Portside

Recent policy developments, primarily the Affordable Care Act's Medicaid expansion, have the potential to improve access to health care for women who aren't eligible for Medicaid under current requirements. But 19 states, including most in the South where maternal mortality rates are higher, have opted out of Medicaid expansion. Georgia, for example, has 838,000 uninsured women, more than 25 percent of whom are African American.

Kids' books are missing the diversity of modern America. In children's books, it can be easier to find talking pandas than characters of color. Only 6 percent of children's books published in 2012 featured diverse characters.

Islamist militancy in Nigeria is being strengthened by western and regional fossil fuel interests. The roots of the country's security and instability go back to its formation by the British during colonial times: the Muslims in the North, the Christians and animists in the South. The country's Civil War/Biafran War, from 1967 to 1970, was the first rupture because of ethnicity.

Of 3,200 children's books published in 2013, just 93 were about black people, according to a study by the Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin.

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This evidence suggests that cuts to programs for seniors may be unlikely to end up benefitting our kids. Rather such cuts may be associated with reduced spending on kids as well. If the public does not trust the government to provide good care for seniors, it may also not trust the government to provide good care for children.

Most comprehensive climate change review to date warns of risks to children, with Unicef arguing that children have been largely left out of the debate so far.

According to the Academic Pediatric Association and the American Academy of Pediatrics, the effects of poverty are the most important obstacle to the health and well being of young people. To try to remedy that, the American Pediatric Association Task Force on Childhood Poverty is beginning a long-term effort to address the problem by looking for solutions that will be effective, sustained and “protected from retrenchment."