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right to make our own decisions about our lives sent anti-abortion groups into a frenzy of denunciation. Following the '73 court decision and the widespread legalization of abortion, the right-wing forces concentrated on coun termobilizing and organizing to turn the clock back to a time when women were more easily kept in subordinate positions.

The large array of anti-abortion groups has succeeded in whittling away at the victory represented by the Roe v. Wade decision, but they have not succeeded in overturning it and outlawing abortion entirely.

These same forces mobilized to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment as it neared passage in the late 1970s. These anti-women forces are willing to fight to keep women in their status of second-class citizens. Over 10,000 members of one of the misnamed "Right-to-Life" groups, Operation Rescue, have been arrested in the past several months as they harass women seeking abortions.

But as these right-wing fanatics and the government officials of the Democratic and Republican parties who agree with them are discovering, their task is not going to be so easy. As Molly Yard, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) stated in the Dec. 5 issue of Time magazine: "Mr. Bush may intend to make abortion illegal again, but he has to understand that if he tries, he will be awakening a sleeping giant."

Yard was responding to the latest government attempt to deny women our constitutional rights. In mid-November, the U.S. Justice Department submitted a "friend-of-the-court" brief that urged the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the appeal of a Missouri case, Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, which involved a law defining life as beginning at conception.

The U.S. Court of Appeals had ruled the Missouri law unconstitutional. Past court votes on abortion cases have only narrowly upheld Roe v. Wade. A Supreme Court decision that failed to uphold the freedom to choose would

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Misnamed Operation Rescue is on a national campaign to shut down abortion clinics.

SOCIALIST ACTION JANUARY 1989 11 often not able to take advantage of opportunities for education or good jobs. In this context, the issue of childcare obviously remains a pivotal one for women as we fight for real equality.

There are many issues relating to women's status in society that can and should be addressed as supporters begin organizing to put the fight for women's rights on the offensive.

Changing consciousness

The recent Time magazine article on the status of the fight around reproductive rights mentions another phenomenon worthy of consideration. The Time writer states that "Motivating this [sleeping] giant—the millions of women who have exercised their right to abortion— may prove difficult." The writer gives the following reasons for this opinion:

While an average 1.6 million women in the United States have had abortions each year since 1973, and while a majority of Americans favor the right to abortion (64 percent of the population according to an October 1988 NBC poll), many supporters tend to think of abortion as a settled question. The article quotes Emily Tyne, a former NARAL, official as saying, "Many people we deal with have grown up with legal abortions. ... They feel it's a fundamental right that's part of their world."

Indeed, a whole generation has "come of age" since the Roe v. Wade decision and has grown up not only with abortion legal and birth-control information more available but in a society that has begun to project women in a different manner.

Contrast the women in today's popular television programs with those of the '50s, when America's favorite family was the Ricardos of "I Love Lucy." Lucy's crazy antics were usually a rebellion against some dictate of her husband and master, Ricky. In one episode, Ricky actually turned Lucy over his knee and spanked her for her "disobedience!"

There is a more generalized awareness that society should not discriminate against half of its population. More young women and men reject ideas that women are inferior or unable to take on challenging careers.

This has even percolated down to Little League sports, where boys on a Catholic elementary school basketball team in upstate New York recently refused to play without their female teammate. The league had threatened to remove the team's only female from competition, citing their concern "in case she was injured."

This represents a big change, as the first females out for previously all-male teams could verify.

Why we still have to fight But even though there has been real progress in the past two decades and real victories have been won in the arena of women's rights we still have a long way to go in every area of concern to women.

In the workplace, a much higher number of women are working in previously all-male job categories. But over the past decade, many of the affirmative-action gains have been wiped out, and women still make significantly less money than men in the same fields.

For several years, numerous studies have shown that women and their children are the fastest growing group of the poor. Homeless families wander from shelter to shelter in every major city in this country today.

And as the capitalist austerity drive deepens, an accompanying propaganda offensive against women's equality has been launched.

Magazine articles books Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW) activists from Washington state hosted the fifth biennial convention of CLUW in Seattle on Nov.17-20. More than a thousand union members from CLUW chapters all over the country were there. One third of the participants were Black women.

A high point of the convention occurred on the final day. Molly Yard, president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), addressd CLUW members. Yard said that a stronger alliance of labor unions and women is needed "if we are to see progress in this country."

She said that proposed legislation supported by NOW has been stalled in Congress for nearly a decade. "We'll replace them with us," she told the crowd of cheering CLUW members.

Much of Yard's fiery speech urged participation in several demonstrations planned by NOW. She predicted that one of these events, a "pro-choice" march in Washington, D.C., on April 9, 1989, "will be the biggest women's march in history."

"No woman is free without the right to control her productive life," Yard said. "It's a women's right to say what she will do with her body. It's not up to the state."

CLUW delegates voted unanimously to support the April 9 demonstration called by NOW. Women want to move forward, and a large turnout in Washington, D.C., on April 9 will be a step in the right direction. discuss the effects on children of having working mothers. When children alienated from this society turn to drugs, and the public educational system fails, mothers are blamed.

Responsibility for all of society's ills are put on individual family units. Those who oppose women's rights continue to imply that women who are really concerned about their children should stay home with them. They ignore the fact that women do not work for "pin money," but in order to keep a roof over their heads.

While this propaganda offensive against women's human rights goes on, quality childcare becomes scarcer, adding to women's burdens. Low-paid women and male workers pay disproportionate percentages of their salaries for childcare, which is often not the quality daycare they want for their children.

And though it is illegal, a growing number of pregnant women report that they are being discriminated against by potential employers who don't want to pay any maternity leave. The bosses simply give other reasons for failing to hire a pregnant women-and they are rarely challenged.

When it comes to forced sterilization, the U.S. government and the medical establishment have also become more sophisticated. We no longer read about large-scale plans to sterilize all welfare mothers who get pregnant. But statistics regularly show that more unnecessary hysterectomies are performed in U.S. hospitals than almost any other type of surgery.

It is quite probable that many of the women who are victimized in this way are the poorer women in our society. A disproportionate number of the poor are Black, Latina, and Asian. Poor families are less likely to have the resources to get a second opinion.

Attacks on reproductive rights Over the past 10 years, reproductive rights have been limited rather than expanded. In 37 states, Medicaid no longer pays for abortions, and parental-consent laws have been passed and enforced in several states.

During the time Minnesota's parental consent-law was enforced (it is currently under appeal), it succeeded only in raising the state's teenage birth rate. According to information published by the American Civil Liberties Union Reproductive Rights Project, the proponents of parental-consent laws actually advise teens against telling their parents they're pregnant until it's too late to get an For several years, the federal government has cut funding for clinics that offer abortion counseling in addition to birth-control information. By introducing rules that seek to prohibit counselors from discussing all the options open to women who are pregnant, the government hopes to stop women from terminating pregnancies.

While this is a vain effort, the constant threats of cutting off funding tie up the resources of clinics in fighting the state's encroachments. The resources could be better used in making birth-control methods more widely available, especially to teenagers who are still often uneducated about the realities of getting pregnant. Given the AIDS crisis, this lack of education can become even more critical for young people.

Cindy's story

The difficulties that a teenager can confront when parental-notification laws are in effect is detailed in the recent and widely publicized story of a young woman named Cindy.

When Cindy found out she was pregnant, telling her Catholic parents who oppose abortion was not an option. She had to arrange to go to court in St. Paul, Minn.—a four-and-one-half-hour bus trip from her home to have a judge decide that she was competent to make the decision to terminate her pregnancy. After getting shuffled from one unhelpful clerk to another and finally getting court authorization, she had to make another trip. This time, luckily, she was driven by a friend to get the abortion.

But by this time Cindy was too far along in her pregnancy for that clinic and had to be referred to another clinic for a more complicated procedure. This required yet another trip from her hometown. In the end, she missed three days of school and work, and paid more money from her savings due to the delay in getting her abortion. She also served several days of school detention for her unexcused absences.

Cindy's story sounds more like one from the days before abortion was legalized. And she was relatively lucky: She wasn't physically harmed as countless other women who were forced to go to illegal clinics.

But we can and must expect better treatment than this for women in 1989.

The fight for women's rights is not over. The supporters of women's rights, who are in the majority of this country's population, need to go on an offensive to protect and expand our freedom to choose. We need to take visible united action as we will on April 9.

The changed consciousness that began smashing the stereotypes of women as second-class citizens makes it possible to involve all the allies of women's rights in this march and in our future battles. Labor unions, civil rights groups, students, and other young women and men are all needed to ensure our rights and make another slogan of the women's movement reality: "Not the Church, Not the State, Women must decide our fate."

Free Dr. Elizabeth Morgan!

Dr. Elizabeth Morgan has been in jail for over one year. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals denied her appeal on a civil-contempt conviction last Aug. 5.

Morgan, who believes that her then-5-year-old daughter was sexually abused by the child's father, refused to turn her daughter over for unsupervised visits with the father. The judge, Herbert Dixon, refused to hear evidence of sexual abuse from experts who had examined the child. The judge also refused to hear the child's evidence. There are additional allegations of abuse from the child's halfsister.

There has been a favorable ruling in a separate legal action that Dr. Morgan brought against the father demanding that the court hear the evidence from the child victim and medical experts. But even if that court rules that the abuse occurred, it has no weight on Judge Dixon, who can keep Elizabeth Morgan in jail for another two years.

In addition to jailing her, the court has fined her more than $200,000 and seized her home to pay the fine. The judge also ordered her to pay her former husband's legal expenses and seized her passport. Morgan now has legal and medical bills totaling over $1.5 million, with no means to pay while she sits in a jail cell. Her daughter meanwhile is in an undisclosed location with friends of her mother.

Why would a respected plastic surgeon sacrifice her career and home and be separated from her daughter if she does not have just cause to fear for her child's safety? Morgan says she will stay in jail until Hilary is 18 if that's what it takes to keep her from being violated further.

The National Organization for Women (NOW) is supporting Morgan in her fight and has held rallies and protests demanding that she be released.

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C.L.U.W. endorses pro-choice march

OPERATION RESCUE!

Brenda Bishop/Socialist Action lict Antian