We Wont Go Backie

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NOW leadership has to organize more mass actions for the right to choose.

Excitement was generated one year ago in a workshop on political action at the national NOW conference in Cincinnati when speaker after speaker blasted the two main parties as enemies of women and then voted overwhelmingly to explore the establishment of a third party.

NOW members continued to have great interest in this project again this year. Over 300 people attended the conference workshop scheduled to discuss it. The apparent contradiction of calling for a new party while working to elect Democrats in 1990 didn't seem to bother the NOW leadership. Neither did the appointment of commissioners, who are active Democratic Party members, to hear testimony on the new party issue.

Some NOW leaders claim that a third party could throw its support to one of the major party candidates. Statements like this, also reported in the daily press, indicate that the third party idea may be meant as a palliative for militants in NOW who are fed up with the performance of so-called feminist politicians. Such politicians, once elected to public office, do nothing to further the cause and often join with others to defeat or compromise away women's rights.

For example, Dianne Feinstein, running for California governor as a "feminist" candidate, did nothing to advance the cause of women's rights when she was mayor of San Francisco. She fought against expanding childcare programs, opposed pro-choice resolutions, opposed a comparable-worth plan for city employees, and failed to appoint a greater percentage of women to city commissions than her predecessor had.

NOW leaders who are committed to the Democrats (such as Molly Yard, whose active involvement with the Democratic Party goes back, she boasts, to Franklin Roosevelt's fourth-term election) may hope that all this talk of a new party will convince the activists to work for the Democrats while waiting for NOW to get a better party launched.

The NOW leadership is well aware that thousands joined the organization this past year because NOW took the leadership of the struggle to defend abortion rights by calling President for Action, answering the phony argument of the court that claimed parental notification laws protect the rights of families, said, "The only power these laws protect is the coercive power of the state. They're states' rights laws."

"Fundamental rights are not treated this way," said O'Dell, who warned that the court is "telling us that they don't think abortion is a fundamental right" and therefore are moving in the direction of throwing out the run unopposed, but they also took the unusual step of picking the next leadership team.

They pushed through a "Team Transition Resolution," which announced Yard's intention of resigning mid-way through her three-year term of office, at which point Patricia Ireland, who now serves as Executive Vice President, will assume the presidency and within its own organization.

Mass action needed

The new Supreme Court decision against young women, which chips away at the right to abortion, combined with the extreme anti-abortion laws in Pennsylvania, Guam, and Louisiana show that the right to abortion must be defended even more vigorously now than before.

Unfortunately, a resolution calling for a national abortion rights march in the spring of 1991 (which was supported by over 700 conference participants who signed a petition for it) was placed low enough on the agenda to preclude debate and adoption. It was referred to the National NOW Board, where it faces certain defeat.

The national leadership claims that it will mobilize 1 million in the streets again when one of the current state anti-abortion laws reaches the Supreme Court as "the challenge to Roe v. Wade."

This is good, but a date should be set, and we should be working on a national action now while the stakes are so high. Instead, the leadership is counting on the election of some supposedly pro-choice candidates to stop the anti-abortion steamroller. This reliance on the politicians has already begun to demobilize the movement.

An important resolution passed at the conference set up a "campus caravan for women's lives," with the aim of organizing youth in the fight for reproductive rights. But a major portion of this resolution calls on youth to work on electoral political (read: Democratic Party) campaigns.

The organization of youth in the fight for women's rights could be the crucial factor in saving legal abortion in the United States— but this can only happen if the movement stays independent of the two status-quo capitalist political parties.

A lesson from the Vietnam antiwar movement is extremely relevant today. The movement needs to be independent and in the streets. This is the only way we can win! •

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Letion Joseph Ryan/Socialist Action