Free Abortion on Demand!

Supreme Court Rolls Back Abortion Rights

On April 18, the Supreme Court upheld a 2003 law criminalizing a rarely used second-trimester abortion procedure, intact dilation and extraction. Doctors now face up to two years in prison for performing the procedure. As we wrote four years ago in “Fight Rollback of Abortion Rights!” (WV No. 800, 28 March 2003):

“This is nothing short of a major assault against legalized abortion established by the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. If this bill becomes law, it would be the wedge for overturning all abortion rights, which the anti-woman bigots have sought for the last three decades through both legislative and judicial means and the unleashing of ‘god squads’ that have bombed abortion clinics, terrorized patients and even murdered doctors.”

Troy Newman, president of Operation Rescue, which has long spearheaded the drive against abortion rights, gloated: “The court has now said it’s OK to ban procedures. We can do more than just put hurdles in front of women seeking abortions—we can put roadblocks in front of them” (BostonHerald.com, 18 April). In fact, the Bush gang wants to impose its reactionary “morality” on every aspect of everyone’s life. The onslaught against abortion is a spearhead for generalized social reaction—against women’s and gay rights, against black people and other minorities, against civil liberties.

What is urgently needed is militant struggle to defend and extend women’s rights, including the right to abortion. It is outrageous that the capitalist state—from state legislatures up to whatever nine people are appointed for life to the Supreme Court, an inherently reactionary institution—should have the life-and-death power to intervene in people’s most intimate, private decisions. We fight for free abortion and contraception on demand as part of a program of free, quality health care for all. These are vital necessities for women and for working people as a whole, along with paid maternity and paternity leave and free 24-hour childcare. Every real gain won by working people and the oppressed has been the result of hard class and social struggle, not appeals to capitalist politicians and the courts.

With their eyes on the White House prize, Bush’s bourgeois Democratic Party opponents were quick to seize on the Supreme Court ruling. Senator Dianne Feinstein said she was “truly shocked” by the decision, and presidential contender John Edwards called it “a stark reminder of why Democrats cannot afford to lose the 2008 election.” But it was the Democratic Party politicians and bourgeois feminists who paved the way for the attacks on abortion rights, however “shocked” they now claim to be. Three decades of attacks on Roe v. Wade started with “born again” Democratic president Jimmy Carter, who in 1977 sneered, “There are many things in life that are not fair” as he signed into law the Hyde Amendment eliminating abortion coverage from Medicaid.

The Reagan years and those of Bush Senior were dark ones for defenders of abortion rights, but the rollbacks continued under Bill Clinton. During his eight years in office, safe access to abortion was gutted in much of the country, as numerous state laws further restricted access and the number of abortion providers plummeted. Clinton ended “welfare as we know it,” consigning millions of single mothers and others to desperate poverty. Bourgeois feminist groups such as NOW and NARAL demobilized protest in defense of abortion clinics by preaching reliance on the Democratic administration. Today, while paying lip service to abortion rights, the Democratic Party spouts the “family values” rhetoric of the Republicans, aiming to win over a section of their religious constituency. Pandering to religious backwardness, Hillary Clinton proclaimed in 2005 that “abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic choice.” In fact, for many women abortion is more a necessity than a “choice.”

The Supreme Court ruling is a stark expression of how religion is used to further social reaction. The majority’s “faith-based” decision reflects a confluence of reactionary Catholic and Protestant fundamentalist hostilities to women and modern medical science. Preaching about the “difficult and painful moral decision” involved in abortion, the Court’s patronizing edict evokes biblical images of women as the weaker vessel who must be protected from deceitful doctors hiding from them the horrible “crime” they are about to commit. The decision borrows directly from the phrasebook of the Operation Rescue bigots in upholding the state’s “legitimate interests” in promoting “respect for life, including life of the unborn.”

The need for abortions in later stages of pregnancy is particularly an issue for women who are young and poor, many of them black and Hispanic, because they have virtually no access to health care, contraceptives or even sex education. What’s actually painful and difficult in racist, capitalist America is being a single mother, desperately seeking nonexistent day care or an affordable medical clinic or an apartment to live in. Or how about the anguish of a frightened teenager seeking a pharmacy that will sell her Plan B contraceptives? Or the difficulty of getting hold of a car and driving hundreds of miles to the only abortion clinic in Mississippi and sleeping overnight in the parking lot to fulfill the state-mandated waiting period—and then waking up to a gauntlet of protesters with five-foot posters of fetuses? Today 87 percent of U.S. counties have no abortion provider.

The legal right to abortion was won as a result of the massive social struggles of the 1960s and 1970s, centrally the struggles for black rights and against the Vietnam War. But as the attacks on abortion rights show, reforms are always reversible when power is in the hands of the racist capitalist exploiters. It is only with the destruction of capitalism that humanity will be freed from state repression and religious bigotry interfering in the private affairs of people’s lives. The liberation of women requires a socialist revolution that will uproot the private property system and bring women fully into social and political life.