PRA believes that this moment should be a wake up call for the gender and reproductive justice field. If the passage of Roe v. Wade in 1973 was a nadir point for the reproductive and sexual health and rights movement for the Christian Right, they very effectively regrouped and built out new strategies and tactics to counteract that loss. This moment is our own nadir point. In order to protect gains now being rolled back and further expand access to gender, sexual, and reproductive health and rights, we must, as a field, engage in a fundamental reassessment of our goals, strategies, and tactics and develop a strategic vision for the future of gender and reproductive justice in this country.

Internationally, it is important to protect the gains made in the last several years through informed advocacy. PRA supports international human rights and social justice faith communities, particularly in Africa, to understand the U.S. Right and to develop more effective responses and countermeasures to the rise of U.S.-style culture wars. Beyond Africa, we have partnered with organizations and activists in Europe and at the United Nations to defend gender and reproductive health, rights, and justice. PRA challenges both anti–LGBTI and –SRHR campaigns, and the “bad actors” that work across these issue areas. 

Carol Mason on Sentimentalism and Resentment

Carol Mason talks with Mary Reynolds and PRA’s Annie Wilkinson about how her 2021 article “Sentimentalizing Resentment” still holds true—and the ways that the culture of sentimentalism and resentment on the Right has shifted in just the past three…

In this episode, Koki talks with Alex DiBranco, executive director of the Institute for Research on Male Supremacism. Alex breaks down for us: What is male supremacism? What is its relationship to other supremacist ideologies and movements? And how…

Lessons from Bay Area Radical Abortion Defense

Abortion defenders and activists showed Angela Hume the inherent contradiction in the anti-abortion movement: it purports to protect women while actively harming them. Hume coins the term “violent care” to explain this contradiction and points to…

Host Koki Mendis talks to Heron Greenesmith about the anti-trans organizing and what to expect from the anti-trans movement in the year to come.

A militant wing of the anti-abortion movement has long looked to the 19th century anti-slavery abolitionists for inspiration and guidance, organizing under the banner of “abortion abolitionists.” This movement distinguishes itself from the self-…

Inform Your Resistance Season 1: Episode 1

Abortion abolitionists: who are they, what drives them, and how do their tactics overlap with those of other far-right movements? Join host, Koki Mendis, and PRA Senior Research Analyst, Cloee Cooper, as we reveal the chilling facts about this…

Featuring civil rights and gun safety advocate Brandon Wolf, Communications Manager of the Transgender Education Network of Texas Gin Pham, PRA Senior Research Analyst Heron Greenesmith, and organizer Kwyn Townsend Riley. In this briefing, we…

From the candidates in 2022 races carrying the mantle of the Far Right to the treatment of anti-LGBTQ persecution as “phobia,” join PRA Research Analysts Ben Lorber, Habiba Farh, and Heron Greenesmith as they name and explore the language and…

The webinar asked the question: “What’s next for the anti-abortion movement in this post-Roe moment?” with a focus on the ongoing anti-comprehensive sex ed movement, its overlap with the antiabortion and anti-trans/anti-lgbtq movements, and,…

Anti-abortion Politics in the Americas

Opposition to reproductive and sexual rights is at the heart of authoritarian and theocratic politics around the world, including in the United States. The Trump-Pence administration worked hard to build a…

Enduring the End of Roe and Thwarting an Accelerated Push Toward Authoritarianism

For much longer than 50 years, individuals who should be free have been made to endure the cruelty of courts. On June 24, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that for now, bodily autonomy is not a protected freedom, instead giving states greater…

A January 6th Roundtable Discussion

In a January 6 PRA briefing, panelists convened to situate January 6th in a longer trajectory of ongoing insurrection and answer the questions that are foremost on our minds. What do we do if we keep losing? What are some of the most significant…

Introduction: The Insurrection Isn’t Over; Neither is the Attempted Coup The January 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol provided the bloody final chapter to Donald Trump’s term as president, as “stop the steal” loyalists from all over the…

This May, Texas passed a law deputizing citizens to sue anyone who aids another in obtaining an abortion after six weeks, and rewarding those whose court challenges are successful with $10,000 in attorney fees. This clever and destructive law is the…

A Gift Guide and/or Reading List to Close Out 2021

White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism By Andreas Malm and the Zetkin Collective Read PRA’s review here. The book, coauthored by an…

Watch Now: A briefing from PRA

Even as we reel from one of the most deadly and destructive years in recent memory for anti-LGBT advocacy, we must start preparing for the next. On December 9, PRA hosted an invaluable conversation about the past year and what we expect to see in…

Anti-Sex Work Feminists have a (deadly) listening problem: a problem listening to the people whose lives and livelihoods have been made economically and socially precarious by the state and made subject to daily violence by its carceral arm. In this…

Under the perceived threat of a Democratic administration stymieing the war of attrition against reproductive rights, the anti-abortion movement continues to strategize for a post-Roe future. From the growth of the abortion abolitionist movement to…

How Media and Academia Help Incels Rebrand

On July 13, 2019, in Utica, New York, 17-year-old Bianca Devins was murdered. Her alleged killer, a 21-year-old man named Brandon Clark, was charged with second-degree murder after he posted a photo of her body and nearly decapitated head on Discord…

The city of Spokane, Washington sits at the eastern edge of the state—a mountain range and a cultural world away from the Pacific coast. It looks eastward to Idaho and Montana, and south to Eastern Oregon, where far-right secessionist movements have…

The Christian Right and anti-trans activists have united behind a single-minded agenda to prevent children from accessing life-saving trans-affirming healthcare and living full, authentic lives. On May 13th, PRA hosted a roundtable discussion with…

An Ohio state legislator may have leaked a new set of anti-trans “principles” endorsed by three major anti-LGBT organizations.

Amid a spate of legislation in early 2021 targeting trans-affirming health care for youth and trans and gender nonconforming athletes, Ohio…

President Trump’s third and most recent appointment to the Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, clearly opens the door for new strategies, messaging, and rhetoric by the anti-abortion movement. But it’s also a moment the movement has long…

Anti-Abortion “Abolitionists” Go to City Hall

In the spring of 2019, a steady stream of young, White men began appearing at Raleigh, North Carolina City Council meetings to speak on behalf of the “pre-born.” Sometimes the men appeared with their elementary school-aged children, who read pre-…

This directory lists the current prochoice and reproductive justice elements of organized religion in the United States. It is intended primarily as a resource for those seeking to support these values in light of contemporary legislative and…

There is a vast prochoice religious community in the United States that could provide the moral, cultural, and political clout to reverse current antiabortion policy trends in the United States. Most, but not all, of this demographic are Christians…

How Anti-Trans Feminists Are Complicit in Christian Right Anti-Trans Advocacy

Since 2016, anti-transgender feminist advocates in the US have used funding and fame from the Christian Right to undermine gains made towards justice for transgender people. After 40 years of activism, anti-trans feminists have now achieved greater…

On March 20, Ohio became the first state to use the COVID-19 crisis as an excuse to ban abortions, with the state’s attorney general calling pregnancy terminations “non-essential” health services.1 After Ohio opened that door, anti-choice…

The fight against so-called “gender ideology” has well and truly arrived here in the United States, not only in venues like the United Nation’s Commission on the Status of Women—a common marketplace for anti-LGBTQ and anti-abortion ideology—but in…

After the 2010 census, Michigan’s Chamber of Commerce worked to gerrymander the state’s districts to ensure a permanent Republican, business-friendly legislative majority. The effort worked so well that, according to the Brennan Center for Justice,…

How the Christian Right Built Capacity to Undo Roe State By State

Executive Summary The progressive movement and advocates for reproductive rights, health, and justice have been caught off guard by a movement that has adapted to a changing political, social, and cultural landscape. The Christian Right has…

A Roundtable on Gender and White Supremacy

In the early 1990s, when researcher and activist Loretta Ross was monitoring the White supremacist movement for the Center for Democratic Renewal, a national anti-Ku Klux Klan network, she realized that most fight-the-Right organizations were…

Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey on Wednesday evening signed a bill into law intended to ban nearly all abortions and criminalize physicians who provide abortion care, and hours later the Missouri state senate approved legislation that ban abortions after…

A Roundtable Discussion

In the 1980s, the Moral Majority helped usher in an era of politicized Christianity in the United States. The breadth of Christian Right activity since then, from the evangelical Right, to fundamentalist homeschooling, to cross-denominational…

Evangelical “purity” culture, roughly defined, is the belief that Christianity requires sexual abstinence before (heterosexual) marriage, especially for girls and women, and promises sexual fulfillment to those who save sex until marriage.

How New Atheism Feeds the Right

Over the last few years, incidents like these have created a deep rift that’s split the atheist community. At the root of these battles is a question of identity: should the atheist movement strive to be part of a progressive coalition and uphold a…

Trump’s Rebranding of Abstinence-Only

In a private session intended to set language for gender equality policies and to brief non-governmental organizations on U.S. priorities for women’s issues, a senior advisor from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), Bethany Kozma…

When the news broke on November 2, that a male shooter had killed two women at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, Florida, George Sodini immediately came to my mind.

From Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill to Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, the machine of right-wing politics has gone into high gear to defend prominent men from women’s accusations of sexual violence and harassment.

How the “War on Trafficking” Was Made to Unite the Left and Right

The prevailing narrative about “human trafficking” was shaped by a relatively small group of political influencers on the Right who had dreams of organizing Christian activists around winnable social issues.

Anita Hill and the Growth of Misogynist Ideology

Today, #MeToo, a Twitter hashtag now synonymous with the campaign to call attention to the widespread problem of sexual harassment and often name perpetrators, picks up on Hill’s legacy in bringing this issue into the national spotlight.

The Heritage Foundation is a right-wing think tank that claims to be “the most influential conservative group in America.” Its mission is to “formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited…

How the Vatican's Position on Gender Threatens Human Rights

In September 2016, Sharon Slater of the U.S.-based Christian Right group Family Watch International issued a special appeal to a crowd of African conservatives, including Kenya’s Catholic Conference of Bishops, which was sponsoring the gathering.…

Movement Misogyny Delivers Another Massacre

On April 24, minutes before Alek Minassian plowed his van into a busy pedestrian street in Toronto, killing 10 and wounding at least 13—predominantly women—the 25-year-old posted an explanation of sorts on Facebook: “Private (Recruit) Minassian…

Human Life International (HLI) is a Catholic organization with a long history of vicious and hyperbolic attacks on LGBTQ and reproductive rights. It opposes contraception, in-vitro fertilization, comprehensive sex education, and abortion in all…

The depth and breadth of White evangelical support for Donald Trump before and since his election has perplexed most observers. But a team of sociologists, freshly-analyzed data in hand, may have the answer that has eluded journalists, scholars, and…

The ascent of Donald Trump to the presidency has dramatically worsened an already grave set of challenges confronting justice-minded people, and has presented the women’s movement in the United States with an historic opportunity to create a…

Religious freedom is a central issue of our time. It has figured prominently in recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court. It was a major theme of the presidential election of 2016. And it has been a major theme of the Christian Right in both…

In the year of the #MeToo movement, Women’s Marches took place in every state on January 20 and 21, drawing crowds of a little over a thousand to half a million. But, from Knoxville, Tennesee to Seattle, Washington, Far Right and White nationalist…

As we mark the 45th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, two facts about the current abortion patient population in the U.S. are especially striking. First, that patients are disproportionately poor, with half living below the official poverty line and…

Paul Rosenberg recently published an essay at Salon that challenged the myth that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation. The occasion was the then-forthcoming annual celebration of Religious Freedom Day, which commemorates the…

Originally published in 2011, the Culture Impact Team Resource Manual—which includes, among other things, sample voter guides and instructions for church-based voter registration drives—has served as the primer for church-based, Christian Right…

Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore –– arguably the most openly theocratic candidate to run for a major office in the U.S. in modern times –– almost won. This, despite credible allegations of child sex abuse, a reputation as a serial…

On November 2, federal Judge Lee Yeakel began hearing arguments in Whole Woman’s Health v. Paxton, a lawsuit challenging Texas’s new ban on Dilation and Evacuation (D&E) abortions. Yeakel’s hearing is just the first step in a process that is…

As Donald Trump exited the stage after addressing the 2016 Values Voter Summit (VVS) in Washington, DC a year ago, the Rolling Stone’s “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” blasted from the speakers. The audience gathered together for the Family…

A raft of state-level legislative and regulatory restrictions on access to abortion followed the “wave election” of 2010. But a closely related trend has gone less noticed: the increasingly successful movement to bar or discourage the practice of…

The Right-Wing International, a Crisis of Democracy, and the Future of the European Union

One of the more striking features of the 2016 U.S. election was the convergence of the rhetoric and talking points of President Donald Trump and his supporters with those of the Kremlin. And in the tangled and ongoing investigation of Russian…

The more recent trend in anti-reproductive justice attacks is a state-by-state approach designed to gradually chip away at existing rights. According to the Guttmacher Institute, in the 40+ years since Roe v. Wade, states have enacted over 1,000…

Effectively fighting mobilizations like those emboldened by Trump’s election requires accurately understanding their composition—one in which misogyny thrives alongside, and intertwined with, racism.

In June 2016, the Supreme Court struck down a Texas anti-abortion TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) law that threatened to shutter all but a handful of the state’s clinics by requiring them to meet costly ambulatory surgical center…

In July 2016, the University of KwaZulu-Natal’s highly reputable and peer-reviewed academic Journal of Theology in Southern Africa (JTSA) published its…

The Religious Freedom Strategy of the Christian Right

Mixed with the systemic ingredients of anti-trans violence, which put trans women of color especially at the life-threatening nexus of white supremacy, heterosexism, and misogyny, is a cadre of Christian Right actors who are effectively fueling the…

The 2014 case of General Synod of the United Church of Christ v. Cooper was a landmark event because, although the case was ostensibly about opposition to marriage equality, the decision upheld foundational notions of religious equality and equal…

“Feminisms” for Life, Liberty, and Politics

n 1979, the rise of feminism and the Equal Rights Amendment motivated conservative evangelical Beverly LaHaye to found Concerned Women for America, established as an overtly anti-feminist female voice. Yet CWA has clung to relevance over the years,…

The Right’s success in reframing and co-opting social justice movements has derailed more than one progressive campaign. Among them is an emerging effort to convert the “Black Lives Matter” rallying cry into an anti-abortion one.

The real result of the anti-abortion movement — if not the intended goal — is to punish women for terminating pregnancies.

To say that Sheryl Sandberg ruined my life would be to make the same mistake that Sandberg herself makes—it would be to assume that the successes or failures of an individual woman, feminist or no, equal the successes or failures of feminism.…

Texas restrictions shot down; criminalizing miscarriage in El Salvador; and more

The Charlotte Lozier Institute aims to abolish abortion rights in the United States by recasting antichoice as authentic feminism, promoting incremental antichoice laws, and undermining the work of the prochoice Guttmacher Institute. Though it bills…

Activist Resource Kit

In the 40 years since the passage of Roe v. Wade, the struggle for reproductive justice has evolved and intensified. We must be prepared to deftly confront right-wing attacks and advance reproductive justice for all. The Roe 40th

Iden Campbell McCollum is the founder of The Campbell Center, a peer-run resource center for people living with mental health challenges. The center serves the primarily low-income and African American community in Southeast Washington, D.C.…

An Old Scare Tactic Re-Emerges

This February, a highly provocative series of 65 billboards went up around Atlanta, which featured an African American infant and the proclamation, “Black Children Are an Endangered Species.” The signs directed viewers to a website, TooManyAborted.…

Continuing Threats to Reproductive Freedom

In the run-up to the August 2009 Congressional recess, TV ads on health care reform hit the airwaves. The Family Research Council’s political action committee launched a five-state effort to squash a comprehensive health care bill with their spot,…

It didn’t turn out like they had planned. Two decades of political investment by the antiabortion movement and the Religious Right did not result in the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Even conservative Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged during…

A Warrior With Words

Exactly two months before abortion provider George Tiller was assassinated in the foyer of his church in Wichita, Kansas, Janice Shaw Crouse lent her voice to the chorus of pundits criticizing Tiller’s unwavering support for women who sought his…

For the leaders and workers of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, attacks from right-wing foes are nothing new. Almost from the moment that the U.S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, the federation and its clinics have been in the…

Sex Education as Ideology

Abstinence only sex education is widely spread across the United States, pushed by friends in high places, and the Christian Right.

From the podium at the Christian Right’s Values Voter Summit in mid-September, National Review Institute’s Kate O’Beirne, 59, pronounced that the “selection of Sarah Palin [as the GOP vice presidential nominee] sounded the death knell of modern…

Thirty-seven-year-old Erik Martin says he got involved in the American Life League shortly after his eight and 10-year-old children came home from their Blacksburg, Virginia, public school several years ago with an illustrated comic book entitled,…

New Theme of Right to Life Committee

They pledged to “Bring life to the heart of America and bring the heart of America to Life.” In 72 workshops, five plenaries, and three worship services, more than 500 members of the National Right to Life Committee gathered in Kansas City, Missouri…

On Tuesday, July 18th, for the first time in ten years, protesters arrived on Dr. Joseph Booker’s block in Jackson, Mississippi. They went door to door, ringing bells and telling people that their neighbor, the state’s last abortion provider, is a…

How Anti-Abortion Myths Feed the Christian Right Agenda

The anti-abortion movement uses B.A.D science and agenda-driven journals to back up false claims about abortions, in an effort to make abortions illegal.

The African American Anti-Abortion Movement

Introduction For those on either side of the abortion debate there are great stakes involved with the outcomes of the upcoming 2004 elections. There could be the possibility of three open vacancies on the Supreme Court within the next few years,…

Abstinence-Only-Until-Marriage Education in U.S. Schools

The welfare reform law of 1996, premised on the unproven claim that poor women’s failure to marry is the cause of high rates of family poverty in the United States, promoted an abstinence-only-until-marriage policy that teaches that sex outside the…

Reproductive Rights Under Siege

A woman’s ability to control her reproductive decisions—her reproductive rights—involves more than her right to safe and legal abortion. Reproductive rights encompass the right to bear and raise children, the right to access adequate reproductive…