Linked Foundation is excited to highlight the release of Jonathan C. Lewis’ book The Unfin sh d Social Entrepreneur” or and I quote him, a book to “power up your social justice career”. Founder of MCE Social Capital and winner of the Social Venture Innovation Award, Lewis is a leader in effecting social solutions. MCE is a result of Lewis’ vision of reducing poverty by mobilizing private investment capital to finance micro-businesses throughout the world. As a MCE Guarantor, Linked Foundation is supporting hundreds of thousands of loans to women and families living in extreme poverty around the world. Brutally honest, Jonathan Lewis’ new book will entertain, enlighten and motivate. It is scheduled to be released in June 2017 by Red Press, below is an excerpt from his essay on “Civic Entrepreneurship and Political Engagement”:
“Elections have consequences for the causes and communities that you and I care about. Consider a life and death example: killing moms and babies. Right now, somewhere in an under-developed part of the world, a woman you and I don’t know is in labor. Let’s assume she lives in a mountainous rural village. Nine months ago, she probably didn’t have access to family planning information, let alone contraceptives. As her contractions intensify, she is without medical care. No doctors, no primary health clinic. By the time you finish reading this essay, she’ll be dead.
Every minute, at least one woman dies from complications related to pregnancy or childbirth – that means 529,000 women a year. In addition, for every woman who dies in childbirth, around 20 more suffer injury, infection or disease – approximately 10 million women each year,” reports the World Health Organization. 220 million women in the developing world do not have access to basic family planning and contraceptive healthcare.
Non-existent reproductive healthcare steals a woman’s chance to make, in the trenchant phrasing of the U.N. Population Fund, “crucial choices about their own bodies and futures.” Reproductive services – information about safe sex, family planning counseling, contraceptives, child-birthing care and affordable access to safe abortions – are life-saving.
If you didn’t know any of these facts, my mistake. I assumed you were an informed global citizen.
Adhering to lockstep Republican doctrine and practice, four days into the Trump Administration, the Trump/Republican Wasteland re-imposed the so-called gag rule banning any nonprofit organization receiving US foreign aid money from even talking about abortion. As a result, Marie Stopes International predicts in the next four years there will be 6.5 million unintended pregnancies, 2.1 million unsafe abortions and 21,700 maternal deaths. The horror compounds when babies die at birth.”
If health justice for moms and babies matters to you, you don’t have to be a gynecologist or public health worker to do something about it. You don’t need to start an innovative social venture delivering healthcare services. You don’t have to make a donation to a women’s health clinic. You don’t even have to hold a door open for a pregnant woman.
You do need to vote for political candidates who support women’s health and reproductive rights.
Because economic opportunity for women in the developing world is my obsession, I vote against any political party that, driven by principled conviction or political kowtowing to its fundamentalist religious base, opposes family planning services in U.S. foreign aid programs.The woman about to die in labor, and the other women in her remote village, can’t vote in the next American election.
But you and I can.