A world where only husbands vote
  May 14, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, We are excited to officially invite you all to a virtual book club discussion of Yesteryear, the book we quite literally cannot stop talking about. Your favorite newsletter pals will be in attendance, and we’d love it if you could join. Just hit the button below to sign up for our inaugural meeting. You’ll receive a link to join and a few discussion questions to noodle on ahead of our chat. It will be a lunch-and-laugh, so feel free to come with a snack or your favorite emotional support beverage (mine is a twice-reheated cup of coffee that I forgot I reheated). In today’s newsletter, we are exploring the wonderful world of submission. No, not that world, the other one. Plus, Erin Brockovich has a new mission, and your weekend reading list. See you at book club, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONCreeping conservatism: An outlandish suggestion has been cropping up on the right-wing internet. One so silly, so out of pocket that you would think it hardly merits discussion…and yet! Apparently, there are women out there who believe, quite firmly, that women should not have the right to vote as individuals—a position euphemistically known as “household voting.” Far be it from me to yuck anyone’s yum, but when your yum is coming for my rights, I will yuck if you buck. This thought isn’t new amongst conservatives, but it is gaining enough ground that at next month’s Turning Point USA Women’s Leadership Summit, one of the invited speakers is an influencer named Savanna Faith Stone who doesn’t believe women should vote. As far as we know, the 19th Amendment is not in immediate danger (even if our own Secretary of Defense’s pastor is a fan of it and the SAVE Act is setting the stage). But we bring it up today because, in the age of algorithms rewarding extreme rhetoric, fringe ideas are increasingly becoming mainstream. Look at the president. Remember when that was just a national joke?  SAVANNA FAITH STONE (SCREENSHOT VIA TURNING POINT USA) Stone, like many of her ilk, believes “husband and wife are one flesh and therefore should make that political decision together.” One family, one vote…it’s an idea that was first proposed in the ‘80s, inspired by pronatalist movements in Europe. Now it’s getting an alluring rebrand courtesy of beautiful 20-year-old influencers yearning to give up their vote in exchange for a man who will make all the decisions, and the money. This current iteration of household voting relies on strict interpretations of Biblical passages establishing the man as the head of the household and the woman as a “helpmate.” Ephesians 5:22, for instance, reads, “Wives submit yourselves to your husbands as you do to the Lord.” This idea of complete submission lies at the heart of the “no votes for women” issue, and that idea isn’t as fringe as we might like it to be. In fact, people who say they prioritize submission in their relationships are everywhere, and they’re talking about their desire for submission loudly and proudly. If you’ve seen the most recent season of Love is Blind, then you’ve heard about submission from Christine and Vic. If you’ve watched more than two minutes of Pop the Balloon or Find Love on YouTube— a speed-dating show with more than 100 episodes and more than a million views per video—you’ve heard it from literally hundreds of contestants on that show, regardless of gender. The rise of Mormon influencers who are talking about their mixed feelings on submission while still submitting? We see so many of them because they’re literally paid by the church to sell a vision of the nuclear Christian family. Submission is in the air—not in the Fifty Shades of Grey way, more the “you and your votes are mine” way—and it’s being renormalized at an alarming rate.  Of course, the promotion of Christian submission gets less strict when applied to men. Conservatives who take Ephesians literally conveniently forget the line that comes right before the submission of women: “Submit to one another for the sake of Christ.” Details, details. At any rate: The worry shouldn’t just be that someone like Savanna Stone is going to Turning Point to talk about this. We should worry more about how easily the same idea has been sliding into television and social media as an aspirational way of living. Women and young girls consume more media than men. Our eyes need to be fully open to what we’re waving off as too small to succeed. You know what they say about mustard seeds. AND:
 SIRI, PLAY IT'S RAINING MEN. (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO LEAVE THESE DELIGHTFUL CHILD FANS? (VIA GETTY IMAGES)  WEEKEND READING 📚On the facts in front of us: Tracie Morrissey painstakingly lists the many details about the young boys that were part of Michael Jackson’s orbit. Seeing it all together is stomach-churning. (Flagged & Reported) On the “ambition penalty”: Apparently, nothing has changed since 1999: Single women are being shunned by potential dates for owning property. (The Guardian) On sisterly love: Lindsey Adler goes long on Amy Wallace, who fiercely protects her brother David Foster Wallace’s legacy and humanity. (The Small Bow)  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
The devil wears a prairie dress
 May 12, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, The WNBA’s 30th season tipped off this weekend with gigantic rings and an iconic performance from the one, the only, the incomparable Ellie the Elephant. You literally love to see it.  ELLIIIEEEEEE (VIA GETTY IMAGES) In today’s newsletter, we’re putting on our cutest boots to dig into the intersections of “The Devil Wears Prada 2” and book-of-the-moment Yesteryear. They’ve got more in common than you think! But first, the news. xoxo, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ON
 The Devil Wears a Prairie DressYesteryear and “The Devil Wears Prada 2” have the same moral: Let women’s ambition run wild.BY NONA WILLIS ARONOWITZ  ANNE HATHAWAY'S ANDY SACHS IN "THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2" AND MODERN DAY TRADWIFE HANNAH NEELEMAN, AKA BALLERINA FARM. (SCREENSHOTS VIA YOUTUBE AND INSTAGRAM)
Everyone is talking about Yesteryear, Caro Claire Burke’s bestselling novel about a deeply venal tradwife influencer who suddenly wakes up in the year 1855. The book (which will soon be a movie) hits many, many notes: Its time-travel element reminds us how little the 19th century deserves rose-colored glasses, but Yesteryear also seeks to expose modern ills like the empty grift of tradwife cosplay, the rise of the manosphere, and social-media brainrot. Maybe it’s because I immediately followed this book with a viewing of "The Devil Wears Prada 2," but to me, Yesteryear is above all a warning about what happens when women are not allowed to be openly ambitious. A little-discussed detail about the main character, Natalie, is that she breaks with her small-town Christian upbringing to attend Harvard on a free ride. She doesn’t mention specific intellectual ambitions, but we know Natalie is gifted and sharp from a young age. She was “practically running” her Sunday school class by the time she was 12. Never one to socialize, she was excited to go to a college “where intellect would matter much more than being likable.” Pretty soon, though, Natalie’s long braid and air of superiority render her an outcast, and we are treated to a succession of fish-out-of-water scenes that reminded me of Tom Wolfe’s anti-hookup-culture novel I Am Charlotte Simmons. Homesick and lonely, Natalie takes refuge in a church group whose members are comfortingly familiar, even if they’re “dumb as rocks.” It’s there where she meets her future husband, Caleb, a wealthy senator’s failson. She never gets her degree. Within a few short years, she’s a wife, mother, and owner of a vast Idaho farm that becomes the stage for her illusory world—and her family’s principal source of income. Without giving away too much, I’ll say that throughout Yesteryear, Natalie is not well. She is selling a life premised on domestic bliss, but she experiences very little genuine happiness throughout the book. She tamps down her anger by pretending she is being watched at all times. She smiles maniacally no matter what. She appears to suffer from severe postpartum depression and psychosis. She has zero respect for her increasingly red-pilled husband, whom she realizes is “an actual, honest-to-God idiot.” (“Please give my husband a spine,” she prays to the Lord at one point. “I’m tired of him needing to borrow mine.”)  (VIA PENGUIN RANDOM HOUSE) One of the only flashes of pleasure we see Natalie have is her rush of ecstasy when two nannies show up to almost fully take over her five children’s care. Eventually, she becomes physically unable to repress her innermost negative thoughts and instincts (which leads to an incident that jeopardizes her influencer career). Other than a desire for control and outward perfection, we don’t know what truly makes her tick—because she doesn’t know. In her 1983 book Right Wing Women, Andrea Dworkin describes how a woman’s intelligence, if left to wither, disfigures her. “Imprisoned, intelligence turns into self-haunting and dread,” she writes. Confining a smart woman into a domestic space for which she is ill-suited will only lead to misery, because intellect by its very nature cannot be perfect and pre-packaged. “Wild intelligence abhors any narrow world” because “intelligence is also ambitious: it always wants…more of a bigger world.” And yet, Dworkin notes, within the traps of a patriarchal society, a woman “cannot be ambitious in her own right without also being damned.” Natalie’s distress and eventual downfall in Yesteryear is a cautionary tale of what happens when a woman’s intellect is imprisoned, or in this case, channeled into the pursuit of creating an avatar of the ideal white Christian American family. Natalie becomes an influencer almost by accident, but her ruthless negotiations with Caleb’s father reveal her skill for playing hardball, her fearlessness in the face of power—leading us to wonder what would have happened if that unflinching quality had been applied elsewhere. Contrast this bleak portrait of an unfulfilled woman with the fizzy romp that is "The Devil Wears Prada 2," the number one movie in America right now. Watching “DWP2” on the heels of reading Yesteryear, it struck me how happy the lead women seem to be when they’re working hard, especially in comparison to the first movie. The first act treads familiar territory—Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestley is cruel and vindictive as Runway’s editor-in-chief; Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs is put upon as her newly minted features editor. But the rest of the movie has a dynamic duo caper feel, allowing the two women’s wild ambition to thrive in a bigger world. Andy’s successes are unvarnished feel-good moments, and we spend absolutely no time mourning the hypothetical family she never built. Instead, we hate the brotastic heir, and later the callous billionaire tech mogul, who pose an existential threat to Runway and the media industry writ large. At one point, Miranda does acknowledge the domestic sacrifices she’s made, the many lost moments with her daughters, but leaves us with an affirmation: “Boy, I love working. I really do. Don’t you?” These lines are delivered with an authentic smile that makes a mockery of Natalie’s Instagram-ready grin in Yesteryear, a smile so relentless that, at one point, it remains frozen upon her face even when tears run down her cheeks. The moral of both stories seems to be: Let women’s ambition run free—free from the manosphere, free from insipid rich dudes, free from stifling expectations. The villains of "The Devil Wears Prada 2" are not powerful women, but unambitious men messing with the careers that powerful women painstakingly built. In the funhouse-mirror world of Yesteryear, the antagonists are men, yes, but also women enforcing the rules. Perhaps the runaway success of both projects shows us that work can make us happy—as long as we’re the ones making the rules. P.S. Our Yesteryear book club is meeting next week, and we’d love to have you! Reply to this email if you want in.  FOLLOW THE METEOR     Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
The Toni Morrison approach to mothering
Black women deserve to claim and relish the depths of freedom motherhood can bring.
By Rebecca Carroll
When I was nursing my son as a baby, he started doing this thing where he would latch the little fingers of his free hand around my bottom lip, and then proceed to slowly knead at it in a small but persistent effort to pry open my mouth. It almost felt like he was trying to find some sort of entryway back into my body. Once, when he was about two, I softly placed my hand over his as he tugged at my lip, and asked in a whisper, “Does this feel like love to you?” He stared back at me with his beautiful, bright eyes, and nodded “yes.” It felt like love to me, too.
I am reminded of this hushed exchange of heartwork between us whenever I see one of these pieces about “styles of parenting” that crop up online every now and again, introducing or reintroducing terms like “attachment parenting,” “helicopter parenting,” “gentle parenting,” and “intensive parenting.” The methods they describe might sound fresh, but they’re often adjacent to the four Mayo Clinic-approved styles of parenting, which have been around since the 1960s—authoritative, authoritarian, permissive, and uninvolved. And they almost always feel white-coded, not just because labeling (or, let’s be honest, marketing) how parents interact with their children is about having the time and the income to ponder how you might like to categorize your “style” of parenting. These terms also dissociate and intellectualize what is, to me, and to many Black mothers I know, an emotionally freeing, visceral experience.
It is striking to me how little the experience of Black mothers factors into the standard offerings on how to parent today. Instead, we get media portrayals of Black mothers as struggling single moms and “modern-day mammies,” or neck-rolling, meme-friendly, “You got McDonald’s money?” kinds of stereotypes. But Black mothers are, and Black mothering is, so much more than that. And we deserve to claim and relish the depths of freedom mothering can bring——especially given the inherent, deeply harrowing history of when and if we were even able to keep our children.
Morrison offers this piece of advice: “When they walk in the room, my face says I’m glad to see them.”
No one knew that better than the late novelist Toni Morrison, who was herself a single mother of two boys. Becoming a mother, Morrison said in a 1989 conversation with Bill Moyers, “ was the most liberating thing that ever happened to me.” The demands of her children, she went on to explain, were not like those of her colleagues, friends, or lovers. “Somehow all of the baggage that I had accumulated as a person about what was valuable just fell away. I could not only be me—whatever that was—but somebody actually needed me to be that.” That’s exactly how I felt when I was nursing my son, when he needed me to be that person who would feel like love.
Later, years after I stopped nursing, I snuggled him often and regularly, let him sleep in the bed with us at night, and made myself available to him in ways that felt centered and honest. I seldom missed a call. I always allowed myself to be vulnerable even, and especially, when I didn’t have an answer to solve a problem—while also trying like hell to solve the problem. “If you listen to [your children],” said Morrison, in that same conversation with Moyers, “somehow you are able to free yourself from baggage and vanity… and deliver a better self, one that you like. The person that was in me that I liked best was the one my children seemed to want.” Obviously, we have to make choices, set boundaries, and act as moral compasses for our children, but isn’t that part of delivering the version of ourselves that we like best?
REBECCA AND HER SON, KOFI (COURTESY OF REBECCA CARROLL)
My friend Caryn and I raised our sons, who are just eight months apart, as cousin-brothers, and have frequently mused over the past 21 years about the ways in which parenting Black children is not just about “the talk” for our sons, or warnings about the oversexualization of Black girls for our friends with daughters. It’s about mitigating the harshness of their inevitable reality growing up in America, with the softness of our generational instincts.
Morrison’s approach to parenting squarely challenges the meme and media stereotypes (not that she would have paid them much mind), and blatantly disregards white mainstream guides. Black mothering doesn’t need a name or a category; it deserves a kind of reverence. In simpler terms, Morrison offers this one piece of salient advice: “Let your face speak what’s in your heart. When they walk in the room, my face says I’m glad to see them. It’s just as small as that, you see?”
The summer after my son went to college, I was really struggling with him being away. Like, actually grieving. We sat down one evening to talk about it. I told him how hard it was for me to be physically separated from him, almost as if a part of my body was missing. And he said, “Mom, I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing. And that’s a testament to you and your mothering.” I’d like to think that is in no small part because my face has always said I’m glad to see him when he walks into a room.
More Mother’s Day reading and watching from The Meteor:
A Feminist Love Letter to Baby Formula
It’s Time to Rethink the Empty Nest
My Abortion Story Is Not What You Think
Three Questions For Tracy Clark-Flory About Motherhood and Sisterhood
Syria's Mothers Are Fighting to Rebuild Their Homes
Quick, what's in the Constitution?
  May 7, 2026 Hi, sweet Meteor readers, My daughter got a big-girl bed last night, and her unmitigated joy about unicorn sheets and celestial-themed pillows was frankly inspiring. “I have been yearning for this all of my life,” she told me. May we all cope with sudden change as well as she does. Today, we are moving past the devastation of the Voting Rights Act’s “demolition,” and towards what we can actually do about it. Plus, good news about S-E-X (for once) and three questions for journalist Tracy Clark-Flory about her amazing new memoir. Having mom feelings, Nona Willis Aronowitz  WHAT'S GOING ON“We are not without power”: We’ve spent the last week grappling with the Supreme Court’s gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. This week—even as conservative states move quickly to gerrymander the hell out of their maps—it’s time to talk about what we can do about it. Melissa Murray, a NYU law professor and author of the new book The U.S. Constitution: A Comprehensive and Annotated Guide for the Modern Reader, was a guest this week on UNDISTRACTED with Brittany Packnett Cunningham, and she has some basic advice: Start with the actual Constitution. “Raise your hand, America, if you've actually read the Constitution,” Murray says. “Don't play in my face.” The answer is likely to be “no.” Murray says many of her own law students haven’t read until she assigns it on the first day of class. The Constitution is still relevant, despite recent evidence to the contrary, because it gives us context both to how we got ourselves here, and how we dig ourselves out. Murray calls the Constitution “a trauma-informed document”—the trauma of the colonies having been oppressed by a global superpower. The whole purpose of the document, Murray says, was to limit the government’s power so it didn’t “run roughshod over the rights of ordinary people.” But of course, the original Constitution also contained some pretty horrific concessions to Southern states; the Constitution, Murray notes, “is literally rooted in a series of compromises about how to keep people enslaved, and we have to wrestle with that.”  On the other hand, the Constitution famously has amendments, and those amendments are a profound exercise in citizen power. In Murray’s book, she tells the story of the 16th, 17th, 18th, and 19th Amendments—all of which “were passed in this period at the turn of the century, where there was a huge populist movement.” These were drastic changes we can scarcely imagine now: The 19th amendment that enfranchised women, for instance, “basically doubled the size of the electorate in one fell swoop. Think of what we can do if we harness that kind of power.” Amendments are possible, she says: We could be thinking about statehood for Washington, D.C.— “Hello, it’s a Black city”—or we could pass an amendment to get rid of the electoral college, which Murray reminds us we once came very close to doing. (Did you know that? I did not.) Murray would love every college student in America to read her chapter about the 27th amendment, which regulates pay increases for Congress. It tells the story of a University of Texas-Austin student who helped get it passed in the nineties, more than 200 years after it was proposed. “That is a lesson for young people,” Murray says. “You can be constitutional change agents. We don't have to take this.” AND:
  Three Questions (and a Compliment) About...Motherhood and SisterhoodTracy Clark-Flory’s new memoir grapples with her mother’s secret teen pregnancy, and a half-sister she never knew.Ever since she was a teenager, Tracy Clark-Flory was aware her half-sister existed. Her mom, Deb, had gotten pregnant as a teen in the 1960s, and been sent away to a home for unwed mothers. Deb placed the baby for adoption, but endured decades of grief, thinking about her lost baby every day even after she had Tracy years later. When Tracy was in her thirties—now married, a mom, and a writer—she took a DNA test and finally tracked down her sister, Kathy. I talked to Tracy about how this revelation led to her incredible memoir, My Mother’s Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family’s Fractured Past, a personal and political journey that is almost psychedelic in its immersiveness. Mother’s Day is on Sunday, so let’s talk about Deb first: What do you see as your inheritance from your mom, especially when it comes to the issues you write a lot about, like sex and family? As a feminist journalist and memoirist, I have been in many ways writing against what happened to my mom back in the '60s without realizing it. I saw the ironic juxtaposition that my mom was sent away in shame in the '60s as a pregnant teenager and then I, so many decades later, devoted my life to writing about sex, publishing personal essays on the internet—in some cases, writing personal essays in defense of casual sex, which is to say premarital sex. But now I very much understand that sex was part of what devastated my mom and changed the trajectory of her life—and that I wanted to resist that. It’s why I’ve spent so much of my career writing about things like porn and sex workers’ rights; I have repeatedly confronted shame across my career. Without knowing it, I was trying to address some of the unfinished business from my mom's life and her experience as a young woman in this world.  TRACY CLARK-FLORY AND HER MOM, DEB (COURTESY OF TRACY CLARK-FLORY) Also…the impacts of adoption are generational. There are all these ways in which Kathy's absence and my mom's longing for her was very present across my childhood, even before I knew of my sister’s existence. I detected my mom’s longing and didn't have an explanation for it. I didn't understand how my mom could sometimes be so close to me, but also absent from me and at arm's length. Now I see that as being part of the legacy of the adoption, of the fact that she lost her first child. Your sister is half-Black; her biological father is a man from Nigeria whom your mother met at college. And a big part of this book is about race and the lopsided sexual expectations that Black and white women have to reckon with. Can you explain more about how this dynamic works? These homes for unwed mothers would not have existed without racist ideas that place white women on a pedestal—and of course, once you're on the pedestal, you can fall from it. Black women, on the other hand, were cast as bad girls from the start; there was no distance to fall. [Black feminist writer] bell hooks writes about this shift in the 19th century where…white women were cast as pure and innocent, whereas Black women were portrayed as hypersexualized jezebels. [Black feminist scholar] Patricia Hill Collins has argued that the jezebel stereotype made the idea of pure white womanhood possible. Through these homes, white unmarried mothers were rerouted towards marriage and the nuclear family. Black unwed mothers, on the other hand, were expected to raise their own children. And then, as a result, they faced all sorts of costs, from lost education to poverty. They were also targeted with harassment from welfare officials and sterilization. This racially divided approach to unwed motherhood worked against shared rebellion, and Black and white women's fates were determined along these very separate paths, which also served to hide their shared interest in reproductive justice.  TRACY CLARK-FLORY AND HER SISTER, KATHY, DURING THEIR FIRST MEETING. (COURTESY OF TRACY CLARK-FLORY) You discuss these traditional institutions and expectations that harmed your mother, and at the same time you are very aware of the fact that you ended up in a heteronormative, monogamous, nuclear family. How do you think your family configuration fits in with this fascination you've always had with shame and sexual rebellion? It's been very odd to be researching the ways in which marriage, as an institution, have been historically used to control women's sexuality, and then look at my own life and see I have found myself within this institution. I’ve found some of my greatest happiness, my greatest sense of comfort within marriage, and yet Christopher and I will sometimes look at each other and be like, "Why did we get married?" And it's not because we're questioning our connection or commitment to one another, but we're questioning how it is that we ended up within an institution that in so many ways we do not philosophically or politically agree with. And of course, I know the answer. There's so much that points us in this direction and rewards us for taking this sort of path. But I wish we lived in a world where there were more options readily available. I'm very interested in imagining alternate ways of structuring our lives. Speaking of, I love the descriptions of the unwed mothers living together and even writing a newsletter together. It's so cool and ironic that while these unwed mothers were sent away to be “redeemed” so that they could be in a nuclear family, they were actually living communally in a temporary sisterhood. They should’ve started a mommune! I love these women and their gallows humor. [In their newsletter] they're joking about the unwed mother-mice that go skittering across the floor in their rooms. You know, the vibes were pretty good! They were in these really miserable and traumatizing circumstances, but the fact that they were still able to develop that kind of sisterhood really speaks to the power of the connection.  ONE MORE THING A new exhibit from The Institute for Primary Facts drives home the enormity of Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged crimes. It transforms the Epstein files into an imposing physical entity, with 3,437 books, more than 3.5 million pages, and 17,000 pounds spanning the width of several walls. But why print, catalog, and display an archive that’s already available on the internet? David Garrett, a lead organizer of the exhibit, tells Meteor contributor Ann Vettikkal that it will force people to take the files seriously by removing them from the context of “doomscrolling.” The volumes, he says, also serve as a monument to the “sheer scale of evidence” of Epstein’s alleged crimes and connections to powerful figures like Trump. The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room will be open to the public in New York City starting tomorrow through May 21.
 FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Abortion care in your living room
  May 5, 2026 Good evening, Meteor readers, I stayed up until midnight reading the absolutely batshit conclusion of Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear. All I’ll say now is that it had me squeezing my baby extra-tight in the morning, and that I’m more than ready for our Meteor roundtable—remember to ping us if you want in! Today, we’re digging into just how much a restriction on the most commonly-used abortion pill will affect pregnant people in every state. Plus, three questions for Iceland’s First Lady, Eliza Reid, and some positive parenting news. Ready for that tradwife horror movie, Nona Willis Aronowitz  WHAT'S GOING ONAn “essential” pill: It was late summer 2022, only a couple of months after Roe v. Wade was overturned, when Alex, then 33, realized she was pregnant. She had two young children, and she and her husband had already made the decision not to have a third. “The difficult part,” she says, “was figuring out how to have an abortion.” She lived in upstate New York, a state she presumed was safe from the fallout of Dobbs, so she was “shocked” when the process turned out to be convoluted. Neither her OB/GYN nor her primary care doctor provided medication abortion, which Alex figured was the best method for her early stage of pregnancy. Both doctors referred her to a local Planned Parenthood, but the clinic wasn’t able to see her for weeks—maybe, she speculates, because of the increase of out-of-state patients from abortion-hostile areas of the country. Frustrated, Alex posted this gif from “Veep” to friends in her group chat:  She didn’t want to wait around feeling more and more hormonal, nauseous, and tender. Her husband did a quick Google search and found HeyJane, a telehealth service that mails abortion pills. Alex chatted with a doctor and got the medication in the mail three days later. “Feeling relieved!” she texted the group chat. After a stressful few days, ordering the pills online ended up being “safe, super-effective and very straightforward,” she told them. Alex is one of hundreds of thousands of patients who have gotten abortion medication through the mail since 2020, when the FDA temporarily lifted the in-person requirement on mifepristone, the most common abortion pill (it made the move permanent the next year.) It’s a change now under legal threat, as the Supreme Court mulls whether to uphold an appeals court’s decision to revert mifepristone’s regulations back to its pre-2020 state. That might sound arcane, but there’s a huge amount at stake: Abortion pills now account for almost two-thirds of abortions nationwide. And by mid-2025, more than 1 in 4 abortions nationally—and virtually all abortions in states with bans—were provided through telehealth doctors. The expansion of telehealth is a major reason that abortion numbers have climbed steadily despite bans across the country. And getting a telehealth abortion—with pills and without an office visit—isn’t just important for women in states with extremist laws. Today, like Alex, patients in every state seem to value the privacy, efficiency, and flexibility of accessing the pills online.  ALEX WITH HER BABY DAUGHTER ON THE DAY SHE TOOK THE ABORTION PILL, FEELING “JOY” AND “RELIEF." (COURTESY OF ALEX)Telemedicine has “been so essential,” says Dr. Keemi Ereme, an OB/GYN in Washington State and a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health. Unlike organizations like Plan C, Dr. Ereme is not able to ship abortion pills to ban states. But the option has filled a crucial need in her “safe” state, too. “It's a [method] that patients really appreciate,” she says. “It's so nice to talk to patients in the comfort of their own homes with their loved ones around them and not [require them] to come into an office space, which for a lot of people is not a safe place to be.” In other words, as another telemedicine patient put it to The Meteor, ordering online is just “less emotionally complicated.” Dr. Ereme says she sees a “stark difference” from the care she provided in 2019, when patients were required to take mifepristone (the first step in a medication abortion) in the office. Because of work, childcare obligations, transportation issues, or straight-up fear of the doctor, patients were “showing up when they could—which typically is later on in pregnancy—when they could have had a very safe medication abortion at home.” After the restriction was lifted, she says, more people have been able to avoid a torturous waiting period, or a later-term surgical abortion. Like many other providers, if the Supreme Court does ban telehealth use of mifepristone, Dr. Ereme plans to shift to a misoprostol-only regimen (rather than a combination of mifepristone and misoprostol) for telehealth patients. But while safe, she notes, this method is “significantly less effective” than using both medications: Miso-only regimens have an effectiveness rate as low as 78%, as opposed to 95% for the combo method. There can be more side effects and pain. And, Dr. Ereme points out, miso-only is especially ineffective for very early abortions—precisely the kind telemedicine has facilitated. Meanwhile, doctors like Dr. Ereme will continue to spread the word about how safe mifepristone is. “It seems like we're battling people who don't know what they're talking about,” she says. “It is honestly criminal and immoral to block patient care like this … So there's a lot of anger and frustration, but also a lot of will to keep fighting because we have to. Our patients need this care.” —Nona Willis Aronowitz AND:
 LAUREN WASSER, SINÉAD BURKE, AND AARIANA ROSE PHILIP AT THE MET GALA 2026 (VIA GETTY IMAGES)
 Three Questions about…Being a Modern First LadyEliza Reid, former First Lady of Iceland, on this quintessential “soft power” roleBY CINDI LEIVE  FIRST LADY OF ICELAND ELIZA JEAN REID AND HER HUSBAND, FORMER PRESIDENT GUDNI JOHANNESSON, IN 2017 (VIA GETTY)Eliza Reid was living her life as a writer and mom, having moved from her native Canada to Iceland with her history-professor husband, when suddenly, her spouse decided to run for president. And won! The next eight years were, for her, an experiment in trying to hang on to her identity while also serving a country she had come to love. (She famously googled how to curtsy. She also wore a suffragette-white pantsuit to meet Mike Pence.) Now, with her husband having stepped down, she’s written a memoir, The First Lady Next Door, which will make you want to hang out with her. We did—and we had questions.
You were the First Lady of a country known for its gender equality. But some of the rules you were expected to follow feel pretty archaic. Why is this particular role so slow to evolve? I wouldn’t necessarily say archaic rules, because there really are no rules for this unofficial role. There were, however, expectations that aligned with what I felt could be outdated stereotypes of female spouses of male heads of state. Having said that, the positive side of serving as first lady of the country that is closest in the world to closing the gender gap meant that I felt more comfortable in speaking up about those contradictions. I think one of the biggest mental obstacles I had to overcome was simply deciding that I should be active and outspoken with the platform even though I only had it in the first place because of something my husband (and not I) had achieved. How do the First Ladies (and Gentlemen) of the world communicate? Please tell me there’s a Signal thread and an annual girls’ weekend in Tulum. (And while you’re at it, who is a fantastic First Lady all our readers should know about?) I wish there was a huge group chat! I am so fortunate to call several current and former FLGs (that’s often our shorthand!) friends…I’d recommend people in general pay closer attention to the spouses of world leaders; they will find an interesting and diverse gang, and one whose members have more influence than you might think. I will call one person out: Olena Zelenska of Ukraine. She has been using her platform as FL to bring together other FLGs, which in turn highlights the incredible “soft power” that these people have to tackle various issues. In her case of course that involves vital fundraising for important work connected to Ukraine’s war effort. One memorable passage in the book is about how at first, people would repeatedly walk right by you in receiving lines, rushing to get to your husband. What did you learn from that? I learned that if I didn’t tackle even the “small” stuff, such as the microaggression of people not noticing me enough to shake my hand even though I was standing right next to my husband, then it would fester into greater resentment. The good news is there was a quick fix: assertively and cheerfully sticking out my hand to make sure no one missed it – and make sure that I occupied the space I deserved.  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
A "demolition" at SCOTUS
  April 30, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, Today is my second-favorite day of the year because it’s the one where I get to see the below gif at least 49857394768 times in 24 hours. Life is beautiful.  In today’s newsletter, we take a look at the fallout of the Supreme Court’s voting rights case. Plus, a brief dispatch from down unda’. ♉, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONMoving the line: Yesterday, the Supreme Court handed down what Justice Elena Kagan described in her dissent as “the latest chapter in the majority’s now-completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act.” Louisiana v. Callais, which was decided 6-3 on partisan lines, centered around a new voting map in Louisiana that had created two majority-Black districts. The map was challenged by a group of “non-African Americans” who were concerned about their voting power being diluted in the state. The Court sided with the challengers and ruled that Louisiana could not use the new map, agreeing with a lower court ruling that the map violated the equal protection clause in the U.S. Constitution. All of this tramples over Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which was written to prevent conservative map makers from gerrymandering minority voters into oblivion. Essentially, what the court just did, says Stetson University law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, was allow legislatures to “make the excuse that they are drawing the map lines for partisan advantage” rather than have to cop to racial gerrymandering. To combat unfair and racist maps, constituents will have to go above and beyond to near-impossible heights to prove racial bias. This ruling, Kagan writes, “will effectively insulate any practice, including any districting scheme” that can be branded as “race neutral.”  ACTIVISTS OUTSIDE THE SUPREME COURT DURING ORAL ARGUMENTS FOR THIS CASE LAST YEAR, LAST YEAR. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) While Section 2 has not been entirely struck down, it has been defanged, and the right knows it. And they’re acting quickly: Louisiana governor Jeff Landry announced to GOP House candidates that he planned to suspend May’s primary elections so lawmakers can redraw congressional maps. Florida’s House Republicans approved new GOP-friendly congressional maps just hours after the decision. And Mississippi—where a federal judge had recently ordered that maps get redrawn precisely because they violated Section 2—is planning a special legislative session to redraw its maps. “The ruling invites states to dilute Black and brown voting power,” Carmen Daugherty of the Advancement Project noted, “and will result in aggressive racial gerrymandering that will shrink minority representation in government.” It’s almost certain that red states will be moving fast to prioritize white voters ahead of a crucial midterm election season. As we feel we must always say in times like this, all hope is not lost. There are ways to continue the fight for fairer maps, Torres-Spelliscy says. “As many states as possible need to adopt independent redistricting commissions”—which work to eliminate gerrymandering by taking the task of drawing electoral maps away from the legislature—and add “amendments to state constitutions that will give voters some measure of protection that was stripped away by the Supreme Court.” This is also the time when we absolutely need to show up and show out at the midterms, which are almost exactly six months away. As legal scholar Dahlia Lithwick put it: “The stakes are absolutely vast, and we’re still parsing what’s going to happen in the midterms…But what we know is that there is this one lingering power, which is to get out and vote.” AND:
ONE MORE THING: THE WORLD’S WOMEN CONVENE IN AUSTRALIAThis week in Melbourne (Narrm), Australia, more than 6,000 feminists from everywhere from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe attended Women Deliver, a gathering designed to align on solutions that will actually achieve gender equality. I first attended this conference in Copenhagen in the spring of 2016, which feels both strange and sad (we all remember what happened on November 9th of that year). I was eager to be back to hear from the world’s leading advocates from the Pacific region and all over the world on a key question: Are we closer to achieving ANY of the gender equality goals that we outlined a decade ago? I might have expected the answer to be no, especially given the rollback of women’s rights worldwide and the rise of authoritarian leaders and tradwives alike. And it would have been easy to imagine that, given the ongoing debate in the U.S. about whether feminism ruined the workplace or wrecked the institution of marriage, the mood here would be cautious at best, despondent at worst.  PRINCESS MARY OF DENMARK (CENTER) AT THE WOMEN DELIVER CONFERENCE IN 2019. (VIA GETTY IMAGES) What I’ve found instead is joy around every corner. Of course, there is an understandable urgency on issues ranging from child marriage to maternal mortality, in addition to the existential question of whether global democracy can hold on long enough to save us. But it turns out, it’s feminists who will save us—simply because they are out there in their communities, getting things done. As Happy Mwende Kinyili pointed out as she announced the launch of the Accelerate Together campaign, designed to drive hundreds of millions of dollars to women’s rights activists annually: “Feminist movements are proven engines of social change.” So we spent this week talking, strategizing, dancing, and drinking lots of coffee. And we did it together. My favorite moment was from ʻOfa Guttenbeil-Likiliki, a filmmaker and women’s rights activist from Tonga, who said during a discussion of how to end gender-based violence: “If this is a global movement, it must move the way the ocean moves…leaving no woman behind.” Words to live by, until we meet again. —Tara Abrahams  FOLLOW THE METEOR  Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
Has your mom eaten today?
  April 28, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, There’s been another audio leak from the much-anticipated "Summer House" reunion, and at this point, Bravo just needs to stream all 12 hours of whatever they filmed, editing schmediting, we will watch it raw. In today’s newsletter, we look at what moms are giving up to feed their children. Plus, the enduring, questionable allure of Michael Jackson. Free the footage, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONCook a meal for Mother’s Day: A March survey of more than 1,000 mothers in the United States conducted by the group No Kid Hungry found that moms are struggling to feed their children. According to the findings, one in five moms has skipped a meal or eaten less so that their child could have something to eat. That includes a surprising 20% of middle-income moms, and even a handful of “higher-income” ones—but, as always, lower-income mothers are feeling the squeeze most. “That’s a pattern, and it has a name: maternal sacrifice as a survival strategy,” says Lillian Singh, senior VP of family economic mobility at Share Our Strength, the non-profit that started the No Kid Hungry campaign. The numbers quantify what many parents have already been feeling: It’s hard to be a parent these days—more than any other decade in recent memory, according to more than 60% of the moms surveyed. In fact, nearly a quarter of women surveyed admitted to taking on debt in order to afford food. Even psychologists concur that parenting has become more difficult over the last few years for many reasons, including cost-of-living rises and stagnation in pay. Singh also points to anti-parent policies as a factor: “Proposed SNAP cuts”—like the one happening right now under the Big Beautiful Bill budget—“don't just reduce a benefit,” she says. “They remove the floor that makes those small acts of sacrifice survivable…The moms in our network aren't asking for more. They're asking for less to be taken away.”  The man in the mirror: The biopic Michael, which follows Michael Jackson’s career, is doing record-breaking numbers at the box office despite the fact that its protagonist was the subject of years of molestation allegations (including some published just last week). It’s not because it’s critically acclaimed: The film has a 38% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, but a 97% audience score. (Whereas with the 2019 documentary Finding Neverland, which profiled two of his accusers, those ratings are reversed.) Why the disparity? It’s complicated. Critics are struggling with the erasure of all of the complexities that made Michael, Michael—but that erasure seems to appeal to audiences. The film, produced by the Jackson estate and starring one of his nephews, Jaafar Jackson, glosses over nearly all of the difficulties Michael Jackson faced in his life and instead presents a pristine, idealistic version of the King of Pop. Put simply, the Jackson family is giving the people the version of Michael Jackson that fans loved most—the man on the stage—while completely ignoring the literal man in the mirror. Beyond preserving his legacy for profit, the Jackson estate has been working tirelessly for years on restoring the idea of Michael Jackson’s childlike purity, going so far as to have Leaving Neverland pulled from HBO and most streaming platforms four years ago. For the most part, this relentless rehabilitation has worked; given the wild success of the Broadway show MJ, the Cirque de Soleil show that sold millions of tickets, and a social media army ready to defend his legacy, Jackson appears too big to fail. Even the social stigma has faded: You’re more likely to see people happily bopping to “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” than to R. Kelly’s “Ignition (Remix)” —neither of which I will link to because I’m not tossing any extra streaming pennies to these men. And that’s really the question at the heart of the Michael divide. Can art ever truly be separated from the artist, and who exactly are we willing to do that kind of separation for? This film brings that quandary a step further by eliminating the person and focusing solely on the art. What viewers are left with, if Rotten Tomatoes scores are to be believed, is an enjoyable musical experience devoid of any analysis or acknowledgment of the costs of that art. But certainly, there are adult survivors of childhood abuse seeing all of this dialogue and wondering when art will be less important than their lived experiences. AND:
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The High Cost of Workplace Affairs
  April 23, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, Absolutely everyone is talking about Yesteryear, the new novel from Caro Claire Burke about a tradwife influencer sent back to the 1800s. My local library has a month-long waiting list for a copy, with 433 people currently in line. So we have decided we will not fall victim to FOMO! Over the next two weeks, the Meteor team will be reading Yesteryear and sharing our takes. Are you reading Yesteryear, too? Reply to this email if you want to be part of our roundtable.  In today’s newsletter, we dig into the alleged affair rocking the sports world and why some of us always face more punishment than others. Plus, a very special assignment for your weekend reading. Support your local libraries, Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONNone’s fair in love and football: Yesterday, New England Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel announced that he would be missing part of this year’s draft to attend counseling. Why is a man advertising his plans to seek counseling? Step into my office. Earlier this month, Page Six published photos of Vrabel at a resort in Arizona with esteemed NFL journalist Dianna Russini. The photos were not particularly salacious—the two are seen eating, sitting separately in a pool, and exchanging an awkward hug—although a later one, of Vrabel and Russini sharing a kiss in 2020, hit the internet just today. Both parties have denied any wrongdoing, but it was clear as soon as the first photos went live who would be paying the price for an alleged consensual relationship between fully grown adults: Russini. The backlash has been swift and ugly. Russini resigned from her position at The Athletic, where she is currently under a conduct investigation. There have also been calls for the AP to investigate Russini’s NFL Awards voting history. Patriots fans on Reddit have even stooped so low as to start questioning the paternity of Russini's son, Michael, which was picked up by a sports outlet. Before we go any further, here’s my opinion on the journalistic ethics of it all: Russini, affair or not, is a rigorous and damn good journalist who has been doing the hard work of covering the NFL for years. Her work is not limited to Vrabel or the Patriots, and there’s been nothing to suggest that their alleged sexual relationship influenced her coverage. And even if you do agree that Russini made an ethical misstep, there’s no denying that she’s shouldering most of the fallout. As she was resigning, the NFL confirmed that it would not be reviewing whether or not Vrabel’s actions were a violation of conduct guidelines. There have been no calls for his resignation (at least not over this), and apart from his absence (beginning on day three of the draft), Vrabel is not expected to lose his job. This is, statistically, par for the course. Though Vrabel and Russini didn’t share a workplace, research shows that when women get involved with a coworker, they suffer more than men who do the same. “Women get half the [economic] gain of dating men with power, but pay double the costs when that relationship ends,” economist and associate professor of finance at the University of Southern California Emily Nix, who wrote a paper on the financial impacts of workplace relationships, tells The Meteor. (Think Kristin Cabot, aka the woman from the Coldplay kiss-cam.) Conversely, men see almost no change in their economic status after dating a superior or a subordinate—Cabot’s paramour Andy Byron resigned as CEO of the company and sold his house for $5 million, and is still a billionaire. Women also have a harder time bouncing back from these relationships, much like Cabot, who recently admitted that she is still looking for work. “One of the reasons women suffer such a big financial loss is because they’re the ones who end up leaving the workforce,” Nix explains. “A year after the event, they’re over 12 percentage points less likely to be employed…which persists for at least four years afterward.” That is what’s so vexing about this situation: seeing someone with the skill, expertise, and impeccable resume of Dianna Russini having her career stalled for a relationship with one out of the 384 coaching staffers in the NFL. Not to mention the blocks this could create for other women who are looking to grow in the industry. “I would not have advised her to resign,” Nix says. “I would have told her to fight tooth and nail because it’s very hard to regain your position. And we do find that women who leave one job have a harder time getting a better offer.” But hey, at least Mike is getting counseling. 🙄 AND:
 WEEKEND READING/LISTENING/WATCHING: “LEMONADE” EDITION 🍋🎶👯 EVERYONE WAS FINDING A FORMATION TO GET INTO. (SCREENSHOT VIA YOUTUBE) “Lemonade,” Beyonce’s sixth and arguably most iconic album, was surprise-released 10 years ago today. Even if you weren’t a card-carrying member of the Beyhive, it was impossible to ignore the ripple effects of this trailblazing “visual album,” whose lyrical, cinematic, and literary references to Black womanhood, history, and religion abounded. (And oh yeah, it’s a chronicle of Jaÿ-Z’s infidelity, mirroring the Kübler-Ross stages of grief.) The cameos were legion, ranging from Serena Williams to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie to the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown. Besides gifting us banger after banger, “Lemonade” spurred a kaleidoscope of thinkpieces, reading lists, roundtables, and entire syllabi that reflected on slavery, on Black feminist theory, on food, on witchcraft, on the supernatural, on Afrofuturism, on vulnerability, on capitalism, on marriage, on Black women’s place in rock ‘n roll, and so much more. The 1991 film Daughters of the Dust—directed by Julie Dash, the first Black woman to direct and produce a full-length, widely distributed feature film—was re-released as a result of the album’s nod to it. You could celebrate “Lemonade” this weekend by listening to it…or you could also read the myriad words of others dissecting it. Choose your own adventure!  FOLLOW THE METEOR Thank you for reading The Meteor! Got this from a friend? |
It’s not just “violence.” It’s femicide.
  April 21, 2026 Greetings, Meteor readers, I am sending hearty applause to all of you finishers out there who hit the streets of Boston and Jersey City this past marathon weekend. I genuinely marvel at your abilities. In today’s newsletter, we try to wrap our minds around the uptick in femicides and the lack of response. Plus, a suspicious lawsuit out of California and a shred of good news for bodily autonomy. Shannon Melero  WHAT'S GOING ONCall it what it is: In 2023, historian and author Kimberly A. Hamlin wrote in the Washington Post that femicide—the killing of a woman because she is a woman—was on the rise, and that said rise is not surprising given our country’s deeply patriarchal and white-supremacist history. Her assessment rings particularly true this month, as the news of Dr. Cerina Fairfax, Celeste Rivas Hernandez, Lindha Zerpa Lara, Nancy Metayer Bowen, Ashlee Jenae, and Shaneiqua Pugh have flooded our screens. These women were murdered (aside from Pugh, who was critically injured), and men they were close or married to were named as perpetrators. Over the decade between 2014 and 2024, the number of women killed by intimate partners increased 22 percent. Men are suspects in more than 98 percent of those incidents. Yet “femicide” is not the term most commonly used to describe these kinds of killings; it appears nowhere on the CDC website. The public instead relies on terms like “intimate partner violence”: killed because of a relationship gone wrong. Or “domestic violence”: killed because of some mysterious, private matter inside the home. Neither of those phrases, though, makes clear who the target and perpetrator of that violence is. You can’t address a problem without first properly naming it. Femicide comes closer. The tradition of American femicide has its roots in our country’s history of patriarchy and violence. In her piece, Hamlin points to the exact legal mechanisms that have helped. The most enduring of these was “coverture,” the idea that women’s “legal identity was covered by that of her husband.” Under the laws of coverture, Hamlin writes, it was “basically inconceivable for a husband to be prosecuted for assaulting his wife or children,” because they were his property.  AN ANTI-VIOLENCE PROTEST IN ARGENTINA, 2019 (VIA GETTY IMAGES) More than a hundred years after coverture stopped being common practice, women are still being killed at an alarming and growing rate—and most often, according to data, by men they know. Some women are especially vulnerable: Researchers find that femicide occurs disproportionately among Indigenous, Latina, and Black women, the last of whom make up 14% of the population but, according to the CDC, a full 30 percent of intimate partner murder victims. Laws may change, but the long-term effects of men being told that all things and people are theirs to do with as they please, do not just go away. They adapt. But our response has not. The CDC lists intimate partner violence as a “significant public health issue.” So why is this administration, which purports to be protecting women from everything, stripping away resources meant to protect women from this very real threat? Why is the administration easing gun regulations when on average more than 70 women are shot and killed by an intimate partner every month? In other countries, women have taken to the streets to demand an end to these murders. We could do the same—or at the very least, begin asking candidates what they plan to do about a crisis impacting nearly half of all voters. Because this problem deserves to live not just in “intimate” and “domestic” corners, not just in lurid headlines or true-crime plotlines, but in the open air of the streets. AND:
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Is ICE a reproductive health hazard?
  April 17, 2026 The “Toxic Legacy” of Operation Metro SurgeThis winter, in Minnesota and elsewhere around the country, ICE used tear gas on citizens. Now public health experts worry that these chemical weapons may be linked to reproductive problems. Yessenia Funes reports.BY YESSENIA FUNES TEAR GAS ON A STREET IN MINNEAPOLIS THIS WINTER. EVEN THOSE NOT PROTESTING WERE AFFECTED, RESIDENTS SAY. (PHOTO BY SCOTT OLSON/GETTY IMAGES.) Asha kept a bag ready throughout most of January and February. Inside, she packed bandages, gauze, water, saline, tourniquets, and general first aid. The 30-year-old works as a healthcare professional in Minneapolis, and when she’s off the clock, she responds to community emergencies as a street medic, mostly treating her neighbors who have been exposed to chemical weapons. On the day in January when federal officers shot and killed 31-year-old nurse Alex Pretti, she says, “I watched a lot of elderly people get tear-gassed.” And that wasn’t the first or the last time Asha, who is sharing only her first name to protect her identity, saw law enforcement attack her neighbors. Since the Trump administration’s Operation Metro Surge, which deployed 3,000 federal immigration agents to the Twin Cities, the emergencies have felt nonstop to Asha. The administration concluded its Minnesota incursion on Feb. 12, firing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem weeks later, partly for her failure to manage the fallout in the state. Minneapolis is seeing fewer agents than in prior months, but people are still scared. And the whole city still feels the surge’s effects in their bodies—perhaps literally. Public health experts fear that ICE’s actions will leave a toxic legacy for communities across the country. In cities like Los Angeles, Portland, and Washington, D.C., independent analysts have raised concerns over federal officers’ indiscriminate deployment of chemical agents like tear gas or pepper spray—and not just on protesters. People are being exposed while stepping out for work or errands, or even sometimes at home. Researchers can’t easily study the long-term impacts of these weapons—there’s no ethical way to expose people to these chemicals in a controlled experiment—but what they do know paints an alarming portrait for public health, especially in women, people with uteruses, and children. Asha Hassan, an assistant professor of women’s health at the University of Minnesota Medical School (not to be confused with the street medic), began collecting data on reproductive health impacts in 2020 when the Black Lives Matter uprisings sprang up across the country and, with them, a police response that often involved tear gas. She had heard whispers of menstrual irregularities and miscarriages, but after looking at the available literature, she realized scientists had ignored some key population groups. “A lot of the research that we do have on tear gas is from the ’50s and ’60s,” Hassan explains. “It’s on mostly healthy men who are in a military setting. It really hasn’t been tested on women, children, people with chronic conditions, people with any sort of disability.” Studies have focused on “this particular type of body: a cis, straight man who is serving in the military and has the ability to be healthy.”  A PROTESTER IN LOS ANGELES FLUSHES A FELLOW DEMONSTRATOR’S EYES OUT AFTER EXPOSURE TO TEAR GAS. (PHOTO BY JON PUTMAN/ANADOLU VIA GETTY IMAGES After putting out a social media call to hear from those who had been exposed to chemical weapons like tear gas, she received more than 600 emails from all over the world in just a few weeks. In 2023, she published a paper that included more than 1,200 responses from people exposed in the U.S. between 2020 and 2021. The findings confirmed Hassan’s fears: Tear gas exposure was linked to negative reproductive health impacts for anyone of reproductive age. “Even after one exposure, we started to see some impact,” she says.
The more a person had been exposed, the more likely they were to face a number of issues: breast tenderness, spontaneous bleeding, and cramping. The study also found an above-average rate of miscarriages, but the sample size didn’t include enough pregnant participants to make a strong conclusion about tear gas’s effect. AN “OBJECTIVELY CHILLING” USE OF TEAR GASIn the decades after World War II, the majority of world leaders agreed to ban riot control agents during war as part of the Chemical Weapons Convention. (The U.S. government shares limited information on the chemicals that make up these weapons, but they can include chlorobenzylidene malononitrile and dibenzoxazepine, which can harm the respiratory system.) However, U.S. police are still allowed to use these weapons to protect public safety, explains Rohini Haar, a public health professor at U.C. Berkeley and medical adviser at Physicians for Human Rights. But that’s not what’s happening in the U.S. under Trump, Dr. Haar believes. “You’re not seeing that these weapons are used to quell any sort of riot or protect public safety,” Dr. Haar says, emphasizing that ICE agents have fired tear gas as protesters were walking away, not to disperse a crowd. “They’re actually harming public safety.” Dr. Haar has treated tear gas patients across the globe, including at the Aida Refugee Camp in the West Bank. There, Palestinian families have been exposed to periods of near-daily tear-gas use by Israeli soldiers. No one is safe—not people cooking dinner at home or children walking to school. “That’s happening now in the U.S., too,” Dr. Haar says. “The experience in Aida is kind of a warning.” Indeed, a federal judge ordered ICE to stop its use of tear gas in Oregon last month after the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit on behalf of protesters. In his filing, U.S. District Court Judge Michael Simon wrote, “Defendants’ conduct – physically harming protesters and journalists without prior dispersal warnings – is objectively chilling.” At least one additional case also focuses on the federal government’s recent use of chemical weapons in Portland. The Meteor reached out to Customs and Border Protection to understand its reasoning behind officers’ liberal use of tear gas. The agency did not comment, but Gregory Bovino, the ICE official who led the Minnesota operation and lost his job in January, has defended the use of chemical weapons as a favorable alternative to “lethal devices.” In Minneapolis, ICE agents have also deployed tear gas outside people’s apartments and buildings, where the chemicals can and do seep indoors. The weapons are most toxic in enclosed spaces. The day officers killed Pretti, Asha, the street medic, fled into an apartment building to catch a break. “The air inside was almost as bad as the air outside,” she recalls. “You were standing inside and coughing,” Asha says. Tear gas “was seeping into every apartment in that hallway.”  PEOPLE IN MINNEAPOLIS RUN FROM TEAR GAS—WHICH FEDERAL AGENTS USED WIDELY THE DAY THEY KILLED NURSE ALEX PRETTI. (PHOTO BY STEPHEN MATUREN/GETTY IMAGES) For those who aren’t familiar with the chemicals, stepping outside of one’s home can feel completely normal—until the stinging, dry stench hits, explains Minneapolis resident Slime Seamstress, a 31-year-old trans seamstress using their soon-to-be legal name. They were exposed to tear gas twice in January. They never attended a protest; exposure occurred instead during routine walks to pick up groceries or meet a friend. About a week later, they menstruated for more than 30 days straight. After three weeks of bleeding, they went to see their doctor, who suggested that the tear gas had caused the disruption. “That’s what scared me,” Seamstress says. “They said that it seemed serious.” Seamstress didn’t have the means to purchase more menstrual products after their supply ran out, so they sewed their own reusable pads with the fabrics they had at home. They can’t afford a gas mask, a $40-230+ product which has become essential for many Minnesotans, either. At the height of protests, Seamstress avoided leaving the house. “A HIGHLY TENSE SOCIAL AND PSYCHOLOGICAL SITUATION”Staying home isn’t an option for everyone. Timothy Monko, a former post-doctoral researcher at the University of Minnesota, has investigated these chemicals, contributing to a 2021 paper scrutinizing the safety of tear gas. The research’s takeaway was clear: “We should not be using it without actually understanding its effects,” Monko says. Those findings were enough to scare him and his wife: They may want more children in the future, so his wife carried her gas mask everywhere when ICE officers were regularly facing off against local community responders this winter. Monko isn’t the only researcher to make similar conclusions. Public health expert Patricia Huerta has heard accounts of irregular menstrual cycles and miscarriages following tear gas exposure in Chile. The associate professor of public health and medicine at Chile’s University of Concepción published a 2023 paper focused on the 2019 social uprisings there, where police used crowd control agents during protests. She’s unsure whether chemical exposure alone is to blame for people’s symptoms—or whether it acts in combination with the trauma people experience during these law enforcement confrontations. “It’s a highly tense social and psychological situation,” Huerta says. “It’s quite stressful. It’s the smoke. It’s the smell. It’s a policeman pointing at you with a shotgun that you don’t know will shoot a tear gas canister or a rubber bullet.” Every researcher interviewed for this story agrees that there is a lot regulators still don’t understand about the long-term impacts of exposure to various types of chemical agents, but that they know enough to say with confidence that ICE’s recent use of tear gas and pepper spray isn’t safe. In the meantime, Seamstress is anxious over their next menstrual cycle. Asha, the street medic, remains available should her neighbors need her again. She’ll respond to emergencies however she can as long as her community is under attack. “Through all this, we’re just trying to meet the needs of our community,” she says. “We’re just looking after our neighbors….If it’s dropping off groceries or helping people pay rent, then it’s that. If it’s helping people who have been tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed, then we do that. We’re just helping in whatever way we can.”  ABOUT YESSENIA FUNESYessenia Funes is an environmental journalist focused on uplifting the voices of society's most oppressed. She publishes a climate-justice newsletter called Possibilities, and has been published in The Guardian, The Verge, Yale Climate Connections, National Geographic, New York Magazine, and more.  ENJOY MORE OF THE METEOR Thanks for reading the Saturday Send. Got this from a friend? Don’t forget to sign up for The Meteor’s flagship newsletter, sent on Tuesdays and Thursdays. |
