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	Workers Vanguard No. 924	7 November 2008

For Free Abortion on Demand!

Drop the Charges Against Dr. George Tiller!

For over 30 years, Dr. George Tiller has defended women’s right to abortion. His clinic and its staff members have been the target of “pro-life” terrorists; he survived an assassination attempt in 1993. Dr. Tiller’s Wichita Women’s Health Care Services is one of the few remaining clinics that provide “late-term” abortion services. In Kansas, this very arbitrary calculus of “late-term” is set at 22 weeks. Courageously refusing to buckle under to intimidation and terror, Dr. Tiller now faces up to 19 years in prison, $47,500 in fines and loss of his medical license for misdemeanor charges stemming from the Kansas law, which requires a second “independent” physician to concur on “late-term” abortions. This is an outrage and it must be fought!

The point of such legal restrictions is to hack away at and ultimately overturn the legal right of women to abortion. The labor movement and all defenders of women’s rights have a stake in championing the defense of Dr. Tiller. The Partisan Defense Committee—a non-sectarian, class-struggle legal and social defense organization associated with the Spartacist League—wrote in a 14 July 2007 protest letter to the attorney general of Kansas: “The state’s persecution of George Tiller is part of an all-out assault on abortion rights which anti-woman bigots have sought to overturn for the last three decades through both legislative and judicial means while unleashing ‘god squads’ to terrorize patients and clinic staff and murder doctors. Stop the witchhunt against George Tiller! Drop the charges!”

Tiller’s lawyers have been fighting the constitutionality of the Kansas law and have fought against sinister snooping expeditions to get at patient records. During this current round of attacks, Tiller faced two vigilante-like “citizen-initiated” grand juries seeking thousands of medical records. His Wichita clinic has been vandalized and flooded. In September his attorneys filed for dismissal of the latest charges, documenting nearly 500 examples of legal misconduct in the course of the state’s frenzied campaign against him. The Kansas attorney general’s tactics included an absurd and lying pretext for the inquisition—the claim that the state needed to scour patient records of minors to determine if they were victims of “child rape.” Plans were drawn up for armed raids to seize patient records and employee files. A hearing is scheduled for November 17.

The Kansas law being thrown at Tiller is just one of the many such measures passed following the 1973 Supreme Court Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. Dr. Tiller’s case is a case study in the terror tactics used by anti-abortion bigots for decades. In 1986, Tiller’s clinic was bombed. In the summer of 1991, hordes of Operation Rescue fanatics descended on Wichita for six weeks, blockading his clinic. In 1993, Tiller was shot in both arms by a member of the “Army of God,” a fascistic anti-abortion group that spawned the killer of New York State abortion doctor Barnett Slepian, shot in his home in 1998.

As a result of such unrelenting terror and legal machinations, 87 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion clinics. This year another barrage of anti-abortion measures is on the state ballots. South Dakota has resurrected a ballot measure, which previously failed, for a virtually complete ban on abortion. Colorado has a proposal redefining the term “person” to include a fertilized human egg. The federal courts sustained a similar law this year in South Dakota that forces a doctor to inform women that abortions “terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique living human being.” California has on the ballot in this election a proposition requiring parental notification for women under age 18, the third such proposition since 2005.

The myriad laws that serve to demean and torture women also particularly target the young, working class and poor, who already have limited access to decent health care, childcare, affordable housing or even enough food to feed their families. While we communists defend legal abortion tooth and nail, our demand is for free abortion on demand as part of free quality health care for all! No return to the days of backstreet butchery! Money and connections will continue to buy the best medical care for the wealthy, including abortions. Such is not the case for the working class and poor. “Choice” is clearly not simply a legal question, contrary to the line of bourgeois feminists, many of them movers within the Democratic Party.

The reactionary demagogy of the Republicans is longstanding and obvious enough. But the fact is that there has been little “choice” for poor women since Democrat Jimmy Carter (who now has become an international “human rights” icon) signed into law in 1977 the Hyde Amendment eliminating Medicaid coverage for abortions. During Democrat Clinton’s eight years in office, welfare for mothers was axed, safe access to abortion was effectively gutted across much of the country, as the number of abortion providers plummeted 14 percent between 1992 and 1996, and a huge number of restrictive laws were passed.

In the recent election cycle, Democrats have barely paid lip service to even the formal right to abortion. In July, Barack Obama made clear his opposition to mental health exceptions for “late-term” abortion bans with the reactionary statement that a woman’s rationale for an abortion cannot be “just a matter of feeling blue” (Washington Post, 6 July). Meanwhile, the Democrats have fielded 12 openly anti-abortion Congressional candidates. The reformists who seek to “pressure” this other capitalist party of war and racism have little to offer but wistful whining. The International Socialist Organization wrote: “If the top Democratic contenders aren’t saying anything much this year about protecting abortion rights, it’s because liberal pro-choice organizations haven’t really asked them to” (Socialist Worker online, February 8).

In fact, the concession made by the Supreme Court decision to legalize abortion was not a result of pathetically “asking” politicians to do the right thing. It was the result of social struggle on the streets, linked to a radicalization in U.S. society—the struggle for black liberation and against U.S. imperialism’s losing, dirty war against the Vietnamese people. And such concessions are in turn reversible in a period of its decline. That reversal began with the onset of the Cold War II campaign against the Soviet Union in the late 1970s under Democrat Carter, and the rollback of these gains has been ongoing: from affirmative action, welfare and women’s rights to union rights and the overall living standards of the working class. These attacks were intensified following the counterrevolutionary destruction of the Soviet Union.

The enforced ignorance about safe sex and birth control, led in no small part by religious and anti-abortion bigots, has meant many unwanted pregnancies for young girls. It has also furthered the spread of AIDS. Black teens account for almost 70 percent of new AIDS cases, although they represent only 16 percent of American teenagers. Meanwhile, gay rights have also been further under attack in many parts of the country, as witnessed by Proposition 8 in California banning gay marriage. We defend the rights of gays to marry (and divorce) and to get every benefit of society possible.

It will not be through the voting booth or appeals to the courts, but through the massive mobilization of women, black people, immigrants and all the oppressed under the leadership of the working class and its revolutionary party that the doors to clinics will stay open and decent health care and education will be made available for all. The liberation of women requires nothing less than a socialist revolution which will uproot the private property system and create a socialized planned economy. Only then will the material basis be laid to replace the institution of the family—the main source of women’s oppression under capitalism—with socialized childcare and housework, and bringing women full equality in all areas of social and political life. For women’s liberation through socialist revolution!