Abortion on Demand Is Liberating—Not Genocidal! Protest "#StandingUp4Life"
Updated January 14, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
PROTEST “StandingUp4Life”
Friday, January 23
12:00 pm-2:00 pm
Oscar Grant Plaza, 14th / Broadway, Oakland
From an activist in Stop Patriarchy
On January 23, four Black Christian fascist preachers have the nerve to hold their “StandingUp4Life” event in Oscar Grant Plaza in Oakland (re-named in the memory of one of the thousands of unarmed Black men who have been killed by the police), rolling out their anti-woman agenda under the guise of saving Black lives. These reactionary preachers spread the lie that abortion is genocide. Black women choosing abortion is not genocidal! In many cases, it is a choice they can make that allows them to regain their humanity in a world of rape, racism, and degradation.
Rev. Clenard Childress of BlackGenocide.org, a featured speaker in this year’s anti-abortion Walk for “Life” West Coast in San Francisco on January 24; Walter Hoye of Issues4Life in Union City, who calls Black children an “endangered species” because abortion is still legal; Pastor Bruce Rivers of the Los Banos branch of Greater Exodus Baptist Church; and Pastor Walter Moss of the Black Pro Life Coalition and church leader in Ohio, will preach and march through Oakland as part of a nationally coordinated effort to end abortions.
These men will claim to carry the legacy of the civil rights movement, they will quote Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and they will seem to condemn crimes of slavery, genocide, and injustice against Black people. Do not be deceived. Despite all that rhetoric, these preachers claim that women, and in particular Black women, are responsible for “the denigration of the national conscience,” and have one main objective: to abolish abortion for ALL women in ALL circumstances, and to see ALL women slammed backwards to an openly subservient role, as prescribed by a literal interpretation of the Bible.
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Rev. Childress of BlackGenocide.org claims that abortion is genocide. He says that, like genocides of the past, such as the Holocaust, the “victim class” (which is how he describes fetuses) is perceived as “getting in the way” of things such as acquiring material wealth, career development, and women’s rights. First of all, fetuses cannot be a “victim class” because they are not full human beings. They have the potential to grow into full human beings. But women are human beings. What Rev. Childress and these types of organizations see as a threat is women taking their lives into their own hands! Why? Because women being treated as fully human, with the right to decide when and whether to become mothers, and the ability to have careers and financial independence, “gets in the way” of patriarchy!
As a matter of fact, it is rare to find a discussion of women at all at BlackGenocide.org. The word “women” hardly appears. What does appear quite a bit is the condemnation of terminating “children in the womb.” This is typical of the woman-hating anti-abortion agenda. When women are erased from the picture and the status of a fetus living inside a woman is elevated, it strips women of their humanity and reduces them to incubators. This is dehumanizing! In reality, abolishing safe access to legal abortion means a nightmare of forced motherhood and desperate, illegal, unsafe abortions for a woman who chooses not to have a child for whatever reason. Women who do not risk their lives by dangerous methods of self-inducing abortions end up trapped in abusive relationships, driven into poverty or deeper into poverty, and are denied the ability to decide the course of their futures.
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All of this is enough for people everywhere to oppose this vicious, misogynist agenda. But doing all this in the name of civil rights creates a dangerous misdirection from the real source of the attacks on African-American communities. This system is designed to exploit and oppress people of color, and Black people in particular. It has gone from slavery, to the atrocities of Jim Crow, up through today, when police target, criminalize, mass incarcerate and gun down Black youth with impunity. This is the real genocide, but you won’t hear about this: the actual ways that a slow genocide is being perpetrated against Black people in the U.S., or the horrors of white supremacy, from BlackGenocide.org. You won’t hear from them the ways to fight the power, to turn back the real genocide, much less lead to the kind of revolution it will take to actually put an end to all that oppression. You won’t see these preachers taking to the streets against police murder.
In fact, in recent interviews with UrbanFamilyTalk and ChristianNews.net, Rev. Childress blatantly dismisses the #BlackLivesMatter movement, saying victims of police murder don’t account for half of the “victims” of abortion, and if Black people “really cared about Black lives” they would be fighting to end abortion. He passionately agreed when his interviewer claimed, “We’re so worried about what the White man might do to us... we are sleeping through the biggest crimes being committed in our own backyard.” This is sick. The reality is, the same system that does (not “might”) perpetuate violence against Black people is also at this moment waging a war on women, the battle for reproductive control is a crucial front in that war, and these preachers are firmly standing on the side of that system.
Stand on the right side of history this January 23. Be part of bringing the truth straight into the middle of their shame-fest, and fighting for the full liberation of women!
Abortion On Demand and Without Apology!
Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement!
Fetuses are NOT babies. Abortion is NOT murder. Women are NOT incubators.
Stop blaming women! It’s this white supremacist system that’s genocidal!
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