Tag: birth control
Beyond the Supreme Court: the New Abortion Rights Fight
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.
U.S. Supreme Court Guts Women’s Rights
As soon as we were half-hopeful that despite our concerns about where the “transgender status” part of the Bostock decision might lead us, that at least lesbians might have gained some protection against discrimination, the situation quickly went downhill. The US Supreme Court issued two more decisions, voting to create religious exemptions the size of a Mack Truck into civil rights laws and went on to deny millions of women access to free birth control under the Affordable Care Act. (Don’t worry, Viagra is still available.) Again, the employer’s “religious freedom” has turned female workers into wholly-owned subsidiaries of their employers, with the right to pry into their bedrooms and control what happens to their bodies. Dar Guerra, rad fem lawyer, writer and theoretician, puts this together brilliantly with her gallows humor in her latest blog piece. Please take a look.
Time to organize sisters!