The Equal Rights Amendment – Final Impact Plan!

What is the ERA? The ERA is an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to correct the omission of women. Like all amendments, it required ¾ of the states (38) to ratify it for it to become part of the Constitution. This is the full text:

Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.

Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

Section 3: This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification.

The ERA was ratified by the 38th state (Virginia) on January 27, 2020. So why isn’t it in the Constitution?  Because first the Trump Administration and then the Biden Administration have unconstitutionally obstructed its being published by the National Archivist, as the Constitution requires.

There are so many reasons why women and girls need the ERA. Let’s review some statistics:

  • Over 4 women a week were murdered in California in 2020
  • Over 298.000 rapes of women were reported in the U.S. in the same year
  • Spousal abuse of women is estimated at 4.8 million every year
  • Approximately 1 million women are stalked annually in the U.S.
  • Over 78% of sexual harassment charges were filed by women between 2018-2021
  • 7 in 10 human trafficking victims are women and girls
  • Over 500,000 cases of female genital mutilation have occurred or are at risk of occurring in the U.S.
  • Abortion rights and birth control are increasingly under attack, risking women’s health and lives
  • Women in every state report injustice in their family law cases, especially battered mothers trying to protect their children from abusive fathers who aggressively litigate against them, using family court to stalk, harass, punish, and impoverish their former partners and children
  • Child marriage is still prevalent in the U.S., 87% of victims of which are girls
  • Women still earn 82 cents to every dollar men earn
  • Single women and mothers with children are the two fastest-growing groups of people experiencing homelessness in the United States

All of this is facilitated and amplified by the fact that women do not have equal standing in the U.S. Constitution.

Attorney Wendy Murphy explains more in this video:

Some History:

The ERA was first introduced into Congress in 1923 as the Lucretia Mott Amendment, shortly after women suffragists won the right to vote. It was always Alice Paul’s and the First Wave feminists’ intent to gain equal standing in the U.S. Constitution following gaining the vote. The ERA languished for decades, however, was rewritten in 1943, and finally passed in its present form in 1972. This was due to the efforts of Paul who seized the moment when the Civil Rights Movement for black people gained ground in order to press for the civil rights of women. It then went to the states for ratification and reached 35 states before the imposed deadline of first 7 years, extended to 10 years, expired in 1982. In 1992, when the 27th amendment was passed after over 202 years, efforts began anew to obtain the last 3 states to ratify in order to reach the ¾ requirement.

Because of the tireless efforts of individual women and especially the organization, Equal Means Equal, Nevada ratified in 2017; Illinois in 2018, and Virginia in 2020, reaching the required 38 states. Instead of being published onto the Constitution by the National Archivist as Article V of the Constitution mandates, however, the Trump Administration unconstitutionally interfered with its publication by writing a memo, known as the Bill Barr Memo, to the National Archivist telling him not to publish because the deadline had passed.  As Archivist, David Ferriero had recorded the ratifications of Nevada and Illinois, but pursuant to the memo from the Office of Legal Counsel in the Trump administration’s Department of Justice, he did not act to publish and certify the ERA after receiving Virginia’s ratification documents in January 2020.

Then after the 2020 election, the Biden Administration continued obstructing its publication and has fought it in court like the Trump Administration did, despite claiming support for the ERA and women’s rights when campaigning. This is especially outrageous considering the fact that the Dobbs decision overturning Roe would not have been possible had the ERA been in the Constitution.

David Ferriero retired in the spring of 2022, and Colleen Shogan was confirmed as his successor as Archivist; she has stated she would publish the ERA if she were told to do so by President Biden. So that is what we need to pressure him to do! We need as many people as possible participating every day in this campaign between now and the election, as that is when we have some leverage and can get some national attention.

Here is our battle plan to finally get the ERA published:

  • CALL: White House Comment Line 202-456-1111 open T-Th 11-3 EST 8-12 PDT
  • TEXT: 310-861-2977 – Harris    302-404-0800 – Biden
  • EMAIL: whitehouse.gov/contact – request a response!
  • HOUND ON SOCIAL MEDIA:    

Twitter accounts: @JoeBiden or @POTUS /@KamalaHarris or @VP  –  Use Hashtags #ERA #EqualRightsAmendment #ERANow!

Sample posts:

 The #EqualRightsAmendment was fully ratified on January 27, 2020 and has been unconstitutionally obstructed by Trump & now by @POTUS and @VP. It is now over 100 years since the #ERA was first introduced into Congress. How long must women wait for equality?!  Make the call, @JoeBiden!

Congress and the American Bar Association @ABAesq have both deemed the #EqualRightsAmendment to be fully ratified. Why are you standing in the way of women’s equality? What are you waiting for @POTUS and @VP?! Call the National Archivist and tell her to publish #ERA, @JoeBiden!

  • Write/call/tweet to senators and congressional representatives in support of HJ Res 82 and SJ Res 39, resolutions to urge the publication of the ERA.  Make it clear that you realize that Congress has already done its job in 1972, and it is Joe Biden’s turn to do his by calling the Archivist and instructing her to publish. Let them know they should be pressuring him directly as it is HIS responsibility, not theirs.  No bill extending the deadline is needed either (nor is it valid).

ADDITIONAL ACTIONS:

  • Take a photo of yourself with an ERA sign with the demand “Make the call Joe!” and upload it to https://finalimpact.org.

For more information see the following videos and articles:

https://twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1mrGmyQqmEVGy or https://t.co/hpWyArF6kn

https://x.com/i/spaces/1jMKgmqrXkyJL

https://www.equalrightsamendment.org/faq/

https://www.americanbar.org/groups/diversity/women/initiatives_awards/era

FIST Speaks at Abortion Rights March in San Diego

On January 22, 2023, the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Ann Menasche, member of the Coordinating Committee of FIST, spoke at a San Diego rally for abortion rights.  Ann framed the abortion issue as one of women’s rights, called for the restoration of abortion rights in all 50 states and that women rely on ourselves and not the politicians to win back our rights.   She was well received by the crowd. The spirited demonstration of a few hundred was organized quickly by grassroots feminist activists when the Women’s March failed to organize anything locally. FIST also distributed 60 half page flyers with our statement on abortion rights on one side and our thirteen principles on the other.  The rally was followed by a march through downtown San Diego.   San Diego FIST members and supporters look forward to future local feminist work.

Building Hope for the New Year

It’s been a tough year for women’s rights.  We lost abortion rights (even though access had been eroded for years) when the decision in Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health was issued this past June with our reactionary Supreme Court overturning Roe vs. Wade and 50 years of precedent to give a green light to states to outlaw abortion.  Now 13 states ban all or virtually all abortions and only 17 states and the District of Columbia broadly protect abortion rights. No doubt, many women’s lives and liberty now hang in the balance.

Meanwhile, the Biden Administration has continued to fight in the courts against adding the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, even though already ratified by the requisite 38 states. See Maura Casey’s article, Publish ERA, let skirmishes begin and watch Equal Means Equal’s video: Joe, Do It!

The ERA would establish sex as a protected category, with the same weight as race, which would make it far easier to challenge all kinds of discriminatory practices in every state in the union, including jobs discrimination, violence against women, and yes, abortion bans. See and share our Why We Need the ERA brochure.

And then the coordinated worldwide effort to deny the existence of sex, and to remove sex-based protections including the ability of women to organize against our oppression and to even have language to talk about ourselves, has continued apace in 2022.  California passed two horrific bills this year, SB 923 and SB107 and would respectively indoctrinate the medical and mental health professions in gender identity ideology and make the state a magnet for minors seeking sterilizing and mutilating so-called “gender affirming care.”  See our post about these dangerous bills.

Indoctrination in our schools and universities is endemic.  Feminists are losing jobs and livelihoods and facing civil rights complaints for refusing to deny the existence of two biological sexes. A lesbian in Norway was even facing criminal charges and up to three years in prison for supposed “hate speech” for stating that men could neither be lesbians or mothers.

And most recently, Scotland passed a gender self-ID law, the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, that will allow any male, including convicted sex offenders, to enter women’s spaces and programs simply on his say-so, disregarding concerns about women’s safety.

So, there is plenty of reason to despair.  But there is also reason to hope.

Women can and are fighting back.  Women in Scotland protested and sang a rendition of Auld Lang Syne outside of parliament during the vote, “women’s rights are human rights.”  Their struggle is not over.

Rise-Up for Abortion Rights has done amazing organizing in response to the overturning of Roe.

Two women who challenged their sacking in the UK for their gender critical views were vindicated in court:  Allison Bailey  and Maya Forstater.

Our Duty, a non-partisan group of parents opposing child medical transition, organized a successful “First Do No Harm Unity Rally” of 100 people in Anaheim California in front of a national convention of pediatricians.  The central organizer is a mother, lawyer, and liberal Democrat.  The Tavistock Gender Clinic in the UK has been shuttered following the investigation headed up by Dr. Hilary Cass revealing dangerous invasive procedures being recommended for gender dysphoric youth with little screening or oversight.

And then there are the women of Iran, who are leading a struggle against an extremely repressive and misogynist fundamentalist regime.  In response to the death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in custody of the morals police for not wearing her headscarf properly, and at great risk to themselves, our Iranian sisters have poured out into the streets again and again.

The song, Baraye, has been the anthem of the protests:

For the sake of dancing in the street

For the fear felt in the moment of kissing

For my sister your sister, our sisters

For changing the rotten minds

For shame, for pennilessness

For the yearning for an ordinary life

For the sake of the children that mine the garbage and their dreams…

For women, life, liberty

 

For women, life, liberty!  If they can do it, we can do it!

Happy New Year, sisters!

Drop the Charges Against the Abortion Rights Demonstrators in Riverside!

This letter was sent to the District Attorney in Riverside on October 3, 2022:

Mike Hestrin
Office of the District Attorney
County of Riverside
3960 Orange Street
Riverside, CA 92501

Dear Mr. Hestrin:

We are writing to you on behalf of the national feminist organization, Feminists in Struggle (FIST), to demand that all charges be dropped against those arrested at a RiseUp4AbortionRights demonstration on July 30, 2022, in Riverside, CA and who will be arraigned on October 6.

These arrestees were protesting nonviolently for the basic human right of women to control their own bodies and access abortion, and against the recent outrageous decision by the Supreme Court to overturn this Constitutional right guaranteed by Roe v. Wade.

Women throughout the country are watching the disposition of these cases and are alerting local politicians in your area as to the importance of these charges being dropped. Our right to peacefully protest is guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution and we expect that right to be respected by your office.

Thank you for your immediate attention to this urgent issue.

Sincerely,

Ann Menasche
For Feminists in Struggle

WE ASK EVERYONE TO CALL THE RIVERSIDE DA’S OFFICE AT  951.955.5400 AND TWEET THEM @DA_MikeHestrin and @rivcoda TO DROP THE CHARGES AGAINST THE #RIVERSIDE8!!  You may also email the DA’s office at: inquiries@rivcoda.org

WE SUPPORT RISEUP4ABORTION RIGHTS!!

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!!

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!!!

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.”

War, Peace, and Feminism

During World War I, Alice Paul and her sister suffragists called out the hypocrisy of President Wilson and the US government in denying the rights of women at home while claiming to be fighting a war for freedom and democracy abroad. 


So little has changed. President Biden is beating the drums of war, proposes an unprecedented $770 billion dollar military budget, and risks nuclear confrontation between the great powers, all in the name of “freedom” and “democracy.” Meanwhile, women in the U.S., who make up a majority of the poor, are denied housing, health care, equal pay, and accessible, affordable childcare. Even the pandemic-related child tax credit program that provided government relief to low-income families has been allowed to expire. We are poised to lose Roe vs. Wade, which will have a devastating effect on women’s freedoms with little action from the White House.


Biden has also failed to take the simple step of instructing the archivist to publish the Equal Rights Amendment already approved by the requisite 38 States, which would put women’s sex-based protections into the Constitution. His administration is thus undemocratically depriving us of a crucial tool to challenge our continued second-class status as a sex.


Those who are familiar with the history of U.S. wars abroad over the past century, have long known that U.S. foreign policy has everything to do with oil and empire and not a scintilla to do with democracy. Our military-industrial complex is a destructive money-making machine; it is the epitome of patriarchy in action, fighting to maintain status as the biggest bully on the block with no regard for human beings or their rights. Our government has repeatedly spearheaded the overthrow of democratically elected governments from Chile to Guatemala to Iran, rained untold destruction on Vietnam to prevent the people there from determining their own future, and currently counts as its closest allies (and arms to the teeth) the military dictatorship of Egypt, the religious fundamentalist sexual apartheid Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the ethnic apartheid regime of Israel. The decades-long occupation of Afghanistan not only failed to liberate the women there from the Taliban, but instead murdered 71,000 civilians, mostly women and children, and after the U.S. finally withdrew its troops, the imposition of murderous sanctions is now threatening the civilian population with mass starvation.


We must call out this hypocrisy today loudly and clearly, just as Alice Paul did more than a century ago.  Fortunately, women around the globe are recognizing that war is not in our interests. Medea Benjamin of the women-led organization Code Pink, long a voice of the U.S. peace movement, has been speaking out against the threat of war with Russia over Ukraine, as well as demanding diplomacy and an end to NATO expansion.


On February 15th a group of women from the United States and Russia released a joint statement, “Independent American and Russian Women Call For Peace” raising their voices against militarism and war and calling for diplomacy and peace. They wrote:
“We are women from the United States and Russia who are deeply concerned about the risk of possible war between our two countries, who together possess over 90 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. We are mothers, daughters, grandmothers, and we are sisters, one to another. Today we stand with our sisters in Ukraine, East and West, whose families and country have been torn apart, have already suffered more than 14,000 deaths…For the U.S. and Russia, the only sane and humane course of action now is a principled commitment to clear, creative and persistent diplomacy – not military action…We stand together and we call for peace. Stand with us.” 


Thank you, sisters!

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.

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

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