Road to women’s emancipation debated at US women’s marches – The Militant

[....]  Speaking during an open mic at the end of the program, Ilona Gersh, Socialist Workers Party candidate for Chicago mayor, started from a working-class perspective.

 

 

“Birth rates are down, suicide and drug addiction are increasing, young adults are forced to live with their parents for an extended time,” Gersh said. “We need a union-led fight for jobs — with wages and conditions that allow workers to support a family. We need to fight for child care, health care, cost-of-living raises. And for access to contraceptives and safe, legal abortion when needed.

“Working people are beginning to use their unions to fight for these things. We need to build a labor party, based on our unions. Not look to the Democrats and Republicans, the capitalist parties that have gotten us to this point,” she said.

These were some of the questions SWP members and supporters discussed and debated throughout the day.

“I don’t agree with looking to the courts to advance our interests,” Gersh told Claire, a volunteer handing out flyers urging participants to vote in the upcoming state Supreme Court election. “The Roe v. Wade ruling was the Supreme Court acting as a legislative body. Dobbs was good, because it put the issue back to the states and the people. We need to take advantage of that and debate the issue to win a majority. What we need is a fight to repeal the 1849 law.”

“I think of the court election as a stopgap measure,” responded Claire, who didn’t want to give her last name. “Getting a different balance on the court can block the law. I agree the Democratic Party has failed us, but I’m scared for women’s lives right now.” They left it at that, and each continued talking to other participants.

As the march gathered, Gersh spoke with nursing students Jessica Forsgren and Ashley Morgan. “The biggest obstacle we have is people are so divided between Democrats and Republicans,” Forsgren said.

“What’s at the root of sharpening conflicts today is actually the divide between the capitalist class and the working class,” Gersh said, “as the bosses and their government make us pay for their crisis.”

“Well, it’s a big step to reach that understanding,” said Forsgren....

Full:

Road to women’s emancipation debated at US women’s marches – The Militant

The road forward to meet US rulers’ assault on families, women’s rights – The Militant

Numerous demonstrations took place across the country May 14 following the leak of a draft Supreme Court ruling that would overturn the court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision on abortion.

Justice Samuel Alito’s draft holds the Roe decision was not constitutional, and hands decision-making on abortion and related questions to state legislatures and public debate. It would mean that in states where abortion is legal those laws would continue to stand. Some state governments have passed or are considering legislation to impose restrictions on access to the procedure. Nationally the door would be open to a widespread debate.

But the heart of the discussion has to be put on a broader basis. The key question isn’t abortion. It’s how to organize working people to defend ourselves and make gains amid a broader capitalist crisis that is making it harder to start a family and to hold one together. This includes the fight for jobs, adequate wages, protection against soaring inflation, accessible and affordable health care, child care, access to family planning, including adoption, as well as access to contraception and safe and secure abortion when needed.

Liberals and middle-class radicals, however, oppose this course. They think working people are “deplorables” and fear a fight to win public opinion. They want to shut down discussion and show disdain for the rights and opinions of others.

“To put the right to have an abortion up for debate,” New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie says, “degrades” women. But it’s the liberals’ refusal to discuss this and all the related questions that have aided opponents of women’s rights in systematically restricting access to the procedure ever since Roe was pushed through in 1973....

Full article:

The road forward to meet US rulers’ assault on families, women’s rights – The Militant

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

*   *   *

[....]"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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‘Fight new Texas law that restricts women’s right to choose abortion!’ – The Militant

In 1973 the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade decriminalized abortion up to the point where a fetus can sustain life outside the womb, then considered to be 24 weeks. But since the moment the law was passed, capitalist politicians and state governments have relentlessly sought ruling after ruling restricting that right, closing family care clinics, harassing health care providers and enacting more and more limits on women’s access to exercise her right to choose.

....More abortion restrictions have been enacted this year than any other since Roe v. Wade was decided, the Guttmacher Institute, which tracks reproduction statistics, reports.

These restrictions were made easier because of the character and content of the Roe v. Wade decision. It was based on medical criteria centered on “fetal viability,” and required a “doctor’s consent.” This limited abortion to a “health issue” — not a fundamental right based on women’s “equal protection of the law” guaranteed by the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.

About 90% of U.S. counties had no abortion provider at all as of 2017, and since then several other clinics have been forced to close. The sharp drop in the number of clinics hits working-class women and women in rural areas especially hard.

In the fall the Supreme Court will hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which could decide whether state laws that ban previability abortions are unconstitutional. The Jackson Women’s Health Organization is the only remaining licensed abortion provider in Mississippi and it is challenging the “Gestational Age Act,” passed in 2018, which bans most abortions after 15 weeks. Mississippi’s attorney general filed an additional motion in the case in July, urging the Supreme Court to void its previous rulings legalizing abortion. Texas Gov. Gregory Abbott signed a law a few days later that would ban all abortions in the state “the moment Roe v. Wade is overturned.”

‘Fight new Texas law that restricts women’s right to choose abortion!’ – The Militant

Over 1,000 march in Texas to protest new anti-abortion law – The Militant

“The Socialist Workers Party supports a woman’s right to choose whether and when to have a child, free from state interference,” Alyson Kennedy, SWP Texas campaign chair, told the Militant. “We call for working people to mobilize to defend clinics that offer women family planning, including the right to safe and secure abortions.

“Defending this right is fundamental to a woman’s control of her own life and to winning full social, economic and political equality,” Kennedy said. “This right is key to uniting the working class as broader class battles are on the horizon. Millions more women are unemployed today, forced to choose between responsibility for child care under government lockdowns or going to work.

“We need to build a powerful working-class movement that breaks from the capitalist rulers’ parties and forms our own party, a labor party, to fight for women’s rights and for all those exploited and oppressed by capital.”

Over 1,000 march in Texas to protest new anti-abortion law – The Militant