Alexis McGill Johnson Pisses Down the Backs of Girls and Women

and Then Tells Them "It's Raining, so Send Us Your Money"

The end of the year fundraising letter I got from Planned Parenthood’s “Action Fund” a couple of weeks ago  reminds me of an old saying:  “Don’t Piss Down My Back and Then Tell me it’s Raining.”

I might add this: “and then tell me to send you some money to pretend to make me an umbrella.”

Planned Parenthood (PP) President Alexis McGill Johnson wants us to know that “Across the country, since the Supreme Court’s decision Roe v. Wade, politicians have taken away the rights of millions of people, who are left in devastating situations…As many as 26 states could ban abortion, and many already have.  Bans also put pressure on other states’ health care systems as they struggle to meet the needs of patients who need to travel for care.”

But never fear, the Planned Parenthood Action Fund (PPAF) is here, advancing what McGill Johnson calls “acts of radical hope.”   “Ever since the Supreme Court’s decision,” McGill Johnson writes, the PPAF has been leading a great “movement”  to “fight back” with rallies, civil disobedience, “put[ting] our bodies on the line,” voter access efforts, political (Democriatc Party electoral) action, and legislative initiatives

And that’s why I need to send the PPAF $150 or more on or before December 31st.

Not a chance.

There’s so much wrong with Ms. McGill Johnson’s appeal.

It doesn’t even mention the name or date of the despicable, women-hating, arch-patriarchal Christian fascist Court decision that came down this year: Dobbs v. Jackson, June 24, 2022.

It doesn’t point out, much less denounce the thoroughly illegitimate nature of both the absurdly far-right Handmaid/Trump-made Court and the Dobbs decision, which defied super-majority US public opinion backing women’s constitutional right to an abortion. The decision relied on literally medieval reasoning while violating the basic judicial principle of stare decisis to eviscerate a basic human right won through years of struggle by and for women and their feminist male and transgender allies.  

The funding appeal from PPAF fails to note that the (unnamed) Dobbs decision was clearly meant to be a battering ram for a broader white Christian nationalist and neofascist assault on numerous related and basic human and civil rights.   

McGill Johnson downplays the extent of the terror unleashed by Dobbs by failing to note that six states have gone to the sadistic and sexist length of banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest. 

The PPAF appeal says nothing about how the nation’s savage and overlapping inequalities of race, class, and place make it impossible for masses of disproportionately nonwhite poor women and poor transgender people to access abortions in non-ban states.   

It directs political energies into the killing confines of an archaic Minority Rule electoral and policy system tilted far to the right of majority opinion through numerous mechanisms: the Electoral College, gerrymandering, the absurd power and malapportionment of the US Senate, the Senate filibuster, the lifetime appointment and exaggerated power of the Supreme Court, plutocratic campaign finance rules, and extreme “states’ rights.”  

The PPAF appeal claims that the “movement” it pretends to be spearheading has pushed the Biden administration to “put forth” what it calls a “whole-of-government response to the abortion access crisis.” This is disingenuous: PP has never demanded that Biden counter Dobbs by using his power to order the federal government to make safe and legal abortions available on federal lands and medical facilities across the nation, including prohibition states under Christian Republi-fascist control.

The sickest part of McGill Johnson’s fundraising letter is her boasting of  “radical” actions her “movement” has purportedly undertaken “ever since” Dobbs.  

Please. What about before the ruling? Hello?

Let’s get the record straight here.  “The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade” (the name of the decision, again, was Dobbs v. Jackson – say its name, Ms. McGill Johnson) was telegraphed more than half a year before the ruling during the case’s final oral argumentation in December of 2021.  The leak of the decision early last May left little doubt as to how the far-right Court was going to rule. The ruling was widely expected — in the absence of a pre-emptive mass uprising PP refused to help organize  –— from the moment it went before the Trump-packed Court (if not from the moment when the Court agreed to hear the case). There was ample time for those who wished to prevent the coming horror(s) to demonstrate that masses would shut down the country and call into question the legitimacy of its reigning undemocratic legal and political institutions if the nation’s top Christian fascist “justices” went through with their clear desire to reverse, that is kill, Roe.

What did PP and the rest of the liberal, Democratic Party-affiliated “choice movement” do to stave off the malicious women-hating ruling that was clearly on its way?  Did it join the militant feminist organization Rise up for Abortion Rights (RU4AR) in trying to mobilize masses to put their bodies on the line and “shut shit down” to avert the coming Hell?

No, it joined with the dismal Democrats and other leading “liberal” abortion rights groups in advance surrender, announcing the coming of the “post-Roe era” without a fight — without the slightest hint of mass resistance in the nation’s streets and public squares.

Why? A big piece of the answer was suggested in a June 6th New York Times Op-Ed by the liberal Talking Points Memo founder and chief editor Josh Marshall. “Democrats,” Marshall wrote eighteen days before the Dobbs decision, “hope to make November’s midterm elections a referendum on Roe v. Wade, the linchpin decision upholding abortion rights, which the Supreme Court is almost certain to strike down this summer.” I heard much the same morally twisted logic from Iowa City Democrats the previous March: “we’ll win the mid-terms after they get rid of Roe.”

How grotesque and cynical. For the Dems to win in November, which they didn’t — the US House of Representatives goes Republi-fascist in just a few days (how ‘bout that “Roevember”?) — women and girls had to lose a basic constitutional right whose attainment through movement struggle had led to a dramatic improvement in women’s opportunities and freedom. The not-so “leftmost” of the country’s two dominant political parties was banking for Midterm election success on the restoration of female bondage through legally imposed forced pregnancy and motherhood in much of “the world’s greatest democracy” (where 70 percent of the populace supported the continuation of Roe.) The Dems were looking forward to the horrific decision. And the Dem-affiliated “choice” groups PP and NARAL were fund-raising off Roe’s coming demise from the minute the Court decided to hear the Dobbs case. They wouldn’t bring their members into the streets to save women’s right to end unwanted and dangerous pregnances, but they were happy to raise money off the coming doom.

In the absence of support for mass popular mobilization from the well-funded “choice” establishment, real and serious street defense of Roe (however flawed that 1973 ruling may have been) was left to RU4AR. RU4AR sparked numerous impressive and properly angry rallies, marches, and direct actions under the banner of “Post-Roe, Hell No!” It was inspired by and modelled on successful abortion rights activism in Latin America. It promoted the green bandana, the symbol of remarkable women’s and abortion rights protest in Argentina, Mexico, and Columbia. It called for a Green Wave (something very different than the Dems’ tepid, cynical, and misleading promise of an electoral “Blue Wave” in “Roevember”) beneath and beyond the savagely time-staggered major party big money and candidate-centered electoral extravaganzas that are falsely and disastrously sold to the US masses as “politics,” the only politics that matters.

And for this it earned vicious, libelous, COINTELPRO-like neo-McCarthyite attacks from liberal and even supposedly left journalists – attacks that falsely and preposterously accused RU4AR of being a financially corrupt, anti-gay, and transgender-hating “communist cult” opposed to abortion services and abortion funds.

Which reminds me: NO money this year for The Intercept, which published one of the most egregious and despicable neo-McCarthyite attacks of all on RU4AR last July.

The second sickest thing about McGill Johnson’s letter is its chilling and bizarre silence on gender.  It’s mind-boggling.  In a fundraising appeal all about supposedly “fighting” the anti-abortion movement, a movement that has always been and remains fundamentally about male-supremacist control and oppression of women (hence the Christian right’s intimately related opposition to birth control), not “the babies” — about keeping women pregnant and at home, not just the theocratic myth of “fetal personhood” – McGill Johnson can’t write the word “women,” “female[s],” or “gender” once …not even once.  She references only “the rights of people,” “all people,” “our rights,” “reproductive freedom,” “health care,” and “patients,” as if the super-preponderant majority of abortions aren’t sought by specifically female “people,” as if the anti-abortion movement hasn’t long been centrally and overwhelmingly driven by sexism, and as if abortion access is just a “health care” issue with no gender and sexism involved. Hello? This is woketarian nonsense that has worked its way to the very top of the bourgeois- Democratic “choice” establishment.  How pathetic. How idiotic. How reactionary.

Want to give end of the year money to real abortion rights activists? Go with RU4AR. Here’s your link: https://actionnetwork.org/fundraising/rise-up-4-abortion-rights-2?source=direct_link&