| If you’re feeling despair, you’re not alone. Everywhere you look, there’s a crisis unfolding: The “Big Beautiful” law, which threatens access to reproductive health care, makes disastrous changes to Medicaid (including deep funding cuts and added work requirements), and supercharges Trump’s brutal, family-separating deportation machine. The incineration of contraceptives worth $9.7 million that “were almost certainly intended for women in Africa, according to two senior congressional aides,” as reported by The Guardian. The devastating (and deliberate) starvation in Gaza. The list goes on and on. And, as if things couldn’t get worse, Texas lawyer Jonathan Mitchell is back, in a lawsuit that threatens medication abortion access nationwide. With this Supreme Court, anything is possible.
But if you look past the headlines, you will also find just as many reasons for optimism, whether it is the resilient Palestinians who “shall remain here…shall thrive here…and will rebuild” (and the activists around the world who are standing with them); the many judges who are standing up to autocracy; or the abortion providers in Sweden who have a model for expanding access that United States providers would do well to follow. Rather than dwell on those feelings of hopelessness, I invite you to join the growing number of people who are not backing down and instead are “defying gravity.” Don’t let them bring you down.
Regina Mahone
Senior Editor |
