Celebrate the 38th Anniversary of Roe vs Wade; Fight the Right,anti-abortion Walk For Life

The 7th Annual Walk for Life West Coast is scheduled for Saturday, January 22 at the Embarcadero. Walk For Life busses thousands and thousands (up towards 10,000 some years) of West Coast church-based activists into San Francisco to organize for their goal of outlawing abortion - which they consider murder - in the United States.

Factions of this coalition include “Feminists for Life“, for which taking away the right for reproductive choice is the key element of empowering women and removing stumbling blocks to “real feminism”; “I Regret My Abortion” in which individual women talk about long-term upsets over the choice to have an abortion, in a manner suggesting that every women who chooses an abortion will have to live in deep regret and maybe profound psychological trauma; and “Blackgenocide.org”, the brainchild of African American minister Clenard Childrish, which describes abortion as an insidious plot to exterminate the black race in the U.S. One young, articulate Christian woman on their stage last year purported to have infiltrated a Planned Parenthood clinic and describes it in distorted terms as if a butcher shop or factory farm.

The above-referenced information and tactics would be laughable if not so completely effective. The sellout of abortion rights by the Obama Administration in its corporate health care “reform” plan is well publicized. President Obama had reportedly campaigned to overturn the Hyde Amendment, which eliminated abortion for low income and disabled Medicaid and Medicare recipients. The federal health reform basically extended this ban to private insurance plans. Subsequently, he signed an order eliminating abortion from the public insurance exchanges contained in the plan. Somer and Emily reported that the recent legislation which overturned the military “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” law had originally contained a provision to overturn the ban on abortion on military bases, but this provision was eliminated in order to get the Republican support the bill needed for passage.

A real look at the overall agenda for these organizations shows the horrific nature of their political agenda and why they get such positive bias from the establishment including in the liberal Bay Area, while putting the lie to their claim of being “pro-life“. Beside anti-choice, they have been consistently pro-war, anti-immigrant rights, anti-LGBT rights, anti-Single Payer Universal Health Care, and anti-feminism.

Abortion is available in about 14% of Counties across the country and I believe California has a similar ratio. I read recently that 370 anti-abortion bills were introduced at state levels in the past year. A breakdown of state anti-abortion legislation actually passed during 2010 sorts into about 40 different categories of legislation.

Right now, U.S. Representative Mike Pence from Indiana is pushing a bill that will ban the right to federal funding for women’s reproductive services organizations which provide abortion along with other services. The bill is a direct attack on Planned Parenthood. Anyone who works in medical services organizations knows these organizations cannot exist without government funding and the legislation will likely force organizations to choose between eliminating abortion or going out of business. Kansas has legislation pending that will eliminate abortion beyond 20 weeks into a pregnancy, on the assumption that a fetus feels pain at that stage. Similar legislation is pending in at least 3 other states. Parental notification bills for young adults continue to be introduced and passed.

BACORR has its work cut out, as mainstream providers like Planned Parenthood and many pro-choice individuals and politicians choose not to get out in the streets and confront the Right and their issues in this manner. For this year's event, people are encouraged that much of the action have a very positive and uplifting tone, a celebration of what people fought for and we still have in Roe vs. Wade. BACORR will operate within the legalities of licenced demonstrations, while other types of direct action are deemed acceptable for those organizations which want to do so. Come out and bring others, 11AM at the Embarcadero, Saturday October 22, at Harry Bridges Plaza!!!