Now, almost four years later, Congress has voted to take back this right from thousands of women. In September it passed the Hyde amendment as part of a bill including funds for the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW). This amendment would put off federal Medicaid funds for abortion except those necessary to save a pregnant woman's life.

On October 22 a federal judge in New York declared the measure unconstitutional an placed an injunction on it. The government however is preparing to appeal the ruling.

The amendment would deny up to 300,000 women access to safe, legal abortions each year. Even conservative estimates of what could be in store for these women are chilling.

The 1973 Supreme Court decision was the most important gain for women's rights since suffrage. It freed millions of women from unwanted pregnancies. It set the historic precedent that it is a woman's right to decide for herself whether to have an abortion.  
 
November 19, 1951
The capitalist press in this country and in Western Europe is deliberately underplaying the news about the real situation in the Near East. The millions of the Arab world whose living standards are abysmal, in most cases below the level of domestic animals in these areas, refuse any longer to live in this degradation. They hold the old colonial rulers, primarily Britain and France, responsible and are determined to run them out.

This new development is among the greatest revolutionary upsurges in history, matching the postwar upheavals in China and throughout the Far East. In one of the few truthful dispatches from Cairo, columnist Stewart Alsop recognizes this. "The plain fact is that this is an essentially revolutionary situation," he wrote on Nov. 12 about the situation in Egypt.

The situation in French Morocco is similar in all essentials to Egypt.

Alsop's best "hope" in the situation is for the emergence of "reasonably enlightened dictatorship" patterned after that of Kemal Pasha in Turkey following World War I. But even this variant holds no allure for London and Paris. They want to keep things as they are, with themselves in the saddle.

As matters stand, Britain would have dim prospects of hanging on in Egypt, or the French in North Africa, if not for the support of Washington.

The whole Arab world which is now so bitterly anti-British and anti-French is turning more and more anti-American.  
 
 
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