Save the Children Report Ranks Best and Worst Places to Be a Mother: U.S. Drops to 31st . . .
If you read this report, can you not be radicalized by its findings?
Countries faring the worst were those affected by humanitarian crises . . Worldwide, more than half of all maternal and child deaths occur in areas made more fragile by conflict and disasters.
If you are an American, can you not be saddened and embarrassed that in just 15 years the U.S. has fallen from the top five in women’s health to 31st?
Since 2000, the risk that a 15-year-old girl will die during her lifetime from a maternal cause has increased by 50 percent in America . . .
A coinciding study on the same subject, Global, regional, and national levels and causes of maternal mortality during 1990-2013 . . . (The Lancet, 2 May 2014), ranks the U.S. even lower, 60th, and reveals similar sad statistics for the U.S. For example, African-American mothers are more than 3 times as likely to die as a result of pregnancy and childbirth than their white counterparts.
If you care about the future of the world, can you not get up off your couch and do something about bringing about change, even if its only for your own community?
But what of an underlying question:
WHY is women’s healthcare in this country in retrograde?
Citing the study reported in The Lancet, Robert Reich, political economist and former Labor Secretary in the Clinton Administration, again shows us why he has quickly become our progressive guru in chief. His talent is awakening average people of the venality of the right-wing agenda, and he’s done so again with his column on women’s health, today, How the right wing is killing women.
But this tragic trend is also a clear matter of public choice.
Many of these high-poverty states are among the twenty-one that have so far refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government will cover 100 percent of the cost for the first three years and at least 90 percent thereafter.
So as the sputtering economy casts more and more women into near poverty, they can’t get the health care they need.
Several of these same states have also cut family planning, restricted abortions, and shuttered women’s health clinics.
Right-wing ideology is trumping the health needs of millions of Americans.
Let’s be perfectly clear: These policies are literally killing women.
Global women’s health is the mother of causes because so much of our civilization’s future depends on women’s wellbeing, and because of its direct ties to human rights. The true hallmark of any advanced civilization is how justifiably well women are accommodated in society’s rules, policies, and laws.
A final caveat: Consider, the battleground for equality rights begins and ends with women. There are no rights coming to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender people as long as the rights of women are under attack. There is zero separation of women’s issues and LGBT issues, they are one in the same, a fact often overlooked by LGBT people themselves.