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By Carrie N. Baker | In America’s hyper-macho, gun-drenched culture, growing up female has never been safe. But under the Trump administration, America is becoming a much more dangerous place for women and girls.

America is dangerous for women and girls because our leaders choose to make it so. The Trump administration has already begun blocking access to abortion and Medicaid coverage for reproductive health, as well as targeting the rights of pregnant people within the 2023 Pregnant Workers Fairness Act.

Already, the macho culture of the U.S. has steadily made women’s safety in the nation decline. Around 41 percent of women in the U.S. have experienced sexual violence, while a third of women reported severe assault by a husband or boyfriend. The normalization of gun violence and violent pornography have also run rampant across the country, making America more dangerous day by day.

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By Simone Jacques | Trey Reed, a young Black student, was found hanging from a tree on his college campus of Delta State University in Mississippi on Sept. 15, 2025. Trey Reed was a computer science major from Grenada, Miss., and a first-generation student, described as ambitious and eager to create a positive future for himself and his family.

Mississippi police and the Bolivar County coroner’s office have labeled the death a suicide. But Reed’s family members and other advocates, including Reps. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.) and Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.), activist and former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, attorneys Ben Crump and Vanessa J. Jones (both of whom are representing the family), are calling for further investigation. 

Cases like Reed’s awaken questions rooted in legacies of racial violence in the South. “While the details of this case are still emerging, we cannot ignore Mississippi’s painful history of lynching and racial violence against African Americans,” said Thompson in the days following Reed’s death. That history is not distant: Mississippi recorded more lynchings than any other state, and the echoes of those crimes persist in how the deaths of Black people are investigated and discussed. The reflex to dismiss possible racial motives—or to declare a death a suicide before all evidence is known—reflects a deeper national unwillingness to confront the full scope of anti-Black violence.

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(Craig F. Walker / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)

By Carrie N. Baker | For the last three years, Students for Life of America (SFLA) has sought to use environmental concerns to attack abortion rights, claiming—without scientific evidence—that the medication mifepristone contaminates U.S. water supplies and threatens wildlife, the environment and potentially human health.

A recent New York Times article amplified this antiabortion effort, presenting these claims without substantial context. The article does not include interviews with anyone informed about the politics behind the campaign or the science of mifepristone in wastewater. Only a brief mention—seven paragraphs in—notes that environmental experts have dismissed SFLA’s claims, before returning to treating the claims as a legitimate concern. 

“There is absolutely no evidence that this is an environmental issue,” said Nathan Donley, the environmental health science director for the Center for Biological Diversity. “Pharmaceutical waste can be a big issue when we’re talking about widely used drugs, but to somehow point to mifepristone as a bad actor here is completely disingenuous.”

Jack Vanden Heuvel, a molecular toxicologist at Pennsylvania State University, agreed: “Most wastewater treatment plants are very effective at getting rid of any mifepristone that is there.” He described SFLA’s position as “a pretty weakly supported argument.”

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Tune in for a new episode of Ms. magazine's podcast, On the Issues with Michele Goodwin on

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This last Supreme Court term was harrowing—from momentous merits decisions about the First Amendment, parental rights, trans rights and more, to the stream of shocking “shadow docket” decisions and its enabling of many of the Trump administration’s executive actions. What does the 2025-2026 term have in store for our nation? What do we think will advance through the Court? What do we think will come up, when it comes to the shadow docket? And perhaps most importantly, how will the Court choose to mediate the Trump administration’s continued onslaught of executive actions?

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