Roe Wasn't a Constitutional Protection, It Was a Substitute for One
It's time for a new abortion movement, led by working people, that's untied to electing Democrats and ready to fight for an Equal Protection Amendment to the Constitution!
The long-anticipated death of Roe v. Wade, struck down in a historic ruling June 24, is being lamented by many liberals and left–reformists as the death of a constitutional right. This description is wrong and obscures the fact that Roe was not a progressive leap forward. It abruptly ended a debate among working people about the need for abortion as an essential right, by leaving it to a capitalist court, instead of winning abortion as a social conquest, like Black and Women’s Suffrage and the Bill of Rights. So, the struggle picks up right where it left off. It’s now up to us to complete the task.
The debate over abortion was still being hashed-out at the apex of the Civil Rights Movement, in 1973, when a Supreme Court ruling used the controversial legal theory of “implicit rights,” which it itself created, declaring the Constitution implicitly protected abortion. As Socialist Workers Party central leader, Mary Alice Waters, recently said of Roe and the party’s original support for it:
“Fifty years of experience in the class struggle have taught us that judgment was inaccurate. It soon became clear that the court edict set back the fight to repeal all laws criminalizing or restricting abortion.” The ruling — decided by the Supreme Court on a political, not constitutional basis — “short-circuited the momentum that was gaining ground in the political fight to win a majority of the working class, male and female, to recognize that a woman’s right to decide whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term is a precondition for women’s equality.”
Opponents of abortion since used the watery language of the ruling, which allowed broad state regulation, in succeeding decades, picking holes into abortion access, reducing it to the bureaucratic nightmare it is today. As the liberal Ruth Bader Ginsberg, seen by many as a champion of Roe, said of the precedent, on the occasion of its 40th anniversary at Chicago Law:
“Another feature of Roe is Roe really isn't about the woman's choice, is it? It's about the doctor's freedom to practice his profession as he thinks best. You never, read the Roe opinion. You will never see the woman standing alone. It's always the woman in consultation with her physician. For the picture that I got from that, from that decision, was tall doctor and little woman needing, needing his advice and care. It wasn't woman centered. It was physician centered because Roe was not just restricting the woman's choice. It was telling the doctor, even if it is in your best medical judgment that this person have an abortion, you can't exercise that.”
The capitalist Democratic Party also used Roe, and the fear of its repeal, as a campaign issue for 50 years, while allowing its erosion in order to both legitimize the “threat” and milk it for votes. In other words, the DNC made a racket out of abortion, at once creating a problem while selling a supposed solution for profit. Internet memes portraying this racket now flood the ether.
Consequently, decades of Democratic Party rule only crippled abortion access, scapegoating the “sinister” Republicans as the sole-menaces, whenever if rarely held to account. Because of this situation, the fight for abortion in America is seen as a DP project by many working people. This is especially true now that the struggle for abortion has been made synonymous with “trans” rights, broadening the reactionary, leftist attack-on-women.
More and more, however, are seeing through the charade. At a recent pro-choice protest called by Socialist Alternative, in Houston, where he tried to co-op the protest by forcing his way to the front, former Congressman Robert Francis O’Rourke — who’s utilized Roe for votes — was shouted down by droves of protestors chanting, “Voting blue is not enough! Democrats, we call your bluff!” In shame, he hung his head.
Such rebellion from the DP’s own social base, while historically unheard of, is becoming ever more common. Protests that sprouted across the country demanding abortion rights, over the weekend, also included similar sentiments from attendees, including some I spoke to in McAllen on June 24. Many felt insulted by mailers they’d received, asking for money to supposedly fight for abortion, having witnessed years of broken promises. Democrats’ credibility has sunk into the ocean with a stone wrapped around its neck. So, what’s the way forward?
Under capitalism, fundamental rights are not won by elections. Nor are they won by judicial rulings. Like Radical Reconstruction — Women’s Suffrage, the Civil Rights Movement that overthrew Jim Crow — progressive change is brought about when tens of millions take to the streets and demand their rights, regardless of which capitalist party is in power. A new mass national movement for abortion, one that “isn’t tied to electing Democrats or placing women in powerful positions,” is needed.
Such mass movements, even in favor of abortion rights, have been seen recently, in Argentina and Ireland, where abortion was won as a constitutional guarantee. In both countries, it was won through national referendum. The campaigns were led by social and labor organizations, independent of capitalist political parties. While amending the U.S. Constitution would take a revolutionary social struggle to ratify abortion as an equal protection, state by state, we should proudly take up that challenge, in addition to accepting that this is the only way.
As we can also see from Argentina and Ireland, as well as revolutionary Cuba where abortion is a universal right, the struggle for universal abortion is itself universal. It’s universal in that it’s an international struggle. Wherever capitalism employs women, usually with no health or living guarantees, a movement for abortion will inevitably rise. Women innately recognize that without control over their own reproduction — whether opting for abortion or not, especially in a world where survival is dependent on employment — they are not fully free. And that has to change, immediately.
This change, however, can only come by defenders of abortion winning-over our co-workers and families through respectful debate and discussion, as opposed to the Democrats’ thuggish tactics of intimidation and threatening to abolish a democratic and constitutional branch of government, like the Supreme Court. For a mass movement to form, large swaths of workers must be convinced of the fight, as seen in the examples of Lenin’s Bolshevik Party and Castro’s July 26th Movement. This takes patience, democratic principles as well as a class-against-class perspective.
Only Working People Can Lead Fight for Abortion
Globally, Capitalism already had its revolutionary period, beginning around 1500 with the early, European, democratic revolts, and ending shortly before 1900, at the end of Reconstruction. Under feudal governments, the emerging capitalist classes were revolutionary in that they overthrew monarchy to establish capitalist democracies/republics, leading to expansive production and the introduction of civil liberties.
But capitalism possessed its own form of exploitation in that it required workers to generate profits, unintentionally creating its own gravediggers in the process. The once revolutionary class thus became the reactionary class, in that capitalists now aim to prevent losing state-power, which enforces their dominion over us who had to fight in blood to enjoy the rights of The Enlightenment.
It’s up to us to wrench state-power away from the capitalists and re-organize production based on human need rather than profit, and thereby begin to wither away class divisions, and truly realize life, liberty, property and happiness, as production is liberated for the benefit of all mankind, in the long-term. But common struggles that bring workers together, like abortion, prepare us overtime to become that transitional ruling-class on the way to forging a socialist, and ultimately a communist, world.
For now, the capitalists preserve their rule by attacking our living standards, to weaken our capacity to resist their and their government’s attacks on our wages. Restricting abortion, or preferably banning it, weakens working women in particular, as well as her family and community. Because the capitalists are unalterably “invested” in restricting abortion, and both major parties represent the interests of their respective capitalist cliques, neither can advance the struggle for abortion.
Championing an Equal Protection Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which is what is now required, is dependent on us forming a new mass movement for abortion that’s independent of the capitalist class and their institutions. This task is a great, and challenging, but necessary struggle.