From a Revolution/revcom.us correspondent:
Black Women’s Lives Matter! All Women’s Lives Matter! Abortion on Demand and Without Apology!
July 13, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Dori was just 27 years old. A young Black woman full of life who liked to eat her mustard greens, with raw onions—with corn bread—with her fingers—while munching on a jalapeno pepper at the same time.
She liked drinking malt liquor when playing the card game bid whist with her friends—a fun game similar to spades. As an eight-year-old, I remember she was the only adult I felt comfortable talking to because she took my ideas—even though I was only a child—seriously.
This was a time when there was mass upheaval and resistance against some of the openly legal ways Black people were segregated, discriminated against and oppressed. The resistance first mainly involving Black people—but soon joined by whites, Latino people, and other minority groupings of women and men, especially youth as well.
Dori would teach us not to mistreat others—no matter what their skin color. But she also taught us not to take shit from anyone—no matter who. She said we had to stand up, speak up, and demand to be treated equally. This was a life-long lesson. A principle I learned to live by. Including a little later when the cops began to fuck with us because we were Black kids and we would speak up for ourselves.
Do you know anyone else—any person or organization—that has managed to bring forth an actual PLAN for a radically different society, in all its dimensions, and a CONSTITUTION to codify all this? — A different world IS possible — Check out and order online the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America (Draft Proposal).
At 27, Dori already had five children between ages of nine and four. Along the way she also had at least two miscarriages. She was a small person. She had a small bone structure. Her fifth pregnancy and last delivery of her youngest child had been very hard on her body. It came close to killing her. The doctors warned that she might not make it through another pregnancy.
But she was in a second marriage and the dude wanted her to have his children. This was before Roe v Wade so abortion was illegal. Women like Dori had no freedom over her reproduction. She, like millions of other women, did not have the freedom to even consider an alternative—her decision-making process was shaped by, conditioned by, and enforced by thousands of years of traditional chains—and the way those chains have been adapted by every system based on exploitation—including the patriarchy under the capitalist imperialist system of the USA.
When Dori got pregnant again, and went into labor, the hospital was only a few minutes away. It was in Berkeley where we lived. But they refused to treat her. Instead they sent her to the county hospital miles away. It was where most Black people and all poor people went. Her uterus ruptured and by the time she got there she had bled out and died.
Everyone was shocked. Traumatized. Her death is something that her kids, her mother, and those who were close to her never got over. Her death was so unnecessary. We did not give a fuck about or shed a tear for the fetus she was carrying in her uterus. We did not know it. We shared no direct or indirect social experiences with it. It was a developing clump of cells that were a subordinate part of Dori’s body. It was not a human being. A fetus is not a child. Whether it is in the uterus of an African-American woman or ANY woman! It is a fetus. That is a simple scientific fact!
Think again. This was life of a real person. In the world today—mainly the Third World—300,000 women die from complications during pregnancy or during birth every year. These are the lives of real developed people—who do feel pain—who do have social experience with other real people who love them.
A fetus does not feel pain but women do. A fetus has no life separate from the woman in whose uterus it is in. See revcom.us/REVOLUTION newspaper, April 11, 2015—get the picture that breaks it down scientifically: put it up everywhere: It can be liberating! It can contribute to the fight for women liberation. A fetus is not a baby!
You want to talk about genocide as some Black preachers, and the so-called “pro-life” fascist-women-haters, accuse Black women of when the women seek abortions? What about this? This is their way of saying women's lives do not matter— that her value is one of breeder and incubator even if it kills her—literally.
These people are defenders of patriarchy—of the subordination of women to men—they blame women who die for dying because these fools mask, hide, cover-up—protect and defend the most dangerous place for African-Americans—which has always been this system.
The patriarchy is part of the mental chains on people, including Black people, that are rooted in that fucking Bible. In Genesis 3:16, it says god is angry with Eve for getting herself and Adam kicked out of the Garden of Eden and puts a curse on women where it says to the woman, “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”
Explicitly cited or not, this kind of patriarchal view is part of the mental and physical shackles on the society and the people as to the role of women. Women forced into motherhood—denied the right to decide when and if to give birth—denied the right to abortion on demand and without apology—women made into prizes—reduced to objects of sexual rewards, battered as punching bags reduced to “bitches and hos.” No! We do not have to live this way. Just read the book of Numbers (e.g. Numbers 31: 17-18).
These are some of the larger forces that women like Dori—one half of humanity—are ensnared and enslaved in—and it is this communist revolution that can strike deep at the roots of their oppression—and all oppression—overturning it—continuing to transform the soil of exploitation and oppression—reaching a new plateau of human inter-action with each other and the environment.
As Bob Avakian says in his historic Dialogue with Cornel West in November 2014, captured in Revolution and Religion: The Fight for Emancipation and the Role of Religion: “What if a woman could walk down to the street and look any man in the eye and fear nothing?” Imagine that! Women like Dori being treated as full human beings instead living and dying as incubators.
To really appreciate what is being said here—with the most highly and new scientific understanding—new synthesis of communism—I would strongly encourage readers to watch the film by Bob Avakian, Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party: BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS!
We can begin to understand how we are now living in a time when all oppression, all exploitation, all forms of enslavement can be uprooted and eliminated; how the revolution that Bob Avakian leads is today working to hasten and accelerate a revolutionary situation where the masses of exploited and oppressed humanity—along with those who are outraged and alienated by what this system does globally—in their millions and tens of millions can meet, defeat, and dismantle the instruments of violence and coercion, instruments of dictatorship of the capitalist-imperialist system—and replace them with new revolutionary instruments that enables the revolutionary people to radically uproot and transform the whole foundation of this system—replacing it with a new class rule—new revolutionary instruments—the dictatorship of the proletariat—a new socialist system that is the transition to a world community of freely associating human beings—communism.
Think about it.
And, by the way, Dori was my mother.
Volunteers Needed... for revcom.us and Revolution
If you like this article, subscribe, donate to and sustain Revolution newspaper.
