Revoking the right to abortion relegated women as less than full human beings. All human rights are up for grabs, and women’s hard-won rights were deemed easy to destroy. Trump has acted accordingly but is running into “the resistance,” with women leading the way.
After Roe v Wade was overturned after nearly fifty years, what will it mean to be a woman in America and what kind of country is it becoming? This is what the book ‘The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America’ explores, reviewed by Adele.
Takes up: Amazonian Initiative Movement, a Sierra Leone group fighting genital mutilation (FGM); a two-year, 7,400-mile caravan journey through 20 African countries by #FrontlineEndingFGM; Asian Women for Equality struggling to stop massage parlors and other venues of prostitution in Canada; and France becoming the first country to explicitly guarantee women’s legal right to abortion in its constitution.
Republicans have to destroy democracy if they want to rule because a robust majority of the U.S. population supports legal, safe, accessible abortion; are for gay rights and don’t despise Trans people. So how do you trash their rights? You do it by destroying a government by the people and for the people. Let us count the ways.
Adele reviews “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood,” by Michele Goodwin, Goodwin describes the increasing wave of legislation regulating pregnancy and criminalizing miscarriages, stillbirths and supposed “endangerment” of the fetus.
So much is happening regarding abortion—since the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, trashing women’s right to abortion, a human right we’ve had for 50 years—that it is almost impossible to keep track of. For help, you can turn to the splendid blog of Jessica Valenti, “Abortion Every Day.”
Disabled women have joined anti-U.S. Supreme Court demonstrations as they are eleven times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth; Disabled South Koreans protested in subways over lack of access to essential services, abuse in institutions, and elevated death rates; a disabled woman in Pakistan founded two organizations which manufacture and donate wheelchairs, employing mostly the disabled.
It wasn’t alone the question of abortion rights that helped Democrats do so well in the midterm elections, but also what made women and so many others furious was the extreme cruelty and sickening glee with which Republicans imposed their draconian abortion laws and bans. Women could feel the hate.
The Women’s March and other groups held A Women’s Wave Day of Action on Oct. 8, 2022, demanding a nationwide right to abortion after the U.S. Supreme Court gutted that right. Women, youth, and allies are aware of the importance of reproductive justice to our lives and democracy and are motivated to organize and creatively fight back.
Readers’ Views on Abortion Rights Struggles; Ukraine, Russia and the Left; Marx and Transgender; World Food Crisis; Normalized Domestic Violence, and Ecuador’s Uprising
Review of “The Turnaway Study: Ten Years, a Thousand Women, and the Consequences of Having—or Being Denied—an Abortion.” The study was conducted before the overturn of Roe v. Wade, and Diana Greene Foster investigated the real experiences of women receiving abortions in the first and second trimester.
Now that the Supreme Court of the United States has overturned women’s right to abortion, the profound ramifications of that unprecedented decision are becoming known. Women are fighting back, from the Women’s March, to Black women, to Teens for Reproductive Rights, women will reclaim the right to control our own bodies.
The overturning of abortion rights is worse than before it was legal because of the hatred of women for creating a movement that challenged men’s ownership of our bodies, lives and minds, and many are determined to get that power and control back no matter what the body count.
With the gutting of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has taken away a human right and stripped bodily autonomy from half the population. It is a giant step towards fascism. What is the answer to such an outrage? It is not the Democratic Party, who couldn’t even rid us of the Hyde Amendment.
With the gutting of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court has taken away a human right and stripped bodily autonomy from half the population. It is a giant step towards fascism. What is the answer to such an outrage? It is not the Democratic Party, who couldn’t even rid us of the Hyde Amendment.
In San Francisco on May 14 over 10,000 people marched for the right to abortion and against the U.S. Supreme Court which has now lost all legitimacy. A million people marched in over 450 events across the U.S. to show their anger at the Supreme Court’s impending reversal of Roe v. Wade, which had legalized women’s right to abortion.
The raging attack on abortion rights is an attack on freedom by fascist leaders and their followers who want to undermine democracy and save a decrepit, unworkable, exploitative, racist-patriarchal capitalism.
While the U.S. Supreme Court is set to either gut or overturn Roe V. Wade, women cannot depend on the abortion pill alone. The fight for women to control our own bodies is a fight for freedom and should be waged as such. It is time to make that luminously clear.
The raging attack on abortion rights is an attack on freedom by fascist leaders and their followers who want to undermine democracy and save a decrepit, unworkable, exploitative, racist-patriarchal capitalism.
Paxton Smith’s valedictorian speech against a new extremist anti-abortion bill signed by Texas Governor Greg Abbott illuminates how this assault on women’s freedom can open the gates for women–especially young women–to flood the streets and demonstrate that control of one’s own body is something so fundamental to being human that they are willing to overthrow a government to create it.
Readers’ Views takes up: Queer safety is a human right; fake green politics; women in India; women in the U.S.; shameless evictions; voices from behind bars.
“The Power Worshippers” by Katherine Stewart explains the religious Right as a “Christian nationalist” movement. This is not a grassroots movement but one deliberately designed by ultra-rich businessmen and families to impose complete political, social, and economic control.
Review of ‘Without Apology: The Abortion Struggle Now’, on the history of the women’s liberation movement’s struggle for full reproductive justice.
Editorial on the struggle women have in the U.S. to keep abortion legal and accessible, how the Left has mostly given lip service to the struggle, and how today when socialism is again on the agenda, it also has to mean women have control of their own bodies.
“Woman as Reason” columnist Terry Moon writes about the state of abortion rights in the U.S. in light of the draconian attacks against it and relates women’s struggle to control their bodies to the thingification of women, the poor response of the U.S. left, Karl Marx’s devastating critique of capitalism, and what revolution must come to mean.
She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry is a documentary of the women’s liberation movement (WLM) in the U.S., from the late 1960s to the early 1970s. Filmmaker Mary Dore used a wealth of historical news coverage to give a sense of the breadth of organizations and depth of demands in the explosive growth of the WLM. Activists, identified within archival footage—including women like Fran Beal of the Civil Rights Movement’s Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Lesbian rights activist Karla Jay, and Judith Arcana of the abortion underground organization Jane—gave contemporary interviews interspersed in the film.
From the November-December 2014 issue of News & Letters
Pro by Katha Pollitt is a wake-up call to the pro-choice movement to reclaim abortion as a positive social good. Ever since Roe v. Wade legalized abortion, we have allowed religious Right rhetoric to sneak into our own discussions so that even we now [=>]
Review of “Generation Roe: Inside the Future of the Pro-Choice Movement” by Sarah Erdreich
CAPITALIST CRISIS AND REVOLT
I appreciated Franklin Dmitryev’s Lead article in the July-August N&L, on “Spain, Greece, Europe: Capitalist crisis and revolt,” for showing how the so-called “radical Left” is not really so radical. They think they can solve things through managing the economy and redistributing wealth, and channel energy into politics.
The boldfaced paragraph in the [=>]
