https://socialistaction.org/2017/01/19/which-way-forward-for-women-in-201/
Which way forward for women in 2017?
/ 15 hours ago
jan-2017-wom-poland-2By CHRISTINE MARIE
Hundreds of thousands are joining the Women’s March on Washington on
Jan. 21. On the same day, at least 200 sister marches are taking place
in cities and towns all over the United States.
The outpouring, which reportedly began as two social media posts in
response to the defeat of Hillary Clinton by a grossly misogynist
Republican Party candidate famous for joking about sexually assaulting
women, has grown in less than two months into a massive and historic
event, endorsed by the major women’s rights organizations. The chairs of
the coordinating body include three prominent women of color from
non-profit organizations involved in fighting racism, police brutality,
and surveillance.
Women from all walks of life, many of whom have never marched in a
feminist demonstration, are getting on buses and trains to make their
mark on the Trump inauguration spectacle and to flex their political
muscles in anticipation of what will likely be the most concerted
assault on reproductive justice and the lives of working women since the
1980s.
The new administration’s agenda
The Trump administration that is being assembled has given every
indication it will carry out a serious, perhaps devastating, attack on
reproductive justice and the wages and welfare of low-income families.
An assault is planned on abortion rights; the accessibility of
contraception; overall health care; education; working conditions and
standard of living of low-wage women; the few remaining social safety
nets for children; and the movements for Black lives, immigrant lives,
and Muslim lives, all of which are anchored by women.
Trump and the anti-woman right wing that has the majority in Congress
promise to immediately defund Planned Parenthood. The right-wing
establishment is expected to quickly try to prohibit the non-profit from
receiving any federal insurance payments, including Medicaid. Since the
use of Medicaid funds for abortion services was prohibited in 1976, the
new blocking of Medicaid and similar payments would translate into the
cutoff of the most basic gynecological and reproductive health service
to some 1.5 million low-income people.
At the same time, quick action to undo parts of the already horribly
inadequate Affordable Care Act may eliminate the alternative funding
source for this kind of care for 55 million women, men, and young people.
Trump also pledged to quickly pass a national ban on abortion after 20
weeks. The 20-week ban, already enacted in 16 states, is particularly
mean-spirited as it impacts women around the time that most fetal
abnormalities become apparent. It is also a restriction on abortion that
disproportionately affects low-income women, who, in order to take
advantage of increasingly scarce facilities, often need time to raise
funds, find transportation, arrange time off of work, and so on.
And while Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, and other organizations have
sometimes successfully fought the rush of reactionary state legislative
measures driven through by new Republican majorities in the courts, the
likelihood of a federal measure, and the growing limitations on access,
are already resulting in deadly DIY abortions and victimization flowing
from new efforts to criminalize women who fail to bring pregnancies to term.
Democratic Party: ally or foe?
The defunding of Planned Parenthood, the end of Affordable Care Act
subsidies for contraception, and a federal ban on abortion after 20
weeks are just the tip of the iceberg of the Republican majority’s
sexist wish list—which begins with the prize of overturning Roe v. Wade.
But, of course, the undermining of that 1973 decision legalizing
abortion began the day after it was first ruled. Both Democratic and
Republican Congresses and presidents have continued to weaken it ever since.
While there is, today, a well-publicized legislative effort to overturn
the Hyde Amendment, which denied poor women funding for abortion, this
divisive amendment only stayed on the books for 40 years because
successive Democratic majorities refused to junk it.
It must also be said that the erosion of national support for
reproductive justice to its current 69% has been the product not only of
the treachery of mainstream politicians on both sides of the aisle but
of the decision of mainstream women’s rights and reproductive justice
groups to keep the struggle on the tiny playing field offered by
Democratic and Republican Party politics.
Should these groups have relied on the party that initiated the racist
1996 “welfare reform” and dismantled the major safety net for low-income
women and their children to defend abortion rights? Was it rational to
look to the Democratic Party, whose criminal justice “reform” destroyed
communities of color with the tools of the mass incarceration and
surveillance state? Whose full-throated support for barbaric U.S.
military interventions led to astonishing levels of rape, death, and
other victimizations of the women and children of Afghanistan and Iraq?
Did it make sense to continue to let the Democratic Party set the agenda
for our defense when they basically threw women under the bus in the
implementation of Obamacare?
Julia Felsenthal, who profiled several of the major leaders of the
Women’s March on Washington for a July 10, 2017, article for Vogue,
concluded that their commitment to a large intersectional progressive
movement “could offer a blueprint to the flailing Democratic Party.” If
we are to face the doubling down on women of the most reactionary wing
of the big business parties, this unspoken but seemingly obvious
orientation of backers of the march to encourage women to see their
future tied to the victory of Democratic Party candidates in the 2017
mid-term elections is, by any historical measure, an unreliable path
forward.
Changing course and learning from history
If we cannot rely on the anti-Trump Democratic Party to mount an
uncompromising defense and expansion of women’s rights, what hope can we
have? In truth, the political situation for women and the prospects for
change was much more dire when the first major abortion victories were
won almost a half-century ago.
The efforts to legalize abortion in the United States took off in the
mid-1960s in a country that was deeply conservative on gender and
everything else. The political climate had been darkened by the
McCarthyite witchhunt of the 1950s. Yet, public opinion was shifted and
mass pressure was built for a radical overturn of the existing
restrictions on abortion. This was not accomplished by barely
perceptible incremental change inside the Democratic Party, but by
radical and militant propaganda events, well-publicized tribunals in
which working women told their stories and publicly identified with the
movement, and repeated mass actions of thousands of mostly young women
whose politics were, in the majority, far to the left of the electoral
machines.
These activities were, at their most effective, decided upon and
implemented out of mass meetings and large, democratic conferences that
were independent of the Democratic Party. Women could join a local
group, set their political agenda, decide the actions needed, and
collaborate in large national gatherings to call national demonstrations
without having their agenda limited by the pragmatism and cynicism of
parliamentarianism.
Within a few years, this activity created a massive groundswell of
support for women’s right to control their own bodies and a Supreme
Court decision that amounted to legalization. In the 1980s, women of the
left organized a broad, independent, and effective physical and
political defense of clinics targeted by the right.
These are the kind of movements we need to build coming out of the March
on Washington. They need to be movements that we control from the bottom
and whose parameters are set by what the majority of working women need,
not by a strategy for the mid-terms in which are needs are secondary.
Women of the socialist movement were some of the anchors of those
movements then, and they will be the first today to devote themselves to
building a movement independent of the big business parties and focused
on moving towards mobilizing the vast majority of working women around
all the things that we really need: full reproductive justice,
affordable 24-7 child care, universal health care, a dismantling of the
racist criminal justice system and ICE, and union-scale wages on which
one can support a family with dignity.
Throughout the building of such an independent movement, we must also
construct a socialist political party. Without the fundamental change to
a socialist society based on human needs, instead of one based on the
misery and inequality of the profit system, our full liberation will
always be out of reach.
(Photo) Last year 7 million women in Poland took to the streets, and
thousands walked out of work. As a result, the right-wing government
withdrew legislation attacking women’s reproductive rights.
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January 19, 2017 in Women's Liberation.
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