Free Abortion on Demand!

Defend Mississippi Abortion Clinic!

The fundamentalist fanatics of Operation Save America (OSA), a reincarnation of the murderous Operation Rescue, have completed an eight-day siege from July 15 through July 22 at the last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi. In addition to targeting the Jackson Women’s Health Organization clinic, OSA rampaged at some two dozen other locations in the Jackson area, towing five-foot-tall posters of fetuses, screaming through loudspeakers, burning a Koran and a gay rights rainbow flag. A second week of intimidation and confrontation has been threatened by Oh Saratoga!, another crazed emanation from Operation Rescue.

Six clinics have been forced to close in the state during the past decade, leaving the Jackson clinic the sole survivor for the last two years. Groups like OSA have been emboldened by the bipartisan assault on abortion rights, and their stated strategy is to make Mississippi the “first domino to be tipped” in ending abortion in every state. OSA has similarly besieged clinics elsewhere, from Colorado to Texas to North Carolina.

The Jackson clinic annually serves some 4,000 women. Many travel many hours to endure a 24-hour waiting period, which forces them to miss work, scramble for nonexistent day care and sometimes sleep overnight in their cars in the clinic parking lot. Teens whose only source of school “sex education” is ignorant “abstinence only” tirades must get signed consent from both parents. Mississippi also has the nation’s most sweeping “conscience clause,” which allows health workers to refuse to provide abortion-related services or referrals.

Jackson is a 70 percent black city in the poorest state in the nation, where over 20 percent of the population lives below the poverty level. Mississippi has been devastated even further by the racist capitalists’ abandonment of the victims of Hurricane Katrina. In the Mississippi Delta region, the poorest section of the state, there are no abortion options. The Jackson clinic regularly receives phone calls from women asking what they can do to end their pregnancies themselves. Some 87 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion clinics, making abortion virtually inaccessible in wide swathes of the country.

Groups including Anti-Racist Action, the American Civil Liberties Union, Feminist Majority Foundation, National Organization for Women (NOW), Radical Women, Unity Mississippi and World Can’t Wait have courageously participated in protests in Jackson against the anti-abortion bigots, enduring death threats. But the political strategy of the protest organizers rests on appealing to the capitalist state’s courts, cops and politicians. On July 21 and 22, a coalition including NOW gathered to appeal to the legislators at the capitol, whose state flag incorporates the Confederate stars and bars, symbol of slavery. Michelle Colon of NOW invited anyone opposed to the “tactics” of OSA to join, even groups that are not “pro-choice”!

Throughout the 1990s, bourgeois feminist groups such as NOW demobilized protest in defense of abortion clinics by preaching reliance on the Democratic Clinton administration. During Clinton’s eight years in office, 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 laws chipping away at abortion rights were passed. While occasionally paying lip service to women’s formal right to abortion, the Democrats spout the “family values” rhetoric of the Republicans to win over their religious constituency.

On July 25, the U.S. Senate passed a bill criminalizing anyone who takes an underage girl across a state line to avoid parental notification laws. Last year, the House passed an even more comprehensive national parental notification law, and Bush promises to sign any version that comes to him. Forty-four states have parental notification or consent laws on the books. Down with “squeal rules”—abortion rights for teens!

For decades anti-woman bigots along with the KKK and other fascists have terrorized women seeking abortions. Seven abortion clinic doctors and workers have been killed. State legislatures have passed every possible restriction to strangle access to abortion. Democrats and Republicans alike have axed welfare and slashed medical care. What is urgently needed is a fight to defend and extend women’s rights, including the right to abortion. We wrote in the Programmatic Statement of the Spartacist League/U.S.:

“In seeking to forge a Leninist party as a tribune of the people championing the rights of all the exploited and oppressed, we fight for the workers movement to take up the struggle for women’s rights. We call for mass mobilizations backed up by the social power of the labor movement to defend abortion clinics against rightist mobs. We place no reliance on the bourgeois state, the enemy of women’s rights, to defend the clinics. We fight for free abortion on demand as part of the necessary struggle for free, quality health care for all, in order to ensure that legal abortion can become a reality for working, minority and immigrant women.”

The legal right to abortion was won as a result of the massive social struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, the civil rights movement and the radicalization that took place during the Vietnam War years. This short but intense period shook loose some gains for black people and women from a bourgeoisie in fear of losing its control. But as the all-sided attacks on abortion rights show, reforms are always reversible under capitalism. The liberation of women requires a socialist revolution, which will uproot the private property system and replace the family—the main source of women’s oppression in class society—with socialized childcare and housework, to bring women fully into social and political life.