A Black Maoist Analysis of the “Pro-Life” Movement
By: Black Like Mao
Tags: Revolution, Abortion, Maoism, Communism

The legislature of the State of Alabama yesterday passed one of the most draconian measures against free and legal abortion to date. According to this law, doctors who perform abortions at any stage of a woman’s pregnancy can be punished with up to 99 years in prison. As Marxist-Leninist-Maoists, we have to investigate and base our analyses of such things in the principles of historical materialism and, as Lenin said, look for the interests of one class or another in all things, lest we be unable to move forward and subordinate ourselves to emotionalism and movementism. Maoists believe that abortion should be free and available on demand to all who desire it and the State has no right to dictate or intervene in these medical decisions from a moral position. To say otherwise is to take a patriarchal and oppressive position and willfully impede the liberation of women.

America is a fascist country vis a vis the masses of colonized and oppressed nationality people. We have never had the freedom to determine our own destiny in this place, this place was not set up for our benefit, and our liberation can only come about with the destruction, root and branch, of this dreadful place and the construction of socialism on its ashes. The driving force, the vanguard, of this task to destroy the United States, is the New Afrikan proletariat and semi-proletariat. Without this basic knowledge and class standpoint it will be impossible for a party to develop a truly correct line through practice and implement it. It will be forever tossed and turned and driven backwards by revisionism, American chauvinism, and semi-fascism aka social democracy. Applying this analysis to the historical experience of the New Afrikan people with the struggle around birth control and other things of this nature gives us a few basic points:

The birth control and women’s health movement has been, historically, extremely racist and detrimental to the health and well being of Afrikan women. The science of gynecology was majorly developed by an individual named J. Marion Sims, who experimented on Afrikan enslaved women to develop his surgical procedures. “Sims practiced the surgical techniques that made him famous on enslaved women: Lucy, Anarcha, Betsey, and the unknown others. He performed 30 surgeries on Anarcha alone, all without anesthesia, as it was not yet widespread. He also invented the modern speculum, and the Sims’s position for vaginal exams, both of which he first used on these women.” The procedures practiced and developed upon these “human guinea pigs” led to the improvement of the health of wealthy colonizer women, meanwhile Black women continued to be subject to the whims and untender mercies of colonizer men all across this country. The pioneers of the birth control movement in the United States were eugenicists. There was a heavy focus among bourgeois and petit-bourgeois elements of both the colonizer and colonized communities to limit births of children to working class and lumpenproletarian elements with the intention to “better the stock”. This practice of attempting to “wipe out” the “degenerate stock” came to its logical conclusion in Nazi Germany with such things as Aktion T-4 which mandated mandatory euthanasia for those deemed mentally deficient. This practice got its start in the United States and Nazi eugenicists were in constant contact with their counterparts in the United States. Birth control was mandatory for colonized women in the South, Southwest, and Puerto Rico in the post-slavery era. So many black women were given involuntary hysterectomies in the South that they began to be given the euphemism “Mississippi appendectomies”. The noted voting rights activist and tenant farmer organizer Fannie Lou Hamer was just one of the victims of this abominable practice. In Puerto Rico, women who entered American run hospitals to deliver their children came out with their tubes tied. This was with the intention to “control” the population which had been determined by the American fascists to be surplus.

The Black Panther Party took the line that abortion clinics in Black communities were perpetrators of genocide, along with drug trafficking. This was, of course, a rightist line, but it came from a relatively correct analysis that Black people in the United States were seen as being a surplus population and were marked for genocide. Many conspiracy theories were and still are afoot on street corners, beauty salons, and barber shops, the most prominent being the “King Alfred Plan” immortalized in sung poetry by Gil-Scott Heron in 1972 which held that the CIA was planning to place Black people in concentration camps in the event of a mass series of riots or even a New Afrikan revolution. So, the line that abortion was a plot to further the genocidal aspirations of the United States government vis a vis New Afrikan people was, to many of the New Afrikan masses, not too far fetched and still isn’t. This is a pretty accurate summation of the position of the most revolutionary wing of the New Afrikan masses at this time.

In 1970, a new abortion law passed in New York to allowed women to receive abortions “up to 2–4 months pregnant.” The Black Panthers released an article claiming that the law was a victory for “the oppressive ruling class who will use this law to kill off Black and other oppressed people before they are born.” The Panthers thought that abortion would be used against them to “kill” their potential supporters. While feminist movements were fighting to ensure abortion access, the Black Panthers were fighting against it. This is based on the way the Panthers analyze abortion differently from popular, mostly white and middle class, feminist groups. While many others believe that abortion will protect women from the difficulties and dangers of an unwanted pregnancy, the Panthers saw it as an attempt at eliminating black people, or “Black genocide.” The Panthers fear that it won’t take long for “voluntary abortion to turn into involuntary abortion into compulsory sterilization.” Both involuntary abortion and compulsory sterilization have historically been forced on poor women of color. Poor women often have “little practical ability to exercise their theoretical freedom of choice” because raising a child is expensive and they may not have the resources to do it. Even if they wanted to have a child, they are forced involuntarily to have an abortion because they couldn’t afford to raise a child. Some doctors permanently sterilized women with or without their consent, “sometimes eliciting a woman’s signed consent days after surgery,” sometimes “when patients were under the influence of medication or under duress, most commonly during childbirth.” These forced sterilizations occurred most commonly to women of color. On explanation for this is that black women were seen as “welfare queens,” women who had children for the sole purpose of collecting financial assistance from the government. This led poor women of color to become “targets of physicians who believed that it was their social responsibility to prevent the reproduction of ‘unfit’ populations that they believed ‘drained’ government resources.” These doctors attempted to limit black population growth because they thought poor black women were using too many of the country’s resources.

In essence, the abortion rights movement was seen as being a petit-bourgeois colonizer feminist attack on the self-determination of Black people and a plot to strangle the New Afrikan revolution in the cradle, literally. Many within our communities still hold this line. This is unsurprising due to the fact that compulsory/involuntary sterilization was a fact of life for many colonized women within my grandmothers’ and older aunts’ lifetimes. The Tuskegee Experiment, in which the United States government let syphilis run rampant in New Afrikan men in Alabama, is another example of colonizers getting their research to improve their own health at the expense of our proletariat and semi-proletariat. These things have entered the cultural memory of our people and as a result medical science, particularly regarding birth control, is viewed with suspicion and distrust by the masses of our people. This can only be addressed by through political and health education and the development of a cadre of revolutionary people’s health workers that are from and of the people that can help provide free medical care to our people in the best socialist fashion and do this in a nonjudgmental and culturally sensitive manner. Our people do not trust colonizer doctors and colonizer medicine in general because they experimented on and harmed us, it’s that simple. As a result, many quacks like “Dr.” Sebi and the like have risen to prominence because they look like us and talk a good cultural nationalist game but are also harming our people. Medical science must serve the people and be rooted in the people, it’s that simple.

Back to the present day. The so-called pro-life movement is, essentially, a white supremacist, eugenicist movement. They are fully aware of the fact that this century will end with colonizers no longer being a demographic majority. This is also the root of the xenophobic sentiment regarding immigrants. The pro-life movement does not care about the children, unborn or otherwise, of Black people. On the evening of May 13, a Black woman, Pamela Shantay Turner, was murdered by police officer Juan Manuel Delacruz in Baytown, Texas, while shouting that she was pregnant. The so-called pro-lifers are nowhere in sight. When black children die from poisoned water in Flint, or from eating lead paint chips, or from police bullets, or are sent to prison before they are old enough to vote, the pro-lifers are not there. This is a racist, fascist movement that seeks to allay the demographic concerns of colonizer men about the declining colonizer birth rate, and nothing more. This movement includes open and proud Neo-Nazis and other fascists of various stripes, all of which are united in their desire to maintain colonizer numerical superiority in the face of a crumbling empire. These particular colonizers, ironically, also tend to care little about the well-being of their own poor and working class children and young adults, leading to the rebirth of Strasserism aka “class-struggle Nazism” in the person of Matt Heimbach and his now defunct Traditionalist Workers’ Party. These Strasserists are also concerned about the declining settler birth rate. The concern about whether or not women have abortions is regarding colonizer women. The colonizers would be ecstatic if another Black or Brown child was never born. Colonized children are murdered in the womb every day by this fascist-imperialist system, yet the only tears shed are our own.

Charleena Lyles, pregnant Black woman murdered by Seattle PD 6/18/2017

So, what can Maoists do with this knowledge? What is the way forward? Continue to point out and highlight of the contradictions of states that just a few decades ago forcibly sterilizing Black and Brown women and have never given a damn about motherhood. They lynched pregnant black women. They kill pregnant black mothers with impunity. They torture and imprison us from the womb to the tomb. We see no peace unless it is of our own making. Continue to fight for the destruction of this dreadful country so that not only can all women choose whether or not to have children without the meddling of the fascist state, but so that those born can live happy, fulfilling and peaceful lives.