[[link removed]] Ms. Memo: This Week in Women's Rights
April 16, 2025
From the ongoing fight for abortion rights and access, to elections, to the drive for the Equal Rights Amendment, there are a multitude of battles to keep up with. In this weekly roundup, find the absolute need-to-know news for feminists.
How Antiabortion Extremists Stopped a Beverly Hills Clinic From Opening … With Help From City Officials [[link removed]]
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(Courtesy of We Engage)
By Kathy Spillar and Teresa Cisneros Burton | On Jan. 23, in a move as brazen as it was predictable, President Donald Trump pardoned nearly two dozen antiabortion extremists convicted during the Biden administration of violating the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances (FACE) Act. Even those who’d also been found guilty of “conspiracy against rights” got a get-out-of-jail-free card. Trump told reporters present that it was “a great honor” to sign the pardon.
The extremists—described as “peaceful pro-life protesters” by a Trump aide at the signing—had violently forced their way into abortion clinics in four states and Washington, D.C. At one location, the invaders knocked a clinic worker down; at another, a nurse sprained her ankle in the chaos. During the invasion of the Washington Surgi-Clinic, a distraught woman who’d so badly wanted another child that she’d gone to three different doctors hoping, praying, that her current pregnancy could be OK, slumped in agonizing pain onto a hallway floor as her husband frantically tried to reason with the protesters blocking the door to the clinic’s surgical area. The woman managed to inch her way up against a wall, only to have a protester shove her back down to the ground.
By no coincidence, the annual antiabortion March for Life took place in Washington, D.C., the day after Trump issued those pardons. That same day, the Trump administration’s new Justice Department announced that the three pending antiabortion FACE Act cases were being dismissed—effective immediately. Per a department memo:
1. No new abortion-related FACE Act prosecutions could be initiated without special authorization.
2. Until further notice, the attorney general would consider filing FACE Act charges only if an antiabortion crime involved “significant aggravating factors, such as death, serious bodily harm, or serious property damage.”
At the March for Life, a group was caught on video gleefully chanting through megaphones and amplifiers, “We are clinic invaders, and yours is next!”
Just two weeks later, Kristin Turner—of the extremist groups Progressive Anti-Abortion Uprising (PAAU) and Pro-Life San Francisco—made that threat specific. In a Feb. 11 post on Facebook, she named the next target: the Washington Surgi-Clinic, the very clinic where some of the pardoned protesters had been so pitiless to a woman’s emotional and physical agony.
“We’re shutting it down,” Turner wrote.
How? By using the playbook Turner said they’d developed in 2023, during the process of “successfully prevent[ing] a late-term abortion facility from opening in Beverly Hills, California” (by “late-term,” Turner means “all-term”)—the now terminated DuPont Clinic LA.
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Cutting the Workforce at HHS Undermines the Social Safety Net. Families and Kids Will Suffer the Most. [[link removed]] DOJ Attempts to Silence Fired Attorney Liz Oyer for Refusing to Reinstate Gun Rights of Convicted Abuser Mel Gibson [[link removed]]
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A Historic Win in Wisconsin: What Susan Crawford’s Victory Signals [[link removed]] Advocates Beat 91 Percent of Last Year’s Anti-LGBTQ Bills. How? [[link removed]]
What we're reading:
Because it's hard to keep up with everything going on in the world right now. Here's what we're reading this week:
* “Slow Pay, Low Pay or No Pay” — ProPublica [[link removed]]
[link removed] [[link removed]] Tune in for a new episode of Ms. magazine's podcast, On the Issues with Michele Goodwin on
Apple Podcasts [[link removed]] + Spotify [[link removed]] .
As we reckon with an administration hostile to equal rights, feminists will continue to fight. To help keep hope, we must remember and celebrate recent wins.
One of those wins is the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, which took effect on June 27, 2023. This is a landmark piece of legislation that prohibits discrimination and ensures workplace accommodations related to pregnancy for workers. But is the PWFA safe, or will it be threatened by the Trump administration’s crusade against reproductive rights and justice?
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