From the Editors, People’s Tribune
Women, men and huge numbers of youth are in the streets across the country in uncompromising fight for women’s rights and for government to act in the people’s interests. After centuries of oppression and fighting for equal rights, women are letting the powerful know: “We won’t go back.”
Women can’t be equal if they don’t have human rights.
As the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, said, “The decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life . . [It] is a decision she must make for herself. When government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a fully adult human responsible for her own choices.”
With her words, Ginsburg summed up one monumental thing at stake today – whether women are fully adult human beings with human rights.
In one horrible expression of this truth, a woman wrote, “It has been 16 years, but I can still hear myself begging my mother, my doctor, not to make me do this, please don’t make me do this. I was raped when I was 17 years old. I was forced to give birth to a baby when I was 18 years old. My baby died when I was 19 years old.”
The massive assault on women threatens everyone’s rights. And, as in the fight for voting rights, people of color and particularly Black Americans, are assaulted first. The overturning of Roe also means that other rights could be on the chopping block next, such as LGBTQ rights to have intimate relationships, the right to contraception, and the right to interracial marriage. Where will it end?
The assault is not only by conservatives. America’s corporations have been huge financial contributors to anti-abortion laws and to putting justices in place who would over-turn Roe v. Wade. The list includes Google, Coca-Cola, Amazon, AT&T, Citi, CVS and Walmart. Fearful of a powerful women’s movement, they can’t allow women’s ‘rights’ and pro-worker legislation to stand in the way of their profits, and their power.
We the people demand a democracy that serves the people, not the corporations, a society where everyone has rights. And, we won’t accept anything less.
One immediate demand from the movement is that government must pass the Women’s Health Protection Act of 2022, which would make abortion legal nationally. Biden and the corporate Democrats must not squander this opportunity to act.
