The Gender, Sexuality, and Race Room
The Attack on Planned Parenthood
Make no mistake: Yesterday's attack on Planned Parenthood in Colorado Springs, Colorado, which saw three murdered and another nine wounded (because opposing abortion is all about the sanctity of life) not only proves that the "war on women" rhetoric feminists and other progressives have been using in recent years is more than just hyperbole or metaphoric, but also marks a serious escalation of that war. Since the (fake) Planned Parenthood videos created by anti-abortion activists surfaced this last summer, the movement to stop women as a group from exercising bodily autonomy has turned toward violence. This is actually only the latest physical attack on abortion providers in this country over the last several months, though it is certainly the bloodiest of them, I believe in American history. It should not be taken lightly. It will doubtless inspire more and worse.
This attack comes amid a climate of rapidly escalating movement against reproductive rights in general, and especially against the right of a woman to terminate a pregnancy. One expression of that escalation comes in September's threat, and vote, on the part of most Congressional Republicans to shut down the federal government over funding for Planned Parenthood, which I don't believe has ever happened before. For my memory, that was an unprecedented development, though fortunately it wasn't allowed to go as far as it could have. Another expression of the escalation of which I'm speaking can be found in that, amid this context, the sympathetic, Republican-controlled U.S. Supreme Court has chosen to take up the question of abortion rights and issue a major ruling in that connection this coming spring in what very really could be the reversal of Roe V. Wade! Context includes a record number of new legal restrictions on abortion access having been passed at the state level almost every year for the last four years running, to the point that many states now have only one abortion provider remaining within their borders, and various state governments have attempted to shutter those as well, stopped only by legal injunctions citing Roe V. Wade, which, again, may very well be overturned next spring, as in within about seven months from now.
For broader social context on gender politics in America, the World Economic Forum's recently released 2015 report on the global gender gap finds that North America is slipping in its supposed efforts to achieve gender parity in treatment. The report finds that the United States, for example, has fallen eight ranks in the last year to 28th place, with American women losing ground not only subjectively (i.e. relative to other countries), but also objectively (i.e. relative to American men) in most of the areas they measure degrees of parity: education, health care, and, above all, the area already in need of by far the most improvement, political representation (e.g. only 26% of cabinet-level positions in this country were held by women in 2015, down from 32% before last year's Republican wave). The United States also fell two ranks in female workforce participation, with barely 46% of our workforce today being female, as compared with a slight majority back in 2009, with more women nowadays opting out of their careers to become full-time wives and mothers as their husbands return to work. It also comes amid a rising tide of domestic violence against women, with the rate of sexual assaults in particular increasing in many parts of the country, and especially on college campuses (where now half of all women who report being sexually active also report being sexually attacked and where the second most common reason for opting out of campus sex culture provided by female students is fear of coercion), and, probably related to that last point, the general pornification of culture (especially youth culture) over the last decade since the advent of social media, including of large swaths of the feminist movement, quite frankly (I'm talking about you, $#@!-walkers).
Put all of that together for a minute and see if you don't get a bigger picture of what's going on in America. I find it hard not to connect all these things and call it an escalating war against women. When we see, for example, a simultaneous rise in sexual assaults and of violent attacks on abortion providers, I think you get a portrait of a society that's possessed of a decreasing amount of respect for even the basic bodily autonomy of women. And I find it deeply troubling. I will be participating in a demonstration today to bring more public attention to the seriousness and intolerability of yesterday's events, as to hopefully play a part in dissuading any copycats out there.
I believe that the appropriate response to yesterday's major escalation in the American war on women is nothing less than a federal investigation of the anti-abortion movement in this country so that we can learn exactly who it is leading this direction towards violence. This directionality is truly extreme and dangerous and must stop now!
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Originally Posted by IMPress Polly
