Elon Musk

What 200 Gen Z Women Told Me About Birth Control Should Alarm Every Woman in America

PUBLISHED 12/17/2025 by

Birth control is the single most powerful tool for women’s economic mobility and autonomy in modern history. It changed everything: When women could plan if, when and with whom they wanted to have children, college enrollment soared, dropout rates fell and poverty rates declined. The ability to access contraception has been directly tied to women’s ability to stay in school, build careers and make decisions about their own futures.

So why, in 2025, are we finding ourselves in a messaging war on birth control?

Ahead of the Country: How Florida’s Progressive Fight Against Authoritarianism Is Setting the Tone

PUBLISHED 10/31/2025 by

Like many others across the nation, people gathered outside the Duval County Courthouse in Jacksonville, Fla., on Oct. 18, 2025, to send a message: No Kings. People played music and danced. Kids found space to throw a football. People ran into old friends. 

“What really stood out to me was how much fun it was. I mean, people were enjoying themselves. You had people in frog costumes and other things. You had some pretty funny signs,” says Larry Hannan, communications and policy director for State Voices Florida, who attended the No Kings rally in Jacksonville. 

While Florida has trended red in the last decade, its voters have consistently favored progressive measures. In 2024, Florida’s Right to Abortion Initiative, as well as the state’s Marijuana Legalization Initiative, received 57 and 56 percent of the vote, respectively. Even though both measures were supported by the majority of voters, both initiatives were struck down because they failed to meet Florida’s 60 percent supermajority.

“In a lot of ways, the better we fight back here, the better the country is. Because a lot of people are saying, ‘Oh, I can’t believe this is happening.’ And us in Florida are saying, ‘Yeah, this happened a few years ago,’” says Hannan, who noted that Florida has served as a rough draft for the conservative MAGA movement, since many of the president’s current advisers are former Florida officials. 

Who Gets to Procreate and Parent? A Black Feminist Critique of the Pronatalist Agenda

PUBLISHED 10/17/2025 by , and

Pronatalism is not simply about encouraging births—it is a political project rooted in racism and control. Its goal is to engineer a future that permits only certain people to bear and raise children while coercing or punishing others for reproducing or parenting.

Adriana Smith’s experience of coerced reproduction is a devastating example: a Black nurse and mother declared brain-dead, yet kept on life support for months to sustain her pregnancy under Georgia’s restrictive abortion laws. This is what pronatalism looks like in practice—the state asserting ownership over a Black woman’s body.

As Black feminists, we understand that reproductive choices are personal, but they are also deeply shaped by structural power. Pronatalist leaders and influencers cloak their agenda in the language of family and morality, but in truth, they seek to restrict autonomy and consolidate control. Reproductive justice, by contrast, insists on every person’s right to decide whether and how to have children, and to parent in safety and dignity.

In Upcoming Virginia, N.J. and Pennsylvania Elections, Women’s Votes Will Decide the Future of Reproductive Rights and Equality

PUBLISHED 9/18/2025 by

All eyes will be on the elections this fall in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and beyond. These contests are not just bellwethers for next year’s midterms—they’re critical tests of how far Americans will go to defend women’s rights and equality at the state and national levels.

Women’s votes will be decisive. Pollster Celinda Lake told Ms. that women “are our own voters, we make up our own minds.” That independence has shaped elections for decades, with women consistently leaning more Democratic than men. This fall—from Virginia’s history-making two-woman governor’s race, to Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court retention battles—reproductive rights and equality are squarely on the ballot.

The message is clear: State-level elections matter profoundly, especially for women. The Dobbs decision pushed abortion and gender equality battles back to the states, and now voters must decide who will stand up for their rights.

Trump’s Pronatalist Agenda Weaponizes Motherhood to Push Women Out of Public Life

PUBLISHED 8/26/2025 by

The Trump administration is using one of the oldest tools of patriarchy—promising rewards for compliance—through a wave of proposed pronatalist policies designed to push women into motherhood and encourage them to give birth to more children.

A recent report by the National Women’s Law Center warns that these proposals are not random: They stem from an “obscure, dangerous, and increasingly influential movement of ‘pronatalists’” that are now dictating the Trump administration’s family policy. 

According to NWLC, there are two major groups of pronatalists: Silicon Valley tech elites, such as Elon Musk, who claim that “high-IQ” people like themselves should be having more children; and traditional conservatives, who advocate for pushing women back into stay-at-home motherhood.

‘Progressive Pronatalism’ Is an Oxymoron: How Arguments Buying Into the Low-Fertility Panic Fail Women

PUBLISHED 7/18/2025 by

It’s ironic that the U.S. federal budget was signed on the cusp of World Population Day, which is meant to raise awareness of population growth and reproductive rights. The budget reflects Trump administration priorities, including its aggressive pronatalism agenda, which attempts to cajole or coerce women into having more babies. It’s catnip for the GOP conservative base, and as a result, Trump’s symbolic $1,000 “baby bonus” got to remain in the budget bill, while other social spending like Medicaid and food assistance got cut.

But it’s not just conservatives anymore. Now, many progressives are also panicking over an alleged fertility “crisis.”

Hundreds of millions of girls and women worldwide are still unable to control basic aspects of their lives. Dangling pronatalist incentives like a “baby bonus” in front of them, encouraging them to pawn their reproductive choice for favors from pronatalist governments, is grossly misguided.

Why Is the Trump Administration Destroying Almost $10 Million of Contraceptives?

PUBLISHED 7/16/2025 by

After the richest man in the world shuttered the U.S. agency that provides aid for the world’s poorest, the government is now going to spend money destroying the contraceptives, medications and food items it chose not to distribute.

This includes $9.7 million in contraceptives that were bound for crisis areas—places like refugee camps and war zones. It includes $800,000 worth of high-energy biscuits, a kind of emergency food aid for people in the direst of circumstances—and enough of it to feed 1.5 million children for a week.

To be clear, all of these items have already been paid for by U.S. tax dollars. The Trump administration is about to spend more money to destroy them.

Keeping Score: Trump Administration Targets Immigrants and Emergency Abortion Care; Newsom Pushes Back

PUBLISHED 6/12/2025 by

In every issue of Ms., we track research on our progress in the fight for equality, catalogue can’t-miss quotes from feminist voices and keep tabs on the feminist movement’s many milestones. We’re Keeping Score online, too—in this biweekly roundup.

This week:
—California Governor Gavin Newsom stands up to President Trump over ICE raids: “California may be first, but it clearly will not end here. Other states are next. Democracy is next.”
—Trump threatens EMTALA.
—Israeli forces detained Greta Thunberg and 11 other activists while trying to deliver aid to Gaza.
—New research found unintended pregnancies correlate with gender inequality.
—Taylor Swift finally owns her entire music catalog.

… and more.

From Biden’s Cabinet to the Crisis Council: Isabel Guzman on AI, DEI, Elon Musk—and What Real Leadership Looks Like

PUBLISHED 6/4/2025 by

Isabel Guzman previously served as the 27th administrator of the Small Business Administration under President Biden and was the fifth Latina woman to serve in the Cabinet. She cites serving in Biden’s Cabinet, which was majority-women and the most diverse Cabinet in U.S. history, as ‘humbling’ and an “honor.”

Since leaving the Biden administration, Guzman is now on the frontlines of corporate leadership, helping CEOs confront the reputational dangers of AI, DEI and disinformation. Guzman recently sat down with RepresentWomen’s digital media manager Ria Deshmukh to speak about her transformative journey through the public and private sectors. This is her first in-depth interview since finishing her tenure as the SBA administrator, providing a multifaceted perspective of life as a woman leader in public service and business development.

“The most critical moments in my career have been when I’ve taken myself out of my comfort zone.”

“Women need to continue to be bold about their worth and their value for inclusion.”

‘Remember the Ladies’: Attacks on Gender Equity Remain a Core Feature of Surging Authoritarianism

PUBLISHED 6/3/2025 by

In the whirling, swirling hellscape of illegality and cruelty that is the current American political scene, it’s hard to keep track of all the individuals and groups demonized, deported and derided by an administration seemingly motivated by a Machiavellian desire for power that might make Machiavelli himself blush with shame. In the midst of an apocalyptic news cycle, one targeted segment of the population seems to be fading from view: women.

But let us not, as Abigail Adams wrote so many years ago, forget the ladies. “Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could.”