Abortion, Harm, and Retributive vs. Restorative Justice
The Other End of the Abortion Spectrum
Would we tolerate an individual person poisoning 6,500 – 8,000 fetuses every year?
A 2013 study of over 800 women who lived in an area known for high air pollution due to traffic—the San Joaquin Valley of California—found that women in the first two months of pregnancy who breathed high levels of carbon monoxide, due to vehicle exhaust, “were nearly twice as likely to have a baby with spina bifida or anencephaly as those with the lowest carbon monoxide exposure.”[1] Anencephaly is the condition where a fetus develops without a brain, negating the possibility of assigning human personhood to the fetus in the minds of even the most staunch pro-life defenders.
A 2017 study done by the Cincinnati Children’s Medical Center affirmed that pregnant women exposed to air pollution are at higher risk of having children born with birth defects ranging from abnormal hearts to cleft lips and palates.[2]
A 2018 literature review of congenital heart defects in infants, which are the leading cause of spontaneous abortion and which cause 30 percent of infant deaths at birth, reveals that congenital heart defects are associated with exposure to smoking, vehicle exhaust, pesticides used on farms, by-products of disinfectants used to clean public water supplies, toxic metals that can also be found in drinking water, landfill sites and incinerators, and phthalates which are found in plastics and common household products.[3]
The literature is overwhelming, staggering, and growing. Whether tobacco and other companies lie unscrupulously, or whether companies spew carbon monoxide, lead, and other toxins into the environment, or whether government regulators make profound mistakes, the issue is the same. All of these toxins land in the wombs of pregnant women.
Only a small percentage – between 0.7 and 3 percent – of abortions happen because of known fetal abnormalities or because women fear the possibility.[4] However, fetal abnormalities are typically detected after the first trimester, so the possible physical risks to the mother as well as the possible moral injury to the physician and the financial cost to the health care system all increase. Not only that, we are not dealing with a biologically random or purely genetic phenomenon. We are dealing with a social phenomenon: because of environmental racism and classism, people who are already more vulnerable based on where they live and work are also more likely to have their fetuses poisoned by chemicals spewing from industry. The moral category is different. Moreover, the women in question want to give birth to healthy babies and raise them.
One percent of the U.S. range of 650,000 – 800,000 abortions per year would equal 6,500 to 8,000.
The case of Texas is particularly galling, given Texas’ leadership in devising anti-abortion policies. Texas’s big oil and gas companies do significant damage to people’s health by poisoning their air, water, and land.[5] Industrial companies in Texas commit thousands of violations of the Clean Air Act, which have led to 42 deaths and $241 million in known health-related costs per year, in Texas alone, absorbed by Texans against their will. Surely this has an impact on women’s health? When a pregnant woman breathes in fine particulate air pollution—the kind given off by construction sites, unpaved roads, car and truck exhaust, power plants, and fires—the odds increase dramatically that her baby will have autism.[6] If she lives near a farm using certain pesticides, her child is 60 percent more likely to have autism.[7] Since we know that a woman’s body expels certain toxins into her innocent fetus and breast milk, will this draw the ire of conservative activists? Also, what about the higher rates of leukemia and spina bifida in Texas children, probably because of exposure to benzene?[8] Elevated lead levels in Texas children?[9] Increased asthma rates in children living within 1 mile of shale gas development sites, affecting 4.5 million Texans?[10] Increased asthma rates in children exposed while in the womb to certain plastics in women’s nail polish, food packaging, and school supplies?[11]
Where are the outraged pro-life activists trying to correct this corporate wrongdoing? Why have anti-abortion advocates allied themselves with economic conservatives and libertarians like the Federalist Society? The Federalist Society wants to peel back regulations on business, dismantle labor unions which could protect workers in chemically (or otherwise) dangerous workplaces, eviscerate antitrust law which would then allow corporate elites to consolidate power in fewer, more massive companies, enable bailouts and subsidies and tax exemptions on top of that, and maintain corporations’ ability to give unlimited political campaign contributions to legalize the bribery and corruption that will feed the cycle. When a woman puts chemicals into her body to harm her fetus, they are outraged, but when other people put chemicals there against her will and usually her knowledge, they stand by and rationalize it. Is it really true that a moral conservative can be an economic conservative, currently defined?
Restorative Justice in Scripture and in Practice
A restorative justice paradigm can go further than a retributive justice paradigm could, which is important because there are difficult questions here. Who is responsible for directing carbon monoxide into the wombs of women living nearby? The fossil fuel industry? The car industry? Particular drivers? Urban planners? Elected leaders from generations ago who carried out “urban renewal” projects that ran large highways through poor, and very often, black, communities?[12] When responsibilities are diffused, overlapping, or shared, then cause and effect cannot be determined with certainty, and the principle of retributive justice becomes hard to carry out.
What, then, is restorative justice? In the criminal justice field, restorative justice is a process of resolving broken relationship, where there is an offender and a victim. The victim names what s/he needs to heal from the damages and move forward, and the offender is called upon to participate in the victim’s restoration. Restorative justice is victim-centered. It takes account of the past but is forward-looking. Retributive justice, by contrast, is offender-centered. It is backward-looking because the offender is made to suffer something proportional as retribution, regardless of whether the victim is served by the punishment the offender endures.
Jewish law fits this basic pattern of restorative justice, as do many other non-Western cultures. For example, in Jewish law, thieves had to repay two to five times the amount they stole (Exodus 22:1 – 14) because they had to rebuild trust, not just compensate the true owner for economic lost time. Stealing a cow for a week didn’t just mean the owner lost out on milk for a week; it meant breaking covenantal trust and needing to rebuild it. As evidenced here, restorative justice might mean the offender must do more than in a retributive justice framework of proportionality. When King David pronounced a verdict that a certain man deserved death (even though he was unwittingly condemning himself), he said that the sentence would not be capital punishment, but restitution four-fold (2 Sam 12:5 – 6). Even if David was thinking about theft and speaking hyperbolically, his judgment is still of interest when we revisit the “life for life, eye for eye” principle in Jewish law. In the New Testament, Zaccheus honored the principle of restitution for theft in Jewish law: he offered to repay four times what he had stolen, in addition to giving away half his ill-gotten wealth to the poor (Luke 19:1 – 10). Jesus affirmed Zaccheus’ choice as appropriate. Presumably, Jesus would have also agreed with the principle in Jewish law that offenders give unfinished restitution – or reparations – to relatives or descendants of the victims, if the victim has already died (Numbers 5:5 – 9).
The principle of bodily harm is also tied to financial compensation in Jewish law’s restorative justice framework. In Exodus 21:18 – 19, injuring another person requires serving that person “until he is completely healed.” Exodus 21:18 – 19 is the first instance of bodily harm in the case law of the Sinai covenant, where the body is expected to heal.
What if the injury is more lasting than that? Jewish rabbinical commentators interpret the lex talionis “eye for an eye” principle in Exodus 21:23–25 as not strictly retributive, as if it always required death or the same level of injury. At times, it required an offender to help heal the harm he had done. It is an outer limit of proportionality for cases of bodily harm, meant to represent proportional financial compensation (Talmud Bava Kamma 83b–84a) or, in some cases, lashes (Makot 1:1), perhaps because when Israel was in exile, offenders could not partner with God in the garden land to repay mostly agriculturally-related debts. Rabbinical authorities actually make a type of joke out of the wording involved in “an eye for an eye.” They ask, “What if the offender is already blind? One cannot blind an already blind man!” So they believe that the “life for life, eye for an eye” is meant as proportional compensation first and foremost. If you blind someone’s eye, you become his “second eye.” A critical lesson emerges here: Just because this phrase in Jewish law appears in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi, does not mean that it has the same meaning there as here. Context matters.
This restorative justice reading of “an eye for an eye” – of undoing harm and restoring health if at all possible – is reinforced by the following facts. First, in Exodus 21:30, financial compensation is named again, this time for homicide by negligence. The owner of a goring ox who knew about the danger of the ox to humans, whose ox gored someone to death, was guilty of negligence and “life for life,” in principle. However, the family’s demand of a “ransom” appears to be expected. If the ox’s victim was also an indentured servant, the ox’s owner had to pay something to the servant’s master for labor lost (21:32), in addition to paying something named by the servant’s family and to them (21:28 – 31).
Second, moving to other portions of Scripture more broadly, in Leviticus 19:17 – 18, in what is often called the heart of Jewish law, God instructs Israelites to “not hate” or “take vengeance” upon one’s neighbor for a wrongdoing, but instead to “reprove” and “love” one’s neighbor. Exodus 21:24 – 25 and Leviticus 19:17 – 18 are mutually interpreting.[13] The only way to reconcile the “do not take vengeance” command in Leviticus 19:17–18 with the principle of “life for life, eye for an eye” in Exodus 21:23–25 (and Leviticus 24:17 – 22 and Deuteronomy 19:15 – 21 as well) is to interpret the latter as establishing a range of compensations for loss, so the offender can help restore the harm he has done.
Third, considering the Pentateuch as a narrative, God anticipated Israel’s exile from the garden land and loss of political sovereignty (Deuteronomy 27 – 28; Exodus 20:4 – 6). That exile would reenact Adam and Eve’s exile from the garden of Eden (Genesis 3:20 – 24). God knew Israel would not be able to enact capital punishment while being ruled by another nation. So God needed to establish in Israel the principle of restoration and compensation from the start.
The More Developed the Fetus, the Higher Its Moral Value
How do we apply a restorative justice paradigm to abortion? By again thinking about who is harmed, how they are harmed, how to help people heal from the harm, and how to institutionally discourage an offender from reoffending, if possible. That is the forward-looking aspect of restorative justice, because we are pursuing healthy relationships. Which is why, in the last post, I discussed ways to hold fathers of aborted fetuses accountable, both in relation to the fetus and to women in general.
Of course, the fetus is harmed when it is aborted. Many Christians become paralyzed at this point because many anti-abortionists argue that the fetus must have the moral weight of full personhood. How do they argue this? They say either that (1) the fetus must be ensouled from conception, or (2) the fetus is a “potential” full person even if not “actual” yet. Those who believe this might try to prosecute an offender for murder, usually looking to the mother and doctor, rather than the father, or to larger institutions. But Scripture itself does not begin on that footing.
Exodus 21:22 – 25 indicates that the fetus’ moral weight is related to its stage of development. My argument here is based on both the Hebrew Masoretic Text (MT) and the Greek Septuagint (LXX) variations of this passage taken together. After all, at the time of Jesus, both co-existed and were in use.
The Greek Septuagint says that in the event of a miscarriage, the Israelites were to discern whether the fetus was “unformed” or “formed.” The probably meant the degree that the fetus looked like a “formed” human being. Only if it did were the Jews to place the moral weight of the fetus at full personhood.
Since the Greek Septuagint was used in parallel with the Hebrew Masoretic, the Jewish readers must have thought of the “fine” levied by the MT text as expressing the physical stage of the fetus – and thus its moral weight – in the LXX. In its original context, the “fine” probably included the intentionality of the assailant, the degree to which the pregnant woman was an active participant in the fight, and maybe a few other factors.
The Corporation’s Responsibility
Limited liability in corporate law allows corporations to privatize gains but socialize the costs – that is, the harms. Fossil fuel companies place “externalities” like the costs of chemical pollution off of their own accounting books and into the health of people, in this case, pregnant mothers and fetuses. This is one root of the corporate contribution to fetal abnormalities.
British evangelicals were firmly against limited liability when it was first considered there. They argued that not being fully liable for damages is a violation of Christian duty and grossly immoral.[14] It is a form of theft, often accompanied by lying, which violates the commandments, “Do not steal,” and, “Do not lie (bear false witness).” Limited liability doesn’t even measure up to full accountability under the principle of backward-looking, meritocratic-retributive justice.
Even Adam Smith—Mr. “Invisible Hand” himself—was against limited liability.[15] Smith was in favor of the worker-owned corporation, where labor and capital were united, and people could take personal responsibility for what they produced. He was against reducing the corporate entity into a mechanism where people just tried to get as much money as possible: shareholders through stock value, and managers and workers for pay, over against customers in terms of their health and well-being, and the broader community impacted by pollution. Why should actual people be fully responsible for what they do, while “corporate people” are not?[16]
What policies would structure corporate behavior towards restoring the harms they’ve done? Make the public a major shareholder of private companies, and/or implement profit controls like the proposed Windfall Profits Tax on certain companies.[17] As J.D. Zellerbach, who was chairman of the board of paper company Crown Zellerbach, said in 1956, “Americans regard business management as a stewardship, and they expect it to operate the economy as a public trust for the benefit of all the people.”[18] Morally and economically, policies like these would express the claim that it is society that allows the corporation to operate at all, and it is for the good of society that the corporation should operate.
The public should be a major, if not majority, shareholder of Amazon, for instance. Amazon’s business rests on public taxpayer funding: the internet, originally created by the Department of Defense as ARPAnet; computers and devices, originally brought to you by the DoD; the electrical system, a public utility; roads and highways, which are federally and locally funded; and automobiles and fossil fuels, which received major government subsidies and trade protections. Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is currently a big free rider, polluter, and traffic congester.[19]
Shareholder revenues and/or profits above a certain threshold could be used to fund health care, especially improvements in maternal and neonatal health. This way, corporations putting harmful chemicals into the environment and inflicting diffused harm can be democratically managed and have their profits benefit society more than private individual shareholders.
Another application of restorative justice to corporate law would be repealing limited liability status, except for a few select innovators. Modern British evangelicals Paul Mills and Michael Schluter at the Jubilee Centre advocate for this.[20] Where do we actually need more R&D, job growth, and technological change? Clean and green energy companies, certainly. Perhaps a few other sectors. This is a forward-looking remedy that makes corporations internalize the costs of what they do. It is also forward-looking because more economists and scientists argue that we need to plan for a steady-state economy as opposed to a growth economy; infinite growth on a finite planet is mathematically impossible.[21]
People’s General Responsibility to One Another
People together bear some responsibility for not just the cost of harms done to some, but towards the broader vision of human flourishing. If we as members of society benefit (albeit unevenly) from fossil fuels, cars, highways, and the like, then we as a society owe the most vulnerable children and families compensation towards the restoration of their health. The way to express that through institutions and policy is through a single-payer government health insurance plan, rather than private health insurers, especially since we already treat disability and unemployment as insurance from the government. We can also fully fund special needs education and other childraising assistance like subsidized childcare and early childhood education, like many other European countries do. We can learn from Germany, Sweden, and other countries that have incorporated more restorative justice principles into their criminal justice system, since by comparison, families and communities have been unusually decimated by the current American system. We owe each other a context for human flourishing. And lest we forget, poverty drives the abortion rate, so if we want to reduce the abortion rate, we must reduce poverty.
Israel as Partial Restoration in a Garden Land
In Scripture, God’s restorative justice is seen in the fact that God keeps trying to restore His creation to the original vision, ultimately in Jesus. God’s vision of shalom, flourishing, and justice begins in the original garden.
After Adam and Eve corrupted human nature in the fall, God called together a people called Israel and restored them to a garden land, to be the next attempt at being Adam and Eve, living by God’s commandments. God gave Israel commandments not to make them earn hypothetical points on a scoresheet on His mind, or to prove that people can only be lousy failures. Instead, God’s commandments were to help the Israelites undo the corruption of sin that they inherited, and the harm they did which made it worse. Thus, God said to the Israelites, “Circumcise your hearts” (Deuteronomy 10:16) – that is, internalize the commandments so deeply that you cut away the corruption of sin. For Israel, like all humanity, was both victim and offender. Restorative justice in the biblical narrative relates to God’s painstaking effort to restore to restore human beings with human participation to our intended journey into human becoming, to restore His relational vision from creation among human beings, and to restore the garden of Eden’s spread over the wild creation with human gardeners. Israel did experience more spiritual and moral health than the rest of humanity; they diagnosed the disease, hoped for the cure, and documented both (Romans 7:7 – 25; Deuteronomy 4:1 – 6).
God demonstrated His restorative justice as He restored the Israelites’ physical health as well, which is relevant to the topics of abortion, and maternal and neonatal health. Delivering Israel from Egypt, God said, “I will put none of these diseases on you which I have put on the Egyptians; for I, the LORD, am your healer” (Exodus 15:26; Deuteronomy 7:15). God also warned Israel that they would experience diseases if they were faithless and underwent exile and fruitlessness (Deuteronomy 28:60; 29:22). Because this and other warnings in the Sinai covenant sound backward-looking and retributive, they require more explanation; see this link for resources.
In the Sinai covenant, God instilled the original creation vision of people caring for their neighbors, and their neighbors’ children. Their flourishing was connected. If an Israelite became indebted, for instance, God called the creditor to forgive the debt of the debtor – after seven years (Deuteronomy 15:1 – 17) or on the jubilee year on the fixed calendar every fifty years (Leviticus 25:8 – 12, 35 – 55). Indebtedness was a new Pharaoh. An Israelite’s debt interfered with her or him from enjoying the garden land as God intended. That is why God reminded Israel, “For the sons of Israel are My servants; they are My servants whom I brought out from the land of Egypt. I am the LORD your God” (Leviticus 25:38, 42, 55). Thus, an Israelite delivering a neighbor from debt and servitude – and by extension, poverty, displacement, and homelessness, too – was like God liberating that Israelite from Pharaoh’s grip in the Exodus. The jubilee was perhaps a supreme example of participating in God’s restorative justice as a community.
Jesus as the Restored Human
Jesus accelerated and deepened the healing and restoring work of God. He healed people of their diseases, demonic possession, even death. And he did so to illustrate outside of his body the deeper work he was doing inside his body: healing his human nature of the corruption of sin – the reason why God had to exile people from the original garden land lest we immediately eat from the tree of life and make the corruption immortal, too. (Even exile and mortality were a severe mercy from God, acts of His forward-looking restorative justice.) This is why Matthew narrates multiple stories of Jesus healing others, and quotes the Suffering Servant prophecy of Isaiah right in the middle of it all, to frame the meaning of Jesus’ ministry and life: “He took our illnesses and bore our diseases” (Matthew 8:17 quoting Isaiah 53:4). Jesus’ atoning work was an act of restorative justice: a human being who was perfectly faithful to God the Father as covenant partner: Jesus judged the corruption of sin by never sinning, and he restored human nature to the transfigured and purified life God always wanted for us and in us.
Jesus is therefore the “new Adam” who undid the damage that the original Adam did to our human nature (e.g. Romans 5:12 – 21; 1 Corinthians 15:21 – 28, 45 – 49; cf. Luke 3:21 – 38), so that he could do the same in us by his Spirit (Romans 8:5 – 11). Jesus succeeded at “circumcising the heart,” which is what Israel, as another iteration of Adam, could not fully do, and had to await (Deuteronomy 30:6; Romans 2:28 – 29; 6:6; 8:3 – 4). Jesus regained the proper human place in creation in a way that includes us (e.g. Ephesians 1:15 – 2:10; Daniel 7:13 – 14).
Living Out Jesus’ Mission Today
Christians cannot claim the story of Israel pre-Jesus as if we lived in their story. Our land is not a divinely superintended garden land. Nor does God give us promises directly about our physical health. Nor is the U.S. covenanted with God as a nation. However, we can transpose this vision into a more ordinary key.
Christians can strive for broad human flourishing as the public good, especially as it relates to health and human ecology. For God’s original vision of the creation for humanity was to have a collective dominion (Genesis 1:26 – 28): every human being should participate in human community to be nourished by, enjoy, work in, and own some share of creation. That is why Jesus sent us out in a great commission from a mountain (Matthew 28:16 – 20) modeled on three great precursors. The proximate one was the prophetic vision of people spreading out from God’s presence on a mountain to renew gardens (Isaiah 2:1 – 4; Micah 4:1 – 5), where people would “beat swords into plowshares”; each person would sit under his or her “own vine and fig tree.” The historical one was Israel’s commission to follow God’s presence from a mountain into the garden land (Deuteronomy 34). But the prototype and backstory to those was the original commission from a mountain called Eden (Ezekiel 28:13 – 14; four rivers diverging in Genesis 2:10 – 14 indicates elevation), where humans were supposed to spread a spiritual, moral, and physical garden of Eden. Thus, Jesus’ great commission is not about “saving souls” only while neglecting bodies, about preaching words only without shaping the land and law, or about reconciling the vertical God-human relation without reconciling horizontal human-human relations. Jesus’ people integrate care for body and soul, restore all relations, and manifest glimpses of God’s original garden.
Paul demonstrates exactly that. In 2 Corinthians 8 – 9, Paul casts a vision of the global church as a community that expresses the life of Christ, and therefore seeks economic equality across the community (2 Corinthians 8:15). After all, Jesus said that his movement will share together in “houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or lands” (Matthew 19:29; Mark 10:30; Luke 18:29). And Jesus and the apostles carried over the commandments, “Do not steal,” and “Do not lie” (Matthew 19:18; Mark 10:19), commanding thieves to steal no longer and work instead, not just to be “self-sufficient” but to help provide for others (Ephesians 4:28). This is part of the “fruit” of the Spirit – a sign God is restoring His great garden.
Moreover, God’s kingdom confronted the institutions of power with a sensitivity to structural injustice, exploitation, and extortion (Luke 3:12 – 14). John the Baptist and Jesus gave tax collectors and imperial soldiers context-specific and role-specific responsibilities to not steal. For they had political roles that enabled them to steal more easily. They needed a little more help knowing how to put “do not steal” into practice.
Modern corporate law again presents us with an opportunity to express more of a relational, restorative justice vision which the abortion rate forces us to think about. We can offset theft. Sarah Anderson at the Institute for Policy Studies observes that during the COVID-19 pandemic, 51 of the largest 100 U.S. low-wage employers “rigged pay rules to give CEOs 29 percent average raises while their frontline employees made 2 percent less.” [22] Among these 51 firms, the average CEO-worker pay ratio averaged 830 to 1 in 2020. In other words, many corporations cause economic inequalities simply in the way they structure wages. Walmart is a good example, since many Walmart employees have to rely on federal benefits because Walmart wages are so low. Amazon is another good example of a corporation that causes public costs just because of their management goals; Amazon reports double the number of worker repetitive motion and injuries as Walmart; their injured workers need public disability and health care and affordable housing systems.[23]
In the U.S., proposals like the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act could address this. The Act incentivizes corporations to narrow their pay divides by linking each company’s tax rate to the size of the compensation gap between its highest-paid executive and median worker. As a point of comparison, Switzerland regularly puts referendums like this on the popular ballot. One particularly aggressive one failed to pass in 2013; it would have capped CEO pay at 12 times that of the lowest-paid staff; it garnered 34.7% of the vote.[24] Proposals like this would preserve the incentive to innovate and work hard, but tether the firm’s employees together, helping lift the working class in particular.
The only argument in favor of “excessive CEO pay” is the American cultural perception that the CEO takes the most “risk” in the firm, but that view is notably not shared in more community-oriented cultures like Japan and Switzerland. Low-wage workers take risks by staying in decimated, de-industrialized communities, too – as much if not more than the CEO and CEO’s family, who typically make enough to put their kids in private schools, who could move somewhere else if times get hard. The lopsided structures of wages within companies are a far cry from the vision of Genesis 1 where people share collectively in the use and enjoyment of God’s good creation.
Conclusion
If we are committed to bring down the abortion rate, we are forced to look closely at many of our society’s problems, and think hard about how to address them. Central to that is whether we are moved by a backward-looking retributive justice or a forward-looking restorative justice.
Different spiritual and cultural traditions may have different ways answering that question, and of initially articulating that relational vision and those relationships. For Christians, informed and inspired by God’s own restorative justice, we can say that people bear a positive responsibility towards one’s neighbor, and on their behalf. We do not need to even owe a debt or have culpability for wronging someone. We are simply related as human beings, though our laws and attitudes don’t always reflect that. My hope is that this can be a step in that direction, and not an end point.
[1] Padula et al., “Association.”
[2] Ren et al. “Periconception Exposure”
[3] Nicoll, “Environmental Contaminants.”
[4] Brian Clowes, “Shouldn’t Abortion Be Allowed for Serious or Fatal Birth Defects?” Human Life International, April 7, 2021; https://www.hli.org/resources/abortion-serious-fatal-birth-defects/ tabulates data from 2.44 million women from Florida (1998 – 2020), Louisiana (1996 – 2018), Minnesota (1999 – 2019), Nebraska (2001 – 2019), South Dakota (1999 – 2019), and Utah (1996 – 2018). Links provided. Another pro-life writer, Michael Spielman, “The Real Reasons Women Choose Abortion,” Abort73.com, January 10, 2017; https://abort73.com/blog/the_real_reasons_women_choose_abortion/ cites Guttmacher data from 2004 finding that 3 percent of 957 women surveyed responded with “Possible problems affecting the health of the fetus” as their primary reason for choosing abortion: https://www.guttmacher.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/tables/370305/3711005t3.pdf.
[5] Pabst and Metzger, “Illegal Air Pollution.”
[6] Raz et al., “Autism Spectrum Disorder” summarized by Rivas, “Air Pollution.”
[7] Shelton et al., “Neurodevelopmental Disorders” summarized by Olson, “Nearby Pesticides” and Sagiv et al., “Prenatal Organophosphate.”
[8] Whitworth et al., “Childhood Lymphohematopoietic Cancer.” Lupo et al., “Maternal Exposure.”
[9] Kurtin et al., “Demographic Risk Factors.”
[10] Willis et al., “Shale Gas.”
[11] Olson, “Pregnant Mothers.”
[12] Brent Cebul, “Tearing Down Black America,” Boston Review, July 22, 2020; https://bostonreview.net/articles/brent-cebul-tearing-down-black-america/. “Policing is not the only kind of state violence. In the mid-twentieth century, city governments, backed by federal money, demolished hundreds of Black neighborhoods in the name of urban renewal.”
[13] Snyder-Belousek, Atonement, 408.
[14] Hilton, Age of Atonement.
[15] Elliot, “Plc: The Prerogative.”
[16] Mills and Schluter, After Capitalism, 127–143 advocate repealing corporate “limited liability” laws; Mills and Schluter are Christian economists and policy analysts at the Jubilee Centre, UK. See also Maizes, “Limited Liability,” Philip Mattera, “The Buck,” Stephanie Blankenburg et al., “Limited Liability.”
[17] Paul Karp, “Nobel Prize-Winning Economist Joseph Stiglitz Calls for Windfall Profits Tax in Australia,” The Guardian UK, July 18, 2022; https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/jul/19/nobel-prize-winning-economist-joseph-stiglitz-calls-for-windfall-profits-tax-in-australia. Scott A. Hodge, “The History of Excess Profits Taxes Not as Effective or Harmless as Today’s Advocates Portray,” Tax Foundation, July 22, 2020; https://taxfoundation.org/excess-profits-tax-pandemic-profits-tax/ gives a helpful history.
[18] Quoted by Robert Reich, “What Should Be the Purpose of Corporations?” Robert Reich, July 8, 2018; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGhJyAYZj9o. Reich points out that Zellerbach’s view about business was quite common in mid-20th century America, and calls it “stakeholder capitalism.” Reich contrasts that view with “shareholder capitalism” promoted in the 1980s by financiers like Carl Icahn, who said, “I have to look out for the shareholder’s interests, and I’m the largest shareholder.”
[19] Scott A. Hodge, “The History of Excess Profits Taxes Not as Effective or Harmless as Today’s Advocates Portray,” Tax Foundation, July 22, 2020; https://taxfoundation.org/excess-profits-tax-pandemic-profits-tax/ makes an argument against the windfall profits tax, but does not consider public funding of major technologies and infrastructure which would make the public a shareholder. Why do companies get to privatize the benefits of goods produced by public funding, and also externalize costs like pollution? Alex Muresianu, “Windfall Profits Tax Wrong for American Energy,” Tax Foundation, March 21, 2022; https://taxfoundation.org/windfall-profits-tax-oil-company-profits/. Muresianu’s strongest argument is that taxing profit changes the incentives for an oil/gas corporation to invest in new technology or drilling new wells. But oil/gas corporations are already incentivized to keep oil and gas prices high, and therefore to not drill new wells and increase supply. Such corporations could raise capital or debt for new ventures. Finally, is the fossil fuel sector an industry which requires more growth and public and private capital investment?
[20] Mills and Schluter, After Capitalism, 127–143
[21] Herman Daly, Towards a Steady State Economy (W.H. Freeman & Company, 1973). Herman Daly and John B. Cobb Jr., For The Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Beacon Press: Boston, 1994). John Attarian, “The Steady-State Economy: What It Is, Why We Need It,” Negative Population Growth, 2004; https://npg.org/library/forum-series/the-steady-state-economy-what-it-is-why-we-need-it.html. James Magnus-Johnston, “Do We Need a Steady State Economy? One Politician’s Surprising Answer,” The Daly News | Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy, May 27, 2013; https://steadystate.org/do-we-need-a-steady-state-economy-one-politicians-surprising-answer/, which is an interview with renowned climatologist Dr. Andrew Weaver, who became the first Green candidate ever elected to British Columbia’s legislative assembly.
[22] Sarah Anderson, “How Corporations Pumped Up CEO Pay While Their Low-Wage Workers Suffered in the Pandemic,” Institute for Policy Studies, May 11, 2021; https://ips-dc.org/how-corporations-pumped-up-ceo-pay-while-their-low-wage-workers-suffered-in-the-pandemic.
[23] Katherine Long, “Inside Amazon’s Most Dangerous Warehouse,” Business Insider, February 10, 2022; https://www.businessinsider.com/injury-rates-at-amazon-most-dangerous-warehouse-dupont-washington-2022-2. Annie Palmer, “Amazon Warehouse Workers Injured At Higher Rates Than Those At Rival Companies, Study Finds,” CNBC, June 1, 2021; https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/01/study-amazon-workers-injured-at-higher-rates-than-rival-companies.html. Berman, Sobin, Gross LLP, “Amazon Implementing Measures To Reduce Repetitive Motion Injuries,” Berman, Sobin, Gross LLP Maryland Workers’ Compensation Law, July 13, 2021; https://www.marylandworkerscompensationlaw.com/workers-compensation/amazon-implementing-measures-to-reduce-repetitive-motion-injuries/. Strategic Organizing Center, “Primed for Pain: Amazon’s Epidemic of Workplace Injuries,” Strategic Organizing Center, May 2021; https://thesoc.org/amazon-primed-for-pain/.
[24] John Hooper, “Switzerland Votes Against Cap on Executive Pay,” The Guardian UK, November 24, 2013; https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/24/switzerland-votes-against-cap-executive-pay