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Gov’t wages war on young women and children

Published May 4, 2005 5:17 PM

Right-wing forces in the United States continue their ferocious assault on women’s reproductive rights.

The House of Representatives passed a bill on April 27 that would make it a federal crime for any adult to accompany a young girl across state lines to seek an abortion without her parents’ consent. The Senate will consider a similar bill later this year.

This law follows on the heels of passage of the “Born-Alive Infants Pro tection Act,” signed into law by President George W. Bush in August 2004. The law requires “resuscitation” of aborted fetuses showing certain physical signs, no matter how early the abortion. The bill is another effort by the National Right-to-Life Committee to legally re-name the fetus as a “person” as a way to limit abortions. (Catholic Herald)

Parental notification laws have also been part of the reactionary campaign. The result has been serious limitation on access to abortion for the many girls who are victims of incest and rape within their families, or who fear rejection and punishment by their parents for acts of sexual autonomy.

Because of the decades-long attack by reactionary forces, some states, like Ala ska, Hawaii, Idaho, Kentucky, Nebra ska, Utah and Wyoming, no longer have abortion clinics. Other states, like Louisiana, have only a few clinics to serve a huge geographical area.

This most recent bill that tightens parental notification would make a felon out of an 18-year-old woman from Idaho who accompanied a frightened 17-year-old under-age friend forced to travel to Colorado, Montana or Washington State to find a clinic. In fact, any adult person over 18 would be a potential felon if they drove, rode on a bus or train, flew or walked with that young woman so she could bypass punitive parents and have a friend with her as she got her abortion.

Supporters of the right-wing legislation characterize it as “pro-family.” These forces rejected an amendment of the bill that would allow grandparents or clergy members to accompany young women. (New York Times, April 28)

A state agency in Florida showed the hypocrisy of the parental consent position on April 30 when it rejected the request of a 13-year-old girl for an abortion. This decision directly contradicted a Florida state law that specifically does not require a minor to obtain parental consent for an abortion.

The young woman, who is three months pregnant and a ward of the state, was told by the Department of Children and Families that she was “too young to choose.” The American Civil Liberties Union is mounting a campaign against the ruling. (BBC)

The governor of Florida is President Bush’s brother, Jeb Bush.

Racist war on children

The rising right-wing campaign against young women showed its racist face in another brutal attack in Florida in late April.

Schoolteachers called police on a 5-year-old African American girl who became upset and agitated in her math class. A video camera that was turned on in the room at the time captured three cops wrestling the child and handcuffing her while she cried out for her mother. (BBC)

In New York City, racist attacks against young girls and boys have taken the form of testing new drugs on HIV-positive children who are in group homes, many run by the Catholic Church under the aegis of the city’s Administration for Children’s Services (ACS). Ninety-nine percent of these 23,000 children are African American or Latin@. (BBC)

A 2004 BBC program, “Guinea Pig Kids,” exposed the abuse. The ACS enrolled the children, without their relatives’ or guardians’ consent, into HIV treatments that were experimental and sickeningly toxic. One skilled pediatric nurse, Jacklyn Hoerger, who saw the horrifying effects of the drug trials, took the children in her care off the medication. For this action she was accused in court of being a “child abuser.”

A community group that includes Millions for Reparations, the December 12th Movement, the Circulo Bolivariano and the Harlem Tenants Council has organized under the slogan of “No More Tuskegee Experiments” to fight the government’s abuse of children. For more information, contact: [email protected].

The first strike of this current war on women and children of color was the passage of the infamous Hyde Amendment in 1976, which banned federal funding of abortions through Medicaid. The war’s first victim was Rosie Jimenez. A Chicana resident of Texas, a college student, factory worker and mother, Jimenez died in early 1977 of a back-alley abortion.

The current reactionary attack on women is an extension of that racist, sexist war on poor women—and demands a fighting response.

The attacks challenge the women’s movement to return to the grassroots organizing done by groups like the “Janes” of Chicago, who for many years before the passage of Roe v. Wade ran an underground abortion provider service for women of all nationalities who needed their care.

These attacks that focus on children of color, especially young women, challenge the larger women’s movement to a special effort to incorporate the needs of children, particularly children of oppressed nationalities, into its current fight for reproductive rights.