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(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

By Jake Scott | The U.S. childhood immunization schedule, the grid of colored bars pediatricians share with parents, recommends a set of vaccines given from birth through adolescence to prevent a range of serious infections. The basic structure has been in place since 1995, when federal health officials and medical organizations first issued a unified national standard, though new vaccines have been added regularly as science advanced.

Vaccines on the childhood schedule have been tested in controlled trials involving millions of participants, and they are continuously monitored for safety after being rolled out. The schedule represents the accumulated knowledge of decades of research. It has made the diseases it targets so rare that many parents have never seen them.

But the schedule is now under scrutiny.

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By Jenifer McKenna | On Dec. 2, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in First Choice Women’s Resource Centers v. Platkin, an unregulated pregnancy clinic’s constitutional challenge to the New Jersey attorney general’s subpoena for information about its operations, including donor records. 

Despite being awash in revenue, and serial reports of fraud, waste and illegal use of taxpayer funds, these antiabortion clinics are positioning to realize a long-term goal: to “replace” Planned Parenthood and Title X programs and secure federal taxpayer funds to advance an agenda that promotes childbirth and undermines evidence-based healthcare. 

As right-wing politicians decimate the reproductive health delivery system for low-income and uninsured Americans, the UPC industry is ramping up the narrative that their unregulated pregnancy clinics are the answer to the maternal healthcare deserts their policies have created. 

Most media observers are predicting the Court will rule for the crisis pregnancy center, First Choice. If it does, unregulated pregnancy clinics nationwide will be further emboldened to resist any state oversight, including of their medical services. A bold, innovative, multi-front action by reproductive justice advocates, public health professionals and pro-choice officials is the only way we ensure they can’t succeed. 

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By Jackson Katz | Political commentary on the Jan. 6 insurrection has rightly centered race. The mob was overwhelmingly white, Confederate symbols were on full display, and the mythology of a “stolen election” was fueled by racial grievance.
 
But this focus often obscures another critical truth: The insurrection was also a gendered act. The vast majority of insurrectionists on Jan. 6 were not only white people; they were white men.
 
Any serious attempt to understand what happened that day must grapple with the intersection of race and masculinity, and with the cultural meanings attached to male power, entitlement and violence.
 
The insurrection was an overt assertion of white male centrality, staged through force when democratic means failed. Yet media coverage routinely relies on gender-neutral language—“people,” “extremists,” “individuals”—as if the overwhelmingly male composition of the mob were too obvious to warrant scrutiny. It isn’t.
 
The fact that 86 percent of those charged were men offers profound insight into Trumpism itself, which trades heavily on fantasies of masculine strength, dominance and restoration. Political violence, like domestic violence, is rarely spontaneous. It grows out of belief systems that normalize men’s authority and justify force as a tool for reclaiming control. Until we name and challenge those beliefs, we will continue to misunderstand both Jan. 6 and the ongoing threat to our democracy.

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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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In the year since the Trump administration returned to office, there have been hundreds of executive orders, many of which district courts have ruled unconstitutional and illegal. As judges have noted, these actions have caused direct harm to Americans all across the country. And hard-hitting attorneys general have fought back. There are now over 450 lawsuits against the Trump administration, and in many of them district courts have ruled that the administration acted unconstitutionally. In this episode, recorded earlier this year, I’m joined by two Attorneys General who are leading this resistance: Massachusetts’s Andrea Campbell, and Michigan’s Dana Nessel.

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