Mask Optional, Pregnancy Mandatory: Class Warfare

Making abortion illegal is a deliberate strategy of state terrorism, specifically class warfare. 

Racism, homophobia, ableism, transphobia, and misogyny are all implicated in class warfare because black and brown, queer, disabled people and women are kept poor by social and economic structures which reward whiteness, heterosexuality, able bodiedness and maleness. (Please see: there are more CEOs in the FTSE (Financial Times Stock Exchange) 150 companies named Peter than there are women. All of these Peters are white, cis, hetero, able-bodied men).

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Caption: Tweets like this are heartrending and angering, but distract from the point. Lawmakers are keenly aware that forcing expensive births will cripple and kill the working classes. 

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Conservative terrorist ideology around banning abortion leans heavily on rhetoric around the protection of defenceless life. However, abortions are being banned, whilst assault rifles are not. This tells you most of what you need to know about what the white, majority Catholic, Republican Senate feels about the sanctity of life. 

Enforcing pregnancy and subsequent parenthood in the country with the highest maternal mortality rate in the global north, the only nation in the West not to offer paid maternity care, and the only member of the UN to have not ratified The Rights of The Child is a form of political genocide designed to target the poor, and specifically black and brown women and people with uteruses. 

Reminders that banning abortion will only ban safe abortions are true but distracting. As anyone who pays even the remotest attention to the world can tell you; if you have enough money you can do whatever you want with little to no consequences. Please see: world history. 

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Abortion is suicide prevention

Forcing people to have children that they are not psychologically able to care for, not financially able to provide for, and that they don’t want, will kill people. Mostly women. 

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Caption: Again, this story is appallingly heart breaking. And again, let’s not forget that the Senate knows that banning abortion will lead to the deaths of poor people esp. women. 

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The subjugation and by-proxy death of this mostly female population is not an accident. Women are responsible for spearheading and mobilising a huge number of social justice movements around the world. Not only this, but according to Harvard professor of civil resistance, movements led by women are more effective at achieving their aims. 

Because of this, it is a highly strategic act of warfare to target women; how many revolutions would you have time to organise if you were mothering three children and working full time? Since we know that abortion is a suicide prevention technique, we also know that the opposite is true; enforced pregnancy is a strategy to kill. 

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What You Can Do: Mother’s Day Strike 2022

Organizers in the US have already sprung into action. The Mother’s Day Strike initiative calls for a full general strike for one week commencing on America’s Mothering Sunday - the 8th of May. 

The organizers state:

“Marching and writing angry letters to the editor are little more than great exercises in catharsis, and attempting to reason with legislators who don’t see us as human beings is like shouting at a brick wall. What always works, every time, is hitting them in the bank.

Beginning On Sunday May the 8th, 2022, everyone who will suffer immensely and even die under the right-wing extremists repeal of Roe V Wade will simply…stop. Stop shopping. Don’t go to work. Don’t interact with the economy in any way. Keep all transactions to zero. Women and those who are vulnerable to unwanted or high-risk pregnancies will not be participating in or supporting a system that has proven time and time again that it does not regard us as human. 

The mission is simple: Break the economy over the course of one week by abstaining from work, shopping, entertaining; and on the home front, running a household that would fall apart without your care.” 

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What Can We Do If We Are Not in The US?

• The Mother’s Day Strike website includes a brilliant list of trusted organizations that we can donate money to.  A majority of abortions in the US are provided privately rather than by the state and so increasingly rely on private donations to keep running. Every penny helps so do give whatever you can. 
• Tweet about the Mother’s Day Strike. Instagram about it, TikTok about it, LinkedIn and Pinterest and Facebook about it. Be the angry gobshite feminist that the right are so petrified of. 
• Reach out to anyone you know in the US and ask what you can do to help them. 

Mutual aid is an astonishingly powerful force. Reciprocity, shared humanity, and community-driven care and redistribution of resources have the power to undermine structures of domination. Human connection and solidarity have won tremendous social justice victories throughout history and will continue to do so. 

Please see: all the mint stuff people did for each other during the Pandemic. Also, The Orange Revolution, Berlin Wall Protests, Extinction Rebellion, Miners Solidarity Groups, Students Climate Strike, etc do some Googling the list is long.