The Koch brothers, billionaire oil tycoons, bribe legislators around the country, especially in Louisiana, to vote against equal pay, birth control, abortion, family benefits and women’s health care, and raising the minimum wage (the majority of minimum wage workers are women). The bottom line of this is the profits extracted from the underpaid labor of women workers. While Trump boasts of raping women, these so-called moral Christians cheer him on as it confirms their view of male supremacy. It has nothing to do with religion or morality. It is all about using every means to curtail our rights and make us poorer so it is harder to fight them. Birth control, abortion and programs to help raise children made it possible for women to control our lives and take part in political life. They seek to declare that we are servants and sexual receptacles because men should have rights over us.
Religion is a personal matter, and these are personal choices every woman has the right to make without male representatives fronting for Wall Street, criminalizing our decisions. The so-called right to life movement is a right-wing crusade controlled and funded for the benefit of rich men. They prey on women.
The Louisiana House passed by a vote of 90 to 3 a bill that prohibits Planned Parenthood from obtaining an abortion license. Planned Parenthood clinics are non-profits run by people who really care about women. Their clinics are often our only option for abortion, medical screenings and contraception.
Twenty Ohio Republicans have co-sponsored a bill to ban all abortions—punishable by death for women and doctors. Ohio’s abortion ban has no exceptions for rape or incest, or even to save a woman’s life, beginning at the moment of conception. The Kentucky legislature has a bill with a death penalty for abortion, and a candidate for lt. governor in Idaho said the death penalty would be an effective “deterrent” for abortion.
Women are fighting back across the country. Our labor is exploited for their profits. We can show up to work now, but they should remember we can strike for our rights: on March 8th, International Working Women’s Day, the women of Spain shut down the entire country.