Tyb
The Press Has Never Taken Reproductive Health Seriously’: Hillary Clinton Lets Loose on Women’s Rights
Jenny Singer
February 20, 2020
Puerto Rico, which President Trump said received “too much aid” after the U.S. territory was devastated by hurricanes, is an area of focus for the Clinton Global Initiative. Its efforts there involve partnerships with more than 700 organizations to help the island recover from disaster while preparing for the inevitable destruction that future storms will bring. The partnerships range from strategizing sustainable disaster relief fundraising to facilitating the training of public school teachers to ensuring that disaster relief workers get access to quality mental health care.
When I spoke to Clinton, she was leaving a maternal community center, Mujeres Ayudando Madres (Centro MAM), or Women Assisting Mothers, which provides free services to pregnant women and new mothers. Another local, woman-volunteer-led group, Solar Libre, had installed a solar generator at Centro MAM, creating an emissions-free source of energy that can be quickly removed and preserved in the event of another hurricane. Paola Pagán Berrios, the field manager for Solar Libre, says she spent five months without electricity after Hurricane Maria, even though she doesn’t live in a rural area. The women-dominated apprenticeships run by Solar Libre “bring renewables into the island and also create more resiliency,” she says, “while decentralizing the production of electricity and giving people in the communities power and independence.”
Solar-powered midwives has big “this is the future liberals want” energy. It’s also pretty functional. “They’re taking care of women at our most vulnerable, namely pregnant and giving birth, and they’re also doing their part against climate change,” Clinton says of the two nonprofits.
Forever associated with pantsuits, hard choices, and some questionable sound bites, Clinton is sometimes labeled an old-school feminist. But she proudly says that the work she’s doing here is an example of intersectional feminism, the framework coined by theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw to describe how systems of discrimination link. “I am just absolutely convinced that you can’t talk about maternal mortality in the United States without talking about inequality and access to health care, unaffordability of health care, prejudice, racism, anti-immigrant attitudes,” Clinton says. “The more you work on issues like women’s rights, like climate change, like inequality, like economic justice, you can’t help but see how they intersect, how there is overlap. When you’re talking about trying to provide quality health care to expectant moms in Texas, you immediately run into racism and prejudice against immigrants and migrants.”
Motherhood and climate change feel intimately linked even for women who are fortunate enough to not yet feel the daily effects of climate change. For many millennial and Gen-Z women, the idea of bringing children onto an increasingly unlivable planet feels terrifying, or even inhumane. I float this idea past Clinton, who responds to it in much the same fashion as my own mother—not favorably.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/press-never-taken-reproductive-health-160803657.html