BY JOSE G. PEREZ  
P. Redward’s letter says that “there are no individual rights that are above social needs” and therefore Perspectiva Mundial’s position in defense of legal, safe abortion, available to all women, is wrong.

The fact is that the right to abortion—which is simply the right of women to control their own bodies—is a very pressing social need. That’s why tens of thousands of women around the world have struggled to win this right, and why the Marxist movement has traditionally backed their demand.

Redward argues the question of “individual rights” and “social needs” abstractly, obscuring the class questions at stake in the right to abortion.

The issue is not women asserting their “individual” rights against other “individuals,” such as men, or government officials, doctors, or clergy.

Marxists approach all questions from the standpoint of the interests of the working class. On the question of abortion, we have to begin by recognizing that women are not a group of “individuals,” but an oppressed sex. The majority of women in the United States are also exploited as workers.

At the heart of women’s oppression is the denial of their right to control their reproductive capacities. That’s what the abortion struggle is about—the democratic right of half the population to decide for themselves if and when they will bear children.

Redward ignores the deep-rooted discrimination women face in every facet of their lives. But only by examining the ways women are oppressed can we understand why this issue is so important, not only for women, but for the working class as a whole.

The majority of women in the United States work outside the home. When they get off the job, they must put in long hours of unpaid overtime taking care of household chores.

On the job, women earn less than two-thirds of what men earn. The yearly median wage of women who work full time is $6,760 less than what men earn. Multiplying this by the forty-five million women in the labor force, we get $300 billion that the capitalists make—simply by not paying women as much as men.

For Black women and Latinas, who are triply oppressed as workers, women, and members of oppressed nationalities, the wage disparity is even greater.

Whereas white males have a median weekly salary of $380, Latinas earn only $209.

These differentials go against the interests of the entire working class, because it puts a heavy downward pressure on everyone’s wages. Only the bosses profit from this.

In addition, discrimination on the basis of sex—as on the basis of race, nationality, or language—is used to pit working people against each other, placing big obstacles on the road to a united struggle against the exploiters.

Bourgeois ideology justifies discrimination against women on the basis that their “natural” place is the home, performing tasks from rearing children, food preparation and cleaning clothes, to nursing the sick and elderly. This is part of foisting responsibility for all these tasks on individual families rather than making them the collective responsibility of society as a whole. In this way the capitalist rulers and their government free themselves from providing such services as child care, adequate health care, decent education, and so forth.

This is justified by pointing to the biological capacity of women to bear children. Women’s main role in society, the capitalists and their ideologists say, is reproduction, while men are the breadwinners, political leaders, and so forth.

What it comes down to is that women must limit their lives to taking care of their children and home, and not become involved in broader society. From an early age, there is a systematic attempt to convince women that they are weak and unintelligent, and therefore should be dependent on men.

There are, of course, physiological differences between men and women. But biology is not destiny, as women themselves are proving in the United States and other countries.

Since the rise of the women’s movement at the end of the 1960s, thousands of women have entered many jobs they were traditionally excluded from. Women coal miners, truck drivers, steelworkers, and auto workers have given the lie to the claim that these are “men’s jobs” only.

In Central America, Nicaraguan women played a key role in the struggle against the Somoza dictatorship. A number of women reached the rank of commander—the highest military rank among the insurgent forces—and played important military leadership roles. In El Salvador, we see a similar process.

Restriction of women’s right to control their own bodies is one of the most fundamental and barbaric methods of ensuring that women “stay in their place.”

Without the ability to determine whether and when to bear a child, a woman’s entire life is circumscribed by her reproductive capacities. At any time, no matter what her economic circumstances or individual goals, she can be forced to carry a pregnancy to term. Once she gives birth, she will bear the major responsibility for bringing up the child.

Since other forms of contraception are not 100 percent effective, it’s no wonder that millions of women choose to have an abortion at some time in their lives.

Without the option of doing this, women’s right to full humanity does not exist. Without being able to fully exercise control over their bodies, all other rights—including the woman’s right to life itself—are jeopardized.

When abortions were illegal in the United States, rich women could get them from skilled doctors in good hospitals. In capitalist society, there is no law higher than the almighty dollar.

But for most women, the situation was radically different. They were forced to go to back-alley butchers or try dangerous self-induced abortions.

Even following the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down antiabortion laws, this right was not equally accessible to all women. This was partly ameliorated by the Medicaid program, which covers some of the medical costs of people on public assistance. But in 1977, Congress’s Hyde Amendment went into effect, cutting off Medicaid payments for abortions.

This measure is explicitly directed against the most oppressed layers of the working class, especially women of the oppressed nationalities. It is no coincidence that the first woman to die from an illegal abortion—because she could not afford a legal one following the Medicaid cutoff—was Rosie Jimenez, a twenty-seven-year-old Chicana from Texas.

The Hyde Amendment is part of a broader offensive by the ruling class against the rights and standard of living of working people. Women’s right to abortion has been a central target of this offensive.  
 
 
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