Reproductive Justice

The ProChoice
Movement Has a White Supremacy Problem – And AntiChoice
Advocates Are Using It to Their Advantage — Everyday Feminism
http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/06/prochoicewhitesupremacy/

Like many other outcast teenaged white girls of the
90s, my initial identity as a feminist was super
influenced by the Riot Grrrl movement.
I came out as a dyke, joined a punk band, and began
building community with other radical, like-minded
grrrls and womyn. We ran zine libraries, organized
political actions, toured the country playing music,
and had endless conversations about SmashingThePatriarchy.
The more I learned about misogyny, the angrier I got. The angrier I got, the more important
it felt to integrate feminist activism into my daily life.
So aside from growing out my armpit hair, listening to Bikini Kill, and obsessively memorizing
bell hooks passages, I also got involved with the reproductive rights movement.
I have now been a medical assistant and clinical abortion advocate for almost ten years, but
when I first started doing this work, I felt as though it was my feminist duty to align myself
with the pro-choice movement as an “ally” of sorts.
In my early twenties, I was under the staunch and arrogant belief that I, myself, would never be
in need of an abortion. After all, I didn’t even have sex with people who could even get me
pregnant.

I was a capital “L” Lesbian — a naive and self-righteous baby-dyke who still associated
gender with anatomy and had yet to understand the complexities of her own queer desires.
I think it’s fair to say that I initially became involved with the pro-choice movement from a “charity-based” mindset as opposed to a “solidarity-based” one.
I saw myself as a responsible, civic-minded Lesbian selflessly investing her time and energy helping “poor straight women” escape the unfortunate consequences of their sex lives.
This all changed when, at the age of 25, I accidentally got pregnant.
Once I realized that anatomy and gender had nothing to do with each other — or with my
sexual orientation — it was open season! I learned that some of my dates did have the potential to get me pregnant because – lightbulb! – some women have penises and produce sperm!
Identifying as a Queer instead of a Lesbian finally began to make much more sense to me.
It suddenly dawned on me that, though I’d chosen to ignore it, there had always been a myriad
of ways I could have accidentally become pregnant before this — that as someone living in a patriarchal society with the kind of reproductive anatomy I have, I was just as vulnerable to the possibility of accruing an unwanted pregnancy as the patients I supported every day.
Finally I understood that that the fight to keep abortion safe and legal wasn’t only relevant to cisgender, heterosexual women – it was necessary the entire well-being of—well—humanity.
There were queer women in my community who are in the sex industry and occasionally came in for abortions because they’d been with some asshole john who’d poked holes in their condoms out of spite.
There were queer couples who planned to have children together, inseminated, and then
broken up, leaving one partner to choose between abortion and single parenthood.
Furthermore, due to the obscenely high incidents of rape in our culture some of us become
pregnant without ever having consented to having sex in the first place. As a survivor of sexual assault, how could I have ever overlooked this fact?
Once this “Us verses Them” mentality was finally dismantled, my heart was reinvested in
the reproductive justice movement in more genuine and holistic way.
Over the years I’ve continued to gain a more nuanced understanding of what it means to not only be a queer woman working in this realm of healthcare, but also what it means to be a feminist, able-bodied, cisgended white woman in the world and doing this sort of work.
But more about that later…
Infamous Anti-Choice Terror Tactics
Working at various clinics across California over the years has made me a witness to the ways in which US reproductive rights debates play out at the literal sites of confrontation.
In earlier days, I remember dealing with protesters whose tactics were of an aggressive,
sometimes violent nature.
These folks would form impenetrable picket lines to block patients from being able enter the clinic. They would schedule fake appointments in order to gain access into the building, and then stage theatrical, shame-inducing sermons in the waiting rooms. They’d take over the clinic parking lot and vandalize staff cars with blood-red, acrylic paint.
It was even common for protesters to stand on the sidewalk dressed in Grim Reaper costumes disemboweling toy dolls and chucking little plastic limbs at patients as they approached the clinic.
They’d call in bomb threats, hold up banners with graphic images of stillborn infants on them (WTF?), and pass out pamphlets filled with misinformation meant to traumatize people out of having abortion procedures.
On a national level, affiliates of Operation Rescue and other anti-choice spin-off groups were known for stalking and murdering abortion providers, as well as for firebombing reproductive health clinics all over the country.
As volatile as that generation of anti-abortion activists were, they did a pretty good job of
making themselves look like nothing more than a crew of malicious hecklers.
Average members of society who stood on the opposing side of the pro-choice debate often hesitated to call themselves “pro-life” for fear of being associated with these extremest groups or the harmful, violent tactics they implored.
What Has Changed? While there are still clinic bombers and doctor hunters out there, there have been major shiftsin the tactics used by the mainstream pro-life movement.
They have radically transformed their public persona, approaching the abortion debate with thoughtful, compelling arguments meant to engage members of various disenfranchised communities – communities we all know the right wing has never been invested in serving prior to this.
Instead of using shock and shame tactics, anti-choice activists have reframed the “pro-life” debate around issues of a failing system, gendered oppression, and both historical and contemporary forms of institutionalized racism.
They have taken advantage of the pro-choice movement’s general failure to address or
confront the violence waged against people of color, folks with disabilities, and working
class/poor folks throughout history.
The right wing is successfully exploiting the fact that mainstream feminists often focus on
single-issue struggles instead of addressing the overarching and intersecting forms of
oppression (like race, class, gender, and ability) that are constantly at play.
As much as it pains me to admit, the protesters outside our clinic doors today are actually
distributing some pretty accurate historical information about the racist, ableist motives that the reproductive rights movement was founded upon – legacies that, for the most part, the mainstream pro-choice movement likes to sweep under the rug.
Quick Feminist History Lesson: The Pro-Choice Movement’s Epic
Failures
In the early 1900s, Margaret Sanger (reproductive rights activist and founder of the first
contraceptive health clinics in the US), publicly aligned herself with the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement sought to cultivate a nation of “genetically superior” citizens by advocating that folks of color, folks with physical and mental disabilities, folks in low income brackets, and many others, be eradicated from the gene pool by way of compulsory sterilization, forced abortions, euthanasia, and the government sanctioned use birth control.
Sound familiar?
Let’s flip through our rolodex of international genocide campaigns for some similar examples, shall we?
What was that pesky World War II era campaign in Germany? Oh yes, the Third Reich.
Eugenicist ideologies were at the center of Hitler’s Nazi crusade – its national goal being to
exterminate “all lives [Hitler deemed] unworthy of life” in order to the cultivate (what Hitler deemed) a “supreme master race.”
Margaret Sanger herself argued that birth control and abortion should be legalized in the
US not only because women should have the right to determine their own reproductive
destinies, but also because she believed that “birth control would lead ultimately to a
cleaner race.”
She went on record saying things like “We mean to exterminate the black race” and “More
children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue in birth control.”
Practitioners went on to implement her suggestions in a variety of ways, including the widely accepted practice of sterilizing low income women who came into hospitals to give birth if they had already had two or more children, to incentive-based coercion for women on welfare to use Norplant (taken off the market in 2002 due to its dangerous side effects) – a doctorcontrolled contraceptive method implanted in the arm that couldn’t be removed without a surgical procedure.
The pro-choice movement has never officially acknowledged its historical affiliation with the eugenics movement, nor has it held itself accountable for the racist medical practices it condoned.
Instead, the reproductive rights movement has upheld Margaret Sanger as an early feminist hero who fought for women’s access to safe, legal contraception. Period.
So here’s the thing:
When patients enter a clinic with pamphlets full of racist Margaret Sanger quotes given to them by the protesters outside, and there is literally a giant homage portrait of her affixed to the lobby wall meant to valorize and celebrate her work, it makes perfect sense that people would lose trust, feel angry, or even feel downright unsafe.
When patients come into a waiting room and see information packets about doctor-controlled birth control methods (IUDs, implants, the Depo Injection, tubal ligation, and vasectomies) only available in Spanish, while patient-controlled methods (the pill, the patch, the ring, barrier methods, and so on) are in English with attractive, responsible-looking white women on the covers, these racist legacies are being reproduced right before our eyes.
Who’s Dropping the Truth Bombs?
Though contemporary anti-choice propaganda is clearly a sham in its pretense to care about social justice, in the absence of feminist action or accountability, their arguments have become
particularly effective.

One of the main groups distributing this kind of information outside our modern day clinics, is the Radiance Foundation – a group that associates abortion clinics that provide services to communities of color with state-sponsored genocide.
Another group of anti-choice protesters called Feminists for Life deliver compelling critiques of the US social welfare system and its classist, sexist deprioritization of motherhood (and women in general). They argue that the activism that needs to be done is not only rooted in saving the lives of unborn fetuses, but also in “envisioning a better world in which no woman is driven by desperation to abortion.”
And lets be honest: Both groups are right on a lot of levels.
We do live in a white supremacist culture that values certain lives over others and that
perpetuates racist ideologies in not only the realm of medicine, but in most of its
institutions.
Due to the fact that our society has not prioritized building an infrastructure that supports low income parenthood, many women don’t actually get to make a “choice” when it comes to deciding whether or not to continue a pregnancy.
What’s important to keep in mind though, is that neither of these facts negates a person’s right to exercise control over their own reproductive destiny, whether that means preventing pregnancy, ending a pregnancy, or choosing to give birth — which is what the right wing is ultimately fighting against.
In the face of these tactics, we need to stay clear about the fact that the goals of the antichoice movement are not to eradicate white supremacy or increase family planning options for low income folks – it is to reinstate governmental control over the bodies and lives of women.
What’s Next?
The pro-choice movement will continue to lose credibility and strength unless white feminists start recognizing the legacies of unaddressed racism that still exist in the mainstream feminist movement.
White feminists need to remember that we come to the reproductive rights debate with
dozens of valid reasons for our motives to be untrusted.
The contemporary pro-choice movement not only needs to be accountable and transparent about its history, it needs to assess the ways in which eugenics-based ideologies have likely been transmitted into our current medical and cultural practices.
We need to stop centering reproductive rights discussions around the sole issue of keeping
abortion legal, and instead, fight for reproductive justice.
Reproductive Justice means having broader conversations about white supremacy,
heteropatriarchy, ableism, and capitalism. Fighting for reproductive justice means confronting medical establishments and pharmaceutical companies about the targeting of populations with contraceptive advertisements based on race, class, age, and ability demographics.
It means recognizing the ways in which systems of oppression are inherently linked to one
another.
It means leaving nobody out of the struggle.

Annah Anti-Palindrome is a bay-area based writer, musician and queer/femme antagonist who hails from the working-class craters at the base of the Sierra Foothills. For more info on her work, see annahantipalindrome.com. To contact, message her via her facebook fan page!

Master Race of the Left

http://www.paulbogdanor.com/left/eugenics.html

Forced sterilisations in Scandinavia have shocked the world. But the great founding fathers of British socialism, reports Jonathan Freedland, had dreams almost as vile as those of the Nazis.Jonathan Freedland,
The Guardian,
August 30, 1997They will be searching their souls in Stockholm tonight. And in Oslo, Helsinki and Copenhagen, too. All over Scandinavia, people are facing up to the stain now spreading across their snow-white self-image, as they discover that their governments spent decades executing a chilling plan to purify the Nordic race, nurturing the strong and eradicating the weak. Each day victims of forced sterilisation, now deep in middle-age, have stepped forward to tell how they were ordered to have “the chop,” to prevent them having children deemed as racially defective as themselves.Branded low class, or mentally slow, they were rounded up behind secure fences, in Institutes for Misled and Morally Neglected Children, where they were eventually led off for “treatment.” One man has told how he and his fellow teenage boys planned to run away rather than undergo the dreaded “cut in the crotch.” Maria Nordin, now seeking compensation from the Swedish government, remembers sobbing as she was pressed to sign away her rights to have a baby. Told that she would stay locked up forever if she did not cooperate, she relented – spending the rest of her life childless and in regret.In Sweden the self-examination has already begun. A government minister has admitted that “what went on is barbaric and a national disgrace,” with more than 60,000 Swedish women sterilised from 1935 until as late as 1976. What has shocked most observers is that all this was committed not by some vile fascistic regime, but by a string of welfare-minded, Social Democratic governments. Indeed, the few voices of opposition came from Swedish conservatives.But the reckoning cannot be confined to Scandinavia: Britain has some soul-searching of its own to do. What’s more, as in Sweden, the culprits are not long-forgotten fire-breathers of the far right. On the contrary: eugenics is the dirty little secret of the British left. The names of the first champions read like a rollcall of British socialism’s best and brightest: Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, John Maynard Keynes, Marie Stopes, the New Statesman – even, lamentably, the Manchester Guardian. Nearly every one of the left’s most cherished, iconic figures espoused views which today’s progressives would find repulsive.Thus George Bernard Shaw could write: “The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man.” Later he mused that “the overthrow of the aristocrat has created the necessity for the Superman.” The revered pacifist, disarmer and philosophical titan, Bertrand Russell, dreamed up a wheeze that would have made even Nazi Germany’s eugenicists blush. He suggested the state issue colour-coded “procreation tickets.” Those who dared breed with holders of a different-coloured ticket would face a heavy fine. That way the high-calibre gene pool of the elite would not be muddied by any proletarian or worse, foreign, muck. The New Statesman agreed, explaining in July 1931: “The legitimate claims of eugenics are not inherently incompatible with the outlook of the collectivist movement. On the contrary, they would be expected to find their most intransigent opponents amongst those who cling to the individualistic views of parenthood and family economics.” The bottom line is bleak but clear. Eugenics, the art and science of breeding better men, is not just the historical problem of Germany and now Scandinavia, nor even of the jackbooted right. It took root right here in Britain – pushed and argued by the left. Indeed, contempt for ordinary people and outright racism were two of the defining creeds of British socialism.The trouble began with Charles Darwin. His breakthrough work, The Origin of the Species, did not restrict its impact to the academy and laboratories. Instead it transformed the very way mankind understood itself in the 19th century, its message fast spilling over into the realm of political ideas. Suddenly the religious notion that all life was equally sacred was under attack. Human beings were like any other species – some were more evolved than others. The human race could be divided into different categories and classes. When Karl Marx took on the task of charting human development and defining the class structure, he acknowledged his debt – dedicating an early edition of Das Kapital to none other than Charles Darwin.From the beginning socialism regarded itself as the natural ally, even the political version, of science. Just as biologists sought to understand animals and plants, so scientific socialism would master people. According to Adrian Wooldridge, author of Measuring the Mind: Education and Psychology in England 1860-1990, and a recognised authority on early ideas of human merit, progressives believed the only enemies of Darwin were reactionaries, the religious and the superstitious. Science, by contrast, represented progress. Crucially, these early leftists regarded science as an utterly neutral tool; something could not be scientifically right and morally wrong. In this climate, says Wooldridge, “eugenics became the political correctness of its day.” If you were modern, you believed in it.The result was a Darwinian commitment to improving the quality of the nation’s genetic stock. Many of the reforms admired by today’s leftists were not, in fact, borne of a benign desire to improve the lot of the poor, but rather to make Britons fitter – to guarantee their survival as one of the globe’s foremost races. Thus the Webbs pushed for free milk in schools not because their hearts bled for undernourished kids, but because they were alarmed by Britain’s performance in the Boer war, where troops had taken a good kicking at the hands of the black man: the Webbs believed a daily dose of calcium would improve the bones and teeth of the future working class.The contemporary left has a similarly misguided and sentimental view of Marie Stopes’s campaign to bless the women of King’s Cross and the rest of working class Britain with contraception. The unrosy reality is that Stopes, Mary Stocks and the like were not motivated by a kind of proto-feminism, but rather by the urge to reduce the numbers of the burgeoning lumpenproletariat. This rather awkward fact was exposed earlier this year with the release of a long-suppressed essay by the father of liberal economics, John Maynard Keynes. He endorsed legalised birth control because the working class was too “drunken and ignorant” to be trusted to keep its own numbers down: “To put difficulties in the way of the use of [contraception] checks increases the proportion of the population born from those who from drunkenness or ignorance or extreme lack of prudence are not only incapable of virtue but incapable also of that degree of prudence which is involved in the use of checks.”Many progressives were drawn to the hope that science could build up the strong parts of the nation, and slowly eliminate the weak. Dozens of them signed up for the Eugenics Society, which in the 1930s rivalled the Fabians as the fashionable salon of London socialism. Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson even wanted the society to form its own committee of Labour sympathisers. H. G. Wells could not contain his enthusiasm, hailing eugenics as the first step toward the removal “of detrimental types and characteristics” and the “fostering of desirable types” in their place.For these early thinkers, eugenic socialism posed no contradiction: indeed, it made perfect sense. As Wooldridge points out, “the Webbs supported eugenic planning just as fervently as town planning.” If socialism was about organising and ordering society from the centre, then its most extreme advocates believed in extending that control – all the way into the wombs and testes of society’s weakest members. What they wanted was a neat, clean, planned Utopia: eugenics was just one part of that dream.One other doctrine was crucial – profound elitism. It strikes the 1990s ear oddly, but these leading lights of British socialism had no patience for equality. The communist and one-time editor of the Daily Worker, J. B. S. Haldane, considered equality a “curious dogma… we are not born equal, far from it.” Many on the left were members of the upper middle-class or lower aristocracy, convinced their higher intellectual capacities had to be preserved from proletarian infection. One popular idea of the time was to encourage artificial insemination – not to help the infertile, but to impregnate working-class women with the sperm of men with high IQs. Beatrice Webb was sure her genetic material was worth preserving, describing herself as “the cleverest member of one of the cleverest families in the cleverest class of the cleverest nation of the world.” She and her fellow travellers envisaged a world run by an elite made up of people like her, able to determine who could reproduce and who could not. Always fond of gazing into the future, H. G. Wells pictured a caste of all-powerful super-talentedUbermenschen, who would wear Samurai-style dress, and order the affairs of the planet.In this context, there was only contempt for ordinary people, who were regarded as “sub-men” to be tended and looked after – via the welfare state – like a bovine herd. The Labour cabinet minister Douglas Jay felt no embarrassment in putting the attitude on record in his pamphlet, The Socialist Cause. Famously and loftily he declared, “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves.” Non-Britons came even lower on the Darwinian pecking order. In those times it was the Jews who were regarded as posing the chief threat of alien dilution of English blood. Bernard Shaw described the Jews as “the real enemy, the invader from the East, the ruffian, the oriental parasite.” H. J. Hobson, a radical journalist who made his name covering the Boer war forThe Guardian, declared that the Transvaal had fallen prey to “Jew Power.”For years, leftists, historians and everyone else have drawn a veil over Adolf Hitler’s naming of his creed National Socialism. It has been dismissed as a perverse PR trick of the Fuhrer’s, as if Nazism and socialism represented opposite faiths. The same view has infused the left’s understanding of the genocides committed in the name of communism, whether by Stalin or Pol Pot, as if those men were merely betraying the otherwise noble theory whose cause they proclaimed. But the early history of British socialism tells a different story. It suggests that socialism – with its unshakeable faith in science, central planning and the cool wisdom of the rational elite – contained the seeds of the atrocities that were to come later.Eventually, in the shadow of Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor, the British left gave up its flirtation with eugenics. They saw where it had led. But, just like the governments of Scandinavia, their past was buried too quickly – and forgotten. The names of Russell, Webb and Shaw still retain their lustre – despite their association with the foulest idea of the 20th century. They escaped the reckoning. Perhaps now, posthumously, it’s time to see them, and much of socialism itself, as they truly were.

Should imbeciles be beaten to death?

http://mynorthwest.com/129/2717230/Faith-communities-banding-together-against-hate-messages-in-Bothell?pid=2&on=11

http://www.loonwatch.com/2015/02/hindu-center-targeted-with-swastika-and-message-of-muslims-get-out/

Islamophobia in the heartland. Not so bright Neo-Nazis spray-painted hateful messages on a Hindu Temple and Cultural Center.

What’s that about Islamophobia having nothing to do with race again?

My Northwest, By Chelsea Hawkins

It’s not often you see a Lutheran pastor standing in front of a golden Ganesha. But that’s the scene as Christian, Sikh and Muslim leaders stand alongside Hindus in a united front against hate.

“The core value of all faiths and the core value of being an American is about love and care and tolerance,” says Reverend Paul Benz of the Faith Action Network.

Recent acts of vandalism at the Hindu Temple and Cultural Center and Skyview Junior High School in Bothell have members of the community concerned. The Hindu Temple was tagged with a swastika and the message “Get out.” Over at the junior high school a message read, “Get out Muslims.”

Comment: Keeping imbeciles on a short leash is one of the tasks we still need Antifa for. It is highly unethical to attack people without sufficient proof. That is why we should implement eugenics by teaching Arabic and Chinese, instead of all other subjects, on elementary schools and high schools and beating to death children who do not get ahead. This beating should happen before the very eyes of the parents. Only this will teach people to think before they act.

Pundits teach young Hindus Sanskrit. Imams teach young Muslims Arabic. Rabbis teach young Jews Hebrew. However, priests do not teach young Catholics Latin, and reverends do not teach young Protestants Greek. Christian clerics keep their flock stupid, leading to imbecilic vandalism as noted above.

I am beginning to think that eradication of Christianity is necessary before any action against Jews, Muslims and other religious groups could be justified. The stupidity caused by Christianity is pernicious. I do not mince words, Christians should have their arms chopped off and their eyes gouged out, and pointed out to them that Christianity forbids euthanasia. Remind them that the Antichrist would behead them, like ISIS does.

Hell is eternal, Hell is eternal, Hell is eternal…

Link: Child Molestation and Eugenics

Click to access Kinsey-Crimes.pdf

Hell is eternal, Hell is eternal, Hell is eternal…