Vol. 77/No. 14      April 15, 2013

The 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling was a major victory for women in this country and for all working people.

Without the right to decide when and whether to bear a child, women cannot participate as equals in economic, social and political life. And without the fight for women’s emancipation, the solidarity workers need to mount effective resistance against the bosses and wage a victorious revolutionary struggle to take political power out of their hands is impossible.

The Supreme Court ruling reflected changing attitudes among men and women and a growing rejection of women’s second-class status.

During and after World War II, millions of women were drawn into the workforce. Scientific advances for the first time made possible safe and effective contraception and medical procedures like abortion.

In the 1950s and ’60s, the smashing of Jim Crow segregation by the powerful working-class battle for Black rights and the mass protests against Washington’s war in Vietnam had a deep social impact and opened the door to a growing movement for women’s rights.

Equal Rights Amendment

At first, broad public support for the measure pushed Republican and Democratic politicians to back the measure. By 1973, 30 state legislatures had ratified the ERA, out of the 38 required for the amendment to become law.

Shortly after Roe v. Wade passed, politicians of both capitalist parties began to push back the gains it registered, leading to the 1976 adoption of the Hyde Amendment, which cut off Medicaid funding for abortions.

A bipartisan front against passage of the ERA began to emerge. Ultimately, the ERA was defeated, falling three states short of the total needed for ratification by the June 30, 1982, deadline.

Assaults on abortion rights in the intervening decades have primarily focused on changes in state laws, severely limiting access. These attacks have largely gone unanswered. Today 97 percent of counties outside of metropolitan areas have no facilities that provide abortion. Nevertheless, most working people continue to support women’s right to choose, regardless what opinions they may have on the procedure.

The assault on abortion rights is the main front against women today and part of the broader attack on the working class.

Under the impact of the capitalist economic downturn, which began in the 1970s and has accelerated since 2008, the propertied rulers have sought to foist a maximum burden on individual working-class families — above all working-class women — to shoulder the responsibilities of caring for the young, old and sick. This is what inroads made against Aid to Families with Dependent Children led by President Bill Clinton in 1996 was really about.

At the same time, liberal pundits and meritocratic political figures like President Barack Obama have heralded as a big step forward for progressive social values the hearing by the Supreme Court of two cases concerning same-sex marriage.

“In the centers of elite opinion—in particular the universities and the editorial offices of metropolitan newspapers,” Steven Presser, a professor at Northwestern School of Law, wrote in the March 26 New York Times, “the propriety of same-sex marriage is now accepted virtually without questions.”

A few points are useful to remember here.

First, the Supreme Court is behind, not ahead, of changing attitudes among working people on this form of prejudice and bigotry used by the capitalist rulers to divide the working class.

These changes are partially rooted in the revulsion working people felt as the AIDS epidemic swept the U.S., afflicting primarily gay men, intravenous drug users and hemophiliacs.

Growing protests by gay rights groups and others helped draw attention to how discriminatory laws on marriage prevented victims of AIDS from using their companion’s health care plans and barred involvement of companions in their partner’s treatment.

Second, there is nothing inherently progressive in being gay, lesbian or heterosexual, or, for that matter, in getting married, as is often presented by bourgeois-minded radicals who have disdain for workers and view anyone who opposes this view as reactionary. What is of concern to workers is getting rid of laws that allow the capitalist state to interfere in people’s personal lives. The question is one of equal protection under the law and the fight against all forms of bigotry.

And third, any legal gain made by gay people under capitalism stands on shaky ground, especially in the context of deepening attacks on women’s rights.

Those seeking to restrict the scope of any Supreme Court ruling curtailing discrimination against gays in marriage law point to remarks made by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Court liberal, to an audience at Columbia Law School in February 2012, where she criticized the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. “It’s not that the judgment was wrong,” Ginsburg said, “but it moved too far, too fast.”

The movement for gay rights emerged at the end of the 1960s in the U.S. under the impact of the growing fight for women’s rights, and remains inexorably bound to it.

A growing international issue

As the working class grows throughout the semicolonial world today, from Indonesia to Bangladesh, millions of women are being drawn into the workforce, as their sisters in Europe and North America were before them. This has resulted in intertwined struggles for workers’ rights, women’s rights and the right to abortion.

Today the rulers in some 70 countries bar abortion completely or restrict it to cases deemed necessary to save a woman’s life. But the tide of history moves against those who would keep it so.
 
 
Related articles:
Philadelphia trial of doctor targets abortion rights
NDakota anti-abortion laws part of stepped-up attack on women’s rights
Supreme Court hears gay rights suits amid wide opposition to discrimination
 
 
 
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