Detainees Denied Abortion

Full Citizenship Rights for All Immigrants!

In a frontal attack on immigrants and women’s rights, the U.S. government recently sought to compel a pregnant refugee teenager to give birth against her will. The Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), the federal agency that takes custody of the tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors caught crossing the U.S. border, stopped the 17-year-old girl, named in court documents as “Jane Moe,” from going to an abortion clinic. In January, a federal court overruled the ORR after the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed suit on her behalf.

This was the fourth case in the past year that a pregnant immigrant teen was forced to sue the government to obtain an abortion, a legal medical procedure. The ACLU, which aptly characterized the government’s actions as holding these young women hostage, has filed a class-action suit aimed at preventing other detainees from facing the same peril. While the ORR was stopped from doing violence to these four women, they remain in danger of deportation.

The largest jailer in the world, the United States has the biggest immigration detention system as well. Today, the majority of unaccompanied immigrant children and teens ensnared by U.S. Border Patrol are fleeing from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico, countries ravaged by U.S. imperialism. At least one of the four young women was a rape victim in her country of origin. Seeking to escape from desperate poverty and violence, most migrant women are physically and sexually assaulted on their way to the U.S.

Those who make it here only to fall into the hands of the U.S. government face new dangers in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, notorious for their inhumane treatment of detainees, poor medical care and unsafe food. Conditions at ORR facilities are often also deplorable. Formal constitutional rights are regularly denied, not least the right to due process, as the ACLU emphasizes. We say: Free all the detainees! Anyone who has made it to this country has the right to live here, with full citizenship rights! No deportations!

The ORR is headed by Trump appointee Scott Lloyd, formerly a lawyer for the Knights of Columbus, a staunchly anti-abortion Catholic organization. In September, under a new policy laid down by Lloyd, the first of the four women (“Jane Doe”) was refused transport to a health care center for an abortion that had already been approved. ORR argued that this would be “facilitating abortion” and threatened the shelter that was holding her with loss of its federal grant if it allowed her to keep her appointment. Instead, she was taken to a religiously operated “crisis pregnancy center” for anti-abortion counseling. In December, Lloyd personally intervened in the case of “Jane Poe,” a rape victim, charging that the abortion she wanted might “further traumatize” her and would be “violence against an innocent life”!

When challenged in court over the cases of “Jane Poe” and “Jane Roe,” the Justice Department argued: “The government has strong and constitutionally legitimate interests in promoting its interest in life, in refusing to facilitate abortion, and in not providing incentives for pregnant minors to illegally cross the border to obtain elective abortions while in federal custody.” A government lawyer sneered that minors who want to terminate pregnancies can just leave the country—never mind that in El Salvador and Honduras, for example, abortion is illegal even to save a mother’s life. Essentially arguing that undocumented women have no rights that the U.S. government is bound to respect, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton railed that “Texas must not become a sanctuary state for abortions.”

During his campaign, Trump went out of his way to court the racist anti-immigrant and anti-abortion bigots. In January, he made history as the first sitting U.S. president to address the annual anti-abortion march in Washington, D.C., via live video feed. Recently, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Civil Rights created a “Conscience and Religious Freedom Division” to “protect” health workers who object to abortions.

Like the ORR, the HHS is now packed to the gills with off-the-deep-end ideologues for anti-abortion, anti-contraception and abstinence-only nonsense. An exposé in the New England Journal of Medicine (14 June 2017) cites government “health” officials pushing lies that condoms don’t protect against STDs and that abortions and contraceptives can cause cancer, infertility and mental health problems. One adviser to the president, Katy Talento, earlier claimed that a woman’s use of birth control risks “breaking your uterus for good.”

The Roe v. Wade decision establishing women’s right to abortion came in 1973, after a period of significant social struggle in this country. But like any gain won under capitalism, it is reversible, and the availability of abortion has always been limited for working-class and poor women, many black and Latina. The Spartacist League has always raised the demand for free abortion on demand. Over the decades, terrorism against abortion clinics, legal challenges, restrictions and other attacks have massively chipped away at the availability of abortion; 90 percent of the counties in the U.S. have not even one abortion clinic.

Unsurprisingly, Texas is a leader at implementing the “pro-life” forces’ strategy of imposing ever more restrictions, such as medically unnecessary regulations for clinics, which force many to raise fees or just close down. Working women, especially when they have to travel significant distances, are squarely targeted by rules like those requiring a second clinic visit before a patient can obtain an abortion. Lack of access has forced many women to turn back to dangerous means to seek to terminate their unwanted pregnancies.

Both the Republicans and Democrats are responsible. In 1977, Democratic president Jimmy Carter signed the Hyde Amendment into law, banning the use of federal funds to cover abortions; it has been renewed every year since, regardless of which party was in the White House. In order for “Jane Moe” and the other three detainees to obtain their abortions, funds had to be raised from private sources.

The U.S. government’s war on immigrants is similarly a bipartisan policy. Trump inherited a vast deportation machine from his predecessors. In 1996, President Bill Clinton enacted the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act allowing even longtime permanent residents to be deported for minor offenses, and his “Operation Gatekeeper” militarized the border. Democratic president Barack Obama deported record numbers of immigrants and vastly expanded the detention system to trap nearly 360,000 people in over 200 immigration jails nationwide in 2016 alone.

While the Democrats sometimes take the opportunity to posture as defenders of abortion rights, when push comes to shove they will always accede to the anti-abortion crusade, which is driven by conservative social values that they fully share. To appear more decent than Trump is cheap! The Democrats are the “kinder, gentler” face of capitalism, a system that leans on religious backwardness, along with racism and sexism, to keep the working masses divided among themselves and the capitalists in power.

Obama was no exception. He attempted to reverse the FDA’s approval of over-the-counter access to “Plan B” contraception for teens and signed an executive order in 2010 to ensure that federal funds for plans under his Affordable Care Act were “not used for abortion services.” Now the Republicans, again in the driver’s seat, are mounting this new attack on the most vulnerable women—undocumented immigrant teens—as part of a broader assault on women’s right to abortion. This underscores that the struggles of all the oppressed are indivisible.

No amount of tinkering with the capitalist system and its legal codes can liberate women, because women’s oppression is deeply embedded in this system and all previous class societies. At the same time, we defend Roe v. Wade, as we do any gain for women’s rights, however limited, against the continuing efforts to overturn it. For us, this struggle forms part of the building of the future revolutionary party of the working class, necessary to overturn capitalist rule and open the road to socialism. Such a party must be, in Lenin’s words, a “tribune of the people,” championing the needs of all the oppressed, and capable of welding them together with the power of the working class in the fight to bring down our common class enemy.