In the majority opinion, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that the "Nebraska's statute, making criminal the performance of a 'partial birth abortion,' violates the federal Constitution" as interpreted in the landmark Roe. v. Wade decision that decriminalized abortion. The court cited the fact that the state law barred all such abortions and made no exceptions even when the woman's health was at risk, and that it "'imposes an undue burden on a woman's ability' to choose a D&E [dilation and evacuation] abortion, thereby unduly burdening the right to choose abortion itself." D&E is an abortion procedure used by doctors in the second trimester of pregnancy.

In a separate opinion, Justice Sandra Day O'Connor said she might view it as constitutional to ban the disputed abortion procedure if the law included an exemption for the mother's health and life.

The 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision came in the context of a growing mass movement for women's rights, and the powerful social movements for Black rights and against the U.S. war against Vietnam. Since then, opponents of women's rights have sought to undercut and reverse the gains it registered.

Over the years, moves by federal, state, and local courts and legislative bodies have in practice limited access to this medical procedure, especially for working women. In 1998, according to statistics, 86 percent of the counties and one third of the cities in the United States have no abortion providers.  
 
Capitalist politicians abet rightists
Big-business politicians, despite the posturing by many of them as friends of women's rights, have abetted the propaganda war against a woman's right to choose.

Liberal Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, for example, who portrays himself as "pro-choice," is one of those who compares the medical procedure targeted by the Nebraska law as "infanticide."

With the aid of these reactionary moves by Democratic and Republican politicians, rightist forces have made a woman's right to choose a central target. These include the forces around incipient fascist politician Patrick Buchanan, which scapegoat women along with immigrants and workers receiving welfare for the economic and social problems in the country.

"In the '40s and '50s," Buchanan told an anti-choice crowd in a typical speech in 1995, "America was a peaceful country," but that "correlation between the violence in our society and what has happened to 30 million unborn children is absolute." Buchanan opposes the right of a woman to abortion because the right of a woman to control her body it is at the heart of the struggle for women's equality.

Despite the bipartisan attacks over the past quarter century, a woman's basic right to control her body continues to have the support of the majority of working people in the United States today.

Right-wing organizations such as Operation Rescue launched a nationwide offensive in 1992 and mobilized their forces to block the entrances of clinics to women who were exercising their constitutional right to have an abortion. After having shut down the clinics in Wichita, Kansas, in the absence of a concerted defense by pro-choice organizations, the rightist forces bragged they would shut down abortion facilities across the country.

Those forces were defeated by counter-mobilizations of thousands of supporters of a woman's right to choose, many of whom traveled all around the country, from Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to New York City, in order to defend the clinics under attack. Hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Washington in April 1992, and 100,000 rallied in 1995 in support of the right to abortion.

The latest victory registered by the Supreme Court ruling was celebrated by participants at the National Organization for Women conference, which took place in Miami Beach, Florida, from June 30 to July 2. Conference participants at the workshop on reproductive rights discussed this decision as well as the challenges that women face in many states today.

One woman described how she had been forced to run a gauntlet of right-wingers in order to enter an abortion clinic in Louisiana recently. Another woman from Louisiana reported that the state government periodically carries out "investigations" of the clinics that involve wholesale dumping of files and other disruptions.

Women from Gainesville, Florida, most of them students, spoke about the struggle they led in order to make the "morning after" pill available at the infirmary of the University of Florida. The high cost of abortion is an issue for many women, including young women.

Destry Taylor, a 26-year-old student at the University of Florida, said women need "more access to abortion and it should be a priority for actions until the elimination of abortion restriction laws." If women's rights supporters lose this battle, "we will all be at home with our kids and would not be able to fight on other battles," she commented.

The NOW conference adopted by acclamation a resolution demanding that mifepristone, also known as the "morning after pill," be available to women in this country.

Margaret Trowe is the Socialist Workers candidate for vice president of the United States. Rollande Girard is a sewing machine operator in Miami.