Under the banner of opposing “gender oppression,” middle-class left and liberal groups are dealing blows to the fight for women’s emancipation.
In response to recent attacks on women’s right to choose abortion, the American Civil Liberties Union Sept. 18 tweeted out a 1993 quote by former Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had said that the “decision whether or not to bear a child is central to a woman’s life.” But everywhere that Ginsburg said “woman,” the ACLU replaced it with “person” and every reference to “she” was replaced with “they.”
To most working people that’s just absurd. Only women get pregnant. Regardless of how you dress, what surgeries you have had, or how you “self-identify,” it’s a scientific fact that there are just two sexes — male and female.
Under capitalism women remain an oppressed sex, despite important advances won over the last several decades, with more women working in all kinds of jobs. But today women still earn less money on average than men and the bulk of child-rearing and domestic chores falls on their backs.
But the ACLU falsification of the Ginsburg quote is not a joke. It’s part and parcel of the anti-scientific views being promoted in middle-class and liberal circles. Claiming “people without uteruses” need the right to abortion, and “edits” like those made by the ACLU, are part of a deadly counterrevolution against the fight for women’s rights and an attack on the interests of the working class, men and women alike.