The Socialist Workers Party campaign is urging working people to vote “no” on Proposition 73. Mandating parental notification and a 48-hour waiting period before women under 18 may get an abortion, this measure is an attack on a woman’s right to choose abortion and the right to privacy. It is directed at the right of all women to control their own bodies.

The freedom to decide whether and when to bear children is a fundamental precondition to women winning full equality—from the ability to make decisions on education and employment, to being active in unions and in social and political life.

Defending this right is vital to the interests of the entire working class. Bosses profit and workers are weakened by keeping women in second-sex status. Using such discrimination and prejudices, employers pay women less, which drags down wages for all workers.

Since abortion was decriminalized in 1973, Democrats and Republicans have led an unrelenting offensive to chip away at access—including through eliminating Medicaid and other public funding for abortion, imposing waiting periods, parental notification or consent laws for minors, and the demagogically misnamed “partial-birth abortion” ban. Only 13 percent of counties in the United States have an abortion provider today.

These attacks come down disproportionately hard on working-class women. They are accompanied by lies such as “abortion is murder,” which Proposition 73 feeds into by defining abortion as causing “the death of an unborn child.” Many “pro-choice” Democrats reinforce such arguments when they proclaim abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare.” Or when they stop from even using the word abortion, referring only to “choice” in the abstract.

The U.S. rulers’ aim in targeting women’s rights is to roll back social gains working people made through the civil rights movement and related struggles of the 1960s and ’70s. They seek to reinforce women’s second-class status as part of pushing more of the burden of caring for the young, ill, and elderly onto individuals and their families. When the Clinton administration took the lead in eliminating “welfare as we know it” in 1996—the first major inroad against the Social Security Act of the 1930s—it dealt a major blow to women’s rights.

Working people and our allies need to mobilize independently of the twin parties of capitalism to defend the right to choose abortion, not subordinate this fight to electing Democrats or other capitalist politicians. The massive April 2004 march on Washington to keep abortion safe and legal, as well as the mobilizations that put a stop to clinic blockades by rightists in the 1990s, show the extent of popular support for a woman’s right to choose. This has been the decisive factor in defending Roe v. Wade, the ruling that decriminalized abortion—not a predominance of sympathetic judges on the U.S. Supreme Court.

The SWP opposes all restrictions on access to abortion. We also reject any population control schemes like forced sterilization or other tools of racism and class prejudice, and oppose using abortion for birth control, as the Stalinist regimes did for decades in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Teenagers and all other women should have free and accessible contraception of choice.

Join us in campaigning to defeat Proposition 73!
 
 
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California: campaign launched to defeat Proposition 73 restricting access to abortion  
 
 
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