Statement on the Violent Attack on Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood
November 27, 2015 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
November 27, 2015
updated @ 10:30 PM
On Friday a gunman launched an armed attack against the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs, Colorado, wounding at least nine people, with three confirmed murdered as of this writing. This heinous attack marks a serious escalation of the war against women AND a serious escalation in the overall attacks on the people. This must be met with determined, unyielding struggle.
This war has gone on now for several decades. Since 1977, anti-abortion pro-patriarchy fanatics have murdered at least eight people working to provide abortions—the most recent being the murder of Dr. George Tiller in 2009. The terrifying violence against the staff, patients and the clinics has been unrelenting over these decades. Some statistics over this same time period reveal the scale and scope of this vicious campaign to deprive women of the basic right to control their own lives: what was eight murdered before yesterday is now at least 11; and add to this, 17 attempted murders, 42 bombings, 182 acts of arson, and almost 7000 acts of documented violence and 194,000+ acts of active disruption.1 All this is but the leading edge of the violence done to the countless women’s lives who could not access abortion services because so many clinics have been forced to close.
Planned Parenthood has been a major target of this for the last several months with Republican presidential candidates in particular engaging in the most vicious lies, distortions and demagogy. Meanwhile, state legislatures all over the U.S. have put the very right to abortion, as well as birth control, on the firing line and the Supreme Court itself plans to make a major ruling this spring.
It is imperative that this attack on Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs be met with mass action immediately—answering Sunsara Taylor’s call for demonstrations Saturday, November 28. Then, on January 22, 2016 in Washington, DC, and on January 23 in San Francisco, there must be massive national demonstrations on the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which originally made abortion legal in the U.S. against the whole offensive being waged to take away the right to abortion. Beyond and through that demonstration we need a whole societal-wide movement of women and men who refuse to put up with this any longer, who refuse to just hope for the best but instead insist on directly and militantly confronting and fighting this patriarchal madness, who are determined to change the whole terms of discourse and political action to defend abortion and women’s lives in this society, and around the world.
At the same time, during this past week, there was an armed racist attack on demonstrations and an encampment organized by Black Lives Matter in Minnesota against the police killing of Jamar Clark, a young Black man. Not only did the police do absolutely nothing to prevent this shooting of activists, they took it as an opportunity to further harass and repress the demonstrators themselves. Both of these attacks—the one in Minnesota against the movement against police murder of Black and other minority people and the one in Colorado against women exercising their right to make their own decisions about whether and when to be a parent—are linked. They are part of a more overall openly fascist reactionary wind being fanned—again from very high up among the rulers of this country—in which threats, beatings and armed attacks are being unleashed against the people and in which openly racist thugs like Donald Trump are being given credibility and endless air time to promote poison on these questions, as well as his particular bent against immigrants. All this must be opposed both by militant mass action AND by relying on ourselves to defend ourselves and our movements. The lines are being drawn; the people must stand up.
This whole capitalist-imperialist system of America is rife with oppression and repression, and has no answers for the oppression of women or the ongoing murder of Black and other minority people by police other than empty promises and not just continued, but deepened, oppression, while at the same time stirring up and unleashing armed, fascist, racist, woman-hating forces. If this were all that is wrong with this system, it would be reason enough for revolution—and of course there is much more that needs to be utterly changed, from the horrific international situation and the endless wars, to the oppression of refugees and immigrants, to the destruction of the environment. Nothing short of revolution can solve this. And the most important thing is that there is leadership for that revolution, and a vision and plan for a far better society in which people can really get to work on solving these problems—in Bob Avakian (BA) and the new synthesis of communism he has brought forward, and the party he leads.
The time is now to cast away illusions, look reality in the face, and stand up to fight this oppression and while doing so, engage with BA and the scientific method and approach to, and the framework for, an actual revolution aimed at ending all forms of oppression and exploitation throughout the world and get with the movement for revolution and the Revolutionary Communist Party that is at its core.
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1. Statistics from the National Abortion Federation; http://prochoice.org/education-and-advocacy/violence/violence-statistics-and-history/. [back]
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