Abortil Diends the Court
1991 1991-06Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 5 →
Read from the scan by machine and not corrected: expect misread words, and now and then a caption or a line from a neighbouring story. For anything you quote, read the scan.
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April 2, 1989, demonstration of 60,000 in San Francisco, Calif. NOW should organize another mass action to protest court ruling.
SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1991 the "public interest."
Perhaps more disturbing than the decision itself is the response of the leadership of the pro-choice and women's movements. Beth Davenport, executive director of the California Abortion Rights Action League, said the ruling proved women "can't count on the Supreme Court anymore to protect us."
Instead, she advocated electing pro-choice Democrats to office and lobbying Congress to pass freedom of choice legislation. "The only thing we can rely on is the power of our votes," she said.
But that power is extremely limited when it begins and ends at the voting booth. The women's movement is replete with examples of supposedly pro-ERA and pro-choice Democrats who, once elected to office, turned their backs on women's rights.
The strategy of electing "good" politicians and lobbying "bad" ones has been used by the women's movement for the past 15 years. And it has failed. How many more setbacks must women endure before the leadership of the movement recognizes that working within the Democratic Party is a dead end in protecting our rights?
During the 1930s, when the labor movement was struggling to gain decent living standards, Congress passed and courts upheld many laws infringing on the rights of workers to form unions and to strike. The leadership of the labor movement defied the laws and mobilized workers in massive demonstrations of solidarity and independent political action.
Today that strategy—which is the only strategy that can win-must be employed by the leadership of the pro-choice and women's movements. The pro-choice and women's movement should use the May 24 decision to galvanize the overwhelmingly pro-choice sentiment in this country into a politically independent, mass movement.
For openers, the National Organization for Women, which is holding its national conference in New York this July, should issue a call for another huge mobilization in the streets of Washington, D.C.
Mass action is necessary to defend the right to reproductive choice and to demand federal funding for all healthcare programs, including family-planning clinics that perform abortions.
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This is not the only tax loophole available