Women protest attacks on Planned Parenthood
2015Christine Marie 2015-10Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 1 →
The words are the paper's own, from its digital file; the division into articles was made by machine, so a box or caption can end up inside the article next to it.
Scan page 1
VOL. 33, NO. 10, OCTOBER 2015 WWW.SOCIALISTACTION.ORG U.S. / CANADA $1 On Sept. 29, women in at least 90 cities around the United States demonstrated in defense of the health provider Planned Parenthood.
“Pink Out Day,” the organizers state, provided the opportunity to say: “Listen to over a million Ameri cans who are sick and tired of the relentless attacks on reproductive health care. Listen to the one in five American women who has received care at a Planned Parenthood health center … Tell anti-abortion ex tremists and politicians that we are everywhere and we will not let them use fraud and deception to shut down the health centers so many women rely on for care. … We’re not backing down, not today, not ever.”
These actions were only one element of the re sponse to an extreme right-wing campaign to deprive one of the most important sources of woman’s health for low-income and young women in the country of the $500 million a year in federal funding that it re ceives mostly through Medicaid reimbursements and grants.
In an electronic version of the tribunals organized by women in the fight for reproductive rights before the U. S. Supreme Court legalized abortion in 1973, women are countering the right wing’s attempt to stigmatize abortion on social media. According to the Guardian newspaper, three defenders of reproductive justice—Amelia Bonow, Lindy West, and Kimberly Morrison—started #ShoutYourAbortion on Sept. 18, and tweets quickly climbed into the tens of thousands.
The demonstrations and social media campaigns are in response to the latest outrages in an orchestrated campaign of lies and efforts to defund the health-care provider that took off after undercover videos, edited to make it appear that Planned Parenthood trafficked in fetal tissue, began to be posted to YouTube in July.
In response, Planned Parenthood head Cecile Rich ards testified before a Sept. 29 House of Representa tives hearing that “the outrageous accusations leveled against Planned Parenthood, based on heavily doc tored videos, are offensive and categorically untrue.”
On Sept. 18, the House passed two sensationalist bills that furthered a propaganda war on reproduc tive justice. One bill defunded Planned Parenthood for a year, supposedly in order to allow Congress to investigate the organization’s supposed profiting from the sale of fetal tissue. The other bill was a piece of legislation designed to convince the public that doctors who perform abortions are often the murder ers of fetuses who “survive” the procedure.
Both bills were introduced by conservative “moder ates” who hoped to assuage right-wing “radicals” de termined to link defunding of Planned Parenthood to the big spending bill that would provide government operations funding for the fiscal year beginning on Oct. 1 and a potential government shutdown.
The Senate defeated the Republican efforts to use the funding extension bill to cut off Planned Parent hood, but both houses continue to look for ways to mollify the right-wing “radicals.”
Even though defunding bills, no matter what the form, are likely to be vetoed by President Obama, a member of the House Republican leadership, Steve Scalise, told The New York Times, “We’re going to keep attacking this [abortion] on many fronts” (Sept. 24, 2015). This includes legislation being introduced in the states. On Sept. 1, the governor of Louisiana ended that state’s contract with Planned Parenthood, ending service for 5200 Medicaid patients. The Wis consin Assembly voted on Sept. 24 to ban the state from usng federal family-planning money from going to Planned Parenthood.
The Republican presidential debates have also been the occasion for a level of virulent and misogynist at tacks on female dignity and reproductive justice that have not been heard on mainstream media since Roe v. Wade became the law of the land more than four decades ago.
Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has never prov en itself to be a reliable defender of abortion rights. The willingness of Obama to throw women under the bus during the Affordable Care Act debates was only the last of a string of concessions to reactionary thought that began almost as soon as abortion was legalized.
The most devastating blow to availability of repro ductive choice began in 1976 with the passage of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibited the use of Medic (continued on page 11, in “The real story on immigration in Canada”)
Scan page 2
Tony Savino / Socialist Action
----- pull-quotes -----
INSIDE U.S. labor — 2 SOCIALIST Greece’s Syriza — 3 Blunting reforms — 4
China economy — 6 E.V. Debs — 8 Trotsky book — 9 CHINA and the world economy See page 6
Canada news — 10 Climate action — 12