Rise, mothers, and all who love them.
Honoring and fighting for human rights is the best Mothers’ Day gift of all.
Dear friends: In the U.S. it is Mothers’ Day. As with most holidays here, our current experience of this day is dominated by its commercial aspects. We are cajoled to “honor” our mothers with gifts representing fragrance, cleanliness, and gardens.
The roots of the holiday, however, are in women’s activism for peace in the 19th century. Julia Ward Howe, a mother sickened by the mass violence of the Civil War and war in Europe, began a campaign for mothers to end war. See the link below the photo to read more.
How resonate those roots are this year, as the day falls during the sickening violence of war once again: war of territorial conquest and war against human rights, including a woman’s right to full and free reproductive care.
Sincere personal beliefs about abortion run the gamut. The point of keeping the choice of carrying a pregnancy to term as a private decision between a woman and her health care provider is just this: to allow personal belief and health outcomes to guide these most intimate decisions.
In other words, it is to protect an individual person or family from being forced to comply with the religious beliefs of those in power.
By contrast, the political attempts to overturn the legal decisions that protect access to full reproductive care are part of a larger project to cement the religious beliefs of those in power as law. Overturning Roe v. Wade is one block in the foundation of single-party rule, ceding religious freedom, personal privacy, and equal protection under the law in order to gain the support of those who want a religious autocracy.
The case before the Supreme Court will be cloaked in misleading language of “state’s rights” - another dreadful echo of the Civil War. But it is not about esoteric questions of what the federal government can legislate and what must be left to the states.
The decision is stark: does the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law, and its guarantee of privacy protections from undue government intrusion, apply to women? Does the Constitution serve as a foundation for civil rights, or will it allow single-party rule under the guise of “originalism”? At risk are the very checks and balances that have protected democracy, and allowed it to evolve, for two and a half centuries.
In the face of the devastating violence of war one hundred and sixty-some years ago, Julia Ward Howe called upon mothers all over the world to rise and resist the carnage wreaked by elite groups of powerful men.
On Mothers’ Day 2022, we continue the work of Howe and so many other women throughout the centuries, who insist that women’s rights are human rights, and that human rights outweigh all other considerations of power and wealth.
Honoring and fighting for human rights is the best Mothers’ Day gift of all.
Be safe and well.
