Defend Planned Parenthood, abortion rights!

The Nov. 27 attack at a Planned Parenthood clinic that provides abortions in Colorado and the strident political campaign to demonize and defund Planned Parenthood pose sharply the need for the labor movement and all defenders of women’s rights to speak out and mobilize: Defend women’s right to choose abortion! Stop the attacks on Planned Parenthood!

The right to control one’s body, to decide whether and when to bear children, is fundamental to women’s equality. Ever since the Supreme Court was obliged to decriminalize abortion in 1973 — under the pressure of a rising women’s movement on the shoulders of the massive working-class struggle for Black rights — opponents of women’s rights have waged a relentless campaign to drive the medical procedure out of hospitals and limit access, especially for working-class women.

This chipping away has accelerated in recent years, with hundreds of new state laws placing restrictions on the right to choose — from “waiting periods” and parental consent laws to onerous regulations designed to force clinics to close.

Working people are paying the price for the refusal of labor officials and the main women’s rights organizations over many years to mobilize a nationwide campaign of public action to bring to bear the broad support that exists for women’s right to choose abortion. Instead, they tell people don’t rock the boat, work to elect and rely on “pro-choice” capitalist politicians.

In the early 1990s Operation Rescue attempted to physically shut down abortion clinics across the country. Defenders of women’s rights, after some early blows, effectively countered the rightists with mass mobilizations that kept the clinics open in Buffalo, New York, and across the country. It’s an example of reliance on independent political action of working people — not on the capitalist politicians and their cops and courts — that’s needed today.

Pushed back by this victory for women’s rights, a small layer of rightists lashed out, assassinating several abortion providers and bombing clinics between 1993 and 1998. In 2009 Dr. George Tiller, one of a handful of U.S. doctors who performed late-term abortions, was murdered by Scott Roeder, who had a long history of anti-abortion violence. These were acts of weakness, which won no support within the working class or more broadly.

There’s no evidence this kind of terrorist anti-abortion campaign is starting again. But the steady drumbeat against the right to choose abortion, including the political campaign against Planned Parenthood — especially when not answered by the mobilization of working people to defend women’s rights — increases the odds of individuals carrying out acts like the attack in Colorado.

Because of historic social changes over the past 50 years, women now make up 47 percent of the workforce. To fully participate alongside their brothers on the job — and in battles to defend wages and working conditions — women’s ability to control their reproductive lives is crucial.

Many working people today are gaining confidence in our capacity to organize and fight through concrete experiences — in the movement for $15 an hour and a union, in fights against police brutality and in union battles like the strike against two-tier wages at Kohler in Wisconsin, to name a few. A public fight to defend a woman’s right to abortion will be part of strengthening and unifying the working class in these struggles. It’s a fight the entire labor movement must take on.

Related articles:
Colo. shootings highlight attack on Planned Parenthood

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