Dear Readers,
Today is Mother’s Day in the United States, and I’ve been thinking about just how much has changed, and not changed, for women since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade nearly two years ago.
My reflections come from a deep concern for all young women who are coming of age at a time when their choice about becoming a mother will be influenced and possibly determined by this return to an era of limited choices.
Since Roe was revoked, “26 states have banned or are likely to ban abortion, none of whom will then offer new mothers any paid family leave,” according to a recent report from The National Partnership for Women & Families.
The National Partnership for Women & Families and Paid Leave for All created this new map to show that in all of the states that have taken extreme measures to ban abortion, none of those states offer paid family leave.
In the absence of a federal paid leave policy, 14 states have created their own policies, but in states where women no longer have access to abortion, there’s also a real lack of support for them after they become mothers. Happy Mothers Day, indeed.
All of this is happening when so many young women are greatly worried about the potential of bringing a child into a world where the natural ecosystems that sustain life are no longer in balance.
As many of you know, mothers and their children are already the most impacted by the climate and nature crisis. The UN reports that women and girls “are at higher risk of food insecurity than boys and men, are more likely to die in extreme weather events, and are more likely to experience mental health impacts caused by climate change.”
Add to that the fact that higher temperatures, increased rainfall, and humidity create favorable conditions for diseases such as “malaria, dengue fever, and Zika virus, which can cause miscarriages, premature birth, and anemia among pregnant women.”
A habitable future for those yet to be born is questionable unless we all take up the choices of restoring, protecting and regenerating the earth, or continue on the path to an uninhabitable planet.
That is why I am so deeply committed to a women-led global campaign to restore earth’s ecosystems so that it is a livable home for everyone — now, and into the future. I hope you will join me in that campaign, named Project Dandelion, a healing, persistent, resilient plant that grows, welcomed or not, on every continent on the planet that is, of course, the Mother of us all.
Onward!
- Pat
Featured photo credit: Mother Earth is a work created by the organizers of the Mosaïcultures Internationales de Montréal competiton. Credit: Jonathan Cohen
