“Genocide Joe”: Feminist silence is complicity

President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris hosted their first joint 2024 reelection campaign event—a “Reproductive Freedom Campaign Rally”—on January 23. The Biden administration is evidently pinning its reelection hopes on the overwhelming support for abortion rights across the U.S.—including in states with abortion bans—since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in its June 2022 Dobbs decision. Anger at the Supreme Court decision drove pro-choice voter turnout in 2022, allowing the Democrats to win a slim majority in the Senate.

Biden’s and Harris’s “Reproductive Freedom Rally” was a camera-ready event. Its stage was jammed with “Defend Choice” and “Restore Roe” signs and banners. Its seats were filled with enthusiastic campaign volunteers and staffers from loyal Democratic Party feminist organizations, such as the National Organization for Women (NOW), Reproductive Freedom for All (formerly NARAL), and Planned Parenthood. Its speakers were prepared with carefully worded scripts to showcase Biden’s accomplishments.

This painstaking planning, however, could not prevent the ensuing chaos, when pro-Palestine protesters disrupted the speeches with chants of “Genocide Joe” and “How many kids have you killed in Gaza? How many women have you killed in Gaza?” Thirty protesters, organized by the anti-imperialist feminist group Code Pink, had made their way into the event, while 50 more rallied outside—all demanding a ceasefire in Gaza.

Kylie Cheung from Jezebel reported,

The protesters who confronted Biden during the rally cited the estimated 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza and the over 10,000 Palestinian children who have been killed since this iteration of Israeli attacks on Gaza began. Code Pink, one of the groups that helped protest the rally, pointed to how “miscarriages are up 300%,” “two mothers are killed by Israel every hour” according to the United Nations, and 20,000 newborns born into the war are without neonatal care in social media posts about the rally. “How can [Biden] campaign on reproductive justice while dropping bombs on Palestinian mothers?” the group tweeted on Tuesday, highlighting how Biden’s refusal to demand a ceasefire has directly contributed to reproductive violence in Gaza—in direct contrast with the reproductive freedom values espoused at the Tuesday rally.

Biden’s loyalists tried to shout down the protesters with jeers and chants of “Four more years!” and “We love Joe!” As the two sides engaged in screaming matches, Biden tried unsuccessfully to continue his prepared remarks, but his speech was interrupted a total of 14 times.

Imperialist feminism rears its ugly head—and anti-imperialists fight back

If Biden’s rally did not proceed as planned, there is a simple explanation: Feminists are deeply divided.

Biden’s support among well-heeled feminists with a Democratic Party donor base remains strong. This feminist coterie uncritically cheers on Biden’s reelection campaign—even as his administration continues to enable Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, with a death toll now approaching 30,000 Palestinians (most of them women and children).

As such, imperialist feminism has reared its ugly head once again. Imperialist feminists have been around as long as imperialism itself—rooting for their own ruling class’s military escapades while repeating the jingoistic phrases used to justify any given war.

Those old enough to remember the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 will recall mainstream feminists claiming that war criminal President George W. Bush was “liberating women” when he ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001—which paved the way for the long-planned U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. When the U.S. finally withdrew its last troops from Afghanistan 20 years later, having killed 47,000 Afghan civilians (including women and children), it abandoned Afghan women to Taliban control once again.

But imperialist feminists often face opposition—including from anti-imperialist feminists.

Planned Parenthood itself is deeply divided: While the U.S.-based Planned Parenthood organization is silent about Biden’s relentless support for Israel’s war, the International Planned Parenthood Federation has called for an immediate ceasefire. Hundreds of U.S. Planned Parenthood’s workers signed a letter in December lambasting its leaders’ silence—even after Israel destroyed the health center of the International Federation’s affiliate in Gaza.

In October, the reproductive justice organization ARC-Southeast issued a letter supporting Palestinian liberation signed by more than 60 feminist organizations—including the National Network of Abortion Funds and the Feminist Women’s Health Center. The letter stated, “Zionism is a contradiction to Reproductive Justice:” And Code Pink and other pro-Palestinian protesters have protested Biden at nearly every campaign stop since October.

Despite corporate media attempts to cast pro-Palestinian protesters as anti-Semitic, Jewish-led organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow have spearheaded many anti-Zionist protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza.

Eva Borgwardt, the national spokesperson of the Jewish American group IfNotNow clarified that she was a Democratic field organizer during the 2020 presidential election. She stated, “As an American Jew who worked for Biden in 2020, I’m furious and frustrated that he is risking throwing this election to Trump over his refusal to call for a ceasefire.”

When she was asked if attacking Biden about his unflinching support for Israel would help Trump, she responded, “Young Jews are terrified of a Trump presidency.” But she also said it is “absurd” to blame young voters “who are rightly furious with Biden for backing the Israeli government which has caused tens of thousands of deaths, rather than the commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in the world”.

Hazami Barmada, a Palestinian-American activist who attended the protest on January 23, argued, Trump and Biden “both terrify me. But you cannot win an election on the backs of women in Gaza, off burning, mutilating, killing, maiming innocent civilians.”

The reproductive health crisis at home

But (invariably well-to-do) pro-imperialist feminists also care very little about the problems facing their working-class “sisters” at home, whatever their rhetoric to the contrary.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, it effectively launched an all-out war on reproductive rights—with no end in sight. The result is a spiraling healthcare crisis, as 21 states have now passed abortion bans or other draconian restrictions. Some of these bans have exceptions for rape victims, to save the life of the pregnant person, or in the case of a fetal defect so severe it could not survive outside the womb. Other abortion bans have no exceptions.

Even in states that allow such exceptions, it can still be virtually impossible to actually get an abortion.

Abortion bans that allow exceptions for rape survivors require “proof” that from a police report or doctor’s statement. One study documented nearly 65,000 people who became pregnant after being raped between June 2022 and January 2024 in the 14 states with complete bans on abortion—including those with exceptions for survivors of rape and incest. This number is certainly an underestimation, given how few rape victims report their assaults.

But the most common reason why women can’t access abortions in states that ban it, even with exceptions in place, is because of fear on the part of doctors and other medical staff that they will be prosecuted and land in jail. Some ER nurses have stopped giving emergency contraception to rape victims because they could be accused of “aiding and abetting” abortion.

No government agency is tracking how many patients have been turned away from emergency rooms while they were miscarrying or critically ill from a dangerous pregnancy—or both, as in the case of an ectopic pregnancy. But the horror stories abound—of women being told by ER staff that they should go out to the parking lot or go home and wait until they were closer to death before they return for treatment. Those who can afford it must travel to a state where abortion is still legal, often hundreds of miles away.

But for anti-choice fanatics, criminalizing clinical abortion is not nearly enough. The U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to decide whether to ban the abortion drug mifepristone—which is used for a majority of abortions in the U.S.—by June of this year.

In this atmosphere, every later-term miscarriage is grounds for suspicion. An Ohio woman, for example, was charged with “felony abuse of a corpse” when her already dead fetus fell into her toilet at home last year, when she was 22 weeks pregnant. A Grand Jury only dismissed the charges in January.

The Alabama Supreme Court recently took the notion of “fetal personhood” to a new extreme, ruling in February that human embryos and fertilized eggs are children under the Alabama Wrongful Death of a Minor Act. In his concurring opinion, the Court’s Justice wrote, “We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness.” In the days following the Court’s ruling, three Alabama IVF clinics paused all invitro fertilization treatments out of fear that they could be charged with the wrongful death of a child.

Biden vs. the doomsday scenario (Donald Trump)

Jeet Heer argued recently in The Nation, “The horrific Dobbs decision was a political gift to the Democratic Party, but if anyone can squander that gift, it’s Joe Biden.”

Biden claims that his Catholic faith requires him to personally oppose abortion (although 56 percent of U.S. Catholics support the right to abortion in all or most cases.) And he has repeatedly made clear, as he did last year, “I’m not big on abortion.”

He initially opposed the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v Wade decision, arguing that it went “too far.” The following year, he declared that a woman should not have the “sole right to say what should happen to her body.” As Heer described,

Pro-choice groups quoted by the Times described Biden’s record on abortion in the 1980s as “erratic” and “unreliable.” While he came to affirm the main tenets of Roe, he would occasionally side with right-wing anti-choice politicians like Senator Rick Santorum on restricting late-term abortions, even when the life of the pregnant woman was at risk. As the Times makes clear, Biden’s full endorsement of pro-choice politics came late in his life, in 2008 when, at age 65, he became Barack Obama’s running mate.

Yet those who criticize Biden are usually met with the hostile accusation from his supporters that they are helping Trump to win in November.

Renee Bracey Sherman, who is the executive director of the abortion rights organization We Testify, has an answer for that accusation: ““Reproductive freedom doesn’t stop at our borders. It is not liberation for me as a Black woman to have abortion access on the backs of dead Palestinians.”

Bracey Sherman had been invited but chose not to attend the January 23rd rally for Biden. She undoubtedly spoke for others when she told Jezebel that she “did not sign up to be an arm of the Democratic Party.” She added, “but what I was deeply disturbed by was seeing a number of leaders in our movement cheering ‘four more years,’ as feminist protesters were begging the president to stop bombing pregnant people and children and families.”

The letter by ARC-Southeast supporting Palestinian liberation noted, “Some ask why a reproductive justice organization like ARC-Southeast would speak out on Palestine,” answering “We cannot fight for reproductive autonomy at home while ignoring the struggles of marginalized people for bodily autonomy abroad, especially when the same government responsible for our reproductive oppression at home is sponsoring the reproductive oppression of Palestinians.”