Vol. 77/No. 4      February 4, 2013

Without the right to decide when and whether to bear a child, women cannot participate as equals in economic, social and political life. Without this, the solidarity the working class needs to meet growing attacks of the bosses—and to wage a victorious revolutionary struggle to take political power—is impossible.

“Seven in 10 Americans believe Roe v. Wade should stand,” the Wall Street Journal reported Jan. 22. The poll the paper conducted along with NBC News reflects the long-term transformation in attitudes toward women’s rights. These figures are up slightly from 20 years before.

A companion article in the same issue of the Journal is headlined, “Abortion foes mark gains by targeting clinics, abortion providers.” Ongoing attacks championed by sections of the propertied rulers have placed new restrictions on access to abortion, especially affecting women in the working class and in rural areas.

How was right to choose won?

These changes, combined with the political impact of the smashing of Jim Crow segregation by the mass working-class struggle for Black rights in the United States and the far-reaching radicalization of youth reflected in the mass mobilizations against the war in Vietnam, affected the consciousness of both men and women on women’s rights.

A section of the women’s rights movement that began to emerge in the late 1960s campaigned for the right to choose abortion. Demonstrations, teach-ins and other activities began to be organized. At that time an estimated one in four women had an abortion at some point in their lives, even though this meant risking an illegal and often dangerous procedure.

In 1969, the year before New York State legalized abortion, nearly a quarter of pregnancy-related admissions to New York City hospitals were for complications from illegal abortions. Of the hundreds who died every year from botched abortions, working women were the most effected, and 80 percent were Black or Latina.

Social attitudes toward abortion shifted rapidly. In 1968 polls reported that 15 percent of the population thought women had a right to abortion. By 1969 the number rose to 40 percent. By 1971 it was 50 percent.

It was in this context that on Jan. 22, 1973, the Supreme Court voted 7-2 to strike down all laws restricting abortion up to 24 weeks. In part, the court acted on behalf of the ruling class, which hoped to forestall a broader fight for women’s rights.

Defending abortion rights

Opponents of women’s rights have pressed to chip away at access to abortion through more and more state and federal regulations. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 43 state laws were adopted last year and 92 in 2011 making it harder for a woman to get an abortion. A new Louisiana law, for instance, requires women to wait 24 hours between the time they undergo a mandatory ultrasound and the time they can have an abortion. Unless the pregnancy is the result of a rape, the woman is required to listen to a description of the ultrasound.

The only clinic that provides abortions in the state of Mississippi is threatened with closure because local hospitals refuse admitting privileges to the doctors who work there. Some 87 percent of counties have no facility that provides abortions. That figure jumps to 97 percent outside of metropolitan areas, making it especially hard for women in rural areas to get an abortion.

Most hospitals no longer perform abortions. This simple medical procedure has been increasingly restricted to specialized clinics that become targets for foes of women’s rights. Harassment of women going into these clinics is common. Doctors and staff have been targets of bombings and assassinations.

There were a number of important battles to defend clinics and the right to abortion in the early 1990s. In the summer of 1991, thousands of rightists and other opponents of abortion rights led by Operation Rescue descended upon Wichita, Kan. They blocked clinics there for six weeks. Leaders of traditional women’s rights organizations, such as the National Organization for Women, refused to organize a countermobilization to defend the clinics, instead relying on elected officials, the cops and the courts. But the authorities stalled and the clinics were shut for seven weeks.

Emboldened, Operation Rescue announced its next campaign: a siege of clinics in Buffalo, N.Y., in 1992. But this time supporters of women’s rights mobilized. Some 1,500 people, many of them youth, turned out to defend the clinics there, outnumbering the rightists three-to-one. By the end of the second week, Operation Rescue had failed to close a single clinic. Momentum had shifted.

In April of that year half a million people marched in the streets of Washington, D.C., the largest abortion rights march ever in the U.S. In 1995, 100,000 turned out in the capital. These powerful mobi-lizations of defenders of women’s rights—not reliance on Democratic or Republican politicians, or their cops and courts—pushed the right-wing thugs into retreat.

But the fact is, such mobilizations have been few and far between in recent years, giving opponents of women’s rights the initiative for now.

The social changes that led to the victory of safe, legal abortion in the United States have not been reversed. In fact it is a growing question for the working class worldwide—from Uruguay to Indonesia—as women are drawn increasingly into the working class by the inexorable workings of capital and insist on the ability to function as equals in society.

Defending a woman’s right to control her body, including deciding whether and when to bear a child, remains a key question for the working class today.  
 
 
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