As Hurricane Isaias heads for the Gulf Coast, here’s what Women in America has learned this year about who climate disasters hit hardest, and who gets to decide what happens next.
Every time we post about how climate change hits women harder, some mediocre dude in our comments always replies: “oH, sO tHe wEaThEr iS sExiSt nOw?” We usually resist responding but, today we’re taking the bait, because the answer is in the work Women in America has been doing in climate spaces all year.
Hurricane Isaias is bearing down on the Gulf Coast, and forecasters expect landfall anywhere from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle by late Friday, with 6 to 10 feet of storm surge. The storm will hit every household in its path. What happens afterward will fall hardest on women, because the systems that decide who gets help after a disaster, who pays for the recovery, and who gets a say in preparing for the next one were built without women in mind. Women are routinely shut out of all three, and that is the conversation we’ve been bringing to climate leaders this year.
Who gets hurt and who gets help
Women do a disproportionate share of caregiving and unpaid labor in any weather, and that work multiplies when the power goes out, let alone when your house is destroyed. A natural disaster like a hurricane can also level health facilities and pharmacies, which cuts off prenatal visits, birth control, and abortion care at the moment people need them most. Then, women face the additional increased risk of domestic violence when they and their families are displaced.
Abortion access shows how quickly a climate disaster becomes a health crisis. Since SCOTUS overturned Roe, abortion is banned outright in 13 states and heavily restricted in many others, including much of Isaias’s projected path. Last year, about 142,000 people traveled to another state for an abortion, and every one of those trips depended on open roads, child care, and a paycheck that a hurricane can wipe out overnight. If highways and clinics are destroyed in a natural disaster, a pregnancy complication can evolve into a life-threatening emergency well before local emergency responders can arrive. Reproductive freedom is part of disaster preparedness, and disaster plans should treat it that way.
That’s why, when Women in America met with two U.S. mayors at London Climate Action Week in June, we asked both of them the same question:
Continue reading over at the Women in America Substack.
Become a paid subscriber today. Because reproductive freedom can’t wait, and neither can we.
