Vol. 75/No. 25      July 11, 2011

The letter below is from two readers in Wisconsin who canceled their subscription. They say they signed up during protests against the law initiated by Gov. Scott Walker taking away most collective bargaining rights for state employees.

“As much as we agree with some of what you write,” they say, “we were greatly displeased to see the latest issue [June 6] that so prominently supported ‘abortion rights.’ What an irony. The one group pledged to defend the vulnerable will not defend unborn babies?” Legal abortion, they write, “has done more damage than you can possibly imagine.”  
 
Ending back-alley butchery
In face, among other factors, of a rising movement for women’s rights, the U.S. Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in 1973. Before then, working-class women with an unintended pregnancy either had to attempt a dangerous self-induced abortion, find someone who would perform the procedure (often at exorbitant prices and using unsanitary methods), or have the baby they were unable or not ready to raise.

The human toll when abortion was illegal is staggering. In 1930 nearly 2,700 women in the United States died of illegal abortions. While the number dropped as medicine advanced, in 1965 about 200 women died from botched abortions, 17 percent of all maternal deaths that year. Many more were maimed. In 1968, for every 14 women giving birth at the Los Angeles County Medical Center, one woman was admitted with abortion complications.

Not all women faced these barbaric conditions. Those from wealthy or better-off middle-class families usually could afford a safe procedure. But for women from working-class or farm families, it was a life-or-death matter. Like other social conditions afflicting working people, the consequences of “back-alley abortions” fell heaviest on women who were Black or Latina. In New York City in the 1960s, one in four childbirth-related deaths for women who were Caucasian was the result of an illegal abortion. The figure for Blacks and Puerto Ricans was one in two.

Capitalist politicians and groups that oppose a woman’s right to choose seek to divert attention from the butchery women faced when the procedure was illegal by raising the issue of “unborn babies.” While there are many conflicting views about when life “begins,” it is a matter of simple fact that the criminalization of abortion killed thousands of women. Why return to that era?  
 
A working-class question
The demand to make it a woman’s choice whether or not to proceed with a pregnancy arose, above all, as a product of growing numbers of women entering the workforce during and after World War II. Women gained greater confidence in their ability to be productive members of society on an equal footing with men.

As more and more women cast off the stereotype that their place was in the bedroom, nursery, and kitchen, they began to confront all the reactionary attitudes, practices, and laws holding them back. Chief among these were laws making it a criminal offense for a woman to decide for herself whether to carry a pregnancy to term, as well as the bourgeois social norms stigmatizing women as “sluts” if they had sexual relations for reasons other than to reproduce.

Defending a woman’s right to choose is a class question—one of decisive importance to the working class and unions. Without the right to decide when or whether to bear a child, women cannot participate as equals in economic, social, and political life. And without women’s equality, the solidarity the working class needs to fight the bosses—and to wage a victorious revolutionary struggle to take political power out of their hands—is impossible.

Workers determined to end capitalist exploitation and all the forms of oppression it perpetuates must fight uncompromisingly for the right of the woman—only the woman, not the state, the church, doctors, parents, husbands, or boyfriends—to decide to bear a child. If women cannot control their own bodies, they will never be able to struggle effectively for their full emancipation.  
 
Not a ‘population policy’
Not only does the Militant oppose all laws or practices denying a woman the right to choose, we are equally intransigent in rejecting the use of abortion by any government as a “population policy.”

We speak out against the privileged social caste and growing capitalist layers in China—and the misnamed Communist Party that acts on their behalf—which force women to end pregnancies if they already have one child.

In the latter half of the 20th century, we condemned the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union for its brutal use of abortion as virtually the only form of available birth control. Just as in the 1930s we exposed Stalin’s effort to boost the population (cynically extolling the “joys of motherhood”) by reversing the right to abortion guaranteed from the very first days of the victorious October 1917 revolution by the Bolshevik-led workers and peasants government.

We reject the U.S. government’s racist campaign that, by 1968, had sterilized one-third of all women in Puerto Rico, as well as the forced sterilization of countless African American women prior to the conquests of the Black struggle in recent decades.

The Cuban Revolution and its proletarian leadership have set an example in this regard. Not only did the revolutionary government make abortion accessible to women as a right from the outset in 1959. But as some in the government began emulating bureaucratic layers in the Soviet Union and relying on the procedure as a primary method of contraception, the Federation of Cuban Women started fighting back and campaigning to reduce the rising rate of abortion.
 

Even in face of the worst of penalties and dangers to their lives, women will choose abortion when there is no alternative. The question for the working class is, will women do so under safe legal conditions? Or will the days of back-alley butchers return?

Like the readers whose letter is printed here, tens of thousands of women and men took part earlier this year in mobilizations against union busting in Wisconsin. As workers’ resistance grows to the capitalist crisis and assaults by the employers and their government, women will continue to make up a growing portion of the ranks and leadership of coming class battles.

The same working-class solidarity we organize for public employees under attack, or for workers engaged in a fight against capitalist employers, needs to be extended to struggles for equality and human dignity by women, Blacks, immigrants, and all those oppressed under capitalist social relations. That includes active support for women’s right to control their own bodies, free from government interference or restrictions of any kind.
 
 
Related articles:
Letter from two readers
Right to abortion central to fight for women’s equality  
 
 
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