Attack on Minority Women

Congress Bans Abortion Funds for D.C.

For weeks this spring, Republicans and Democrats competed over how deeply to cut the U.S. government budget, finally agreeing on April 8 to the largest cuts in U.S. history, a massive $38 billion in the next six months. The Republicans, with a majority in the House of Representatives, took advantage of the “budget crisis” to further the assault on abortion rights. Their key demands included reinstating the recently lifted ban against the District of Columbia using its own money to fund elective abortions through Medicaid and banning federal funding for Planned Parenthood.

While the latter has been temporarily set aside, the Obama White House okayed the ban on local D.C. funding for abortions, sacrificing black women and others who are dependent on such aid on the altar of the anti-abortion bigots. The Democrats also agreed to ax $17 million from Title X, which provides federal money for birth control and reproductive health to Planned Parenthood and other organizations nationwide.

From the time of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the Democrats as well as the Republicans have instituted one measure after another to limit access to abortion. The new measure will redound most harshly against impoverished black women who cannot afford to pay for this simple and safe medical procedure, which we say should be freely available on demand. The one-quarter of the city’s population that depends on Medicaid is overwhelmingly black and Latino. As soon as the ban took effect on April 13, Medicaid funding was immediately cut off for 28 women scheduled to receive abortions that week.

Barring the city from funding abortions from its own budget is another measure of the boundless contempt the ruling-class parties have for the mostly black residents of Washington, D.C., who have never been accorded full democratic rights. This has always been a divided city, a government center served first by slaves and later by wretchedly paid, largely black labor. While in the past couple of decades Washington’s demographics have changed with an influx of whites, more than half of black adults and 31 percent of Latino adults in D.C. are jobless. Those who live in the nation’s capital, otherwise known as “the D.C. plantation,” are denied the right to a voting representative in Congress. Until 1964, the city’s residents could not even vote for president. It was not until 1973 that the right to elect a mayor and city council was granted.

But so-called “home rule” for D.C. is a fraud, for it is Congress that really pulls the strings according to its own political agenda, especially when the city government tries to enact a budget or a law. In 1998, D.C. residents overwhelmingly voted in favor of a medical marijuana program, but Congress forbade them to implement the law. That same year, the district, which faces an HIV/AIDS rate rivaling that of African countries, tried to use local funds for needle-exchange programs. Congress stopped it. While killing abortion funding this April, Congress also ordered the D.C. City Council to reinstate a reactionary school voucher program that gives local tax dollars to private and religious schools.

For an act of civil disobedience in protest against the blatantly undemocratic abortion funding ban, Mayor Vincent Gray, six members of the D.C. Council and 34 others were arrested on April 11. Held in jail for hours without food, Gray was not released until 1:00 a.m. the following morning, and the remaining protesters were only released several hours later. The abuse of a black mayor at the hands of police is not new in D.C. For Marion Barry—a victim of a bipartisan racist vendetta—it was much worse. For years in the 1980s and early 1990s he was constantly hounded by the Feds and spent six months in federal prison.

Condemning the funding ban, D.C.’s non-voting Congressional delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton declared: “These Republicans are saying, ‘You don’t count as American citizens. Indeed, you raise some money, hey, it’s ours. We will decide how you spend your money, and we will close you down if you don’t like it’.” This certainly captures the Republicans’ arrogance. But Norton self-servingly alibis her own party, the Democrats, who have themselves ensured that for most of the last 20 years, local funding for elective abortions has been banned in D.C. President Bill Clinton signed the ban into law six times, and Obama and the Democratic-controlled House and Senate upheld it in 2009. (They tempered this a bit some months later by easing restrictions on the city using its tax money for abortions while upholding the ban on federal funding.) Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who cried foul over Republicans’ attacks on Planned Parenthood, has voted ten times for the D.C. abortion funding ban since 1995.

Nationwide, access to abortion is increasingly out of reach. It was the Democrats’ health care “reform” that made good on Obama’s promise that no federal dollars will be used to fund abortion. During the 2008 campaign, Obama declared his support for restrictions and even prohibitions on late-term abortions. Between the onslaught of government legislation and the extralegal violence of the anti-abortion terrorists, very few doctors in the U.S. today are willing to perform late-term abortions.

When running against the Republicans, who openly flaunt their racist, anti-worker, anti-woman program, the Democrats pose as defenders of black, labor and women’s rights. This is a deception that serves to keep the exploited and oppressed politically chained to the capitalist system. In regard to abortion, the “pro-choice” Democrats’ strategy has been to keep it safe and legal for the wealthy, but to hell with the poor and minorities. This was seen with the Hyde Amendment, signed into law by Democratic president Jimmy Carter in 1977, which eliminated Medicaid funding for abortions. Even as abortion rights continue to be axed and access is increasingly limited, pro-Democratic outfits such as the feminist National Organization for Women have limited their actions to “fight the right” electoral tactics.

Looking to the Democrats to defend women’s rights is a time-tested strategy that has brought nothing but defeat. The Spartacist League and Spartacus Youth Clubs fight for free abortion on demand as part of our call for free, quality health care for all. This is the only way that legal abortion can become a reality for black, immigrant and all working-class and poor women. The anti-abortion offensive is part of a generalized assault on the living conditions of the working class. It is in the interest of the working class to mobilize in its own name—in opposition to the Democrats—to fight for access to abortion and full equality for women.

In the ban on funding abortions in Washington, D.C., the bourgeoisie’s attacks on women, on minorities and on basic democratic rights come together. This underscores the need to build a revolutionary workers party that will champion the interests of all the exploited and oppressed against the outrages of this capitalist society.