08 May 22
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The US supreme court draft ruling on abortion is an assault on fundamental individual freedoms. The Handmaid’s Tale author reflects on the issues at stake
Perhaps a different way of approaching the question would be to ask: What kind of country do you want to live in? One in which every individual is free to make decisions concerning his or her health and body, or one in which half the population is free and the other half is enslaved?
Women who cannot make their own decisions about whether or not to have babies are enslaved because the state claims ownership of their bodies and the right to dictate the use to which their bodies must be put. The only similar circumstance for men is conscription into an army. In both cases there is risk to the individual’s life, but an army conscript is at least provided with food, clothing, and lodging. Even criminals in prisons have a right to those things. If the state is mandating enforced childbirth, why should it not pay for prenatal care, for the birth itself, for postnatal care, and – for babies who are not sold off to richer families – for the cost of bringing up the child?
And if the state is very fond of babies, why not honour the women who have the most babies by respecting them and lifting them out of poverty? If women are providing a needed service to the state – albeit against their wills – surely they should be paid for their labour. If the goal is more babies, I am sure many women would oblige if properly recompensed. Otherwise, they are inclined to follow the natural law: placental mammals will abort in the face of resource scarcity.
But I doubt that the state is willing to go so far as to provide the needed resources. Instead, it just wants to reinforce the usual cheap trick: force women to have babies, and then make them pay. And pay. And pay. As I said, slavery.
If one chooses to have a baby, that is of course a different matter. The baby is a gift, given by life itself. But to be a gift a thing must be freely given and freely received. A gift can also be rejected. A gift that cannot be rejected is not a gift, but a symptom of tyranny.
We say that women “give birth”. And mothers who have chosen to be mothers do give birth, and feel it as a gift. But if they have not chosen, birth is not a gift they give; it is an extortion from them against their wills.
No one is forcing women to have abortions. No one either should force them to undergo childbirth. Enforce childbirth if you wish but at least call that enforcing by what it is. It is slavery: the claim to own and control another’s body, and to profit by that claim.
Emergency services personnel after school building was hit by Russian bomb. (photo: State Emergency Services/Reuters)
Rescue attempts impossible due to constant shelling in Bilohorivka, says Luhansk governor
Russian attacks in the east and south intensified at the weekend ahead of Monday’s symbolic Victory Day celebrations, with the Black Sea city of Odesa coming under repeated missile strikes and the remaining Ukrainian fighters in the Azovstal steelworks in the besieged port city of Mariupol staging a press conference on Sunday saying they had been “abandoned” by the government as Russian attacks continued
About 90 people had been using the school in Bilohorivka, a village 60 miles (97km) north-west of the Russian-controlled city of Luhansk, as a shelter after the previous place of refuge, a clubhouse, had been destroyed in an earlier attack.
Serhiy Gaidai, the Luhansk governor, told the Guardian he believed the 30 people who escaped had been outside in the grounds of the building. He said he had little hope for those who were under rubble.
“Unfortunately, they are probably dead,” he said. “Because the building collapsed. Besides, an air bomb is not a missile, its explosion produces extremely high temperatures. That’s why most likely people haven’t survived.”
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has stated he intends to take the eastern Luhansk and Donetsk regions by 9 May when Russia marks Victory Day and the defeat of Nazi Germany in the second world war.
In an address to mark Ukraine’s 8 May remembrance and reconciliation day, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said his country paid homage to all those who helped defeat Adolf Hitler but accused Russia of repeating his crimes.
He said: “Every year on 8 May, together with the entire civilised world, we honour everyone who defended the planet from Nazism during world war two. Millions of lost lives, crippled destinies, tortured souls and millions of reasons to say to evil: never again!
“We knew the price our ancestors paid for this wisdom. We knew how important it is to preserve it and pass it on to posterity. But we had no idea that our generation would witness the desecration of the words, which, as it turned out, are not the truth for everyone.
“This year we say ‘Never again’ differently. We hear ‘Never again’ differently. It sounds painful, cruel. Without an exclamation, but with a question mark. You say: never again? Tell Ukraine about it.”
Zelenskiy went on: “On 24 February, the word ‘never’ was erased. Shot and bombed. By hundreds of missiles at 4am, which woke up the entire Ukraine. We heard terrible explosions. We heard: again!”
Illya Samoilenko, a lieutenant in the Azov regiment in Mariupol, said his fellow soldiers would be executed if captured by the Russians and that surrender would be a “gift” to the enemy. “We are witnesses of Russian crimes,” he said. “Surrender is not an option because Russia is not interested in our lives.”
Gaidai said the attack on the school in Bilohorivka had taken place at 6pm on Saturday night and had been followed by a constant barrage in the surrounding area that had made rescue attempts impossible.
He said a bus had been sent to the village, which has a population of 800 to 900 people, to evacuate the remaining residents on Sunday morning but it had to turn round due to the ferocity of the shelling on the roads.
Gaidai said: “Right now they are asking us, begging us to get them out, but we can’t because everything is now under shelling. Around 70 people wanted to be evacuated today. We sent a bus, but it turned around and went back. Not just the village, but also a highway is under shelling.”
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Gaidai said he had been frustrated in recent weeks that the residents had repeatedly refused to leave despite the growing dangers to their lives as Russia has focused its attacks in the east and south of Ukraine.
Earlier on Saturday, eight miles (13km) north of the school, two children died and a further two children and an elderly woman were injured when a missile hit the village of Pryvole, Gaidai said.
He said: “Around a week ago we tried to evacuate around 300 people from Bilohorivka. We’d already settled this, and sent a few buses. But most of them refused to go. So we managed to evacuate only 60-70 people.”
Ukraine’s prosecutor general said that as of 8 May, 225 Ukrainian children had died since Russian launched its invasion on 24 February.
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A person wearing a medical jacket holds a sign during a Cancel Student Debt rally outside the US Department of Education. (photo: Stefani Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)
As liberal pressure builds on Joe Biden to cancel some student loan debt, here are options he might consider.
Before abortion rights seized the national spotlight this week, student loans, and competing proposals for how to handle the nearly $1.7 trillion of debt owed by more than 40 million Americans, were at the top of the White House’s agenda. President Joe Biden seems to be warming up to a plan to cancel at least some amount of debt before the current pause on loan payments expires in September — just weeks before the midterm elections.
Biden has already extended the pause four times (former president Donald Trump issued the first pause, then extended it twice), amounting to about $200 billion worth of savings, but pressure from liberal activists and Democratic lawmakers is building. Student loan experts told Vox it’s important to use two frames to understand what kind of debt relief is coming: the amount of money that would be forgiven and who receives that forgiveness.
Progressives want Biden to go big, pushing for the maximum amount of forgiveness with the lightest eligibility requirements. They say the stakes are high for Biden and his party, given the high likelihood that Democrats lose control of Congress after elections this year—in part because of low turnout from Democratic voters in midterm elections and lackluster enthusiasm from activist-minded young voters and other members of the party base.
The first scenario: Biden cancels up to $10,000 of student loans
This seems to be a likely option. In the 2020 Democratic primaries, Biden said he supported congressional action to eliminate up to $10,000 of student loans, while his rivals to the left argued for more ambitious proposals. Reports suggest he has since become more amenable to using executive action to cancel federal loans, but he doesn’t seem likely to implement this option without some conditions.
“[T]he goal, right, is to make sure it’s targeted at people who need help the most,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week. Administration officials have been debating those eligibility requirements, which could include an income-based limit using tax returns or pay stubs (likely to be a $125,000 income cap), whether the institution a borrower attended was a public or private school, the kind of loan that was taken out, and whether the loan was used for undergraduate or graduate studies.
The move would definitely provide relief, canceling out debt for about 32 percent of borrowers, or about 13 million people, according to an analysis prepared for Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) by scholars for the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank. Two million Black borrowers would see their debt erased, and among those borrowers who now owe more than they did when they took out a loan, this level of relief would zero out the debt of 14 percent of those borrowers.
But the average student debt that Americans hold is about $30,000 — meaning the vast majority of debt holders would still be on the hook for payments. Any amount of forgiveness is unpopular with conservative figures, and progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) argue that the figure wouldn’t make a meaningful amount of difference for many people. And the $10,000 figure would cost about $373 billion to roll out— about as much as the amount the federal government has spent on welfare (the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program) in the last 20 years.
Still, this move has broad support, including among young people, and if canceling any amount of student debt contributes to inflation, this option inflicts the least damage.
The second scenario: Biden cancels between $10,000 and $50,000 of student loans
This option seems a little less likely, but not out of the question. Biden has said he is looking at under $50,000 of forgiveness per person, about what Warren and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) have demanded.
Biden likely wouldn’t go to the maximum dollar amount here and would probably stick to the $125,000 income cap, experts told me. But any additional $10,000 in relief over the first $10,000 would make massive differences for the least well-off borrowers, according to the Roosevelt authors: “Every dollar of student debt cancellation counts, but bigger is better for advancing racial equity and economic security,” Charlie Eaton, an assistant professor at UC Merced, and four other scholars write.
With $20,000 of relief, student loan debt for half of borrowers, about 20 million people, would be erased. Each additional $10,000 increase results in nearly an additional 10 percent increase in debt-free borrowers. But that full $50,000 figure would cost about $1 trillion — more than has been spent on Pell Grants or housing assistance since 2000 — and has lower though broad support among Democrats, independents, and young people. It would also likely worsen inflation somewhat, though not as much as full debt cancellation.
The third scenario: Biden cancels all student loan debt for everyone, or for borrowers with more than $50,000 of debt
This option has extremely low odds of happening, not only because Biden has said that more than $50,000 of relief is off the table. The full $1.7 trillion price tag would be more than the federal government has spent on either the earned income tax credit or unemployment insurance since 2000, and would increase the inflation rate by between 0.1 and 0.5 percentage points over a 12-month period, according to the fiscally conservative Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget. Universal debt cancellation would also disproportionately benefit a lot of the wealthiest Americans, since more than half of outstanding debt is owed by people with graduate degrees.
Still, progressives are pushing for this option hardest, and groups like the Student Debt Crisis Center are calling for a suspension of any eligibility requirements or applications. Herein lies a tension: Targeting relief at all goes a long way toward making sure the lowest-income borrowers get the bulk of the help, but the Department of Education lacks the means to implement a massive screening effort to review applications. Right now, the Department is already struggling to implement smaller, targeted relief efforts the Biden administration has already rolled out, according to Adam Minsky, an independent student debt lawyer.
“Even if it’s fairly broad [requirements], there are a lot of legitimate concerns that some sort of means testing or other mechanisms to limit eligibility could be a huge problem administratively,” he said. “The Department of Education is already strapped trying to rapidly implement all of these changes, and you’re going to add something else on top of that that potentially could impact millions and millions of borrowers.”
Inaction seems unlikely, but any of these moves is a political gamble. Though some kind of relief polls well, it is not the top concern of most voters. As the Atlantic’s David Frum has written, student-loan forgiveness carries the risk of being seen as “a tax on the voters whom the Democratic Party most desperately needs to regain,” non-college-educated and working-class Americans, while also slowing efforts to combat inflation and only leaving some of the most progressive members of his party happy.
Regardless of which path is chosen, Natalia Abrams, the president of the Student Debt Crisis Center, told me progressives will have won at least one battle. The president’s legal authority to cancel student debt is an open question, but “if this happened, President Biden will be agreeing that the President and the Department of Education do have the authority to cancel student debt,” Abram said. “We can continue to push for more. We can agree that this is a lever and if they can cancel $10,000, they can cancel $50,000. And then they can cancel all of it.”
Abortion rights advocates and antiabortion advocates demonstrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court on May 3. (photo: Jabin Botsford/WP)
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Would Make Abortion a Felony if Roe Falls
Justice Alito’s leaked opinion cites Sir Matthew Hale, a 17th-century jurist who conceived the notion that husbands can’t be prosecuted for raping their wives, who sentenced women to death as “witches,” and whose misogyny stood out even in his time.
The so-called marital rape exemption — the legal notion that a married woman cannot be raped by her husband — traces to Hale. So does a long-used instruction to jurors to be skeptical of reports of rape. So, in a way, do the infamous Salem witch trials, in which women (and some men) were hanged on or near Gallows Hill.
Hale’s influence in the United States has been on the wane since the 1970s, with one state after another abandoning his legal principles on rape. But Alito’s opinion resurrects Hale, a judge who was considered misogynistic even by his era’s notably low standards. Hale once wrote a long letter to his grandchildren, dispensing life advice, in which he veered into a screed against women, describing them as “chargeable unprofitable people” who “know the ready way to consume an estate, and to ruin a family quickly.” Hale particularly despaired of the changes he saw in young women, writing, “And now the world is altered: young gentlewomen learn to be bold” and “talk loud.”
Hale became Lord Chief Justice of England in 1671. In his time (Hale’s contemporaries included Oliver Cromwell and Charles II), Hale was a respected, perhaps even venerated, jurist known for piety and sober judgment. He wrote a two-volume legal treatise, “The History of the Pleas of the Crown,” that has proved influential ever since.
Alito, in his draft opinion, invokes “eminent common-law authorities,” including Hale, to show how abortion was viewed historically not as a right, but as a criminal act. “Two treatises by Sir Matthew Hale likewise described abortion of a quick child who died in the womb as a ‘great crime’ and a ‘great misprision,’” Alito wrote.
Even before “quickening” — defined by Alito as “the first felt movement of the fetus in the womb, which usually occurs between the 16th and 18th week of pregnancy” — Hale believed an abortion could qualify as homicide. “Hale wrote that if a physician gave a woman ‘with child’ a ‘potion’ to cause an abortion, and the woman died, it was ‘murder’ because the potion was given ‘unlawfully to destroy her child within her,’” Alito wrote.
Courts have long leaned on precedents established by old cases and the scholarship of legal authorities from centuries gone by. But what happens when you trace citations back to their ancient source? In Hale’s case, you sometimes find a man conceiving precepts out of thin air. Other times it was the opposite, as he clung to notions that were already becoming anachronistic in the last half of the 17th century.
Consider the marital rape exemption. In “Pleas of the Crown,” Hale wrote, “The husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up herself in this kind unto her husband which she cannot retract.” So, according to Hale, marriage, for a woman, amounts to contractual forfeit, in which she loses legal protection or recourse should her husband sexually assault her.
Hale’s pronouncement became the accepted common law and served as foundation in the United States for immunizing a husband accused of raping his wife. And where did Hale’s pronouncement come from? What did he base it upon? Who knows? “Hale appears to have been the first to articulate what later would become an accepted legal principle, that a husband cannot be charged with raping his wife,” according to a footnote in one law review article. Another law review article, titled “The Marital Rape Exemption: Evolution to Extinction,” called Hale’s pronouncement “an unsupported, extrajudicial statement” lacking in authority.
Starting in the 1970s, states began to abandon the marital rape exemption, in whole or in part. In 1981, the Supreme Court of New Jersey wrote that it could find no support for Hale’s proposition among earlier writers. Hale’s declaration, the court found, “cannot itself be considered a definitive and binding statement of the common law, although legal commentators have often restated the rule since the time of Hale without evaluating its merits.” In 1984, the Supreme Court of Virginia wrote: “Hale's statement was not law, common or otherwise. At best it was Hale's pronouncement of what he observed to be a custom in 17th century England.” The Virginia court went on to note, “Moreover, Hale cites no authority for his view nor was it subsequently adopted, in its entirety, by the English courts.”
Like the marital rape exemption, the so-called Hale Warning to jurors caused centuries of misfortune in the American courts.
In “Pleas of the Crown,” Hale called rape a “most detestable crime.” Then, in words quoted many times since, he wrote, “It must be remembered, that it is an accusation easy to be made and hard to be proved, and harder to be defended by the party accused, tho never so innocent.”
Hale evoked the fear of the false accuser — and made for that fear a legal frame, which lasted for more than 300 years. In weighing the evidence in cases of alleged rape, jurors (all men, in Hale’s time and for long after) needed to consider a series of factors, Hale wrote. Did the woman cry out? Did she try to flee? Was she of “good fame” or “evil fame”? Was she supported by others? Did she make immediate complaint afterward?
Hale’s words and formulation became a standard feature of criminal trials in the United States, with jurors instructed by judges to be especially wary of allegations of rape. The effect was predictable: Charges of rape were frequently rejected. In the United States, one early example was chronicled by historian John Wood Sweet in his soon-to-be-published book, “The Sewing Girl’s Tale.” (I was allowed to read an advance copy.)
In 1793, in New York City, an aristocrat, Henry Bedlow, was accused of raping a 17-year-old seamstress, Lanah Sawyer. Bedlow hired six lawyers, including a future U.S. Supreme Court justice, who used Hale’s framework to destroy Sawyer. Sawyer said she screamed. But, one attorney asked the jury, did she also stamp her feet? Witnesses spoke of Sawyer’s good fame, according to the trial record. But “she may have had the art to carry a fair outside, while all was foul within,” the same attorney argued. “Ultimately, the defense team’s dizzying effort to dispute and distort reality had been part of a relentless effort to transform a young woman who mattered into one who didn’t,” Sweet wrote. The jury took 15 minutes to acquit.
Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, courts in the United States began moving away from instructing juries with Hale’s admonition to be particularly skeptical of rape claims. The repudiation of Hale became so complete that when a Maryland lawmaker, in 2007, invoked Hale’s words in a state legislative hearing, it was met with “outrage,” according to the Washington Post.
Despite those legal changes, the fear of the false rape accuser still persists in the justice system, at times leading to horrendous outcomes. I began researching Hale when writing, with T. Christian Miller, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” published by ProPublica and the Marshall Project. The story reconstructs what happened when a young woman in Lynnwood, Washington, reported being raped. We later expanded the story into a book, “Unbelievable,” in which we described Hale’s influence in rape cases at greater length. (The story also became a Netflix series.)
Then there was Hale’s role in what today is synonymous with the perversion of justice: witch trials.
In 1662, Hale presided at a jury trial in Bury St. Edmunds in which two women, Amy Denny and Rose Cullender, were accused of being witches. In a book on this case, “A Trial of Witches,” authors Ivan Bunn and Gilbert Geis wrote that by 1662, “belief in witches was in retreat in England.” Hale, however, was not part of that retreat. He believed witches were real. “Hale represented not a mainstream position but rather one rapidly becoming anachronistic,” Bunn and Geis wrote.
What’s more, Hale instructed the jurors that witches were real. A written record of the trial recounts what Hale told them: “That there were such creatures as witches he made no doubt at all; for first, the scriptures had affirmed so much. Secondly, the wisdom of all nations had provided laws against such persons, which is an argument of their confidence of such a crime.”
The jury convicted Denny and Cullender, after which Hale sentenced both women to hang. (Four years before, Hale had also sentenced to death another woman convicted of being a witch.)
Hale’s influence, once again, extended beyond the immediate case and his time. Thirty years later, his handling of the trial in Bury St. Edmunds, preserved in written record, served as a model in Salem, Massachusetts, in the infamous witch trials in 1692. “Indeed, the Salem witch-hunts might not have taken place if there had not been a trial at Bury St. Edmunds: the events at Salem notoriously imitated those at Bury,” Bunn and Geis wrote.
Hale is known mostly for his legal treatises. But his views toward women are perhaps best revealed in a letter he wrote to his grandchildren, titled “Letter of Advice.” (In a twitter thread this week I said Hale’s letter was 182 pages long. I may have understated it. I’ve since found a version online that goes on for 206 pages.)
In this letter, Hale prescribes individualized counsel for three granddaughters.
Mary, he wrote, possessed great wit and spirit, and “if she can temper the latter, will make an excellent woman, and a great housewife; but if she cannot govern the greatness of her spirit, it will make her proud, imperious, and revengeful.”
Frances, he wrote, possessed great confidence: “If she be kept in some awe, especially in relation to lying and deceiving, she will make a good woman and a good housewife.”
Ann, he wrote, possessed a “soft nature.” “She must not see plays, read comedies, or love books or romances, nor hear nor learn ballads or idle songs, especially such as are wanton or concerning love-matters, for they will make too deep an impression upon her mind.”
Hale complained in his letter that young women “make it their business to paint or patch their faces, to curl their locks, and to find out the newest and costliest fashions.” And with that, he was just getting started. Hale followed with a 160-word sentence that is a marvel in its depth of disdain.
“If they rise in the morning before ten of the clock, the morning is spent between the comb, and the glass, and the box of patches; though they know not how to make provision for it themselves, they must have choice diet provided for them, and when they are ready, the next business is to come down, and sit in a rubbed parlour till dinner come in; and, after dinner, either to cards, or to the exchange, or to the play, or to Hyde Park, or to an impertinent visit; and after supper, either to a ball or to cards; and at this rate they spend their time, from one end of the year to the other; and at the same rate they spend their parent’s or husband’s money or estates in costly clothes, new fashions, chargeable entertainments: their home is their prison, and they are never at rest in it, unless they have gallants and splendid company to entertain.”
Some observers have been taken aback that Alito referenced Hale. But not everyone was surprised. Eileen Hunt, a Notre Dame political science professor who has written extensively about Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the path-breaking 1792 treatise “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” tweeted:
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a conservative Supreme Court justice will cherry-pick an Enlightenment-era man as a timeless authority on reproductive rights but ignore #Wollstonecraft’s pivotal philosophical views on women, mothering, and the sexual double standard.”
Heather Ahearn of the American Federation of Teachers (front) tries to block the sign of Arrah Nielsen of the anti-feminist Independent Women's Forum (IWF), during a rally on April 19, 2005, announcing two bills in the House and Senate designed to help close the gender wage gap. (photo: Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images)
The pandemic has exacerbated this gender gap, with more than 10 percent of women reporting new caregiving responsibilities. The International Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development has called the disproportionate decline in women’s workforce participation, fueled by the demands of additional unpaid care work during the pandemic, a “momcession.”
As parents and mothers in particular struggled, federally-funded childcare, which would alleviate financial hardships from working while raising families, seemed like a genuine possibility. The Biden administration’s Build Back Better (BBB) bill, an estimated $2 trillion climate and social spending package that passed the House last year but stalled in the Senate, included breakthrough childcare and early education provisions that would increase access for most families.
However, special interest groups funded by corporations and the ultra-wealthy—like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the National Federation of Independent Business and Americans for Prosperity, all of which have close ties to libertarian billionaire Charles Koch—went all out in attacking Build Back Better.
Staffers from the Koch-funded “Independent Women’s Forum” (IWF) also attacked BBB, pejoratively referring to the bill as “Build Back Broke,” specifically going after its childcare and paid family and medical leave provisions.
IWF and its sister group, the “Independent Women’s Voice” (IWV), have put a woman’s face on the corporate-funded assault on pro-woman policies. IWF is a 501(c)(3) group that pushes out the austerity messaging favored by its funders, and IWV is its 501(c)(4) advocacy arm. IWF is a pay-to-play operation that has taken money from corporations and industries, like vaping and fossil fuel, and then written in favor of public policies these industries prefer without disclosing their financial relationship.
IWF and IWV seem to play a special role within the right-wing dark money infrastructure. (Dark money organizations receive money from donors whose identities are kept secret from the public to make significant expenditures to influence elections and government policy.)
In recent months, IWF fellows and staffers have appeared in the media, identified as mothers without revealing their ties, to promote their right-wing talking points. This tactic lends a woman’s face to anti-feminist policy positions while reproducing social inequalities for families across generations by opposing policies and structures that would advance equality and improve economic mobility.
On issue after issue—from paid leave, the Equality Act, the Equal Rights Amendment, and reauthorizing the Violence Against Women Act, all of which they oppose—IWF and IWV position themselves against policies favored by most women and that would benefit almost all women. So perhaps it should come as no surprise that IWV has received substantial donations from men. A rare glimpse into IWV’s funders in 2010, before donor disclosure laws became even weaker as a result of Citizens United and its progeny, showed that 89 percent of their reported donors were not women but actually wealthy white men.
In addition to Koch money, the right-wing Bradley Foundation, which financed groups that have fueled Trump’s Big Lie and has long pushed school privatization, funded IWF to develop messaging kits aimed at countering popular progressive policies like paid leave, federally funded childcare, and increasing the minimum wage. Since 2014, Bradley has donated $1.35 million to IWF.
IWF and IWV are able to carry through the free market extremist, anti-woman agenda of their wealthy donors by positioning themselves as “politically neutral” women’s groups, as The Nation reported.
Their veneer of neutrality helps to spread their right-wing messaging to larger audiences. In a media obsessed with presenting “both sides,” even when the facts or public sentiment are largely on one side of an issue, IWF and IWV get airtime in major news outlets. For example, IWF representatives have appeared frequently on PBS’s “To the Contrary” to present their right-wing position on healthcare access; defend Bill Cosby, even though 60 women accused him of sexual assault; demonize transgender athletes; and oppose women’s legal equality.
IWF and IWV’s assault on federally subsidized childcare is a case study in the way well-funded right-wing women can use their identities as mothers to weaponize disinformation about a popular progressive policy that has well-documented benefits.
A poll conducted by Data for Progress found that 70 percent of respondents supported universal childcare. Research also shows that the expansion of affordable childcare would likely increase full-time, year-round employment for women without a college education by 31 percent. Reliable and affordable early childhood education and care has also been shown to help parents get and keep jobs, increase women’s lifetime earnings, and reduce the earnings gap between women and men. Such programs would greatly benefit women of color, who have less access and greater financial barriers to childcare support.
Despite their professed dedication to advancing policies that “enhance women’s … well-being,” IWV spent an estimated $20,000 on Facebook ads that reached more than 1.5 million people attacking Build Back Better’s childcare provision.
Carrie Lukas, IWF’s leader, also testified twice in 2022 on the topic of childcare in congressional hearings. She used the opportunity to demean government-funded social programs and argue against any public policy changes “that would make our childcare and preschools function more like our K-12 public schools.”
Her hit against K-12 schools is no surprise, as Lukas specifically has absurdly claimed that Democrats indoctrinate toddlers through federal childcare programs. And notably, many of IWF and IWV’s funders—like the Bradley Foundation, ALEC, the Koch network, and former Trump Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos’s American Federation for Children—are outspoken proponents of so-called “school choice.” That phrase is a rhetorical device school privatizers often employ to justify the funneling of resources from public schools to privately-administered institutions.
The current arrangement that leaves families to fend for themselves on childcare subsidies and other pro-woman policies is not inevitable. It is the product of choices fueled by pressure campaigns of groups beholden to billionaires and other elites. And it’s well past the time that people elected to represent us start supporting the intersectional feminist fight for childcare, an important step toward socioeconomic and political equity in this country.
Exhausted workers, who bring dead bodies for cremation, sit on the rear step of an ambulance inside a crematorium, in New Delhi, India, Saturday, April 24, 2021. (photo: Altaf Qadri/AP)
The World Health Organization says the coronavirus pandemic has now caused an excess of 15 million deaths globally. We look at how staggering death counts reveal broader political failures to protect public health and close the international vaccine gap. “Western governments and rich corporations who are based primarily in the West have done very little to advance vaccine inequity or to help the entire world end this pandemic faster,” says Achal Prabhala, coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, who adds that many poor countries have also not used all the policy tools at their disposal.
DR. SAMIRA ASMA: What we released today is a staggering number of 14.9 million excess deaths since the start of the pandemic, from January 2020 to December 2021, in a period of 24 months. What we also reported today is that the majority of these deaths occurred in Southeast Asia region, followed by Europe and the Americas.
AMY GOODMAN: The WHO report also suggests 4.7 million people have died in India alone from the pandemic — far higher than India’s official death toll at just over half a million. This all comes as NBC News reports the United States has passed a grim milestone with over 1 million official COVID deaths, though many public health officials say that, too, is an undercount.
We’re joined right now by two guests. Dr. Abraar Karan is an infectious disease doctor at Stanford University in California. And Achal Prabhala is the coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa. We normally speak to him in Bangalore, India, but he’s joining us today from South Africa.
Let’s begin with you, Achal. If you can talk about the massive undercount that we’re looking at, this number of 15 million people dead in the world because of the COVID pandemic?
ACHAL PRABHALA: Good morning, Amy, and good morning to your listeners.
I am surprised at the reaction of the Indian government, primarily, to the WHO report on excess deaths and its estimate of the true toll of the pandemic, especially in India. But it didn’t come as a surprise to anyone who was following mortality news through the pandemic. There have been previous estimates by independent researchers and magazines, such as The Economist, which also suggested that we were looking at numbers that were far, far higher than the official figures that were released, estimated.
I think that the most significant thing here for me as a citizen and a resident of India is the fact that the Indian government has so vociferously denied the numbers that the WHO released. And the reason that they’re loath to admit that nearly 5 million people, as opposed to a little over 500,000 people by their estimate, died during the pandemic possibly of COVID is that it points to a political failure. And the political failure is not restricted to the government’s actions or inactions during the pandemic alone, but points to a much broader political failure of failing to protect public health in the country. It’s, to me, an incredibly tragic reminder that if we can’t even count our dead or know them, how can we possibly be expected to keep them alive?
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about both places — usually you’re in India, now you’re in South Africa, both key places when it comes to the pandemic — how the governments have dealt with both differently and what you think needs to happen now. In the United States — and we’ll talk about this with Dr. Abraar Karan in a minute — with over a million deaths, this incredibly grim milestone, the funding for COVID, now far less than is being appropriated for Ukraine, has not even been approved, let alone vaccine access for the rest of the world.
ACHAL PRABHALA: There are a couple of really important things here, Amy, that are, I think, being buried under, of course, the other pressing emergencies that the world is dealing with, but also, I think, in a rush to declare the end of the pandemic in the hope that it may actually be over — and, of course, it’s not.
The first, I think, is that I’ve been on Democracy Now! several times talking about the ways in which Western governments and rich corporations who are based primarily in the West have done very little to advance vaccine inequity or to help the entire world end this pandemic faster. And often it’s set up as a death match between bad rich governments and good poor governments. I live, unfortunately, in a poor country. That’s just not the case. Poor countries have some culpability in this exercise. But they also have responsibility. And I think the thing that disappoints me a lot is that poor countries have failed, right through this pandemic, to take responsibility for what they could do themselves.
So, let’s take the TRIPS waiver, for instance. India and South Africa, about a year and a half ago, went to the World Trade Organization to ask for a pause, a temporary suspension of pharmaceutical monopolies, so that not just vaccines but things like Paxlovid, the new wonder drug from Pfizer, that, if taken a few days after being diagnosed with COVID, dramatically reduces your chance of dying due to COVID — so that drugs and vaccines in the pandemic could be more widely available. It’s been a year and a half. There’s been almost no movement — in fact, negative movement. And the truth is that India and South Africa are asking for permission to do something that they’re already allowed to do. They have a full legal right, under the World Trade Organization’s own rules and emergency exceptions, to create what we would call a national TRIPS waiver. And, in fact, the government of Brazil, surprisingly, did this last year in September without waiting for the World Trade Organization to tell them that it could do so. We’ve been asking a year and a half for permission to do something we’re already allowed to do. And at this stage of the pandemic, I think it’s ridiculous for poor countries to blame everything on what Western countries aren’t doing for them, and I think they have to begin to think very seriously about what they can do for themselves.
And the second piece of this puzzle, which I think also there’s been inaction around, is to figure out how to have access to mRNA technology. At the moment, mRNA vaccines are by far our best chance at protecting against transmission of the Omicron variant, which is why in the United States you get a Pfizer or Moderna vaccine as a booster, and you can’t actually get a J&J vaccine, or, in Europe, you can’t get an AstraZeneca vaccine as a booster. But that’s all we have. So the entire country of India has zero access to an mRNA vaccine today.
But more importantly, in about three or four months, the mRNA vaccine manufacturers are very likely to be the first vaccine makers to come up with an Omicron booster or a bivalent booster that works against Omicron and the Delta variant. They have plans to introduce these vaccines in the fall. At that point, that vaccine will be the only vaccine worth taking anywhere in the world. And 92 poor countries — about half the world’s population — has no access to those vaccines. In two years we’re likely to have things like an HIV vaccine on the mRNA platform, or cancer medicines of all kinds. None of those mRNA medicines and vaccines, now or in the future, are available to us.
But we also haven’t fully noticed, and the governments of these countries need to understand what they don’t have and figure out ways that they can get them. And I think a part of the reason that countries like India aren’t doing so is it is again an admission of political failure. The idea that they need something that they don’t have and have to work to get it, I think, points to a kind of weakness, which they don’t want to admit.
AMY GOODMAN: Of course, COVID is so personal for so many around the world. What about your own parents in India, Achal?
ACHAL PRABHALA: My parents are in their eighties, Amy. And a couple of weeks ago, they received an AstraZeneca vaccine as a booster, so they got their third shot. We don’t have fourth shots authorized in India as yet. A few weeks later, I became eligible to get the same booster, and I actually got that. I’m much younger than my parents; I don’t worry too much about myself. But my parents are in their eighties, and they, essentially, got a vaccine that provides a documented level of 0% protection against transmission of the Omicron variant, versus a slightly higher degree of protection had they been able to get an mRNA booster like you and your loved ones have got in the United States. That’s not available to us.
And the thing that irks me the most is that the government of India hasn’t noticed. The government of India hasn’t done anything about creating access to mRNA vaccines now and the mRNA technology in the future to protect us. And very few other poor countries have. And this strikes me as absurd, because what they’re doing, essentially, is trying to delay the sort of eventual failure of their efforts to contain this pandemic within their countries.
AMY GOODMAN: You’re in South Africa, usually in India, because you’re making a film, about what?
ACHAL PRABHALA: I’m making a film on how 25 years of pharmaceutical monopolies have wreaked harm around the world in unprecedented levels and fundamentally changed the world in ways that are yet to be resolved, in ways that were evident in pockets of people who had HIV or hepatitis C or certain kinds of cancers, but then, once the pandemic hit, became a universal concern, which is yet to be resolved but is a powerful force in the world that’s been shaping it in a way that I think very few of us have noticed.
AMY GOODMAN: Achal Prabhala is coordinator of AccessIBSA. IBSA stands for I-B-S-A, India, Brazil, South Africa.
India. (photo: Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images)
Soon after I arrived in the eastern megacity of Kolkata in February, temperatures began climbing. They always do when India’s short winter turns into an early spring. But then they kept rising.
I was fortunate to have any air-conditioning at all. Most of India’s 1.4 billion people would consider themselves lucky to have a fan and the electricity to run one. A ride in a three-wheel tuk-tuk feels like having a blow-dryer directed straight at your face. The inside of a slum dweller’s windowless room, often housing an entire family, can become a lethal hotbox. Health authorities have reported hundreds of deaths across the country from heatstroke, but the actual number is likely to be far higher.
The only saving grace, as I write now from the northern state of Punjab, is that the unseasonable spring heat has come before the monsoon rains. Although that’s led to drought conditions in some places, it has also kept humidity levels low enough for India to largely avoid a national spike in deaths from heatstroke. For the country’s health and climate experts trying to plan for global warming, the “wet bulb” temperature is the danger they fear most. This deadly combination of heat and humidity, which prevents a human body from cooling itself by sweating, is a huge looming threat for South Asia’s wet season, experts say. Although climate scientists are still puzzling out the precise details of global warming’s role in India’s current heat wave, the correlation is clear enough: Spells of blistering heat such as this are becoming a regular feature of South Asia’s weather, rather than a once-in-a-decade-or-more crisis.
The heat wave has been severe enough to make international headlines, but it is far from the only impact of climate change I’ve witnessed in the first half of my six-month journey through the country to research and report on climate change and the energy transition India is undertaking in an attempt to mitigate it. India is at the sharp end of this predicament. A recent report by Standard & Poor’s concluded that South Asia’s economies are the world’s most vulnerable—10 times more exposed to global-warming threats over the coming decades, the consultants estimated, than the least vulnerable countries, mostly in Europe.
During a visit to the sprawling Sundarbans mangrove swamp, part of the world’s largest tidal estuary, where several great rivers meet the Bay of Bengal, I saw for myself how rising sea levels and more frequent and intense cyclones are helping destroy what is not only a complex and sensitive ecosystem but also a major carbon sink. One island in the estuary, Ghoramara—pounded by four major cyclones from 2019 to 2021—has lost about half its landmass and more than half its population in recent decades. A tropical storm last year submerged the entire island under several feet of churning water. Thousands of residents were forced to take refuge in a school shelter. Though inches above the floodwaters, they escaped with their lives but lost practically everything else, including personal effects and the school’s textbooks.
Nearly a year on from the disaster, I met Ajiman Bibi, a 60-year-old mother of five who was born on the island. As we talked, she spread out grain to dry on a blanket in front of her makeshift shelter. “If the government didn’t give this to us, we would have nothing,” she told me.
Continuing my journey, mostly by train, to the tea-producing slopes of Darjeeling in the foothills of the Himalayas, I saw the damage from last October’s shattering rainfall—a phenomenon associated with a warming climate. The autumn “rain bomb,” in which a month’s worth of precipitation fell in a single day, caused landslides that cut a path down the mountainside still visible from across the valley. Tea producers told me how irregular rains and higher temperatures, especially at night, have severely challenged the delicate crop in recent years, threatening the entire industry.
How the country meets an escalating demand for energy is a problem the whole world must reckon with.
Here in Punjab, India’s breadbasket, wheat farmers who were looking forward to a bumper harvest in a year when prices have been boosted ahead of reduced yields from Ukraine have seen crop losses amid the searing heat. This is not just disappointing for them but, as The Atlantic’s Weekly Planet newsletter recently noted, deeply concerning for countries facing worldwide food shortages in coming months. The state’s power minister said electricity demand had jumped 40 percent, year on year, as people ran fans and AC units at home and industrial production picked up after COVID. Railways canceled dozens of passenger trains in order to rush coal shipments to power plants trying to avoid blackouts.
Wherever I go, I expect to encounter more signs of climate change. In the northern Himalayas, rapidly rising winter temperatures have thrown snowfall patterns into disarray and are causing glaciers to melt. Down south, cities such as Chennai are plagued by both drought and flooding, depending on the season.
In the face of these mounting challenges, Indians are scrambling to adapt. Cities have implemented “heat action plans,” halting some outdoor work and prompting special measures to distribute water. In Darjeeling, tea growers have turned to organic-farming techniques, partly to make their estates more resilient against the gyrating weather patterns.
“Everybody now is trying to work to mitigate the climate challenges,” Kaushik Das, an experienced manager for the Ambootia Group, told me as we drove through the Chongtong estate he oversees.
And in the Sundarbans, I met researchers who were studying how to restore the degraded mangrove habitats—as a crucial natural barrier against the rising sea level and tidal surges that accompany cyclones. Still, even if such strategies have further room to run, there are limits to adaptation. Solutions to climate change are also needed.
India has committed publicly to generating half of its energy from renewable resources by 2030 and aims to install 500 gigawatts of renewable capacity by then. That’s a huge undertaking, building from a capacity of about 150 gigawatts today. India has added renewable energy at a faster clip than any other large country in the world, including an 11-fold increase in solar-generating capacity over the past five years, but it is playing a seemingly perpetual game of catch-up.
According to the International Energy Agency, as a developing nation, with large swaths of its population still living in poverty, India will account for more energy-consumption growth than any other country from now until 2040. To make that happen while scaling back on coal, the country will need to grow renewables much faster still to meet its pledge to reach “net-zero” emissions by 2070. This will require major foreign investment, which is becoming more active in India, but meeting the net-zero target is a daunting task.
On top of the heat wave, India’s energy industry has been rattled by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. India imports more than 80 percent of its oil, so the cost of meeting demand is creating a yawning current account deficit. The prices of gas shipments from abroad—a vital input in manufacturing fertilizer—have similarly shot up. That, too, is hammering the federal budget as the government boosts subsidies to keep prices stable for struggling farmers.
All of this casts a pall over pressing global climate negotiations. This fall, national delegates will assemble in Egypt for the 27th United Nations climate-change gathering known as the Conference of the Parties. Last year’s COP26, held in Glasgow, Scotland, ended on a sour note when India, cheered on by China, forced a watering-down of the conference’s ambitions to cut the use of coal (China and India are the world’s top two users). The move came after India’s and other developing countries’ acute frustration over the abject failure, yet again, of the world’s wealthier, industrialized nations to make good on a promise to deliver $100 billion annually to help them deal with climate change.
Those tensions were already likely to resurface at COP27. This spring’s heat wave in India is already ratcheting up the pressure. As Indian officials are quick to note, the country may be the world’s third-largest greenhouse-gas emitter now, but it is a latecomer, and its share of the warming gases accumulated in the atmosphere is just 3.4 percent, compared with the U.S.’s 20 percent and fast-growing China’s 11.4 percent. Although the developing world played little part in causing global warming, this is where the toll will be the worst.
A thundershower this week brought a welcome break in the weather here in Punjab, at least for now. But without new commitment from the developed world to bear more of the costs of climate change, India’s spring heat wave will still be felt in the fall.
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