Dr. Leroy Carhart successfully challenged the Nebraska law, preventing it from ever taking effect. Under the law doctors who performed abortions faced up to 20 years in prison if their method fell under a sweeping definition of "deliberately and intentionally delivering into the vagina a living unborn child, or a substantial portion thereof" before terminating the pregnancy. The Supreme Court held that under the law doctors "must fear prosecution, conviction, and imprisonment" using a common procedure after the first trimester of pregnancy known as dilation and evacuation, or D & E.

The 5-4 court decision reflects the fact that despite an offensive against abortion rights since the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court ruling, the government and the wealthy ruling class have been unsuccessful in undermining support for women's rights, including the right to choose to have an abortion. It is a reflection of the fact that working people--men and women--are fighting and resisting the assault on democratic rights, their standard of living, union organization, and basic dignity of human beings.

The ruling class, under successive Democratic and Republican party administrations on both the state and federal level, has been successful in making access to abortion nearly impossible for millions of working women. This includes the denial of Medicaid funds for abortion under the Hyde amendment in 1976, the growing number of counties where abortion services are unavailable, laws subjecting young women to undemocratic "parental notification," and measures to impose waiting periods in order to receive an abortion. These moves all have a class bias, in that they affect working women in disproportionate numbers.

The victory registered in the decriminalization of abortion opened the door for millions of women--especially working women, Blacks, Chicanas, Puerto Ricans--to begin to control their own reproductive functions, their own bodies. It went a significant way toward establishing a fundamental right for all women--the right to choose whether or not to bear a child.

Freedom from enforced motherhood is a precondition to women's liberation. Only with the right to control their own bodies can women begin to reassert their full human identity as productive, not only reproductive, human beings. It helps open the door to women being equals in all aspects of social and political life, hastening the development of a proletarian vanguard of fighting women and men who can build a mighty social movement that heads in a revolutionary direction in the United States.

It is for these very reasons that the superwealthy rulers fear abortion rights and that fascist demagogues, such as Patrick Buchanan, put abortion rights among the central targets of his scapegoating campaign. Buchanan calls abortion a "calamity" and "the greatest tragedy in the history of mankind."

Opponents of a woman's right to choose have insisted on using the unscientific term "partial birth abortion" as part of whipping up opposition to women's rights. They portray women as irresponsible, as murderers, as destroyers of the fabric of society.

Meanwhile, bourgeois politicians warn that the closeness of the vote in the High Court means the way to defend abortion rights is to elect Democratic presidential candidate Albert Gore so that future nominations to the Supreme Court will be "abortion friendly."

In fact, the Supreme Court decision is an expression of the support in the working class and in U.S. society as a whole for abortion rights, not a result of the predominance of sympathetic justices. It is useful to recall developments in the early 1990s, when right-wingers, who began street mobilizations to shut down clinics and deny women access to abortion, were out-mobilized and decisively defeated by thousands of counterdemonstrators in city after city.

Then, in October 1992, a huge march to defend abortion rights took place in Washington, D.C. And in 1995, 100,000 more turned out in the capital. These mobilizations included unions, fighters against racist attacks, and many militant young people. As a result, the back of the rightist offensive was broken. In this way, over the years, abortion rights has become a conquest in struggle of working people.

This has taken place in the context of a steady increase of women in the workforce. As more women become workers, the fight for equal pay, for access to jobs that traditionally were male-only, and against sexist treatment is strengthened. The fight for women's rights is in the interests of all working people.

Pictures over the past months in the Militant of confident, militant women on picket lines, at working-class protest actions, at rallies to fight for a union and to demand immigrant rights, and protests to defend abortion rights show the real problem the employers and their government face. They also help show the stakes for the labor movement in defending abortion rights and joining the struggle for women's liberation.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home