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Women’s Rights Under Assault, Abortion Outlawed In South Dakota
The right to abortion was won in the United States in 1973 through a mass struggle in the streets that culminated in the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion.
Women’s Rights Under Assault, Abortion Outlawed In South Dakota
By STEVEN ARGUE
On March 6, 2006 South Dakota’s Republican governor, Mike Rounds, signed into law a bill banning almost all abortions in the state. The bill makes it illegal for doctors to perform an abortion under any circumstance other than to save the life of a woman.
The right to abortion was won in the United States in 1973 through a mass struggle in the streets that culminated in the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. A radicalized movement for women’s rights, born out of the movement against the Vietnam War and other struggles for social justice at home, was sickened by the injustice of women being butchered in illegal back alley abortions and saw the right of women to control their own bodies as fundamental in the struggle for women’s equality.
Today the bill passed in South Dakota is a blatant violation of the law under Roe v. Wade meant to force the issue back onto the Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade. In response National Lawyers Guild (NLG) President Michael Avery said, "The legislators and the governor of South Dakota have violated their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. Local officials are obliged to follow the law as declared by the Supreme Court and are not entitled to repeatedly violate the law in the hope that the Court may change its rulings." The 6,000-member NLG is calling for the impeachment Governor Mike Rounds.
Women in sparsely populated South Dakota currently obtain about 800 abortions a year. Under the new law women will be forced to take time off of school and work and spend money traveling out of state. These expenses and hardships are added to the price of abortion in the United States, putting the ability women to control their own bodies and their own lives further out of reach for many poor women.
While abortion is a free on demand health service in revolutionary Cuba, public funding for abortion in the United States was eliminated in 1977 when Democrat Jimmy Carter signed into law the Hyde Amendment that cut off Medicaid funding to 23 million poor women in the US. In response to critics Carter, a millionaire peanut farmer, replied, “There are many things in life that are not fair.”
In the 1980’s, under the Republican regime of Ronald Reagan, the right to abortion was widely seen as under attack. In response mass mobilizations for women’s rights continued to apply the kind of pressure that made the government fearful of inspiring deeper radicalizations by overturning the law. Internationally, however, the Reagan administration engineered major setbacks for women’s rights. In Afghanistan the U.S. gave billions of dollars of military support to the misogynistic Mujahideen that threw acid into the faces of women liberated from the veil and murdered teachers for teaching little girls how to read in write. US intervention brought to power the most rabidly anti-woman government in the world. In Poland the US helped organize and fund the rightwing Catholic Solidarnosc movement that upon taking power made abortion illegal and instated capitalist economic policies that brought about 50% unemployment. In El Salvador and Guatemala Reagan funded and trained rightwing death squad governments that routinely used the rape, torture, and murder of women in an attempt to silence the population.
On all of these international attacks on women’s rights by Reagan’s Republican administration the Democrats of Congress were willing partners.
While Clinton continued the Reagan Bush policy not touching the formal legality abortion he took no real action to preserve the right either. In fact abortion rights suffered more under Clinton than under the previous two Republican administrations as the pro-choice movement became largely demobilized and wrongly saw “effective” and “responsible” political organizing as support for the Democrat Party. Parental consent laws aimed against the rights of teenagers were passed all across the country and between 1992 and 1996 the number of abortion providers plummeted by 14%. While abortion was being chipped away at Clinton carried out a frontal assault on gay rights with his homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy” and the poor were driven down even further into desperation with his promise to “end to welfare as we knew it” made reality with his signing of the “Personal Responsibility and Work Responsibility Act”. Not coincidentally this was accompanied by his delivered promise of 100,000 more cops on the streets and an ever-increasing mass incarceration of millions of the poor.
Today in Iraq Bush Jr. has followed in Reagan’s Afghanistan footsteps by destroying another secular government where women’s rights were a priority and replacing it with a murderous anti-woman Islamic government friendly to U.S. imperialist interests. In the United States Bush’s religious anti-woman and anti-sex crusade has gone so far as to oppose letting girls be inoculated by the new Papillomavirus vaccine. The virus is known to be a cause of cervical cancer and the vaccine will save lives. In an article on the subject the New Yorker stated March 13, “The Bush Administration has been relentless in its opposition to any drug, vaccine, or initiative that could be interpreted as lessening the risks associated with premarital sex.”
With its nine lifetime appointees the U.S. Supreme Court will review the law passed this month in South Dakota. If upheld the legal right to abortion will be overturned in the United States. Sitting on that court will be two new openly reactionary judges appointed by the Bush administration, John Roberts and Samual Alito. Their decisions, however, will potentially be swayed by mass movements just as in 1973 the opinions nine reactionary judges were ultimately decided by the power of a mass movement that demanded nothing less than full rights for women.
Socialists stand unapologetically in full support of all women’s reproductive rights including access to RU 486, other birth control, and the right to free abortion on demand as an essential component to the liberation of women and the entire working class. To win and maintain these rights we see the necessity of building mass movements as well as the need to build a socialist movement independent and opposed to the Democrats, Republicans, and corporate media with the ultimate goal of establishing a democratic and egalitarian socialist society.
Women’s Liberation Through Mass Action and Socialist Revolution!
All Power To The People!
Liberation News
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
By STEVEN ARGUE
On March 6, 2006 South Dakota’s Republican governor, Mike Rounds, signed into law a bill banning almost all abortions in the state. The bill makes it illegal for doctors to perform an abortion under any circumstance other than to save the life of a woman.
The right to abortion was won in the United States in 1973 through a mass struggle in the streets that culminated in the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. A radicalized movement for women’s rights, born out of the movement against the Vietnam War and other struggles for social justice at home, was sickened by the injustice of women being butchered in illegal back alley abortions and saw the right of women to control their own bodies as fundamental in the struggle for women’s equality.
Today the bill passed in South Dakota is a blatant violation of the law under Roe v. Wade meant to force the issue back onto the Supreme Court in an attempt to overturn Roe v. Wade. In response National Lawyers Guild (NLG) President Michael Avery said, "The legislators and the governor of South Dakota have violated their oath of office to uphold the Constitution. Local officials are obliged to follow the law as declared by the Supreme Court and are not entitled to repeatedly violate the law in the hope that the Court may change its rulings." The 6,000-member NLG is calling for the impeachment Governor Mike Rounds.
Women in sparsely populated South Dakota currently obtain about 800 abortions a year. Under the new law women will be forced to take time off of school and work and spend money traveling out of state. These expenses and hardships are added to the price of abortion in the United States, putting the ability women to control their own bodies and their own lives further out of reach for many poor women.
While abortion is a free on demand health service in revolutionary Cuba, public funding for abortion in the United States was eliminated in 1977 when Democrat Jimmy Carter signed into law the Hyde Amendment that cut off Medicaid funding to 23 million poor women in the US. In response to critics Carter, a millionaire peanut farmer, replied, “There are many things in life that are not fair.”
In the 1980’s, under the Republican regime of Ronald Reagan, the right to abortion was widely seen as under attack. In response mass mobilizations for women’s rights continued to apply the kind of pressure that made the government fearful of inspiring deeper radicalizations by overturning the law. Internationally, however, the Reagan administration engineered major setbacks for women’s rights. In Afghanistan the U.S. gave billions of dollars of military support to the misogynistic Mujahideen that threw acid into the faces of women liberated from the veil and murdered teachers for teaching little girls how to read in write. US intervention brought to power the most rabidly anti-woman government in the world. In Poland the US helped organize and fund the rightwing Catholic Solidarnosc movement that upon taking power made abortion illegal and instated capitalist economic policies that brought about 50% unemployment. In El Salvador and Guatemala Reagan funded and trained rightwing death squad governments that routinely used the rape, torture, and murder of women in an attempt to silence the population.
On all of these international attacks on women’s rights by Reagan’s Republican administration the Democrats of Congress were willing partners.
While Clinton continued the Reagan Bush policy not touching the formal legality abortion he took no real action to preserve the right either. In fact abortion rights suffered more under Clinton than under the previous two Republican administrations as the pro-choice movement became largely demobilized and wrongly saw “effective” and “responsible” political organizing as support for the Democrat Party. Parental consent laws aimed against the rights of teenagers were passed all across the country and between 1992 and 1996 the number of abortion providers plummeted by 14%. While abortion was being chipped away at Clinton carried out a frontal assault on gay rights with his homophobic “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy” and the poor were driven down even further into desperation with his promise to “end to welfare as we knew it” made reality with his signing of the “Personal Responsibility and Work Responsibility Act”. Not coincidentally this was accompanied by his delivered promise of 100,000 more cops on the streets and an ever-increasing mass incarceration of millions of the poor.
Today in Iraq Bush Jr. has followed in Reagan’s Afghanistan footsteps by destroying another secular government where women’s rights were a priority and replacing it with a murderous anti-woman Islamic government friendly to U.S. imperialist interests. In the United States Bush’s religious anti-woman and anti-sex crusade has gone so far as to oppose letting girls be inoculated by the new Papillomavirus vaccine. The virus is known to be a cause of cervical cancer and the vaccine will save lives. In an article on the subject the New Yorker stated March 13, “The Bush Administration has been relentless in its opposition to any drug, vaccine, or initiative that could be interpreted as lessening the risks associated with premarital sex.”
With its nine lifetime appointees the U.S. Supreme Court will review the law passed this month in South Dakota. If upheld the legal right to abortion will be overturned in the United States. Sitting on that court will be two new openly reactionary judges appointed by the Bush administration, John Roberts and Samual Alito. Their decisions, however, will potentially be swayed by mass movements just as in 1973 the opinions nine reactionary judges were ultimately decided by the power of a mass movement that demanded nothing less than full rights for women.
Socialists stand unapologetically in full support of all women’s reproductive rights including access to RU 486, other birth control, and the right to free abortion on demand as an essential component to the liberation of women and the entire working class. To win and maintain these rights we see the necessity of building mass movements as well as the need to build a socialist movement independent and opposed to the Democrats, Republicans, and corporate media with the ultimate goal of establishing a democratic and egalitarian socialist society.
Women’s Liberation Through Mass Action and Socialist Revolution!
All Power To The People!
Liberation News
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberation_news
For more information:
http://lists.riseup.net/www/info/liberatio...
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The men in control of the anti abortion movement call abortion "murder" if the woman terminates the fetus. However, when they start wars and kill ex-fetuses, it's "collateral damage"
Soldiers are called "heroes" and not called what they really are-serial killers.
These anti choice guys want the power of mandated birth and mandated death. Like tin gods.
In South Dakota, abortion is forbidden *even in cases of rape and incest*.
The men who wrote the law said exceptions for "woman's health" would have been too general "What if the womans emotional health was ruined by being forced to bear the child of a rape or incest? What about her mental health?" This would have justified abortion.
However, the woman is of no concern. The only exception to get an abortion is to "save the live of the "woman" (read: functioning uterus).
That's all women are to them, uteruses for the mandated manufacture of consumer/worker/soldier units.
Its time for women to learn and teach Menstrual Extraction to take care of business at home.
Google "Sister Zeus" to find women to help you. Google "Menstrual Extraction" and read A Womans Book of Choices to learn to give and receive Menstrual Extraction and the safe use of herbs. (be careful with herbs-they can be dangerous if misused-alwayscontact a skilled herbalist)
At the first sign of a missed period, the menses are gently suctioned out of the uterus with a Del Em kit made from common articles like a jar, plastic tubing and rubber stoppers. Cannulas and one way bypass valves can be ordered from medical supply houses.
* Menstrual extraction also expells a fertilized egg up to seven weeks in the privacy of your home with the help of trusted midwives or friends taught to Safely do menstrual extractionl
These guys can stick their medieval laws where the sun dont shine! Women are not mens factory farms!
Soldiers are called "heroes" and not called what they really are-serial killers.
These anti choice guys want the power of mandated birth and mandated death. Like tin gods.
In South Dakota, abortion is forbidden *even in cases of rape and incest*.
The men who wrote the law said exceptions for "woman's health" would have been too general "What if the womans emotional health was ruined by being forced to bear the child of a rape or incest? What about her mental health?" This would have justified abortion.
However, the woman is of no concern. The only exception to get an abortion is to "save the live of the "woman" (read: functioning uterus).
That's all women are to them, uteruses for the mandated manufacture of consumer/worker/soldier units.
Its time for women to learn and teach Menstrual Extraction to take care of business at home.
Google "Sister Zeus" to find women to help you. Google "Menstrual Extraction" and read A Womans Book of Choices to learn to give and receive Menstrual Extraction and the safe use of herbs. (be careful with herbs-they can be dangerous if misused-alwayscontact a skilled herbalist)
At the first sign of a missed period, the menses are gently suctioned out of the uterus with a Del Em kit made from common articles like a jar, plastic tubing and rubber stoppers. Cannulas and one way bypass valves can be ordered from medical supply houses.
* Menstrual extraction also expells a fertilized egg up to seven weeks in the privacy of your home with the help of trusted midwives or friends taught to Safely do menstrual extractionl
These guys can stick their medieval laws where the sun dont shine! Women are not mens factory farms!
I hope that women will not be forced to clandestinely use the procedures Utopia Bold speaks of. The experience before 1973 was that illegal abortions were very dangerous. Even if there are some good alternative procedures, there can be little doubt that those will be misused when they are driven underground and performed at times by people of questionable motives and credentials.
Steven Argue's assertion that Ronald Reagan, while hostile to abortion, did not in reality have a policy to directly overturn Row vs. Wade didn't seem right to me so I did a little internet search on it.
Now I do think he is correct. The following quote from an anti-choice website called "On The Issues" does back Steven's claim:
"Reagan was not as obsessive about anti-abortion legislation as he often seemed. Early in his California governorship he had signed a permissive abortion bill that has resulted in more than a million abortions. Afterward, he inaccurately blamed this outcome on doctors, saying that they had deliberately misinterpreted the law. When Reagan ran for president, he won backing from pro-life forces by advocating a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited all abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother. Reagan’s stand was partly a product of political calculation, as was his tactic after he was elected of addressing the annual pro-life rally held in Washington by telephone so that he would not be seen with the leaders of the movement on the evening news. While I do not doubt Reagan’s sincerity in advocating an anti-abortion amendment, he invested few political resources toward obtaining this goal."
Now I do think he is correct. The following quote from an anti-choice website called "On The Issues" does back Steven's claim:
"Reagan was not as obsessive about anti-abortion legislation as he often seemed. Early in his California governorship he had signed a permissive abortion bill that has resulted in more than a million abortions. Afterward, he inaccurately blamed this outcome on doctors, saying that they had deliberately misinterpreted the law. When Reagan ran for president, he won backing from pro-life forces by advocating a constitutional amendment that would have prohibited all abortions except when necessary to save the life of the mother. Reagan’s stand was partly a product of political calculation, as was his tactic after he was elected of addressing the annual pro-life rally held in Washington by telephone so that he would not be seen with the leaders of the movement on the evening news. While I do not doubt Reagan’s sincerity in advocating an anti-abortion amendment, he invested few political resources toward obtaining this goal."
Regarding Steve Argue's concern that Menstrual Extraction (ME) may be misused and harm women:
ME is done by *trusted friends in womens self help groups* who ALWAYS use high standards of medical hygiene (sterilizing all medical items etc) and who trained together with nurses and midwives)
Self help groups of trusted women friends giving ME is not in the same universe as pre Roe butchers who often were filthy and not caring enough to worry about the women.
Read A Womans Book of Choices for detailed information about ME and other ways to end
an unwanted pregnancy.
ME is done by *trusted friends in womens self help groups* who ALWAYS use high standards of medical hygiene (sterilizing all medical items etc) and who trained together with nurses and midwives)
Self help groups of trusted women friends giving ME is not in the same universe as pre Roe butchers who often were filthy and not caring enough to worry about the women.
Read A Womans Book of Choices for detailed information about ME and other ways to end
an unwanted pregnancy.
Utopia Bold says, "ME is done by *trusted friends in womens self help groups* who ALWAYS use high standards of medical hygiene (sterilizing all medical items etc) and who trained together with nurses and midwives)."
We would hope that if abortion were made illegal every woman would have this kind of support if they needed it. I just don't think that will be the case.
And just because someone is a midwife that does not necessarily make her qualified to do anything. A friend of mine almost died of blood loss while giving birth due to the mistakes of a midwife.
In a situation where all qualifications will be outside of legal scrutiny, at least if those doing the procedure are still in operation, I don't assume that those doing the procedure (ME or any other kind of abortion) will always include people who are both qualified to do the procedure and that can be trusted.
We would hope that if abortion were made illegal every woman would have this kind of support if they needed it. I just don't think that will be the case.
And just because someone is a midwife that does not necessarily make her qualified to do anything. A friend of mine almost died of blood loss while giving birth due to the mistakes of a midwife.
In a situation where all qualifications will be outside of legal scrutiny, at least if those doing the procedure are still in operation, I don't assume that those doing the procedure (ME or any other kind of abortion) will always include people who are both qualified to do the procedure and that can be trusted.
Steve, if medical complications can occur even by midwives and those who practice menstrual extraction. But without trained midwives and women traine to do menstrual extraction, what are womens alternatives in a nation that is slowly but surely outlawing abortion?
One alternative is for women to have children they dont want.
The other is back alley butchers who are NOT trained in menstrual extraction or safe abortion practices.
Women must TAKE back their uteruses which are being increasingly appropiated by anti choice men.
One alternative is for women to have children they dont want.
The other is back alley butchers who are NOT trained in menstrual extraction or safe abortion practices.
Women must TAKE back their uteruses which are being increasingly appropiated by anti choice men.
Here are the three points that I have been putting forward as the alternative to illegal abortions:
1. It starts with recognizing that the laws do matter, that do it yourself abortions are not going to solve the entire problem. We need to keep abortions safe and legal and we do not accept any other alternative forced down our throats by this government.
2. From there we recognize that while the current trend by the US capitalist government is towards making abortion illegal, it was mass action by a movement in the streets that made abortion legal in the first place. Such a movement can potentially do the same today in keeping abortion legal.
3. That we need to continue to build a political alternative to this capitalist system. That instead of the capitalists that promote religion and sexism to divide the exploited majority socialists say no to the dark ages that they would impose on us and fight for the enlightenment of women's rights, science, and an end to class exploitation.
1. It starts with recognizing that the laws do matter, that do it yourself abortions are not going to solve the entire problem. We need to keep abortions safe and legal and we do not accept any other alternative forced down our throats by this government.
2. From there we recognize that while the current trend by the US capitalist government is towards making abortion illegal, it was mass action by a movement in the streets that made abortion legal in the first place. Such a movement can potentially do the same today in keeping abortion legal.
3. That we need to continue to build a political alternative to this capitalist system. That instead of the capitalists that promote religion and sexism to divide the exploited majority socialists say no to the dark ages that they would impose on us and fight for the enlightenment of women's rights, science, and an end to class exploitation.
Abortion is horrific. Late term abortion is obviosly a form a violence. Yet much of the left sells out human rights and supports these abuses. Abortion, like war, is all about violence and injustice. It is the left's deadly contradiction. There are a growing number of lefties willing to oppose this barbaric practice. Just because some conservatives agree it is wrong does not make it a right wing issue. The left should re examine the issue and embrace pro life consistency opposing war, abortion and capital punishment.
There is no violence in a woman deciding to end her own an unwanted pregnancy.
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