Our system, anything but female, doesn’t do family planning…
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Good afternoon, America!
The purple crocus outdoors are blossoming this month, my first Robin sighted — a reminder of Nature’s reliability that we all count on. New life was resurrected just about the time when we Vermonters were beginning to fear that winter’s cold and the glacial movement of all Trump’s lawsuits might never end.
Not much besides crocus and robins felt right this month, with some temps above 80 degrees already — and we’ve barely survived the sweat of Tax Day. We heard news that the Fifth Appeals court in New Orleans supposedly tempered a Texas ruling that threatened to make Mifepristone, the abortion pill, unavailable even in states where it’s legal. But really the appeals court added their own restrictions.
The appeals court did block the overturning of FDA’s approval of the pill, safely used for 23 years, but they maintained the part of the Texan ruling that banned the pill’s being mailed. Astonishingly, they also tightened the drug’s use to the first seven weeks of pregnancy, when few can even know they’re pregnant.
Just this Friday, the Supreme Court finally responded to an emergency appeal by Biden’s administration with a stay on the first Texas ruling. Without accompanying reasoning, they kicked it back to the Appeals Court, which will revisit it May 17. Be grateful Mother Nature will deliver us fragrant peonies by then to help calm our tensions over what could happen next.
Imagine restricting an FDA-approved pill to prevent a heart attack to the moment you first feel severe pain. Are these health conditions really comparable? Heart attacks and unplanned pregnancy are both life-changing and sometimes life-ending. Only one’s intervention is outlawed now in a dozen states.
There are 17 positions on the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court; one still vacant. Twelve of 16 got appointed by so-called conservatives, Reagan, George W., and the Donald, who alone placed six. This shouldn’t matter because, as we’re often told, the courts function according to the law, far above politics. Just as the economy functions by the immutable laws of supply and demand, rather like Earth’s gravity.
Not all of Earth’s physics are so immutable. Climate at the base of any economy is changing, and its surprises can be as punishing as Trump’s judges. Our system’s laws and economic choices that ignore over-population and poverty have much to do with it. Our politics, economics, and the spirit of our laws are anything but female. This supposedly “conservative” system’s courts and legislatures don’t do family planning.
Without family planning, the once reliable supply of Taiwan’s spring “plum rains” for farmers is now failing, and made worse by water demands of US microchip manufacturers. The demand of 2.2 million Americans without running water and indoor plumbing must give way to demands of industrial agriculture. Worldwide, fossil-fueled agriculture uses 70 percent of earth’s fresh water, even depleting our ground water. With droughts common now, a growing number of lakes look like huge, drained bathtubs with awful dirt rings.
Rains we counted on for supply are disrupted and sporadic, and we know the reasons why. Severe droughts and related flooding, the UN reported last month, are bringing us a global water crisis. Accusing us of being water vampires, predicting conflicts over water, and wars affecting billions of people, the UN calls on technology and co-operation to save us.
The fair distribution of vital resources has rarely beat at the heart of nation-states or competing corporations. Might it though? Could national laws and economics transition to a more motherly-centered system? Many are calling for this!
Our great grandmothers were truer conservatives than the ones we know now. They wasted nothing, said good manners were good morals, and concocted desserts from unpromising stuff like melon and orange rinds, Living by the seasons, seized by the immutable gravity of our situation, let’s help our patriarchal system stop its warring long enough to do some family planning — and like our indigenous ancestors remember to include and honor sister crocus and brother robin and the spirit of water and its renewal of life.
In solidarity,
Rickey Gard Diamond
AEOO Founder
Let’s Talk About Taxes
AEOO Board member Jhumpa Bhattacharya, along with Saadia Van Winkle, wrote an important piece this month in Ms. Magazine about how the U.S. Tax Code disadvantages single women, married Black couples and gay couples the most. The piece is written with delightful style and sheds light on significant problems.
Jhumpa, formerly with Insight Center for Community Economic Development, is one of the founders of The Maven Collaborative. The new organization’s mission is Centering Race, Gender, and Joy in the Pursuit of Economic Justice, and their work is “unapologetically” focused on Black women. “We know that centering the needs of Black women enables us to develop bold solutions to structural problems,” they explain, “so that everyone can live a life of joy, dignity, and respect.” Sign up for their newsletter here.
Data from Rickey Gard Diamond’s latest in Ms.
AEOO founder Rickey Gard Diamond also focused on taxes and needed reforms this month in Ms., as part of her Women Unscrewing Screwnomics column, arguing that taxing women and their wombs hurts all of us. The article explains Biden’s proposed tax and budget changes she expects will be silenced or screamed about.
“Physicians were reporting a trending increase in sterilization procedures before the Supreme Court’s Dobbs opinion on June 24, 2022. On that day, Planned Parenthood reported an ‘unprecedented’ number of ‘sterilization’ searches on its national webpage — an increase of 2,205 percent,” she observed. “When you’re worried about going to jail for planning when and whether to have kids, this makes a sad kind of sense.”
What We’re Reading
The Wage Gap is growing. AEOO counts on research done by EPI, which draws on more diverse economists than most think tanks. Elise Gould and Katherine deCourcy at EPI’s Working Economics Blog reported this month that despite historically fast real wage growth for low-wage workers between 2019 and 2022, and despite this recent period of growth, wage levels for U.S. workers at the bottom of the earnings distribution remain low, making it difficult to make ends meet in any county or metro area.
In 2019, women, on average, were paid 20.3% less than men. By 2022, that gap widened to 22.2%. Gould and deCourcy say the gender wage gap persists no matter how it’s measured. Women are paid less than men as a result of occupational segregation, devaluation of women’s work, societal norms, and discrimination, all of which took root well before women entered the labor market.
Gender and hunger. We don’t often see male-authored articles that passionately argue on behalf of women and were delighted to discover not only a substantive article, but a great movement against hunger. Both are the result of work by New Jersey’s Adam Lowy. His article in Philanthropy News Digest yields stunning statistics on the many reasons, in the US, “Women are Forced to Bear the Brunt of Hunger.”
Did you know that one in four US women experience food insecurity at some point in their lives? Are you or a female friend one of these? The shame isn’t yours, says Lowy. “Aside from glaring inequalities in the workplace, women are also expected to become the ‘default’ parent for their children, fulfill household responsibilities and provide support for all other family members,” Lowy writes, also sharing news of Move for Hunger, a surprising organization he founded to facilitate food donations through socially responsible moving companies. Lowy has ideas for how we can make a difference at your local food bank or food shelf.
Telling truths about poverty. With one simple comma, Poverty, by America reminds us of the mind-blowing punctuation in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Author Matthew Desmond also wrote the Pulitizer Prize-winning Evicted, and says we have been asking the wrong questions when we’re focused on the poor: Why are women, especially women of color, so often poor? How poor are they?
Instead, he argues, we need to ask, who benefits from keeping them that way?
Demond shows how welfare money has nearly tripled since Clinton’s welfare reform, yet poverty rates remain stuck. Why? Less money directly goes to the poor. Instead, states get block grants, used creatively, sometimes illegally. Biden’s Covid-related checks reversed that trend, cutting child poverty by half. So why then the big push to end what we’ve seen can work?
Another example: In 1977, a third of banks charged no fees, but as bank regulation was loosened in the 80s, bank fees increased. By 2019, account holders were paying over $11.6 billion in overdraft fees, though admittedly this was largely paid by only 9 percent of customers. Who were they? Those who carried an average balance of less than $350.
The book’s opening epigram is from Leo Tolstoy: “We imagine that their sufferings are one thing and our life another.” We expect this book soon to be on Florida’s banned list.
From the AEOO Resource Library
If Wall Street and Silicon Valley have more billionaires than ever, how come Main Street’s people are living from paycheck to paycheck — and that’s if they’re lucky?! What is the nature of the currency we call the dollar? And how can we invest our privately earned dollars and our shared public dollars more wisely for the long term?
Learn how women are working now to more clearly explain our current money world, including the Federal Reserve, and working to change our money’s intent — not to enrich just a few winners at the cost of mostly losers, but to grant all of us a livable future — in our Zoom of our Own on monetary policy and reform.
Learn from Ebony L. Perkins, who participates in the US Forum for Sustainable & Responsible Investing, Women In Philanthropy, and the Financial Planning Association; Ellen Hodgson Brown, founder and Chair of the Public Banking Institute; farmer, explorer, postal worker, peace & justice advocate, and mom Mary Sanderson; and Adrienne Massanari, an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
You can tune in to the replay on our website — and access our reader for further learning.
