Mt. Pleasant Public Schools will build a fitness center for students and the community, promoting wellness and outdoor movement.

Mt. Pleasant Public Schools (MPPS) has been awarded a $40,000 National Fitness Campaign grant to build an outdoor fitness facility on a MPPS property in 2027 that will be open to the students and the Mt. Pleasant community. 

What it is: The state-of-the-art fitness facility is called a Fitness Court® and is approximately half the size of a basketball court. Users can rotate through seven stations for a full-body workout in about seven minutes. These stations include zones for pull and push movements, agility exercises, circuit training, core exercises, squats, and lunges. A similar facility was installed in Union Township at McDonald Park in 2023. 

What’s next: In addition to the National Fitness Campaign grant, matching funds and additional grants will help fund the project. Site and design decisions will be made in the fall of 2026.

LANSING, Mich. (News 10) - The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services has launched the Recovery Housing Assistance Fund, a new program designed to help people receiving treatment for substance use disorder or those in recovery secure stable housing.

The program is funded with $3.5 million from the Michigan Opioid Healing and Recovery Fund and provides financial assistance to eligible individuals and families as they transition into recovery housing or permanent housing.

The Recovery Housing Assistance Fund offers up to $4,000 in assistance to help prevent housing instability and reduce the risk of homelessness. 

Eligible expenses include emergency funding to prevent eviction or utility shutoffs, as well as first month’s rent, security deposits and other approved housing-related costs.

“Recovery does not end when treatment ends,” said Dr. Natasha Bagdasarian, chief medical executive and chair of the Michigan Opioids Task Force. “Safe, stable housing provides the foundation people need to focus on their recovery and stay connected to their community. The Recovery Housing Fund helps alleviate financial barriers that too often interfere with long-term success in recovery.” 

State officials expect the program to assist about 1,000 individuals and families as they move into recovery or permanent housing. 

In addition to providing financial assistance, the department will evaluate the program to better understand barriers to recovery and stable housing.

For more information about the RHF program, visit the settlement spending webpage.

Mile-a-minute weed, a highly invasive vine that can smother trees and vegetation, has been confirmed in Jackson County following a landowner’s report to the Michigan Invasive Species Program through the Midwest Invasive Species Information Network’s online reporting system. 

The report was verified following a site visit by staff members from the Jackson, Lenawee, Washtenaw Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area, who found several established patches of the plant on the property. 

Mile-a-minute weed was first detected in Michigan in 2020 at Albion College’s Whitehouse Nature Center in Calhoun County. Since then, the Barry, Calhoun, Kalamazoo Cooperative Invasive Species Management Area has been conducting outreach, surveys and treatment of infested properties in the vicinity of Albion and Homer in eastern Calhoun County.  

The new detection in Jackson County is in Concord Township, approximately 4 miles from the Whitehouse Nature Center and less than 2 miles from the nearest known mile-a-minute weed site in Calhoun County. 

The vine’s dense growth and ability to climb tall trees make traditional herbicide treatment difficult. Though it is an annual vine, its numerous berries reseed infested areas and are spread by birds, other wildlife and human movement to new locations.

Mile-a-minute weed can be removed by hand, but seeds can persist in the soil for up to six years, so infested sites need to be monitored regularly for regrowth. New shoots can be mowed or tilled in the spring or early summer before fruiting, as even immature, green fruits can carry viable seeds and create new plants.

What is mile-a-minute weed?

Mile-a-minute weed (Persicaria perfoliata) is an annual vine that gets its name from its ability to grow up to 6 inches per day, or 25 feet in six to eight weeks. Its light green leaves are shaped like equilateral triangles, and both the stems and leaf blades are lined with small, recurved barbs that help it climb over other vegetation.

Small, inconspicuous white flowers appear in spring, developing into spikes of pea-sized, blue fruits in mid-summer. Unusual circular leaves called ocreae clasp the stems below the fruits.

Mile-a-minute weed thrives in full sun and wet soils, but it can grow in a variety of conditions. Like many invasive plants, it takes advantage of open space and disturbed areas including roadsides, stream banks, forest edges and fence lines.

Why is it a problem?

The vine’s fast growth and climbing habits allow it to overtake native and landscape vegetation, eventually smothering plants and trees under dense, prickly thickets.

“Mile-a-minute weed can displace native plants, disrupt the food web and alter forest regeneration after harvest or natural disturbance,” said Katie Grzesiak, terrestrial invasive species coordinator for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.  

Because of the risk to Michigan’s agriculture and habitats and the plant’s limited distribution, mile-a-minute weed is on the state’s invasive species watch list.

What is being done?

JLW CISMA has joined forces with BCK CISMA to encourage landowners around the infested area to request mile-a-minute weed surveys. Since the new detection, the two CISMAS have worked together to survey approximately 3,000 acres in Jackson County and an additional 2,600 acres in Calhoun County. No additional infestations have been found in Jackson County.

Herbicide treatment was initiated on the Jackson site shortly after the detection was confirmed. CISMA staff will continue to monitor the site and work with the landowner to conduct follow-up treatment.

The two CISMAs are able to provide treatment assistance and free survey services through support from the Michigan Invasive Species Grant Program and other grant funds.  

Earlier this year, the BCK CISMA, in collaboration with Grand Valley State University, initiated a trial release of the mile-a-minute weevil (Rhinoncomimus latipes) in four test plots in Calhoun County as a biological control agent to reduce populations of the invasive vine. Study of the weevil’s feeding activity and survival rates is ongoing.

How can people help?

Anyone encountering a vine that could be mile-a-minute weed should visit Michigan.gov/Invasives to review identification information. If the plant appears to be mile-a-minute weed, take photos, note the location and report the find using one of these methods:

• Use the Midwest Invasive Species Information Network online reporting tool. 
• Download the MISIN smartphone app and report from your phone.

 

For more information on mile-a-minute weed and other invasive species of concern in Michigan, visit Michigan.gov/Invasives. Use the Invasive Species Watch List Viewer to see a map of infested areas. 

Michigan's Invasive Species Program is cooperatively implemented by the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy; the Department of Natural Resources; and the Department of Agriculture and Rural Development.

 

sources:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-millions-of-print-books-to-build-its-ai-models/

https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/ai-companies-destroying-rare-books

https://futurism.com/future-society/anthropic-destroying-books

https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25982181/authors-v-anthropic-ruling.pdf

July 21st, 2026

The Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the top cop in the United States of America, the man with the keys to every counterintelligence file the Republic owns is reportedly getting on a plane.

Destination? Moscow. Then St. Petersburg.

His host? Russia’s FSB, the direct institutional successor to the KGB.

According to Politico, the trip is penciled in for October 14 and 15. That’s a matter of weeks before the American midterm elections. 

It remains unclear whether Patel will meet Vladimir Putin or any of his senior aides. The agenda is undisclosed. A closed door. A blank calendar. The most powerful law-enforcement officer in America walking into the lion’s den, and the “itinerary” is a shrug.

Even Politico’s own sources -people paid to be diplomatic- called it what it is: “an unusual and sensitive trip for an FBI chief to one of America’s top adversaries.”

Unusual and sensitive. That’s Washington-speak for “we can’t believe he’s actually doing this.”

The last sitting FBI director to set foot in Russia was Robert Mueller. In 2013. Thirteen years ago. And Mueller, remember him? Was later named special counsel to investigate Russia’s interference in American elections. The man who investigated the Kremlin was the last director to go. The next one to go is a man who spent years insisting the whole investigation was a fraud.

Because that’s who Kash Patel is. He rose to power as a House Intelligence Committee staffer, made his name attacking the Russia probe. Branded the whole affair the “Russiagate hoax,” and even wrote a trilogy of children’s books mocking it. Children’s books. About the Russia investigation. 

And now the man who built his career telling you Russia was never a threat is flying to Russia to be chaperoned by Russia’s spy service weeks before your election with no agenda anyone will name. Trump’s negotiators Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff have made repeated trips to Moscow. Trump himself met Putin in Alaska. Fine. Those are diplomats and envoys. Cutting deals is arguably their job. 

The FBI is not a diplomatic agency.

The FBI is the tip of the spear in America’s counterintelligence war, the agency whose entire reason for existing includes catching Russian spies. America’s law-enforcement and intelligence institutions are independent. That they answer to the law; not to a strongman, ours or anyone else’s.

He’s not just doing this in the dark. He’s already drawing fire from across the spectrum, even from his own side. MAGA figure Laura Loomer publicly slammed the trip; a former Democratic strategist openly asked what “legitimate reason” there could possibly be. 

BONUS INVESTIGATION: Follow the Money to Moscow

Before Kash Patel Booked a Flight to Russia, a Kremlin-Linked Filmmaker Wrote Him a Check

Here’s the fact, straight Patel’s own financial disclosure submitted during his confirmation. In 2024, before he ran the FBI Kash Patel was paid $25,000 by a film company owned by a Russian national with U.S. citizenship; a company that has produced programming pushing “deep state” conspiracy theories and anti-Western narratives of the kind the Kremlin relentlessly promotes.  The company was Global Tree Pictures. The man who runs it was Igor Lopatonok. His previous projects include a pro-Russian influence campaign that received money from a fund created by Vladimir Putin himself. A fund. Created by Putin.

Lopatonok’s filmography reads like a Kremlin wish list. His productions include Ukraine on Fire which featured Oliver Stone interviewing Putin and pushed the narrative that Ukraine’s 2013 Maidan Revolution was a U.S.-orchestrated coup. He also directed Maidan Massacre- a film that denies pro-Russian forces were behind the killing of activists in Kyiv.  This is the man whose company cut Kash Patel a check.

Patel’s appearance was in a six-part series. The series was called All the President’s Men: The Conspiracy Against Trump. It depicted Patel and other first-term Trump officials as victims of a “deep state” plot to destroy those who stood by the president. It featured Steve Bannon, Rudy Giuliani, and Michael Flynn, who resigned in 2017 over false statements about his talks with Russia’s ambassador and aired in November 2024 on Tucker Carlson’s online network.  The series was directed by Sean Stone, who had hosted a show on the Russian state network RT America until it shut down in 2022 after the invasion of Ukraine. A filmmaker funded by a Putin fund. A director who worked for Russian state TV. A production financed and distributed through pro-Kremlin channels. And in the middle of it, cashing a check, the man who now runs American counterintelligence.

It’s one thing for a private citizen to take questionable money for a documentary. It happens. But that same man is now the sitting Director of the FBI and he’s reportedly headed to Russia in October to be hosted by the FSB, agenda undisclosed, weeks before an American election.

The $25,000 was 2024. The Moscow trip is 2026. Now with a security clearance and the keys to the building.

In Fairness–Here’s His Side: Patel disclosed this payment himself. It was in the official paperwork which is exactly how it became public. His spokesperson said Patel went “above and beyond” the process- countless meetings, hundreds of pages of documents, six hours of testimony, and that the Senate evaluated all potential conflicts. 

Why did a Putin-adjacent film company want Kash Patel’s face in their product? Why $25,000? And why of all the people in the U.S. government is this man, with this history, now the one boarding a plane to be welcomed by Russia’s spy service three weeks before you vote?

by Jack Hopkins

The check cleared in 2024. The confirmation came in 2025. The Moscow flight is booked for October 2026…a matter of weeks before you walk into a voting booth. 

Same man. Same orbit. Only now he’s got a badge, a clearance, and the keys to America’s counterintelligence files. 

Sources

On the reported Moscow trip (Politico, July 2026):

The Moscow Times — Patel Plans Trip to Russia in October

The Independent (via Yahoo) — Hosted by the KGB’s successors

Washington Examiner — Trip details unknown

Raw Story — “Unusual and sensitive” trip draws scrutiny

Kyiv Independent — Patel expected to visit Russia

Meduza — Patel plans to visit Russia in October

On the $25,000 payment (disclosed via Patel’s confirmation filings, Feb. 2025):

The Washington Post — Patel paid by Russian filmmaker tied to Kremlin

Newsweek — Scrutiny over payment from Russian-owned film company

The Daily Beast — Patel pocketed $25K from filmmaker with Kremlin ties

Kyiv Independent — Trump’s FBI pick took money from Russian propagandist

A trove of chat logs created with Anthropic’s Claude (some including sensitive personal and company information) have been left exposed to Google, making them searchable to anyone on the web. Many of them appear to have been made public when users opted to distribute a given chat or project to colleagues or associates using the “share” feature. After hitting the “share” button in the top right corner, sharing will create a “public” link, which “anyone with the link can view.” The warning, though, doesn’t alert users that shared content might wind up being indexed by a search engine meaning that a user could effectively be sharing their Claude-generated document with the entire internet.

Such documents included what appeared to be a detailed medical report of a real patient, clinical trial results that included patient names, documents sharing the names and phone numbers of primary school-aged children, company documents marked for internal use only, and employee reviews that included personal information about workers.

Why YSK: if you've shared chats via Claude, that's not private information anymore

UPDATE: has been patched, no longer searchable but the damage is still done

The once underground and countercultural “rave” has fully spread to the mainstream in the form of themed pop-ups and sponsored parties. For newbies, it can be a sanitized gateway into electronic music. For true ravers, it’s more complicated.
by Kiana Mickles July 15.2026

On a blue-skied morning in March, gentle house music wafts from inside the Brooklyn lounge bar Superior Ingredients. When I get to the door, I flash my ticket to the bouncer and scurry past a sign that reads “WELCOME TO FRIENDSHIP” until a smiling woman with sequined UGGs chases me down for a hug. “Huh? Oh, sure,” I say, lightly patting her shoulder. I learn she’s been hired to hug everyone at Daybreaker, the self-described sober rave I’m attending.

Inside the venue’s sun room, a pre-rave yoga session is already underway. As a mashup of Rihanna’s “Kiss It Better” and Luther Vandross’ “Never Too Much” plays over the speakers, a perky instructor guides us through 20 squat jumps. After closing with a shavasana, she shouts, “Are y’all ready to dance?!” before a DJ in an aloha shirt throws on a tech-house remix of Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams.” Later, a five-person band featuring a white guy slapping a giant hand drum climbs onto the stage to perform an acoustic version of “Crazy Frog.” “I haven’t felt this good in a while,” Alex, a 36-year-old from Queens, tells me mid-song. “It’s only with friends that you can open up.” He then gives me my second unprompted sober-rave hug of the day.

Once a signifier of unsanctioned parties, the word rave has never been more ubiquitous. While there are still echoes of its subversive origins in the current Brooklyn DIY scene—warehouse nights listed with a TBA location on Resident Advisor, beach raves announced via flyers circulated on Discord—if you get sucked into the right algorithm, “rave” quickly loses meaning. Today’s mainstream offerings include sauna raves, Labubu raves, Shrek raves, and even a Trader Joe’s vs. Aldi rave, with revelers arriving “decked out in produce swag.” Unlike IYKYK events, where nocturnal freaks roam free and a gruff bouncer might threaten banishment for a dancefloor selfie, cameras are strongly encouraged. “We’re adding to the culture of the rave community,” Daybreaker co-founder Radha Agrawal tells me. “Communities naturally evolve, rave culture evolves. Everything evolves.”

To rave is to party, but to party is not always to rave. Raving is a youth movement that has always rejected conformity. For decades, in the face of economic, social, and political decline, factions of queer, Black, and lost children have skulked around paradisal jungle gyms by way of bunkers, wild forests, and abandoned buildings, anywhere that couldn’t easily be accessed by the establishment, paving the way for punkish innovations across electronic music and fashion. On the political spectrum, ravers lean deep left—in a society that criminalizes the use of mind-altering substances and loud music, you don’t become a promoter because you want to get rich. A great rave will more often than not barely get out of the red, only to be shut down in the first few hours. To understand the untamed nature of raves, you can review its fascinating etymology. In the early 14th century, to rave was “to dream; wander here and there, prowl; behave madly, be crazy.” By 1989, it would be pegged as a “mass party with loud, fast electronic music, and often psychedelic drugs,” a definition still widely used today.

Raving can be traced to the late 1980s, when artists like DJ Pierre and Spanky sparked a bright but short flame of acid house in Chicago clubs, manipulating synthesizers to create squelchy beats dancers could jack their bodies to. When a police crackdown forced the scene to fizzle out, raving travelled to illegal squats in the UK, where, in 1988, in the so-called Second Summer of Love, it was framed as a rebellion to the working-class deterioration of the Thatcher era. A few years later, it journeyed back to America: In New York, Frankie Bones’ and Adam X’s Storm Raves took place in dilapidated apartments on Coney Island Avenue; in the Bay Area, a group of English DJs called Wicked threw acid-laced full-moon raves surrounded by bonfires; and in the Midwest, an abundance of open fields and warehouses in cities like Detroit and Columbus allowed raves to surge. It experienced another Stateside boom in the 2010s, thanks to DJs like Skrillex and Deadmau5, who transformed UK dubstep into screeching dopamine hits called brostep, boosting the genre all the way to the mosh pits of America’s newly supersized EDM festivals—and, in the process, turning the idea of raving into an extremely profitable business.

At the same time brostep was finding its footing, I was a teenager partying in an equally flourishing underground DIY scene in New York. The Cabaret Law, the city’s infamous Prohibition era “no-dancing” ordinance, was still in effect, which meant most off-the-grid events were clandestine and word-of-mouth. In $20 platform sandals, I would attend sets from queer DJs like Venus X and Juliana Huxtable at experimental loft galleries in Queens and Brooklyn. By my twenties, I spent summers abroad at raves in a school gymnasium in London, in a marisquería in CDMX, and in a building in Lisbon that could only be entered by precariously climbing a wooden ladder. The most memorable raves were scrappy, long nights and mornings typically fueled by candy-colored pills that helped me work my legs until sunrise.

Not every mainstream rave in 2026 is the antithesis of underground parties past and present, but Daybreaker comes close, both in its devotion to sobriety and in how much money the organizers claim to make (the company claims to pull in seven figures annually). I later ask Agrawal about those who criticize organizations like hers—which freely use the term rave while being bolstered by handsome wellness sponsors like AG1—versus the current, primarily queer and racially marginalized underground system that can struggle to turn a profit. “It’s all about, how do you operate?” she replies. “Are you just drinking your profits away? Are you getting high? We’re sober. We’re serious professionals. You take it seriously, you can make more money.”

Plenty of similar parties benefit from the same big-tent communal mindset. Take the Midnight Rave at House of Yes, where attendees are giddy to support the promoters, Kseniya Sovenko and Mary Wolff, better known on social media as NYC Rave Girls. Priding themselves on rave etiquette, the two thirtysomethings promote electronic music gigs via TikTok and Instagram, preaching “girls to the front” while shimmying to polite techno.

Despite the name of their one-off event, Sovenko and Wolff both admit Midnight Rave is more of a “party” than an actual rave. “Not everything is a rave,” clarifies Sovenko. “A pop-up at a coffee shop is not a rave. Even our parties, most of the time, are not raves.” Instead, she says, they use the word loosely to capture “the spirit of raving and the essence of it, this idea of showing up to dance and taking care of the people around you.” Indeed, during these events, I rarely spoke to a person who didn’t look like they were having the time of their life. And many of them got what they wanted out of it: a tight-knit family, or at the very least the appearance of one. “I like that it’s really building a community,” says Paty, a 27-year-old DJ I meet in the venue’s back room. “You forget how crazy the world is so you can have fun for the night.” Christina, a 44-year-old mother, agrees. “This is a form of self-care,” she yells to me over a booming house beat. “Some people get Botox. I think house music is my Botox.”

Conversations with people like Christina left me questioning whether this format of raving is really just a new beacon of wellness culture. Historically, the music at the raves I’ve attended tends to lean darker: techno, acid, electroclash, the kinds of sounds that rearrange your brain when you’re stomping on the concrete of a warehouse floor. But at these new feel-good raves, maximizing your mindstate appears to be more important than the music you’re actually listening to. For example, in the 100-page Daybreaker playbook, there is one (made-up) genre underlined: happy house. “Something that you can sing along to, music with words, music that you can feel joy in your bones,” as Agrawal explains it.

For some longtime ravers, this approach isn’t much cause for concern. There’s a prevailing sentiment that as long as newcomers are going to their own raves, they aren’t going to the ones that truly matter. Yet events thrown by organizers like NYC Rave Girls have received criticism for making the scene a little too open to novice ravers, dampening the night for educated dancers who have been supporting raves for years.

“I have noticed an influx of kind of inexperienced, cis white girls showing up at parties I go to,” says McKenzie Wark, the author of Raving, an autofictional book exploring the queer rave scene in New York. While she doesn’t mind raves becoming increasingly ubiquitous, she worries that newcomers, accustomed to pop-up raves at restaurants and bathhouses, will find themselves unprepared to handle themselves at a debaucherous all-nighter. “You want it to be for everybody, but it’s like, Girl, you’re not ready for what this one is. I just want a little bit of daylight between where I want to go and where beginners are going to go. My day job is teaching people. I don’t want to do it at the party.”

Sovenko, however, rejects that line of thought. “I think it’s interesting when people say that we are ‘ruining’ the crowds,” she says. “They don’t consider the fact that all the clubs in New York need to stay open. If it was truly gatekept, those spaces wouldn’t survive.”

For Laura Villasenin, founder of the luxury shoe brand MIISTA—and a former raver who used to attend underground raves in Hackney Wick warehouses—raving belongs at the center of mainstream culture; she considers the trend a natural response to a society still rebuilding itself after COVID lockdown. “It comes from a desire for community connection,” she adds.

This past spring, Villasenin dreamt up a pop-up rave in Los Angeles at a clothing factory, where a gallery wall loudly declared “RAVING REPAIRS THE SOUL. IT BRINGS US TOGETHER.” Footage of the event showed a baile funk edit of Denise Belfon’s “Work” blaring as models decked out in oversized black sunglasses and dark, avant-minimalist outfits swung their hips on sewing tables. Below them, tailors dressed in white button-ups diligently mended items the guests brought, a service MIISTA provided free of charge. But, like Midnight Rave, if the MIISTA event didn’t have the hallmarks of a true DIY rave, why not just call it a party? “Rave is, of course, about music and bringing people together, so it felt right,” says Villasenin.

Beyond post-pandemic freedom, the recent rave explosion can also be credited to BRAT, Charli XCX’s 2024 album that glamorized raving as an It Girl activity. (“365 party girl bumping that/Shall we do a little key?/Shall we have a little line?” she raps on “365” with a breezy, fabulous air that seduces you into her lifestyle even if you’ve never touched a stimulant in your life.) A week after my Daybreaker experience, I slip into a warehouse on a dark street in Gowanus for Heated Rivalry Rave, a party catering to the fandom of the steamy sports-romance series on HBO. The queen of club rats herself appears on a giant projector screen as the revving synths of her song “Von Dutch” lash at a pogoing crowd of screeching women and gays. The DJ later plays millennial hits like Zedd’s “Clarity” and Hannah Montana’s “He Could Be the One,” then throws glowsticks toward the hungry flock. One denim-clad brunette shrieks like a child, drunkenly pouting her lips and clawing her hands toward the DJ booth like a bridesmaid desperate to catch a bouquet at her best friend’s wedding. A slender twentysomething soon brushes past me, wearing a white crop top that reads “Heated all the time. Rivalry, occasionally.”

Later, in an elevated seating area, I ask a 29-year-old longtime raver named Estephani what she makes of the night. Although it’s very different from the raves in her usual rotation, she tells me she’s having a blast with her girlfriends. “It’s very like, girly pop,” she says. “Like karaoke night, almost, but with dancing.”

By the end of my rave journey, I was comforted by the knowledge that there is a space for people—newcomers, veteran partygoers like Estephani—to discover the joys of dancing among like-minded attendees. As I tucked myself into an Uber home from the Heated Rivalry rave, I fuzzily recalled my own first non-rave rave experience in 2014 at a Pacha event, wearing a peach Forever 21 crop top and sipping a non-alcoholic spritz while surrounded by fog and 18-year-old boys swaying to Top 40 hits. It was far from underground and I was entirely sober, but exhilaration climbed up my spine as I got drunk on the newness that had entered my world. When I plopped onto my bed at the end of the night, I texted my friends, telling them I just had one of the best nights of my life. I daydreamed about the person I could become and the people I could meet at the next one.

So much of raving’s appeal is about the potential of magic happening. For some, that means experiencing spiritual transcendence from having the perfect concoction of songs melded together in a discreet location, for others it looks more like a screeching sing-along to Ariana Grande’s “Break Free” as a DJ flings merch from a popular HBO show. “Rave culture itself is about community, music, gathering, and we brought it together around a central theme,” Heated Rivalry Rave’s founder, Tu Vu, tells me. As someone who came up in the old rave scene, he considers the current state of high-profile raves a natural progression for the art form. “I just think there’s an accessibility to it. If you look back at the architecture of raves, it doesn’t have to mean anything in particular.”

July 22, 2026 by Carrie N. Baker

It took until July 7, 2026, for the world’s leading human rights body to call forcing someone to be pregnant — or forcing them not to be — what it is: reproductive violence. In a landmark resolution adopted unanimously, the UN Human Rights Council formally recognized “reproductive violence” as a specific, systemic form of gender-based violence. 

The resolution defines reproductive violence to include “forced pregnancy, forced abortion, forced sterilization, forced contraception, denial of contraception, and targeted attacks on reproductive healthcare facilities.” The resolution focuses on humanitarian situations, but the definition creates a new framework for protecting against “intentional acts or omissions that cause harm by interfering with reproductive autonomy,” defined as “the ability to make independent decisions about one’s reproduction free from coercion.”

Recognizing reproductive violence as a human rights violation is a critical step, said Dr. Diana Pulido of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. “By naming reproductive violence, the Human Rights Council has made visible a distinct and devastating form of harm that has too often gone unrecognized. Survivors can now name what happened to them in language the system finally recognizes.”

This historic UN declaration has implications for the United States, where the state itself sanctions, funds, and enforces reproductive violence. Forty-one states, including Massachusetts, ban abortion at some point during pregnancy. These bans block medical providers from offering needed care. To make matters worse, police and state attorneys are arresting and criminally prosecutingpregnant women whose reproductive decision-making they oppose.

Any law or government action that requires a person to carry a pregnancy to term against their will is a form of bodily assault. The dynamics mirror domestic violence and sexual assault. The core of rape is the violation of consent — taking control of another person’s body and forcing them to submit. Abortion bans likewise hijack a person’s body, stripping them of their bodily integrity and self-determination.

As anti-violence advocate Irene Weiser once asked: “How can we ever begin to end violence against women if the laws of our society will not even guarantee the most fundamental of human right to women — to say at all times, under all circumstances, what we allow to happen to our bodies?”

The answer, so far, is that we cannot. In the U.S, interpersonal reproductive violence is condemned, but when the state commits reproductive violence through laws, policies, and institutions, this form of violence is tolerated. 

The parallels between interpersonal abuse and state violence are reflected in the medical understanding of reproductive coercion. Medical literature defines reproductive coercion as behavior that interferes with autonomous decision-making in reproductive health —specifically, attempting to maintain power and control over a partner’s sexual and reproductive lives. This coercion rarely exists in a vacuum: it is almost always accompanied by other tactics of coercive control, including isolation from friends and family, surveillance and monitoring of movements and communications, deprivation of basic necessities, gaslighting, degradation, and threats of violence.

These exact abusive behaviors are mirrored in U.S. laws, law enforcement actions, and state-funded anti-abortion violence. State “aiding and abetting” laws mimic the isolation tactic, criminalizing anyone who helps a person obtain an abortion. Police engage in digital surveillance, tracking the digital footprints and physical movements of women travelling out of state for healthcare. Law enforcement arrests, detains, and prosecutes pregnant women for behaviors that do not violate the law. Meanwhile, police stand by as anti-abortion groups harass, intimidate, and threaten abortion providers and patients seeking care. Beneath it all is a single premise, enforced by political, cultural, and religious institutions alike: women’s bodies are state and community property.

This systemic reproductive violence has already cost us dearly. Maternal mortality is surging, with death rates rising rapidly in states banning abortion, where women are denied emergency medical care. The federal Hyde Amendmentweaponizes poverty, turning abortion into a right that women on Medicaid cannot afford to exercise. Millions in federal and state taxpayer dollars bankroll unregulated “crisis pregnancy centers” that prey on women with medical misinformation, pressuring them to carry unwanted pregnancies to term. ICE is transporting pregnant minors as young as 13 to detention camps in ban states to block abortion access, while at the same time failing to offer basic reproductive healthcare. Trump pardoned anti-abortion extremists convicted of terrorizing clinics, sending a clear message of state-approved intimidation. A Georgia hospital used Adriana Smith’s brain-dead body to gestate a fetus for four months against her family’s wishes. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The UN’s new framework holds a mirror up to America, forcing us to confront the structural violence written into our own laws, policies, and practices. We must now call on the United Nations to investigate the people perpetrating reproductive violence in the United States, including state and federal lawmakers passing harmful laws, state officials using these laws to coerce and abuse pregnant women, and the people running state-funded private organizations, including crisis pregnancy centers, that are violating our human right to say at all times, under all circumstances, what we allow to happen to our bodies.