So as a human with reproductive organs, the leaked draft of a Supreme Court opinion overruling Roe v. Wade — and the constitutional right to abortion — is obviously personal to me. But it’s personal for another reason, too.

I come from a line of pro-choice advocates. My late grandmother, Eileen Alperstein, was on the board of a Planned Parenthood chapter. She fought to get an ad placed in The New York Times to shine a light on the issue, well before Roe v. Wade was settled.

She marched, too. At one of her last demonstrations before she passed away from breast cancer, she joined my mom and me — a toddler in a stroller — as our family marched on Washington to support the right to choose.

I’m proud to descend from brave people like these, who demanded reproductive freedom before women even had the right to open credit cards in their own name. Their hard work led to Roe, which Americans support upholding today by a 2 to 1 margin.

But thanks to an extremist minority, our right to bodily autonomy is on the verge of being dismantled. The results will be devastating.

Even if you don’t know it, you probably know someone who’s had an abortion. One in four women in this country have ended a pregnancy, whether because it was life-threatening, nonviable, unaffordable, or they simply didn’t want it.

Already, 26 states are likely to ban or restrict abortion once Roe is overturned. Each one could be more extreme than the last. Even now, a new Texas law offers offers a $10,000 bounty to anyone who reports someone they suspect has helped facilitate an abortion after six weeks.

Forget A Handmaid’s Tale — we’re at risk of going full Crucible: “I saw Goody Proctor at the clinic. Burn the witch!”

But Roe doesn’t just protect people seeking abortions. The rationale underpinning that ruling protects all of us from government interference in the most intimate areas of our lives: who we love, who we marry, and how and whether we choose to raise a family.

If Roe falls, the right to take birth control — something relied on by millions of people of child bearing age, including me — could also become a thing of the past. So could the right to love or marry someone of the same gender, or a different race. All of these deeply personal decisions could end up falling under the purview of politicians.

So how can we protect the right to choose?

One hope is that Congress will step up. For decades, champions like Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) have fought for legislation like the Women’s Health Protection Act, which codifies the right to choose and expands access to affordable reproductive healthcare for all Americans.

Failing that, Americans in individual states will need to fight hard to pass state-level legislation that protects the right to choose and so much else.

My mother and grandmother were born into a world where dangerous back alley abortions were a reality for millions. Institutions like Planned Parenthood existed alongside hidden networks like the Jane Collective, which secretly assisted with access to abortion services.

It wasn’t so long ago. I’ve been in marches where I carried signs with the same exact slogans that my mother, her sisters, and my late grandmother carried. I’ve fought for the same rights and protections that they did. And I’m furious that their victories are under dire threat.

But like millions in our movement, I’ve been anticipating this moment. I’m going to fight like hell.

And this time, it’s personal.

Via Otherwords.org

In January, a Tennessee county school board voted unanimously to ban Maus, a graphic novel by Art Spiegelamn about his parents’ experience in Auschwitz, from school classrooms. The ban, which complained about profanity and (mouse) nudity, came shortly before Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Decisions like these shortchange kids in every community.

Authors like Spiegelman didn’t just write (or illustrate) their books for a Jewish audience. They wrote for a wider audience of people who don’t know how horrific the Holocaust was, what caused it, or that the Holocaust didn’t kill only Jews.

Most books like these are disturbing. They’re supposed to be. Reading about how human beings — including infants — died so horrifically, you’re supposed to break down crying, asking: How could this have happened, and how can we ensure it never happens again?

That gut-wrenching sense of mourning — and the thrill for the people who fought back — is similar to how you should feel when you read other banned books about Black Americans being sold as human chattel, lynched, or blasted with water cannons as they protested for civil rights.

The people who want to ban Maus or The 1619 Project or any number of books about the lives of queer people or people of color are the very ones who need to read them.

Perhaps they don’t want to confront that ugliness because it means confronting something within themselves, their upbringing, or their communities that needs fixing. Confronting history also means recognizing that those legacies are far from over, a tough but crucial realization.

Fear and hatred have a close cousin in ignorance — it’s much easier to hate or fear someone you can’t see. And millions of Americans may have never met a Jewish person, a person of color, or an immigrant. But one of the best tools to defeat prejudice is education.

That’s why books like Maus and other frequently banned titles are so powerful and necessary. The Holocaust, after all, didn’t start with gas chambers and crematoriums. It started with book burnings, segregation, persecution, and hateful rhetoric from powerful politicians whom some dismissed as harmless buffoons — until it was too late.

If you’re hearing eerie echoes of that today, you’re not wrong. The January 6 insurrection featured a shameful parade of anti-Semitic groups and white supremacists who would like to reprise the Holocaust. For hateful people like the rioter who wore a “Camp Auschwitz” t-shirt, “Never Again” doesn’t resonate as much as “Never Enough.”

Genocide isn’t a thing of the past any more than racism. For decades, Holocaust survivors have shared their stories, because they know that those who don’t understand past horrors are doomed to repeat them. So have others who endured slavery, racism, and all kinds of discrimination.

Participating in our democracy requires confronting some of the awful and inconvenient truths about our society. You can’t change things for the better if you don’t understand why they shouldn’t remain the same.

That isn’t critical race theory. That’s basic critical thinking.

Instead of banning books, we should be asking: Why aren’t more school districts requiring students to read Holocaust memoirs like Night or Maus, Black stories like Between the World and Me, or reflections on Japanese-American internment camps like They Called Us Enemy?

All of these titles have been banned at some point. That’s why we need more parents of all backgrounds demanding that kids in their communities get a chance to learn from these stories.

We still need Black History Month because Black history isn’t treated like U.S. history. We still need Holocaust Remembrance Day because some people don’t know why we should remember it. And every day of the year, we still need books — to remind us of how we got here, of our common humanity, and of a better future we’re still seeking for everyone.

Olivia Alperstein is the media manager of the Institute for Policy Studies. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.

Via Otherwords.org

While Americans were quietly preparing to ring in the New Year, the EPA gave families a deadly present to start the year off wrong.

On December 28, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a proposal that would effectively weaken the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), which protect American families from mercury and other harmful air pollutants emitted by power plants.

The EPA “proposes to determine that it is not ‘appropriate and necessary’ to regulate” these emissions, the EPA wrote in a statement. This means that the regulations will lose the necessary legal mechanism that actually enables them to actually be enforced.

These regulations save a lot of lives — 11,000 every year, according to the EPA’s own data — and they prevent 130,000 asthma attacks annually. Stripping this regulatory power virtually guarantees more asthma attacks and more preventable deaths.

For families, those aren’t just numbers.

At any age, exposure to even small amounts of mercury can lead to serious health problems. The worst health impacts include irreparable brain development defects in babies and young children, and cancer, heart disease, lung disease, and premature death among people of all ages.

Infants, young children, and pregnant mothers are particularly vulnerable to mercury — as well as to arsenic, lead, dioxin, and acid gases, which are also regulated by MATS.

Before MATS, coal-fired power plants were the largest source of these pollutants. American families paid the price for lack of federal regulations.

I’m a fairly young person — I grew up with dire warnings about exposure to these chemicals. Yet despite overwhelming evidence of their health effects — and the longstanding availability of proven control technologies — it took over 20 years after the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments to establish federal regulations on power plant emissions of these harmful substances.

Through the MATS program, Congress identified approximately 180 hazardous air pollutants, including mercury, and directed the EPA to draft regulations governing their emissions from power plants.

The impact has been enormous. A significant majority of top power companies have already complied with MATS, for a fraction of the originally estimated cost. It’s estimated that over 5,000 emergency and hospital visits and 4,700 heart attacks have been prevented each year as a direct result of these vital regulations.

In fact, one of the EPA’s own resources on the program highlights its widespread benefits: “The benefits of MATS are widely distributed and are especially important to minority and low income populations who are disproportionately impacted by asthma and other debilitating health conditions,” it notes.

Undoing critical health and safety standards and putting more Americans in danger goes against the very purpose of the EPA. Even utility companies, who invested in complying with the standards, are calling for the EPA to keep MATS fully intact.

Younger generations deserve to grow up protected from these harmful and deadly substances. The EPA wants to make mercury and air toxics deadlier again. We can’t let that happen.

Via Otherwords.org

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

PBS NewsHour: “How Trump’s EPA is changing the public health benefits around mercury”

While Americans attended memorial services, the EPA announced plans to roll back regulations on methane — a powerful greenhouse gas that damages the world’s climate and threatens human health.

Methane carries up to 36 times more warming potential than carbon dioxide.

More methane emissions mean more lethal heat waves, extreme storms, rising sea levels, drought, and floods. They mean worsening air quality, water quality, and crop damage. They mean certain crops will lose nutritional value, and pest- and waterborne diseases will spread.

Specifically, the White House wants to kill the Obama administration’s 2016 New Source Performance Standards, which require oil and gas drillers to limit emissions of methane during fracking and flaring (the process of burning off gas that won’t be captured and transported).

It’s yet another big present to the oil and gas industry. Meanwhile, ordinary working families will pay the price, and so will their health. Children, the poor, the elderly, and those with a weak or impaired immune system are especially vulnerable.

The EPA itself agrees: Its own analysis concludes that the new proposed rules could send hundreds of thousands more tons of methane into the atmosphere. The EPA acknowledges further this would hurt thousands of people and rack up a huge cost in health care and agricultural damage.

There are short-term threats, too. Both fracking and flaring pose serious risks to nearby communities, including possible methane leaks.

Methane leaks are frequently accompanied by volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are known to be toxic and/or carcinogenic to humans.

VOCs carry a boatload of negative health impacts. For example, when combined with particulate matter in the presence of sunlight and heat, VOCs form ground-level ozone, a pollutant that aggravates chronic lung diseases, pre-existing heart problems, and asthma.

Put simply, they’re terrible for the air you breathe and the water you drink and the ground you walk on.

Fracking itself poses a danger. This past March, Physicians for Social Responsibility and Concerned Health Professionals of New York released a report showing that fracking increases the risk of serious medical conditions such as asthma, birth defects, and cancer.

A study by the Environmental Defense Fund found that the U.S. oil and gas industry emits 13 million metric tons of methane from its operations each year — nearly 60 percent more than currently estimated by the EPA.

This attempt by the EPA to roll back the methane rule undermines the health and safety of families and communities. It flies in the face of scientific and medical evidence that methane poses serious hazards to our climate and health.

We need more regulation of methane, not less.

The EPA is directly tasked with creating policies that protect human health and the environment. It’s reckless and irresponsible to weaken a rule that directly fulfills that mission.

Via Afterwords

Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative 3.0 License.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Donald Trump Admin Reportedly Making It Easier To Release Methane Into Air | Velshi & Ruhle | MSNBC

President Donald Trump has nominated Judge Brett Kavanaugh to replace former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Why should you care? Because everything from reproductive rights to voting, education, and health care is now at stake.

Kavanaugh, a judicial ideologue committed to pulling the Court further to the right, may also reverse decades of key rulings that uphold the constitutional right to personal liberty and autonomy.

All Americans say they value personal freedom, especially the right to make our own decisions about our private lives. Every day, we take that liberty for granted, from exercising our right to free speech to lighting up sparklers on the Fourth of July. Cherishing our liberties is as American as apple pie — but our right to exercise those liberties could be undone.

Nowhere is the issue more critical than on reproductive rights. Kavanaugh’s nomination will mean a major battle to undo key protections in Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court case that firmly established the right to access safe, legal abortion.

Striking down Roe would immediately outlaw abortion in states where pre-Roe anti-abortion laws are technically still on the books. As many as 22 states could be impacted over the course of two years.

That’s bad enough. But it’s also critical to remember the reasoning behind the historic 7-2 ruling: that people have a constitutional right to privacy.

Specifically, the Supreme Court upheld and enshrined the protections included in the First, Fourth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments, holding that those protections applied to decisions a person might make about their own body.

Ultimately, that decision informed several other critical rulings, including cases that forbade bans on same-sex romantic relationships and affirmed the right to same-sex marriage. According to Roe, the right to make your own choices is one of the founding principles that govern this country.

If Roe is overturned, that could set off a chain reaction that upends this critical foundation behind other landmark cases — both those that came before and those that came after.

The constitutional right to privacy informed Loving v. Virginia, which struck down criminalization of interracial marriage, and Griswold v. Connecticut, which enabled the legalization of contraceptives. The constitutional right to privacy also played a key role in Carpenter v. United States, a recent ruling that prohibits warrantless collection of cellphone users’ data without reasonable cause.

Judicial precedent set by the Supreme Court has built a solid foundation for interpretation of the law — but all it takes is a stacked court to have that foundation tumble like a house of cards.

Supreme Court appointments are for life. The rulings these justices make affect the entire judicial system for decades, if not centuries, to come. Each year, dozens of critical cases come before the court that deeply impact people’s rights and daily lives.

While outgoing Justice Anthony Kennedy wasn’t perfect, he was committed to upholding the personal right to privacy as enshrined in U.S. law. Kavanaugh, however, could roll back our hard-won freedoms — and those of future generations.

The Senate will be voting soon on whether to confirm Kavanaugh. A lot more than just a vacant bench hangs in the balance.

By Olivia Alperstein

Olivia Alperstein is the Deputy Director of Communications and Policy at Congressional Progressive Caucus Center. Distributed by OtherWords.org.

Via Otherwords.org

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Senate Democrats Push To Avert Brett Kavanaugh SCOTUS Appointment | AM Joy | MSNBC