Nevertheless, Persist
It’s been a long week, in big part because it began with the awful news that the Supreme Court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, jeopardizing the reproductive rights of tens of millions of women in this country. My first reaction was a type of shock. Though I was well-aware the court was likely to at least curtail abortion rights sometime this summer, it was still hard to process the leaked draft opinion emotionally.
As the news set in, my thoughts — and my reading — took me down a rabbit hole as I tried to figure out the far-reaching implications of the opinion, including the many ways it relates to environmental justice and the climate crisis.
The women who will be most impacted in the wake of a Roe reversal — lower-income women and women of color — already face disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards. They also face higher barriers to recovery following hurricanes and other natural disasters, which will become more frequent and more intense as the climate warms. If they must soon travel across state lines for abortions, those extreme weather events will increasingly pose an added barrier to access on top of economic ones. Not to mention the toll that climate change takes on maternal health.
The connections don’t end there. As data compiled by the youth organization Earth Uprising makes clear, we can thank the fossil fuel industry at least in part for the current make-up of the court. High donations from oil and gas companies correlate strongly with votes to confirm conservative judges. And that conservative majority has implications for more than abortion access. Environmentalists, for one, fear that the court’s willingness to overturn well-established precedent is a bad sign for West Virginia v. EPA, a case challenging the EPA’s authority to regulate carbon emissions that the court will decide this summer.
The news about Roe v. Wade got me down, there’s no denying that. But as the week has marched on, it’s also gotten me fired up. Because this is no time to throw in the towel. Now more than ever, it’s time to double-down on the fights for women’s rights and climate justice — fights that are each so essential in their own right, but also so clearly intertwined.
Zoe Loftus-Farren
Managing Editor, Earth Island Journal
Photo by: Max Elman
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