A Call to Atheists and Secularists to Defend Women's Right to Abortion and Birth Control

Signed by:

Annie Laurie Gaylor, Freedom From Religion Foundation*; Sikivu Hutchinson, BlackSkeptics; Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist; Sunsara Taylor, Revolution Newspaper & sunsara.blogspot.com; Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon*, Norm Allen, former executive director of African Americans for Humanism*, and many others.

Add Your Name Here: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/atheists-and-secularists-defend-abortionrts/


Atheists and secularists generally pride themselves on respect for science, opposition to harmful religious myths, and a fierce defense of the separation of church and state.  Yet there is a critical need for atheists and secularists of conscience to collectively challenge the current moral, cultural, and political siege upon women’s right to self-determination. Flowing from each of these principles, we call on atheists and secularists to make public their support for women's right to abortion and birth control. Due to the insidious climate of anti-abortion propaganda and legislation these basic rights are being viciously imperiled.


Nearly 90% of U.S. counties have no abortion provider. 2011 saw 92 new abortion restrictions enacted throughout the states, shattering the previous record of 34 adopted in 2005 under President Bush. Doctors who provide abortion are terrorized and killed. In many communities, Crisis Pregnancy Centers (CPCs), funded by powerful Religious Right foundations and staffed by non-medical personnel, outnumber legitimate reproductive health facilities. Due to this climate of misogynist persecution the moral stigma and shame cast on women who get abortions is as great as ever. Women of color and working class white women who live in communities without adequate reproductive health care are disproportionately impacted by these policies.


But that is not all. Birth control is also under attack. Pharmacists refuse to fill prescriptions. “Personhood” amendments threaten to criminalize miscarriages and ban all contraception. And President Obama openly upheld Kathleen Sebelius's unprecedented decision to overrule the FDA, thereby banning over-the-counter distribution of Plan B (emergency contraception).


All this constitutes an affront to science. Fetuses are not babies. Women are not incubators. Abortion is not murder. Fetuses have the potential to become babies but until they are born they are a subordinate part of a woman's body and they are not independent biological or social beings.


All this is rooted in harmful religious myth. The driving core of the anti-abortion movement has always been the biblical mandate that women bear children as “payment” for having allegedly caused original sin. This is clearly laid out in 1 Timothy 14-15: “And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.” This explains why every major anti-abortion organization is also anti-birth control.


All this is an egregious violation of the separation of church and state. Given that the restrictions on a woman's right to abortion and birth control fly in the face of science and are driven primarily by religious myth and social stigma rooted in these myths, they are wholly illegitimate. In the final analysis, these incursions fundamentally undermine women’s right to self-determination.


We, the undersigned atheists and secularists, find one or all of these reasons require us to raise our voices in defense of women's right to abortion and birth control. Women who cannot decide for themselves when and whether to bear children are not free and if women are not free then none of us are free.


We call on others in the atheist community to publicly join us in this stand. Add your name to this call. Pledge that on January 22nd, the anniversary of Roe v. Wade (the Supreme Court decision which legalized abortion), and going forward after that, you will join us in publicly expressing these views through blogs, interviews, articles, Facebook and other social media; as well as to the friends and family in your lives.

*organizations for identification purposes only

Who did I meet at the Texas Freethought/Atheist Alliance of America Convention?

Lots of interesting people!

I met a slightly older white guy who wanted my thoughts on why there were so few women in his local atheist group. While I didn't feel in position to definitively answer, we discussed some of the factors in society and within his group that could lead to that situation. In the course of this, however, he told me the following story. He was walking past the University of Texas, Austin with his young son. A fraternity was sitting on bleachers they had set up in front of their frat house. Every time a woman would walk by they held up numbers to “rate her.”

It is hard to find words to describe how damaging this must have been to the women walking by. Or to convey the degree of entitlement and dehumanization of women that is revealed in these young men's thinking. At the same time, this is just bringing to the surface and making explicit the way that women are always being looked at by huge numbers of men every time they step out their door. This is extreme and cruel and humiliating, but it is also just a matter of degree worse than the routine catcalling, elevator-eyes, and talking-to-women's-breasts that goes on every day. All this is totally unacceptable and urgently needs to be revolted against.

To his great credit (and to my great pleasure), the man telling me this story said he stopped and spoke really loud to his son. “Son,” he said, “If you ever want to know what an asshole looks like, there's a whole bunch of them right there on display.”

I met a young Black man who had never attended an atheist event before. He came because he was friends on FaceBook with Sikivu Hutchinson and wanted to hear her speak. He explained that he hadn't “come out” as an atheist to his friends or family yet. He feared their reaction and explained that there weren't any other atheists among his immediate community. There was also a hysterical, although also rather painful, discussion between him, a couple older Black folks, and myself over how to handle atheist dating.

He explained that nearly every date he'd ever been on ended as soon as he told the woman he was an atheist. The older guy in the conversation (who I really enjoyed talking to overall) gave him some terrible advice (it included dishonesty and an attempt to appeal to a woman's most materialistic side), but the woman in the conversation cut through that very quickly and with a firmness. We teased and laughed over the situation, but the truth remained that it is not easy and can be lonely to be an atheist. We live in an extremely atomized and alienating society where finding real human connection and closeness based on something other than surface superficiality is not easy to begin with. Finding that as an atheist in an overwhelmingly Christian community only compounds the problem. (The same thing goes for folks who are progressive or radical or revolutionary.)

Without attempting to downplay the difficulties above, there is an absolute baseline of being honest with the people you are meeting and getting to know. There is NOTHING good that can come of trying to hook up with or forge a relationship with someone you don't respect enough to be honest with. There is no relationship worth having – not a friendship or a romantic relationship – that is not based on mutual respect and equality. Further, if they don't know where you are coming from and what you want out of life – then you will never find anyone who is actually attracted to you on the right foundation. Too often dating and relationships are treated as some special “separate realm” from our overall life's pursuits and world outlook. Like, “Over here is what I am about... over there is someone I am trying to date and what I am looking for in a relationship.”

People should live their lives fully and be as open as possible in the world about what they think needs to be different and they should act on it – and in the course of that they will find others who share similar interests, or are intrigued by and open to hearing about those interests. Dating, starting a relationship, and falling in love are not just automatic outgrowths of “shared interests,” there is a unique process and chemistry involved that goes beyond shared interests. But, all that ought to be on the foundation of shared convictions and principles. And, relationships and love are things that develop, need to be worked at, and transform over time – through a lot of learning and struggling through differences and challenges. This is what gives them richness and real closeness. This is not always easy (and this world throws up all kinds of barriers and obstacles to people being able to connect with each other on the basis of equality and mutual respect, especially all the many ways that social attitudes reflecting the oppression of women manifest – including on very intimate and personal levels) – but it is only possible by being honest, open, and above-board.

During the panel on “Diversity in the Movement” I commented that I don't think atheists should think of ourselves as an identity group that is just fighting for acceptance. What people think is not the same as whether they are born male or female, Black or Latino or white, on one side of a border or another, or whether someone is primarily attracted to one gender or another, etc. Everyone can change how they think and we all ought to repeatedly throughout life as we learn more. Further, while we should oppose bigotry against atheists, the main harm caused by religion is not the bigotry against atheists. It is the way that it enslaves and shackles people's minds and keeps them slavish towards their own oppression, instead of being able to consciously understand the world and transform it in their interests. Anyway, afterward Woody Kaplan gave a brilliant example illuminating this perspective.

James Byrd

Matthew Shepard

He recounted the horrific murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998. Matthew was tied to a fence and tortured and then left to die in Wyoming because he was gay. That same year, James Byrd – a Black man in Texas – was tied to the back of two white people's truck and dragged to his death. Kaplan pointed out that while atheists are really not accepted in public office and this is a problem, there is no comparison to this kind of violent oppression still facing by Black people and gay people (and I would add women and immigrants, among others).

There were tons of other fascinating people I met over this past weekend. A young woman who had gotten sucked very deeply into the world of conspiracy theories through that horrible film Zeitgeist. She described getting out of it being comparable to trying to get out of a cult. An older Black man who was in the military and then a school teacher who was told by family members that he couldn't really love his grandkids because he didn't love god (WTF!). He was undeterred, but think of what this actually reveals about the way in which those other family members love those children. They only love them because they love god? So, they don't really care for the kids otherwise? An anthropology professor who was as angry as I was about the biodeterminism that was preached by Michael Shermer about the supposedly “genetic” basis for men preferring large breasts (this is total BULLSHIT and perhaps the subject a future blogpost). She thanked me for saying something about it in the women's panel (a lot of people thanked me for this) and then gave me a list of titles to check out from her own field of research. And lots more folks... including a ton of good-natured non-god-fearing Texans.

Okay – that is just a small flavor. To everyone I met, thanks for taking the time to talk. Please do stay in touch. Either in the comments section – or via email: sunsara_tour (at) yahoo.com

Diversity (and Black people specifically) in the Atheist Movement

This second installment off the recent Texas Freethought Convention takes off from a panel called "Diversity in the Movement" which I was part of together with Dr. Sikivu Hutchinson, author of Moral Combat: Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and Secular America, Jason Torpy of Military Association of Atheists and Freethinkers, and Rich Rodriguez, of Rational Response Squad. There are many dimensions to diversity, but this installment will focus on Black people.

The conference as a whole was kicked off by an excellent talk that PZ Myers gave on mutants. PZ, as he is prone to do, made an entertaining and invigorating sport of scientifically refuting creationist bullshit. Almost like a bonus track, he threw in several scientifically rigorous lines of refutation of Spiderman and other comic books.

At a certain point, PZ explained that neanderthals interbred with early humans in Europe (after these early humans left Africa). As part of discussing mutations and how we are all mutants (be very afraid!), he explained that everyone with European or Asian background had some neanderthal DNA woven into our make-up. On the other hand, Africans and African Americans don't (I am sure this is not totally true as most Black people in this country have some European DNA at this point, but the main point he was demonstrating was valid and fascinating).

However, when PZ asked Black people in the audience to raise their hands – part of his engaging speaking style – there was a very long pause as everyone looked around the auditorium... searching... searching... searching for anyone Black. Finally, a young woman way in the back stood up, waved her hand and took a bow.

Now, it turns out there was more than one Black person in the room. But not very many more. This was rather shocking, and in some ways a very important lead-in to the "diversity" panel.



Sikivu Hutchinson & me
at Texas Freethought Convention

While I appreciated everyone's comments and perspective on the panel, I was especially pleased to be sharing the stage with Sikivu Hutchinson. I very much enjoyed (and recommend) her book. I interviewed her for Equal Time for Freethought and you can listen to it here.  She brought alive the reality of the New Jim Crow that confronts Black people; mass incarceration, institutional racism, and a white supremacist power structure. She spoke as well to the degradation and oppression of women, the assault on women's right to abortion and the special demonization of Black and Latina women who get abortions.  

I highlighted a quote from Bob Avakian's Away With All Gods that, "Oppressed people who are unable or unwilling to confront reality as it actually is, are condemned to remain enslaved and oppressed."  Most oppressed people are still denied any real scientific education or exposure to atheism and this is something atheists must take much greater responsibility for changing.   It is a form of profound disrespect for people to think they are too stupid to come to understand the way the world actually is and to fail to struggle for them to take up science and unchain their minds from religious shackles. At the same time, there is tremendous oppression and crimes – from police brutality to mass incarceration to the assault on women's reproductive rights and beyond – that everyone needs to be coming together to fight and to build a movement for revolution to get rid of once and for all.   This fight should include both religious and atheist people.   I posed a different synthesis – of militant atheism but also of not making atheism a dividing line; instead making the fight against oppression and exploitation the dividing line (which actually divides both atheists and religious folks sharply, but in a much more favorable way in terms of bringing about a much better world in this world, the real world, the only world there is).

During the Q&A, one man posed that he wasn't sure that the right questions were being asked. Rather than ask, regarding Black people, "Why don't they come to our events?" and then having Black people always ask, "But why don't you take up our issues?" white atheists ought instead to support Black atheists in taking atheism to Black people.

I want to share my answer to this.


While there is importance to Black atheists fighting – and being supported in their efforts to fight – for atheism among Black people, it is profoundly wrong to equate "them" coming to "our" events (speaking of "them" as Black people and "our" as if all of us at an atheist convention primarily identify as "white atheists") with the notion of Black people insisting that "we" take up "their" issues.

The oppression of Black people is NOT "Black people's issue." The oppression of Black people is woven into the fabric of American society.  "There would be no United States as we know it today without slavery. That is a simple and basic truth." (1:1, BAsics, from the talks & writings of Bob Avakian).  After that, it was Jim Crow and generations of racist terror in which every Black person lived under an active death warrant. It may or may not have been carried out, but it was always there and every Black person knew that any white person could accuse them at any time and they could be lynched, or wrongly imprisoned and sent to a chain gang (an incredible and important book, Douglas A. Blackmon's  Slavery By Another Name), or for no reason at all. Today, it's the New Jim Crow. 1 in 9 young Black men is in prison. Prisons institute widespread torture – by standards of international law (things like years and decades of isolation! – something California prisoners are currently hunger striking against), rampant police brutality and murder, the worst education, the worst health care, and the largest transfer of wealth out of the Black community in history through the recent mortgage crisis.

The retrenchment, in new forms, of the longstanding oppression of Black people in the U.S. is one of the great moral questions of this era. If this is not "your issue" then you are not leading a moral life. There is NO EXCUSE for white people (or other people not of African descent) in this country to treat this like someone else's problem.


To underscore further the problem with the kind of thinking reflected in the question posed, a bit more...


Black people don't owe any atheist organization their participation. I believe it would be very good if more Black people were atheists and if more Black atheists were involved in atheist organizations and activism. It would be even better if more Black people and more atheists (and the two are not mutually exclusive) were getting into the movement for revolution and transforming themselves in the course of coming together to transform the world. But this would be good because it would benefit Black people as a whole and humanity as a whole. That's why it's important. Not because Black people have an obligation to atheists organizations.

On the other hand, everyone on U.S. soil has a responsibility and a moral obligation to fight against the not-merely-historic but present-day-reality of profound and systematic oppression of Black people in the U.S.A.

Troy Davis was just recently legally lynched:  Overwhelming evidence of his innocence. 7 out of 9 witnesses recanted. No physical evidence linking him to the crime. A million people worldwide petitioned for a new trial. Thousands protested. Former prison wardens called for the Georgia prison officials to refuse to participate in the execution.  Former FBI Chief William Sessions called for commuting Davis' death sentence.  But Troy Davis was murdered by the U.S. State. I feel like screaming as I type. This is everyone's responsibility.

Okay, fine – a lot of white people (and frankly, a lot of immigrants from every part of the world) are kept ignorant of this reality.   But, you who are reading this – and those of you who had enough heart and interest to attend the diversity panel over the weekend – it is not acceptable and there is no excuse for remaining ignorant.  Follow the links in this article. Read up. Learn. Here is an excellent place to start, a special issue of Revolution dealing specifically with, "The Oppression of Black People, The Crimes of this System and the Revolution We Need."  

“The young man was shot 41 times while reaching for his wallet”…“the 13-year-old was shot dead in mid-afternoon when police mistook his toy gun for a pistol”… “the unarmed young man, shot by police 50 times, died on the morning of his wedding day”… “the young woman, unconscious from having suffered a seizure, was shot 12 times by police standing around her locked car”… “the victim, arrested for disorderly conduct, was tortured and raped with a stick in the back of the station-house by the arresting officers.”

Does it surprise you to know that in each of the above cases the victim was Black?¹

If you live in the USA, it almost certainly doesn’t.

Think what that means:" read more...

* * *

Another point that I want to highlight was a comment from Naima Washington during Sikivu Hutchinson's presentation later that day. She said a number of things, building off much of what Sikivu spoke to about how Black people are viewed still in animalistic terms. Naima spoke to how Black people have been viewed as able to tolerate higher levels of pain, able to work harder without fatigue, and in other ways being physically predisposed to enslavement. She detailed how these myths continue in myths, including through myths of innate athletic super-prowess. (An important aside, Dorothy Roberts recently exposed how Black people are systematically prescribed significantly fewer pain-killers for the same medical procedures out of prejudices and assumptions about Black people.)  Then, at the tail end of her remarks, Naima commented that, while she is concerned about the number of people of color in the room, she is more concerned with the number of people of conscience.

Excuse my religious language, but A-Fucking-Men.

The participation of Black people (and other oppressed people) matters. It matters a lot. But even more – and frankly as a foundation to whether there will be an increasing basis for attracting and involving Black atheists – is whether there is a foundation of conscience. Once again, and as a conclusion to this entry, there is no foundation of conscience that does not include a firm stand against the oppression of Black people as "everybody's" issue.

Tune in Sat, Aug 6th 3-4pm EST, for my interviews with Sikivu Hutchinson and Mara Hvistendahl

August 6th

3:00 to 4:00 pm, EST

WBAI radio, Pacifica in New York

99.5 FM

streaming live at wbai.org

This week on Equal Time for Freethought, I talk with two guests:

Mara Hvistendahl and Sikivu Hutchinson

Sikivu Hutchinson is the author of Moral Combat; Black Atheists, Gender Politics, and the Values Wars. She has published fiction, essays and critical theory in Social Text, Black Agenda Report, Secular Nation and the American Atheist Magazine. She is also the editor of blackfemlens.org, a founder of the L.A. Black Skeptics, and a senior fellow for the Institute for Humanist Studies.

I will speak with her about how U.S. white-supremacist slavery and continued white American identity has influenced and shaped the prevalence of Black religiosity as well as explore some of the particular harms of religion among Black people. We will also discuss the vicious and misleading campaign to portray abortion as “Black genocide” and the links between pornography and sexual degradation of the mainstream secular culture and the puritanism and sexual repression of the Christian fascists.

Mara Hvistendahl is a correspondent with Science magazine and a contributor to publications ranging from Foreign Policy to Popular Science. She is also the author of Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men. Thanks mainly to sex selective abortion, there are over 160 million fewer females than would be naturally occurring in Asia’s population and an unknown number missing from other continents. We will discuss how this gap is transforming communities, leading to everything from a spike in bride-buying to an increase in crime — and how the West played a role in sparking this global problem.