Ravishly • 24th June 2021

Banning Abortion Isn’t Pro-Life: Anti-Choice Legislation Killed My Great-Grandmother

Two big things happened in 1929: the stock market crashed, and my grandmother was born.

My maternal grandmother, Ann, was the second child in the Hubbard-Miller family from Clinton, Missouri. Over the next four years, my maternal great grandmother, Joyce June Hubbard, would bear two more children. In 1936, at just thirty-six years old, she found out she was pregnant again. The family had lost nearly everything in the ’29 crash and could barely feed their family of six.

The Independent • 10th May 2021

The sexist truth about gun violence a lot of powerful people don’t want you to know | Carli Pierson

Democratic Michigan Congresswoman Debbie Dignell grew up in a home that was under a constant threat of gun violence. “We don’t forget about hiding in closets,” she said during a speech in the House. “Or our father taking locks off of doors. Or my grabbing a gun from my father, so he wouldn’t kill my mother, and being convinced that we would die.”

The Independent • 29th April 2021

Catholic bishops plan to pressure Biden over abortion rights. It’s time to make a choice | Carli Pierson

When Joselyn turned 15 she was already two months pregnant. Her mother, a housemaid who worked in another city, came back to her tiny village in a rural area of Puebla, Mexico, for her daughter’s quinceañera and her abortion. They had the party celebrating her 15-year birthday and so-called “entry into womanhood” first, and the next day they induced the abortion. It was bloody and painful. She retched on the floor for hours.

The Independent • 23rd April 2021

Red flag laws don’t work. The only way to heal our nation is to ban guns | Carli Pierson

How many shootings in the past month? In 2021? Well, as any “woke lawyer” (as my trolls on Twitter like to call me) would tell you, it depends. It depends on how you count them, for instance. According to the Gun Violence Archive there have been (so far) 36 mass shootings in April with a total of 44 people killed and many more injured. If you want to count “simple” shootings, then in just the past 72 hours there were over 253, but that number will likely go up between the time I finish writing...

The Independent • 8th March 2021

Opinion: Is 2021 the year of the Equal Rights Amendment? I hope so

If you believe that women’s rights to equality under the law are enshrined in the US constitution, and that the Equal Rights Amendment consecrating women’s rights passed decades ago, then you’re wrong.

The ERA was famously drafted by Alice Paul of the National Women’s Party in the early 1920s and was introduced in every Congressional session since the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. The bill gained significant momentum in the women’s movement of the 1970s and was approved by 35 states before...

The Independent • 18th January 2021

The first three things Biden should do in office

An economic recession that left millions of Americans unable to pay rent or put food on the table amid a raging pandemic is just the beginning of the new president-elect’s problems.

Our healthcare system is stretched beyond repair, we have an unpredictable white supremacist autocrat clinging to power, and too many gun toting Republican politicians in Congress and local governments that support him and his vitriol.

The Independent • 10th April 2020

Trump could face international human rights law consequences for his coronavirus pandemic response

“Donald Trump has blood on his hands.” Those were the words of New York City’s comptroller Scott Stringer, whose mother died last week of Covid-19. He wasn’t the first person to say it, but this time Stringer’s words hung glaring, suspended in air thickened with the struggling breaths of tens of thousands of sick New Yorkers and exhausted medical workers struggling in emergency rooms and ICUs overflowing with dying patients. This time those words meant something to everyone in America...

The Independent • 31st October 2018

Opinion: Here's why Trump doesn't really want to stop the migrant caravan

There’s a saying in Spanish, “Don’t give me anything; just put me where there’s something.” Under the current administration, the private immigration detention industry is certainly the place to be if you’re looking to make serious dividends.

While Trump distracts the American public with his inflammatory words about the migrant caravan making its way to the US-Mexican border ahead of the midterm elections next week, government contracted immigration detention centres are packed...