The battle for women’s reproductive rights must meet new challenges

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Socialist Action FEBRuary 2011 5 HARTFORD, Conn.—Emboldened by their gains in November’s mid-term elections, conservative legislators across the country are working to systematically chip away at abortion rights at the local and state levels.

They are seeking to introduce bills that would redefine fetal viability to a nearly unprecedented 20 weeks, require women considering abortion to view an ultrasound of the fetus and to seek counseling about their decision, limit insurance coverage of abortion and other reproductive procedures, and alter tax laws in order to penalize businesses that provide abortion coverage.

According to a recent NARAL (National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws) report, in 15 states both the legislature and the governor are explicitly anti-abortion. A recent New York Times article explained that in 2010 over 30 laws to restrict abortion were adopted in nine states. A Nebraska law bans abortions after 20 weeks, excluding cases where the woman’s life is immediately threatened. Similar measures are underway in other states, including Iowa, Indiana, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma.

This ban and other legislation aimed at reversing the gains of Roe v. Wade, are based on the uncorroborated claim that fetuses can feel pain at this point in the pregnancy. Oklahoma enacted a requirement last year that women undergoing an abortion watch the entire procedure on an ultra-sound screen and listen to a technician explaining the procedure in meticulous detail as it is performed. This outrageous requirement is rife with sexist discrimination and would never be compulsory for any other procedure such as leg or heart surgery.

The push within the anti-abortion movement to stress fetal “personhood”—or the idea that a fetus is a full human deserving of rights even at the expense of the pregnant woman’s rights—is not a new strategy. Since the introduction of reproductive technologies such as ultra-sound in reproductive care, anti-choicers have used fetal imagery on billboards and in movies to humanize the fetus and even grant it superhuman status while diminishing the personhood of the pregnant woman. It is important to note that anti-choice ideology not only privileges the fetus over the woman but also positions women seeking abortions as unfeeling, selfish, and irresponsible.

Anti-choicers argue that a fetus belongs to all of society and thus an individual woman should not have the right to determine one “innocent” life (even though it is growing within her body and she must sacrifice to produce, and later raise and pay for this life). However, if society at large is indeed responsible for protecting the growing fetus, why are pregnant women the only ones whose behavior comes under social and legal scrutiny? Why are other entities that are potentially threatening to a pregnancy, such as private industry, let off the hook? Why are there no laws that ban companies from producing waste that is toxic to a growing fetus?

Moreover, anti-choicers argue for defending the life of innocent “unborn children” but have nothing to say about the lack of social and economic resources that propel many women to resort to abortion in the first place. Perhaps they fail to recognize that defending fetal rights are fruitless if there are no resources in place to defend children’s rights.

It is notable but unsurprising that the attacks outlined above are being waged under Obama’s allegedly pro-choice administration, which recently passed a health-care bill that renewed the Hyde Amendment—banning the use of federal monies for abortion. This bill nearly ensures that low-income women, who are disproportionately women of color, are denied the legal right to abortions when they can’t afford private insurance.

Here in Connecticut, a bill was introduced in the House of Representatives during the week of Jan. 17 that would effectively eliminate insurance coverage for abortion and penalize businesses that seek insurance policies that cover abortion and other reproductive care.

In response to these mounting attacks, on Jan. 21, Socialist Action Connecticut hosted a forum both to commemorate the anniversary of Roe v. Wade—the Jan. 22, 1973, landmark Supreme Court decision that reversed all state laws blocking legal abortion in the United States—and to underscore the urgency of continuing the struggle for full reproductive freedom. The featured speakers included women’s rights activist and Socialist Action member Aubrey Arpie, and a long-time women’s and labor rights activist and PhD candidate from the University of Connecticut, Bayla Ostrach.

Arpie opened the forum with a talk on the history of abortion criminalization and re-legalization in the U.S.

She explained that “women around the world have engaged in pregnancy termination for thousands of years, and for most of this time they were performed safely and legally,” and further that “when the U.S. Constitution was adopted, first trimester abortions were legal and common.”

She explained that at that time reproductive and gynecological care was dominated by women and midwives (which seems quite logical). However, as medicine developed as a professional career that required university training, only relatively wealthy men could afford this type of schooling and thus came to dominate the field. The newly trained male doctors felt threatened by midwives and other lay healers, and so they worked with state legislators to effectively criminalize abortion and eradicate any competition.

Aside from ensuring that women were erased from reproductive care, abortion laws were also developed in many states because racist policymakers felt the threat of high fertility rates among new immigrants and feared that the white population would diminish.

Forum organizers made a point to acknowledge that the battle for reproductive freedom is not singular or universal. Women of color within the U.S. have a unique history of reproductive oppression that includes coerced sterilization, forced birth control, and social conditions that make it hard for them to raise children. Arpie noted that reproductive freedom not only means the right not to have children— through open access to birth control and abortion—but also the freedom to have children and to parent them without fear of economic deprivation.

All of these abuses stem from the potent combination of racism and sexism fostered by the ruling class. As Arpie noted, “It is in the interest of the ruling class to ensure that oppressed nationalities and groups remain in the minority and to continuously deny them rights in order to divide the working class to prevent people from fighting together for working class interests.”

Aubrey Arpie concluded that full reproductive freedom and full rights for women generally cannot be realized within a capitalist system because such injustices “[are] symptomatic of capitalism.” She noted that anti-choice laws have been made to control women and their bodies and that these laws in conjunction with the lack of social services and sufficient resources ensure that women are confined to the domestic sphere and forced to provide free labor as they raise the next generation of wage slaves. In this way capitalism ensures the perpetuation of a sexist and exploitative system.

An applied medical anthropologist by training, Bayla Ostrach spoke about her work in abortion clinics for over 10 years and her research on social and economic barriers to abortion access among low-income women in Oregon.

She provided on on-the-ground evidence of the logistical barriers that low-income women face in seeking abortions—although abortion is purportedly legal on the federal level. Her findings indicate that obstacles preventing women from easily accessing abortions include cost of the procedure, difficulties in Medicaid applications, lack of social support—and occasionally, fear of abortion protesters.

She recounted several stories of women who waited weeks and even months to learn if they qualified for (Left) Pro-choice activists debate anti-abortion protesters in front of U.S. Supreme Ct. building, Jan. 24.

Medicaid, despite the Department of Human Services’ policy that patients seeking abortion coverage must hear back from the department in no more than 24 hours. Sometimes it was too late for women to have the procedure legally by the time they learned that they qualified for Medicaid.

Based on the logistical barriers to abortion access outlined in Ostrach’s research, and the mounting legal attacks that we are seeing across the country, it is clear that attempts to undo Roe v. Wade and women’s rights generally are on the rise and must be met with resistance.

As Aubrey Arpie noted: “We’re made to beg for reforms, as if that has gotten us any closer to the freedom to choose than we were hundreds of years ago. Throughout U.S. history women have been given rights, and then have had them taken right back. All the while a woman has never been given the full choice over what to do with her body. And it won’t be given to us; we have to take it. We must refuse to be silent and apologetic about abortion. We must educate ourselves and challenge the system and demand the impossible.”

It is imperative that women speak out about their experiences with abortion and reproductive abuse in order to de-stigmatize abortion and expose the sexist oppression they suffer. Socialist Action argues for building a mass movement that unites women of all ethnicities, and men, to fight for women’s rights. At the same time we must struggle to replace the capitalist system, which engenders women’s oppression. n (continued from page 3: “Obama maps out plans to rescue U.S. capitalism”)

In what promises to become an increasingly common phenomenon, Nassau County in New York had its finances taken over by a state board, which immediately declared union contracts null and void.

In recent weeks, right-wing media commentator Glenn Beck has repeatedly attacked Professor Frances Fox Piven as a terrorist for encouraging the country’s unemployed to take to the streets to demand jobs. No doubt Beck would apply the same label to workers in Portugal, Greece, France, and elsewhere in Europe who have repeatedly engaged in general strikes and mass revolts against unemployment and benefit cuts.

And there’s no question Beck would label as Islamist dupes the heroic unemployed youth who are right now engaging in revolutionary upsurges in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Yemen and elsewhere throughout the Arab nation against regimes whose subservience to dictates of Western banks and corporations and the IMF have meant catastrophic levels of unemployment.

Workers in the United States must study closely the tactics used by these workers, and find in ourselves the same heroism they are showing, a heroism shown frequently in pitched battles against our own U.S. employers—including GE!—in the past. n

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... Egypt, Tunisia in Revolt! 6 Socialist Action FEBRuary 2011 (continued from page 1: “Egypt, Tunisia in revolt!”) than the direction a free Egypt might hypothetically take (falsely implying that Egypt is likely to replicate the current Iranian regime).

The fear of Islam—under the pretense of only disliking “radical Islam”—has been one of the main justifications for U.S. support for the “secular” Mubarak regime. This and the immense political and logistical assistance Egypt provides to both the United States and Israel comprise the ways in which repeated American administrations have tried to dress up the brutal dictator Mubarak as some sort of force for progress.

There are some common elements to the conditions and events in both Tunisia and Egypt that to a large extent caused these uprisings. The first is that the economic situation facing the majority of people in both countries is bleak. Particularly for the youth of these countries, unemployment has been fiercely high and future work prospects dim. Additionally, 40% of the people in Egypt—which is the second largest economy in Africa—are living below the World Bank poverty line of $2 per day (and have faced a 17 percent increase in the price of basic food items for three consecutive years). Basic economic concerns, faced by millions around the world in the recession, are the backbone of the people’s resistance.

Frustrating economic situations were combined, in both cases, with dictators who repressed almost every expression of real political opposition. There was effectively no legitimate institutional recourse for democratic dissent in these countries. Leaders and members of opposition parties in both countries have been imprisoned, forced to flee, and in some cases murdered. For the youth coming up, allowing these aging autocrats to continue to monopolize power was indigestible.

Another element that spurred protest in both countries was the constant police harassment and brutality the youth faced. Almost everyone agrees that the spark that set off the protests in Tunisia was the attempted suicide of a youth, Mohamed Bouazizi, after he was harassed, intimidated, and brutalized by Tunisian police. In Egypt, it was the June 2010 murder of the youth Khaled Said by police that became the original reason youth organizers called a protest on Jan. 25, not knowing that when that day came the scope of the protest would be drastically larger because of events in Tunisia.

One final similarity worth noting is the general refusal by army troops in both Tunisia and Egypt to fire on protesters. Most analysts agree that the fact that Ben Ali could no longer rely on the army to counter the pro-democracy protesters forced him to abdicate power and leave the country. Likewise, the Egyptian military’s announcement on Jan. 31 that they wouldn’t fire on peacefully demonstrating citizens, and that the grievances held by citizens were legitimate, seemed to put Mubarak in an untenable situation. We must note, however, that army troops did nothing to aid protesters who were attacked by pro-government goons on Feb. 2.

Meanwhile, Mubarak is using every trick up his sleeve to stop the protests, including shutting off the internet and a majority of cell-phones. He has also sought from the beginning to portray the protests as the beginning of chaos that would tear Egypt apart.

This last issue is quite important, as Mubarak is attempting to divide the opposition by casting security concerns and appeals to the sanctity of private property as the main issues for Egyptians to be concerned about. Mubarak reiterated this theme in the speech he gave the evening of the “March of Millions” protest on Feb. 1. But the Egyptian masses haven’t been buying it from the beginning; and took it upon themselves to stop the narrative that the protests were about looting and destruction in its tracks. They formed neighborhood defense groups, which organized block by block to stop looting and destruction (which almost all Egyptians believe is the work of the police forces).

The stakes are high for the outcome in Egypt, both due to the implications it would have on international relations (vis a vis the Israel-Palestine conflict) and because Egypt controls the Suez Canal (which is a crucial point of global trade). Western powers cannot stand a stoppage of goods and oil passing through the Suez Canal due to unrest; and they know that it will be very difficult to find any incoming Egyptian administration that is as friendly to American and Israeli interests as the Mubarak regime has been.

It is no secret that the Egyptian people do not approve of the horrible treatment given to their Palestinian brothers and sisters; in fact, the Egyptians protested against the Mubarak regime in support of Palestinians on multiple occasions, facing down police repression every time. And while reformist leaders like Mohamed Elbaradei are quick to dismiss Western fears that a democratic Egypt might revise its foreign policy to be more favorable for Palestinians than during Mubarak’s reign, the bottom line is that Egyptians should be able to decide for themselves.

The events of Tunisia and Egypt have inspired people all around the world. Protests in which the participants have evoked Tunisia or Egypt have erupted all around the Middle East—including Algeria, Yemen, and Jordan. Even mainstream analysts believe that Mubarak—if he does indeed fall from power, as most predict—will not be the last leader to fall from this wave of unrest. Some leaders are already taking extraordinary measures in efforts to undercut any detractors; Jordanian King Abdullah II fired his entire cabinet on Feb. 1, ordering his new prime minister to immediately pursue political reforms.

Outside of the region, these uprisings have also inspired worldwide solidarity protests—usually held to demonstrate support for the Egyptian protesters and to oppose the imperialist support given to the dictator Mubarak.

The people of Tunisia, despite the inspiration they have given to many, face a precarious situation; they have gotten rid of a dictator but have no assurance that lasting political or economic gains will result. As it is now, the current Prime Minister (Mohamed Ghannouchi) of the interim government has reshuffled his cabinet and promised reforms, but is viewed as a discredited ally of the ousted dictator. Not only are lasting political gains unsecured, but the economic concerns of the Tunisians have also been hardly addressed at all.

Egyptians face a similar predicament. Will this uprising result in tangible gains that not only address their democratic concerns but also their dire economic situation? To achieve both political and economic change, Egyptians will need to build organizations that fight independently for working-class interests. On this note, the news that a new Egyptian union federation has been formed Ben Curtis / AP Ibrahim Usta / AP (Top) Protesters board army carriers near Cairo’s Tahrir Sq., Jan. 28.

(Below) Members of Islamic group in Istanbul show solidarity with Egyptian protesters, Jan. 28.

(which will not be directly controlled by the Mubarak regime) and that an indefinite general strike is being undertaken are very welcome.

As their struggle develops, it is to be expected that more and more Egyptians and Tunisians will understand that in order to substantially better their conditions, they will need to construct a revolutionary political party that is fully representative of the working class of their countries, and that can also speak to the aspirations of the peasants, youth, and other oppressed people. Ultimately, they and the people of the entire Middle East will need to do away with the rotten neo-colonial regimes that dominate the region and take the same road that the Cubans took 50 years ago toward making a socialist revolution.

It is necessary for concerned people around the world to demonstrate solidarity with those struggling for political freedom and economic change. We must oppose the funding and maintenance of repression and autocracy by the U.S. government. Protests are scheduled locally and regionally in support of Tunisians and Egyptians. And this will be a major theme of the antiwar protests scheduled for April 9 in New York City and April 10 in San Francisco. U.S. hands off the Middle East! n