..finally from above.
quote:
As such, despite our intimate knowledge of reproductive primary care and despite interprofessional consultation and advocacy, bringing midwives into the fold in B.C. requires the impetus of the Ministry of Health, a change to the Midwives Regulation in the Health Professions Act, followed by the support of our provincial regulatory body.
In other words, access to abortion really does remain a matter of political will.
That would be a great improvement since it is easier to have qualified midwives serving rural and remote communities one would think.
That would be a great improvement since it is easier to have qualified midwives serving rural and remote communities one would think.
..midwives would also somewhat depoliticize the issue. it would become more of a health/body issue that women themselves can take care of. without having to run it though a gaggle of men. it would be very empowering i imagine.
Think abortion is legal in Great Britain? Ask the two women currently facing life sentences
Like many people in Britain, you probably watched with horror the US supreme court’s reversal of Roe v Wade, thinking, “Thank goodness women could never be prosecuted for having an abortion here.”
But let me tell you, it already happens here.
Two women are currently awaiting criminal trial in England for abortion-related offences, both facing charges that carry a maximum sentence of life. At least 17 women have been investigated by police over the past eight years for having had abortions.
In Oxford, a 25-year-old mother of one is facing trial for allegedly taking the drug misoprostol – one of the two pills routinely prescribed by doctors to abort a pregnancy. But her baby was born alive and she was subsequently reported to the police. She is being charged under the Offences Against the Person Act, a law passed by parliament in 1861, before the invention of the lightbulb and before women had the right to vote. The law states that a woman must be “kept in penal servitude for life” if she procures an abortion.
Another woman is facing trial after she took abortion pills she obtained from the British Pregnancy Advisory Service (BPAS) by post when rules were relaxed during the pandemic to allow this. She was allegedly 28 weeks pregnant at the time and is facing charges of “child destruction” (note the visceral language) under the Infant Life (Preservation) Act from 1929, which also comes with a maximum life sentence. She could spend the rest of her life in prison.
We so often think that the 1967 Abortion Act legalised abortion. But it did no such thing. It partially decriminalised abortion in England, Scotland and Wales, so long as strict conditions were in place, such as a confirmation from two medical practitioners that the pregnancy had not exceeded 28 weeks (subsequently reduced to 24 weeks in 1990), or that the termination was necessary to prevent injury or mental harm. Any abortion outside these criteria is still a criminal offence.....
Michigan Voters Will Determine Fate of Abortion Rights in November Referendum
The Michigan Supreme Court is allowing voters to decide in November whether to enshrine abortion rights to the state Constitution. The ballot initiative gathered over 700,000 signatures in support. This comes after a judge on Wednesday struck down a 1931 Michigan anti-abortion law that prohibited the procedure unless the pregnant person’s life was at risk.
Abortion is Healthcare and So Much More
Abortion is healthcare. It is a personal choice. It’s nobody’s business but the pregnant person’s. All these things are totally true. The push to treat abortion, and all sexual and reproductive health, just like every other private health item on the agenda is a good way to shove cis-hetero misogyny out of our bodies, brains, and beds (or wherever else you like to fuck). There are sound policy and human rights-based arguments to back this strategy, and I do connect emotionally to its messaging, because at its core is the deep scream I’ve been screaming since childhood at the white, male, and Christian gaze: GET THE FUCK OUT!!!
Here is the political problem: we are losing this war.
Beyond electoralism, beyond non-profit charity models
I didn’t think much about leaping into a gig as a legislative assistant with the federal New Democratic Party (NDP). The salary was more than I could ever earn as a bartender and playwright. But when I began to distinguish myself as the go-to staffer for “women’s issues,” I started to realize how my status had shifted. I was on the inside of a power-wielding institution, and I was also powerless.
I regurgitated the NDP’s lines about how we were the activist party and hustled for our MPs to get speaking slots at strategic protests across the country. This was between 2011 and 2015, when words like activism and feminism were having a mainstream liberal comeback, but words like socialism were still very scary. As a socialist, I understood that NDP MPs were co-opting activist voices, but I believed that relationships between elected officials and activists would ultimately lead to influence for the latter. I took great pleasure in writing words that were spoken in the House of Commons and, if I was very lucky, clipped in news. Yet I can say now that not a single problem I wrote about was ultimately solved or even significantly helped by having been given a bit of air in Parliament.
I didn’t understand the meaning of organizing. Like many still do, I mistook proximity to powerful individuals for a means of building grassroots power. I was born in the ’80s and had heard stories about, but hadn’t lived the reality of, the civil rights or women’s liberation movements; I hadn’t experienced a big win by organized labour. I didn’t know a single thing about winning real social power. To my shame, I convinced social movement fighters – some of whom were my friends, people with whom I’d organized demonstrations and direct actions, and who trusted me – to parade through the halls of power and pose for pictures next to opposition MPs, which those MPs would use as evidence that they were committed to important causes.
After three months on Parliament Hill, one of the top staffers in the NDP leader’s office told me that the public doesn’t care about women’s issues. If I had a women’s issue that people would vote for, I should call him, but he’d never seen one. I think he was trying to give me career advice: Find a new thing if you want to be important here. The party had given the Status of Women critic portfolio to an MP who was also the Justice critic. She rarely attended meetings of the Standing Committee on the Status of Women, and no one expected her to. I did attend, with the backbench MP I worked for, and everyone was fine with us being the only party representatives showing up.
The one issue that the party would pull out all the stops for was abortion. Conservatives could be trusted to attack it in the House every year or so; New Democrats and Liberals could be trusted to jump in to defend it. An exercise that was good for all parties involved.
Other problems of gender and sexuality didn’t get that kind of attention. That same Justice and Status of Women critic took an incredibly compromising stance on sex work, for example, advancing the paternalistic position that prostitution is inherently harmful and victimizing. The NDP caucus wanted that whole fight to go away. It scared them. After I had enabled years of parliamentary co-optation of feminism, that was the moment when I stopped believing electoral politics could save us.
I left the NDP to work for a sexual rights advocacy non-profit, an organization descended from Planned Parenthood Canada and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). It had an analysis and a plan that got policy results for women, queers, and kids, even if it operated on a charity model designed never to fundamentally threaten capital. Non-profits like that one have developed a human rights-based language for abortion, and for all sexual rights, that shapes discourse among liberals and much of the left. Abortion is healthcare. But since the US Supreme Court’s recent Dodd decision that overturns the constitutional right to abortion in America, I’ve wondered: are there limitations to that discourse?.....
..more from above.
quote:
Abortion is healthcare. It is normal. It is common. But the choice to become a parent is massively meaningful, just as forcing someone to birth or parent is hugely violating. Of course these experiences impact your health and well-being, but they’re also way fucking more. Kids are life-consuming, identity-thieving, heart-exploding, titanic changemakers (mostly in a good way) for those of us who have them. Of course, not everyone wants to have children or considers parenting a fundamental part of self-actualization. For many people, becoming a parent would be self-obliterating. If we’re going to build a mass movement to fight for reproductive justice, we have to embrace the contradictions and powerful emotional investments many people have in the questions of trying to make new life or choosing not to.
To fuck or not. A little or a lot. For money or for play. For love or for marriage. These choices, and the identities and journeys they give rise to, are essential to our experience of being human. They always have been. They are a big deal. They play an enormous role in how you become who you are and a part of your community.
For many people, that community context is a religious one. Right-wing Christianity has led the North American war on abortion, but most religious practices are not right-wing Christian ones, nor are the reproductive rites and rituals of every religion inherently anti-choice. Seeking to ban abortion is misogynist, not religious. Socialist feminist movements urgently need to recruit people of faith and other strategic allies who may not yet have a perfect feminist stance or call themselves “progressive.” We can do this in part by pointing to the truth that only a few religions are avowedly anti-abortion. We need to recruit those who don’t agree with us…yet!
Another friend said that she cannot distinguish what is strategic from what is true when it comes to abortion and sex, because she has always lived under the shadow of patriarchy. These complexities and grey zones are not the enemy of radical activism, but realities with which our movements must grapple. If there were millions of women in the streets chanting abortion is healthcare and bringing America’s elite institutions to heel, we might be winning. But there are not, because most people cannot be mobilized by a top-down institutional model that prioritizes policy and judicial arguments. To mobilize at the necessary scale, we need a different kind of organizing......
Frontera Struggles for Reproductive Justice
Rosie Jiménez died at the age of 27, in 1977, a year after the passage of the Hyde amendment, which removed Medicaid funding for abortions. This meant that people such as Rosie could no longer afford medically safe abortions, and instead, had to find alternatives. Her future as the parent of a 5-year old daughter and as a soon-to-be-qualified teacher was robbed from her. Rosie was from McAllen, TX, one of the main cities in the Rio Grande Valley on the US-Mexico border and is the first known person to die as result of the Hyde Amendment. Her story and legacy is remembered daily by the grassroots organizers of the RGV, who continue to fight for a future where reproductive justice and body autonomy is guaranteed for everyone.
REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE AND BODY AUTONOMY IN THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY
The struggle for reproductive justice in communities of color such as the RGV has been deeply interwoven with issues of racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights and the fight for body autonomy and body self-determination. In many communities, exclusion from quality, inclusive and dignified healthcare is deeply connected to issues of reproductive justice. The material fight for healthcare access matters for everyone, but for our community, the fight for healthcare, and for particular types of healthcare, is the fight for survival. The RGV, like many other places in the United States, has always had a thriving grassroots tradition which has developed through struggles for the right to one’s own body and a dignified life.
There are some important but often overlooked aspects to the RGV, and many other communities along the US-Mexico border. Many may be surprised to learn that the United States has 71 internal checkpoints 100 miles north of the US-Mexico border. The geography of the RGV allows these checkpoints to cut off the RGV from the rest of the country entirely. There are only two roads north, and both have permanent checkpoints (Falfurrias and Sarita), and all three Valley airports have CBP agents that check every passenger prior to any TSA checks. Until very recently, the Whole Woman’s Health Clinic in McAllen was the only clinic where pregnant people could receive an abortion in the Valley. Anti-abortion advocates have attempted to shut down the Whole Woman’s Health Clinic in McAllen for the past few years. The fight to keep the clinic up and running is documented in the 2022 documentary, “On the Divide.” However, in July, the clinic was forced to close, along with other Whole Woman’s Health Clinics in Texas.
quote:
THE POWER OF RESISTANCE
However, it is precisely in this time of outrageous attacks on our most basic rights that communities like the Rio Grande Valley also show the power of resistance and the ways in which we can organize hope. There are two examples that are worth highlighting. The first one was the July 2021 successful defeat of an ordinance in the city of Edinburg, TX. The ordinance attempted to create a sanctuary city for the “unborn” in Edinburg. This was an important victory, and one that was organized almost overnight.
It mattered because local activists considered this to be a test case. Edinburg city officials probably did not expect such protest, because in their view the proposed ordinance would not really have an effect on Edinburg, as there was no abortion clinic in the city. But if successful, it would have paved the way for neighboring McAllen to approve a similar ordinance. Local activists, especially, La Frontera Fund, knew that it was crucial to win this battle. And they certainly won. This was such an important victory, ahead of the changes the following 12 months would bring, including SB8 and the overturning of Roe v. Wade, perhaps the two most devastating events on our basic human rights.
Lizelle Herrera could have been forgotten in a South Texas jail. On April 2022, before Roe v. Wade had been overturned, the 26-year old was arrested and placed into Starr County Detention Center on a $500,000 bond. The county sheriff’s office stated the reasons for her detention as: “intentionally and knowingly [causing] the death of an individual by self-induced abortion.” Once again, the resourceful and quick reaction of local organizers who immediately went to protest outside the center and mobilized extensively succeeded in freeing Herrera. Local reproductive justice activists used social media to accomplish both victories and gained national attention in doing so.
For us to ensure that abortions are safe, legal, and accessible, we need to make sure that we are centering Black and Brown people, working-class folks, people with disabilities, young people, immigrants, and queer and transgender people in our work. We will be the most impacted by abortion bans, and we will also be the ones leading the fight for liberation. Struggles for body autonomy and liberation have historically been inextricably linked with struggles for racial and sexual liberation.
Communities like the RGV need to be brought to the forefront of the national reproductive justice agenda. This is down to the ideas, experiences and particular ways in which our community is impacted and able to organize in especially challenging circumstances. The fight for reproductive justice continues in the RGV and grassroots organizers are considering ways in which they can continue their work in an extremely hostile environment......
Sen. Lindsey Graham Introduces Nationwide 15-Week Abortion Ban
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina has introduced legislation to ban abortions nationwide after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Sen. Lindsey Graham: “Here’s what I think. I think we should have a law at the federal level that would say after 15 weeks, no abortion on demand, except in cases of rape, incest, to save the life of the mother. And that should be where America is at.”
Graham’s nationwide abortion ban proposal shocked many in Washington, including some Republicans who say the issue should be addressed by states, not the federal government. Under Graham’s bill, states could still impose harsher bans on abortion. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi tweeted on Tuesday, “The nationwide abortion ban proposal put forth today is the latest, clearest signal of extreme MAGA Republicans intent to criminalize women’s health freedom in all 50 states and arrest doctors for providing basic care.”
Spectre Journal recently hosted an event for donors about global lessons for the struggle for abortion rights and reproductive justice after the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. The panel included Camila Valle, Sherry Wolf, Emily Janakiram, and Holly Lewis. This is an edited transcript of their speeches and wrap ups after the discussion.
The Fight for Abortion and Reproductive Justice after Roe
quote:
Camila Valle:
First, I want to argue that the Argentinian abortion movement’s building of its own infrastructures was critical for its victory. I think there’s a tendency on the left in the US, at least one that I have felt, especially when it comes to the issue of abortion, to counterpose the building of independent infrastructures, which often provide direct material and affective support, such as helping people get abortions, and the idea that we should demand things from the state (i.e., our right to abortion codified into law). The experience of Argentina, as well as that of other countries such as Mexico, actually shows that you can’t do one without the other.
In Argentina, the National Campaign for the Right to Legal, Safe, and Free Abortion was extremely multifaceted: there was of course the legislative aspect that folks may be most familiar with—they presented their bill to the government for debate and voting many many times over the course of years, until it was finally passed and became law—but there was also so much more, and I don’t think we would have the seen that victory without these other components. To name some examples, there were networks that distributed abortion pills, that accompanied people through their abortions, there were networks that taught medical professionals how to perform abortions since it wasn’t part of their formal training, there were networks of teachers who developed comprehensive sex education curricula, artists and journalists and photographers who debuted public exhibitions about abortion, there were mass tablings, marches, occupying workplaces, bringing the issue to the unions, going out into the streets, and whole systems in place for mass meetings, assemblies, etc., to discuss the campaign, demands, and have political debates.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore said about abolition: “it requires that we change one thing: everything.” And I think that’s a very useful sentiment and one that the Argentinian movement really lived up to in its own way. Every single place, every single platform, every single person became a tool to raise public awareness around the issue, to raise the organizational level of our side, and to strengthen the fight.
Abortion is so stigmatized in society, it is a source of so much shame and guilt, it is not something we are often taught about, it is kept from us, and we have to take seriously that part of our role is to make everything about abortion and abortion about everything.
To win a demand like the legalization of abortion, on such a scale, the state has to feel that it is in its own interest to concede our demands—that what would happen if they didn’t would be much worse. And part of that is showing that we don’t need them and, actually, if they want to remain relevant, if they want to have any control over the situation, they need to give us what we want.
I think this is fundamentally tied to a certain understanding of how people radicalize, particularly around this issue. People join the movement through personal experiences and collective struggle, people change their minds through collective struggle. People’s horizons about what is possible are raised. The idea that somehow we will be able to do all that without talking about the specificities of abortion and, frankly, without engaging with and helping people seeking abortions—which is an argument I have heard—I think is a failing strategy. It’s not the only thing we should do, of course, but it should be an important part of what we do.....
..more.
quote:
Sherry Wolf:
I’m really glad that we started on such a positive note from Cami about how activists in Argentina led a struggle from dictatorship to democracy and then a massive victory for reproductive justice. She brought together the experience in a real way, showing how mutual aid was politicized and political organizing was tied to aid.
For my remarks, I was asked to talk about some of the lessons of the eighties and nineties. I want to forefront three key points to hammer home about that period of the abortion wars. One, I think that there was never a heyday of a united reproductive justice movement.
It has always been a struggle riven with divisions and debates among left and moderate and right wings that have had to battle it out occasionally uniting in explosive actions, but more often dividing over issues of race and class and strategy.
Second, when the left has argued and organized for a strategy and tactics of agitation and direct action and confrontation with anti-choice bigots and people who attack our bodily autonomy, it created a bridge for new activists to join our side, we made gains and marginalized the right.
And lastly, our movement is in an abusive relationship with the Democratic Party, whose elected leaders, including many who identify as progressives have really been selling out the left, women, trans people, and gender nonconforming people for decades. And I believe like all abusive relationships, it must end.....
..the whole transcript is a excellent read.
..as has been pointed out many times as related to the abortion issue.
Thousands of Students Walk Out in Virginia to Oppose Youngkin’s Anti-Trans Policies
In Virginia, thousands of students walked out of middle and high schools Tuesday to protest Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin’s plan to roll back the rights of trans students. Walkouts were reported in over 100 schools, with many students chanting “Trans rights are human rights” and ”DOE, let us be.” Under Governor Youngkin’s plan, schools would be required to categorize students based on their assigned sex at birth and bar students from changing their name or pronouns at school without a court order. Walkout participants included 17-year-old Casey Calabia, a nonbinary senior in high school who criticized Governor Youngkin’s policies.
Casey Calabia: “I would tell him he is not protecting anyone. He’s not protecting parents’ rights. He’s not protecting trans students. All his talk of, 'Oh, these big progressives in Fairfax,' are progressives that are standing up for kids like me. I am scared of this man. My friends are scared of this man. How can he stand there and say that he loves this country and this state if he wants to hurt us?”
India Expands Abortion Access to Single Women and Survivors of Marital Rape
India’s Supreme Court has ruled that all women can access abortion care up to 24 weeks of pregnancy, regardless of marital status. Thursday’s ruling ends a disparity in the availability of abortions to single versus married women. The court also ruled for the first time in its history that marital rape should be included in the definition of rape if a woman wants to abort her fetus. However, India remains one of 36 countries where marital rape is not a crime. Meanwhile, LGBTQ groups say the court’s ruling leaves out transgender, nonbinary and gender-diverse persons who deserve reproductive care and protection from sexual assault.
Alito Pushes Back After Justice Kagan Warns Supreme Court’s Legitimacy Has Suffered
A new poll finds public trust in the U.S. Supreme Court at a historic low. Less than half of U.S. adults polled by Gallup report they have “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of trust in the Supreme Court. That’s a 20-percentage-point drop from two years ago. This comes amid fractures between the Supreme Court’s conservative majority and liberal justices over whether the court’s legitimacy has been damaged by recent rulings overturning decades of precedent. Justice Elena Kagan has repeatedly spoken out over the issue during the court’s summer recess. Here she is speaking at Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law on September 14.
Justice Elena Kagan: “When we’re talking about legitimacy of the court, it prevents people from thinking that it’s all about politics. I mean, if a new judge comes in, if there’s new members of a court, and all of a sudden everything is up for grabs, all of a sudden very fundamental principles of law are being overthrown, are being, you know, replaced, then people have a right to say, like, you know, ’What’s going on there? That doesn’t seem very law-like.’”
Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the Dobbs decision in June allowing states to once again ban abortions, told The Wall Street Journal this week, “[S]aying or implying that the court is becoming an illegitimate institution or questioning our integrity crosses an important line.” Chief Justice John Roberts has also criticized Justice Kagan’s remarks.
How Amazon, Google and Facebook Helped Fund the Campaign To Overturn Roe
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/01/roe-amazon-google-facebook-independe...
"Despite the public perception of Silicon Valley's alignment with progressive values and liberal causes, tech companies, particularly those fearing state regulation, have long funneled money to right-wing groups..."
Maybe they are not theocrats but they certainly are libertarians. Probably think that abortions are okay as long as they are not funded through taxes.
Or more likely, how can we play both sides for the benefit of our bottom line?
University of Idaho Warns Employees Against Discussing Abortion and Contraception
The University of Idaho has warned its employees not to discuss contraception with students or to provide reproductive health counseling — at the risk of being fired and charged with a felony. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in June that overturned federal abortion rights under Roe v. Wade, Idaho has seen nearly all abortions outlawed under a so-called trigger law passed in 2019. Last week, the university’s general counsel wrote in an email to faculty and staff that officials will also enforce a law dating back to 1867 — when Idaho was a territory — making it a crime to advertise abortion services and birth control. Civil liberties groups have condemned the guidance as a violation of free speech on campus. Adam Steinbaugh is an attorney with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Adam Steinbaugh: “The First Amendment protects the rights of university faculty at public universities and colleges to discuss matters in class that are relevant to the class. The First Amendment protects that. And if you were telling them that if they are seen to promote abortion in their class or academic work, they could wind up in handcuffs, that’s a First Amendment problem.”
Sheesh that's depressing. It's hard to take the US' outrage at the treatment of women in Afghanistan and Iran - such hypocrites. (And lets not forget the silence on Saudi Arabia's treatment of women.)
The alt-right anti-trans crusades
Gender essentialism, social reproduction, and the tasks of the Left
2020 marked an enormous shift in the movement for trans liberation, as the chant “Black Trans Lives Matter” became a feature of the multi-racial, multi-gender rebellions that swept the United States that summer. The popularization of the chant not only expressed the emancipatory desires of the most marginalized section of the trans community but also signaled the emergence of trans liberation politics within the broader Left. And yet, much like the politics of Black liberation, the growth of trans liberation politics––the passing of what Time Magazine termed the “transgender tipping point”––has also coincided with a backlash of political reaction.
Why are we sliding backward now? In this article, I first provide a brief survey of that political reaction—both legislative and cultural––and then make an argument for what is animating that reaction. Finally, I suggest ways that the Left might seriously engage the politics of trans liberation.
2022 has been a landmark year for anti-trans legislation. Across the country, 238 anti-LGBTQ bills were introduced, about half of which specifically target transgender people. To put this regressive trend into perspective, 2017 saw the introduction of just 41 anti-LGBTQ bills. The 2022 wave of reactionary legislation primarily targets trans youth, but as advocates have warned, this has proved to be just the beginning. To situate us in the present political context, what follows is a brief sample of the recent anti-trans legislation.
In February, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued an executive order banning youth access to gender-affirming care. Strikingly, Abbott did so by reinterpreting an existing state statute to designate gender-affirming healthcare as child abuse. He then instructed the Department of Family and Protective Services to begin investigating the parents of transgender children. This year, Texas also passed a law preventing trans athletes from participating in scholastic sports.
quote:
Biological essentialism and the alt-right
The alt-right’s antifeminism undergirds its preoccupation with transgender politics.This preoccupation evinces a violent reactionary logic that casts trans people as degenerate threats to the natural order. Looking at the cultural and ideological production of the alt-right underscores this point, and although examining reactionary words and thought is troubling and potentially triggering, considering the rhetoric the alt-right uses illustrates its fluid migration into the political mainstream. What follows are two examples of cultural artifacts that underscore this point.
quote:
Neoliberalism and the family
Writing about the Anti-Gender movement in Europe, a campaign similar in composition to the U.S. alt-right, Graff and Korolczuk argue that the current moment is one of political realignment. While the political Left identifies the source of familial precarity as an intentional set of socioeconomic policies, the Right identifies the source as a lapse in values (p. 167). As conspiratorial as it may seem, there is a kind of logic to these claims. According to Graff and Korolczuk, as the deregulation of capitalism displaced workers and eliminated many of the social provisions of the Keynesian era, transnational corporations flourished. Because neoliberalism insists on the open flow of capital, Western corporations experience nearly unlimited mobility. As a result, individual family units weather the devastating effects of regressive economic restructuring; simultaneously, a new set of values are projected through Western enterprise.
In this sense, the multicultural public relations of Amazon and Google present themselves as both an ideological and material threat. Not only has the nature and wages of work changed, but that change has also coincided with a corporate identity politics which can be interpreted as undermining the family and traditional sex roles. Neoliberalism is defined as both a set of market policies and a cultural project that disrupts social patterns. Traditional gender roles then become the political right’s antidote to the alienation and individualism of neoliberalism. Graff and Korolczuk emphasize that the anti-gender movement is not a simple backlash to the relative advances achieved by LGBTQ people and cisgender women; it is also bound up in rejection to the neoliberal order wherein “western liberal elites are equated with global economic elites” (p. 164).
Capitalism in general and neoliberalism in particular rely on the privatized family to reproduce its workforce—what Marxist-feminists define as social reproduction. Tithi Bhattacharya defines social reproduction as the labor necessary for ensuring the maintenance of the workforce. This labor includes the feeding, clothing, and educating of the working population, the physical and psychological care of children and the elderly, and the biological reproduction of future workers (Bhattacharya, 2017). And, although Bhattacharya notes that this socially reproductive labor is increasingly fulfilled by both or all genders, she acknowledges that it is most often supplied by women. Bhattacharya insists that employers have a substantial interest in how social reproduction is carried out.
Generally, the ruling class opposes the kind of Keynesian interventions that would allow for a socialized provisioning of social reproduction; nevertheless, it has a keen interest in ensuring that families produce the kinds of workers who have the correct aptitudes and attitudes for employment. Further, a weakened welfare state that individualizes the provisioning of social reproduction results in more pliant workers. As a result of domestic precarity, both men and women become more “vulnerable in the workplace and [thus] less able to resist.”......
..more from above.
quote:
What can the Left do?
First, it is essential to understand that the attacks on transgender and gender nonconforming people are part of the ruling-class offensive against social provisioning. Trans rights are not a fringe issue or a cultural battle, and the Left must take them seriously. The right understands this and believes that any welfare intervention must go to the “right” kinds of families—white middle-class families, who comprise the bulk of the Right’s base.
Second, because the attack on trans people centers on the categorizing, ordering, and regimenting of bodies, it cannot be decoupled from the return to carceral law-and-order politics, which has historically been used as a tool to categorize and discipline the bodies of Black, Brown, and queer people.
Finally, the Left must go beyond reactive demands. Queer liberation is not just about rolling back the most recent legislative attacks, but also about progressive tax reform, state-funded healthcare, state-funded childcare, and elder care. All these material preconditions are required for the bodily sovereignty of all working people, trans-bodied and cis-bodied people alike. Importantly, the Left must do this in a non-reductive way that acknowledges and affirms the unique exploitative conditions that trans people face. Equally important, settling for a politics of representation that situates trans identities in the context of corporate Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion campaigns not only fails to meet the material needs of trans people, but also provides further credibility to the alt-claim that trans and queer liberation are the conjuring of a wealthy elite.
Kentucky constitutional amendment on abortion fails
Constitutional Amendment 2 failed Tuesday night, allowing abortion to remain a constitutional right in Kentucky.
ABC News projected the amendment failed at around midnight, with the ACLU of Kentucky declaring victory. Around 53% of Kentuckians had voted against the amendment with 91% of precincts reporting.
"The majority of Kentuckians made one thing clear: abortion is our right and politicians have no place in our private medical decisions," ACLU of Kentucky tweeted.
Abortion was outlawed in Kentucky under the state's trigger law after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June. In that legislation, the only exception was when the health of the mother is threatened.....
What in the world happened to the Supreme Court
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/what-in-the-world-happened-to-the...
As US Backslides, French Celebrate Historic Abortion Protections
As U.S. President Joe Biden garnered fresh condemnation from rights advocates for his latest comments on abortion care on Monday, the Place du Trocadero in Paris was crowded with people celebrating an overwhelming vote by French lawmakers in favor of enshrining abortion rights in their country's constitution.
The French Parliament voted 780-72 to add an amendment to the constitution stating that there is a "guaranteed freedom" to obtain abortion care in France.
"The law determines the conditions by which is exercised the freedom of women to have recourse to an abortion, which is guaranteed," the amendment reads.
Demonstrating that the fight to protect abortion rights "has no borders," several legislators wore green scarves to the vote, symbolizing solidarity with the "Green Wave" that has seen advocates successfully push for reproductive freedom in Latin American countries.
quote:
The Eiffel Tower was emblazoned with the words, "My body, my choice" as supporters rallied in Paris to mark the historic vote—but across the Atlantic Ocean, an interview with Biden in The New Yorker included a comment in which the president, who has repeatedly said he has personal objections to abortion care but believes Roe should have been upheld, denigrated the idea embraced by the French lawmakers.
"I've never been supportive of, you know, 'It's my body, I can do what I want with it," Biden told the magazine, sparking renewed anger among reproductive justice advocates.....
