Hi,
I was on an international flight when the news that the U.S. Supreme Court officially reversed Roe v. Wade broke. While here in Italy, I’ve been spending my days touring around and learning about history as far back as the first century. So much human conflict of the past is present in our society today. It’s insane how we’ve made progress only to forget and retreat.
In today’s issue, I’m sharing a few quotes from Sheelah Kolhatkar’s New Yorker piece, The Devastating Economic Impacts of an Abortion Ban, as a reminder of progress lost and the potential devasting effects that our future may hold:
“Women who were able to delay motherhood through legal access to abortion were much more likely to finish college, pursue higher degrees, spend longer in the labor force, and enter higher-paying occupations; they were much less likely to fall into poverty later in life.”
“In 2014, forty-nine percent of all abortions were obtained by people who were below the federal poverty line. As of 2004, approximately a third were obtained by people who were white, thirty-seven percent by those who were Black, and twenty-two percent by Hispanic people. Black women are significantly more likely than white women to experience an unintended pregnancy, owing to disparities in the economy and the health-care system, and other factors; for the same group, childbirth is more dangerous. ‘Whether you believe abortion is a moral thing or not, the evidence is the evidence. [...] And the overwhelming thrust of the evidence is that this is going to negatively impact women and other pregnant people’s economic prospects, their mental health, their physical health, and ultimately their lives. The end of Roe v. Wade is likely going to have devastating fallout.’”
“The U.S. is one of the few nations that doesn’t guarantee paid leave to new parents. The cost of child care is prohibitively expensive, averaging more than a thousand dollars a month for infants. Research conducted by economists such as Claudia Goldin, at Harvard, and Francine Blau, at Cornell University, has shown that the gender pay gap begins to widen once women become mothers. The workplace protections that do exist for mothers apply mostly to people with college degrees; at the lower end of the economic spectrum, where hourly workers may be engaged in shift work with unpredictable hours, there are few safeguards in place.”
It’s strange to be so far away as this news continues to unfold. It’s a little bit like those early half-awake moments where you fully believe that the dream or nightmare you’ve just had is totally real. Perhaps, that’s the only way I can begin to wrap my head around this shocking news and what’s to come. Now more than ever, we need to come together, exercise our agency to hold the powerful accountable and fight to maintain our freedoms.
Your friend,
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1. 💰 Five Financial Things: Meditations on Money (HYG Original) 2. 🐒 All Their Apes Gone (Slate) Scammers are stealing those Bored Ape Yacht Club avatars in frankly ludicrous numbers. 3. 👨 The Ruthless Rise of a Gunmaker (Intelligencer) Daniel Defense established itself by allegedly undercutting a business partner and preying on American paranoia. 4. 🤓 A bookkeeping thing - Why Outsourcing Your Bookkeeping Will Save You Money (HYG Original) 5. 🌆 Inside LA’s Homeless Industrial Complex (The New Republic) Just 7 percent of the people in Los Angeles’s Echo Park encampment found permanent housing after it was cleared. Almost half are missing. Seven are dead. That’s not a failure of homelessness policy; it’s an example of the system working exactly as intended. 6. 💸 Buy Now. Pay (and Pay, and Pay, and Pay) Later. (Intelligencer) “The evisceration of the finances of a generation will suppress innovation and economic growth. Western capitalism once fueled the greatest increase in prosperity in history, giving us technological advances that would have seemed like magic a few generations ago. What are we doing with that abundance? Engineering ever more insidious ways to get young people to buy disposable clothes. Torched credit ratings and mounting debt deter people from starting families and businesses. Those are the building blocks of our society and economy, and without them, we will all pay later.” 7. 🤷♀️ The Funk of Poverty (Catapult) “My poverty is the most dangerous kind of poverty. It is religious. This is what I know, what my family and community know. In the middle of my imagination, I am a girl who will always be homeless, but in reality, I am an educated Black woman who rents an apartment in Downtown Columbus. Trying to outrun poverty has cost me a piece of my soul. A piece that needs rent more than it needs to be loved.” 8. ✉ An Heir, a $25 Million Giveaway and 30,000 Unopened Letters (The New York Times) Brody, whom Jones described as ‘hyper-privileged,’ had access to ‘all the most beautiful things, including this beautiful shiny idea that you could use wealth to solve literally all the problems of the world. But what he got back, and what I sense shocked him, is how little of that had touched the lives of the vast majority of people.’
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