling on whether the criminalization of abortion was constitutional. A psychologist by training and a native of the northern state of Coahuila, Hernández is the co-founder of Acompañantes Laguna, a network of volunteers that has helped thousands of people obtain abortions over the years. Until recently, Coahuila, which borders Texas, had stringent prohibitions
Why the Left Wants to Get Rid of the Term “Pregnant Women”
Last year, a brand-new labor-and-delivery hospital opened on the well-to-do Upper East Side of New York City. Its name, the Alexandra Cohen Hospital for Women and Newborns, might strike most people as innocuous or straightforward. But to some people, the suggestion that a hospital where babies are born is for women is offensive, because transgender and nonbinary people who do not identify as women can also get pregnant and deliver babies.
Only niche groups tend to care about how Americans
The Radical Women Who Paved the Way for Free Speech and Free Love
Anthony Comstock may be the only man in American history whose lobbying efforts yielded not only the exact federal law he wanted but the privilege of enforcing it to his liking for four decades. Given that Comstock never held elected office and that the highest appointed position he occupied in government was special agent of the Post Office, this was an extraordinary achievement—and a reminder of the ways that zealots have sometimes slipped past the sentries of American democracy to