Women’s rights are a key part of the broader fight of the working class against the attacks of the capitalist rulers and their government

Bourgois electoral politics is not one evil party versus one good party.

It's two parties of the class enemy on a seesaw. Each time workers buy into their lesser-evil con, we lose more rights and freedoms we fought for. 

Each side of the seesaw is a different type of assault. That's the context for everything from the Hyde Amendment to "Abortion should be legal... But rare."

JR

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[....]"The framework for the debate working people need about women's emancipation can't start from abortion or the Roe v. Wade decision," Mailhot said. "It starts with combating all the obstacles under capitalism to family formation in the working class and worse-off layers of the middle class. And with the second-class status of women and the way it underpins capitalist rule."

The comments of several judges during the Dec. 1 hearings shows a Supreme Court majority is considering  overturning Roe v. Wade, if not now, then down the line, Mailhot said.

But that won't close off the needed discussion over how women's rights are a key part of the broader fight of the working class against the attacks of the capitalist rulers and their government. This includes the need to advance all aspects of family planning, fighting for health care, society's responsibility for contraception and child care, and more.

Debate over adoption

One aspect of this is the place of adoption. Judge Amy Coney Barrett noted that since Roe v. Wade adoption and "safe haven laws" make it easier for women to give up unwanted children without fear of being prosecuted. Why not talk about adoption as an alternative? she raised.

"Questions like the one asked by Barrett about adoption can't be sloughed off as irrelevant — or even worse — 'Catholic-minded,'" Mailhot said. They must be taken up from the standpoint of the working class.

"Among working people, adoption is a normal way of dealing with a societal need — couples who can't have kids and giving a home to kids who don't have one," Mailhot said. Relatives and friends often take in children of people they are close to.

For most working-class families adoption is an exercise in class solidarity — a rejection of the 'me and mine' attitudes hammered into us by the capitalist class."

"Two of the five children adopted by my sister and her husband were foster kids, who were never formally adopted but were taken in as part of their family," he recalled. Mailhot described how a neighbor complained to his parents, "your daughter's family looks like the League of Nations."

"Along with fulfilling a need, I always thought my sister's family helped break down prejudices in the small town where they lived and in my own family," he said.

Mailhot pointed to a Dec. 2 article by Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who said that the Roe v. Wade ruling has generated such sharp debate because "Roe involved death."

"But it is the capitalist system that is about death," Mailhot said. "From the rulers' wars, to the maiming and deaths of workers on the job, to the treatment of the elderly, to the thousands of women who lost their lives in botched abortions before the procedure was decriminalized."

From the full article here:

https://themilitant.com/2021/12/24/working-class-fight-for-womens-emancipation-support-for-families/

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