Hello and welcome!

Hi, my name is Loren.  Welcome to my blog (under construction.  Well, I wasn't sure where to start, but this seems like a meaty story:

As NARAL alerted me, Congress is voting to block the people of D.C., through their elected representatives, from using their own tax revenues to provide abortion services for low-income women.    Keep in mind that this is a Congress that has one of the world's best corporate health care plans for its own members, and a Congress in which the District of Columbia has not a single voting representative, even though its population is higher than some states.

Now, the District also has one of the highest Black populations in the country.  So, to sum up, what we have here is a largely male, white-dominated government representing rich women who can afford access to safe, legal abortion, denying the right of a lagely Black community to afford that same access to its members.  The white lawmakers live side by side with the Black subjects but don't even pretend to give them a voice in the  government.

I can't help being reminded of the infamous abortion policies of white-ruled S. Africa, where thousands of Black women died every year because they lacked access to safe, legal abortion, while affluent whites could afford to get abortions in other countries, albeit inconveniently.

This is one of many examples of governments chipping away at abortion rights recently, and a lot of the fault lies with the failures of liberal feminists to approach abortion as an issue of race and class.  The focus on securing legal access to abortion for white, middle-class women has led many "feminists" to connect abortion rights with reactionary population-control policies.  from the time of Margaret Sanger up through the second-wave feminist period, many abortion rights organizations tacitly or openly championed the forcible sterilization of Blacks, Puerto Ricans, and other marginalized women. This genocidal position naturally alienated anti-racists from the abortion rights struggle, and philosophically represented a concession that a woman's right to control her body--to choose to have OR not to have children--is trumped by alleged social interests in controlling her.

It is only when the right to abortion is championed based on a woman's fundamental right to make her own informed medical decisions--a right that is also under attack with prosecutions of medical marijuana patients and other examples of the war on drug users, which itself has resulted in a disparate devastation's being visited on the Black community--that alliances capable of putting powerful social forces behind safe, legal abortion become possible. Such a movement would situate this struggle in the context of the unions' fight for a national, free, government-run health care program.