Why is there no struggle?
I have to admit that my frustration about my right to control my body has reached an all-time high. Disturbingly the 1-year anniversary of the end of Roe v. Wade with the passage of the Dobbs Decision on June 24th, 2022, by one of the US’s most anti-democratic institutions, the SCOTUS, came and went with barely a blip on the local or national radar.
There was no national march on Washington, DC like the in 1992 when George Bush was president and almost a million protesters took to the streets when abortion rights were then under attack by the Supreme Court. There wasn’t the 100,000 thronging into the streets of Madison, Wisconsin (as when Donald Trump was elected President). There were no mass mobilizations anywhere, with the dangerous exception of the ones held by the religious right who were grotesquely and without consequence dancing on the grave of Roe v. Wade in cities everywhere.
The only thing happening on June 24th, with the exception of a dozen tiny local events was that my email box and Facebook feed, with millions of other especially women’s mailboxes and Facebook feeds were blowing up, not with invites to join the fight in the streets, but with requests for money; money most of us don’t have. Every giant and small non-profit organization asking if we could chip in $3, $7, $20, $50, $100, or $500…to save abortion—as if we can buy our way out of this dire situation.
Ah, yes, and giant billboards were designed and paid for and erected in New York City Times Square and across the country by the Democratic National Committee claiming, “the Republicans will make things even worse so we better vote for the Democrats, again”. And again, we are to vote for the old Catholic, anti-abortionist, rapist (remember Tara Reade), Joe Biden. That's what happened on June 24th!
People who can become pregnant in 14+ states have essentially no access to abortion. These include Florida and Texas, who have 25 million people who can become pregnant between the two of them. In my home state of Wisconsin, 100% of people have no access to abortion. Nothing significant took place in any of these states. If millions of people who can become pregnant and regardless of the circumstances can’t abort, thus ruining, or even costing them their lives, had no opportunity to show their outrage, to rage against the machine and march in the streets. There was barely a peep out of anyone across a country of 330 million people, half of whom are directly impacted by Dobbs.
Those of us staunchly in favor of free abortion on demand, who believe teenagers, BIPOC, rural populations, and migrants need abortion on demand, we need to be asking and answering why is there no struggle? Where is the struggle? We have to interrogate a political and social situation where we are like toads sitting in water watching it simmer and yet take no action to escape the damned cauldron as rightwing religious extremists and Neo-nazis continue to twist the stove’s knob to the right.
I had my second trimester abortion in 1987. I was Catholic, I would have lost my chance to be the first person in my family at a college degree, would have had nowhere to live. With no job and no future, I might have committed suicide had I been forced to carry that pregnancy to term. Sort of miraculously, in my darkest hour, a group of young socialist students, a professor and a dozen Palestinian Women at the University of Warwick in Great Britain came to my aid, providing around $4000 which enabled me to access a second trimester surgical abortion in a private hospital. I was approximately 17 weeks along.
While abortion is widely available in parts of Great Britain 2 doctors have to sign a piece of paper saying carrying a fetus to term will cause a mental health breakdown or a physical crisis first. It’s the law and the only way to get an abortion via the free National Healthcare System. To this day pregnant people are required to find two pro-abortion doctors willing to sign off to acquire one of those free abortions. The doctors in impoverished Coventry, England, where I was studying on scholarship were unprepared to sign off for me. I was white, in college and married, therefore in 1987 there was no problem with me carrying an unplanned vehemently unwanted pregnancy to term. So, no signatures and therefore no abortion! According to them I was going to be the perfect mother: white, educated, and married.
Obviously after having a second trimester abortion paid for by socialists and Palestinians—whom I barely knew—my life was never going to be the same. Without that abortion, in my eyes, my life would have been over. I joined a socialist organization and never looked back. The popular notion of “Who Keeps Us Safe, We Keep Us Safe!” was 1000% borne out in my lived experience.
As a 61-year-old lesbian who was 12 when Roe was signed into law, the same year I was raped for the first time, it’s been devastating to see decades of attacks on access to these lifesaving procedures.
The Hyde Amendment that formally denies federal funds for procedures for the poor, is what stripped federal abortion funding from those in the most need, Black people, Migrants, women, and people living in poverty. Not fighting the Hyde Amendment tooth and nail was the beginning of the end of a massive women’s movement. Anti-Abortion, Southern Baptist Democrat Jimmy Carter happily signed that legislation into law. Democrats and Republicans have signed the Hyde Amendment into Law every 2 years since 1976, without a problem! The Democrats have had a trifecta (a trifecta is when one of the two parties has majority control of the house, senate, and presidency) five times since Roe v. Wade was passed. Five times! And not only did they not codify abortion rights, they didn’t even end the Hyde Amendment!
Simply being pro-choice and supporting “safe and legal” abortion in the face of a growing right-wing movement determined to end access paved the way for the passage of parental consent laws, 24, 48, 72 hour waiting periods, forced ultrasounds, and dozens of other restrictions. The Left, by not fighting for full bodily autonomy with every ounce of their beings, opened the door for an insurgent far right with the support of the Republican Party and the tacit tolerance of the Democratic Party. In this arrangement, the Right has not only created endless legal obstacles, but also enabled extremists to begin violently attacking abortion clinics and hospitals with arson, bombs, shootings, vandalism, their bodies, their churches, their neo-fascist orgs and leaders like Terry Randall and the organizations he has led (including Operation: Rescue and others).
The endless limited demand of, “safe and legal” abortion versus free and on demand ones defanged the movement for abortion, ultimately leaving us with facilities in only 11% of counties in the whole US by 2021. Even before the Dobbs ruling, there were no abortion clinics in 89 percent of counties in the US– PRE-DOBBS! I wonder how many well-to-do wealthy white women knew that was the case, or cared?
Unfortunately, no one, not the National Organization for Women (NOW), NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood, The Women’s March, Indivisible, Democratic Socialists of America, or the Democratic Party called for a national mobilization to march on Washington DC to fight for our bodily autonomy on June 24th, 2022, or June 24th, 2023. It’s our responsibility to ask and answer why. Support or opposition to abortion isn’t a question of good or bad ideas, good or bad people. It is a question of power: Ruling class power versus working class power. The people who rule the rest of us, millionaires, billionaires, bosses, and politicians desire two things: control over reproduction/fertility, and to maintain political divisions inside the working class. The first has to do with access to cheap labor power, i.e., workers. The second has to do with being sure that the working and middle class are divided by race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. It’s essential for them that women can be forced and manipulated into performing vast amounts of unpaid labor including giving birth, feeding, cleaning, raising children, caring for the disabled, sick and seniors. This labor power is stolen from us in the same way wages are stolen from every worker every day, only in an even more hidden fashion. That work is collectively worth trillions of dollars to those who own and control every factory, hospital, corporation, and government entity.
While I feel as though I was kicked in the gut yesterday and I cried for all those who cannot, for whatever reason, abort a fetus at will, I also feel anger, a lot of anger. A person isn’t pregnant every day therefore this isn’t a crisis in everyone’s life, every day. But it is a daily crisis in thousands of peoples’ lives who are raped, poor, struggling mentally, carrying non-viable fetuses, beaten by fathers, boyfriends, husbands, or made homeless by their angry families. For those people it is an everyday, all-day crisis. And any of us could find ourselves there. Honestly putting our feet in the shoes of every working class and impoverished person in Wisconsin, Texas, Alabama, Florida, Poland, England, Ireland, Mexico, everywhere is our job, as descent, loving human beings—like that’s our job. Not one person in need of abortion in Wisconsin is more or less important than anyone anywhere else, full stop.
Socialists know this is about profits and division. The ruling people in this society must maintain the status quo to maintain their wealth. We know or we should know that the Jimmy Carter's, Bill Clinton's, Barak Obama’s, and Joe Biden’s of the world have not and will not give us free abortion on demand. If we’ve learned nothing else since the murder of George Floyd and the ensuing Black Lives Matter Rebellion of 2020, we have to figure out that the people capitalism tramples on the most are those most in need of our solidarity. And as it turns out, are because of their position in society, some of the most powerful. The 20+ million people that poured out into the streets shows that the thing standing between us and a series of ever more powerful uprisings for free abortion on demand, free healthcare, housing, access to college, is the false belief that we can win a better world or even a socialist one by voting for better democrats or even electing reformist socialists and giving more money to non-profits. Until that never ending demand to vote, vote, vote for the Democrats is recognized as a dead-end strategy, that this history is faced up to, and learned from, we will repeat it at our peril and the peril of millions everywhere.
