Jimmy Carter, “A Call to Action”

Jimmy Carter says in his new book, “A Call to Action,” that the most important issue the world needs to face is the enhancement of women's lives. The first sentence on the flyleaf reads: “The world's discrimination and violence against women and girls is the most serious, pervasive, and ignored violation of basic human rights: This is President Jimmy Carter's call to action."

I thought several times as I was reading the book of Diane Ravitch's writing that the the first step in true reform of education is to assure adequate prenatal care for women.

Carter went on the Charlie Rose Show recently to promote and to discuss his book, but Rose seemed just to want to discuss Israel. Carter politely told him a couple times that he wanted to discuss the book, but Rose clearly was not interested. However, I heard enough to know that I had to read the book.

Jimmy Carter has an awe-inspiring list of accomplishments. Just his eradication of Dracunculiasis, called guinea worm disease (GWD), in Africa is inconceivably magnificent, in my eyes. He has done so much more and is still very much doing it at ninety years of age.

He writes a lot in his first chapter about the misinterpretations of religious scriptures that promote the destruction of women's lives. Rightly so, but I was more struck by the passages later in the book in which he points out that it is actually women who make things work.

Here are some quotes from the book, for the truth of them, and to provoke your interest in the book, and simply for sharing:

p.70. Of even greater significance is what we have learned about the vital role that women can play in correcting the most serious problems that plague their relatives and neighbors. Almost everywhere, we find that women are relegated to secondary positions of influence and authority within a community but almost always do most of the work and prove to be the key participants in any successful project.

p.156. There have been surprising reductions [of Female Genital Cutting] in Kenya and Central African Republic. It is not clear why this is so, but it seems obvious that outside pressure has had little effect except in encouraging the education of young women...A public opinion poll that same year [2008] revealed that only a third of the younger women wanted to see the practice continued, while two-thirds of the the older women supported its continuation. Because the decision to perform FGC is made almost exclusively by mothers, without consulting their husbands, these numbers give hope that the next generation of daughters might be spared.

p.193, quoting Ela Bhatt: “I have faith in women...In my experience, as I have seen within India and in other countries, women are the key to rebuilding a community. Why? Focus on women and you will find an ally who wants a stable community.”

p.35. There are now more than five times as many American inmates in federal, state, and local prisons as when I was president and the number of incarcerated black women has increased by 800 percent! An ancillary effect is that this increased incarceration has come at a tremendous financial cost to taxpayers, at the expense of education and other beneficial programs The cost of prosecuting executed criminals is astronomical. Since 1973, California alone has spent roughly $4 billion in capital cases, leading to only thirteen executions, amounting to about $307 million spent for the killing of each prisoner...Despite the proliferation of excessive imprisonments, the number of pardons by US presidents has also been dramatically reduced. I issued 534 pardons in my four-year term, and in their eight-year terms, Ronald Reagan issued 393, Bill Clinton 396, and George W. Bush 189, but in his first term Barack Obama issued only 23.