Citizens Prerogative

Episode discussion topics

• Paraphrasing Gandhi and Jefferson, if we measured society based on how we are treating our most vulnerable, it would get a failing grade.
• Forced pregnancy and childbirth have a long disgusting history in our country and in the world.
  • The UN recognizes this as a human rights violation and tracks this global problem.
  • The slavery economy in the United States featured, at its core, a potentially renewable resource for labor at cost or an asset.
  • Plantation owners would routinely force pregnancy on their slaves and wives for the sake of the business.
  • The industrial barons in the non-slavery states were not much better in the sense that they provided for child labor and a low-wage environment. Many people, men, women, and children alike suffered greatly under this system with unlimited working hours, unsafe conditions, and utterly no respect for human life.
  • As a reminder, the system we all live and work under today is an amalgamation of both the slave trade and industrial servitude systems. Well, we all live under it except for the wealthy, who are the freest among us all by their design.
  • We must also mention that sexual violence is part and parcel of much of this, including the opposite, forced sterilizations. No bodily autonomy.
• Some of the preceding points and others are clearly articulated in an amicus brief from Howard University School of Law for the recent Dobs case (SCOTUS pdf).
  • For instance, because slaves were property, "After Congress prohibited the importation of slaves in 1808, slave masters—who could no longer rely on the international slave trade to replenish their labor force—gained an acute 'economic incentive to govern Black women’s reproductive lives.' Female slaves were 'valuable to their masters not only for their labor but also for their ability to produce more slaves.”
• Forced Labor, Revisited: The Thirteenth Amendment and Abortion a 2010 Faculty Working Paper (Northwestern pdf) from Northwestern University School of Law that provides another legal perspective for consideration.
• Citizen Do Good might pull their sponsorship if we failed to mention that according to the literal text of the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that citizens are born or naturalized and will not be deprived of life, liberty, or property. The unborn are clearly not citizens and not entitled to rights.
• In spite of all the perspective of history that was re-established for the record in painful detail and the fact that the constitution does not grant rights or privileges to the unborn, Dobs became the case our religious court used to put reproductive rights back on the legislative block for all 50 states. So much for liberty.
  

• Calls to Action:
  • Learn more about United States History, especially the uglier parts. The parts that act as warnings through history if only we learn them. Anything "again" is a bad slogan.
  • Start with a group or set of events relevant to today that you know nothing about!
  • Keep an eye and ear out for headlines for clues in your search as most stories today lack historical context.
  • Vote in November and support candidates that support civil rights for us all.

Your hosts: Michael V. Piscitelli and Raymond Wong Jr.

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