Taxation for Peace not War: An Interview with Dr. Jerilynn Prior

I did not expect when I spoke with Jerilynn Prior that along with our talk about war tax resistance and peace taxes we would get into a discussion of ovulation, menstruation and perimenopause. Jerilynn founded the Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research as a Professor of Endocrinology at The University of British Columbia. I have been struggling with this hormonal transition time and Jerilynn let me know:

“The good news is, and I know that from experience, is that a difficult perimenopause leads to a very much better menopause. The idea that this misery goes on forever and it’s due to estrogen deficiency is totally wrong; the problem in perimenopause is high estrogen and it’s swinging levels.” I’m looking forward to reading her book “Estrogen Storm Season” which is a work of fiction describing an endocrinologist and how eight of her very diverse patients are navigating this period of transition.

She and her then new husband became Quakers in Massachusetts when he started at Harvard Divinity School and she transferred to Boston University to finish her medical degree. They began attending Cambridge Friends Meeting in support of a young man who had deserted the US army. The Meeting was physically sheltering him, as did Jerilynn and her husband until the military police came for him after eighteen days. Her first experience of Friends was years before when she attended an American Friends Service Committee march in Portland, OR.

She moved to Canada in 1976. Her husband was in divinity school when he turned in his draft card to a well-known cleric at a cathedral in Boston as a protest to being conscripted in the unjust war in Vietnam. For his trouble he was considered A1 delinquent by his draft board. Jerilynn said “…the issue of punitive reclassification was taken to the Supreme Court and won; therefore, they couldn’t seize or jail him. We ended up coming in to Canada ‘76 because I couldn’t work in a medical system where someone who couldn’t pay would think of me as a fat cat and be mad at me before they ever knew me. I also wouldn’t be able to turn anyone away if they couldn’t pay. I would be both burnt out and broke. We came here so I could work in the publicly funded health system.”

She and her husband joined the Vancouver BC Monthly Meeting shortly after they arrived. She grew up as the child of Baptist missionaries in remote Kodiak Island fishing villages in Alaska and felt herself a part of her parent’s mission; which was to support village people, live alongside and with them. As an adolescent and young adult, she had to live away from home to go to high school and work her way through her university and medical school. This was difficult but ultimately taught the resilience that has been essential during her career.

This interview is abridged and edited for brevity and clarity:

Western Friend: Can you tell me about your war tax resistance and Leading related to Peace Tax in the United States and Canada?

Jerilynn: The Vietnam war was going on and I felt strongly that it was wrong. I didn’t earn any money until I became a medical intern in July, 1969. At the time almost half of the Gross Domestic Product in the United States was going to support the war. That was horrifying. When the time came to do my taxes there was a section on the form asking how many dependents you have. I put ten, (implying that these are people in Vietnam who have become orphans because of the war). Each time I didn’t have to pay a percentage of taxes I would donate that amount to a peace organization. I continued to do that through residency and my fellowship in endocrinology in upstate New York. When we worked at the Quaker Friends School in Poughkeepsie, NY for two years and when we went to Alaska and I worked in the Alaska Native Health Service I continued peace tax activism.

I think they were catching on to me (laughs) because by the time we came to Canada in 1976 the IRS was after me. I paid all the taxes owing in Canada. We rented for the first year and half but when we bought a small house the IRS threated to put a lien on our home. I found out that there was an agreement between the US and Canada that if I paid my Canadian taxes, the IRS couldn’t take anything from me. At the same time there was a Quaker from Victoria, BC, Edith Adamson, who felt strongly that the law should allow conscientious objection to military taxation framed as a Peace Tax.

Canada didn’t have an equivalent to the Bill of Rights until 1982 when the Charter of Rights and Freedoms was enacted. As soon as that became law, our goal was to test conscientious objection to military taxation as a matter of both conscience and religious freedom. It just happened that I had started doing that kind of tax resistance in Canada again after the Charter was enacted and after I was divorced from my husband: who was no longer willing to be part of that type of resistance. I filled out my income tax and said I was withholding the portion, that Conscience Canada had figured out, was directly related to military.

The tax court called me up, and so that's where the legal action began. I ended up being the “test case” that took Peace Tax resistance forward. There were people from the Meeting and many others as well who supported this, not as something they would do, but as something that should be available to others in support of conscience. Somehow the money to pay for legal fees was raised—looking back, it's hard to imagine how we got that kind of money.

In the final years of that Peace Tax action, my lawyer was Thomas Berger, who had been a judge. He was a man of high prominence in the Canadian legal system, having been a social justice minister for the government. Despite that, in part because my legal action started with the tax court, which has very limited scope, we faced challenges. In their view, there wasn't anything about taxes that related to conscience. We lost repeatedly in various courts and appealed to the Supreme Court twice, but both times the case was not heard. I had to say to Thomas Berger, "The law is your life, but I think the law is wrong in this case." Since that time, I continued by donating a large enough proportion of my salary so that I wasn't, in my view, paying for military taxes.

Conscience Canada developed a Peace Tax Fund, with the understanding that if the money belonged to a whole bunch of people, they couldn't garnish it or take it. I was depositing the taxes owing into is Fund. Because Revenue Canada then took that amount out of my salary, I was basically paying twice. I tried very hard to get the university to support me, to not withdraw tax funds before I ever got them. But no, that was not possible. Then I tried taking out my salary in traveler's checks. It was difficult. And I was a single parent with two young children, so that made it additionally hard.

Western Friend: How did Spirit show up in this Leading? Did your meeting support you?

Jerilynn: The meeting was supportive. The meeting as a whole didn't see their way clear to say this is what we should do, but they said, "We support thee in your Leading." There were a couple of other people in the meeting who also withheld military taxes. In particular, one woman made herself available as the person who did the administrative stuff and supported me. So, I am deeply grateful for that.

Western Friend: How does your Quaker practice connect you to the energy of sacred resistance?

Jerilynn: If you believe that there's that of God in every person, it just doesn't make sense to purposely plan for or equip for killing other people. My understanding that that was not just horrifyingly wrong, but stupid—it doesn't solve problems. This belief began when I was a kid. My father was a conscientious objector in World War II. He was assigned to milk 40 cows morning and night on farm outside of Mount Vernon, Washington, which is where I was born.

Western Friend: What is Spirit leading you to focus on currently?

Jerilynn: My Leading now and for the last four decades has been to transform understanding of women's reproduction, so it fits within the whole of our lives. We need to understand how it connects to our sense of self, our well-being, our physical and emotional wellness or illness. The way it does that is by modulating progesterone and ovulation. To ignore ovulation and progesterone, focusing only on estrogen, is to understand half the picture and prevents women from understanding themselves, and prevents doctors from effectively treating women’s problems.

Western Friend: Can you give an example of how knowing about ovulation and progesterone could help a doctor better treat a patient?

In perimenopause, women are often given menopausal hormone therapy, which is estrogen dominant. Estrogen is high during perimenopause because feedback links are broken, on purpose, so we don’t end up with a period it our 90s ; it's highest in those who are symptomatic, for sure. And the progesterone is already decreasing in perimenopause. So, we did a randomized controlled trial and showed that oral micronized progesterone (300 mg at bedtime) daily both significantly improved night sweats and improved sleep—the two things that bother women the most.

Learn more about the Centre for Menstrual Cycle and Ovulation Research at www.cemcour.ebs.ca

For online:

If you would like more information about Jerilynn’s peace tax action you can look at the Sunderland P. Gardner Lecture that she gave in 1992 at the Canadian Yearly Meeting annual meeting. She wrote this lecture as a pamphlet called “I Feel the Wings of God Today” about Peace Tax, conscientious objection to military taxation. It was published by Argenta Friends Press, which was founded, along with a boarding high school by conscientious objectors who left California for Argenta B.C. because they would not sign allegiance cards during the McCarthy era. It’s available on the Western Friend website.