Category: abortion

WE SUPPORT RISEUP4ABORTION RIGHTS!!

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We wish to voice our full-throated support for the group, RiseUp4AbortionRights and commend them for leading the fight against the reprehensible Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe V. Wade.  RiseUp4Abortion Rights has been on the ground working for years to build grassroots resistance to the attempt by the religious right and extremist politicians to pass restrictive, punitive laws regarding abortion and we wish to acknowledge them specifically as the driving force demanding the right to abortion with no apologies!  We agree with their core message, that this is a fight for women’s lives, and that we need to exercise solidarity and sisterhood, get in the streets, and not wait for elections!! We wish to thank Sunsara Taylor, Merle Hoffman, and Lori Sokol for their leadership and for calling for unity of all women’s groups and people of conscience to join the fight!!

Read the Open Letter for Unified Action

Demand Legal Abortion Nationwide

Sign up for RiseUp4AbortionRights Actions

WE DEMAND NOTHING LESS THAN FULL EQUALITY AND ABORTION ON DEMAND, NO APOLOGIES!!

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Well, we knew this was coming.  The wrongheaded, misogynist decision by the highest court today to overturn Roe v. Wade was expected, but still is a brutal blow to the basic human rights of half the population.  Such a blatant attempt to restrict women’s autonomy, agency, and freedom could only be accomplished in a system devoted to the institution of patriarchy and promotion of male supremacy.  The court showed its callous disregard for the suffering and brutalization of women and girls in its 6-3 decision to upend 50 years of precedent, ending an ugly week of attacking the separation of church and state, elevating gun rights over human rights and public safety, with the disastrous decision to dismantle Roe.  As one female abortion protester’s sign read, “Guns have more rights than I do.”  As do churches, one might add.

Apparently the current Supreme Court thinks it knows best and is above the law, but it is in error.  This court is an illegitimate travesty of injustice by any rational person’s standard, completely out of touch with the majority of the populace who want legal, safe abortion, more gun control (not less), and which is increasingly secular. It is time that we consider imposing strict standards of conduct, eliminate lifetime appointments, expand the number of justices, institute citizen oversight and input into the selection process, and facilitate and streamline impeachment procedures in order to be able to recall justices who defy the Constitution, disregard decades of legal precedent, and substitute spiteful partisanship and sanctimonious religiosity for fairness.

It’s past time that we women stand up and seize our rightful place of honor and respect, and that we demand full citizenship by inclusion in the founding document of this nation, the Constitution, that we have earned as the Equal Rights Amendment has been ratified and is now law.  All that’s needed is for the Biden Administration to stop giving lip service to women’s rights, get off their collective derriere and publish the ERA!  Legislation is needed to protect women’s reproductive rights as well, but with the ERA in the Constitution, we can adjudicate all the unfair laws at the local, state, and federal level, including abortion restrictions, and we are on much firmer ground than with only legislation.

One good thing about this ruling, it has stirred the sleeping Tiger that is WOMAN, and WE WON’T GO BACK, WE WON’T GROVEL, WE WON’T ASK PERMISSION, WE DEMAND NOTHING LESS THAN FULL EQUALITY AND ABORTION ON DEMAND, NO APOLOGIES!!

DEFEND ABORTION RIGHTS – MARCH ON MAY 14th!!!

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In the wake of the horrifying Politico leaked draft Supreme Court decision in the Dobbs vs. Jackson case, placing Roe vs. Wade in immediate jeopardy, FIST urges all women and their male allies to join the beginning fight back in peaceful protests to defend the right of women to control our own reproductive capacity and our own lives.

The 1973 Roe decision was not a gift from on high by powerful males in the Supreme Court, but the result of the organizing and mass struggle of a powerful independent movement for women’s liberation that emerged in the late 1960’s. We can secure our rights in the same way we won them, by relying on ourselves, not the politicians, and by pouring into the streets and building our independent movement.

We should demand that the Supreme Court uphold Roe, that Congress immediately pass the Women’s Health Protection Act, that President Biden register the Equal Rights Amendment that will put sex-based protection in the U.S. Constitution, and that all anti-abortion laws in every state be repealed. We join with Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights in demanding ABORTION ON DEMAND AND WITHOUT APOLOGY!

Please join the national protests called by Rise Up culminating in united actions on May 14th! Checked the Rise Up website for more details. Take a FIST Abortion Flyer with you!

In the words of Christabel Pankhurst: “Remember the dignity of your womanhood, Do not appeal, do not beg, do not grovel. Take courage, join hands, stand beside us, fight with us.”

Texas Abortion FightBack

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At the FIST forum on abortion rights last week we heard from Merle Hoffman, founder and CEO of Choices Women’s Medical Center in NY, that clinics can register with various abortion funds to serve women who cannot afford the procedure or need to travel long distances to obtain the care they need.  The severe restrictions in Texas have increased the need for donations to abortion funds. Choices has already served more than a dozen women from Texas.  With sheer grit, abortion funds persist in the state despite the vigilante law that encourages citizens to turn in anyone helping a woman get an abortion after 6 weeks of pregnancy.

The National Women’s Law Center has identified the following groups already on the ground helping to keep access to abortion in Texas.  We encourage donations.

 

Beyond the Supreme Court: the New Abortion Rights Fight

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Please join us on Saturday November 6th at 11:30 AM Pacific time for a timely women-only forum and discussion with feminist activists: “Beyond the Supreme Court: the New Abortion Rights Fight.”



Tickets are $5 with some free tickets available at eventbrite.

Women have always had and will continue to have abortions. The Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1973, though limited from a feminist perspective, was a great defeat for anti-abortion forces. Those forces have been hard at work chipping away at our right as women to control our reproductive capacity ever since. It seems likely the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade this term. If that happens, how do we fight to keep abortion services safe and make them accessible?

Featured speakers:

Merle Hoffman founded one of the first abortion clinics in the U.S. in New York in 1971. She wrote a book about her experiences, Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom, she edited a feminist quarterly, On the Issues Magazine, a Magazine of Feminist, Progressive Thinking on reproductive rights for more than a decade, and formed the Choices Global Institute to help underserved women in the U.S. and abroad find women’s health services.

Kathy Scarbrough has been active in feminist and left organizations since the late 1970s. Currently, she is a member of FIST, supporter of Redstockings and co-editor of Meeting Ground Online.

FIST’s Feminist Forums series are interactive and organizing events. At our forums, women have an opportunity not only to hear interesting speakers on a variety of feminist topics but to meet each other, make comments, ask questions of the presenters and discuss feminist politics together. We also usually tape the events so they may be viewed later. Women in attendance are free to shut off their cameras and mute themselves, should they prefer to do so. If you prefer to remain anonymous within the group, or plan to sign in under a different name from the name you have used for registration and purchase of your ticket, please contact the organizer prior to the event. Thanks.

While some of our events are open to both men and women, THIS IS A FEMALE ONLY EVENT. We ask that our male allies respect our right to meet together as women.

FIST MEMBERS JOIN MARCHES FOR ABORTION RIGHTS

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On October 2nd, FIST members participated in the abortion rights marches in San Diego, Chicago, New York, and other places. Here are some brief reports:

New York:
A group of gender critical feminists (FIST members and others) met beforehand and held signs with the word Woman on them. There were seven of us. We noticed other people with signs with the word Woman or with wire hangers. This was despite the fact that the Women’s march organizers In NY had instructed participants not to use the word “women” or the wire hanger symbol. I brought a wire hanger which I wore as a prop. We gave out a few flyers. The rally was well attended but a lot smaller than the prior Women’s Marches in January over the past few years..

Chicago:

The marchers’ signs carried the original words of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life, to her well-being and dignity. It is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.” They were clear, saying we’re not going back. Not in Texas, not anywhere else. Over 2000 turned out for the rally and march Saturday, for abortion justice. The action, sponsored by Women’s March Chicago, Planned Parenthood, and Chicago Abortion Fund, mobilized women young and old, whose signs and chants reflected their anger and resistance: “Pro-choice+ pro-women”; “I am a woman, not a womb”; “Abortion is Health Care”; “Safe abortion for All”; “Down with the patriarchy”; “My Body, My Rights”; “Her Body, “Her Rights”; “Reproductive Freedom is the beginning of Women’s Liberation” were among the slogans on handmade banners.

Whatever limits were imposed in other cities (like NY) This crowd wasn’t having it. Most speakers talked about defending women’s right to abortion.  FIST supporters in Chicago marched with friends and circulated our statement on abortion rights.


San Diego:


We carried our beautiful FIST banner (“Our bodies, our spaces, our sex-based rights”) in the spirited march of several thousand along the waterfront, and distributed over 100 fliers containing FIST’s abortion statement and some FIST brochures. One woman came up to us and offered to take photos of our banner. The word “woman” was not buried at this event.

Women, their rights and nothing less. Men, their rights and nothing more!

A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO SAFE, ACCESSIBLE ABORTION ON DEMAND

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While our Afghani sisters face an uncertain future under Taliban rule, we women in the United States have our own Christian fundamentalist version of the Taliban with which to contend. The goals are the same – to keep women barefoot, pregnant and locked in our houses, under the unquestioned rule of our husbands, fathers, and brothers, enforced by the coercive combined power of fundamentalist religion and the state.


The U.S. fetus fetishists’ latest monstrosity is the Texas anti-abortion law that prohibits all abortions after six weeks (before most women know they are pregnant) and that provides for vigilante enforcement, deputizing anyone in and out of Texas to seek $10,000 in bounty, plus attorneys’ fees against abortion providers, or anyone else assisting a woman in obtaining an abortion. By letting this law stand as part of its “shadow docket” (without benefit of full briefing or oral argument), the U.S. Supreme Court may have effectively overturned Roe v Wade or at the very least, signaled its intentions to do so.


Though this turn of events has frightening consequences for women in Texas and elsewhere around the country, for many women, abortion rights was already hanging by a thread or practically non-existent. Abortion has not been accessible to poor women on Medicaid since 1977 with the passage of the Hyde Amendment, a mere 4 years after the ruling. As predicted by radical women’s liberationists who regarded Roe as an inadequate compromise, women’s right to abortion has been whittled away little-by-little until what we are left with today is largely an empty legal right, unavailable to vast numbers of women living in this country. In the 1980s, Marion Banzhaf of the Abortion Rights Movement (A.R.M.) argued that feminists needed to take a stronger line than “pro-choice.” She said, “Being pro-abortion means going on the offensive to answer the attack on abortion rights. Being pro-abortion means that the woman is more important than the potential life– the fetus. It really is quite simple. The pro-abortion movement puts the woman first.”


The Biden administration and the Democrats in Congress are hardly blameless regarding the state of affairs brought about by the Texas anti-abortion law. They could take effective action to protect women’s right to abortion, yet so far have not done so. President Biden could instruct the archivist to register the Equal Rights Amendment, already ratified by 38 States, into the U.S. Constitution tomorrow, thereby placing sex-based protections into the Constitution, which would strengthen the legal grounds for abortion rights. Instead, the Biden Administration has fought feminists in court who sought this very result, while feigning outrage at the Texas law’s assault on women’s “constitutional rights.”


Additionally, the Biden Administration and Congressional Democrats could work with all deliberate speed for passage of the Women’s Health Protection Act (HR3755 and S1975), federal legislation first introduced in 2017, that would secure the right to provide and receive an abortion, free from medically unnecessary restrictions that single out abortion from other medical procedures. They could also act decisively to re-configure the Supreme Court so far-right justices no longer dominate, which should have been done before the Texas law took effect, if protecting the right to safe, legal abortion were a priority. Though the Justice Department has just filed its own suit against the Texas law, this is far from sufficient to solve the crisis women face.


If we have studied our history, we know that women have never had our rights handed to us by men in power or by male-dominated institutions. Rather, we have fought tooth-and-nail for them, from winning suffrage, the right to manage our own financial affairs, civil rights laws against sex discrimination in the workplace, to achieving legal abortion. Much is yet to be won.


We are therefore heartened that the Women’s March and other mainstream women’s groups have finally called for actions in support of abortion rights on October 2 in cities across the country.  FIST plans to be there and we urge other feminists to join us. We will demand that not only Roe be upheld and the Texas law defeated, but that the Equal Rights Amendment be enshrined in the Constitution and that unimpeded access to abortion be guaranteed to all women everywhere in the country via passage of the Women’s Health Protection Act.


To fight effectively against those who would strip women of our reproductive rights, we need at the same time to challenge the erasure of women as a sex through language and public policy. Gender identity can no longer be allowed to override or supplant sex. As the abortion issue should make clear, women’s oppression is based on our biological sex, regardless of the degree to which we may conform to or reject a set of society-imposed stereotypes about how women are supposed to use make-up, dress, and behave. Women–adult human females–are half the human race. Only women–females of reproductive age–have the capacity to get pregnant and give birth. Only women need abortions. Control over our own reproductive capacities, sexuality, and labor is absolutely required for the liberation of women.


So, using terms like “pregnant people,” “chest feeders” and “menstruators,” rather than being inclusive, actually undermines the struggle for women’s liberation by obscuring the source of our oppression and makes it more difficult to re-build our movement. It would be like refusing to recognize the racist nature of policing by rejecting the slogan “Black Lives Matter” in favor of “All Lives Matter,” as we’ve seen in the right wing backlash against the current wave of activism combating police brutality. Black people and their allies rightly struggle against such language. Women and our allies should be similarly willing to stand up for strong, clear language that abortion is about the rights of women.


It is time for women to fight back proudly as women for our sex-based right to control our own reproduction. We demand a WOMAN’S right to abortion without apology or impediment!
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DOWNLOAD A COPY OF FIST ABORTION STATEMENT

ARGENTINA LEGALIZES ABORTION!

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This is an historic day for feminism in Latin America–Argentina voted to decriminalize abortion, thanks to a growing feminist movement, despite tremendous opposition by the Catholic Church!

Please join us on January 23rd and our SPECIAL GUEST FROM ARGENTINA, Jimena Diaz, psychologist, feminist and women’s rights activist on the successful abortion rights struggle there!

Tickets available at Eventbrite, for $5.00. A few free tickets are also available but please pay if you can in order to help us continue to fight for women’s rights.

Why Do Young Women Today Like This 47 Year Old Book?

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That a novel by Alix Kates Shulman, first published in 1972 is being embraced by young women today seems to suggest that we’ve made little progress on the issues like sexual harassment, job discrimination, the sexual double standard, rape, abortion the beauty standard and the impact of marriage and motherhood on women. Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen was a controversial book, excoriated by reviewers of the mainstream media when it first came out. Although much of the terrain covered is now well understood, young women today are chuckling with recognition of the same struggles that the protagonist waged in the 1950s.

Some victories haven’t been reversed but the backlash has whittled away at many women’s rights, according to Shulman in this interview on National Public Radio’s “All of It” https://www.wnyc.org/story/memoirs-ex-prom-queen-reissue/.