2026-05-15 01:30:00
2026年1月23日，华盛顿特区举行的“生命游行”集会。尽管反堕胎运动在美国近年来取得了一些重要胜利，例如推翻“罗诉韦德案”（Roe v. Wade）判决，但他们对当前局势感到失望，认为自己本应取得更多成果。反堕胎组织认为，共和党在国会拥有盟友，最高法院对他们的立场表示支持，而特朗普作为他们帮助重返白宫的总统，也自称是“最支持生命”的总统。然而，反堕胎运动领袖却警告称，这可能是其运动的“存在性时刻”。他们担忧，如果共和党完全遵循特朗普政府的“各州自行决定”策略，并放弃在联邦层面推动反堕胎政策，那么该运动将面临终结。
反堕胎组织对特朗普政府在堕胎药监管上的做法感到不满，尤其是其批准米非司酮通用药，并保留拜登时期的远程医疗规定，允许女性通过电话医疗订购堕胎药而无需亲自就诊。他们认为，共和党在堕胎问题上停滞不前，而民主党则试图将“罗诉韦德案”纳入法律。因此，反堕胎组织认为，特朗普在这一问题上的态度与他们预期的有所偏离。
反堕胎运动中最具影响力的团体之一是“苏珊·B·安东尼生命保护协会”（SBA），该组织在2024年总统大选后，呼吁特朗普支持联邦层面的反堕胎政策，但特朗普表示“这一问题已经解决，我将专注于其他事务”。这引发了反堕胎组织的不满，他们认为特朗普的立场动摇了共和党的核心价值。
文章指出，特朗普在2016年和2020年曾积极支持反堕胎政策，但近年来其关注重点已转向贸易、移民和外交政策，而对堕胎问题不再积极介入。反堕胎组织希望共和党在2028年总统大选前重新确立对堕胎的严格限制，以维护其作为共和党核心选民的地位。这一分歧可能揭示出美国新保守主义的未来方向。
If you talk to folks in the anti-abortion movement, they’re pretty disappointed about the state of things in the US.
Despite the headline victories they’ve achieved in recent years — like, say, the overturning of Roe v. Wade (1973) — they thought they’d be accomplishing a lot more.
Granted, they have a few things going for them: Republican allies in Congress. A Supreme Court has been sympathetic to their cause. And the man that they helped return to the White House, Donald Trump, who has embraced the title of most “pro-life” president ever.
And yet, leaders in the anti-abortion movement are ringing alarm bells and describing this as an existential moment for their movement.
“If the Republican Party fully follows this administration’s states-only strategy and abandons its commitments to pro-life action at the national level, then the movement as we know it is finished,” Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of the anti-abortion group Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, told members at SBA’s April gala. “There are more abortions in the United States now than there were on the day that Roe Wade was overturned.”
One of the movement’s major frustrations is that the Trump administration has embraced a patchwork framework for regulation of mail-order abortion pills, largely deferring to the states rather than calling for a national abortion ban.
Philip Wegmann, a White House reporter at the Wall Street Journal, is the author of the recent piece “The anti-abortion movement is turning on Trump.” He joined Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram to discuss why the anti-abortion movement felt triumphant just a few years ago, but now are very much on the back foot.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
These lobbying groups thought that the decision from the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade would mean fewer abortions in the United States. Was that kind of their bad for thinking that?
There certainly was an expectation that once Roe was reversed, there were going to be all sorts of other fights — that they were going to fight this out in all 50 states.
At the same time, though, these anti-abortion groups are of the opinion that the Dobbs decision leaves room for federal action. And what they’re frustrated by right now is that Trump, in their mind, has really held them at arm’s length. Not only does he not want a federal abortion ban, but his administration has moved forward with the approval of a generic version of mifepristone. They have kept on the books Biden-era regulations that allow a woman to order these drugs through a telehealth service and not actually have to go see a doctor in person.
They believe that Republicans are standing still at a moment when Democrats, and frankly, this is backed up by the reporting, say that they want to codify Roe. So for these “pro-lifers,” it’s existential.
These groups you’re talking about, can we get more specific? Who are we talking about here?
There’s a lot of different groups here. When it comes to the “pro-life” lobby, there’s Americans United for Life, the March for Life, the Family Research Council, but the most politically connected is the Susan B. Anthony List. If a member of Congress gets a call from the March for Life, they’re picking up the phone eager to talk. If they get a call from Susan B. Anthony List, they might be sweating.
Marjorie Dannenfelser, the president of Susan B. Anthony List, is very much a political operator. That entire group, they are knife fighters through and through and they put the Republican Party on notice earlier this month when they announced that they were going to be spending $160 million, not just in the coming midterms, but in the 2028 Republican presidential primary.
The “pro-lifers” at SBA, they have not hid their frustration. They were angry at FDA administrator Marty Makary because he approved a generic [mifepristone pill]. So last December, they called for Makary to be fired. They’ve been sort of rattling the saber. But in our interview with her, she told the Wall Street Journal, “The president is the problem.” That’s a direct quote.
She believes that Trump, who was as pro-life of an advocate as you could have in 2016 and again in 2020, has set aside the issue.
The president met with people from the Susan B. Anthony List, including their leader Marjorie [Dannenfelser], last week. Do we know how much Marjorie and the president see the midterms and the 2028 elections differently?
The pro-life lobby thinks that there is a way for Republicans to run on abortion and not run away from it. They are going to spend a lot of money in these coming midterms, but they’re also going to spend a ton of money in the coming presidential primary. And the expectation here is that any candidate that they’re going to support has to agree to federal action on the abortion issue.
Marjorie told the Wall Street Journal in our reporting that the president, who had been staunchly and openly pro-life…remember, in 2016, there’s that moment on the debate stage where he says that Hillary Clinton is okay with “partial birth abortion” and describes that in vivid terms.
That got all of the social conservatives to stop thinking twice about this billionaire playboy from New York and see him instead as a social conservative champion. Well, in the 2024 election, Trump says, “Hey, I delivered you three pro-life Supreme Court justices. My work here is done. I’m going to focus on other things.” And when Marjorie went to Trump and said, “Hey, we need federal action, I need you to get on board,” the answer that she got was, “No. This issue is killing us.”
There’s a belief inside of the current administration that if they didn’t have to deal with abortion, then maybe Republicans would be picking up dozens of additional seats. So the fact that this meeting was put on the schedule is incredibly significant because it shows that the White House knows, look, we have to service this part of our coalition. We have to get on board with them. Maybe it reflects that the administration believed that they let a core constituency outside of the fold.
It seems pretty clear if you look at his decades of history of weighing in on every last issue that abortion didn’t weigh heavily on the president’s mind until it became politically expedient to do so.
Do you really think if, say, JD Vance come 2027 or so starts advocating for a federal abortion ban, a 20-week abortion ban, whatever it might be, that it’s going to upset President Trump?
You know, [with] Donald Trump, I think that everything is transactional. And so where you have these pro-lifers who are motivated by a single principle, and then you have a politician who is motivated just by getting the best deal that he can, do they get it back on the same page? Or is this a break?
And look, the anti-abortion lobby has been one of the most loyal constituencies for Republicans for decades. This is the story of the Trump era. He shows up and he tears the curtain on what Republican orthodoxy is, remaking the party in his own image. There are some things he absolutely cares about. Trade, immigration, foreign policy. In all of the other areas though, now there’s no gatekeeper to say what is and isn’t conservative. And all have sort of freely entered in to have this argument.
Some folks, like the pro-lifers, are saying this has been a party platform issue for decades. It cannot change. It shouldn’t change. They are looking not just to change the direction of the current administration. They’re looking to the future of the party and saying, “What will Republicans believe in 2028?” And their argument is that any definition of conservatism has to include robust limitations on abortion.
Previously, a lot of Republicans were very successful in saying, “Hey, we want to overturn Roe v. Wade.” That was the consensus. And so this is going to be a fascinating, fascinating fight that is going to tell us a lot about the identity of the new American right.
2026-05-14 22:35:00
白宫信仰办公室负责人保罗·怀特（Paula White）于2025年5月1日在美国华盛顿特区白宫玫瑰园举行的全国祈祷日活动中，与总统唐纳德·特朗普及其他宗教领袖一同站立并歌唱。全国祈祷日是一项由国会认可的活动，呼吁所有信仰的人参与祈祷与反思。本周六，一系列基督教宗教领袖和政府官员将聚集在华盛顿特区的国家广场，参加由白宫支持的“自由250”庆祝活动，该活动旨在纪念即将到来的7月4日独立日，并将作为“重新确认美国为上帝之下的一个国家”的仪式。如果你关注美国文化中宗教复兴的趋势，这一活动并不令人意外。在特朗普的第二个总统任期内，宗教右翼势力持续上升，并利用他对规则和传统的蔑视，模糊了教会与国家之间的界限。白宫内部，国防部长将伊朗战争和美国海外军事行动描述为上帝授权和指导的。而在政府之外，这种教会与国家的联盟往往接近于公开的偶像崇拜。保守派牧师甚至竖立了特朗普的黄金雕像（但强调这并非效仿旧约中的“金牛犊”），并在祈祷中将他与耶稣相提并论，尽管他自称是“AI-福音弥赛亚”。这些保守和福音派宗教领袖似乎确信他们所倡导的基督教观念或更宗教化的美国正在崛起。然而，皮尤研究中心（Pew Research Center）最新报告指出，这些以“基督教民族主义”为信仰的活动人士，并不符合美国公众的普遍意愿。大多数美国人实际上反对这种更为保守的意识形态对美国的设想。他们承认宗教是积极的力量，但大多数人仍支持托马斯·杰斐逊提出的政教分离原则。换句话说，他们并不认同宗教右翼日益激进的主张。
皮尤报告表明，过去两年中，认为宗教在美国公共生活中影响力增强的美国人比例上升了19个百分点，但整体上，人们对组织宗教的角色仍持积极态度，约为55%。然而，这并不意味着宗教右翼的特定世界观正在获得广泛支持。尽管“基督教民族主义”这一术语在过去四年中被更多人知晓，但其整体受欢迎程度并未因此上升，正负评价均有所增加，且其理念仍不被大多数美国人接受。例如，公共宗教研究中心（PRRI）提出了五个衡量基督教民族主义的指标：认为美国法律应基于圣经原则、主张联邦政府正式宣布美国为基督教国家、认为基督教是美国身份的核心、认为上帝对美国有独特使命，以及认为基督教神对美国比其他国家更偏爱。然而，即使在这些广泛定义下，这些观点仍缺乏广泛支持。皮尤调查显示，过去几年支持基督教民族主义理念的比例保持稳定，没有因特朗普而显著上升。同时，大多数美国人希望教会和宗教场所远离日常政治，不支持候选人。此外，支持联邦政府放弃政教分离的比例也几乎没有变化，这与保守派基督教民族主义者如白宫宗教自由委员会主席、德克萨斯州副州长丹·帕特里克（Dan Patrick）的明确目标相悖。同样，认为美国法律应主要基于圣经的比例也未发生显著变化。反对任何圣经介入或优先考虑选民意愿的人数仍超过圣经原教旨主义者。此外，关于基督教神是否特别眷顾美国的信念在过去五年中也保持不变。尽管有17%的美国人表示愿意接受基督教成为官方宗教（较2024年的13%略有上升），但这一比例仍属少数。皮尤研究中心及PRRI的调查结果表明，过去四年中，大多数美国人对基督教民族主义理念的支持并不明显。PRRI的创始人兼主席罗伯特·P·琼斯（Robert P. Jones）表示，特朗普对保守和福音派基督徒的欢迎是兑现竞选承诺的表现。他说：“他是在与一群知道自己正在衰退、数十年来在人口结构上逐渐失去主导地位的人群对话，并承诺将他们重新带回权力中心。”然而，皮尤的研究结果以及PRRI的自身研究显示，宗教右翼与白宫之间的合作，以优先考虑“基督教某一派别”为目标，可能并未带来预期的成果。琼斯指出：“这并未导致美国社会格局的重大变化。换句话说，他们并没有吸引更多人接受这一世界观，只是在向一小部分已有这些观点的美国人发声，而这群人恰好是他们的政治基础。”
This weekend, an array of Christian religious leaders and government officials are scheduled to gather at the National Mall in Washington, DC. They’ll convene to pray, yes, but this rally — organized as part of the White House-backed Freedom 250 celebrations tied to this coming July 4 — will also serve as a “rededication of our country as One Nation under God.”
If you’ve been following the cultural resurgence of religiosity in the United States, this ceremony shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. The religious right has been ascendant during the second presidency of Donald Trump, and they’ve harnessed his disdain for rules and norms to blur the lines between church and state.
Inside the White House, the secretary of defense has framed the war in Iran and American military action abroad as sanctioned and guided by God. Outside the government, this alliance between church and state often skirts near the edge of outright idolatry. Conservative pastors are erecting golden statues of Trump (but insisting it does not mirror the infamous golden calf of the Old Testament). They’re extending their hands over the president in prayer after comparing him to Jesus and standing by him, with some mild criticism, after he cast himself as an AI-slop Messiah.
Through it all, these conservative and evangelical religious leaders seem confident that their vision of Christianity, or a more religious America, is on the rise.
Yet, a new report from the Pew Research Center suggests that these activists — who tend to agree with a range of beliefs that can be described as “Christian nationalist” — are not in line with the reality of what the American public wants.
Instead, Americans broadly reject many of the precepts of this more conservative ideological vision of America. They agree that religion is a force for good, but large majorities stand by the principles of Thomas Jefferson’s wall of separation between the sacred and the secular.
In other words, instead of being persuaded or converted by a bolder and louder religious right, many Americans don’t like what they’re seeing.
The Pew report shows a historic high in the share of Americans who say that religion is gaining influence in public life, rising 19 points in two years. And the reaction to this trend isn’t necessarily negative. Overall, views of the role of organized religion remain positive at about 55 percent.
Still, none of this suggests that the particular worldview of the religious right is catching fire. Though awareness of the term “Christian nationalism” has increased in the past four years, the additional attention hasn’t boosted its net popularity. Both positive and negative associations with the term have risen, and its precepts still remain unacceptable to the vast majority of Americans.
Here, it’s useful to define “Christian nationalism.” Though it’s a newer term often used by religious liberals or atheists to deride fundamentalist, evangelical, or conservative Christian interpretations of the Bible that link faith and patriotism, there are a handful of more specific ideas that fall under this umbrella.
The Public Religion Research Institute, for example, laid out five metrics they use in their polling to define Christian nationalism: the beliefs that American law should be based in Biblical principles; that the federal government should formally declare America a Christian nation; that Christianity is central to American identity; and that God has a unique mission for America and its Christians.
Yet, even with these fairly expansive definitions, these views don’t carry much public support. The Pew survey found that support for Christian nationalist ideas has remained steady for the last few years; there’s been no Trump bump for the most conservative Christian views.
The Pew researchers also noted that a steady majority of Americans want churches and houses of worship to “stay out of day-to-day politics and not endorse candidates.” And there has been basically no change in the share of Americans who want the federal government to abandon the separation of church and state — an explicit goal of the most conservative Christian nationalists like the chair of the White House’s infamous Religious Liberty Commission, Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick.
Similarly, there has been statistically no change in the share of Americans who believe American laws should be primarily grounded in the Bible. Those who oppose any Biblical involvement or weigh the will of voters first still outnumber Biblical fundamentalists by the same margins over the last six years.
Another tenet of Christian nationalist ideology has seen little movement: the sense that a Christian God uniquely favors or blesses the US over other countries. There, the percent who agree is unchanged over the last five years.
There has been a slight change in the share of Americans who would be comfortable with Christianity being declared an official religion — 17 percent, up from 13 percent in 2024 — though it’s still a small minority.
These results align with survey findings from the Public Religion Research Institute, which found little public support among most Americans for Christian nationalist beliefs or change over the last four years, its president and founder Robert P. Jones told me.
Trump’s welcoming of the most conservative and evangelical Christian believers is him fulfilling a campaign promise, Jones, who is writing a book about this topic, said.
“He’s speaking to a group that knows they’re in decline, knows their grip on power demographically speaking has been slipping for decades, and he has made the big promise that he’s going to bring them back into power,” he said.
Yet, the Pew findings, as well as PRRI’s own work, suggest that this deal between the religious right and the White House to prioritize “one sector of Christianity,” as Jones put it, might not be reaping the rewards that may have been expected.
“It hasn’t resulted in major shifts in the landscape,” he said. “In other words, they’re not pulling people into that worldview. They’re basically just appealing to a small subset of Americans who already hold those views and who just happen to be their political base.”
2026-05-14 18:30:00
美国民众对经济的悲观和绝望情绪正在加剧。根据密歇根大学的一项调查，自1952年以来，消费者情绪指数首次降至历史最低点。此外，一项CNN调查显示，人们对“美国梦”的信心也在下降，仅47%的受访者认为努力工作就能改善生活，而十年前这一比例为67%。这种悲观情绪在年龄、种族和性别上普遍存在。与此同时，特朗普总统在经济方面的支持率也创下了新低，分别降至39%和30%。尽管GDP增长和就业数据表现良好，股市也接近历史高点，但民众仍因高物价和生活成本而愤怒。在CNN的调查中，76%的受访者认为“价格过高”是家庭面临的最大经济问题，且这一问题似乎没有缓解迹象。近期数据显示，通胀率已升至三年来最高水平，且已超过工资增长速度，生产者价格指数也出现大幅上升，预示未来消费者价格可能进一步上涨。
经济学家指出，这种情绪的根源在于“预期差距”（vibe gap）。他们认为，过去几十年的经济环境塑造了美国人对物价稳定的预期，而当前的通胀则打破了这一预期，让人感到被背叛。例如，2020年代的通胀虽不如1970年代严重，但因长期价格平稳的背景，显得尤为突兀。为了验证这一理论，Bernstein和Posthumus在模型中加入了消费者对价格水平的预期变量，结果发现该模型能更准确地解释当前的悲观情绪。他们指出，如今的通胀已不再被视为普通的经济挑战，而是经济体系出现根本性问题的信号。如果近期的通胀数据持续恶化，这种“预期差距”可能还会持续更长时间。
Americans’ doom and despair about the economy is mounting.
In fact, by one measure, the public is more depressed than they’ve ever been in the postwar era. The University of Michigan has been surveying American consumers’ sentiment since all the way back in 1952 — and their result from last month was the lowest level they’ve ever found.
A CNN survey this week found deepening doubts about the core of the American dream. Asked whether most people can get ahead if they’re willing to work hard, 47 percent of respondents agreed. A decade ago, in 2016, 67 percent agreed. And the swing toward pessimism was relatively similar regardless of age, race, or gender.
President Donald Trump’s approval ratings on the economy also hit new all-time lows in recent weeks, in polls from both CNBC (which showed him at 39 percent) and CNN (which showed him all the way down at 30 percent).
All this is occurring while several key topline economic stats — such as GDP growth and jobs numbers — continue to look decent or outright good, and while the stock market remains near all-time highs.
Yet the American people are furious, for the same basic reason they’ve been furious most of this decade: high prices and the cost of living. In an open-ended question in CNN’s survey, 76 percent of respondents offered some variation on affordability as the biggest economic problem facing their family.
For that particular problem, there’s no end in sight — indeed, recent economic news suggests it’s getting worse:
Yet as painful as the 2020s inflation has been, there’s still a bit of a puzzle about why exactly it appears to be overwhelming all other economic indicators in Americans’ minds this time around — making people feel worse than they did even in inflationary periods that were far more prolonged and severe.
A new article from two economists proposes one explanation for what they term the “vibe gap”: that the past few decades fundamentally changed Americans’ expectations for the economy in ways that have left them more outraged than ever before. If they’re right, it could be quite a while before consumers start feeling like happy days are here again.
In explaining Americans’ bad economic vibes, some point to decades-long economic trends like the rise of inequality or the failure of the country to adequately recover from the Great Recession. Others are inclined toward big society-wide explanations that don’t have much to do with the economy at all — for instance, negativity on social media, or deepening political partisanship.
These explanations simply don’t fit the data based on the timing. That’s because, in the mid-to-late 2010s, Americans thought the economy was doing just great. And, as you may recall if you’re old enough, social media negativity and intense political partisanship existed plenty back then.
The University of Michigan’s monthly survey is widely held to be the gold standard on measuring US consumers’ sentiment about the economy. The number they report is an index based on how positively survey respondents answer various questions. (Its peak was 110, in early 2000, at the height of the dot com bubble.)
During President Barack Obama’s second term and Trump’s first term, the index was regularly in the nineties, and even the high nineties for Trump. But the pandemic — and then, even more so, the post-pandemic inflation of the Biden years — sent it plummeting, to a nadir of 53 in the summer of 2022.
Things slowly began looking better as President Joe Biden’s term stretched on, albeit well short of the highs of the 2010s. Then Trump’s second term sent it crashing downward again — with the decline spurred first by his tariffs, and more recently by the Iran war and surging gas prices.
It’s not exactly news that Americans are irate about high prices — it’s been the central political story of the 2020s.
Still, the sheer depth of rage and despair has been somewhat of a puzzle to economists, who tend to believe that the current economy really isn’t anywhere near as bad as the public appears to think.
They point to healthier current indicators like GDP and job growth, and argue that things have certainly been far worse at many points in the past. Inflation in the 1970s, for instance, was far more severe and lasted far longer than that of the 2020s — yet it’s now that the consumer sentiment index hit an all-time low. And the consumer sentiment index typically matched “hard” economic data measures of well-being — until, in the 2020s, it stopped doing that.
What accounts for the difference? One new and compelling theory, put forth by economists Jared Bernstein and Daniel Posthumus this month, is that there’s a gap between the economy that Americans expected to have and the one they’re getting that’s proving especially hard to reconcile.
Inflation was a major problem between the mid-1960s and early 1980s. But once the Federal Reserve finally got it under control, it stayed relatively low regardless of what else was going on in the economy.
As a result, Americans are now comparing how much things “should” cost based on not just the last few years, but a sustained four-decade period of predictably smooth price increases. And for most workers, it was the only economy they’d ever known: “Nobody under the age of 43 in 2022 would have been alive during the last time inflation breached 7.5 percent, much less actively participating in the economy,” the authors noted.
To test their theory, Bernstein and Posthumus added a new variable that accounted for consumers’ expectations for price levels over time, and found that their model predicts recent dismal consumer sentiment far better.
In that context, the 2020s inflation no longer seems like a typical economic headwind — it comes off as an outright betrayal, a sign that something had been fundamentally broken in the economy.
And if the recent ominous inflation data is any indication, it still hasn’t been put back together again.
2026-05-14 01:50:00
2026年5月4日，华盛顿特区最高法院大楼。| Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
过去几周，美国堕胎药的获取方式经历了复杂变化。路易斯安那州去年年底起诉美国食品药品监督管理局（FDA），试图通过远程医疗和邮寄方式限制堕胎药米非司酮的使用。5月1日，美国第五巡回上诉法院支持路易斯安那州，暂时禁止全国范围内的远程医疗堕胎和邮寄药物。随后，最高法院介入，保守派大法官萨缪尔·阿利托虽反对堕胎权，但仍暂时恢复了远程医疗和邮寄获取药物的途径，以便法院进一步审理案件。目前，最高法院表示将维持对第五巡回法院裁决的暂停，直至周四下午5点。
Today, Explained节目主持人肖恩·拉梅斯瓦拉姆与Politico资深医疗记者艾丽丝·米里亚姆·奥利斯坦进行了对话，讨论此案的复杂性及潜在影响。路易斯安那州声称，患者通过远程医疗和邮寄获取堕胎药的行为违反了州法律，导致该州受到“主权损害”，因此要求最高法院立即实施限制。而药企则反驳称，这种政策不应因州政府的不满而被全面废除，且该政策已实施多年，并非紧急情况。
目前，最高法院尚未明确表态，但其可能采取的立场引发争议。一方面，反堕胎人士认为不应让堕胎权跨越州界；另一方面，支持堕胎权者则强调孕妇的权利不应被州界限制。若最高法院最终限制远程医疗获取堕胎药，将对全国范围内的堕胎服务产生重大影响，尤其是那些原本依赖远程医疗的州。
此外，特朗普政府在本案中保持沉默，未向最高法院提交意见，也未要求维持现状或支持路易斯安那州的立场。FDA则表示正在审查药物安全性，并将自行决定是否继续允许其使用。此案凸显了联邦政府与州政府在堕胎权问题上的持续冲突。
Abortion pills have been on a bit of a journey in the United States over the past few weeks.
It starts in Louisiana: The state sued the Food and Drug Administration late last year, seeking to eliminate access to the abortion pill mifepristone through telehealth and mail order.
On May 1, the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Louisiana, temporarily blocking access to telehealth abortion and pills by mail nationwide. Then the Supreme Court weighed in; Justice Samuel Alito, a conservative opponent of abortion rights, nonetheless temporarily restored access to the pill by telehealth and mail while the Court considers at the merits of the case.
Now, the Court says it will maintain its stay on the Fifth Circuit’s decision until at least 5pm on Thursday as it deliberates.
To understand the intricacies of the court case and what’s at stake, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Alice Miranda Ollstein, a senior healthcare reporter at Politico.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
By the end of the week, could the nature of access to abortion pills across the country change?
Yes. What Louisiana is demanding is that the Supreme Court allow restrictions to go into effect right now, even before the case is finally resolved. Louisiana says that every day that patients in our state can get abortion pills online and get them shipped in — in violation of our state’s ban — is a day we are being injured as a state. They’re claiming sovereign injury.
They say the ability of patients around the country to access these pills by telehealth, to have them prescribed by a doctor online and sent by mail, is helping people in their state circumvent the law. And that’s why they want the Supreme Court to step in and cut that off for everyone nationwide, because it’s a federal policy.
The drugmakers are the ones fighting back against that — the two companies that make this abortion pill. And they say there’s no sovereign injury. You can’t just get rid of a policy for everyone because you don’t like how people are using it.
And they say that this policy has been in effect for several years already. There’s no sudden emergency where you need it banned just now. And thus, the Supreme Court should keep everything the way it currently is while the case works its way through.
Do we have any idea where the Supreme Court stands on abortion pills at this point?
The reading of the tea leaves is always a tricky venture with the Supreme Court. People try to guess based on the questions that were asked at oral arguments. We haven’t even gotten there yet in this case. It’s very hard to know.
Politico hasn’t gotten, like, a leak this time about the decision.
Not on this one. It’s very possible that, once again, they duck the heart of the issue on abortion, on federal power versus state power, and they just say, “Nah, you don’t have standing. You can’t prove that you, the state, are being injured by this policy.”
It seems a little contradictory, right? I mean, the Supreme Court said let the states decide. Years later, you have Louisiana saying, “Hey, ban abortion pills for the entire country.”
What’s interesting here is you really have both sides making a states’ rights argument and saying, “My rights as a state are being infringed upon.” You have Louisiana saying, “Why should other blue states’ liberal abortion policies where anybody can get pills be allowed to invade our state when we’re over here trying to ban abortion?”
They’re basically saying that allowing this anywhere, you know, infringes on their right as a state to prohibit it. Now, of course, as you just articulated, you also have people saying, “Wait a minute, so that means it gets to be restricted for everybody, even people who have laws on the books in their states supporting access to abortion?”
It’s one of those compromises that pleases nobody, because the anti-abortion folks, they are not ever going to be satisfied. They say, “Why should a fetus’s rights end at a state border?” And of course, on the other side, you have folks saying, “Why should a pregnant woman’s rights end at a state border?”
And so this is always going to be a federal fight.
“Even if the pills aren’t banned entirely, but telehealth is restricted, that’s going to be a big blow.”
How big a deal have abortion pills become since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade [in 2022]?
Even before that, they were becoming more and more popular as a method of abortion. And especially since the Covid pandemic, they have become the predominant method that people are choosing in order to terminate their pregnancies.
More than a quarter get them by telehealth. So even if the pills aren’t banned entirely, but telehealth is restricted, that’s going to be a big blow. And it’s not just a big blow to people living in states like Louisiana, where there’s a ban locally and they can’t go to a doctor’s office and get them even if they want to. It’ll impact people in states like California, where there are these huge swaths of the state where it’s very difficult to get to a clinic.
We have medical deserts all around the country, have shortages of providers, and telehealth has really broadened access, including in states where it was already legal and technically accessible on paper, but not in practice.
Let’s say the Supreme Court weighs in on Thursday afternoon, Thursday morning, who knows? If they say no more abortion pills via telehealth, what does this look like in the United States?
We actually got a sneak preview of what it would look like a couple weeks ago.
We had a few days between when the Fifth Circuit ruled for Louisiana and said, “Okay, we’re gonna restrict access to these pills nationwide.” It took the Supreme Court a few days after that to step in and say, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s hit pause. Let’s go back to the way things were. Let’s restore telehealth access while we figure this out.”
In those few days, you saw these providers who prescribe and ship the pills to people living in states with bans make a variety of decisions. Some of these groups immediately paused. Other groups, including some doctors I talked to in Massachusetts, have been preparing for this for years. And so they had a plan already in place to pivot to only providing the second pill of the two-pill abortion regimen.
To have an abortion, you can’t just take mifepristone alone. You have to take it in combination with another pill, misoprostol. You can take misoprostol alone, and that’s actually pretty common in other countries. So these groups, including the ones I talked to, immediately pivoted to only sending misoprostol to patients who are ordering the pills.
So there’s a lot at stake here for abortion access in the United States this week at the Supreme Court. I’m curious how the president of the United States feels about this. Not that he has a say, per se, but has he weighed in?
He has not, and neither has his Justice Department. What was really striking is that the Supreme Court was like, “Okay, we’re gonna step in here and at least decide this case on a temporary basis.”
They heard from Louisiana, they heard from the drug makers, they heard from all of these other people — members of Congress, governors, medical groups, activist groups on all sides, former FDA officials.
Everybody was sending briefs up to the Supreme Court, but you know who didn’t? The Trump administration.
The guy who talks about everything didn’t say anything?
The Trump administration did not weigh in, did not either ask the Supreme Court to maintain the status quo or side with Louisiana. They were silent. The FDA has said it is reviewing the safety of the pills and will make its own decision, so the Trump administration had told lower courts, “Hey, back off, let the FDA do its thing.” But now that the case is before the Supreme Court — nothing to say, silent.
2026-05-13 19:30:00
几个月前，我在一项近期的爱好（或说是强迫行为）中，坦白了一个长期压抑的恐惧，或许是出于羞耻或否认，或两者兼有。这个仪式是：睡前，我像外科医生一样精确地在脸上贴上一层贴纸。这些贴纸来自Frownies品牌，被宣传为比肉毒杆菌更便宜、更不侵入性的替代品。贴上这些米色贴纸——它们以独特形状贴合眼睛、额头或嘴唇——据说能在黎明前消除所有可见的衰老迹象。但事实上，没有人愿意主动贴上这些会让人看起来像混凝土的贴纸。我之所以坚持这个习惯，是因为我明显在变老，对此感到不悦。作为一名30多岁的女性，我期待着未来多年的生活，不想因为年龄增长而被社会边缘化，不想在面部出现细纹时变得隐形。我希望自己看起来不像幼稚的人，而是一个神秘、年龄模糊的外星生物。（当然，我也意识到这可能是幸运者的担忧，但别担心，我也担心每月是否能支付账单。我内心充满矛盾。）
我之所以报告这一现象，是因为我成长于2000年代初，那时杂志和娱乐产业将美丽、青春和苗条推向极致。如今，这些理想再次流行，但伴随着社交媒体和美容手术的普及，压力更大。在人生转折点，我开始思考是否应该忽视对完美的追求，以及如果这样做，我的身份认同会如何变化。虽然我深知抗拒衰老是荒谬的，毕竟我们终将面对同样的命运，但某些人却能更“无瑕”地走向终点。据美国整形外科协会统计，2019年至2022年间，肉毒杆菌等神经调节剂的使用率增长了73%；2024年，填充剂成为最受欢迎的微创美容项目；自2017年以来，面部提升手术增加了60%，年轻患者也越来越多。尽管男性逐渐加入美容手术行列，但主要接受者仍是女性。据一项研究，2020年至2023年间，全球美容手术增长了40%。人们不仅在改变面部，还在缩小身体。2025年的一项调查显示，近八分之一的美国成年人正在使用GLP-1药物，这些药物因明星和普通人的减肥需求而流行，重新点燃了“美丽必须瘦”的旧观念。换句话说，我们如今比历史上任何时候都更能够掌控自己的身体和外表。我们既是雕塑家，也是被雕刻的大理石，不断塑造出与我们（或我们认为的我们）最契合的形象。然而，我们的生活和身体却在不断变化：我们变老、怀孕、骨折、生病、哀悼，这些都会改变我们的外貌，使我们与自我认知产生冲突。当身体和外表可以被改变时，我们是否还能认同内在的自己？
我完全普通，从不因美貌而受到称赞，也从未从“美丽特权”中获益。因此，我几乎不认为自己的外貌是我在世界中的核心。但即便如此，它仍与我如何看待自己以及希望向他人传达的形象息息相关。我并非唯一如此的人。心理学家维维安·迪勒在2010年合著的《Face It：女性外貌变化时的真实感受》一书中，主要读者是40到50岁的女性。当时“抗衰老”是热门话题，而肉毒杆菌尚未普及，改变外貌的选择有限。一些女性感到必须采取极端措施，如全脸拉皮，才能显得年轻。如今，迪勒认为，人们开始担忧年龄增长的阶段提前到20多岁，不再只是40、50岁。人们不仅希望看起来年轻，更希望看起来“不老”，仿佛时间可以被阻止。这种理想化的形象往往与过去的自己混淆，暗示着某个版本的自己（或未来的自己）最贴近“真实的自我”。剑桥大学政治哲学教授克莱尔·钱伯斯在《Intact：为未被修改的身体辩护》一书中指出，人们普遍认为某个特定时刻（如大学毕业后、成为母亲前、更年期前）才是自己最真实的身体状态。然而，我们往往无法在那个时刻真正接纳自己的外貌，直到多年后才意识到它已消失。如果你认同自己是年轻美丽、有孩子、运动员或职业女性，当这些身份的外在表现发生变化时，可能会陷入存在主义危机。钱伯斯认为，这种观念导致人们认为自己的身体永远不够完美，必须不断修改才能保持真实。但她说，真正的自我并不取决于某个特定的身体状态，而是我们当前拥有的身体。
我缺乏经济能力进行美容手术，这或许对我而言是件好事。因为如果我现在有注射器在手，我可能会用它来掩盖更深层的身份危机。虽然我过去几年已逐渐陷入不安全感，但最近的分手让我彻底陷入存在主义的深渊。我曾设想的未来一夜之间被摧毁，取而代之的是一个因哭泣、失眠和营养不良而显得疲惫的脸，以及比一年前明显增多的白发。我开始怀疑，自己是否还能再次被他人视为有吸引力。在自我怀疑的泥沼中，我不断思考自己在这个人生阶段应该成为怎样的人，而过度关注外貌则成为逃避“我该怎么办”的借口。改变外貌比改变生活更容易。
皮肤科护理师苏恩·阮（Sun Nguyen）在宾夕法尼亚州中部工作，她经常面对那些不确定自己当前应如何表现的患者。她不急于推销手术，而是鼓励客户进行自我反思，尤其是当她与客户建立关系时。她说，这种反思远不止一次15分钟的检查能完成。美容医生们一致认为，了解自己为何寻求美容手术至关重要，要深入理解改变外貌的动机。心理治疗师安妮·赖特指出，如果一个人的动机源于对关注、相关性或爱的恐惧，那么他们可能并非出于真实的自我，而是将自我认同寄托于镜子。当镜子中的形象与自我认知不一致时，钱伯斯建议接受现实而非反抗。她强调，衰老是一个持续的过程，若选择对抗，只会陷入艰难的斗争。她鼓励我们放弃“未怀孕、未分手、未生病时的身体才是真实的”这种观念，接受当下身体的状态。这并不意味着我们不能通过化妆、染发、纹身甚至某些美容手术来表达自我或性别，但重要的是要思考这些改变如何与超越“性感”或“20多岁”等标签的身份相连。我们需要学会接受变化，接受生活和地位的转变，即使这些转变并不令人愉快。钱伯斯提醒我，我的分手让我更加意识到自己如何向他人呈现，以及我的外貌是否足够吸引人。我已30多岁，不再年轻，但我告诉自己，作为朋友、女儿、潜在伴侣或人类的价值不会因社会暗示而贬值。与波特兰一位53岁的小学教师珍·詹克（Jen Janke）交谈时，我意识到这一点。她一生都在被父母的美貌所影响，认为外表重要。在母亲的葬礼上，许多宾客称赞她的美丽，但她说，人们更应记住她母亲的幽默和善良。我同样希望，当我的生命结束，人们不会只谈论我的脸、皱纹或白发，而是记住我带给他们的感受。在推崇女性自我怀疑的文化中，最激进的行为或许是真正了解自己，不再依赖面部来寻找答案。你的脸会不断变化，但真正的自我，是你需要花时间去认识的。
A few months ago, while engaging in one of my more recent pastimes (or compulsions), I verbalized a fear I’d long kept buried, perhaps out of shame or denial or some combination of both. First, the compulsory ritual: Before bed, with the precision of a brain surgeon, I arrange a layer of stickers on my face. The brand is Frownies, and they have been marketed to me as a cheaper, less invasive alternative to Botox. Place these beige patches — offered in unique shapes meant to hug your eyes, caress your forehead, or cradle your mouth — over your wrinkles, and by daybreak, perceptible signs of aging will have vanished. Allegedly.
Which brings me to the admission. No one with any confidence in their face willingly adheres appliques that calcify into what can only be described as a layer of concrete. I perform this routine for a simple reason: I’m visibly aging, and I’m not happy about it. As a woman in her 30s, with years of continued living to look forward to, I don’t want to socially vanish, which is what usually happens to many women of a certain age. I don’t want to become invisible once my face droops a little or when the wrinkles won’t abate with stickers. I want to look not like a puerile being, but some mysterious, age-ambiguous alien. (I do recognize this is a concern for the fortunate, but don’t fret: I also worry about whether I will be able to pay my bills each month. I contain multitudes.)
I’m a product of the early 2000s when magazines and entertainment glorified beauty, youth, and thinness to the highest degree. The trend cycle has worked its way back around and these ideals are in fashion again, only now with the added pressures of social media and the accessibility of cosmetic procedures. At a moment of transition in my life, I wondered whether I should ignore the constant pressure to look perfect — and what it meant for my identity if I did.
The desire to not age is laughable, I’m well aware. We’re all hurtling toward the same inevitable fate. But some people’s journeys to the pearly gates are more poreless than others. Cosmetic procedures like Botox, fillers, and facelifts aren’t new, but their startling ubiquity is. Between 2019 and 2022, the prevalence of Botox and similar neuromodulators increased by 73 percent, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Fillers were second to Botox in terms of the most popular “minimally invasive” procedures in 2024. Since 2017, surgeons have reported a 60 percent increase in facelifts and younger patients are increasingly seeking them out. And although more men are seeking cosmetic procedures, the population who most frequently undergoes these treatments is overwhelmingly female. All told, between 2020 and 2023, aesthetic procedures increased 40 percent globally, according to one study.
People aren’t just modifying their faces, but shrinking their bodies, too. Nearly one in eight American adults said they were taking a GLP-1, according to a 2025 KFF Health Tracking Poll. The term “Ozempic” has become shorthand for the class of drugs that celebrities and everyday people alike utilize for weight loss, helping to reinvigorate the briefly dormant ideal that to be beautiful and desired, you must be small.
In other words, we now, as a society, have more control over our bodies and appearances than at any point in history. We’re both sculptor and marble, chiseling our images into a version that most aligns with who we are — or who we think we are. But our lives, and our bodies, are constantly changing. We age, we get pregnant, we break bones, we get sick, we grieve, throwing off the balance between how we see ourselves and how the world perceives us. There exists a fear of not recognizing ourselves as we move through these transitions. When bodies and appearances are malleable, what does that mean for the person underneath?
Let’s get one thing out of the way: I am completely average-looking. Never one to have been praised for my beauty or to have profited from pretty privilege, I hardly see my face as central to my status in the world. But it is directly related to how I see myself and how I’d like to telegraph that version of me to others, and I’m not alone in this.
When the book she co-authored, Face It: What Women Really Feel as Their Looks Change, was released in 2010, psychologist Vivian Diller’s audience was primarily in their 40s and 50s. The term “anti-aging” was en vogue at the time and Botox hadn’t quite hit the mainstream, so options for transforming your face were fairly limited, Diller says. Some women felt the pressure to take drastic measures, like full facelifts, to look younger. “If I were to write that book now,” Diller tells me, “it almost feels a little old-fashioned because the age that one thinks about aging or looking old is no longer in your 40s, 50s.” Instead, it’s late 20s. And it’s not just that people want to look younger, Diller says; they want to look ageless, to prevent the passing of time from occurring in the first place.
That an idealized image is so often conflated with a past self signifies there was a version (or will be a version) that was most aligned with our “true” identity. In Intact: In Defence of the Unmodified Body, University of Cambridge political philosophy professor Clare Chambers argues that people tend to believe there was a point in time, often in the past, where their bodies were most authentically their own: the post-college glow-up, the pre-baby body, the pre-menopause face.
Inevitably, we fail to embrace this edition of our appearance in the moment, only appreciating it much later as something we’ve lost. If you identify as young and beautiful or a parent or an athlete or a career-oriented professional, and the outer shell of that identity changes, you can fall into an existential crisis.
The result, Chambers tells me, is a feeling that our bodies as they are right now are never enough. “In this narrative, the body must be constantly modified to remain true to itself,” Chambers writes in her book. “But why on earth should that particular body, the one that has done so much less than you have, be the ‘real’ you?”
“The body we have right now is our authentic body,” Chambers tells me. “That’s simply the body we have.”
The idea that you will miss the current version of your body when it’s gone is also stressful, particularly when you are surrounded by “anti-aging” marketing making it clear that this is the phase of life everyone else is chasing, one which you’ll eventually look back upon with envy. Although she is only 24 years old, Medha Arora, an actor who lives in Toronto, is terrified of losing her fleeting youth and the benefits that being young and beautiful confers. The more she hears of women her age getting Botox, the more pressure she feels to preserve what she currently has and follow suit. “I feel so confident and I love how I look, and then as a result, there’s this anxiety that’s like, you have to do something to keep it,” she tells me.
The core tension at the center of today’s obsession with idealized bodies, American Society of Plastic Surgeons president Bob Basu tells me, is the mismatch between how people feel and how they look. No matter what you do to feel your best — therapy, sleep, a nutritious diet, a great sex life, strength training, fulfilling relationships — time, gravity, and…life will eventually leave their mark. “As we get older, we want to look as good as we feel,” Basu says. Now, we’re told, fillers, Botox, facelifts, and the like can help close that gap.
A better way of thinking about whether our bodies and identities are aligned is to be mindful of how it feels to be in them, Chambers says. “Do they feel like our own bodies? Do they feel healthy, comfortable, easy to live in, familiar to us?” she says.
Because pregnancy, menopause, illness, and disability can drastically alter the corporeal form, sometimes quite rapidly, the body and soul can feel diametrically opposed. The outer shell is foreign. But there are other ways to reconcile this that don’t involve neurotoxins.
In many ways, I feel especially youthful. Thanks to my longtime devotion to cardio and strength training, my body is sturdy. I try to eat as balanced as possible, and I remember to wear sunscreen most days. Sleep used to come easily and in great quantities, but a recent breakup derailed such rejuvenation. (I’m working on it.)
However, my face betrays these healthful habits. There are bags under my eyes, dark and heavy, and the tone of my skin is sallow and wan. I look in the mirror and see crow’s feet and forehead lines — memorials of happy, more expressive times — and emerging dark spots are coming to claim vengeance for the one summer in high school I decided to be really tan. While I may feel 23, I no longer appear to be.
Running on the hamster wheel of nostalgia often gets us nowhere; we’re chasing a face and body that’s lost to history. But that doesn’t mean that person didn’t exist. There is a difference, however, in grieving who we once were and grasping for who we once were.
“Grief is I miss who I was and I’m letting myself feel that fully. Grasping is I miss who I was, so I’m going to chase that through procedures, restriction, trying to reverse time,” licensed psychotherapist Annie Wright tells me. “Grief is a passage. Grasping is like a prison. And the cruel irony is that grasping is what most of the cosmetic and wellness industries are selling.”
When Wright’s clients find themselves hyperfocused on a past version of themselves, she invites them to consider what their younger self had access to that they lack now. “Honestly, it’s almost never just about the body,” she says. “It’s usually something like possibility, attention, lightness, being at the beginning of things.”
My 23-year-old self felt hungry for the opportunities that lay ahead; the 33-year-old is open to big shifts while still being grounded by the predictability and stability of routine. “We can’t compare across stages,” Wright says. “That’s really rigged. Instead, we ask, what’s uniquely available to me now that wasn’t available before?”
And what is available to you now may be access to filters on videoconferencing platforms, beauty products, and cosmetic procedures with the potential to change your appearance. “The mirror becomes a threat detection device,” Wright says. Clocking every life transition that manifests on our faces becomes a way of asking whether we’re still acceptable, still valuable, still safe.
If she could afford it, Patricia Catallo would get a facelift. The 62-year-old retired bartender from Philadelphia considered herself a “bombshell” earlier in life, but after a recent illness caused her to lose 60 pounds, Catallo says she wasn’t comfortable with the reflection staring back at her. “I felt like I just didn’t look good anymore and I felt invisible,” she tells me. Catallo was used to being approached by fellow shoppers in the store to get her opinion on what shampoo to buy, to chatting with the patrons at the bar where she worked. Now, she feels like someone who isn’t worth engaging with at all.
Talking to Catallo was like staring into the future, or maybe the sun — necessary and painful and impossible to ignore. Ageism is felt by both men and women, but people are generally more positive toward young women than older ones, research shows. Older women report feeling invisible and inconsequential, uncertain about their role in a world that coupled their utility with youth and attractiveness. This waning irrelevance has become somewhat of a stereotype, a seeming inevitability — “and that I think is not changing,” Diller, the psychologist and author, tells me. Is it wrong to want to avoid this fate myself?
If freezing and tightening away every little wrinkle to remain visible is the goal, it might be masking a deeper identity crisis. “Botox, fillers, lasers can soften the visual signs of aging, but they don’t resolve deeper questions about identity or self-worth,” Sonia Badreshia-Bansal, a dermatologist with offices in the Bay Area and Beverly Hills, tells me in an email. “When patients expect a procedure to fix something emotional, the results are almost always temporary in how they feel.”
Perhaps it’s for the best that I lack the funds for cosmetic procedures, as I should not be left unattended with an injector right now. Because, if I’m being totally honest, I’m unsure of my worth, of who I am, and therefore, how I should look, and I would most definitely be using procedures to fix something emotional.
While I was already meandering down the path of insecurity over the past few years, the end of my seven-year relationship a few months ago sent me spiraling toward full existential catastrophe. The life and future I’d envisioned were wiped away overnight, and in its place, a new face, haggard from crying and sleepless nights and poor nutrition. Noticeably more grey hair than a year prior. I questioned whether I, let alone anyone else, would find me desirable again. Still wading through the muck of self-doubt, wondering who I was supposed to be at this stage in my life, fixating on my appearance became a distraction from the lingering question of “What do I do now?” It’s easier to fix your face than to fix your life.
“What do I do now?” is a question best served for a therapist and not an injector, which doesn’t mean Sun Nguyen still doesn’t field it. A dermatology nurse practitioner in central Pennsylvania, Nguyen sometimes deals with patients who struggle to articulate why, exactly, they’re in her office; who, like me, are unsure of how they’re supposed to look at the present stage of their life. Instead of pushing procedures, Nguyen tries to help clients get introspective, especially when she sees them more often and has a relationship with them. “It’s deeper than a 15-minute exam can do,” she says.
Nguyen and other dermatologists I spoke to reiterated something so simple I’m embarrassed I’d never considered it: it’s important to know why you’re seeking cosmetic procedures, to understand your specific motivations for changing your face. And Nguyen is right that this soul searching should go beyond the brief questions your doctor asks in an exam room.
Someone who is driven by the fear of losing attention, relevance, and love, who is letting external voices into their head, is likely being driven not by their true self, says Wright, the psychotherapist. Instead, they are outsourcing their sense of self to the mirror.
When there’s a disconnect between what you see in the mirror and who you believe yourself to be, Chambers, the philosopher and author, suggests acceptance instead of rebellion. That means really settling into the fact that aging is a never-ending process, and will be an uphill battle if you choose to fight it. It starts from the moment we enter this mortal plane, and it never stops. She encourages us to push back against the idea that the pre-baby, pre-breakup, pre-accident, pre-sickness body was the “real” version of each of us, and to be okay in our bodies as they currently are.
That’s not to say we can’t delight in utilizing makeup, hair dye, tattoos, piercings, and even some cosmetic procedures as a form of self- or gender-expression, but it’s important to seriously consider how these modifications connect to an identity that goes beyond just “hot person” or “person in her 20s” or “me, but before this bad thing happened.” It requires getting comfortable with the uncomfortable notion that things change, that our lives and statuses change, often in ways that we don’t like. “In trying to pursue a sense of an aesthetic ideal, we risk not really keeping that connection between who we actually are and what we look like,” Chambers says.
My breakup, Chambers reminds me, has made me acutely aware of how I present to others and whether my appearance will be enticing enough for people to want to get to know what’s beyond the surface. I’m in my 30s and I’m not getting any younger. Still, I tell myself that my value as a friend, a daughter, a potential partner, a human does not depreciate even if society is hinting that it does. I’m reminded of this fact when speaking with Jen Janke, a 53-year-old elementary school teacher in Portland.
Her entire life, Janke was constantly reminded how attractive her parents were, and came to see the value in looking good. At her mother’s funeral, she remembers many guests mentioning how beautiful her mother was. “People also talked about how funny my mom was and thoughtful,” Janke tells me. “But I would want the first thing for someone to say is how thoughtful and funny she was.”
I agree. When my time expires and people are called to remember me, I hope they won’t talk about my face or my wrinkles or gray hair, or really anything about my appearance. What’s more lasting is how I make people feel.
“The most radical thing a woman can do in a culture that profits from her self-doubt, is to know herself well enough that she stops looking to her face for the answer,” Wright says. “Your face will keep changing, and your true self, that’s the one you should spend the time getting to know.”
2026-05-13 19:15:00
2026年5月11日，医疗人员在西班牙加那利群岛特内里费岛的MV Hondius号邮轮上引导最后一批乘客撤离。媒体头条频繁提出诸如“你是否应该担心、害怕、恐慌或惊慌？”等问题，但作者指出，这类问题的答案通常是“不”。除非你是该邮轮的乘客或密切接触者，否则无需过度担忧。目前，该病毒爆发已被有效控制，且不太可能演变为影响公众的更大威胁。
然而，媒体将报道焦点放在公众情绪上，这种做法存在弊端。将疾病爆发的报道与个人恐惧挂钩，容易引发不必要的恐慌。尽管世界卫生组织（WHO）和美国疾病控制与预防中心（CDC）等机构强调，这种病毒不具备引发大规模疫情的传播能力，但社交媒体上的信息可能夸大其影响，甚至引发对病毒可能灭绝人类的猜测。
作者指出，目前对汉坦病毒的了解仍有限，尽管有300例人传人病例的记录，但其传播方式仍存在不确定性。此外，全球公共卫生系统正面临挑战，例如CDC自2025年1月以来减少了四分之一的工作人员，而阿根廷在病毒爆发前两周也退出了WHO，进一步削弱了全球应对能力。历史上，许多看似严重的疫情（如尼帕病毒、MERS和SARS）最终并未演变为大流行，但它们的爆发仍对全球造成了巨大影响。
因此，作者认为，媒体不应只关注“是否应该恐慌”，而应思考当前支离破碎的全球卫生系统是否仍有能力采取有效措施。真正的应对之道在于确保病毒不会造成威胁，而非仅仅安抚公众情绪。原文最初发表于《未来完美》（Future Perfect）通讯，欢迎订阅。
Should you be worried about the hantavirus outbreak? Should you be afraid? Should you be panicking? Should you start freaking out?
If you’ve been following the coverage of the hantavirus outbreak aboard the cruise ship MV Hondius, these are the questions you’ve seen posed in headlines. And a small tip from inside the media: If a question is posed in a headline, the answer is almost always “no.” (It’s such a common trope that there’s even an informal law about it.)
So, unless you’re a passenger or close contact of someone on the Hondius, you shouldn’t really worry about the hantavirus outbreak. You shouldn’t really fear it. You definitely shouldn’t panic. And do I really need to tell you that freaking out generally stops being acceptable behavior after the age of 15?
As my colleague Dylan Scott has reported, by far the most likely outcome is that the hantavirus outbreak will ultimately be controlled and won’t become something that will disturb the general public. As of May 12, there were 11 confirmed or probable cases and three deaths. While a hantavirus outbreak in a tightly packed cruise ship is new and certainly suboptimal — not to mention bringing back unsettling memories of early Covid — experience with the deadly virus strongly suggests it probably doesn’t have the transmissibility required to become a larger pandemic threat.
After some initial dysfunction that was itself partially explainable by just how unusual a seaborne hantavirus outbreak was, the response system appears to be working relatively well. Citing moral and legal obligations, Spain accepted the passengers at Tenerife in the Canary Islands over the objections of some officials there; they were met on the dock by hazmat suited workers. Eighteen US-bound passengers from the cruise are being kept in quarantine units where they can be safely monitored for symptoms; even the planes they flew out on had special biocontainment equipment. Other passengers and contacts around the world are being isolated and watched.
So, yes, without outright telling you what you should feel, you have reason to feel reassured.
But framing emerging disease coverage around how the audience feels — should you worry, should you panic — is exactly the problem.
For one thing, the personal fear framing has a single, predictable response. The only answer a responsible public health official can give to “should the public panic?” is “no,” which is precisely why every senior figure taking part in hantavirus response has been singing in this key for two weeks. World Health Organization (WHO) Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus specifically told Tenerife residents that “this is not another Covid.” WHO epidemic and pandemic chief Maria Van Kerkhove told the media: “This is not SARS-CoV-2. This is not the start of a Covid pandemic.” Acting Centers for Disease Control Director Jay Bhattacharya said on CNN that “we don’t want to cause a public panic over this.”
The reassurance is technically accurate, but because of the way the media asks the question, it’s the only thing anyone can say. That framing flattens out the actual, complicated response to an actual, complicated emerging disease outbreak. The implicit tone of the coverage is that the only reason that you, the audience, should care about a disease outbreak is whether it is coming for you personally.
That’s a problem, because it can cede the ground to precisely the kind of hysteria these statements are meant to counteract. Just because the audience doesn’t have anything to directly worry about now does not mean this situation is normal or okay. An outbreak with some person-to-person transmission of a respiratory disease with no vaccine or cure that has a fatality rate of around 40 percent is not normal. And in the current media hellscape environment, the gap between what reporters are pressing public health officials to say and what people can see on their TVs is filled by TikTok influencers predicting the virus could wipe out the whole human race.
I can say with the highest confidence that hantavirus will not, in fact, wipe out the human race. (Hope that makes you feel better.) But there is a more reasonable argument that the current messaging may be overconfident on the underlying science.
We know hantavirus, but we don’t know it that well. The total scientific record on person-to-person transmission of this strain of the hantavirus is maybe 300 cases in all, while one outbreak in 2018 featured three super-spreader events before it was suppressed. While the WHO says that person-to-person hantavirus transmissions generally only occur with “close prolonged contact,” that’s the median case, not the potential outliers. And, as we learned with Covid, assurances about how a virus behaves early in a new outbreak can sometimes turn out to be wrong in a big way.
The fundamental fact that Covid taught us is that a pandemic can be so catastrophic that it can be worth doing almost anything to prevent one. That’s why some experts, like Harvard’s Joseph Allen and former White House Covid coordinator Ashish Jha, have argued for a much fuller quarantine of Hondius passengers, rather than the self-monitoring approach that has been allowed for some returnees viewed as lower risk. Even the 2003 SARS outbreak, which ultimately killed fewer than 800 people, cost the global economy at least $40 billion and led to worldwide disruptions. The cost of caution is small; the price of being wrong the other way could be immeasurable. And the calculation of how we should respond should not be driven by feeling.
If you need something to be worried about, worry about this: The global public health system that is meant to be driving this response is being dismantled. The CDC has lost about a quarter of its staff since January 2025, leaving the remainder stretched thin. That includes the acting director, who was already running the National Institutes of Health. Georgetown’s Lawrence Gostin told the AP that “the CDC is not even a player” in the global response, which has been further hampered by the fact that Argentina — likely where the outbreak began — followed in America’s footsteps by withdrawing from the WHO just two weeks before the Hondius left the country.
A pandemic is the ultimate low-probability, high-consequence event. I can easily count off the outbreaks that appeared scary at the moment but ultimately fell well short of a pandemic — Nipah virus, MERS, SARS — both because of the characteristics of the pathogens and because of the response. That’s almost always the way it goes, and most signs indicate that the same will be true for hantavirus. But we also have very fresh memories of just how horrible a true pandemic can be.
It’s a hard ask to keep both possibilities in mind, but the way the media covers these events doesn’t help. “Should we panic about hantavirus?” asks the wrong question. The right one is whether an increasingly fractured global health system still has the capacity — and the political and public support — to go beyond reassurance. The best way to keep people from panicking about hantavirus is to do everything possible to ensure there is nothing to panic about.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!