A committee of advisers recently recommended that the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) begin allowing sales of an over-the-counter (OTC) birth control pill—the first of its kind in the nation. All 17 members of the committee voted to recommend sales of Opill to the public, at a time when the Republican Party has carried out a widespread assault on reproductive health care. Although the FDA can decide whether or not to follow the committee’s recommendations, it rarely overrides it, and is unlikely to do so given President Joe Biden’s pledge to defend against “politically-driven attacks on women’s health.”

Margery Gass, one of the advisory committee members, who is an emerita professor at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, told the Washington Post, “I think this represents a landmark in our history of women’s health.” Not only is the expected legalization of Opill a step toward bringing the United States up to international standards—currently such pills are available in more than 100 countries worldwide—but it is also a useful political counterattack against a party leading a full-scale assault on the rights of everyone but rich white men. And, most importantly, it has the potential to buttress women’s economic independence.

By making the purchase of a contraceptive pill as easy and affordable as a trip to the drug store, birth control can become more accessible to those who are uninsured or underinsured, who may not have the time and resources to make an appointment with their OB-GYN, or who may live in rural areas where Republican officials have decimated local free abortion clinics. It is also likely to increase accessibility to the pill among young people of color.

There have been many studies in the U.S. examining the impact of access to birth control on women’s independence and educational achievements. A report by Planned Parenthood concluded that “Being able to get the pill before age 21 has been found to be the most influential factor in enabling women already in college to stay in college.”

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research reviewed the available evidence from many such studies and found that since prescription birth control pills began to be available in the U.S., they helped women stay out of poverty, enabled women to enter college and graduate in higher numbers, and empowered women to find jobs, keep them, and access more senior, higher-paying roles in their workplace.

It’s no wonder that a massive majority of women surveyed were in favor of an OTC pill being available in the U.S.—77 percent of women aged 18 to 49, as per a Kaiser Family Foundation survey in November 2022.

There was a time when Republicans were also fully in support of OTC birth control pills—in 2015 when they fought against the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that insurance companies cover the cost of the pill. Seeing an OTC pill as a weapon against Obamacare, GOP lawmakers argued that people should simply be able to buy the pill on their own. Democrats countered that it might become too expensive if insured people were forced to pay out of pocket. Indeed, the Affordable Care Act made birth control pills more affordable for insured women.

Setting aside the idea that all health care and medication should be tax-funded and cost nothing at the point of access—a radical notion that Medicare should be for all—an OTC contraceptive pill should supplement, not supplant prescription birth control, which the FDA is expected to shortly allow.

Moreover, legalizing an OTC contraceptive pill does not undo the damage of the ongoing GOP assault on abortion access. Florida became the latest state to ban abortions past six weeks into pregnancy—a stage at which pregnant people barely realize what has happened to their bodies. Governor Ron DeSantis signed the ban even before an earlier ban on abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy could take effect while it is being challenged in court. The Associated Press explained his reasoning in plain language: “The ban gives DeSantis a key political victory among Republican primary voters as he prepares to launch an expected presidential candidacy built on his national brand as a conservative standard bearer.”

Privileging fetal cells over the autonomy of the living, breathing human hosting those cells is not the real reason for the GOP’s attacks on abortion. The real reason is to obtain the political allegiance of a reliable subsection of anti-abortion fanatics among the U.S. voting public.

How fanatical are they?

One organization peddling flat-out lies in order to pave the way for ending access to contraception is Pulse Life Advocates. On its website are claims that are so preposterous, they veer on comical, such as, “Contraception increases likelihood of divorce,” and “Contraception kills babies.”

These same sort of zealots want the GOP to attack access to prescription birth control pills, as well as Plan B, the “morning-after” pill. The popularity of such pills offers little political protection—a majority of Americans have continued to support access to abortion and yet it is  no longer a right federally.

If the anti-abortionists were truly interested in protecting fetal cells, contraceptive pills would help ensure such cells were not generated in the first place. But of course, the ultimate agenda—usually couched in faux concern for women’s health—is to control women. Indeed, Pulse Life Advocates sees the birth control pill as akin to couples saying to god, “We want the physical pleasure of sex, but we want control, we want to leave you out of it.”

Um, yes. Wanting control over one’s body is a fundamental tenet of democracy. The anti-abortionists and their antiquated views on birth control represent medievalism, not modernity.

Mother Jones reported in May 2022 that such fundamentalist activists were plotting their next move against birth control pills and that one attendee at an anti-abortion conference called birth control, “Unbiblical and harmful to women’s bodies.”

Pregnancy is far more harmful to women’s bodies, education, careers, wages, and overall well-being than abortion or contraception. For those who choose to have children in spite of the disadvantages—people like me—the risks are worth the rewards. But the critical factor is choice.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

Author:   Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

Two recent exposés about child labor in the United States highlight how prevalent the once-outlawed practice has become. In February, the New York Times published an extensive investigative report by Hannah Dreier about scores of undocumented Central American children who were found to be working in food processing plants, construction projects, big farms, garment factories, and other job sites in 20 states around the country. Some were working 12 hours a day and many were not attending school.

A second story, revealed in a press release in early May by the U.S. Department of Labor, found more than 300 children working for three McDonald’s franchises operating dozens of restaurants in Kentucky. The children were working longer hours than legally permitted and tasked with jobs that were prohibited. Some were as young as 10 years old.

If such stories are becoming increasingly common, it is not because there is more attention being paid. An Economic Policy Institute (EPI) analysis found a nearly fourfold increase in labor violations involving children from 2015 to 2022.

While this says volumes about existing loopholes in labor law and enforcement, and about the state of the U.S. capitalist economy more broadly, there is another, even more disturbing dimension to child labor in the U.S. Lawmakers, mostly Republican ones, increasingly want to deregulate laws governing children in the workplace. According to EPI, “at least 10 states introduced or passed laws rolling back child labor protections in the past two years.”

Among them is Arkansas, whose GOP governor is the former White House press secretary under Donald Trump, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. In March, Sanders signed a new bill removing employer requirements to verify the age of children as young as 14 before hiring them, calling such protections “burdensome and obsolete.” Her Republican colleagues in Iowa and Wisconsin have passed similar laws. In Ohio, one Democrat even joined in to loosen the state’s child labor laws.

t’s already legal for teenagers to take on certain types of summer jobs and paid internships. In an ideal world, such employment can offer them valuable work experience in a safe environment and allow them to earn extra spending money to save up for nice things. Indeed, children from privileged backgrounds have traditionally been able to land such jobs over their less privileged counterparts, using family connections.

Republicans are invoking such benign jobs as babysitting or lifeguarding to claim that deregulation will help kids earn money to save up for a car or prom dress. But children’s well-being is not driving their desires to ease child labor laws. These lawmakers are hardly concerned about making it easier for teens to deliver newspapers or wash cars during summer vacation. We would be hard-pressed to imagine their 16-year-old children or grandchildren serving alcohol for six hours a day at a bar past 9 p.m. on a school night and letting the bar owner off the hook if that child gets injured on the job—which is what Iowa Republicans have now legalized.

What they appear to care about is businesses having a larger pool of vulnerable workers to exploit at a time when worker demands for higher wages and better working conditions are rising and strike activity has increased. Who’s more vulnerable than children, particularly undocumented and low-income ones?

The idea to undo labor laws protecting children goes back at least a decade when conservatives began dreaming about reviving the good old days of children being able to legally work tough jobs. The Cato Institute, a right-wing think tank that ought to be credited with saying the unthinkable out loud, published an essay in 2014 unironically titled, “A Case Against Child Labor Prohibitions.” In it, writer Benjamin Powell invokes an idea couched in the world of Charles Dickens’s dystopian literature: “Families who send their children to work in sweatshops do so because they are poor and it is the best available alternative open to them.” He added that the type of labor restrictions that protect children “only limits their options further and throws them into worse alternatives,” and that apparently “sweatshops play an important role” in the economic growth of societies.

Another right-wing think tank called the Acton Institute, one that obscures its agenda in religious thought, declared in 2016 that “Work is a gift our kids can handle.” The story is accompanied by a photo of a smiling, well-dressed, young white boy tending horses on a farm—a wholesome fantasy that is at odds with the abuse that Human Rights Watch researcher Margaret Wurth documented in a report on child labor in the U.S.: “a 17-year-old boy who had two fingers sliced off in an accident with a mowing machine. A 13-year-old girl felt so faint working 12-hour shifts in the heat that she had to hold herself up with a tobacco plant. An eighth grader said his eyes itched and burned when a farmer sprayed pesticides in a field near his worksite.” Wurth points out the “racist impacts” of labor law loopholes particularly on “Latinx children and families.”

The conservative organization Foundation for Government Accountability has also played a central role, taking the lead in convincing GOP lawmakers to loosen child labor laws. A Washington Post report credits the group for helping push through Arkansas’ new law and for lobbying Iowa and other states to do the same.

Now, advocates of fair labor standards are aghast, watching in horror at the Republican-led rollback of laws protecting children. Charlie Wishman, president of the Iowa AFL-CIO, told the Guardian newspaper, “It’s just crazy to me that we are re-litigating a lot of things that seem to have been settled 100, 120, or 140 years ago.”

Indeed, the past is precisely where grim lessons abound about how children suffer when there are no labor laws protecting them. One history article written in 2020 about the painstaking movement to regulate child labor begins optimistically: “At least in the United States, child labor is almost exclusively a thing of the past.” Stemming from a medieval mindset that children were the patriarchal property of their fathers, the young were pushed into servitude en masse during the Industrial Revolution where their small size and nimble fingers were as beneficial to employers as their inability to demand high wages or organize their workplace.

It was through the critical narrative work of a teacher and photographer named Lewis Hine, whose never-before-seen images of abused child workers between 1908 and 1924 helped to move public opinion, that labor laws were eventually changed. The 1938 Fair Labor Standards Act finally outlawed most child worker abuses at a federal level.

There was a time in the U.S. when, just a few decades ago, child labor was seen as a global problem of poorer nations where exploited children worked in unimaginable conditions making products for wealthy Westerners. A 1996 Life Magazine article famously offered a horrifying glimpse into the life of a Pakistani child making soccer balls for Nike. Child workers in Bangladeshi sweatshops making designer clothing spurred activism in the U.S. against such exploitation.

Garnering less attention were the loopholes in U.S. federal law allowing for child labor in the agricultural industry where hundreds of thousands of mostly immigrant children were found to be working on tobacco farms and elsewhere.

Rather than close these loopholes, like Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin wants to do with her newly introduced Child Labor Prevention Act, Republicans want to throw them wide open.

Debra Cronmiller, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin, said, “The notion that we would be solving some economic turmoil by allowing the expansion of child labor hours, is at best, ridiculous, and at worst, very detrimental to young people.” There is no labor shortage. There is simply an unwillingness on the part of profit-seeking companies to pay workers enough.

Republicans claim they care about protecting children. But their actions speak louder than words: they have made it easier for mass shooters to kill children in schools, and they have attacked the rights of LGBTQ children to play sports, to use the bathrooms of their choice, to access gender-affirming care, and to learn about their community. They have barred children from learning accurate history about racism and white supremacy and unleashed police into schools in spite of evidence that school cops are targeting Black and Brown children.

Seen as part of this larger trend, the push to overturn laws protecting labor abuses of children is perfectly in line with the GOP’s agenda to harm kids.

Author:   Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her forthcoming book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.

This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

The United States was founded on the declaration that all people are inherently endowed by their Creator with the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but what about the rest of life on the planet?

With climate-change-fueled droughts and environmental exploitation in the form of oil pipelines causing the depletion and contamination of watersheds and endangering plant and animal species, some in the legal community have decided to swim against the current of conventional law. They are fighting not only for the inalienable rights of humans but for the legal protection of nature.

Proponents of the Rights of Nature movement, which has been gaining momentum since 2006, believe that legal systems should ensure the rights of Earth’s natural environment, which includes all the flora and fauna in any given ecosystem, and put an emphasis on protection, restoration, and stewardship of nature instead of exploitation.

“Rights of Nature is cutting edge,” says tribal rights attorney Frank Bibeau. “It’s not the old paradigm, and people aren’t prepared for it.”

Bibeau, a member of the Anishinaabe or Ojibwe people, based in the White Earth Indian Reservation of northern Minnesota, has become an effective champion for the Rights of Nature because the concept is also a tenet of the Anishinaabe’s spiritual beliefs.

“When we were spiritual beings, the Creator petitioned all of the living creatures—the plants, animals, birds, and fish—and asked if they would be willing to give us substance and flesh, and they agreed,” says Bibeau. “So we have a covenant to watch out for each other because they make sure that we have everything that we need, so in turn, we watch out for them.”

After serving as a journalist for nearly two decades, Bibeau was encouraged by his friends to switch gears and attend law school.

“Sometimes your friends can see the logic better than you can see it yourself,” says Bibeau. “I had so many questions when I went to law school, and I found out that those professors did not know the answers.”

His legal questions centered not around constitutional law but Indian law, which serves as a way for Native Americans to govern themselves and interact legally with the U.S. government on a federal and state level.

Bibeau points out that although his people are the Anishinaabe, “Indian” is still the catch-all title used in the U.S. legal system for Indigenous Americans, however inaccurate.

“All of the treaties with my tribe refer to us as Chippewa, but we don’t call ourselves Chippewa,” says Bibeau. “We’re usually called the Ojibwe, or we call ourselves the Anishinaabe, but as far as Congress goes, they call all of the tribes collectively ‘Indians.’”

Early in his career, Bibeau was encouraged by his friend Winona LaDuke and Rights of Nature attorney Thomas Linzey to fight for the rights of the Mississippi River against the Line 3 pipeline replacement project, but for all of his effort, Bibeau couldn’t find a legal foothold to stop it.

“Sometimes you’re on the wrong road,” says Bibeau. “I was talking with Winona about it, and I told her this doesn’t make sense to me, and she said, ‘How about the rights of manoomin?’ I said to her, ‘I can do that easily.’”

Manoomin, or wild rice, is a culturally and spiritually significant plant for the Anishinaabe and serves as a staple food source alongside fish and maple syrup.

Through an 1837 treaty between Bibeau’s ancestors and the U.S. government, the Indigenous people ceded large portions of their land to the nascent country but kept the right to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice there.

“Wild rice is reserved specifically in the 1837 Treaty,” Bibeau says. “Article Five says that we reserve the right to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice on the lakes, rivers, and lands being ceded.”

Wild rice then became the legal foothold that Bibeau was searching for because as he learned in law school, treaties are recognized by the federal government as the supreme law of the land.

“It made wild rice, to me, invincible, in terms of the Rights of Nature,” says Bibeau.

Bibeau and others were able to codify manoomin’s rights into law in December 2018, when the White Earth Band of Ojibwe adopted the rights of manoomin tribal law, which recognized wild rice as having the right to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as establishing its inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.

Later in August 2021, the Tribal Court of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe filed an action on behalf of wild rice, the White Earth Band of Ojibwe, and several tribal members, represented by Bibeau and Linzey, to stop the State of Minnesota from allowing Enbridge Inc. from using 5 billion gallons of water for the construction of the Line 3 pipeline.

The plaintiffs argued that the diversion of the water for the oil pipeline would interfere with the rights of manoomin, and the rights of tribal members to use the land covered in the treaty to hunt, fish, and gather wild rice.

“That threw everybody off,” says Bibeau. “What we were able to demonstrate is that the federal courts will hold off and not dismiss our actions because we have a valid tribal court, we’ve made a law, and now it’s time for the court to determine whether or not we have jurisdiction over the state and over the water.”

Bibeau’s legal strategy to use treaty law and tribal law to sue entities outside of tribal land in the name of a sacred plant or animal has little legal precedent, and ultimately the case was dismissed by the White Earth Tribal Court of Appeals. Bibeau filed for reconsideration of the case, but that was denied in the summer of 2022.

Bibeau and his colleagues are now back in the legal library, trying to dial in the Rights of Nature law and judicial procedure.

“It’s almost like the pieces have been left here for me to find,” says Bibeau. “Our elders put different protections into place that have lasted and come back in a strong way.”

Rather than citing wild rice, Bibeau is devising ways to fight for nature’s rights on behalf of animals, specifically fish, which are sacred to a number of Indigenous groups and more well known to the general public than manoomin. He says the public can expect to see a legal action filed on behalf of fish in the next year, against a yet-to-be-determined target.

“The thing that I like about fish is that almost everyone knows what a fish looks like, and everyone knows what a dead fish looks like, and everyone knows what 1,000 dead fish look like,” says Bibeau. “They are the canary in the mine, except they are the fish in the water. As long as we can protect the fish, we’ll have good water, and the animals and plants will have good water and resources, and we’ll have a better chance to survive on the planet.”

Although the manoomin case was dismissed, Bibeau feels that it has brought much-needed attention to him and other Indigenous people fighting for nature’s rights, such as the Tohono O’odham people of Arizona who gave the saguaro cactus legal personhood in their tribal court in May 2021.

He says that with the growing number and interest in these cases, the Rights of Nature movement will continue to exist, flourish, and evolve into the future.

“I think there’s a whole other wave that’s going to come,” Bibeau says. “We’re going to make a difference. It just takes time.”

Author:  Aric Sleeper is an independent journalist whose work, which covers topics including labor, drug reform, food, and more, has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, the Santa Cruz Sentinel, the East Bay Times, the San Jose Mercury News, and other publications local to California’s Central Coast. In addition to his role as a community reporter, he has served as a government analyst and bookseller.