Must-Read Links: Child Brides, #ShoutYourAbortion, + More

Child Brides Photo Series Proves Girls Are Simply ‘Too Young To Wed’

Around the world, more than 14.2 million girls every year are forced to marry before they turn 18. Photographer Stephanie Sinclair’s work tells their stories in this piece at the Huffington Post. 

 

It Happened to Me: How I Became a First-Person Human Trafficker

For “Self Portrait” week at The Cut, ex-xoJane staffer Mandy Stadtmiller reveals her talent—which became a detriment—for finding personal stories that would light up the Internet, helping to usher in the new age of oversharing.

 

I’m a Lesbian Marrying a Man

“I am not, as a rule, attracted to men. I simply fell in love with this person and didn’t hold his gender against him.” At Salon, EJ Levy describes why identifying as a lesbian is important, despite, or perhaps because of, the gender of her future husband.

 

Why I Had an Abortion After 20 Weeks

In light of the too-close-for-comfort vote in the Senate this week that nearly banned abortion after 20 weeks, Rebecca Cohen’s heartbreaking story at the Washington Post about terminating her pregnancy at 21 weeks is more crucial than ever.

 

I Set Up #ShoutYourAbortion Because I Am Not Sorry and I Will Not Whisper

Even amongst the most stalwart of her pro-choice friends, Lindy West realized that abortion, as in “who’s had one,” was still totally taboo. So she decided to stop being quiet about it and started #ShoutYourAbortion, as she writes at the Guardian. The positive response has been downright deafening. 

 

Take a Valium, Lose Your Kid, Go to Jail

Alabama’s “chemical endangerment of a child” statute, meant to protect kids from parents running meth labs, has become the state’s greatest weapon against pregnant women, as Nina Martin’s chilling expose at ProPublica reveals.

 

If Disney Movies Were Way More Feminist

Snow White becomes I’m Not Your Fucking Maid in this BuzzFeed roundup and it only gets better from there.

 

Intersectionality Is Not a Label

“Floating down a river of think pieces on why ‘intersectional feminism’ is important, one would get the impression that this latest wave of sisterhood has finally conquered its internal divisions around the historical fault lines of race, class, ethnicity, and nationality.” But as Latoya Peterson writes at the Washington Post, many of us have forgotten intersectionality’s defining characteristic: action.

 

The Head of NARAL on Why It’s Not Strange That She’s Pregnant

That a headline like this even needs to exist is what makes this profile of NARAL’s Ilyse Hogue, by Rachel Combe at Elle, so important.