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

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