H 23°, L 4° | Tomorrow: 
H 21°, L 6°On Jan. 22, 1973, years of agitation paid off for women as safe, affordable access to abortion was legalized through the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. Millions of women had previously depended on unsafe back-alley abortions and risked death for the most basic human right — to control her body. Thirty-one years later, the right wing in this country has taken back much of what the Roe decision guaranteed for women. And this process (state-by-state, procedure-by-procedure restrictions) has been paralleled by an ideological war against women’s rights, from access to a safe abortion to decreasing wages for women.
To understand the pathetic state of reproductive rights, one needs to look back to how abortion rights were won to begin with. In the late 1960s, inspired by the civil rights movement and its victories, the women’s liberation movement grew rapidly. At the center of this movement was the demand for a woman’s right to choose — in addition to equal pay and childcare. In 1970 California became the first state to legalize abortion — under the governorship of none other than Ronald Reagan. And just three years later, under the presidency of anti-abortion bigot, Nixon — the Supreme Court (packed with conservatives) ruled that women should have the right to abort unwanted pregnancies. Not the church, not a judge, not her family … herself!
Almost immediately following the decision, conservatives began organizing for its demise. Illinois Republican Henry Hyde knew that the only way to defeat the Roe decision would be to chip away at it with one piece of legislation at a time. And that’s just what they did. Beginning with Hyde’s own attack on poor women: 1976’s Hyde Amendment banned federal Medicaid funding for abortions. A month later, a Texas Medicaid recipient, Rosie Jimenez, bled to death from a back-alley abortion.
One procedure at a time, under both Democrats and Republicans, access to abortion has reached frighteningly low levels. Today, only 15 states provide abortion access for low-income women. In 90 percent of counties across the nation abortion isn’t provided at all. A woman from western Nebraska faces an eight-hour drive east or west to gain access to safe abortion procedures. If she shows up in Omaha she faces a 24-hour waiting period, and if she goes to Denver and is under 18 she needs parental consent.
The latest attacks are attempts to ban third-term abortions — misnamed by the Right as ‘partial birth abortions.’ Republicans do not bear all the responsibility for these attacks. 74 democrats voted in favor of criminalizing the procedure as well. And we can’t tell how senators John Kerry and John Edwards would have voted: both were no-shows.
Thanks to recent court rulings, these bans were ruled unconstitutional because they do not allow for exceptions when a woman’s life is at risk. What does it mean when a woman’s right to choose is upheld only when her right to live is threatened? We can turn the tide, but only if we abandon the current strategies of the pro-choice movement.
On April 25 of this year, over a million took to the streets in Washington, D.C., for the March for Women’s Lives. The crowd exploded in applause for actress Cybill Shepherd’s impassioned, non-compromising calls for free abortion on demand, free birth control, and free morning-after pills. The contradiction is that the same crowd cheered for Hillary Clinton’s claim that we didn’t need to protest for eight years. Clinton was clearly alluding to the eight years of her husband’s term as president. The problem with this is that Bill Clinton actually opened the door for Bush’s current all-out assault on abortion rights.
In 1992, Clinton campaigned promising the “Freedom of Choice Act.” After his inauguration, he never uttered the words again. Federal funding for abortions decreased, and the percentage of American counties providing abortion procedures fell to 10 during Clinton’s tenure.
The moral of this story: we cannot trust the Democrats. While John Kerry panders to the right proclaiming his personal pro-life position, we need to rebuild the movement that won women abortion rights to begin with. Without apologies or concessions, we need to rebuild a movement that takes to the streets — not the ballot box.
Christopher Dols, a member of the International Socialist Organization, is a senior majoring in civil engineering.
IP hash: 5e1ca0b3
Hey Chris,
I began reading your article about Roe v. Wade. I thought I would scroll to the end of the article to find out who you are. When I saw that you are a socialist, I stopped reading your article. Anyone who can claim socialism is good can rationalize just about anything, employing euphemisms all the while to avoid confronting certain realities, including the tremendous horror that an international socialist order would inflict. Such socialist ideology is actually quite antithetical to true human freedom, especially the autonomy of the family within society. In short, socialists have never been right when those with legitimate moral authority have been wrong. All the while, socialists inherit a dubious legacy.
Socialism has for “its philosophical basis, pure materialism; its religious basis is pure negation; its ethical basis the theory that society makes the individuals of which it is composed, not the individuals society, and that therefore the structure of society determines individual conduct, which involves moral irresponsibility; its economic basis is the theory that labour is the sole producer, and that capital is the surplus value over bare subsistence produced by labour and stolen by capitalists; its juristic basis is the right of labour to the whole product; its historical basis is the industrial revolution, that is the change from small and handicraft methods of production to large and mechanical ones, and the warfare of classes; its political basis is democracy (…) It may be noted that some of these [bases] have already been abandoned and are in ruins, others are beginning to shake; and as this process advances the defenders are compelled to retreat and take up fresh positions. Thus the form of the doctrine changes and undergoes modification, though all cling still to the central principle, which is the substitution of public for private ownership”(The Quarterly Review).
IP hash: f329cb1d
It is amazing how the whole pro-choice views becomes solely based on a
IP hash: 03f6dcc4
why did you post a forwarded email?
IP hash: 1308b269
To Kevin - What is your point. Do you care to respond to any of the points Chris makes in the article? Oh, I see, you can dismiss them because he’s a “socailist”. It sure is nice to be able to win any argument with anyone by dismissing their point of view as invalid because you disagree with their politics. What’s the point of reading articles and debating issues if you make your mind up based on the politics of someone espousing a certain viewpoint?
-Shane Wealti [email protected]