Mother Jones

Oklahoma incarcerates more women than almost any other state. Under its punishing, under-the-radar “failure to protect” law, mothers — even those who are victims of domestic violence — can be sent to prison because of their supposed failure to keep their children out of harm’s way. In this devastating read, Samantha Michaels tells the story of one Oklahoma woman, Kerry King, who was sentenced to 30 years in prison — but had never hurt her kids.

These laws also create an impossible dynamic that makes survivors less likely to report what’s happening to police. When someone calls 911 after being abused by a partner, some cops open a child welfare investigation if there are kids in the family. So if a mother calls 911, she risks losing her kids; if she doesn’t, she risks being prosecuted for failure to protect. As one legal expert suggests, there’s no way to win.

Kansas voted this week to save abortion, but the hardest work is yet to come. For her forthcoming book No Choice: The Destruction of Roe v. Wade and the Fight to Protect a Fundamental American Right, author Becca Andrews spent time at a reproductive health clinic with a tragic history:

Trust Women is familiar with working under pressure. From 1975 to 2009, Trust Women was called Women’s Health Care Services, and it was helmed by Dr. George Tiller, one of the few doctors in the nation who offered abortion care in the third trimester. That clinic closed down when Tiller was murdered by an anti-abortion extremist. Today, friends and acquaintances of the man who killed Dr. Tiller still linger outside his former clinic. States have put large monetary bounties on the heads of those who can be proved to have “aided and abetted” abortion. It begs the question: How much longer before violence sparks once more?

In May 2020, a plane full of monkeys, intended for COVID-19 research, was supposed to depart Mauritius. But it never did. So, who purchased the monkeys? What lab was their final destination? When Jackie Flynn Mogensen began to investigate why the flight didn’t take off as planned, she discovered a whole lot more about the wider trade of primates, and how a shortage of monkeys for research leads to serious issues, from stalled research and drug testing in many high-priority areas to an increase in the smuggling of animals.

By the fall of 2020, monthly monkey imports had returned to their 2019 levels, thanks to large increases in supply from Cambodia and Mauritius—and since have largely stabilized. And last year, despite zero monkeys coming from China, the US managed to import more than 31,000 monkeys in total, just 8 percent less than imports in 2019. But this has hardly meant a return to normalcy in the US. Keep in mind that while the total number of imports may have recovered, the entire world is fighting a pandemic. On top of the demand for studying HIV, or malaria, or cancer, or an endless number of other research areas, two years ago a never-before-seen virus swept across the planet. And we needed monkeys to fight it.

For fields outside of Covid, like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and heart disease, the low monkey supply has been “devastating,” Roberts adds.

“Today, the official records of these older killings are often inaccurate. If they aren’t corrected soon, the true stories may never come out; many witnesses to the crimes of the Jim Crow era are aging and dying.”

“Trees have always migrated to survive. But now they need our help to avoid climate catastrophe.”

“At Moody Bible Institute, purity culture and complementarianism have worked together to forgive abusers and punish the abused.”

“Does running for office make him less dangerous—or more?”

“Unidos en Salud ‘made the pain undeniable.’ And then got to work.”

“It’s not just the economy, stupid.”

In their own words, eight would-be Americans share their experiences — and the challenges they’ve faced amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on legal and unauthorized immigration.