2013: Call to the Action
We are gathering for the eleventh “March 8 Feminist Night Action”!
Since last March 8, we have not remained silent in the face of threats and attacks seeking to seize women’s bodies, labor and lives!
We pushed back the attempt to ban abortion, brought onto the agenda with the Prime Minister’s claim “Abortion is murder. Every abortion is Uludere,” by declaring “Abortion is a right, Uludere is a massacre.”
Despite the AKP government’s pressure for “not even three, but five children,” we refused to be incubators.
We continued our struggle for real justice against male justice that searches for consent in rape and unjust provocation in murder. Süreyya Yıldırım in Erzurum, Pembe Dal in Bingöl, Hanım Korkmaz in Zonguldak and Gülfidan in Sakarya, who were constantly subjected to violence and rape, forced to take up weapons because the state did not protect them, and injured or killed their husbands; Nevin Yıldırım, who killed her rapist; and many more women who resisted by exercising their right to self-defense showed that it is possible not to submit to the power of men and patriarchy.
Despite the strengthening of the family as state policy, and despite the oppression and threats of death, violence and poverty we face because of the family, the number of women refusing marriage and divorcing increased.
To claim our labor, bodies and identities, to proclaim women’s struggle and solidarity against patriarchy, heterosexism, homophobia, capitalism, nationalism, militarism and war, we are together and in the streets for the March 8 Feminist Night March, now in its eleventh year!
Istanbul Feminist Collective