The new law allows administrators of health institutions that receive federal funding to block doctors from providing abortion—or even informing women about the option!

States like California that have legislation in place mandating hospitals to provide abortion and information about the procedure would face losing federal funding, including the ability to accept Medicaid patients, for enforcing such laws.

In rural areas, where workers and farmers in a wide area of the country often depend on one or two health facilities, ANDA places more power in the hands of hospital administrators to determine whether women in entire regions have access to abortion. Already 87 percent of all counties in the United States have no health facilities or doctors that provide abortions. Nearly a quarter of all women who obtain abortion must travel more than 50 miles to get to the nearest provider.

A firm majority of the U.S. population, and an even larger majority among women, defend access to abortion and view it as a woman’s right to choose. In spite of all the obstacles measures like ANDA create, an estimated one in three women today have an abortion before the age of 45.

Given this reality, opponents of a woman’s right to choose know that they cannot carry out a frontal assault on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that decriminalized abortion. Instead, using duplicitous rhetoric, bourgeois politicians—both Republicans and Democrats—are working to undermine this right by passing measures that whittle away at access to the procedure for the majority of women.

Some defenders of a woman’s right to choose have advanced the notion that such laws would not pass if the current Republican Party administration was not at the helm. But history belies that notion. The effort to erode access to abortion has continued unabated through Democratic and Republic administrations and regardless of which party controls Congress or who sits on the Supreme Court.

The Hyde Amendment, the opening shot against abortion rights since Roe v. Wade, was signed into law in 1977 by Democratic president James Carter. It cut off access to funding from Medicaid for abortion, affecting millions of working-class women. Democrat William Clinton signed another measure in 1999 extending the Hyde Amendment to ban Medicare funding for abortions, cutting off 700,000 disabled women from access to abortion through the program.

At the start of the Clinton-Gore administration, 16 percent of U.S. counties had abortion providers. By the end of those eight years that figure was down to 14 percent. Today it is 13 percent. During the same period, the cost of paying for the procedure has continued to rise, averaging $364 today. The overwhelming majority of abortions are paid for out-of-pocket.

This steady chipping away at access to abortion goes hand-in-hand with the economic grind bearing down on working people. Costs of health care are increasing for working people, while the number of uninsured continues to rise. Real wages have been on a downward curve for nearly three decades. Social programs like Aid to Families with Dependent Children have been eliminated and the rulers are preparing new attacks on Social Security. Meanwhile, the employers are pressing production line speed-up and stretching out the workday, workweek, work year, and work life of the vast majority who toil for a living. All this is aimed at shoring up the bosses’ declining profit rates.

The one million people who took part in the April 25 March for Women’s Lives in Washington, D.C., sent a clear message to the rulers: The right to choose will not be taken away without a fight. It is a precondition for women in the struggle to overcome their second-class status. But as long as society is run by a tiny minority of already super-wealthy families, any gain working people have made in struggle will be eroded. Only by taking power out of the hands of the capitalist exploiters and opening the road to building a society based on human solidarity—a socialist society—will working people be able to make these gains long-lasting. Along this road, defense of a woman’s right to choose and opposition to any measure that undermines it is a vital necessity.
 
 
Related articles:
U.S. ‘Abortion Non-Discrimination Act’ further undermines right to choose  
 
 
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