No Reliance on Democrats, Courts!

Fight for Free Abortion on Demand!

For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!

The utopian socialist Charles Fourier wrote in the 19th century that the social progress of any society can be determined by the condition of women within it. Today, in cruel and unequal capitalist America, one measure of the degraded status of women is the dismantling of abortion rights. During the first half of 2019, some 400 anti-abortion measures were introduced across the country, and many enacted. Laws criminalizing abortion at early stages in pregnancy, including at just six weeks, have been signed in nine states. The most draconian is Alabama’s near-absolute ban set to take effect in November. Likely to face lengthy court battles, the abortion bans are explicitly designed to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling. Over the past four decades, state forces have erected so many financial and legal barriers to Roe that abortion access is practically nonexistent for the vast majority of working-class, poor and minority women.

Women’s fundamental right to abortion should be a question of basic health care, period. Abortion and contraception allow women to have sex without childbearing and give them some control over reproduction, and therefore their lives. This relative freedom collides with what the ruling class and religion deem women’s “god-given” role as mothers. Abortion is viewed as a threat to the sanctity of the patriarchal family, which is the main source of women’s oppression. The institution of the family is the means through which the bourgeoisie passes on its wealth to offspring and the working class reproduces the next generation of wage slaves. Along with religion, it also serves the rulers ideologically by enforcing gender roles, promoting bourgeois morality and instilling obedience to authority.

The Trump/Pence administration has energized the bible-thumping medievalists who want women to shut up and stay barefoot and pregnant. Yet this White House is hardly the birthplace of anti-woman bigotry. The decades-long backlash against abortion is stamped with bipartisanship. The first major post-Roe attack on abortion rights took place under “born again” Democrat Jimmy Carter, who signed the 1977 Hyde Amendment eliminating abortion coverage for 23 million poor female Medicaid recipients. Both capitalist parties have renewed this ban on federal funding for abortion every single year since.

The Kafkaesque obstacle course that many women must undertake to terminate a pregnancy today was set in place by the landmark 1992 Supreme Court case Planned Parenthood v. Casey. “Pro-life” Democrat and Pennsylvania governor Robert P. Casey defended the state’s restrictions on abortion. The ruling gave clearance for state governments to impose ceaseless stipulations against abortion as long as they did not pose, in the court’s words, an “undue burden.” What followed was unduly burdensome to say the least: from mandatory waiting periods and parental consent rules to TRAP (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers) laws, which continue to drive clinics out of business.

Liberals and feminists of the anti-Trump “resistance” sell the lie that the only way to rescue abortion rights is by voting blue at the ballot box. However they differ in tactics, verbiage and individual views on matters like abortion, Democratic Party politicians are just as committed as Republicans to upholding the capitalist exploitation of the working class, to furthering U.S. imperialist interests and to maintaining the institution of the family. This is not just the case for “establishment” Democrats but also “progressives” like Bernie Sanders, a darling of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Sanders recently claimed that he has consistently voted against the Hyde Amendment. A half-truth is also a lie: Sanders has repeatedly backed government spending bills that included this anti-abortion measure targeting poor women.

We oppose the Democrats on principle because they are a capitalist party. As such, they are an obstacle to women’s emancipation. In September 1972, just months before Roe was handed down, we explained:

“For communists the reason for a complete break with capitalist politicians lies in the understanding that the oppression of women is one of the pillars upon which the capitalist system rests. Struggles against women’s oppression will be bitterly opposed by the capitalist state and its political agents. On occasion reform issues may be supported by particular politicians, but this ‘support’ inevitably comes down to cynical manipulations to garner votes.”

—“SWP/WONAAC Sink in Bourgeois Swamp,” WV No. 11, September 1972

As Marxists, we have always called for unrestricted, free abortion and contraception on demand, as part of a program of free, quality health care for all. These are necessities for all working people, along with paid parental leave and free 24-hour childcare. We link these demands to the fight for socialist revolution, which would lay the basis for socializing the functions of the family. Only with the abolition of classes in an egalitarian socialist society can women achieve true liberation.

The rights to legal abortion and contraception were not a gift from the courts or bourgeois politicians. They were concessions granted during a relatively brief but intense period of convulsive social struggles in the 1960s and ’70s, reflecting a broader radicalization. In the context of battles against Jim Crow segregation in the South and opposition to U.S. imperialism’s war in Vietnam, abortion emerged as a political demand alongside other advances for women, such as greater access to higher education and employment.

While the reforms wrested during this period were important, they were also partial. As shown by the rollback of women’s and black rights since, the ruling class always tries to reverse the gains for workers and the oppressed when such struggles subside. At bottom, reforms under capitalism reflect the relationship of class forces.

The civil rights movement, dominated by a liberal, pro-Democratic Party leadership, could not challenge the root cause of black oppression—the American capitalist system. Nor could the petty-bourgeois women’s liberation movement challenge the foundation of sexual oppression—the family. The crucial element lacking was the leadership of a revolutionary vanguard party, forged in opposition to the Democrats and their reformist hangers-on. Such a party, a tribune of the people, would have united all those on the receiving end of capitalist brutality around a program to overturn the system of exploitation and oppression and to establish the class rule of the workers.

Democrats, Republicans, Supreme Court: Enemies of Women’s Rights

Back in May, nationwide protests demanding “Stop the Bans,” organized by an array of organizations like Planned Parenthood and the ACLU, channeled justified fear and outrage over the assault on abortion into reliance on Democratic presidential hopefuls (and the hopeless Hillary Clinton). The Democratic Party’s professed support to abortion rights is vacuous. Repeatedly pandering to anti-sex Christian fundamentalists, it has implemented or been complicit in the stripping away of access. This has meant that only some women have the “right to choose” while young, immigrant, poor and black women are left to fend for themselves.

Democratic politicians have the support of the feminist establishment that pushes an electoral “movement” to preserve Roe. Feminism represents bourgeois and petty-bourgeois women who seek their own power and prestige in a society they view as entirely gender-based, not class-based. All feminists, including the “radical” variant, support the capitalist system. What is more, many have been bedfellows with the religious right in state campaigns against pornography, prostitution and youth sexuality. Far from offering young women activists a road toward liberation, feminism keeps them wedded to the same puritanical and repressive order that oppresses them.

In the years just prior to Roe, it was the Democrats, with their large Catholic constituency, who opposed abortion while some Republican politicians were behind efforts to decriminalize it. The majority of Republicans during the 1960s regarded abortion as simply a private matter between a woman and her doctor. In 1967, California Republican governor Ronald Reagan signed one of the nation’s most liberal abortion laws; shortly after, New York Republican governor Nelson Rockefeller repealed the state ban on abortion. Of the seven Supreme Court justices who ruled in favor of Roe, five were Republican appointees.

The recent Netflix documentary Reversing Roe (2018) gives a taste of the evolution of abortion as a highly politicized issue attracting the wrath of Christian zealots. By the mid 1970s, Republicans increasingly sought to make common cause with religious voters, especially Catholics, in opposition to abortion and in support of “family values.” Today’s anti-abortion movement has its origins in defense of racial segregation. A Protestant evangelical wing within the Republican Party was cohering as a political force, initially in the drive to maintain tax-exempt status for private, white-only academies. But this burgeoning “moral majority” had to calculate the best way to gain support for its agenda without proselytizing for outright racism. Opposition to abortion and other “moral” issues related to women—from pornography to the Equal Rights Amendment—was the perfect catalyst around which to organize.

The religious right was not simply the progeny of the Republicans, but went mainstream through the Democratic Carter administration, which needed to bolster the standing of U.S. imperialism following its defeat in Vietnam. To carry out Washington’s renewed Cold War drive against the Soviet Union, Carter sought to regiment the population behind God, family and country, reinforcing anxiety around sex and race. In the subsequent Reagan decade, the abortion question fed a domestic crusade against secularism, women’s equality and racial integration. The backlash was accompanied by a massive assault against the labor movement, kicked off by Reagan’s 1981 smashing of the striking PATCO air traffic controllers union using plans drawn up under the Carter administration.

The 1980s and early ’90s were a period of anti-abortion terror, as outfits like Operation Rescue and fundamentalist “god squads” regularly bombed clinics and maimed and murdered abortion providers. On the legal front, the courts and politicians pursued “salami tactics,” slicing away at abortion access bit by bit, to the point that 90 percent of U.S. counties have for years not had a single abortion clinic. Today, the anti-abortion fanatics can claim success on the political and ideological terrain. Abortion is stigmatized as shameful, and the issue has been doused with the (bogus) religious notion that human life begins at conception.

For decades, fighters for abortion rights have been demobilized by the losing strategy of entrusting the Democratic Party and liberal judges with protecting women. Reversing Roe, which was released to coincide with the confirmation hearings of Justice Brett Kavanaugh last year, partakes of this self-defeating approach. Just one example is how the documentary gives Bill Clinton and Barack Obama a “get out of jail free” card for having appointed “pro-choice” justices to shift the balance of the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, it omits key facts: under Clinton, welfare for mothers was axed as the number of abortion providers plunged and clinics closed across the country; under Obama, the Affordable Care Act denied federal funds for abortion and hundreds of new state restrictions on abortion were imposed.

The working masses do not have a stake in who sits on the Supreme Court, an inherently reactionary institution and rogues’ gallery of enemies of the working class, women and black people. Along with the police, prisons and military, the courts are part of the bourgeois state machinery, whose job is to enforce the repressive rule of the capitalists. Over the last 15 years alone, this court of injustice has ruled against black voting rights, prohibited late-term abortions, put limits on Medicaid expansion, overturned affirmative action and pointed a gun at public-sector unions. Reliance on these high-court tyrants for state-sponsored benevolence is perhaps the blindest act of faith.

Racial Oppression and Anti-Woman Bigotry

After a May court ruling on Indiana’s abortion law, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas dug into his anti-woman grab bag and issued a treatise full of historical falsehoods comparing abortion to eugenics. The bourgeois media seized on his invoking of that pseudoscientific doctrine to debate whether advocates for sexual freedom have a hidden genocidal agenda. Quite a ruse by Thomas, a black front man for white supremacy whose political record would put him in the company of the KKK if not for his skin color.

Citing eugenics has long been a weapon in the anti-abortion arsenal, most recently wielded to vilify Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger in order to further right-wing efforts to defund the women’s health care provider. A courageous pioneer in the birth-control movement in the early 1900s, Sanger was both ahead of her time as well as of her time. Committed to educating women and doctors on safe birth control methods, Sanger also endorsed the mainstream eugenics view that social problems were a result of the uncontrolled fertility of the poor. However, as Dorothy Roberts points out in her book Killing the Black Body (1997), “Sanger was motivated by a genuine concern to improve the health of the poor mothers she served rather than a desire to eliminate their stock.”

The racist American eugenics movement did not promote abortion but rather forced sterilization, which was given legal sanction by the Supreme Court’s 1927 Buck v. Bell ruling. In the first half of the 20th century, dozens of states, as well as Puerto Rico, had laws mandating sterilization for those deemed “unfit” and “undesirable,” in other words, the poor, uneducated, sick and minority populations. Tens of thousands were sterilized across the country, particularly black, Latina and Native American women, largely against their will and often without their knowledge. Even after World War II, when eugenics became associated with the Nazi Holocaust, North Carolina expanded its sterilization program, which was not abolished until the mid 1970s.

Racist government-led medical experimentation and state eugenics programs are part of the long history of atrocities committed against black people. Recognition of this reality has been manipulated to stoke fears that birth control and abortion amount to black genocide, a myth peddled by black nationalist demagogues like Louis Farrakhan and some black preachers. Today, a few have cynically hijacked the slogan “black lives matter” to discourage black women from exercising their right to prevent or terminate a pregnancy. Such backward thinking—that a woman is a baby-making vessel whose place is in the home—shares common ground with the racist state forces intent on condemning black families to a living hell.

None of this belies the obvious: Access to contraception and abortion was, and continues to be, a huge benefit to all women. The majority of black people in this country continue to support the legal right to abortion as an essential feature of health care that should not be infringed upon by the government. In a society founded on chattel slavery, black women have long been brutally denied control of their bodies and livelihoods. Ground down by entrenched racial and class oppression, they suffer from substandard medical service, housing and education. They are also subjected to anti-woman chauvinism, stigmatized as “welfare queens” and criminalized as “unfit mothers.”

When abortion was outlawed, black and minority women faced the greatest risk of state repression and physical harm, including death, from back-alley butchers or self-induced abortions. In the years immediately following Roe, these women for the first time had wide-ranging access to skilled physicians, and maternal mortality dropped dramatically. Attacks on facilities like Planned Parenthood that provide crucial health care, including prenatal and postpartum care, have been particularly disastrous for the black, minority and poor women they serve. Southern states with high populations of black women have the most stringent abortion restrictions, the fewest clinics and the worst health care. Black women, who account for some 30 percent of all abortions, would face the most devastating consequences with the banning of abortion.

A Socialist Perspective for Women’s Emancipation

In the U.S., the democratic right to abortion raises the question of women’s freedom, which itself is inseparable from the freeing of all working people from capitalist exploitation. Only the multiracial working class, whose labor produces the wealth of society, has the power and interest to shatter the capitalist order. As Marxist revolutionaries, we fight to change the consciousness of the working class and break illusions in the capitalist profit system and its political parties, illusions fostered by the current labor misleadership.

For the working class to take up the fight for women’s emancipation would require a great leap in consciousness, and for that to happen, a revolutionary leadership is key. The issue of abortion is polarizing among working people in this country. It is through the intervention of a Leninist vanguard party in class and social struggles that the proletariat can overcome its own divisions—racial, gender, religious—which are sown by the rulers. A revolutionary workers party would mobilize the proletariat behind the causes of the oppressed, such as free abortion on demand, equality and integration for black people and full citizenship rights for all immigrants, as part of bringing working-class power to bear against the common enemy.

The vast bulk of the left has the very opposite strategy: peddling some version of Democratic Party “lesser evilism” to workers, black people and women. In a 29 July article, the reformists around the publication Left Voice promote their call for a “mass strike for reproductive justice”—nothing more than empty bombast with pro-worker coloration for the same dead-end bourgeois pressure politics. The main vehicle proposed for this so-called militant action is the Democratic Socialists of America, a component part of the Democratic Party. Left Voice urges the DSA leadership to organize the shutting down of “key parts of the U.S. infrastructure when Roe vs. Wade is challenged at the Supreme Court.” That Left Voice supporters are themselves members of the DSA is a telltale sign of how beholden they are to begging a wing of the ruling class to wage a fight on behalf of women.

To free women from their deep-seated special oppression will take a workers revolution that expropriates the wealth and productive capacity of society and organizes a planned, socialized economy at the service of human need. A workers government would crucially fight to extend proletarian rule worldwide. Only then can we undertake the profound changes in the fabric of everyday life that will replace the institution of the family with collectivized childcare and housework, enabling women to fully participate in social and political life. This is the perspective that the Bolsheviks sought to implement after the 1917 Russian Revolution, which gave flesh and blood to the Marxist program (see Quote of the Week, page 2). Three years later, Soviet Russia was the first country in the world to grant women legal, free abortion.