Dispatch #107 White Lesbian Age 71 Considers Democrats Betrayal of Women

July 4th 2023  

864 Days Since Inauguration of First Woman Vice-President

231 Days Until the 2024 Presidential Primaries Begin 

375 Days Since Supremes Ruled Women Don’t Have Human Rights

Have you wondered why the HELL Democratic Party officials are glaringly MIA in the public discourse outrage about the violations of women’s human rights!? WTF!?

In her June 29^th column in The Guardian titled “Biden has reminded us yet again that he’s a weak and lukewarm ally of abortion rights” Moir Donegan gives the answer.

At a June 27^th fundraiser Biden told a crowd of wealthy supporters that he was personally ambivalent about abortion [care] rights. “I’m a practicing Catholic. I’m not big on abortion [care],” the president said. Nevertheless, he claimed that the compromise Roe v Wade decision on abortion [care] “got it right”.

Biden’s reassertion of his own discomfort with abortion [care] came just three days after the first anniversary of the US supreme court’s Dobbs decision, which eliminated the abortion [care] right. In the year since women lost the constitutional right that the president says he is not “big on”, the bans that snapped into effect have had life-changing – life-ruining – effects for thousands.

If Biden had been required to say women’s human rights, or women’s right to control their bodies, or women’s right to reproductive health care, then perhaps he might not have been so cavalier about the lives of women.  As Donegan points out:

Women have been forced to carry for months babies that cannot live outside the womb, which they have had to watch die after agonizing moments or hours of life. Women and girls have been forced to flee their home states to get abortions after being impregnated through rape. Women have lost their organs to abortion bans, needing emergency hysterectomies to save their lives after incomplete miscarriages or cesarean scar pregnancies. Others have been drafted into exercises in morbid futility, forced to carry fetuses that lack major organs, such as heads, in a new reality that has been likened to torture. Other women have been forced to become sicker and sicker – suffering, risking their lives, and incurring permanent damage to their bodies in order to be made ill enough that abortion might become legally permissible.

Many more women have been stripped of control over their lives – denied healthcare, denied the ability to plan their families, denied the freedom to choose the course of their own lives, for the sake of retrograde, bigoted and punitive conceptions of gender and sexuality held by others. All American women, along with many trans people, have been degraded and humiliated by abortion [care] bans, relegated to a lesser class of adult citizenship, informed that they are not permitted to control their own fates.  www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/29/biden-abortion-rights-dobbs-roe-v-wade 

What could the Biden Administration have been doing? Donegan has this query covered:

Throughout the past year, members of the Biden administration, and President Biden in particular, have been largely absent from this unfolding catastrophe. They have not taken on an expansive view of executive authority in attempts to restore abortion rights; they have not pressed allies in Congress to advance pro-choice legislation; they have not been willing to challenge, even tentatively, an anti-choice federal judiciary that is wildly expanding its interpretations of its own power.

They are not even willing to do the one thing that the president has the unquestioned authority to do: use the bully pulpit to express solidarity with American women, to grieve for their lost health, futures and dignity, and to rally Americans to the increasingly popular pro-choice cause. Joe Biden has abdicated leadership on abortion, the loss of which is causing untold suffering, and which will define life prospects for a generation of women. Because he finds it distasteful. Because he’s not “big on” it.

Black women represented one of the foundational anchors for Biden’s win.  Black women secured victories in Georgia that ensured Democratic control of the Senate.  Women represented the winning majority of votes for Biden. (DO look at the data, you will be surprised www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/ ) And yet, Biden still sees women as less than fully human, subservient to their womb.  Donegan provides persuasive evidence for her conclusion that “it is not Catholicism that makes Joe Biden unwilling to issue a full-throated support of abortion [care] rights. It is sexism.” Do read her entire column.

Biden’s failure to give full-throated support to abortion [care] rights marks a bitter betrayal to the women who to his campaign.  Biden shows his fealty to America’s white heteropatriarchy by refusing to recognize women’s right to bodily autonomy.  And not surprisingly, mainstream media have avoided coverage of Vice-President Harris and her tireless work for reproductive justice, inside and outside the Administration, and especially across college campuses prior to the midterm elections. 

BTW, Biden recently showed his fealty to US imperialism by rolling out a huge red carpet for visit of India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi.  Yeah, state dinner, address to joint session of Congress, standing ovation for the ‘world’s largest democracy.’  Since his election in 2014, Modi has curtailed the free press, attacked opposition leaders, targeted Muslims and other minorities, and advocated an aggressive form of Hindu nationalism designed to demonize Muslims.  Prior to becoming Prime Minister, Modi was banned from entering the United States for several years over his role in anti-Muslim riots in 2002 that left over 1,000 dead in Gujarat province, where Modi was chief minister. www.democracynow.org/2023/6/22/india_modi_human_rights_record

Perhaps Biden’s ‘moral flexibility’ vis-à-vis women’s human rights allows him to minimize the violations of human rights in India in favor of the strategic priority to outflank China in SouthEast Asia.  

Yeah, once you acknowledge that one group of humans is lesser than your own group of humans, then the principle of human rights becomes an ephemeral and illusory value.