www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, DECEMBER 2003Woman as ReasonWhat late term abortion ban meansby Terry Moon The banning of late-term abortion brings into stark reality how badly women are losing not only our right to control over our bodies, but the concept that women are full human beings. That this is, in fact, the intent of the Right is seen in how Attorney General John Ashcroft gave enforcement responsibilities for this new misogynist law, not to the Justice Department’s criminal division, but to its civil rights division instead. This is not only a thinly veiled attempt to claim that a fetus is a human being; it is an attempt to use the claims of the fetus to negate those of the woman, to have the fetus trump the woman’s civil rights, to render a woman less human than a fetus. The civil rights division that is charged with prosecuting anti-abortionists who block women’s access to clinics will now be responsible for policing and second-guessing the doctors that they were formerly supposed to protect. MARGINALIZATION OF WOMEN The drive to humanize the fetus and dehumanize women continues with "The Unborn Victims of Violence Act" introduced in Congress that would punish attacks on a fetus separately from the attack on the pregnant woman who carries it. The intent is to establish that there are two victims and that killing a fetus is murder. In October the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from a woman sent to prison for up to 20 years on the charge of murdering her stillborn child because she acknowledged using cocaine while pregnant. The power of anti-abortion fanatics was revealed on a different level in Austin, Texas, where last month they were successful in temporarily stopping the construction of a Planned Parenthood Clinic when the builder was boycotted by plumbers and carpenters who were being pressured by a powerful, anti-choice construction industry executive. The Bush administration’s outrageous and successful attempts to legitimize women’s marginalization have emboldened the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Now they plan to begin a new campaign to reemphasize the Church’s ban on contraception--something Catholic women have ignored in the U.S. up till now--and to link the ban on contraception to their anti-abortion campaign. They think if you can convince the U.S. public that late-term abortion is murder, the logic of that idea, carried to its extreme, will be to consider early abortion and contraception murder as well. When they can’t get their way by persuasion, the Catholic hierarchy lies, as did Cardinal Alfonso Trujillo, who lied on the BBC by saying that not only can sperm pass through condoms, but so can the AIDS virus! This lie will mean that many people--especially in the developing world--will forego latex condoms, which are 99.9% effective when used correctly, and get AIDS. These developments and the ban on D&X abortions reveal clearly what a mistake it was to settle for less than the radical demands of the early Women’s Liberation Movement, for free abortion on demand, for no forced sterilization, for safe and free contraceptives, in short, for full control over our bodies and lives. We have to remember that the right to abortion was NOT won in the Supreme Court on what the women’s movement demanded: that women have the RIGHT to control our own bodies. Women do not have the right to an abortion; rather what the Supreme Court granted us was a narrow right to privacy that at this time includes the decision to have an abortion. NEED TOTAL VIEW FROM THE START What these profoundly retrogressive anti-human events reveal is the necessity to start with the demand for absolute freedom, and never be bought off by anything less. When the Supreme Court made abortion legal in 1973, a huge portion of the women’s movement collapsed, thinking their goal was met. Three years later came the Hyde Amendment, which cut off federal abortion funding for poor women, beginning the destruction of women’s right to abortion by attacking those least able to fight back. Now we see where the movement’s capitulation has led. As one longtime feminist Marxist-Humanist said, the ban on D&X abortions "is a qualitatively different defeat from the many restrictions of the last 30 years because it is so absolutist with no exceptions, no way around it except going underground; and it so completely denies women’s personhood in terms of her relation to healthcare." In our age of fundamentalism, with forces worldwide--including the U.S.--trying to force women to accept a reality where we are viewed as less than human, we can’t make the same mistake twice. For women to finally experience freedom, our vision of social change must be a revolutionary vision that is total from the start. |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
