MAGA Republicans are back in the White House, and Project 2025 is their guide—the right-wing plan to turn back the clock on women’s rights, remove abortion access, and force women into roles as wives and mothers in the “ideal, natural family structure.” We know an empowered female electorate is essential to democracy. That’s why day after day, we stay vigilant in our goals to dismantle patriarchy at every turn. We are watching, and we refuse to go back. This is the War on Women Report.
Since our last report…
+ After a highly publicized trial, a jury acquitted music mogul Sean “Diddy” Combs of the most serious charges—sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy—while convicting him of two lesser counts of transportation to engage in prostitution. During the trial, Combs’ former girlfriend Cassie Ventura described more than a decade of physical and sexual abuse at Combs’ hands, including raping her, forcing her to engage in drug-fueled sex with male escorts and violently attacking her.
+ An investigation from ProPublica and CBS News revealed that Texas’ funding pipeline for antiabortion crisis pregnancy centers allowed CPCs to spend millions of taxpayer dollars with little oversight into how the money was used. Texas has since cut off funding to these pregnancy centers, including one in San Antonio that spent taxpayer money on vacations, a motorcycle, and to fund a smoke shop business that the president and CEO owned.
+ A Texas man is suing a doctor in California who he claims sent abortion pills in the mail to his girlfriend. This is the second case out of Texas targeting a blue state abortion provider, after a Texas judge fined New York doctor Margaret Carpenter for prescribing abortion pills to a woman near Dallas.
+ Some good news: A federal judge has blocked part of Tennessee’s 2024 “abortion trafficking” law, saying it violated First Amendment speech protections. The judge’s ruling struck down a “recruitment” section of the 2024 law which made it illegal for adults to “recruit” minors for legal, out-of-state abortions. However, other parts of the law that make it illegal to provide transportation or shelter for a minor seeking an abortion remain in place.
Let’s not forget what else was sent our way in July …
Wednesday, July 2
Florida Can Require a Transgender Teacher to Misgender Herself in the Classroom
Trump-appointed judges on the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in accordance with a 2023 Florida law which prohibits school employees and educators from using a pronoun or title that “does not correspond to such person’s sex,” along with expanding the state’s already strict restrictions on “classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity.” Katie Wood, who would have been forced to misgender herself as Mr. Wood at school, was granted a preliminary injunction in a federal suit in 2024 which deemed the Florida law a First Amendment violation. But Florida state officials appealed to the 11th Circuit, which upheld the restriction on freedom of pronoun use.
Wisconsin Removes Abortion Ban
In some good news, Wisconsin’s Supreme Court has struck down a 1849 near-total abortion ban. The court’s 4-3 liberal majority ruled that the law had been overridden by more recent regulations, including those which criminalize only abortions conducted after the fetus could survive on its own outside of the womb. The initial ban had been overruled by Roe v. Wade in 1973, however, conservatives argued the Dobbs decision reinstated the 1849 ban due to it never being fully repealed.
Thursday, July 3: South Carolina Woman Turned in to Child Protective Services After Miscarriage
After a 31-year-old woman in South Carolina (name intentionally withheld) suffered a miscarriage, police arrested her for “desecration of human remains” because she placed the fetal remains in the trash. She faces up to 10 years in prison for the felony charge.
According to records Abortion, Every Day obtained from the sheriff’s office, the woman was arrested after she went to the hospital for medical care after her miscarriage, and someone there called Child Protective Services, apparently equating the miscarriage with child abuse. However, despite sensationalistic local news coverage claiming that the woman “dumped” a “stillborn baby,” the miscarriage came at 18 weeks, about two months before viability for any pregnancy.
This is the latest case in a growing trend of women being arrested for miscarriages. So far this year, the War on Women Report has reported on two similar cases in March and May when police arrested two women in Georgia and Texas for “abuse of a corpse” after they suffered miscarriages. (The woman in Texas, Mallori Patrice Strait, spent five months in prison before her charges were dropped.) In January, Brittany Watts sued her home state of Ohio after she was arrested for a miscarriage.
All four of these women arrested for miscarriages are Black. Also, in all four cases, local news media exaggerated and sensationalized the cases with lurid headlines suggesting that the arrested women were throwing dead babies’ remains in dumpsters instead of naturally losing pregnancies at home.
Friday, July 4: Trump Signs ‘Big, Beautiful Bill’ Into Law
On the 4th of July, after the so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill” received the needed support from Republicans in Congress, Trump signed the bill into law. The economic agenda is a billionaire-first budget reconciliation bill that seeks to provide tax cuts for the richest Americans through massive cuts to Medicaid and food assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program SNAP.
Dubbed a “reverse Robin Hood” bill by opponents—stealing money from the poor to give to the rich—the Big, Beautiful Bill has received widespread criticism for kicking the 17 million Americans who depend on Medicaid off of their healthcare and hurting working families’ ability to put food on the table, among a host of other disastrous effects. Some of these changes aren’t set to take effect until after 2026—strategically right after the midterm elections, when Republicans stand to lose their House majority for taking healthcare and food from millions of Americans.
The bill disproportionately affects children and low-income communities by cutting $1 trillion in funding for SNAP and the Child Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The bill also effectively repealed the Affordable Care Act and data shows that new work requirements will leave an estimated 4.8 million without health insurance. Ironically, this decimation of Americans’ healthcare and reproductive rights will actually increase the budget deficit by at least $3.3 trillion, debunking any fiscal excuses for cutting Medicaid made by conservatives.
It also hurts immigrants by penalizing states for providing immigrant families with state health insurance and increasing funding to ICE by nearly $80 billion, promoting more mass raids and separations of families.
Monday, July 7: White House Halts Release of the Epstein Files Despite Wide Backlash
Democrats in Congress are pressuring the Trump administration to release the rest of the “Epstein Files,” FBI-obtained information about pedophile and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died in prison in 2019 after being arrested for sexual abuse stretching back decades, including procuring children for prostitution and sexually abusing teenage girls.
Epstein’s associations with many powerful people, including Donald Trump, have been well documented. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi released “Phase 1” of the documents, which included few new revelations and largely consisted of documents that have already been leaked, prompting criticism for the lack of new information. On July 7, the Justice Department backtracked on Bondi’s promise to release more documents, claiming that it had found no “incriminating client list” to warrant public disclosure. At a Cabinet meeting on July 8, Trump criticized a reporter for asking about Epstein.
Trump’s friendship with Epstein has been reported for years before the Epstein files scandal. Quoted in a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said, “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Even far-right Trump supporters are criticizing the White House’s alleged cover-up of the Epstein files. In a podcast episode from earlier this month, right-wing brocaster Joe Rogan (who endorsed Trump in 2024) said, “They’ve got the videotape and all a sudden they don’t … Why’d they say there [were] hundreds of thousands of hours of tapes of people doing horrible s–t? Why’d they say that?” Influencer Theo Von also posted a video of JD Vance saying, “seriously, we need to release the Epstein list,” and added the comment, “Yeah what changed?”
Friday, July 11: Missouri Republicans Try to Override Voters’ Will With Abortion Ban
In November 2024, voters in Missouri passed Amendment 3, which enshrined the right to abortion until “viability” in the state constitution. Now, however, Republican lawmakers are trying to place a constitutional amendment that would ban abortion in the state on the 2026 ballot. This proposed measure is deceptively titled Amendment 3—the same name as the pro-abortion amendment that Missourians voted into law less than a year ago.
The proposed abortion ban also relies on anti-trans bigotry. Besides banning abortion, the ballot measure would ban transgender healthcare for minors (which is already illegal under Missouri state law). Antiabortion lobbyist Sam Lee defended the decision to include the language about restricting transgender rights, saying, “I certainly think it could influence voters who, you know, maybe they’re not sure where they are on abortion, but there are a lot of voters and polling shows us a lot of voters who oppose gender transition surgeries for minors.” (In other words, even though Missouri voters have already made their support for abortion rights clear, lobbyists are hoping that including the language about banning trans minors from receiving gender-affirming care will sway some pro-abortion voters to support the antiabortion amendment.)
According to transgender Missouri woman Celeste Michael, quoted in The Kansas City Star, antiabortion advocates are “using trans people as a scapegoat so that they can get what they want.”
Saturday, July 12: ICE Continues Wave of Attacks on Immigrant Women
In the wake of ICE raids across the country, the federally backed attacks against suspected undocumented immigrants are having a disproportionate effect on women.
This year, ICE and local police have carried out numerous raids on massage parlors, targeting immigrant women suspected of sex work, and arrested street-based sex workers, according to reporting from Truthout from earlier this month. Meanwhile, fear of arrest is forcing massage workers to turn to “riskier and riskier clients” and work for lower pay, according to organizer Yin Q. According to Mateo Guerrero of the Trans Immigrant Project, intensified raids are leading to an increase in police sexual abuse. Guerrero described immigrant sex workers being forced to perform oral sex in a police car to avoid arrest.
At the same time, the ICE raids are having a chilling effect across all immigrant communities. Immigrant women survivors of domestic and sexual violence and those trying to flee abusive relationships are afraid to seek help from the police or the courts. Fifty percent of advocates from the Alliance for Immigrant Supporters reported in a recent national survey that immigrant crime survivors they work with have dropped civil or criminal cases against their abusers out of fear of deportation.
Meanwhile, ICE raids are emboldening U.S. men to impersonate ICE in order to attack immigrant women. Multiple men in at least three states have been arrested for allegedly dressing up as ICE agents or law enforcement officers in order to rape immigrant women, sometimes claiming to deport them if they did not comply with their demands.
Among women whom ICE has arrested, Tufts doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk has described the harrowing conditions within an ICE processing facility in South Louisiana during the 45 days she spent incarcerated there.
Tuesday, July 15: Trump Administration Offers Incentives for ‘Infertility Training Centers,’ Further Promoting Pronatalist Agenda
According to The New York Times, the government posted a grant opportunity to an inconspicuous website offering $1.5 million of Title X funds to “promote access to robust body literacy education and fertility awareness-based methods to address root causes of infertility.”
This is not the first move made by the Trump administration to boost birth rates. In January, the Department of Transportation ordered preferential treatment for “communities with marriage and birth rates higher than the national average.” Later, a February executive order announced an initiative to boost IVF by lowering procedure costs, although current attacks on abortion counteract this supposed support to mothers. Elon Musk, father of 14 children, has also become a major proponent of the right-wing tech and pronatalist hybrid movement. In a jarring post on X, “Instead of teaching fear of pregnancy, we should teach fear of childlessness.”
Of course, this push for women to have more babies is not accompanied by any actually meaningful incentive such as improved healthcare. In fact, maternal and neonatal health are sure to decline following significant cuts to Medicaid and reproductive health centers. In truth, the pronatalist movement is an anti-women movement that smacks of eugenics, seeking to keep women in the home and restrict immigration, disguised as a solution to “demographic collapse.”
Friday, July 18: Tennessee Woman Denied Prenatal Care Because She Is Unwed
The 35-year-old, who chose to remain anonymous, shared her traumatizing experience at a town hall meeting. She gave an interview with TN Repro News who explained, “She references Tennessee’s total abortion ban and explains that just being pregnant and the idea of giving birth here terrifies her. She recalled what happened to Adriana Smith in Georgia and worries it could happen to her.”
Tennessee’s Medical Ethics Defense Act describes discrimination and medical neglect as “conscience protection” for providers. Signed into law by Gov. Bill Lee (R), on April 24, the act allows doctors and medical providers to decline care to a patient if that care ambiguously “violates the conscience of the healthcare provider.”
This law is not about preserving “medical ethics” or true care for patients. State Rep. Gloria Johnson (D) told Jessica Valenti, “They want to control you, and have full and total control over the citizens.” Notably, the bill was promoted by Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative legal organization who served the antiabortion plaintiff in Dobbs. Rep. Johnson added,
“It’s absolutely not ‘pro-life’—and not very Christian either.”
Thursday, July 24: U.S. State Department Orders Nearly $10 Million Worth of Contraceptive Care to Be Burned
According to Reuters, the U.S. government will spend over $160,000 to destroy contraceptives originally intended to be sent to low-income countries. A source cited Washington’s hesitation to distribute USAID-branded material since Trump’s reinstatement of the Mexico City Policy as there was no way to prevent the contraceptives from going to abortion-providing clinics.
Making matters worse, the U.S. government denied offers from the United Nations and other family-planning organizations to purchase the contraceptives for distribution to those countries in need, even those who offered to remove USAID-branding from the products.
A USAID spokesperson told Reuters that no HIV medication or condoms would be destroyed, but the rest of the materials, including birth control pills, IUDs and implants, all of which have been stored in Belgium since Trump froze USAID, are set to be incinerated in France. The Guttmacher Institute shared that the contraceptives, if distributed, would have provided more than 650,000 women with pregnancy protection for up to a year.
Thursday, July 24: Artist Amy Sherman Cancels Smithsonian Show, Citing Anti-Trans Censorship
Artist Amy Sherald canceled her Smithsonian exhibition after she said the museum warned that her painting of a transgender Statue of Liberty may be removed so as to not anger President Trump. Her piece “Trans Forming Liberty” is a depiction of the iconic New York statue as a Black transgender woman—but the Smithsonian told her they wanted to replace the painting with a video of viewer’s reactions, which would have inevitably also included anti-trans rhetoric.
Sherald, best-known for her 2018 portrait of Michele Obama, disapproved of the Smithsonian’s reaction to censorship pressures: “It’s clear that institutional fear shaped by a broader climate of political hostility toward trans lives played a role.” The exhibition, Amy Sherald: American Sublime, which would have been the National Portrait Gallery’s first by a Black contemporary artist, was scheduled to be open in September.
Friday, July 25: Author of Texas Abortion Ban Denies He Paid for Abortions Amid Accusations from Exotic Dancer
According to exotic dancer Alex Grace, Texas State Rep. Giovanni Capriglioni, who wrote Texas’ “trigger ban” on abortion, “funded several abortions for his own personal gain.” In an interview with the far-right Substack publication Current Revolt, Grace alleged that she had a long-term affair with the married representative, beginning around 2004 when she was 18 years old.
In response, Capriglioni admitted in a statement that he had an affair but claimed he “have never, nor would I ever, pay for an abortion.”
Grace alleged that over the course of their affair, she began doubting Capriglioni’s character based on his political actions. “If you are using abortions for your personal gain, if you are using women for your personal gain, why announce to the world that this isn’t who you are?” she said.
According to Grace, Capriglioni has also shared disturbing sexual fantasies about little girls. The San Antonio Current reported that “Grace described becoming uncomfortable when Capriglione mentioned wanting to ejaculate into batter for cookies that would be sold at his daughter’s bake sale. In the video interview, Grace stated that Capriglione said he enjoyed the thought of children—particularly young girls—consuming his semen.”
Capriglioni has announced that he will not be seeking reelection.
Great Job Ava Slocum & the Team @ Ms. Magazine Source link for sharing this story.
