First Published: Workers Viewpoint, Vol. 2, No. 7, August 1977.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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In the past year, the US ruling class has whipped up a big fanfare around the so-called “morality of abortion”. This peaked in the Supreme Court and Senate ruling on June 30 that took away Medicaid funds for abortions.
The court ruling is clearly an attack on working women. Even Carter had to admit on TV that it is discriminatory. He then justifies it with a limp voice, “there are many things in life that are unfair.” Even Carter with all his public relations gimmicks is finding it impossible to whitewash the criminal rule of capitalism.
Communists defend the right of Abortion. We also fight for government funded abortions as a special demand for working women in our overall fight for better health care for working women and all workers. Under socialism, the government actively promotes family planning as part of the plan to build socialism. Safe methods of birth control are propagated among the masses. But under capitalism, many working women don’t have access to good and safe birth control and will have accidental pregnancies. Many working women will have to have abortions because of financial hardships which is particularly true of lots of working women who are the sole supporters of their families. Many working women will also be forced to have abortions because of unstable relationships which is a by-product of capitalism. (we will go into this in a future article.) Unlike socialist countries such as China, where young women find their lives meaningful in dedicating themselves to the cause of building socialism, young people in this capitalist society often find themselves drifting. For many of these young people who can’t find jobs or get thrown out of the rotten bourgeois education system, men-women relationships often becomes art escape or the cause of life itself. The bourgeoisie pushes this hedonism (seeking pleasure as an end in itself) and reactionary romanticism among youth to divert them from actively struggling against their oppression.
Under capitalism, many women will also have pregnancies because they marry or begin relationships at a young age under the influence of male supremacist idea that women’s role is in the hone. Such ideas are actively propagated by the bourgeoisie to suppress the revolutionary potential of working women and to drive a wedge between men and women.
Planning under socialism will help avoid the need to have abortions, but since this doesn’t and cannot exist under capitalist society, we must fight for the right of working women to have government funded abortion.
But unlike the liberals, we cannot confine our struggles to the demand for government funded abortions. We must see through the phony debate around the so-called “morality of abortions.”
The debate is phony because the liberals that said they want to fight for the right of abortion are not fighting for the working class. They are only the slicker wing of the bourgeoisie that is using the issue to spread pessimism, hedonism and to disarm us ideologically. The liberals said that they support abortion because it is “a greater immorality to bring to this world where there is no housing, education or anything.” This is the outlook of the dying class, not the working class’ outlook of fighting for our bright future of socialism.
The working class cherishes our children with great hope and pride. As we struggle day in and day out against the oppressive rule of capitalism – the budget cuts, layoffs, unemployment, attacks on our right to strike – every day we are gaining in consciousness and organization. Every day we see that the bourgeoisie is being caught in its own contradictions under the blow of the working class. From our experience and the laws of history, we know that we are the invincible class that will one day put an end to the criminal rule of capitalism.
The petty bourgeois solution to the oppression of capitalism is escapism and hedonism. This is what the liberal representatives of the bourgeoisie is actively promoting in the courts on the abortion issue. They want to tell us not having children gets us out of capitalist oppression. It is like telling us to jump out of the window if we hate the capitalists.
But the working class solution is not to jump but to fight back, fail, fight again to victory. That is why we cherish our children and will bring them up as revolutionary successors and better fighters than we are. We know that it is only through struggling against the bourgeoisie that we will bring hope to our children and our children’s children.
This is why we will raise our kids and weather them through the storm of class struggle and train them to be class fighters to carry on the struggle and the noble cause of socialism and communism.
Another sinister aspect of the liberal outcry for the “right to funded abortion” is preparation for fascism by feeding the ultra-right wing, the religious fundamentalists, and right-to-lifers. Because the liberals promoted hedonism and escapism, the right wing fascist forces have exploited the issue by appealing to the good, working class instincts of cherishing our children and stable man-woman relationships. This is why the “right to life” has become a rallying point to provoke and create a right wing fascist movement in some sectors of the working class. These right wingers are also actively pushing the male supremacist idea that the women’s place is in the home and that the women’s place is in the home and only to bear children.
To fight the attacks of the bourgeoisie, not only must we fight for the right to government funded abortions, but more importantly, we must also take up the fight of the immediate interests of the working class and link them up to the fight for the noble goal of the dictatorship of the proletariat and communism. We must take up the fight for jobs, better housing, and better education for our children and our class brothers and sisters. We must also fight the bourgeoisie on the ideological front by promoting in the course of struggle the bright outlook of the working class on children and stable men-women relationships. Through the course of struggle we will make our families a fighting unit in the struggle against the bourgeoisie.