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NEWS & LETTERS, August - September 2008
Woman as Reason
Nicaragua: what happened after the revolution?
by Terry Moon
The necessity of addressing the philosophic question, "What happens after revolution?" before and during the revolution itself, was raised concretely recently by Sofia Montenegro, a long-time revolutionary feminist activist of the Nicaraguan Autonomous Women's Movement. Montenegro excoriated Daniel Ortega, the president of Nicaragua and the ruling Sandinista National Liberation Fronts (FSLN) reactionary role in making Nicaragua's anti-abortion law one of the most repressive on earth, outlawing all abortions for any reason, including a woman's health. Since the law came into effect in November 2006, it has caused the deaths of well over 100 women. Many die in agony, mostly from completely treatable conditions.
Montenegro said to her InterPress interviewer, "It was the votes of FSLN lawmakers, not the Right, that made the repeal of therapeutic abortion possible. It was a betrayal of women, who were key allies of the 1979 Sandinista Revolution."
WOMEN STILL DYING
While the FSLN-affiliated womens organization, AMNLAE, kept quiet about the appalling lack of reproductive rights during the revolution that overthrew the dictator Somoza in 1979 and for many years after, by 1983 Maria Torres, the director of Children's Hospital in Valex Pals, Nicaragua, complained to the U.S. feminist journal off our backs that illegal abortions were one of the three major causes of maternal death. Torres' hospital saw one or two self-induced or butcher abortions a day. The oob article also quotes the authors of Sweet Ramparts: Women in Revolutionary Nicaragua, who "note that one hospital in the capital city of Managua admits an average of ten women a day as a result of illegal abortions."
We wrote then in the pages of News & Letters: "we must ask what it means for Nicaragua, four years after revolution, to have a law that is so awful that abortion is only legal if the woman's life is in danger and even then consent must be given by the man!" (See December 1983 N&L, "Philosophy critical for 'feminist dialogue.'") Now, even that law, with the help of Ortega and his now counter-revolutionary FSLN, has been gutted. We concluded in 1983: "What is most unserious is to bury the demand of women to control our own bodies as if that isn't a priority simultaneously with feeding the hungry and fighting U.S. imperialism. . . [W]e are talking of revolution in permanence, of the fact that womens fight for full freedom has always deepened the concept of how total revolution has to become. . . "
Revolution is always the test of revolutionaries, and that the Left just didnt get it was revealed, again, in May of 1985 when Ernesto Cardenal, the then Nicaraguan Minister of Culture, spoke at the University of Illinois. His short speech ended with a call for a dialogue with his audience. I took the opportunity to say: "I want to know how it is that five and a half years after revolution, women are still dying from butcher abortions in Nicaragua? What I am really asking is why is it that the fight to control our own bodies is seen as divisive to revolution, rather than as deepening it?" Cardenal responded that women could get abortions if it was medically necessary--something that now, partly thanks to him, is no longer possible. (See June 1985 N&L, "Feminists question Nicaraguas Cardenal.")
Telling was how no one in that lecture hall dared to support me because they knew they would be attacked and in fact those who took the floor condemned my question as one Latin American activist did, by saying that: "Yes, women are oppressed, but Latin America is different from the North American womens movement, and the main point is that womens struggle must be seen in terms of the overall view of the class struggle."
There is no need or space to argue with such ideas that have been long discredited by books like Margaret Randall's Gathering Rage, or most importantly, by the indigenous Nicaraguan womens movement and women like Sofia Montenegro.
WHAT HAPPENS AFTER?
What must be stressed is there were 11 years when the Sandinistas ruled Nicaragua and could have codified womens freedom and reproductive justice in the laws and practices of the land. Had they done that, there is no way now that Ortega could genuflect to the Catholic Church and mount the presidency on the backs of women dying from treatable medical conditions and butcher abortions. It isn't only those like Cardenal and Ortega who are to blame. The left was and remains almost completely silent on the question, whether it is women dying in Nicaragua, or right here in the USA.
What is revealed is a narrow concept of what revolution means, a failure to come to grips with what happens after, and a non-understanding of Marx's concept of revolution in permanence. This is grounded in thinking that philosophy is an abstraction so that the vision of what it means to be a whole free human being and how deep and continuous must revolution become to make that vision a reality is simply lost, set aside. The reality of Nicaragua today, where women are needlessly dying because a revolution stopped short with the seizure of power, shows just how philosophic is the question of What happens after revolution? and that we need to be addressing that question right now.
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