Vol. 77/No. 24      June 24, 2013

The fight to defend a woman’s right to choose abortion — from El Salvador to Ireland to the U.S. and Canada — is a crucial issue for the working class.

Without the right to decide when or whether to bear a child, women cannot participate as equals in economic, social and political life. Without breaking down these barriers, the solidarity the working class needs to fight the bosses — and to wage a victorious revolutionary struggle to take power out of their hands — is impossible.

Since World War II, there have been significant changes in the relationship of class forces that advance the fighting capacity of the working class. Women in the U.S. and in other advanced capitalist countries have joined the workforce in ever greater numbers, boosting women’s self-confidence and expectations and transforming attitudes of their male coworkers.

Out of these social changes, women began to fight against second-class status, demanding equal pay and job opportunities. Their fight built on the shoulders of the massive proletarian battle to overthrow Jim Crow segregation and street mobilizations against the U.S. war in Vietnam.

The 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision and the 1988 Canadian Supreme Court ruling decriminalizing abortion registered these social advances.

In recent decades the working class, more than ever including both men and women, has grown substantially across the semicolonial world through relentless expansion of capitalist production and trade. Inevitably, this has led to growing working-class battles, among them fights for women’s rights.

The fight for a woman’s right to choose abortion has come to the fore from El Salvador and Uruguay to Indonesia, Ireland and the Middle East. More than one-quarter of the world’s population lives in countries where the propertied rulers severely restrict or completely bar abortion for the toiling majority.

Advances in the battle for women’s rights have been met with stiff resistance. In the U.S., attacks on access to abortion mean that in 87 percent of counties across the country there is no abortion provider. Opponents of women’s rights are pushing laws requiring humiliating, badgering “counseling”; waiting periods; invasive ultrasounds; and other obstacles.

To the bosses, gains for women’s rights are a threat, limiting the profits they reap from women’s oppression and their ability to foist the maximum burden for care of children and the elderly on the family.

The fight for women’s rights is, and will increasingly be, a central part of working-class struggles worldwide.  
 
 
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