The Great Recession's Continued Impact on Single California Moms

I don’t know about you, but as a single parent and a law student, the impact of this “economic downturn” is hitting me pretty hard. Although my son is 27, he had to resort to doing three retail jobs until he could find new work in his profession of environmental policy. Finally after 16 months, he landed the great job. However, a week before he was to begin getting benefits, they dropped his hours. I worry about what would happen to my little family unit if he had a major health crisis without health insurance. Because he is 27, I can’t insure him under the Obama plan which covers children up to age 26.

Its hard not earning an income going to school full-time and taking care of an aging parent, but I am in the home stretch and will complete law school in 2011. Mildly put, the job prospects are rather bleak for most third year law students. But, not being one to wallow in self-pity, I decided to do a bit of checking on how other women were doing in the great state of California. Not great.

"In 2009, California’s unmarried women with children were nearly twice as likely as their married counterparts – both men and women – to be unemployed, and their average weekly hours of work declined more than at any point in the last 20 years, diminishing their total earnings.” (California Budget Project May 2010.)

Concern over California’s 2010-2011 Budget is producing significant worry particularly for low income women and women of color. Unlike powerful business and industry, low- income women’s voices are not heard as loudly where government is concerned.

However, the California Coalition for Reproductive Freedom (CCRF), comprised of over 50 independent organizations representing California’s diverse communities is rightly focused on trying to preserve state programs for these women.

Some programs that are on the chopping block:

• Access for Infants and Mothers (AIM)*
• Every Woman Counts
• CalWORKS
• Family PACT
• Healthy Families
• Medi-Cal

These programs are part of low-income women’s safety net of critical health (particularly reproductive health) and human services.

According to CCRF,

“Preserving the safety net is critical to low-income women’s health and well-being, and necessary for preventing greater health disparities. Low-income women are four times more likely than higher-income women to report being in fair or poor health. Additionally, while one-third of California women ages 18-64 (34%) have low incomes, women of color are more likely to be low-income.”

In a great article by Judy Patrick, she says:

"Women make up more than three out of five adults enrolled in the major safety-net programs -- the CalWORKs Program, the Supplemental Security Income/State Supplementary Payment (SSI/SSP) Program, and the In-Home Supportive Services (IHSS) Program -- programs that help low-income women support their families, find jobs, and help those who are elderly or have disabilities remain safely in their homes.” (See also this article on Schwarzenegger's budget proposal.)

My worries look small in comparison to these women, because without these services, without this safety-net, they could find themselves in life-threatening situations and increase the health disparities especially among women of color. Women of all socio-economic classes must demand a budget that protects California's single moms and their families, who are struggling to make it through these tough economic times.

New restrictions on funding or elimination of programs for things like breast cancer screenings for the poor could result in more women getting breast cancer. This will create a situation where the taxpayer burden to pay for the care is higher. (It costs less to do a breast cancer screening than it does to treat breast cancer that has gone undetected and spread.) Additionally, without screenings available to women of color and lower socio-economic status, the medical community will be deprived of the very critical statistical information that leads to improved treatment or even preventative measures for cancer.

In the absence of funding abortions for the poor, a significant percentage of women will have pregnancies that would have otherwise been aborted. Costs to the taxpayer for programs that offer a first-trimester nonhospital abortion will always be far less than the cost of subsidizing prenatal and delivery services. There are also significant secondary costs of an unwanted birth, such as the additional time a woman spends on welfare and struggling to provide for her family trying to regain self-sufficiency.

When there are a higher number of uninsured people in California, they will wait until their health issues are serious before they seek care. The care will likely be in an emergency room at a much higher cost that routine care. The hospitals will need to pass on that cost to the folks that have insurance. So the wealthy and middle class will absorb the additional expense in the form of increased health premiums. So, without these less expensive programs, the rich will pay anyway.

Finally, there is the issue of solidarity. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, in a speech in Nashville, Tennessee in December 1962:

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

If privileged women allow a budget that disproportionally impacts poor women’s access to critical health care, it can erode access for all women.

After all, there is no guarantee that wealthy women will always remains so.

Ignoring rape?

It's been happening for decades, indeed centuries, but here is the latest example of legal and other state authorities failing to respond appropriately to rape. This New York Times story reports that an early email within the United Nations indicated that rapes were occurring in early August in a region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, but peacekeepers failed to respond in a timely fashion. Here's part of the story's lede:

The United Nations’ beleaguered peacekeeping mission in Congo, which costs more than a billion dollars a year but has failed to stop widespread violence against civilians, has been harshly criticized since the news broke 10 days ago that United Nations peacekeepers did not respond to a rebel attack in which nearly 200 women were raped.

According to an e-mail sent within United Nations agencies on July 30, as the attack was unfolding, United Nations officials knew that the rebels had infiltrated the area and that at least one woman had been raped.

* * *

Over the three days [following the email], from July 30 to Aug. 2, hundreds of F.D.L.R., along with gunmen from another rebel group, raped at least 179 women.

F.D.L.R. is the acronym for Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda, described as "a fearsome rebel group that includes former Rwandan genocidaires who have been hiding out in Congo for years and preying upon the local population." According to the NYTimes story, many women were gang raped in the presence of their families.

Sarah Palin as feminist? and how the Democrats should respond

This provocative and thoughtful op-ed by Anna Holmes and Rebecca Traister in today's New York Times caught my attention. It points out that--two years after Sarah Palin hit the national stage as John McCain's running mate--the left should be outraged not only at Palin's popularity, but at their own inaction and failure to promote and celebrate women leaders and candidates.

Holmes and Traister discuss the left's exasperation as Palin "enthrall[s] pundits and journalists who devote countless television hours and column inches to her every Twitter message and Facebook update."

What makes this all the more frustrating, of course, is that progressives helped to give Ms. Palin her start; her political career was a natural outgrowth of feminist successes. As a teen, she played basketball thanks to Title IX; as an adult, she enjoyed a professional life made possible by the involvement of her load-bearing husband Todd, entering Alaska’s governor’s mansion at 42 with four children in tow and giving birth to a fifth while there.

* * *

We progressives discount [Palin's] references to the women’s movement — not to mention her validity as a candidate — by looking down on her as a dim, opportunistic, mean-girl prom queen, all spunk and no policy muscle.

But Holmes and Traister say that the Democrats are partly to blame. They have failed to give Hilary Clinton her due, and they treat her best when she "plays well with others in the Senate or State Department." Thus Clinton, like Nancy Pelosi, is "about as eager to mount a Palin-style girl-powered campaign as ... to wear a miniskirt on the House floor." Proudly touting their "feminist credentials" or otherwise taking risks, Holmes and Traister assert, has become "taboo" for these second-wave feminist politicians. Holmes and Traister thus call for a "smart, unrelenting female, who, unlike Ms. Palin, wants to tear down, not reinforce, traditional ways of looking at women." But, they acknowledge that this will require a party "eager to discover, groom, promote and then cheer on such a progressive Palin."

Gender equality? Not really

Read Victoria Shannon's report in the New York Times here. She reports on a Pew Research Center poll, conducted in 22 nations in April and May, about gender equality. The poll found "that in both developing countries and wealthy ones, there is a pronounced gap between a belief in the equality of the sexes and how that translates into reality." Here's the story's lede:

People around the world say they firmly support equal rights for men and women, but many still believe men should get preference when it comes to good jobs, higher education or even in some cases the simple right to work outside the home, according to a new survey of 22 nations.

* * *

In nations where equal rights are already mandated, women seem stymied by a lack of real progress, the poll found.

“Women in the United States and Europe are shouldering major responsibilities at home and at work simultaneously, and this makes for stress and a low quality of life,” said Prof. Herminia Ibarra, co-author of the 2010 Corporate Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum.

No relief on work-family front--even for super-privileged professional golfers

Even professional golfers--even professional women golfers--are expected to be what Joan Williams has called "ideal workers." Read Karen Crouse's New York Times story about Cristie Kerr, age 32, here. She is the number 1 female golfer in the world, following the retirements of two other high profile women who retired to start families. An excerpt from the story follows:

For Kerr, the impediment to motherhood is golf, and there is no automatic relief. A woman’s athletic prime and her peak child-bearing years are like carbon copy pages in her reproductive calendar. A woman’s fertility peaks in her mid-20s and declines sharply after the age of 35, a real conundrum for golfers, whose games, like the courses they play, take years to mature.

Michael Whan, the LPGA Commission is quoted as saying that it's “a tough, aggressive, highly paid career path, and people struggle with what kind of competitor they want to be and what kind of mom they want to be. ... We try to make it possible to be a mom and be competitive, but we can’t make it where nobody leaves because, quite frankly, that’s personal choice.”

Women and work, at different ends of the privilege spectrum

Yesterday's New York Times Magazine ran this item by Lisa Belkin about the anticipated presence of three women on the U.S. Supreme Court, two of them single and childless. What, Belkin asks, has changed since mothers like Justices O'Connor and Ginsburg ascended to the high Court? Are women making progress? Have women's paths narrowed, even as they have ascended? Belkin writes:

Expectation brings obligation, and Sotomayor and Kagan were of the generation facing new tradeoffs. Pursue the career and sacrifice the family. Have the family and ratchet back the career. True, the stigma of not marrying or having children waned for this younger generation, making it more of a deliberate choice for some. But still, roads had to be chosen. There would be no taking five years off to stay home with your children [as O'Connor did] if you hoped for a seat on the Supreme Court.

So, there's a not terribly uplifting report from the more privileged end of the work-life(family?) conundrum.

At the other end are the working poor, like Alexandria Wallace, featured in today's NYTimes front-page story headlined "The New Poor: Cuts to Child Care Subsidy Thwart More Job Seekers." Wallace, 22 and a single mother, has left the work force because state cuts to subsidized child care have put her 3-year-old daughter on a waiting list for that care--along with 11,000 children. Here's an excerpt from Peter Goodman's story, which illustrates how the recession and associated cuts to state budgets have turned welfare reform on its head:

Despite a substantial increase in federal support for subsidized child care, which has enabled some states to stave off cuts, others have trimmed support, and most have failed to keep pace with rising demand, according to poverty experts and federal officials.

Goodman notes that cuts to child care subsidies challenge "the central tenet" of the 1996 welfare reform legislation: "low-income parents were forced to give up welfare checks and instead seek paychecks, while being promised support — not least, subsidized child care — that would enable them to work."

The story continues:

Now, in this moment of painful budget cuts, with Arizona and more than a dozen other states placing children eligible for subsidized child care on waiting lists, only two kinds of families are reliably securing aid: those under the supervision of child protective services — which looks after abuse and neglect cases — and those receiving cash assistance.

These reports show the landscape for working mothers to be rather fraught with pitfalls--regardless of the socioeconomic stratum into which they fall.