We are NOT a nation that loves its children or their mothers or this — and the “child care cliff”, the imminent loss of funding allowing many child care facilities to stay open, pay workers, and support millions of hardworking parents who rely on childcare to be able to stay on the job — would NOT be happening.

If we truly loved children we’d

- love their mothers as they carry their babies

- see policy and systems change to prevent the inequity in birth outcomes — Black maternal and infant mortality is THREE TIMES that of White women for myriad reasons: generational collective trauma of Black women; bias against Black women by people in medicine; poverty and inequity in healthcare, opportunity, air and water quality, food availability, transportation, and more result in 10-year gap in life expectancy. TEN YEARS

- make mandatory paid family leave for six months to a year, as is then norm in every other industrialized nation

- pay people a living wage instead of the $7.25 an hour that has heron the minimum wage since 2009!

- support health care for all instead of the hodgepodge sick care system we have now and is a racist, classist relic making the U.S., again, the outlier among industrialized nations as we are the sole leading nation without healthcare for all

- support all workers in having sick pay; that some railroad workers have had literally no paid sick leave for years is a likely factor in the rash of literal train wrecks — some involving spills of toxic chemicals — in the U.S. over the last couple of years

There is much more I could say about our racist and corrupt “child protective services” system;  the absurdity of government supports to homeowners, and how these supports are nothing more than entitlement programs that further expand the gap between the morbidly wealthy, the shrinking middle class, the increasing number of the paycheck-to-paycheck working poor, and the people who are jobless, homeless, hopeless.

For more information I highly recommend “Poverty by America” as an audible book or bought from an independent bookseller. It is by Pulitzer Prize winning author Mathew Desmond, who also wrote “Evicted”.  His books are terrific reads. Or “listens”.  Though they may well jack up your blood pressure.  If they don’t evoke outrage and action to evoke change, I’ll be surprised.

Thank you for posting the above article, Dr. Gordon!

Carey Sipp