Many happy returns — and eternal gratitude for your decades of  dedicated work for women’s rights!

On January 19, 2016, from 6 to 8 pm, Pat Maginnis will be the special guest at the Celebration of Choice of Northstate Women’s Health Network and Women’s Health Specialists, with an exhibition of her cartoons enlarged to poster size on the walls.

The public is invited, so come on down to the Vintage Wine Bar & Restaurant in Redding to meet Pat, celebrate sisterhood, and see her wonderful political cartoons!

Just an update: Pat has just had successful hernia surgery and is back home already, doing well. Can’t keep a good woman down!

On this, the 42nd anniversary of the historic Roe v Wade decision, Pat Maginnis, who worked for more than five decades to make that decision happen, issued this statement:

ABORTION: THE SUCCESSFUL TABOO?

For the mass of our citizenry, the concept of parenting when and if the human female is ready and accepting of pregnancy is a reasonable condition, not arousing controversy. Why then, when it comes up in the personal lives of women, is the topic of pregnancy cancellation—.i.e., abortion—expected to be shrouded in apology, guilt, angst, and declarations of misery?

The emotional trappings mentioned above point to the historical entrenchment of the Taboo psychology of abortion pounded into the human female from very early on. In a desperate move to stigmatize choice—that is, to condemn the acknowledged, legitimized right of the human female to make her own decision about her readiness for parenting—the anti-abortion folks have used vandalism, arson of clinics, murder of abortion providers, stalking of clinic staff members, and hounding of clinic patients.

The institutional control of female fertility—which I call the Department of Human Female Husbandry—is a focal point, the apex of power, around which Religion rotates. That grandiose thought needs explanation… and the younger and poorer the female, the easier to exercise far-reaching control. It is reported that in Brazil, little girls as young as 9 years of age, pregnant even from sexual assault, are gestating fetuses to term. Even three decades ago, the nun director of San Francisco St. Elizabeth’s Home bragged about having “girls here 14 and 12 and even 10!”

Keep in mind that it isn’t male fertility that has these Religions so committed to the extreme violence and destruction noted above. Religion deems it essential, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY, to focus the human female child on the role her body plays in promoting human population.

So today, the 42nd anniversary ofthe Roe v Wade decision, people against abortion are conducting massive demonstrations to end abortion as part of women’s normal health care. But throughout the country, women who prize their bodily agency, along with the men who trust them, are taking to the streets to defend our legal rights and end this taboo. Let’s speak out to free women from the stranglehold of religious interference with our bodies.

For information about a demonstration near you as well as everyday ideas on supporting women’s right to choose, check out the Stop Patriarchy stoppatriarchy.org and Trust Women Silver Ribbon campaigns oursilverribbon.com .

After a hiatus, patmaginnis.com is gearing up again, standing tall against the War on Women. Pat is doing well, busy with pro-choice demonstrations, cartoons, cat rescue and beekeeping, but will visit here on occasion to drop off a post, a limerick or a cartoon.

In these dark days of Republican rule, when women’s hard-won rights are being systematically destroyed before our eyes, women and our supporters must band together and foster a feminist movement so powerful that it can withstand this and any future assault.

On Saturday, January 21, 2012, Pat spoke at the West Coast Rally for Reproductive Justice on the horrific incident that made her devote her life to eradicating abortion laws in the United States, and offered inspiration for the future.

Watch Pat tell the story of this historic moment.