Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer speaks at a gun violence prevention rally outside the U.S. Capitol in Washington, June 8, 2022. Senator Schumer says he believes a bipartisan deal on gun safety could pass as early as this week.

The gun safety bill released by a bipartisan group of senators on Tuesday is a modest piece of legislation. It does not include major items pushed by Democrats and gun control groups such as bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.

But it could still be a breakthrough effort in a Congress where gridlock so often rules the day. If it passes, both Republicans and Democrats could appeal to voters this fall by pointing to action taken in the wake of the worst school shooting in a decade, in contrast to the political bickering and gradually fading interest that has followed other school shootings in the United States.

Experts called it the most significant move by Congress in decades to overhaul or tweak the nation’s gun laws. It shows how continued efforts to push even limited political change can pay off, they said. 

“This is 26 years in the making, this framework. … This is a really meaningful step towards ending a period of inaction that cost too many lives,” says Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety.

Bill targets individuals, not guns

As outlined by lawmakers in an 80-page draft bill, the new Bipartisan Safer Communities Act focuses less on guns per se than on human factors that deal with gun acquisition and possession.

That is because moves for greater legal control of gun hardware stands virtually no chance of passage in the current closely divided Senate. But in the wake of the Uvalde tragedy, the more limited approach, crafted by a small bipartisan group of senators, appears able to attract the 10 Republican votes that would enable it to overcome a filibuster. In a preliminary vote on Tuesday night, 14 GOP senators voted to allow the bill to proceed to debate.

“We know there’s no such thing as a perfect piece of legislation,” said Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas and a leader of the bipartisan group. “We are imperfect human beings. But we have to try, and I believe this bill is a step in the right direction.”

Mary F. Calvert/Reuters

Republican Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, shown talking to reporters in the Capitol June 21, 2022, has said he felt a responsibility to act after the Uvalde school shooting. If it passes, the bipartisan bill he helped negotiate would be the first gun safety legislation since the mid-1990s.

The main provisions of the bill closely follow an outline of proposals released earlier this month.

The proposed legislation would enhance background checks on prospective gun purchasers under the age of 21, with a limit of 10 days for officials to review mental health records. It would also provide millions of dollars to states to help them pay for crisis protection programs such as extreme risk protection orders – often called “red flag” laws – that allow law enforcement to temporarily take the guns of people deemed a risk to themselves or others.

The law would close the so-called boyfriend loophole, adding serious dating partners to a federal law that bars domestic abusers from buying guns. The bipartisan group’s progress snagged for a time on the difficulties of defining a “dating partner.” Ultimately, they settled on simple language – “a recent or current dating partner” – that will allow courts to make a final decision based on the details of particular relationships involved.

Senators agreed to steer millions more in taxpayer money to mental health resources for schools and communities, and to strengthen school security. They also toughened penalties for people convicted of illegally purchasing a gun for someone barred from owning firearms.

“[The vote was] part of a widespread belief that we really need to do what we can do,” said Republican Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of the bipartisan group, on Wednesday. “There was a significant interest on both sides, and at the White House, of figuring what we we could do, and do something.”

Closing the boyfriend loophole will “definitely reduce” intimate partner homicides, according to Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. Red flag laws can prevent not just shootings of others but suicides as well, he adds.

The impact would have been greater if they had expanded background checks to all private firearms sales, and had more extensive bans for under-21 ownership of guns, according to Dr. Webster.

“But these measures are important,” he writes in an email.

Both parties can point to solutions

None of the 10 Republican senators who signed on to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act are likely to face pushback from conservative voters on their actions. Four of them are retiring: Senator Blunt, Rob Portman of Ohio, Richard Burr of North Carolina, and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania. The other six are not up for reelection in 2022.

Senator Cornyn was booed at a Texas state GOP convention last week. Delegates approved a resolution condemning the gun agreement he was then negotiating. But Mr. Cornyn has been in the Senate since 2002 and won 76% of the vote in his 2020 Republican primary. As senior senator in the state where the Uvalde school shooting occurred, he has said he feels a responsibility to respond to the tragedy. A teenage gunman killed 19 elementary school children and two teachers on May 24 in what the Texas Department of Public Safety this week characterized as an “abject failure” on the part of police.

“I pressed every senator to make their own decision ... but I’m grateful we got a solid vote,” said Senator Cornyn before getting on an elevator Wednesday. “We’re off to the races.”

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has come out in favor of the bill, calling it a “common sense package of popular steps.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer says the legislation is “urgently needed” and predicts it will pass by the end of the week.

What this reveals is that, in the wake of Uvalde, gun violence prevention has become politically important, says Mr. Suplina of Everytown for Gun Safety.

“Americans are demanding action on this issue,” he says.

The modest nature of the action was foreordained. Senator Cornyn said going in that larger measures, such as a ban on high-capacity magazines, were off the table. The closely divided Senate meant anything that could pass a filibuster would have to draw significant support from both sides of the aisle.

Both sides will be able to frame it as a positive going forward, says Mary Layton Atkinson, a professor of political science at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and author of “Combative Politics.”

Republicans will say they acted on something America cares about without overreaching. Democrats will say they acted on something America cares about and proved they are not coming for Republicans’ guns.

“Both Democrats and Republicans will use it as a win going into the 2022 elections,” says Professor Atkinson.

The bill isn’t going to solve America’s gun violence problem. The nation has more guns than people, points out David Brady, a political science professor at Stanford University who is working on a book about political parity and its effect on policy gridlock.

But for quite some time Congress has been unable to do anything about guns, despite the relative popularity of many gun control measures. Professor Brady says this move could be important because something is better than nothing – and because it could show that gun lobby groups are not all-powerful, after all.

“So in the long run it strikes me as a first step toward legislation that will do even more,” he says.

The three Ukrainian girls are in the same Lviv hospital, recovering from severe war wounds.

But the violent impact of Russia’s war on them – which at once abruptly ended their youthful innocence and imposed new requirements of resilience, coping with trauma, and even bravery – has sent their lives on very different trajectories.

As this war enters its fifth month, the separate story arcs of these three girls encountered one day last week, who look to the future now with permanent scars, are emblematic of how the conflict has skewed the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians wounded by war.

Yana Stepanenko smiles for visitors and wears a “Stand With Ukraine” T-shirt, but the 11-year-old quietly excuses herself when asked about the early April day that a Russian rocket landed on the train station in Kramatorsk, taking both of her legs – and one of her mother’s.

Still overwhelmed by the memory, she silently rolls back her wheelchair and exits the small hospital room, leaving behind her mother and twin brother, Yaroslav, who plays with a toy rifle and mobile phone and was untouched by the attack. He was in the train station building, watching the luggage, while mother and daughter were outside on the platform.

This week the family flies to San Diego for specialist care and prostheses.

“I am shocked to be in this situation,” says mother Natalia Stepanenko, who now requires her own wheelchair. She wipes away tears as she describes how Yana is “in more of a good mood,” and OK during the day but not at night.

“You have to be tough”

The trauma ebbs and flows. Spirits rose when one visitor showed pictures of athletes fully active in wheelchairs. “It was very nice, that hope,” says Ms. Stepanenko.

The shock began immediately after the Russian cluster munition landed in the midst of thousands of would-be evacuees thronging the Kramatorsk train station in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region on April 8, killing some 59.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Ukrainian mother Natalia Stepanenko recovers after losing her left leg in the Russian rocket attack on the Kramatorsk train station, at the City Clinical Hospital for Children in Lviv, Ukraine, June 17, 2022. The attack also took both legs of Ms. Stepanenko's daughter Yana, age 11, and the family is due to travel to San Diego to have prostheses fitted.

Yana and her mother were taken to different hospitals in Dnipro, a large transport hub to the west. For 20 days, mother and daughter were gravely wounded – and apart.

“She would call in the evening and cry, and I would cry, and I would say: ‘You have to be tough,’” recalls Ms. Stepanenko. Adding to their agony, Yana’s father, Vasyl, who had been in the Ukrainian army since 2015, was killed May 11, fighting on the front line in the Donetsk region.

The family has mixed emotions about flying to San Diego and living in the United States for a year during treatment, in an arrangement worked out by the Lviv City Clinical Hospital for Children.

“A lot of acquaintances tell us to stay in the U.S.,” says Ms. Stepanenko. But from this small hospital room, already the breadth of Ukraine away from home, the southwestern corner of America seems very, very far away.

“I tell them: ‘If you are so smart, why don’t you leave yourself?’” she says.

“It was OK in the beginning” when they accepted the U.S. trip, adds Ms. Stepanenko, loosing another tear. “But now it is so close.”    

They call her “Schumacher”

Three floors below at the hospital, 15-year-old Anastasia Pryhoda describes a vastly different experience, and a precocious ability to cope.

She recounts how she was at the wheel, evacuating several wounded adults from her hometown of Popasna in eastern Ukraine, when Russian troops opened fire on their car.

First taught to drive at the age of 7 by her mother, who has since died, she says she was the only one in her area willing to risk constant Russian shelling to drive wounded or older residents to safety. On frequent trips to the town of Bakhmut over the course of one month, often carrying five or six passengers, the young volunteer reckons she helped some 200 people reach safety.

Her surname means “adventure,” and the teen goes by Nastia. But she earned the nickname “Schumacher,” after the German Formula One driving legend Michael Schumacher.

With short dyed hair, pale pink nail polish, and black “I ♡ Paris” hoodie – never mind the big dose of nonchalance – she dismisses the term “hero” used by friends, and says her actions were “regular.”

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Ukrainian schoolgirl Anastasia Pryhoda, age 15, recovers from surgery to remove Russian soldiers' bullets from her legs at the City Clinical Hospital for Children in Lviv, Ukraine, June 17, 2022. Nastia was shot while driving several wounded adults from her hometown of Popasna in the Donbas, and says she helped drive some 200 fellow Ukrainians to safety before the incident. She now hopes to enroll in a military academy in Kyiv to one day be an officer in the army.

“No one was brave enough to drive; they were afraid of bombs,” recalls Nastia, matter-of-factly. “But I was not afraid. … If my mother would still be alive, she would do it. Half my friends think I am dead already.”

At first, the evacuation runs were easy and not overly dangerous. “There were far fewer shells hitting the road,” she says.

But as Russia withdrew from its failed advance on Kyiv, and focused its military efforts on seizing the eastern industrial heartland of the Donbas, Nastia’s pathways out of Popasna became increasingly tricky, and far more risky.

The moment of reckoning came May 1. Nastia says she assisted removing shrapnel from two wounded men, and, along with the wife of one, and a man who knew directions, they began driving out of Popasna.

Suddenly, at one corner where Ukrainian troops should have been, the teen driver saw the red armbands and uniforms of half a dozen Russian soldiers. They opened fire from 10 yards, she says, and the car stalled.

The least wounded man leaped out to push the car, which restarted. He was hit with bullets in the arm, and Nastia kept driving a couple of miles before the car stopped for good.

She had been hit with four bullets and shrapnel in her right knee and left foot – she lost a small toe in the firestorm – and she bled from head lacerations caused by glass from the smashed windshield. But they were close enough to Ukrainian troops to be rescued.

“I don’t think I am a hero, as people say,” says Nastia. “I was hit by bullets. When a bullet is coming into you, it feels like a thread on the thigh. I didn’t feel anything for an hour.”  

Now that she has recovered, while listening to Ukrainian music, and with a pillow on her bed in the national colors of blue and yellow that reads “Everything is going to be Ukraine,” she is ready to harness her assertive nature in a new way.

Her hometown of Popasna is now under Russian control. This week, Nastia will move to Kyiv to live with her aunt, and has a strong desire to enroll in a military academy to become an army officer.

“Never look back”

Yet just two hospital beds away, in the adjoining room, 12-year-old Kateryna Iorgu exemplifies continuing trauma from the Kramatorsk train station attack, which claimed her mother’s life and sent her own into a tailspin of uncertainty.

Katia was saved from the Russian cluster munition that day when a man threw himself upon her diminutive frame – though he died while protecting her.

Scott Peterson/Getty Images/The Christian Science Monitor

Ukrainian schoolgirl Kateryna Iorgu, age 12, wounded in the Russian rocket attack on the Kramatorsk train station that also killed her mother, recovers from two surgeries to remove shrapnel from her legs at the City Clinical Hospital for Children in Lviv, Ukraine, June 17, 2022, with her aunt and sister.

Two surgeries have removed most of the shrapnel from her legs, but she walks with a limp and has lost weight. Crutches lean against the wall, though they are not used for short walks. Katia’s younger sister Yulia, age 8, unharmed in the attack, plays with a bucket of slime and a mobile phone with a rubber cat ear case on the next bed.

“I can walk for half a day, then spend two days in bed,” says Katia, who has bright eyes and earrings, and wears a ponytail and red T-shirt printed with the words “Never look back.”

Indeed, when asked about the event that brought her here, Katia’s face darkens, her lips curl up and lock, and her mouth stops working. She no longer responds to questions, even about her school or her favorite subjects.

“Speak, Katia,” implores the girl’s aunt, Olha Lialko.

“She can get stuck like this, because she is thinking about her mother, and her life,” says Ms. Lialko. Psychologists came twice and “tried to draw something” with Katia, but “didn’t get very far.”

There are still shrapnel fragments in Katia’s legs. But hopes of travel abroad for more surgery have been dashed, partly by delays in paperwork to make Ms. Lialko her official guardian, and now by assessments that only rehabilitation is needed.

This week, the family moves to Vinnytsia in central Ukraine, to live with a relative, and for Katia’s rehabilitation.

“We would like to go abroad, because rehabilitation is better there,” says Ms. Lialko. “We feel bad because everybody else goes abroad, but not us. It is senseless. We were here all this time.”

Contributor Oleksandr Naselenko supported reporting for this article.

Alberto Gandolfo/LaPresse/AP

A man cools off at a drinking fountain in Turin, Italy, June 17, 2022. A blanket of hot air stretching from the Mediterranean to the North Sea is bringing much of Western Europe its first heat wave of the summer.

The warning messages are growing ever starker. But they’re ending up in the junk mail folder.

That’s the fate of efforts to confront climate change at the moment. And the implications have been dramatically brought home in recent days by the punishing effects of worldwide record-high temperatures.

But world leaders have been focusing their attention elsewhere – on the war in Ukraine and a widening economic crisis.

Those problems are not going away, which means evidence of the worsening effects of climate change is taxing governments’ policy bandwidth.

It has also highlighted a series of deeper questions – for both governments and their citizens – about priorities and values. Chief among them: How do we balance our own interests, or our own nations’ interests, against those of the planet? Or our responsibility for our own generation against those yet to come?

The question of how we address the wider responsibilities may seem abstract, but it has serious practical implications for our chances of coming to grips with global warming.

Almost all the other major policy challenges preoccupying policymakers worldwide point them toward the short term: the Ukraine war, commodity shortages and rampant energy and food inflation, supply chain bottlenecks. So, too, the overarching conflict between democracy and autocracy that U.S. President Joe Biden has made a cornerstone of his foreign policy.

All have been prodding governments to prioritize their own countries’ economic, political, and security positions. All have assumed a daily-headline urgency overshadowing other, longer-term policy questions.

That’s where the recent weather comes in.

Even by the standards of increasingly familiar “climate extremes,” the intensity of June’s heat has been extraordinary. It’s almost as if the planet itself were trying to elbow its way onto policymakers’ list of priorities and shouting that global warming isn’t a “long-term” threat. It’s here. It’s intensifying. Its effects are growing.

In the United States, nearly a third of the population has been advised to stay indoors. 

Miguel Oses/AP

A firefighting plane drops a fire retardant on a burning area of San Martin de Unx in northern Spain, June 19, 2022. Firefighters in Spain are struggling to contain wildfires in several parts of the country suffering an unusual heat wave for this time of the year.

European schools and businesses have closed or sent people home early. In France, authorities in the region surrounding Bordeaux ordered citizens to cancel public events or outdoor gatherings, as well as indoor ones without air conditioning.

The risk of heat-related wildfires has prompted bans on forest visits in some areas of France. Blazes in Spain led the authorities to order the wholesale evacuation of a number of villages. 

Pakistan and India are also in the throes of a searing heat wave, with temperatures reaching their highest on record. That is doing major damage to India’s wheat crops, even more important than usual to the country’s 1.3 billion people because Russia’s invasion is disrupting exports from Ukraine, one of the world’s key grain suppliers.

Still, it is Ukraine, not the climate, that has been dominating international policy discussions.

This may be inevitable. There’s no doubting the seriousness, or the urgency, of the war, or of the worldwide economic strains it is exacerbating.

Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP

People bathe in the Ganges River to cool themselves off as northern India reeled under an intense heat wave.

But climate activists point out that even before the war began, only a few governments in the developed world were on track to achieve carbon neutrality by midcentury – a benchmark for avoiding irreversible and catastrophic global warming, scientists say. In their minds, Ukraine and other competing issues may be less an explanation for inaction than an excuse.

They’re especially disheartened because of signs that progress is indeed being made, and that more is possible. Wind and solar energy is being used more widely. Electric car sales are growing. “Low-hanging fruit” prospects for further carbon cuts – moving away from coal, for instance, or reducing the amounts of methane that escape during gas production and transport – are available.

In that context, it’s not a matter of choosing to address one urgent crisis rather than another, they argue. It’s about the value judgment, the “wider responsibility” choices.

It’s about doing both.

My own late father-in-law faced a similar trade-off in very different circumstances, when he led a campaign during World War II to persuade the U.S. government to save European Jews from the Nazi Holocaust. Though the Roosevelt administration did, late in the war, finally move to help, officials argued for a long time that such action would deflect them from their central goal of defeating Adolf Hitler.

Early in his advocacy campaign, he partnered with the celebrated screenwriter Ben Hecht to place a series of controversial full-page ads in The New York Times. One featured a Hecht ballad counseling the Jews just to suffer in silence: Their voices weren’t being heard anyway.

The poem ended with a powerfully ironic line that may resonate with those now arguing for stronger action on climate change:

The world is busy with other news.

Michael Bonfigli/Special to the Christian Science Monitor

Florida Senator Rick Scott speaks at the St. Regis Hotel on June 22, 2022, in Washington, D.C. Mr. Scott was there to talk with reporters as part of The Christian Science Monitor’s longstanding breakfast series.

In politics, as in the business world, Sen. Rick Scott has enjoyed great fortune.

Like another Florida-based politician, former President Donald Trump, Senator Scott won the first race he ever ran – in his case, for governor of the third-largest state. Then he won reelection. Four years later, he took on incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, and won.

Now, as chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, he’s in the catbird seat. With the Senate currently at 50-50, all he needs in the November midterm elections is a net gain of one seat for the Republicans to take the majority. And, with Democratic President Joe Biden mired in the polls and battling sky-high inflation, Mr. Scott seems to have the wind at his back. 

But nothing is ever quite that simple. Mr. Scott does have several Democratic-held seats in his sights – Georgia, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Arizona, he says – yet the GOP-held seat in Pennsylvania is at risk, and relations within his own Senate conference have gotten complicated. 

At a Monitor Breakfast for reporters Wednesday, Mr. Scott declined to say if he would support the top Senate Republican, Mitch McConnell, for majority leader, if the GOP retakes control of the chamber. 

“There’ll be an election,” was all he would say. Asked if he might run for majority leader himself, he replied: “I don’t have a plan to run.” 

Back in February, Mr. Scott raised some GOP eyebrows – including Senator McConnell’s – when he released an “11-point plan to rescue America.” The plan included some controversial proposals, including requiring that every American pay at least some income tax and sunsetting all legislation after five years, including presumably Medicare and Social Security. 

The Florida senator has since revised his plan, and now touts work – and the taxes that flow from it – over just the paying of taxes. 

“I believe in people working and [Democrats] are trying to get people not to work,” said Mr.  Scott, the former CEO of a major hospital network. “Look, there’s people that don’t believe we ought to run on a plan. I do. I’m a business guy. I believe we ought to have a plan. And I believe we ought to fight over what’s in it.”

Mr. Scott also pushed back on the idea that he supported cutting or even potentially eliminating two bedrock social programs. 

“I’m not going to reduce the benefits in Social Security and Medicare,” he said. “But I think we have to figure out how to live within our means.”

The estrangement of former President Trump and Senator McConnell also can’t be easy for Senator Scott, who maintains a good relationship with Mr. Trump. Mr. Scott says he and his wife had dinner with the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago in February. And, he noted, he talks to Mr. Trump “every two to three weeks.” 

“He is interested in the Senate races,” Senator Scott says. “He’s trying to be helpful. As you know, he’s endorsing [in] a lot of races. ... He’s been helpful on the fundraising and at the NRSC.”

What about the Missouri Senate race, where one of the Republican primary candidates – former Gov. Eric Greitens – is controversial? He resigned the governorship in 2018 amid allegations of sexual assault, and recently ran an ad suggesting gun violence against anti-Trump Republicans.

Mr. Scott says he’d prefer no endorsements in that primary. “I’m not just saying him,” he says, referring to Mr. Trump. “I’m saying, just let the voters decide.”

The C-SPAN video of the breakfast can be viewed here.

Following are more excerpts from the breakfast, condensed and lightly edited for clarity. 

On whether Mr. Trump might run for president again in 2024:   

He doesn’t ask me if he should run, but, you know, he’s always talking. I mean, you have to assume he’s going to run. He’s not suggesting he’s not. 

On whether Florida Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis should not run for president if Mr. Trump decides to run: 

Oh, that’s ‘24. I’m going to focus on ‘22.

On whether Georgia GOP Senate nominee Herschel Walker – who has admitted to past domestic violence against his ex-wife – and Mr. Greitens hurt the Republican Party brand: 

Georgia voters are going to make a choice. Herschel has been very honest and upfront about his background. ... I think Herschel is going to win because Herschel is talking about the issues that are important.

On the new Texas Republican Party platform, which describes homosexuality as “an abnormal lifestyle choice”:

My experience is, the Republican Party is inclusive. And so I wouldn’t have supported that, what they did.

On whether the House hearings on the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol have helped or hurt Mr. Scott’s cause as NRSC chair:

I think it’s irrelevant, it’s reality TV.

On whether Mr. Scott considers President Biden the legitimately elected president of the United States: 

Yes, absolutely. 

On whether Mr. Scott rejects Mr. Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him: 

Well, here’s what I think we have. Joe Biden is the duly elected president. I do believe, when you go around the country, people have a belief that they’re concerned about whether we have good election laws. 

I went through this as governor. You know, we’re constantly trying to figure out how to improve the election laws. And whenever you did, everybody wanted to call you names, right? 

Here’s what I tell people. It’s not just that you have to have the right laws. You have to get involved to make sure they’re enforced right. You have to go volunteer to make sure you watch and do this stuff. You know, the more there’s oversight over things, people do a better job. 

So I tell people, if you actually want the elections to be secure, you’re part of that. Go volunteer, make sure they’re secure. 

Toni McClendon has fought for reproductive and minority rights in Pittsburgh for decades. But she has long eschewed the labels “pro-choice” and “pro-life” as divisive, limiting and above all failing to address what many Black women experience in America’s shrill reproduction debate.

Then, when she was asked to join Black women from the Rust Belt for the March for Women’s Lives in Washington in 2004, she found “reproductive justice,” a movement that went beyond that simple binary to cooperate with allies on a host of issues facing minorities – and one that has come to the fore as American women wait to see if Roe v. Wade will be rolled back. Ms. McClendon returned home from the march to become one of the founding members of New Voices for Reproductive Justice in Pittsburgh.

“I support the right to have a child, the right not to have a child, and the right to raise families in a world that is fair and equitable. That’s the core of reproductive justice,” she says. “In this country, it’s always an either/or. If you do this, then you can’t be this. And if you’re not this, then we’re against you. Everything is an ‘us and them’ thing, instead of a ‘we’ thing.”

As the U.S. Supreme Court appears poised to overturn America’s constitutionally protected right to abortion in its upcoming ruling on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, those on the front lines of the reproductive rights movement frame it as a door closing after 50 years of abortion access.

But for many Black and other minority women across the country, the entryway to abortion access has long been shut by financial and cultural barriers. That’s why they began reframing reproductive rights as a matter of social justice in the 1990s.

Now the leaders of reproductive justice, often called RJ, say their vision is the way forward for those who will be made most vulnerable if the leaked draft opinion stands, returning the abortion question to the states.

Sara Miller Llana/The Christian Science Monitor

Toni McClendon, a founding member of New Voices for Reproductive Justice in Pittsburgh, says the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life" simply divide the American public. The reproductive justice movement has a more expansive view of reproductive rights that builds coalitions with other social justice movements.

Implicit in the RJ movement is support for abortion rights, but many observers say RJ has the potential to help Americans understand a much more expansive view, since it also focuses on the right to have children and to nurture them in a safe and healthy environment. An encompassing social justice movement, RJ has grown alongside a larger reckoning on racism, inequality, and environmental rights.

“RJ is a way of the future,” says Elaina Ramsey, executive director of Faith Choice Ohio, a faith-based group that supports abortion rights and works with RJ leaders in the Midwest. “It’s fundamentally a lifestyle practice. They’re trying to build communities, raise families whatever they look like and with whatever decisions they want to make.”

“Settled law but not settled reality”

Since its founding in the 1990s, RJ has grown across racial and ethnic lines and across the United States, from the Pacific Northwest to the Rust Belt. For example, Black women from around the country joined RJ advocates in Washington over the Juneteenth weekend in a march dubbed Black Bodies for Black Power. 

It’s also increasingly a campaign issue. La’Tasha D. Mayes, founder and former executive director of New Voices for Reproductive Justice, is running for office as a state representative in Pennsylvania, having scored the Democratic primary in May. “White women thought Roe v. Wade was the end of the attack or that the legal precedent would actually get us where we need to be,” says the candidate, who put RJ as her top platform issue. “But for Black women and marginalized communities, it was settled law but not settled reality.”

“The shorthand in politics is pro-choice, a woman’s right to choose,” she continues. “Those things are so limiting in terms of the actual depth and breadth of reproductive justice issues or concerns that voters and constituents have.”

The term “reproductive justice” was coined by 12 Black feminists, and later the movement was turned into a collective called SisterSong, based in the South. The founders felt shut out of the discussion on reproductive rights, despite the disproportionate toll that pregnancies and unwanted pregnancies take on minority women. According to 2011 data from the Guttmacher Institute, the unintended pregnancy rate for non-Hispanic Black women (79 per 1,000) is more than double that of non-Hispanic white women (33 per 1,000) – often because of a lack of access to reproductive services and contraception. Minority women overall face far higher rates of preterm deliveries and infant mortality, and they suffer worse maternal health outcomes and criminalization around reproduction. 

But Black women have been skeptical of reproductive rights movements that were tied historically to forced sterilization, says Ms. McClendon. “What most people knew about reproductive health was Planned Parenthood,” she says, an organization that lost the Black community’s trust due to co-founder Margaret Sanger’s ties to eugenics.

Shuran Huang/Reuters

Demonstrators, including reproductive justice advocates, walk to the U.S. Supreme Court during the Black Bodies for Black Power rally in Washington, June 18, 2022. Since its founding in the 1990s, RJ has grown across racial and ethnic lines and across the U.S., from the Pacific Northwest to the Rust Belt.

By contrast, she says, RJ gained trust through a broad association with social justice groups, including environmental justice, voting rights, equal pay, and ending police brutality.

“The idea of choice was really limited as a framework because of these histories, because of the fact that for many communities of color, choice wasn’t just about whether or not you could have an abortion. It was about whether or not you could actually have children,” says Zakiya Luna, author of “Reproductive Rights as Human Rights: Women of Color and the Fight for Reproductive Justice.” 

“What we’re trying to do ... is to say there’s a range of reproductive justice issues that, particularly in marginalized communities, choice does not get at,” she adds.

Coalition building

That range of issues invites cooperation. “I find so much common ground with reproductive justice,” says Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa, founder of the anti-abortion New Wave Feminists in Texas, which seeks an end to abortion through systematic change. She says the RJ movement recognizes that everything from racism to overpolicing has impacted Black women’s reproductive choices. “It’s a much more nuanced perspective. ... So they’re not fighting for it in the same way that a lot of more privileged white feminists are fighting for it.” 

While the Black feminist community launched RJ, the movement has entered the discussion in nursing schools, law schools, and even the White House. Sometimes the term is co-opted, and those working in it are careful to honor its roots as a Black movement. 

RJ advocates have shown the feminist movement how exclusive it’s been, says Greer Donley, assistant professor of law at the University of Pittsburgh. “We’re really trying to forge allies with a huge cohort of people in a way that the reproductive rights movement of generations past has not. I think we’re kind of at this moment because that model failed,” she says.

Dana Sussman, acting executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, concurs. “What they have shifted is the understanding that this is not just about abortion, that abortion is but one piece of this much larger ecosystem. That environmental justice is reproductive justice. That criminal justice reform is reproductive justice. That immigrant justice is reproductive justice. ... We have the reproductive justice leaders and the mothers of the movement to thank for helping the rest of us understand that voting rights is a reproductive justice issue, that all of these things are so deeply interconnected,” she says. 

“Building those coalitions now in this crisis moment, and moving forward to collectively imagine a new vision to uplift this vision that they’ve had for a long time, is just incredibly important.”

AP

Young cast members making their Broadway debuts in "The Music Man" perform outside the Winter Garden Theatre in New York Feb. 8.

During two years of the pandemic, Americans continued to be a generous lot. Despite lockdowns and hardship, total giving to charities went up 8.1% in 2020 and was essentially flat last year after adjusting for inflation. The big surprise was an unexpected jump in contributions to a sector that often delivers transcendent messages for grim circumstances.

Giving to arts and cultural groups was up nearly 22% last year, the largest rise in 35 years, according to the annual Giving USA report. That was far higher than the increase in grants and donations to religious, health, environmental, educational, or animal welfare groups.

One reason for the hefty benevolence may be that the creative industries, which rely largely on in-person attendance, were among the first to close their doors in early 2020 and to furlough staff. For safety, Broadway shuttered its theaters, art studios had to go viral, and poetry readings and music concerts moved to Zoom. The sudden downturn triggered the uptick in philanthropy from individuals, foundations, and corporations. One charity, Creatives Rebuild New York, gave no-strings cash payments to hundreds of artists.

Now, after a two-year intermission, arts groups are reviving in their local areas, ever more appreciative of the public’s support and their role in society. “That type of community connectedness is making the arts relevant and making them a necessary good,” Randy Cohen, vice president of research at Americans for the Arts, told The Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Arts and culture often lift thinking to see another reality. As the narrator in Thornton Wilder’s 1938 American drama “Our Town” says, “We all know that something is eternal.” Giving to others is like that, especially when the giving contributes to respite and inspiration.