Progressive Voices

Two years after his death, efforts to raise funds for a memorial center in Raleigh continue A neighbor remarked last week that the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas had quickly pushed the grocery store killings in Buffalo, New York off the front pages of most newspapers. He concluded that the mass shooting at a Tops Friendly Markets store in Buffalo, which resulted in 10 deaths, has already been forgotten...

We had been married a little over a year when I had an abortion. Put down your rocks and torches. If I had not had the abortion, I might well have died. Not so simple now, is it? If I had been your wife, your daughter, your sister, your friend.

During a 2014 symposium marking the 60th anniversary of the Brown v. Topeka Board of Education decision, a statement from one of the plaintiffs offered what today feels like prescient insight. Many of the Virginia plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit, feared integration and would have preferred separate and actually equal.

Sexual violence survivor details some of the horrors that await if the Supreme Court ends abortion rights When I was raped in 2016, one of my attackers reached inside me and pulled out my NuvaRring, an internal birth control device, and asked me what it was. When I told him, he cast it aside where it was lost until police retrieved it a couple days later.

A step taken by a former chief justice 50 years ago provides the model In 1972, not long after the decision in Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to determine whether the death penalty violated the Eighth Amendment ban against cruel and unusual punishment.

As a researcher who measures the effects of contraception and abortion policy on people’s lives, I usually have to wait years for the data to roll in. But sometimes anticipating a policy’s effects before they happen can suggest ways to avoid its worst consequences. In my forthcoming peer-reviewed paper, currently available as a preprint, I found that if the U.S. ends all abortions nationwide

An economist explains why investments in childcare and eldercare could aid the U.S. economy Inflation is by far the biggest economic concern facing the U.S. economy today. While job growth is historically rapid and survey evidence indicates that workers think now is the best time in years to find a good job, the inflation surge has kept this labor market strength from translating into higher wages and incomes for most households.

Automation is already here: What is our responsibility to the people and communities left behind? Somewhere on Minnesota's Iron Range a railroad engineer noses an 85-car train under the load-out chute at a taconite plant. One by one, each car fills with almost 100 tons of iron ore. The contents of this train will be worth several hundred thousand dollars to the company.

Earlier this month, a North Carolina father contemplated an unthinkable decision: should he bring his 12-year-old son home from his group home without the services necessary to keep his son and the rest of his family safe, or abandon his son by not picking him up at discharge? In considering giving up his child, this father risks judgments and assumptions, though none of them would be accurate. The reality? He loves his son unequivocally. It is because he loves his son that he is pondering this horrific choice.

A few months ago, I was pulled over by a Springfield, Illinois-area police officer for a minor traffic violation. He shined a flashlight in my car and said, “Mr. Reeder, are you carrying?” I replied that no, my firearm was home locked up in a safe.

When they’re not busy accusing her of being too lenient on pedophiles and too hard on white people, Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee holding hearings on Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson purport to worship an originalist judicial philosophy. That means they like judges who promise, all Antonin Scalia-like, to base judicial rulings on what (they prefer to think) the Constitution’s framers intended.

"Sunlight is the best disinfectant.” “If we do not learn history, we are condemned to repeat it.” Americans often turn to these two aphorisms in discussions of public policy and usually for good reason. Both emphasize the value of openly and honestly confronting the truth – wherever it may lead.

Even though asking job applicants for their salary history feeds a vicious cycle, our report finds that most North Carolina counties still do it This past Tuesday, March 15, was National Equal Pay Day. As President Biden rightfully noted in a White House proclamation, "Equal pay is a matter of justice, fairness, and dignity — it is about living up to our values and who we are as a Nation." Meanwhile, here in North Carolina, counties have an important opportunity to address gender-based pay disparities through a simple hiring practice change.

I’m trans. This year I turn 30, and my teenage self would be beyond surprised — not just at the joys that fill my life, but the fact that I’m alive at all. I’m part of the last generation that didn’t quite have the language for the feelings that flooded us as kids. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t take off my shirt as I stomped through puddles with my pals, why I was never invited to the sleepovers I actually wanted to go to, or why I seemed to be the only one that couldn’t quite envision my future self as a devoted wife and mother.

Earlier this past month, Senator Thom Tillis tweeted something that no one could disagree with. “During #BlackHistoryMonth, we recognize the experiences and contributions of Black North Carolinians to our state.”  Those are easy words. But, the fact is, Senator Tillis blocked the historic appointment of a Black North Carolinian to the powerful Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System in the same month.