I watched an MSNBC movie about the assassination of Dr. George Tiller today. I’m familiar with the story, I wore the pin and spread the news about Tiller’s amazing work with women’s reproductive health and his outspoken support of women’s decisions. Watching this film only reminded me of my passion for women to have a choice, and of the insanity a handful of people can create when they rely on religion to think for them.
I understand the stance of abortion as murder. I understand why people are against abortion, and I can relate to an uneasiness around the issue. I cannot tolerate hate or murder for the sake of fanaticism, and I certainly will not tolerate domestic terrorism against women.
I never see pro-choice rallies and gatherings bombing churches and health clinics, I never see pro-choice people going so far as to assassinate the leaders of anti-abortion groups. That brand of evil is firmly in the hands of anti-abortion crazies.
I want to be clear. Abortion is a controversial issue, and I am all for lower abortion rates. But there is no way in hell that making abortion illegal is going to do that. Instead of a dead fetus, there will also be a dead woman. And I value myself and women everywhere way too much to think that’s ok. Let me repeat that- illegalizing abortion and using blatant lies and scare tactics, harassment and threats is not going to get rid of abortion. I’ve seen the pictures of dead women with their vaginas torn up, insides spilled out on the ground, curled over puddles of blood. I’ve heard the stories of women being rendered infertile or crippled because the person claiming to be a doctor in their back alley abortion had never touched a medical manual in their lives. I remember the stories of wire coat hangers. And that is an unacceptable era of history to return to.
Ask anyone standing outside a women’s health clinic with a picture of a dead fetus way older than they tell you, and that nut will insist that abortion is bad. They will also insist that birth control is abortion, and poor women are sluts who keep pumping out kids to get welfare money. They’ll tell you that welfare is bad, too, and that giving low income families free childcare will reduce us to a nanny-state.
The only way abortion is going to decrease is through comprehensive sex education including teaching about abstinence (and not from a religious point of view), free birth control for women, welfare to help low income women and men get on their feet and keep their children from starving, and free childcare for low income families so they can get jobs and make desperately-needed money. There is no getting around this. Look at the statistics, look at the studies.
The women who are being hurt the worst by our current, shameful Republican-led War on Women are poor minority women. These are the same women branded as welfare sluts. These are the women who rely on Planned Parenthood as their only form of healthcare. These are the women who are affected most by abortion legislation, which is quickly turning abortion into a wealthy white woman’s privilege instead of a poor black woman’s right. These women are the ones who can’t march in the streets because they can’t afford to miss a day of work. They are the same ones who labor sixty hour weeks at fast food restaurants to support the children they were forced to have because they didn’t have access to or education about birth control and abortion. These are the women who can barely afford to pay the weekly grocery bill, much less spend hundreds every week on childcare. These are America’s forgotten women, who are no longer afforded a voice due to their audacity to want a life beyond hand to mouth survival. These are women who have been pounded into the ground not just by sexism, but racism too.
Dr. Tiller’s death was one of the worst acts of domestic terrorism I’ve ever lived through, and I saw the second tower fall during 9/11. Dr. Tiller was a voice for women everywhere, the poor Latinas and whites, and even the wealthy anti-abortion corporate queens who took quiet vacations to take care of the problem growing in their wombs.
Abortion is and must always be a fundamental right. No one has the right to tell a woman what she can or can’t do with her body, rich, colored, poor, or white. Dr. Tiller knew this, and he was willing to stand up to the danger that should not be inherent with it. I know it, and I have been spit on and had rocks thrown at me for it. And I will take that nasty, hate-mongering behavior any day if it means one more woman can make her own reproductive choices.
I look at the legislation being introduced today and it’s so crazy L. Ron Hubbard is wishing he thought of it. My constitutional right as a woman is being slowly eroded by the Heartbeat Bill, 24-hr waiting periods, 72-hour waiting periods, mandatory counseling sessions, crisis pregnancy center lies and scare tactics, mandatory ultrasounds, misinformation and miseducation. They are telling lies about us and about our bodies, and they are telling them straight to our faces. If we don’t stand up for ourselves there is no one else to do it for us, and we’ve seen what lack of representation of women in our governments and our politics leads to. Women are being stuffed back into the patriarchal pigeonhole of house servants and sex slaves, and I am not going to take it lying down. Dr. Tiller didn’t, black women didn’t, our grandmothers and mothers didn’t. It’s the same fight, but this time it’s our turn to dig in our heels, break out our signs and say “Enough”.
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