Leftist Erasure of "Women" Hurts Abortion Fight
I'm old enough to remember when the chant was, "Women must decide their fate!" I refuse to omit "Women" for "People"
It’s time to stop fooling around: Women, and women alone, are the only “people” who can bear children. This is the unassailable reality of our species. Because of it, women uniquely face predicaments men don’t. Carrying a pregnancy to term — involving complex questions of autonomy, health and employment — must be the woman in question’s sole-decision. Placing women as non-primary stakeholders to abortion — as is done with the substitution of “women” from pro-choice chants for “people” — negates the foundational premise that makes women’s liberation conditional on the right to choose or not choose abortion. Moreover, the visceral distaste induced by the ultra-left veneer of it all, hurts the cause, by isolating the most important social ally women have in this fight — the working class.
False “inclusivity” has been weaponized by the middle-class left to “exclude” women as a unique political class. At a recent protest for abortion rights in McAllen, held shortly after the Dobbs decision, the Democratic Party-funded organizers of the event led a chant I’ve been hearing at abortion protests the last ten years, but with a not-so-curious revision — replacing “women” for “people.” It is argued that saying people is “inclusive,” while ignoring its inclusivity is contingent on excluding any mention of the word “women”. Dialectically-speaking, “people” is the negation of woman, in that women are unique in their own way, separate from “people.”
It used to go, “Not the church, not the state! Women must decide their fate!” Always being my favorite, hearing the most important word switched-out for an impotent one was infuriating. I shouted the original chant, in response, hoping it would catch on. It didn’t.
Nevertheless, I spoke with a few women after the protest, like local activist, writer and my good friend, Allyson Duarte, who agreed that this erasure of women as a unique class made no sense. Duarte added the Democrats would do nothing to help fight for abortion, as “they’re just using the issue of abortion to get re-elected.”
We can distinguish between the protest attendees and the organizers. Clearly, the decision to change the chant was not an organic one. It was strategic, coming down from DNC-linked leaderships of organizations with monopoly on abortion activism, like the ACLU and the Texas Civil Rights Project, in line with the broader and ongoing campaign to erase women.
The ACLU — who recently lost the last shred of national credibility it had defending the disgraceful Amber Heard, even after she defrauded them — recently explained “why we use inclusive language to talk about abortion.” Subtitled, “Women aren’t the only people impacted by the fall of Roe v. Wade,” the report argues that women are not the only people who can become pregnant, clearly based on the anti-materialist and anti-scientific belief that humans can objectively change their sex by subjectively declaring it so.
To the question of who gets abortions, the report begins by conceding, “There is, of course, the obvious answer: women. Cisgender women have abortions more than any other group of people. There is plenty of data to back this up.”
They conclude, “anyone who can become pregnant needs to be able to get an abortion if they need or want one, including many cisgender women, some non-binary people, some intersex people, some Two Spirit people, and some trans men.” The ACLU and their co-thinkers, as we can see, make no distinction between the objective and subjective. Surely, they would say the distinction is a “white, male construct.”
The report equates the struggle for abortion — an essential right for women as an oppressed class under capitalism — with people who identify as “trans” receiving “gender affirming healthcare.” This equivocation is absurd on its face and invites people to lie to themselves about what they know to be true about reality, also known as gaslighting. Many women, who have a disposition to being nurturing and empathetic, are bullied by delusional men into “affirming” the impossible and accepting these ludicrous conclusions out of corrupted politeness. Women should resist the fear of being labeled bigots and proudly affirm their womanhood and sole ability to birth life. To claim men can give birth blights the abortion fight, by linguistically muddying the waters, and devaluing women’s unique place in society.
While many well-attended protests for abortion sprouted after Dobbs, and while abortion protests have historically been well-attended, unions and labor organizations in their masses are not mobilized to fight for abortion. This is partly to do with organized labor’s long retreat from the class struggle. But given that many working people are turned off by identity politics in general, which has been demonstrated in several elections and captured in countless investigative articles the last five-to-ten years, we can extrapolate that they must also be at least slightly turned off by the identity politics subsumed into the fight for abortion, probably undermining the alliance between social organizations and labor that’s needed to win abortion as a universal right for women.
How Class-Divided Society Enslaved Women
Under capitalism, and ever since the matriarchy was crushed by the introduction of class-divided societies millennia ago, women’s unique biological disposition was used as a justification for oppression and a tool for producing laborers — the necessary subject of class exploitation. As the late and longtime Socialist Workers Party leader, Evelyn Reed, once wrote of the myths created to justify the oppression of women — which claimed motherhood deemed women “naturally” inferior — in Problems of Women’s Liberation:
“This is a falsification of natural and social history. It is not nature but class society which lowered women and elevated men. Men won their social supremacy in struggle against and conquest over the women. But this sexual struggle was part and parcel of a great social struggle — the overturn of primitive society and the institution of class society. Women’s inferiority is the product of a social system which has produced and fostered innumerable other inequalities, inferiorities, discriminations, and degradations.”
“It is not nature but class society which robbed women of their right to participate in the higher functions of society and placed the primary emphasis upon their animal functions of maternity. And this robbery was perpetrated through a twofold myth. On the one side, motherhood is represented as a biological affliction arising out of the maternal organs of women. Alongside this vulgar materialism, motherhood is represented as being something almost mystical. To console women for their status as second-class citizens, mothers are sanctified, endowed with halos and blessed with special “instincts,” feelings and knowledge forever beyond the comprehension of men. Sanctity and degradation are simply two sides of the same coin of the social robbery of women under class society.”
Leon Trotsky, central leader of the Bolshevik revolution — which ushered in the first government in history to guarantee abortion, acknowledged the unique place of women in society and biology, in the Revolution’s early years:
“The October Revolution honestly fulfilled its obligations in relation to woman. The young government not only gave her all political and legal rights in equality with man, but what is more important, did all that it could, and in any case incomparably more than any other government ever did, to secure her access to all forms of economic and cultural work. However, the boldest revolution, like the “all-powerful” British Parliament, cannot convert a woman into a man—or rather cannot divide equally between them the burden of pregnancy, birth, nursing, and the rearing of children.”
Women, subjected to second-class citizenship by class-divided society, are not fully free without control of their reproduction, as well as full healthcare, employment and housing. Giving birth is their choice, and their choice alone. The road to liberation entails an understanding and an authentic “affirmation” of Women’s history, as well as a radical acceptance of the biological reality that underlies women’s incomparable oppression. In all, without a solid historical grasp of women’s oppression under capitalism, as well as working people in general, we will fail to liberate ourselves from the shackles of capitalism. As a chapter title in a new book about this subject firmly states, without materialist dialectics, there can be no working-class revolution.