Elon Musk seems to have abandoned his many children to hang out with Trump’s family and JD Vance is … just bizarre Melania Trump has made it clear that her second stint at being first lady will be conducted entirely on her own terms. It’s been reported that she’s unlikely to move back to the White House and will spend a lot of the next four years flitting between New York and Florida. Maybe she’ll write another coffee table book. Maybe she’ll develop another caviar-infused skincare line. Who knows. But whatever she does, it’ll be in the service of her own interest, rather than the country’s ..read more

Some in the US are reconsidering children, with fears over reproductive healthcare and the climate crisis front of mind Chris Peterson wasn’t surprised that Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election. But he was surprised by how quickly he and his wife started asking one another: should we try to have another baby before a possible nationwide abortion ban takes effect? Or should we give up on having a second child? Peterson and his wife, who live in North Carolina, are thousands of dollars in debt because their first child needed to spend weeks in the hospital after being born prematurely ..read more

Does self-protection have to mean rejecting men and sex and joining the 4B movement? Of course not – but it does mean recognising the power of cultural persuasion “Your body, my choice,” wrote the troll on a post about my mother dying. It was meant to intimidate me. Instead, it’s launched me into strategy mode, thinking through how women and their friends may build the cultural resilience to survive this neo-Trumpian era. The slogan was coined by the white supremacist, antisemitic, misogynist Nick Fuentes. It’s everywhere online. Hateful extremists of his calibre once struggled to find an audi ..read more

Reform UK leader says it would be ‘worthy’ discussion and parliament should get more time ‘to debate things people talk about at home’ Nigel Farage has said MPs should look at rolling back Britain’s abortion limit from 24 weeks, in a signal that he could try to open up a debate about women’s reproductive rights. The Reform UK leader was speaking as he unveiled the former Conservative minister Andrea Jenkyns as the latest recruit to Reform UK, announcing she would be the party’s candidate for mayor of Lincolnshire ..read more

I quickly learned that the decision to terminate a pregnancy wasn’t purely a matter of 'my body, my choice’ Roughly 36 hours after I first heard about the horrifying Maga taunt “your body, my choice”, I learned that I was pregnant, despite having a contraceptive coil. My relief that I lived in the UK, not the US – where abortion is rapidly becoming illegal or inaccessible at best – was profound. Yet I realised that I had no idea how to access abortion, having complacently assumed that it would always be available if I needed it. Some fraught Googling led me to the British Pregnancy Advisory Se ..read more

First major report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tallies abortion provision in the post-Roe US Despite the wave of state abortion bans that took effect after the US supreme court overturned Roe v Wade in June 2022, the number of abortions performed in the US fell by only 2% that year, according to the first major report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to tally abortion provision in the post-Roe United States. The findings in the report, released Wednesday, echo other research that has uncovered that US abortion rates have surprisingly risen in th ..read more

In an age of cynicism and mistrust, politicians must work harder to involve the public in difficult decisions When MPs vote this Friday on assisted dying, they will be trying to answer two questions folded into one. First comes the ethical choice. Is it ever permissible for one person to help someone else take their own life? Then comes the regulatory challenge. Under what conditions might that permission be granted in law? It isn’t easy to separate those considerations. Sometimes you have to work through scenarios of implementation before arriving at a view on the prior principle. But when le ..read more

A star player gets pregnant and is harassed by the religious right in this tense and engaging film Brazilian film-maker Lillah Halla has created a punchy drama about sisterhood and queer solidarity in the face of bigoted Bolsonaro-era attitudes. It’s an engaging watch, but it’s let down a bit by the convenient ending facilitated by a slightly unfocused melodramatic finale. The setting is São Paulo, where a youth volleyball team is poised to win a championship. The star player is 17-year-old Sofía (Ayomi Domenica Dias), who is herself about to clinch a life-changing sports scholarship. (The “po ..read more

Porsha Ngumezi, 35, is the fifth pregnant woman ProPublica reports to have died in connection to the fall of Roe v Wade A Texas woman has died after receiving inadequate medical treatment for a miscarriage, according to a new report from ProPublica – the fifth pregnant woman the publication has found to have died since the fall of Roe v Wade after receiving inadequate care or being denied a legal abortion. Porsha Ngumezi, a 35-year-old mother of two, died in June 2023 after experiencing a miscarriage in Texas, where nearly all abortions are banned, ProPublica reported on Monday. Ten weeks into ..read more

Next May’s presidential vote is in effect a referendum on whether Donald Tusk’s government can rule freely Donald Tusk’s government in Poland is gearing up for a crucial presidential election next year, after a first year in office that has been marked by clashes with the current president, Andrzej Duda, as well as splits within the ruling coalition. Tusk took office as prime minister last December, ending eight years of rule by the populist Law and Justice (PiS) party. The change of government prompted celebrations from progressive Poles and relief in Brussels, where PiS had put Poland on a c ..read more