The broad language describing the method to be proscribed could cover other more common abortion procedures. It is designed to have a chilling effect on the willingness of doctors and women’s health-care providers to perform them.

During the congressional debate, capitalist politicians and other opponents of a women’s right to choose continued to use the concocted and unscientific term “partial birth abortion” to describe the procedure. They also surrounded themselves with graphic photo displays of fetuses in utero in order to obscure their real aim—to further restrict women’s access to abortion.

The action follows in the tradition of the 1976 Hyde Amendment whereby Congress denied the use of federal Medicaid funds for abortion, disproportionately effecting working-class women and those of oppressed nationalities. By 2000, some 87 percent of U.S. counties and one-third of U.S cities had no abortion providers. Since the Hyde Amendment, many federal and state measures requiring parental notification and the imposition of waiting periods to get an abortion have also been passed.

Emboldened by the congressional vote and Bush’s signing the bill into law, rightists of various kinds and other opponents of abortion rights have announced plans to push an array of anti-abortion legislation. These include the so-called Unborn Victims of Violence Act, the Abortion Non-Discrimination Act, and the Child Custody Protection Act. The converse character of their names notwithstanding, these bills have one and only one objective: to further restrict a woman’s right to choose.

Liberal politicians, many of whom voted for banning the late-term abortion procedure, have been part and parcel of these attacks. In vetoing a similar bill in 1996, former president William Clinton encouraged opponents of a women’s right to choose to give him a bill with language he could “happily sign.”

The capitalist class, however, is far from being able to turn back the clock of history. When he pledged to sign the current legislation, Bush conceded that the “culture has not changed enough” to take away the right to abortion altogether. Despite the three-decades long campaign by the wealthy, who benefit from reinforcement of the second-class status of women, the majority in bourgeois public opinion continues to back a woman’s right to choose.

Registering the importance of the growing number of women in the industrial workforce, the United Auto Workers union has raised the demand in contract negotiations that abortion be covered in employer health-care plans.

The historic decision legalizing abortion was won through the independent action of millions of women and men in the streets. It is a precondition for the full equality and liberation of women and is a by-product of the massive civil rights struggle that overthrew Jim Crow segregation against Blacks in the 1950s and ’60s. It took similar mobilizations of women in their hundreds of thousands throughout the 1980s and ’90s to push back campaigns by rightists to shut down abortion clinics through bombings, arsons, blockades, shootings, and murder of abortion providers.

That is what is needed today to stem the rulers’ attack and advance the broader fight for women’s rights.
 
 
Related articles:
Bush signs into law ban on late-term abortion procedure;
U.S. judges block legislation  
 
 
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