Wore must see the connection between their oppression and their paychecks'

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SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 1989 wing of the anti-choice movement, they're not particularly concerned about what happens to babies after they're born.

S.A.: What is NARAL doing to counter these attacks on women's right to choose? Mindes: We're now in the midst of a petition campaign, "Millions of Voices Silent No More." The purpose of the campaign is to gain at least a million signatures by October. We're working hard to get more signatures sooner because of the possibility the Supreme Court may rule on the Webster case before the end of this term. There may be a decision by the end of July. NARAL is also participating in the April 9 march in Washington. N.O.W. is putting increased emphasis on this march as a defense of women's reproductive lives.

S.A.: How does reproductive freedom relate to other feminist issues?

Mindes: If you can't decide when and whether to have children then the other freedoms that you might possess are irrelevant. I don't think you can be a feminist and say you're opposed to abortion. If we give in on this issue, then we're talking about giving in on a whole range of issues.

S.A.: What direction should the pro-choice movement take after April 9? Mindes: An awful lot depends on the to be consenting to abortions only if they're shown pictures of fetuses 3 feet high. Informed-consent legislation, which basically lies about the nature of the procedure and its risks and tries to persuade women that the fetus is almost a full grown baby, is a favorite gimmick of the "Right to Life." What seems most likely is that some kind of limitation on Roe v. Wade will be enacted that will give the states a lot more power. That's tougher to organize around because it's subtler and takes longer to campaign around the meaning of informed-consent legislation or why minors' access legislation is not about family communication, but is about denying abortions to women.

I think some positive initiatives need to be undertaken too. NARAL has taken a position that we want the restoration of federal funding because abortion is not truly accessible. That's going to require changing some of our legislators. We might want to submit legislation—or propose ballot initiatives-to encourage the restoration of public funding. We need to move people's thinking beyond the privacy issue to the idea that women have a right to self-determination. If the right wing succeeds in passing an anti-abortion amendment to the Constitution, fetuses will have more rights than women.

We need to get on the offensive. For the last eight years, we've been on the defensive.. The following interview with Helen Grieco, executive director of San Francisco N.O.W., was conducted by May May Gong.

Socialist Action: What has been the general response to organizing for the April 2 demonstration?

Helen Grieco: Absolutely wonderful. I think this is because now for many women the threat to abortion has become very real. They finally realize that it's not something that isn't really going to happen-it's happening right now.

Women are seeing what Bush and the Supreme Court are doing, they see what Operation Rescue is doing, and they realize that they're going to have to get out there and do something too. It's a good time to be organizing now yet it's still very challenging as well.

S.A.: What are your feelings on Operation Rescue?

Grieco: Reaganism has given terrorism free rein. Now we see that after five years of harassing women and bombing clinics, you really can get away with it. We're not getting any cooperation from the police. They're just not doing a thing to stop these people. S.A.: What's the general state of the women's movement today and what lies ahead?

Grieco: The women's movement is going to have to organize public sentiment just like we saw during the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. We need more visibility and we need to outnumber the right-to-lifers. The most crucial aspect to organizing women will be connecting their paychecks to politics. What that means is women must see the connection between their oppression and their paychecks.

First of all, they're not getting paid enough. Where do their tax dollars go and what does it pay for? Does it pay for childcare, for insurance, for free medical care, for anything women really need? No. The money taken from our paychecks is used against us. We have to show women how not organizing is hitting them right in the pocketbook.

The women's movement in the 20th century was a powerful movement that made changes that affected half the population— birth control, abortion rights, etc. Right now we're in a "McCarthy era" towards women. There has been a concerted effort to derail the women's movement. Women are told that their problems are caused by the women's Women are producing the next generation of slave labor for these capitalists for free— and yet throughout time women have been systematically excluded from the economic structure. We need a new way to demand our needs and not simply ask for various services. We must tell these people where we want our tax dollars to go. In order to organize women we must give them something concrete to grasp onto. They're already aware of rape, abortion, birth control, being underpaid, lack of childcare, etc.

S.A.: What's going to happen if Roe v. Wade is actually overturned?

Grieco: Essentially they'll be serving women a death sentence and two things will happen: 1) Women will die, and 2) there just better be an uprising!

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even. It was not always easy. We dealt with our sisters in the feminist movement. For a long time they would not stand at the gates of the prison. The imprisonment of our women was "not a feminist issue," they claimed.

Why? The war was "a man's issue." And our women wound up in prison because they blindly and emotionally "followed their men."

We argued it out with the feminists, and we who were feminists and Republicans stuck to our position. We survived this period. It was not always easy going.

I think it is bad to forget that we had those problems. Because it is out of them that we grew. It is still uneven. Still the great bulk of the work falls to us. It is still up to us to see that our offspring are fed before we leave. We are still doing two jobs at once.

We are still seeing that the money reaches the weekend. We should never forget how strong we are, that we manage to do so much, and learn in bits and pieces.

No great "glory!"

I think there is something else, after 20 years, that we should never forget. It hurts! There is no great glory in trying to rear your family while your husband is in prison. When your partner is in prison, and there is not enough money to feed your children. There is no great spiritual uplift in having to trek to the prisons of this state once every seven days-for the best part of 20 years.

It hurts when you see young women taken off to prison, and the best years of their lives spent in that hell hole. There is nothing uplifting about being in prison.

We do it, we battle on. It is the women