Catholics join abortion debate

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International Women's Day, celebrated since the beginning of this century, has recently re-emerged as a symbol of international solidarity among women.

The idea of a special day for women originated among women socialists. In 1910, at the Second International Conference of Socialist Working Women, Clara Zetkin from the German Social Democratic Party, proposed an annual celebration. Four years later, on March 8, Zetkin led thousands of women in a massive demonstration against Germany's rush toward World War I and against Rosa LuxemMarch 8 was chosen in commemoration of the women garment workers' strike of 1908. On that day the women swept through New York City's lower East Side protesting sweatshop conditions and demanding the vote.

In 1917 it was a March 8 demonstration by striking women textile workers in St.

The Socialist Action FORUM celebrates International Women's with reports from around the world of women's growing power and in the struggle for social justice and freedom-for themselves and all SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1985 7 Raped by three men on a country road in Georgia, a woman-alone and without money-tried to get an abortion. Her unsuccessful attempt to obtain an abortion in 1969 led to a lawsuit that eventually resulted in the 1973 U.S Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, the famous Roe vs. Wade case.

What led this individual woman, alone and powerless, to decide that she would not accept society's rules, that she must attempt to change them? Was she aware of the thousands of other women who were waging the same fight?

Did she know about the women who, throughout U.S. history, have fought to control their own reproductive lives— against the authorities who closed down birth-control clinics, who harassed medical workers daring to provide effective advice, who arrested and imprisoned doctors performing abortions for women desperately needing them.

The fact of the matter is that by the late 1960s the combination of women's continued entry into the work force, along with the development of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements, created the climate in which women began to participate as actors in history. The gap between society's view of a woman's role as wife and mother and the discrimination women faced in every avenue of their lives became apparent to larger numbers of women. They began to fight back The rise of the women's movement in the 1970s resulted in two concrete gains—the legalization of abortion and the introduction of affirmative action programs. Many of us who participated in the fight around these issues did not regard the legal victory as the culmination of the struggle. Rather we saw the law as a weapon to help us wage the real fight—the battle over implementation.

Minority becomes majority

In the 1960s many told us that it was impossible to win abortion rights, that the majority opposed such legalization. But the more we fought, the more we explained women's need to control our reproductive lives, the more we demonstrated, the faster opinion polls began to shift in our direction. That is how a minority became the majority.

Of course the law was never fully implemented. Most hospitals simply refused to set up the facilities. Nonetheless, more than 1.5 million legal abortions are performed each year. This figure is estimated to be about the same as the number of illegal abortions performed annually prior to the Supreme Court decision.

But the legalization has meant that abortion is performed earlier in a woman's pregnancy (more than 90 percent are performed within the first 12 weeks of gestation). This has significantly reduced the risk to a woman's health and life.

Over the past dozen years legal challenges have attempted to whittle away the U.S. Supreme Court decision. The attempt to limit the law was based on the right wing's strategy to deny abortion to the most vulnerable women-the women on welfare and the teenagers.

Its tactic was to divert the debate from the issue of the individual woman's right to make her own choice to the rights of the fetus and to the question of whether society should pay for a welfare woman's alleged sexual promiscuity.

Today the right wing is on a roll. It has succeeded in getting some doctors to stop performing abortions. It has succeeded in forcing some hospitals to stop providing abortion services. It has succeeded in closing some clinics. It won this round of the fight to outlaw Medicaid abortions for welfare women, and today only a dozen states fund such abortions.

Diverse opinions among Catholics A new element on the political scene is the emergence of the Catholic clergy and laity-led by nuns who have been influenced both by liberation theology and the women's movement. They challenge the right wing by a simple statement of fact: There is a diversity of opinion on the issue of abortion.

An Oct. 7, 1984, New York Times ad, signed by 24 nuns and more than 50 other members of the Catholic clergy and laity, called for a dialogue within the Catholic community. Sponsored by Catholics for a Free Choice, the ad stated the belief that Catholics "should not seek the kind of legislation that curtails the legitimate exercise of the freeburg's arrest and conviction.

Petersburg that sparked the Russian Revolution.

ple.- THE EDITORS