Vol. 80/No. 46 December 12, 2016
US rulers’ attacks on women’s right to abortion
Below are excerpts from the new book The Clintons’ Anti-Working-Class Record: Why Washington Fears Working People by Jack Barnes, national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party. This section, which takes up the offensive against women’s right to choose abortion that has continued under Democratic and Republican administrations alike, is based on a public talk given in March 2001, just after President Bill Clinton left office. Copyright © 2016 by Pathfinder Press. Reprinted by permission.
Despite George W. Bush’s election campaign rhetoric, the new administration is no more likely than its predecessors to attempt a head-on assault against a woman’s right to choose. Nonetheless, attacks on abortion rights continue, and they’ve been made easier by the character and content of the 1973 court ruling.
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,” described in Roe v. Wade as the point at which a fetus is “potentially able to live outside the mother’s womb” — something that medical advances inevitably make earlier and earlier in the pregnancy.
Opponents of women’s rights have taken advantage of the Supreme Court’s “medical” criteria from the outset. And they’ve made the most of the fact that the 1973 court decision was handed down while a raging debate had not yet been fought out and won by those who insisted that a woman’s decision on this medical procedure falls under the protection of our hard-won constitutional rights.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified in 1868, was a direct conquest of the Second American Revolution. Among its provisions, the amendment established that neither federal nor state authorities could “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” — not to any male person, not to any person of a particular race, not just to any person who is a citizen. No government could deny those rights to any person — period. That’s what the Fourteenth Amendment says.
Nonetheless, for more than a century, one federal court after another denied women just that. It wasn’t until 1971 that the US Supreme Court — in an opinion written by Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Nixon appointee — finally affirmed that women were included in the Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection under the laws.” 1
That shift, of course, didn’t come as a sudden “judicial epiphany.” It was the product of victories won in the streets in the 1950s and 1960s by millions of fighters for Black rights, as well as ongoing mobilizations against Washington’s murderous war in Vietnam. Those battles, in turn, gave impetus to a new wave of activity and consciousness around the fight for women’s rights.
But when the Supreme Court issued its opinion on abortion rights in 1973, the justices retreated. They rejected building on their ruling just two years earlier affirming women’s equal protection under the laws. Instead, they issued Roe v. Wade, which — in the words of one former US solicitor general — read more “like a set of hospital rules and regulations.”
Since then, state governments have loaded on more than seven hundred laws erecting obstacles to women exercising their constitutional right — age restrictions, “consent” by parents, longer waiting periods, mandatory “counseling” about “alternatives,” safety, and many more. Congress and the White House have barred (1) federal Medicaid funding for abortions, even those that are “medically necessary” (the 1976 “Hyde amendment”); (2) federal insurance coverage for abortions for women in the armed forces (except in cases of rape or incest, or danger to the woman’s life), or use of military medical facilities for the procedure even if paid by other means; and (3) US government funding of “foreign aid” programs if abortion-related assistance is included in the program (the 1973 “Helms amendment”).
These “restrictions” have taken a heavy toll. Among other things, today there is not a single medical facility providing abortions in a third of all cities and nearly 90 percent of the counties in the United States — 90 percent! As a result, the extra cost of travel alone means that working-class women and those living in rural areas are at a big disadvantage in having access to this medical procedure.
1. For the first time since ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, the US Supreme Court in its 1971 Reed v. Reed decision struck down a state law on grounds that it violated the amendment’s Equal Protection Clause by discriminating against women. The Idaho state law in dispute gave preference to men over women in appointment as administrators of estates.
Related articles:
A victory in pushing back assaults on women’s rights
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