“Pro-life” is a lie. The United States, its right wing nationalists, its white supremacists, its anti abortion terrorists, love death most all. No money for healthcare, housing, education or debt relief but trillions for war overnight. And now Roe and the looming death sure to come in its absence.
U.S. politicians do not want us to have reproductive freedom or freedom of gender expression because our freedom threatens the systems their wealth and power depend on. The world they want, where their power and wealth are protected, dreams of lots of white babies and unpaid femme domestic labor.
So it comes as no surprise that Justice Alito and 4 other wealthy losers are moving to protect their ruling class, white supremacist, patriarchal fantasies. They think social progress has made redundant our constitutional rights to voting, marriage, desegregated schools, abortion and contraception. Yet they also believe that social progress has gone too far and betrayed the “proud” history of a country built on attempted Indigenous genocides and enslaved Black labor.
But we, the rising movement, will not let their death cults speak for us.
Roe was decided by a Supreme Court full of Republican appointees under President Nixon. The ONLY reason we ever had Roe was because there was a militant multiracial fighting feminist movement in the streets.
We will have abortions forever. I will give abortions forever. And their crusty lifetime-appointment-asses cannot stop us.
We must show solidarity with all facing criminalization, incarceration, state repression and state violence.
When they arrest abortion providers and patients, when they create border patrols to police movement across state lines, we will tear down their prison walls and build a world without borders.
When the cops use their massive budgets to violently attack our demonstrations, we will follow in the example of the Movement for Black Lives and take the streets, government buildings and cities every day until our demands are met.
We will grow this movement into a formidable force of freedom fighters.
I believe that we will win.
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Dr. Mary Bowman originally delivered this speech at the May 7th Rally For Abortion Rights in Downtown Chicago.