SHORTLY BEFORE I joined the International Socialist Organization, I attended a counterprotest to defend Planned Parenthood from anti-abortion bigots that gathered in front of the clinic. Our side was bigger, stronger, there first and there longer.
There was a woman from the anti-choice side who stood on our side, holding a sign that simply had “PP” for Planned Parenthood in a circle with a line through it. She told me that the thing she opposed the most was federal funding going to support abortions.
The Religious Right aren’t worth engaging at these protests, and one of the counterprotesters standing with me said simply, “It’s not about dialogue, it’s about winning.” At the time, I was torn about this statement, thinking that maybe dialogue could help, but the truth is that this woman was trying to engage me in a debate about why federal funding shouldn’t go toward “murder.”
So let’s unpack that.
Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, at this point the Democratic frontrunner, calls himself pro-choice, but supports parental notification for teenagers and opposes funding abortions for poor women.
In fact, the state of Arkansas, which has one of the highest rates of poverty in the nation, only funds abortion if a pregnant woman’s life is threatened. And Clinton himself signed a parental notification bill in 1989. Similarly, despite the Democratic Party’s reputation as pro-choice, Democratic politicians haven’t fought to prevent Congress from denying poor women federal abortion funding. Each autumn since 1977, both houses of Congress have upheld the Hyde Amendment, which cut off federal Medicaid funding for poor women’s abortions.
In 2010, Democratic President Barack Obama issued an executive order ensuring that current restrictions that bar federal funds being used for abortions stayed in place under the Affordable Care Act.
In Why Bad Governments Happen to Good People, Danny Katch points out how even the most progressive candidate play politics with women’s right to choose:
Bernie Sanders has become the country’s most popular politician because of his reputation for putting progressive values ahead of political opportunism. But that’s exactly what he didn’t do when he campaigned for Heath Mello, an antiabortion candidate in Nebraska. Sanders defended himself with the kind of Democratic double-talk that he’s often so good at exposing.
FOR TOO long, we’ve been told that the future of women’s rights lies in whether we get Democrats or Republicans in office. For example, women’s rights organizations that focus on electing Democrats are using the nomination of conservative, choice opponent Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court as the number one reason to get Democrats elected in November.
But we need to oppose Kavanaugh now and show the strength of our side — in protest. In the process, we are also helping to build the kind of opposition that fights for reproductive justice, no matter which party is sitting in power.
Polls show that a majority of this country still in favor of legal abortion. And the #MeToo movement and the Women’s Marches have shown the potential for our side to come together and build this kind of resistance.
What’s at stake is women’s equality. In 2003, the World Health Organization estimated that 78,000 women around the world die from unsafe abortions every year. With one in three women in the U.S. needing to have an abortion in their lifetime and with that rate rising as the economy worsens and inequality grows, the most affected are young and low-income.
Legal abortion is an urgent issue affecting millions of women. Control over a woman’s body, and ultimately over her entire existence, is just another way that capitalism feeds on oppression to keep the working class defeated and divided.
We can clearly see what happens when we ignore the far right and bigots — their confidence and power grow and the deterioration of our hard-fought-for rights. It’s time to once again take to the streets and have our voices heard. Our bodies, our choice, our movement to win.