The socialist strategy for defending abortion rights

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"A repeated refrain of the young women joining the movement today is Won't Go Back!'- an assumption that the control their own bodies right to control their own bodies wai 6 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 1989 The following is the women's liberation report approved by the national committee of Socialist Action in August 1989. The report, presented by Carole Seligman, has been edited for publication.

Socialist Action members were deeply involved in the work of building the April 9 national demonstration organized by the National Organization for Women (NOW). We have built emergency-response actions to the Webster decision, are building mass defense of the clinics, and are now building the Nov. 12 NOW mobilization in Washington, D.C.

We have joined the main organization in the abortion rights fight-the National Organization for Women. We played an important role at the NOW national conference held recently in Cincinnati, supporting the leadership's call to mass action on Nov. 12.

We put forth our ideas on electoral politics, independent political action, and opposing a move to link the feminist fight for abortion rights with reactionary population-control plans.

The Webster decision-representing a tremendous body blow to women's lives-has created a storm of protest and a giant growth in the movement to fight back. In anticipation of the decision, all the pro-choice organizations experienced a growth in membership and funds. Ms. magazine reported in April that tens of thousands of dollars per day were pouring into NOW, NARAL, and Planned Parenthood offices.

Most significant is the growth of NOW to 200,000 members, almost up to the level of 220,000 at the height of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) campaign 10 years ago.

An oft-repeated theme at the national NOW conference was the tremendous number of calls coming into NOW chapters across the country from women asking what they can do to join the fight and the willingness of the new callers to join NOW and do anything they are asked to help win back our rights.

Men also are getting involved in this fight. And why not? Abortion rights are directly in the interests of all workers to control their own lives. Men have wives, mothers, and daughters who will face the dangers of illegal abortion—so this is as much a man's fight as the fight to bring the boys home from Vietnam was woman's fight. And, we notice, men are welcome in NOW and especially at defense of the clinics.

The power of a defensive struggle There is something very powerful about fighting to defend yourself, about fighting to keep something you won and which is now being taken away or threatened. A repeated refrain of the young women joining the movement now is "We Won't Go Back!"-an assumption that the right to control their own bodies was secure, was their own throughout their fertile years. What a giant affront it is to their consciousness that the government now steps in and takes control of women's bodies.

Abortion is a matter of survival. The pro-choice movement—with the April 9 massive march of 600,000 and the mass-circulated film "Abortion for Survival" (which shows graphically how botched abortions kill a woman every three minutes at the rate of 200,000 women per year worldwide)—has taken the offensive in the fight to mobilize the majority who support abortion rights.

The latest polls show the highest support ever in this country for legal abortion. The defensive posture of the movement—-as NOW puts it, "protecting women's rights, saving women's lives"—is providing a very powerful moral underpinning for the movement.

The government attack, the Operation Rescue attacks at the clinics, the enormous growth of the women's movement in defense of assumed rights, the majority support in the population for legal abortion, the center-stage position of NOW as the largest nationally organized membership organization in the pro-choice fight-these factors provide the context for the application of Socialist secure...

Action's strategy and tactics in this movement. This strategy can be summed up in the idea of independent mass action, the working-class method of fighting for justice.

National vs. state strategy Even before the Webster decision came down, some of the key forces in the movement were talking about changing the terrain of the abortion rights fight from the federal to the state level.

Their view was that now that the Supreme Court was ready to allow the states to restrict access to abortion—in effect overturning Roe v. Wade-the task for the movement was to fight at the level of the state legislatures to make sure that they would not rush to duplicate the Missouri restrictions in every state.

The reformists are threatening electoral action to elect pro-choice legislators and defeat those who are against choice. Some statewide demonstrations at state capitols are anticipated as well.

Since the Webster decision, the state-bystate strategy has caused an open division in the movement, with NARAL, Planned Parenthood, and others opposing NOW's call to mobilize in Washington, D.C. NARAL and Planned Parenthood favor state action as opposed to a national campaign.

The NOW leadership has counterposed a two-pronged strategy-national and state. While they embrace electoral action, they wisely recognize that the movement will lose some of the clout it has now if it doesn't organize and mobilize on a national basis.

The arguments advanced by the NOW leadership in support of a national focus and national mass action are sophisticated and militant. They compare the need for the pro-choice movement to mobilize in Washington with the civil rights movement and the Vietnam antiwar movement.

NOW leader Sheri O'Dell said, in response to the Supreme Court decision (and to some NOW members who opposed the Washington, D.C., mobilization), "states rights is a code word for segregation." We cannot win on a state level and we cannot accept restrictions in any state.

The power of mass action The NOW leadership also recognizes the power of the April 9 demonstration and the militancy and anger of its members and the growing movement. April 9 put NOW back into the leadership of the women's rights movement and the abortion fight.

It put the abortion fight on a feminist basis (something that is not always true of NARAL and Planned Parenthood's pro-choice position). The feminist argument for abortion rights is based on a woman's—and only a woman's—right to control her own body.

The April 9 march recruited tens of thousands of people into NOW and brought tens of thousands-if not millions-of dollars into NOW's coffers. It put the fear of women's rage into many of the politicians the NOW leadership perceives as their friends.

NOW's mobilization tactic dovetails with Socialist Action's mobilization strategy. For the NOW leadership, the mobilizations are just tactics, useful sometimes, shelved at others—particularly when there's a hotly contested election in progress.

For socialists, independent mass mobilizations are the means of organizing a movement—a movement that learns to rely on its own power to force change, instead of reliance on capitalist politicians. We believe the mass movement is a school for activists on the way to becoming more radicalized and ready for further steps of independence, such as joining the socialist movement.

Single issue

Prior to Webster, the idea of a single-issue focus was not as widely understood in the movement as it is now. But even in the building for April 9, as the Operation Rescue attacks were escalating and the attention of the country was focusing on the possible results of the Court's deliberations, the abortion issue started to become the issue around which people were coming to Washington, D.C.

It was the sense of urgency around protecting a right we already thought we had—as compared with rights we wanted to gain (such as the ERA)-that pushed the movement to focus on this one pressing issue. After Webster, the need for a single-issue focus for the mass mobilizations has become very well accepted within NOW.

The most effective way to build mass actions today is to organize around one demand for which the broadest support in the streets can be mobilized. Keep abortion safe, legal, and accessible; this should be the focus of the actions.

Many women and men are coming into this movement who are aroused to anger on this issue but completely uneducated about other issues. Even people who voted for Bush in the last election are getting into this fight.

Bringing in a host of other demands such as pay equity, comparable worth, childcare, lesbian parent rights (all of which are important issues supported by feminists and socialists alike) will not help to build a truly massive movement.

Defending the clinics

A mass-action strategy also encompasses mass action at the clinics to keep them open. The only way to defeat Operation Rescue at the clinics is to outmobilize them and prevent them from closing the clinics and terrorizing women. This is a massive task and the movement has only been partially successful so far. We've been successful, for the most part, in maintaining access to the clinics but not in maintaining the rights of privacy for the clinic patients.

Our goal must be to thoroughly demoralize Operation Rescue so that they see their attacks as useless and are forced to abandon them.

Whether this will happen depends on a lot of factors: whether the movement can stay mobilized and increase pro-choice numbers at the clinics, whether we can beat back the government attacks, whether we can get more efficiently organized.

Defense at the clinics is as important as pickets at plant gates to prevent scabs from taking jobs during a strike. During strikes, labor bureaucrats come up with all kinds of alternatives to the basic picket-line defense— corporate campaigns, obeying restrictive court injunctions (such as putting only two pickets at the gate), lobbying, and sometimes marches at public sites, which can be a very good means for building public support for a But during a strike, none of these is a substitute for defense at the point of production. The same is true for clinic defense. No other tactic can substitute for stopping the (continued on next page)

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"SCONSIN PRO NOW members and pro-choice supporters protested in Cincinnati on July 22.

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fanatics at the clinics themselves.

The duty of the movement to put Operation Rescue out of business has only become more clear in the wake of the Webster decision, which has encouraged them tremendously.

The ruling class, some of its more astute representatives are noting, may have bit off more than they can chew with the Supreme Court's ruling against women. They intended, with this decision, to divide up the movement piecemeal on a state by state basis. But the call for national mobilizations and the intense degree of resistance may be more than they are ready to take on.

The importance of NOW Why is NOW the pivotal force in today's fight to defend women's rights? NOW has the moral authority after the historic success of April 9 to make the Nov. 12 mobilization even more massive. They openly say they want a million people to show up.

The fact that NOW is a membership organization makes it the best vehicle for involving new activists directly in the fight for abortion rights.

NOW is already recruiting and involving thousands of new people, and young peoplemainly campus women—in the organizing.

3000 useless and counterproductive working in the capitalist parties really is.

Legislative work

MICHIGAN OHIO population-control plans are perpetrated on "Third World" peoples. Population control constitutes a refusal to oppose imperialism's impoverishment of the peoples of the semiKOP BKTO LEGAL SEXIMID Joe Ryan/Socialist Actin

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ABORTION LEGAL

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