From the StopPatriarchy.org blog:
The “Abortion Holocaust”: A Monstrous Lie From the Christian Fascists
August 22, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Operation Rescue is a highly organized section of the anti-abortion movement. They recently attacked the town of Albuquerque, New Mexico, the only city in the state with any abortion providers at all, as well as home of two of the last four doctors who openly provide later term abortions for women who need them. Operation Rescue has worked this year on introducing a ballot initiative that if passed, will introduce a 20-week ban on abortion in Albuquerque.
Operation Rescue, Justice 4 All, and other anti-abortion forces have said that the abortions performed between 1973 (the year Roe v. Wade was passed, making abortion legal in this country) and now, are equal to the HOLOCAUST committed by the Nazis on Jewish and other people in the 1930s and 1940s. This past week when Operation Rescue came to Albuquerque, their youth group (called “Survivors of the Abortion Holocaust”) swarmed the local Holocaust Museum, claiming they would not leave until the museum added an abortion exhibit. While some oppose the tactics of terror used recently and for too long by Operation Rescue, some of those still find the 20-week ban on abortion to be reasonable.
We have two things to say to those who would accuse women and abortion providers of being on par with HItler and the Nazis:
- The Nazis banned abortion. The role of women under fascism is very, very clear: you are the incubators, the mothers, and the housekeepers; step outside of those lines, and punishment will be inflicted.1 Sound familiar? Along with patriarchy, the fascist program as laid out by Mussolini and advanced by Hitler also required the unquestionable following of the Christian religion, the suppression of science and intellectualism, the banning of trade unions and other institutions and programs that help the working class, and the vicious imprisonment and execution of communists.
- Fetuses are still only potential lives, even at 20 weeks. Women on the other hand, are actually full human beings. While most abortions are not later term, it is essential that women have the right to end an unwanted pregnancy at any stage.2 In a patriarchal society that still reduces women to objects, as sex objects or breeders or both, it is shockingly easy for the anti-abortion movement to promote this objectification and enslavement of women through a fetishizing of the fetus, and by taking the question of women out of the debate altogether.
Fascists are among the biggest opponents to the liberation of women. And what’s more, capitalism itself is the system that creates legitimacy and the possibility for fascism, relying on patriarchy to function. We live in a society and a system where these arguments and these programs gain traction ONLY because we are already divided into classes, and within that organization, slavery is normalized.
Is it reasonable that Black youth in this country can be rounded up or murdered in cold blood—by the millions—by the police or by plain old racists? Is it reasonable that immigrants are exploited in this country and at the same time criminalized and dehumanized and hunted? Are the wars of imperialism, or the domination and control of the resources of the developing world, or sweatshop labor, reasonable? Is it reasonable that women are tricked, kidnapped, or coerced and then sold, trafficked, and raped before being discarded like so much garbage?3 Or are they different forms of slavery that are only acceptable if we accept the whole framework that normalizes slavery? The attacks on abortion are no more reasonable than any of these things.
They are part of a fascist program that, frankly, would make Hitler proud. This is why we need a REAL REVOLUTION, the kind that Hitler felt he had to put down or lose his whole program, a communist revolution, where the masses seize power from the ruling class, and replace this bankrupt system with one that does not allow for the normalization of slavery, in ANY of its forms.
1. In the “Nine Commandments for the Worker’s Struggle,” Herman Goering, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, instructed German women to, “…take hold of the frying pan, dust pan and broom, and marry a man.” Families were publicly honored for being “child-rich,” and bestowed the “Cross of Honor of the German Mother” on women who bore four or more children. Abortion was punishable by long prison sentences. Find out more here. [back]
2. To find out more about how the Christian Fascist movement has lied to us all about abortion and about women, click here. To find out more about the problems and motivations behind 20-week bans on abortion, as well as the “fetal pain” argument, click here. [back]
3. Also in the Nazi concentration camps, there were brothels set up where the “inferior” women were raped constantly. And yes, there were forced sterilizations and forced abortions in that context. So on the one hand, you had the “good” Aryan women who were forced into motherhood, and on the other hand, you had the “bad” non-Aryan women who were used as forced labor and sex slaves. All women being dehumanized, but not by safe access to abortion by choice! [back]
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