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.

Ravishly • 24th June 2021

Powerful Men Do Terrible Things: Why Lawyers Like Kavanaugh Perpetrate Sexual Assault

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh now has two accusers. Listening to debates about the allegations of sexual violence committed by the current SCOTUS nominee, I have been particularly surprised at those who cling to his profession as an attorney and judge as an indicator that he would be morally incapable of doing something as reprehensible as rape or sexual assault. That was, in fact, the opposite of my experience as a law school student.

24th June 2021

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be the first female US president

Donald Trump’s shocking victory in the 2016 presidential race caused liberals across the United States to question whether the country was indeed ready for a woman president. Since then, there has been much speculation about various female politicians and celebrities running for office, including Senator Elizabeth Warren, Senator Kamala Harris, Oprah, Michelle Obama, and others. There have even been rumours that Hillary Clinton might run again. I, however, don’t see any of these women making it

The Independent • 8th June 2021

AOC is right about Kamala Harris. But Americans can’t solve this problem | Carli Pierson

American exceptionalism was on full display in Guatemala yesterday. As Vice President Kamala Harris marched to the podium at a press conference after meeting with the Guatemalan president Alejandro Giammattei, you could almost hear Sir Edward Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance playing in the background. Her straightforward, ominous message for those considering making the dangerous voyage north felt like a watered-down version of Trumpism when she proclaimed: “Don't come!"

26th May 2021

Can AMLO end Mexico’s devastating drug wars?

AMLO’s campaign promises of amnesty fall short of the reality of the country he is about to take the helm of.

The Independent • 21st May 2021

Opinion: For the good of America, Justice Breyer must step down from the Supreme Court

The Supreme Court of the United States sent chills down the spines of progressives this week by agreeing to review Mississippi’s abortion law, which bans most procedures after 15 weeks. The review will take place next term, and it will be decisive. If the Mississippi law is upheld, the ruling could give free reign to other states looking to roll back women’s right to self-determination and health, significantly curtailing Roe v Wade. With that announcement, Democrats are renewing calls for Just

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 • 6th May 2021

Kamala Harris is about to meet Trump-friendly Mexican president AMLO. I have some words of advice | Carli Pierson

Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to meet virtually with the Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador on Friday regarding immigration and the climate crisis. But it’s unlikely she will get far with the bullheaded and contrarian populist ideologue. Let me tell you why. For starters, Lopez Obrador — better known in Mexico by the acronym AMLO — doesn’t have a lot of experience in politics.

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 • 16th March 2021

We all wanted to believe Pope Francis was different. Now he’s finally proven he isn’t | Carli Pierson

“Who here isn’t sure if they believe in God?” I tentatively raised my skinny seventh-grader hand with bitten-down nails and chipped pink and blue polish; the entire class held their breath. I was apparently alone in my apostasy. I had just turned twelve years old and was the new girl at a posh Catholic school in a suburb of Denver, Colorado.

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 • 9th March 2020

Opinion: Mexico's AMLO seems incapable of tackling record rates of femicide

A sea of purple and black swayed in unison with the Jacaranda trees lining Mexico City’s streets yesterday as over 80,000 women descended upon the capital to protest the country’s femicide epidemic. And across the nation, women of all ages and backgrounds joined local marches to protest an increasing outrage at the gender-based violence epidemic and the lack of an adequate response on behalf of the government. Yesterday, women (and some men) came out in the hundreds of thousands to call out the

National Catholic Reporter • 9th March 2020

Despite threats, Frida Guerrera raises women's lost voices in Mexico

In Mexico today, there is an undeclared war against women and girls. Femicide, the gender-based murder of a woman by a man, is a national emergency in a country where violence against women has been spiraling out of control for years.

National Catholic Reporter • 18th February 2020

Activists killed in Mexican state where illegal logging threatens butterflies

Within a one-week span, two environmental activists and advocates for the monarch butterfly were found violently killed in the Pacific coast state of Michoacán, Mexico.

National Catholic Reporter • 14th February 2020

In bone-chilling numbers, femicides in Mexico are a national emergency

That same day, a 64-year-old woman was killed in the state of Puebla by her partner; a woman was found dead in a canal in Veracruz state with signs of torture; and two sisters who had been missing for two weeks were found dead in the state of Jalisco.

The Independent • 6th January 2020

Opinion: Let's talk about why Iran is really angry with America

More major news came out of Iran and Iraq over the weekend. Overnight thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of protestors took to the streets of Tehran to mourn General Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in Iraq last week while part of an official envoy sent to help elect a new Iraqi prime minister. On Sunday, the Iraqi parliament approved a humiliating resolution to expel American troops from Iraq after the US assassination.

The Independent • 2nd December 2019

Opinion: 'The rapist is you' is a post-MeToo feminist battle hymn

The global feminist movement has a new battle hymn: “The rapist is you”. These chilling words, shouted in unison, echoed across the world over the weekend as thousands of women from Chile to Australia participated in the brilliant public feminist performance piece “A rapist in your way” (“Un violador en tu camino”). It’s even been translated into sign language.