A Moment to Honor Those Who Sustain RSN
The problem of people who use Reader Supported News but will not contribute is so serious that it often overshadows the efforts of those who are quite willing to help sustain the organization, and there are many.
We are a long way from finished for August. Let’s take a moment, however, to thank sincerely our sustainers, large and small, each and every one.
In solidarity.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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It Ain't Over 'Til The Last Burger King Leaves Kandahar
ost won’t say it, so I will:
America has thankfully lost another war. Let’s make this the last.
This is nothing here to celebrate. This should only be a monumental gut-check moment of serious reflection and a desire to seek redemption for ourselves. We don’t need to spend a single minute right now analyzing how Biden has or has not messed up while bravely handling the end of this mess he was handed — including his incredible private negotiations all this week with the Taliban leaders to ensure that not a single enemy combatant from the occupying force (that would be us; e.g., U.S. soldiers and spies and embassy staff), will be harmed. And Biden so far has gotten every American and foreign journalist out alive, plus a promise from the Taliban that those who stay to cover it will not be harmed. And not a single one has! Usually a force like the Taliban rushes in killing every enemy in sight. That has not happened! And we will learn that it was because of the negotiating skills and smarts of the Biden team that there was no mass slaughter. This is not Dunkirk.
Dozens of planes have safely taken off all week — and not one of them has been shot down. None of our troops in this chaotic situation have been killed. Despite the breathless shrieks of panic from maleducated journalists who think they’re covering the Taliban of the 1990s (Jake Tapper on CNN keeps making references to “beheadings“ and how girls might be “kidnapped” and “raped” and forced to become “child brides”), none of this seems to be happening. I do not want to hear how we “need to study” what went wrong with this Taliban victory and our evacuation because (switching to all caps because I can’t scream this loud enough): WE ARE NEVER GOING TO FIND OURSELVES IN A SITUATION LIKE THIS AGAIN BECAUSE OUR DAYS OF INVADING AND TAKING OVER COUNTRIES MUST END. RIGHT? RIGHT!!
Just look at this:
Korea.
Vietnam.
Cambodia.
Iraq (1991).
Iraq (2003).
Afghanistan.
There are two themes that run through this list of countries we’ve invaded since World War II.
One, none of them ever invaded us or posed any kind of threat to our lives — the only true justification to ever use armed force.
And number two, they ain’t white. Since May 8, 1945, for some reason, we only kill people of color. Probably just a co-inky-dinky.
As with the Viet Cong in Vietnam, we were defeated in Afghanistan by a rag-tag army that did not own a single helicopter, not a single jet fighter, no stealth bombers, no missiles, no napalm, no Burger King at the PX, not one air conditioned tent — not one! — not a goddamn tank in sight, just a bunch of guys with beards in pick-up trucks firing bullets into the air. Oh, and one other similarity with Vietnam — it was their country! Not ours. We were the invaders. In Vietnam we killed 2 million people. In Afghanistan, estimates of the dead go as high as 250,000. In Iraq we killed nearly a million (going back to Bill Clinton’s civilian bombing campaign).
We spent over $2.4 trillion in Afghanistan for 20 years while the poor in America went without food, medical care, decent schools. The water in the Black-majority city of Flint was poisoned by the Governor. A thousand people shot by the police in the U.S. each year.
We sacrificed over 2,400 American lives to invade a country where Bin Laden was nowhere to be found. Bush said early on he no longer had any interest in capturing him. In 2011, Obama’s seal team found him in a house just down the road from Pakistan’s “West Point”. Who woulda thought!
What a tragic mess. Defund the military-industrial complex, defund the NSA, defund Homeland Security. They sent our young troops to their deaths. For shame! No Afghan attacked the World Trade Center. 15 of the 19 hijackers on 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia! Not from Afghanistan, not Iraq, not Iran. How come “Bandar Bush” — the Saudi Royal Family’s tender nickname for their longtime friend, George W. Bush — why didn’t Bush attack Saudi Arabia? Oh. Right. They have something we need. Fill ‘er up!
So, yes, we lost this stupid, senseless war and I’m happy that it has finally ended. Our fake Afghanistan Army couldn’t wait for us to leave — and, as soon as we did, the Afghan soldiers stripped off their fake Army costumes we gave them, threw them to the ground and spit on them. They joined the Taliban in the streets in celebration. The Taliban did not shoot a single one of them. The Afghan interpreters and others who colluded with the enemy, the USA, for 20 years — yes, they might be in trouble (just like if Russia invaded Alaska and a bunch of Alaskans collaborated with them and after the Russians left some Americans might want retribution from the collaborators). You get that, right?
The pundits on TV wail: “We’ve abandoned our Afghan helpers! No one will ever trust us again! No one will ever believe us! Our word is no good!!”
EXACTLY! Correct! Yessss! We should never be believed! Note to the rest of the world: You see us coming? RUN! Nothing but tragedy awaits you. Do NOT help us. If we sign a climate agreement, we will not follow it! If we sign a nuclear deal with your mullahs, don’t believe it. It only means we’re getting ready to bomb you. And you should know that when it comes to we, the American public, there is not a single morning where we ever wake up thinking about you or giving a rat’s ass whether 80% of your people live in a state of oppressive abject poverty. It’s always only about us, baby — and what YOU can do for US, for our AMERICAN WAY OF LIFE!
And by the way, make sure there’s always a roof where we can land that goddamn escape helicopter when we need to get the F outta Dodge!
It’s always Saigon Time in America.
P.S. May our troops and the Afghan civilians someday forgive us. Much condolences and love to all families who lost loved ones in this disgustingly sad war. I can only imagine how you all have felt this week. Nineteen of our American veterans commit suicide every single day. Please, don’t leave us. I/we will not abandon you. (If you need to talk to someone, call 800-273-8255).
And now for today’s “Rumble with Michael Moore” podcast. This episode is entitled, “Just Where the Heck Is Afghanistan? Name 3 of the 7 Countries It Borders.” (International law states that you cannot invade a country if more than 50% of your own people have no fucking clue where it is.)
My guests on my podcast are Vijay Prashad (who writes brilliantly about Empires and the Third World); U.S. Army Col. Ann Wright (ret.); and my friend and journalist from The Intercept, Jon Schwarz. We will tell you things about Afghanistan you haven’t heard before, especially in the last week.
(If you’ve never listened to a podcast, give this one a try! No one talks in soundbites, no one censors us, and you can listen to it anytime you want. And it’s free. All you have to do is hit the play arrow!)
Members of the Proud Boys and other right-wing demonstrators rally in Portland, Oregon. (photo: John Locher/AP)
Portland’s police force chose to stand back and stand by as Proud Boys who came to the city to fight with anti-fascists assaulted protesters and a right-wing gunman opened fire.
ortland narrowly avoided tragedy on Sunday as the city’s police force abandoned its duty to secure the streets and officers made no effort to stop assaults on residents by members of the far-right Proud Boys gang, many of whom had traveled from around the country to live out their fantasies of attacking anti-fascist protesters.
The absence of the police, in line with a policy on nonintervention announced beforehand by Portland Police Bureau Chief Chuck Lovell, reinforced a sense among anti-fascists that they were on their own. So when a right-wing gunman fired in the direction of black-clad protesters who had chased him away from their protest at gunpoint, it was shocking but perhaps not surprising that one of the anti-fascists fired back, according to witnesses.
Luckily, all eight shots missed their targets, and there were no reported injuries from the exchange of fire.
The shooting unfolded in broad daylight on a downtown street, in front of reporters who filmed it from multiple angles. Sean Beckner-Carmitchel, an activist and videographer from Los Angeles, captured the sequence of events in a thread he shared on Twitter.
The fact that the right-wing gunman — 65-year-old Dennis Anderson from the neighboring city of Gresham — was arrested within minutes by an undercover officer and two uniformed colleagues underscored for many protesters that the police could have intervened earlier but had chosen not to do so.
The Oregonian reported that Anderson — who was charged with unlawful use of a weapon and unlawful possession of a firearm before being released on bail — had been standing at the fringes of the anti-fascist protest for hours before the shooting and told one of the publication’s reporters that the left-wing activists were “the real fascists.”
The police said on Monday that they are looking for the person who fired back at Anderson and suspect that evidence, in the form of a bullet, might have been removed from the scene before they arrived.
Late Monday, Beckner-Carmitchel posted additional footage on Twitter which showed that at least one of the anti-fascists who chased Anderson away from their demonstration was armed with a handgun, and that Anderson then fired the first shot in the exchange of gunfire.
When officers finally did arrive at the scene of the shooting, they were met with sarcastic applause from several anti-fascist activists, including Dustin Brandon, who had been in the line of fire.
“Where were you guys, when you knew they were coming today?” Brandon asked one officer. “You could’ve prevented this.”
“You’re pointing at me,” one officer told Brandon. “I am not the chief of police.”
In a statement released on Friday, Lovell, who answers directly to Mayor Ted Wheeler, had stunned many Portland residents by telling protesters that the police would not protect them from right-wing violence. “This is our main message: if you are planning to come down to instigate fights with those you disagree with, don’t come,” Lovell said. “You should not expect to see police officers standing in the middle of the crowd trying to keep people apart. People should keep themselves apart and avoid physical confrontation.”
Rather than proactively policing the rally by a group devoted to political violence, Lovell only promised that his department was “prepared to monitor this event and may make arrests for crimes when resources allow.”
The gunfire came after a Proud Boys rally, devoted to the “political prisoners” of the January 6 Capitol attacks, about 10 miles from downtown earlier in the afternoon had devolved into violence, with attacks on left-wing protesters who fought back with paintballs, fireworks, and pepper spray.
Given what Zakir Khan, a Portland civil rights advocate, described as “a red carpet and a note saying we won’t intervene,” the Proud Boys brutally assaulted several anti-fascists who showed up at their rally in the city’s northeastern Parkrose neighborhood.
In one incident, which was documented by a number of journalists, several Proud Boys attacked the parked vehicle of a man who seemed to be carrying water and shields for anti-fascist protesters. After they smashed the truck’s windows, one of the members of the right-wing gang climbed inside to beat the man and then shoved him as he tried to run away.
At another point in the afternoon, a group of Proud Boys stopped a white van and forced its driver from the cab by firing an airsoft rifle and pepper spray at point-blank range. When the van then rolled slowly forward into a hedge after the driver fled, propagandists for the right-wing group tried to claim that it was an “antifa van that crashed into the rally.”
With no police around to stop them, the Proud Boys then smashed the van’s windows and flipped it over, shouting “fuck antifa” and painting “FAFO,” short for “Fuck Around and Find Out,” on its roof.
Although multiple assaults were captured on video by journalists on the scene, the police failed to intervene or even appear in the Parkrose neighborhood. Wheeler’s spokesperson, Sara Morrissey, told Oregon Public Broadcasting that officers were nearby and ready to intervene if the violence had crossed some unstated boundary. “Had the situation worsened, police would have taken action immediately,” she said.
There were also reports of attacks on journalists from both right-wing and left-wing activists.
While the gun battle in downtown Portland frightened and enraged many residents of the city, one national news outlet that had previously devoted hours of coverage to protest violence there, Fox News, barely mentioned that a right-wing gunman had opened fire on left-wing protesters on Sunday.
Even though several prominent right-wing video journalists were on hand to cover the Proud Boys rally and anti-fascist protest, a brief report on the violence was the very last of 202 articles on the Fox News home page on Monday morning. The Fox report, which only mentioned the shooting in passing, and included none of the dramatic video of the incident, was headlined: “Antifa members throw explosives, disperse chemical spray in violent Portland riots.”
A patient hospitalized with COVID-19. (photo: BioSpace)
lexander Stockton, a producer on the Opinion Video team, explores two of the main reasons the number of Covid cases is soaring once again in the United States: vaccine hesitancy and refusal.
“It’s hard to watch the pandemic drag on as Americans refuse the vaccine in the name of freedom,” he says.
Seeking understanding, Mr. Stockton travels to Mountain Home, Ark., in the Ozarks, a region with galloping contagion and — not unrelated — abysmal vaccination rates.
Bakersfield Police Department officers respond to an incident at Martin Luther King Jr. Park in southeast Bakersfield, California. (photo: Anne Daugherty/AP)
alifornia’s justice department has announced a court-enforced reform settlement with the Bakersfield police department, following a years-long state civil rights inquiry initiated after a 2015 Guardian investigation found that police in the state’s Kern county were the deadliest in America.
The settlement, known as a stipulated judgment or “consent decree”, was announced on Monday by the California attorney general, Rob Bonta, more than four years after the department commenced its investigation, and requires the police department to revise and reform its policies, overseen by an independent monitor.
The California justice department concluded that Bakersfield police “failed to uniformly and adequately enforce the law, in part because of defective or inadequate policies, practices, and procedures”. It noted that police had engaged in unreasonable use of force and fatal force, as well as unreasonable stops, searches and arrests.
The consent decree requires the department to revise its use-of-force guidance to focus its officers on de-escalation and proportionality; strengthen its use-of-force training for officers; strengthen investigations into officers’ use of force; and modify the use and training of police dogs.
Bonta labelled the court-enforced reforms as “both needed and necessary”.
In a statement, he said: “For Californians who are hurting, trust will not come back overnight – and we cannot afford to be complacent. We must continue to engage and stay on task. Justice demands it.”
The five-part Guardian investigation into Bakersfield police department and the Kern county sheriff’s office – the two largest law enforcement agencies in the county - revealed that the two departments had killed people at a higher rate than police in any other county in America during 2015 and unearthed a culture of violence, corruption and impunity within the agencies.
It was revealed that a number of officers had been involved in multiple fatal shootings over the years, that the majority of investigators examining police killings in the county were former department officers, and that the Kern county sheriff’s office had made multiple cash payments – sometimes as low as $200 – to women who had been sexually assaulted by it officers in order to buy their silence.
In December 2020 the Kern county sheriff’s office entered into a similar consent decree with the California DoJ, following a civil rights investigation that uncovered similar widespread failures in the department.
On Monday, attorneys working with police reform advocates in Bakersfield, including victims of fatal police violence in the city, welcomed the settlement but argued it fell short in a number of areas.
Stephanie Padilla, a staff attorney with ACLU Southern California, said: “We are glad that the state department of justice recognizes there are systemic problems with the Bakersfield police department. But this stipulated judgment doesn’t go nearly far enough.
“It will not, on its own, eliminate deeply harmful practices such as the use of canine force or discriminatory traffic stops for excessive force and intimidation, especially on Black and brown community members.”
Last week, the ACLU released an updated report that built on findings from a 2017 investigation that exposed evidence of continued excessive force by the two departments.
The new report found that Bakersfield PD had continued to use excessive force and pointed specifically to police canine attacks on unarmed people and fatal force incidents, which both continued at similar rates to when the California DoJ commenced its investigation and disproportionately affected Black and brown residents of the city.
“Unfortunately, over the past four years, BPD has maintained these same troubling practices, even as it has been under investigation by the California department of justice for civil rights violations,” the report concluded.
The consent decree does not equate to an admission of wrongdoing from the Bakersfield police department, and the judgment states the department continued to “deny each and every allegation” made by the state civil rights inquiry.
In a statement, the department’s chief, Greg Terry, said the city had agreed to the settlement “after much deliberation”.
“The decision came down to a choice between litigating the past or controlling our future, reassuring our community, and moving forward in a positive way,” Terry said.
Taliban fighters patrol the Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood in the city of Kabul, Afghanistan, Wednesday, Aug. 18, 2021. (photo: Rahmat Gul/AP)
Michelle Bachelet called on the Human Rights Council to closely monitor the Taliban, which took control of Afghanistan just more than a week ago, and to take “bold and vigorous action," according to The Associated Press.
“At this critical moment, the people of Afghanistan look to the Human Rights Council to defend and protect their rights,” she said. “I urge this council to take bold and vigorous action, commensurate with the gravity of this crisis, by establishing a dedicated mechanism to closely monitor the evolving human rights situation in Afghanistan.”
Bachelet referenced the possibility of the council appointing a commission of inquiry, fact-finding mission or special rapporteur in order to further watch the rights situation in Afghanistan, the AP noted.
She said that there have been reports of “summary executions” of former security forces and civilians as well as restrictions on women, recruitment of child soldiers and repression of peaceful protests under the Taliban, according to the news service.
"There are grave fears for women, for journalists and for the new generation of civil society leaders who have emerged in the past years," Bachelet said during an emergency session on Tuesday, which was held at the request of Pakistan and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, Reuters reported.
U.N. human rights experts released a joint statement agreeing with Bachelet's reports, saying that people within Afghanistan have begun hiding out in fear of reprisals.
"Searches, arrests, harassment and intimidation as well as seizures of property and reprisals are already being reported,” they said, according to Reuters.
The council is set to consider a will consider a Organisation of Islamic Cooperation draft resolution that shows concern about the incidents. It asks for Bachelet to provide the forum a report during its March 2022 session and calls for all parties to respect "the full and meaningful participation of women" and all human rights law.
"We were hoping for a stronger text, it is extremely minimalist and we are disappointed," a Western diplomat told Reuters.
Protesters attend an anti-government demonstration in support of abortion rights in Warsaw. (photo: Wojtek Radwanski/Getty Images)
hen Dominika Biernat took to the streets last October, joining the huge public protests against Poland’s near-total ban on abortion, little did she know that in a few months she would become one of its victims.
A single woman and a successful actress with one of Warsaw’s most renowned theatre companies, her pregnancy was not planned. But the father was a good friend and when she found out, the 39-year-old thought it could be one of her last chances to become a mother.
She bought a new flat in one of the city’s hip districts, confident that work with the theatre company would pick up again once COVID-19 restrictions were lifted. Then, as Poland entered a third pandemic lockdown, she went for a routine ultrasound scan that marked the beginning of some of the most trying months of her life.
“I remember that day I thought, I want to rewind my life to five minutes before,” Dominika recounts, amid the still-unpacked boxes and bare walls of her new flat. The empty kitchen shelves contrast with the pots and plants she has laid out neatly on the windowsill.
That day she found out the foetus had omphalocele, a condition that caused part of its intestines and liver to grow outside of the abdominal cavity.
“[The doctor] was just repeating, ‘oh my God, oh my God’,” she says. “When I asked her if she thought I’d have to terminate my pregnancy, immediately there was a change in her face.”
Until this year, a woman whose foetus was diagnosed with an irreversible disability or an incurable illness was able to choose whether to carry on with the pregnancy. But an October 2020 ruling by Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal banned abortion – already severely restricted – on those grounds. The ban came into effect in January. While women are not prosecuted for having an abortion in Poland, helping provide one carries up to three years in prison.
Dominika started compulsively researching the condition.
“I was reading articles, visiting doctors, at least five of them,” says Dominika, who wanted to know what the chances were of her unborn baby surviving and going on to lead a normal life. “And they just put me in this position … that I am a mum now.”
Dominika went through three weeks of uncertainty as doctor after doctor told her more tests were needed to determine whether the foetus was developing other related health conditions, such as heart problems.
“They weren’t very specific and they told me we would know everything after more exams,” Dominika says. “They will call you ‘mummy’, [direct you to] everything you need to do, and you have to follow them. And you are later and later in the weeks [of your pregnancy]. So the decision about abortion is much more difficult.”
Dominika read dozens of articles about omphalocele, about the rounds of post-birth surgery in a case so severe and the possible complications. But it was only when she got on the phone to a doctor from the Czech Republic, where abortion is legal, that some of the guilt that had been instilled in her since she first found out was eased. After the call, she finally made the decision to go through with an abortion.
“My friends said, ‘Dominika, just imagine you are from Czech Republic. What do you feel? You feel sad because you wanted to have a child, but you don’t have this thought that you are a bad person [for wanting to choose abortion]’,” she explains.
While the Catholic Church and the Polish government are supposed to be independent of each other, liberal Poles decry the Church’s increasing role in the country’s political life in support of the nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party. The party is thought by some to protect the Church and use it to appeal to socially conservative segments of this deeply divided nation. Since it lent its support to the Solidarity protest movement that led to the end of communist rule in Poland in the 1980s, the Catholic Church has portrayed itself as a defender of democracy in the country.
A 1993 law known in Poland as the “compromise” only allowed abortion in cases of rape, when the mother’s life or health was at risk, and – until January this year – when there was a severe foetal abnormality. In the European Union, only Malta has a more restrictive law.
Poland’s Constitutional Tribunal, however, ruled that allowing abortions for foetal abnormalities clashed with Article 38 of the Polish constitution, which protects the “right to life of every human being”. It applies even when there is little or no chance a baby will survive after birth.
The ruling sparked the largest protests Poland has seen since the fall of communism, with thousands joining marches in Warsaw and smaller cities around the country amid a second wave of the pandemic last October. Despite that, the ban came into effect in late January, when international media attention had faded and a strong police response dissuaded many people from protesting. Demonstrators argued the court’s decision was equivalent to banning abortion altogether in Poland, a country where 96 percent of all legal abortions in 2019 were due to foetal abnormalities.
Poland has been in a dispute with the EU over changes to its judiciary since PiS began implementing them in 2015; the party argued they were needed to stamp out corruption and the last remnants of the communist era. Critics, however, say they jeopardise the rule of law and democracy. Among the reforms implemented, changes to the way judges are appointed to the Constitutional Tribunal have led to most of them being picked by the governing party.
For the European Parliament, the ruling is “yet another example of the political takeover of the judiciary and the systemic collapse of the rule of law” in Poland.
Chilling effect
As Warsaw emerged from a third wave of the pandemic, the beginning of the summer in the city saw squares and the banks of the Vistula River fill with tourists and young people keen to go back to a semblance of normality. Veteran women’s rights activist Krystyna Kacpura, however, did not have that option.
Kacpura heads the Federation of Women and Family Planning (FEDERA), a small reproductive rights organisation founded in 1991. She has been working non-stop since the ban was announced, answering dozens of calls from women, some of them simply concerned about how they could be affected in the future. She says more than 2,000 women made contact with FEDERA between October and April alone.
“Every day we receive several calls from women from different parts of Poland,” Kacpura says in a park in the southern suburb of Warsaw, where she lives in a Soviet-era residential block. “They went from doctor to doctor, from hospital to hospital. And even if some gynaecologists … understand this difficult situation of women, they are so frightened. They’re afraid of being imprisoned or to lose their right to the profession.”
Her organisation, though, was targeted directly for its work. Earlier this year, she and her staff received emails with bomb and death threats from unknown senders, becoming one of at least seven women’s rights groups to come under fire since the protests, according to a March report by Human Rights Watch, which condemned the escalating threats to activists. The government responded (PDF) saying it was committed to the protection of human rights in Poland and that some of the cases had been referred to district prosecutors and were being investigated.
Meanwhile, Kacpura and others continue with their work, often walking the very thin line of being part of a network of pro-choice activists and medical professionals willing to provide assistance within the boundaries of the law.
“Sharing information, informing and educating people is not punishable,” Kacpura explains, adding that among other things, they are planning on organising legal workshops for gynaecologists and doctors aimed at explaining the boundaries of the new law and that, as she puts it, “it is not their duty to call the police”. In a handful of extreme cases, women have been able to get abortions on grounds that carrying on with the pregnancy would damage their mental health, after consulting a psychiatrist. But finding a hospital willing to perform the abortion remains difficult, even with medical evidence of serious mental health consequences. The most realistic option remains for women to travel abroad.
‘If you have money’
Polish women have been travelling to other European countries for abortions for years. Even before the ban, conscientious objection – the possibility that a doctor may refuse to perform an abortion based on their personal or religious beliefs – made legal abortions difficult. Despite the restrictive legislation, the United Nations estimates that anywhere between 80,000 and 180,000 informal abortions take place in Poland every year. The vast majority are self-managed medical abortions – with pills women buy online, and that the World Health Organization considers safe to practise at home in the early stages of pregnancy.
One consequence of the large-scale protests in October has been the increased availability of abortion information, widely shared by activists at the protests and beyond. The phone number of a helpline linked to an existing transnational network of activists was shared widely, with posters plastered everywhere from cities to small towns, and musicians posting catchy songs with the phone number online. According to Abortion Network Amsterdam, a group that supports women who do not have access to safe abortion, the number of Polish women contacting them has spiked since the ban, with the vast majority being foetal abnormality cases.
Still, women in small towns and traditionally conservative areas face additional stigma and struggle with anonymity. The pandemic made it even more difficult for those women to make excuses to travel abroad when all but essential travel was halted. While organisations that support women living in countries where abortion is banned or restricted do exist, access remains unequal.
“It’s very difficult for a woman living in small towns and villages to go to Netherlands, even if she is assisted and helped by some activists,” Kacpura says. “You know, she never travelled, she can’t understand that she has to go somewhere to end her difficult pregnancy.”
“So this is the kind of reproductive injustice in Poland, that you can buy a safe legal abortion if you have money,” Kacpura says.
Women’s uprising
It would be easy to miss 42-year-old Milena Kwiatkowska’s home in a residential neighbourhood in the small town of Myślibórz, in the northwestern Polish province of Pomerania, amid row after row of one-storey concrete houses with neatly-trimmed and decorated lawns.
But a poster of the All-Poland Women’s Strike (Ogólnopolski Strajk Kobiet) movement attached to the window of her living room leaves little room for doubt. By now, everyone in Poland is familiar with the black silhouette of a woman’s face struck by a bolt of red lightning. It is the symbol of the movement, founded in 2016, that was responsible for the first large women’s rights mobilisation known as the “black protests” as the Polish parliament, the Sejm, debated a law to introduce a total ban on abortion that year.
The bill was eventually rejected by the Sejm. But it was not until October 2020 that Milena – who, during the black protests five years before, felt she could not even entertain the thought of taking part in a demonstration – “inadvertently” became the leader of the protest movement in the town of just more than 11,000. The poster has been hanging on her window ever since, raising some eyebrows among the neighbours.
“In the beginning, I wasn’t interested in politics at all, I was busy with other things in life, but now … it is what it is,” says Milena, who was doing odd jobs before she lost her right leg due to pregnancy-induced thrombosis. She says that while she did not set out to be a protest leader, her booming voice – as well as her disability – made her into one.
“After one of the strikes, my [10-year-old] son came to me and said ‘oh there she is, my feminist mum’,” she recounts, bursting into a resounding laugh. It was the first time, she says, that she thought of herself as a feminist.
On one of the first nights of the October protests, Milena had been surprised to see more than 100 women taking to the streets in Myślibórz. “We knew about five people who said they would turn up, so we really didn’t expect such a crowd.”
More people joined in the days that followed. When Milena refused to pay a 500-zloty ($130) fine she received due to a ban on gatherings of more than five people during the lockdown, she was given a police summons. It further cemented her role as the symbol of the women’s strike in Myślibórz. She decided she would rather be dragged to court than pay, but the case has been pending since.
“It’s not only a matter of women who live in Warsaw or other big cities but small cities too, maybe even particularly small cities,” Milena says as she lights a cigarette, her white linen shirt contrasting with her tattooed arms. Two rabbits are eating their food in a corner of the living room, surrounded by a selection of knick-knacks and candles. A cat jumps onto her lap looking for some attention.
The Constitutional Tribunal ruling galvanised a large number of women all over the country, as many of those who supported the so-called “abortion compromise” felt the ban went too far. Milena had her own reasons for taking to the streets.
“I know what it is like to experience stillbirth and what women will have to go through under the new law because it happened to me twice,” says Milena, talking about the grave complications with her last two pregnancies that led to stillbirths at 33 and 28 weeks. Embracing the Polish women’s cause for her is evidently a way to unload some of the burden of those traumatic experiences, including the loss of her leg.
The nearest hospital for residents of Myślibórz is 40km (25 miles) away, she explains, while women have to travel to a nearby town to find a gynaecologist. Access to good reproductive healthcare, she says, is lacking outside cities. She believes that in at least one case, she should have been offered an abortion when it was clear that the foetus would not have survived, instead of waiting until it died.
“Women are treated like incubators. They are forced to keep the pregnancy even if the foetus is deformed and then give birth. Now I’m looking at it from a different perspective, I will not have any more kids, I can’t. But I’m thinking about my kids’ future now, and their future families,” she says, her eyes sparkling with a mixture of anger and hope.
‘This is terrifying’
Dr Maciej Socha is one of the few outspokenly pro-choice gynaecologists in Poland. He specialises in perinatology at a public hospital in the north of the country and runs his own private clinic. Over the years, he has overseen dozens of births and given prenatal care to women whose foetuses were diagnosed with birth defects.
Yet, since the ruling, he feels forced to behave just like an abortion objector would when he comes across patients with severe foetal abnormalities.
“Even if I am 100 percent sure that the baby will not be able to live normally after it is born, I now have to say no to the patient [considering an abortion] … you need to deal with this diagnosis,” he tells Al Jazeera on the phone from Gdańsk.
“[Some months] ago, I would have said … I’m not really convinced what this chilling effect is, but now I can observe it; you know, almost clinically. It’s just changing the way of thinking of my patients, the way of thinking of gynaecologists, the way of diagnosing procedures, the way people are working in this area. This is terrifying,” he says.
The Polish government has promised to increase funds for antenatal care, including psychological support for women diagnosed with foetal abnormalities and neonatal palliative care. Sixteen MPs have also put forward another draft law, currently going through the Sejm, that would require pregnant women diagnosed with such defects to be referred to antenatal hospices.
Rights groups including FEDERA are concerned these could become places where women could be monitored rather than helped, and their decisions influenced – arguing that a “room for crying” cannot be a substitute for a woman’s right to choose.
“This discussion is very, very strange in the Polish atmosphere,” Dr Socha argues, “because you’re not talking about the specific cases, you’re not talking about the individual, you’re just talking about this religious ideology.”
‘Modern crusaders’
The catalyst for the 2016 “black protest” was a civic law initiative drafted by a then little-known organisation called Ordo Iuris Institute for Legal Culture. The rejected proposal would have allowed abortion only to save the life of the mother, thereby banning it for rape victims as well.
Fast-forward four years and that small organisation is opening a university for legal studies – funded, for the time being, with private money. Conservative-leaning intellectuals from all over Europe and the US were present at a conference at the end of May to launch the new institution, whose aim is to respond to what the group sees as a “deepening crisis of academic life” and consolidate a network of Central European intellectuals sharing the same “classical values”.
Present at the launch were the Polish culture minister and deputy prime minister, Piotr Glinski, as well as the minister of education, Przemyslaw Czarnek, both from the Law and Justice party.
Speaker after speaker discussed how liberal values are being imposed on European societies, forsaking their Christian roots in the name of multiculturalism and a “gender ideology” imposed by the dominant political culture in the EU.
“We advocate for good solutions and inform public opinion about what is going on at the international level, which is not always in line with, for example, the Polish constitution,” one of Ordo Iuris’s spokespeople, Karolina Pawlowska, says on the sidelines of the conference, under the arches of a terraced building at the heart of Warsaw’s old town. At just 31, she is the director of Ordo Iuris’s International Law Center.
Founded in 2013, a lot of the think-tank’s work has revolved around sexual and reproductive rights. In 2017, it published a legal opinion which at the time called for widening prosecution for facilitating abortion to include those providing information about the procedure. The following year, it proposed giving the foetus rights to medical treatment. Ordo Iuris is also behind a local government charter on family rights, adopted by almost 100 towns and regions in Poland last year, that pledges to protect the rights of the traditional family by countering an alleged LGBTQ ideology.
According to Pawlowska, the Constitutional Tribunal’s ruling will not spell the end of the organisation’s work on reproductive rights. As she concedes that it has not stopped abortions, she thinks the next steps should be to make sure it is not merely a “facade law”.
“It is a victory, but we have to remember that it is also a first step and it is not the end of a struggle to defend the dignity of each human being,” she says. “It is a problem, that [abortion] is not recognised as a crime in many countries. But introducing some new provisions to the Polish penal code could help.”
One harsh critic of the organisation is Neil Datta, the secretary of the European Parliamentary Forum on Sexual and Reproductive Rights (EPF), a network of Brussels-based MPs. Datta, who has written several reports on the galaxy of organisations across Europe that promote similar ideas and their sources of funding, says none has as successfully aligned itself with state institutions as Ordo Iuris.
“You have many people involved with Ordo Iuris and related Ordo Iuris organisations now occupying state functions in Poland. To the point where the very founder of Ordo Iuris was Poland’s candidate to the European Court of Human Rights just earlier this year,” Datta, who is being sued by Ordo Iuris for allegedly misrepresenting the organisation, tells Al Jazeera.
Left alone with her choice
Despite pandemic restrictions, it took just a few days for Dominika to organise a trip to the Netherlands, where she made an appointment at a clinic specialising in late-term abortions.
It was week 15 of the pregnancy when she flew to Amsterdam in the middle of a third wave of the pandemic in April.
“The women there were so sad and nervous, stress[ed] and so in their own world,” Dominika recounts of her experience at the clinic. Some of the women around her spoke Polish, others spoke Dutch, she remembers, but she did not talk to them. “You don’t even have eye contact, it was strange.”
Due to COVID-19, she had to enter the clinic unaccompanied. None of her friends or family dared criticise her choice – not even her religious father – but she still felt alienated in the Netherlands, despite speaking English well and being able to communicate with the staff at the clinic.
“[I felt] this is something strange. Why am I going abroad to do this?”
The voices of other women speaking Polish to the doctors in the corridors or in other hospital rooms only amplified that feeling.
Four months on, Dominika is seeing a therapist to help her make sense of the experience, while the easing of pandemic restrictions is helping her get back to normal life and work.
“It was [so] hard to make the decision,” she says, even though she knows it was the right thing to do. “I felt that it’s not only about me, it’s also about the child and about his suffering.”
Firefighters from the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection's Placerville station battle the Sugar Fire, part of the Beckwourth Complex Fire, in Doyle, California, on July 9. (photo: Noah Berger/AP)
PG&E, one of the country’s largest utilities, wants to put 10,000 miles of lines underground.
n July 18, California’s Pacific Gas & Electric revealed that its electrical equipment might have sparked the Dixie Fire, a blaze that has since become the second-largest in the state’s history, torching 700,000 acres and destroying more than 1,200 structures. Three days later, PG&E, which emerged from bankruptcy last year after amassing some $30 billion worth of liabilities from wildfires, announced something more surprising: To prevent future blazes, the state’s largest utility plans to rip out 10,000 miles of overhead power lines in high fire risk areas and bury them underground.
The plan caps a years-long push by utilities to bury more power lines in the face of worsening weather and rising risks from climate change. According to PG&E, it’s the largest such effort ever announced by a U.S. utility: Pattie Poppe, the company’s CEO, described as a “moonshot” on a call with reporters, But whether PG&E can turn its announcement into action is a big “if,” as the utility has not estimated a timeline for the project, and it’s not clear that the benefits will outweigh the multi-billion dollar cost.
PG&E’s announcement, nearly two years after its equipment sparked the deadly Camp Fire, was “a clear recognition that something has to change,” said Julie McNamara, a senior energy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “But if this is not part of a holistic plan that is clearly reckoning with all of the challenges afoot, then this is a distraction.”
Burying power lines isn’t a new idea. The majority of electrical distribution lines, as well as the larger, higher voltage transmission lines that carry electrons over longer distances, remain overhead, said Sadrul Ula, an energy infrastructure researcher at the University of California, Riverside. But utilities have long buried lines in city centers, as well as parks and recreation areas like golf courses, largely for aesthetic reasons. Even though it can cost as much as ten times more than installing power lines overhead, utilities are now burying an increasing number of new lines. That includes power lines serving nearly all new residential and commercial developments in the U.S. They do it to meet customer preferences, help keep the lights on, reduce maintenance needs, and to protect against the growing threat of extreme weather.
Today, McNamara says, whenever a storm knocks out power lines and triggers outages, it kicks off a debate about whether the lines should be rebuilt underground. Similarly, as fire season worsens across the West and power lines are implicated in a growing number of destructive blazes, utilities are feeling pressure to move more of their equipment below ground.
Once buried, the risk of power lines starting fires is “very minimal,” Ula says. From that perspective, placing lines underground is a highly effective wildfire mitigation strategy. But the high cost means that companies rarely treat it as a silver bullet, instead using line burial in combination with cheaper retrofitting strategies, routine equipment maintenance, and vegetation clearing.
After its equipment sparked a series of deadly blazes in 2007, San Diego Gas and Electric launched a $3 billion effort to reduce wildfire risk that included “strategically undergrounding ” high-risk lines, flameproofing existing infrastructure by coating it in fire-resistant materials, and deploying sensors that shut off power to broken lines before they hit the ground. Portland General Electric and Puget Sound Energy, the largest utilities in Oregon and Washington state, respectively, are employing a similar set of strategies to help prevent their equipment starting fires, their spokespeople told Grist.
A spokesperson for Puget Sound Energy called burying power lines a “potential approach” that must be balanced with lower cost moves, like coating wires in insulating materials or replacing wooden poles with fire-resistant metal ones. Many factors go into determining whether a line is suitable for burial, with certain landscapes, like open farmland, posing fewer logistical challenges than areas with mountains and rivers, said Andrea Platt, a spokesperson for Portland General Electric.
“There’s an overlay of municipal codes and also easements and right of ways that all play a role, too,” Platt wrote in an email. “Since the costs of undergrounding are reflected in customer prices, we try to be judicious.”
When utilities do bury lines to reduce wildfire risk, their efforts tend to be measured in tens of miles rather than thousands. Since 2007, San Diego Gas and Electric has put 30 miles of high-risk lines underground as part of its wildfire strategy. It plans to bury an additional 25 miles this year, part of a ramp-up driven by the growing necessity of “public safety power shutoffs” to prevent overhead equipment from sparking fires. On a quarterly earnings call with investors last month, Poppe of PG&E said that the company is currently burying about 70 miles of power lines a year.
These numbers raise questions about how long it will take PG&E to hit its goal of getting 10,000 miles of high-risk lines in the ground. (At its current rate, it would take the company 143 years.) James Noonan, a PG&E spokesperson, told Grist that the company is focused on a “near term ramp up” and that within a few years, it hopes to be burying “well over 1,000 miles” of lines a year. While PG&E estimates it has more than 25,000 miles of power lines in state-designated “high fire-threat districts,” Noonan said it will focus on those in “elevated” and “extreme” zones of fire risk.
Perhaps the most important unanswered question about PG&E’s proposal is how much it will cost. In a June 30 filing to the California Public Utility Commission, the state agency that regulates privately owned utilities, the company projected that the cost of undergrounding lines in Butte County, an area ravaged by the North Complex fire last year, would be more than $4 million a mile through 2025. But Poppe told investors last month that the utility has “absolute evidence” that it can accomplish its larger goal for $2 million a mile, or $20 billion total, saying its rebuilding efforts in Butte County “cracked the code” on cheaper methods. The three weeks between that filing and PG&E’s announcement in July are “a short amount of time to have found such great savings,” said Mark Toney, who heads The Utility Reform Network, a California-based consumer advocacy group. Toney added that PG&E hasn’t filed any formal proposals with the commission detailing its plan, so it’s unclear where the savings would come from.
In response to questions from Grist, Noonan said that projects like the one in Butte County are “enabling the acceleration and expansion of undergrounding projects” by “showing us where we can be more efficient,” but declined to offer specifics. Poppe told investors that PG&E would be releasing more information in February, when the company files an annual update on its wildfire mitigation efforts.
What seems clear is that at least some of the cost of the project will be passed on to PG&E’s customers: Noonan said that the company will “leverage customer and public funding” to pay for power line burials. But that cost will eventually be largely offset by reduced need for fireproofing overhead equipment and clearing vegetation, Noonan said, tasks which are together “on par with the cost of undergrounding on a per mile basis.”
Toney is less optimistic. He worries that by diverting funds away from routine equipment maintenance and vegetation clearing — responsibilities the utility has a history of shirking — in order to bury more lines, the utility could inadvertently create more fire risk at the same time that it’s raising electric bills. Higher rates, in turn, could hinder the state’s attempts to slash carbon emissions, if rising electricity prices make residents reconsider switching to electric vehicles and appliances.
The California Public Utility Commission has the final say over any rate increases PG&E proposes. Terrie Prosper, a spokesperson for the commission, declined to say whether the regulator would consider allowing PG&E to raise rates to pay for the proposal but said it would “work with stakeholders, including PG&E, in a public process to ensure that the utility is making safety investments that are in the best interest of their customers and all Californians.”
If PG&E wants to make communities safer and more resilient to the changes ahead, its new proposal “has to be part of a fully integrated plan” that meets the challenges of our future climate in a way that is just and equitable, said McNamara of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “What that ultimately looks like, what the stakeholder process is, how high risk areas are prioritized, these are all open questions and critically important to get right.”
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