http://themilitant.com/2017/8108/810855.html
The Militant (logo)
Vol. 81/No. 8 February 27, 2017
(SWP campaign statement)
Defend abortion rights, state by state!
The following statement was issued Feb. 15 by Osborne Hart, Socialist
Workers Party candidate for mayor of New York.
Thousands of women and men across the United States, many of them young,
turned out Feb. 11 in defense of a woman’s right to choose abortion,
countering a nationwide campaign targeting Planned Parenthood. These
actions demonstrated the possibility — and necessity — of organizing a
broad public campaign of action, state by state, to push back the
growing array of restrictions on women exercising their fundamental
right to control their own bodies.
Since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling decriminalizing
abortion, this question has been at the center of assaults on the social
and economic gains of women, part of the capitalist rulers’ broader
attacks on the rights and living conditions of working people. Growing
restrictions on access to abortion and laws forcing clinics to close
especially affect working-class women and those living in rural areas.
These attacks have “been made easier by the character and content of the
1973 court ruling,” notes Jack Barnes, national secretary of the
Socialist Workers Party, in The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why
Washington Fears Working People . “Roe v. Wade was based not on a
woman’s right ‘to equal protection of the laws’ guaranteed by the
Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, but on medical criteria
instead. During the first three months (‘trimester’), the court ruled,
the decision to terminate a pregnancy ‘must be left to the medical
judgment of a pregnant woman’s attending physician’ (not to the woman
herself, but to a doctor!).
“At the same time, the court allowed state governments to ban most
abortions after ‘viability,’ … something that medical advances
inevitably make earlier and earlier in the pregnancy.”
The Socialist Workers Party has a proud record in the fight for women’s
right to choose abortion. That demand, so basic to winning real social
equality, became central to the wave of struggles for women’s rights
that grew out of the victories won in the streets in the 1950s and ’60s
by millions of fighters for Black rights.
“I propose a constitutional amendment to write Roe v. Wade into the New
York State Constitution,” Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo told participants
in a Jan. 30 rally for Planned Parenthood in New York. But this would
further weaken protection of a woman’s right to choose!
As protests demanding the right to choose began to spread, abortion was
decriminalized in New York in 1970. This removed all restrictions on
women’s control over their bodies. Cuomo’s move to enshrine Roe v. Wade,
with its strictures on women’s rights, in the state constitution is a
stark warning of the need to debate out the road forward and to fight
state by state for equal protection of the law.
And it underscores the importance of mobilizing in the streets as
opposed to pressure by bourgeois feminists to keep quiet and rely on
capitalist politicians, especially in the Democratic Party!
The Socialist Workers Party says: Abortion is a woman’s right to choose!
Related articles:
Actions defend women’s right to choose abortion
Protesters discuss how to defend women’s rights
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home