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Title: Pro-Choice Revolution or Reform? Author: Carolyn Date: 1995 Language: en Topics: abortion, anarcha-feminism, Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation Source: 1995 Mar/Apr issue of L&R. Retrieved on 2016-06-13 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160322154653/http://loveandrage.org/?q=node/42
On Dec. 30, 1994 John Salvi, an anti-choice hitman, walked into the
Planned Parenthood Clinic in Brookline, Mass., shot and killed Sharon
Lowney, the receptionist, and wounded three others. Salvi then walked
down the block to the Pre-term Clinic and opened fire again, killing
Leanne Nichols and wounding two other clinic staff members. These
murders are the third such attack in the last year and a half. In Mar.
1993, Michael Griffin shot and killed Dr. David Gunn. Griffin was a
member of Rescue America, an anti-choice group founded by former Ku Klux
Klan member John Burt. On July 29, 1994, the Reverend Paul Hill
assassinated Dr. John Bayard Britton and his clinic escort James
Barrett, wounding escort June Barrett.
News reports have been quick to fixate on the establishment churches’
criticisms of the Brookline killings, arguing that the insanity
surrounding abortions leads to such desperate actions. In other words,
“women’s reproductive freedom is unacceptable, this is what you’re going
to get if abortion remains legal.” Yet, while there are no direct ties
between the Catholic hierarchies, Operation Rescue’s troops, and John
Salvi, he is not a lone gunman, nor are his actions beyond the pale of
the religious right’s tactics.
From 1984 to 1993, the National Abortion Federation has recorded 1,540
incidents of violence at clinics; almost 200 clinics have been bombed,
254 have received bomb threats, 276 were invaded, and 279 vandalized.
This rise in violence since the mid-1980s marks the religious right’s
awareness that its legal efforts to overturn Roe v. Wade have failed.
The religious right has now moved to overturning Roe through the use of
violence. In order to resist the right’s use of hitmen and physical
force, we need to break from the politics of liberal feminism and accept
only a feminism that is fundamentally about liberation, not protection.
We must begin by reinvigorating feminism with a refusal to negotiate
women’s reproductive and sexual freedoms. Women’s right to abortion on
demand must be part of a strategy to transform society through a
militant mass movement that is directly democratic and empowers all
women, a movement that can independently guarantee women’s reproductive
freedom.
Women won the legal right to abortion in 1973 because there was a mass
movement forcing the government to change or risk being destroyed by the
social movements of the 1960s. The women’s movement related abortion
reform to a revolutionary vision, shaped by their participation in the
struggle for Black liberation, inspired by the resistance of women like
Assata Shakur, who withstood police torture for being a leading figure
in the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. Sisterhood was an
international solidarity, binding the 100,000 women in Thieu prison in
Vietnam fighting American imperialism to women’s demand for absolute
control of their bodies.
The victory of Roe had clear limitations from the outset—it did not
grant abortion on demand nor do women now have permanent control of
their bodies beyond the state. Simply, it asserted that the state would
not regulate women’s right to privacy. Roe benefited the state,
undercutting more radical demands for free health care, pre-natal
services, and control of the burgeoning abortion business, and cementing
a dependency between liberal feminist organizations, the court system,
and the illusory left wing of the Democratic Party. The result was women
becoming one more interest group whose rights are settled in the court
of public opinion.
Since 1973, the right has mounted a legislative assault on abortion
rights. The Hyde Amendment cut off federal Medicaid funding for abortion
in 1977. Further, the marked decrease in the number of
obstetrics-gynecological residency programs offering training in
abortion procedures, and public hospitals unwilling to provide the
service due to political expediency, illustrates that Roe, like much of
the civil rights legislation of the 1960s, set up symbolic rights,
neglecting the entrenched social and economic inequalities that made Roe
a hollow victory for many women.
During the Reagan-Bush years, the women’s movement was faced with
continued attacks on clinics, an unsympathetic White House, and a
disinterested House and Senate dominated by Democrats. Without a mass
movement, the Democrats could afford to pay lip service to women’s
rights while not following through. The right was then convinced it had
successfully set the national tone to legally dismantle Roe. The new
Bush nominees to the Supreme Court, however, didn’t overturn Roe,
although they severely restricted it. The 1992 Casey decision, and
Webster v. Reproductive Health Services in 1993, required parental
notification and gave the states leeway to require waiting periods;
barriers that overwhelmingly affect poor, rural, Black and Latina women.
Seeing the new Republican-dominated House and Senate willingness to put
their anti-choice, anti-queer rhetoric temporarily to the side, at least
until the 1996 presidential elections, the religious right has faced its
legal efforts’ limitations, and has moved toward a strategy of violence
and intimidation. The religious right has a powerful mass movement
committed to using violence, with ties to neo-nazis, the Klan, and the
growing citizen militias. The pro-choice response has been to assume the
right is willing to negotiate women’s reproductive rights because it
needs to maintain its place in the Republican fold the same way they
need the Democrats.
The liberal pro-choice movement has failed; it’s just too wedded to the
system to admit it. In response to the rise of anti-choice forces in the
mid 1980s many feminists formed local direct action clinic defense
groups. These groups, often coalitions of different political
tendencies, had a more flexible approach to the new terrain of the
struggle. These groups tend to choose tactics which fit the situation,
meaning if the police were relatively benign they would use this to
their advantage, if they were not the clinic defenders challenged
anti-choice forces and the police with the same resistance. The National
Organization for Women’s [NOW] standpoint has always been to lobby the
state regardless of it’s response, and attempt to integrate other
feminist movements’ efforts into their own. This was done not so much
out of opportunism, as the logic of its liberalism. NOW believes its
establishment ties put them on the front line of feminism’s possible
success, therefore they should determine the movement’s direction. The
end result has been the half-hearted use of clinic defenders, chanting
leftist slogans from behind police barricades while the police fail to
provide even the minimal protections offered by the law. The liberal
feminists’ new legislative weapon—National Organization for Women et. al
v. Joseph Scheidler et. al., better known as the RICO case—creates
dangerous legal precedents for revolutionaries (Love and Rage vol. 5, #
3). While this may seem like a display of anarchist revolutionary
elitism, RICO limits all activists’ ability to determine what tactics
are necessary to ensure their freedom. RICO empowers the government to
prosecute any organization (in this case Operation Rescue) engaged in a
pattern of “racketeering,” broadly including acts or the conspiracy to
commit such acts, such as interference with commerce, arson, obstruction
of justice. Prosecution under RICO does not have to take place in a
public court, and grants the state unlimited power to seize documents
and force testimony. NOW argues that RICO will be used to protect
abortion clinics and women, limiting Operation Rescue’s efforts to shut
clinics down, without affecting other political struggles. Just imagine
RICO in the hands of Alabama’s state legislature during the Montgomery
bus boycott. NOW’s myopic view of women’s rights leads directly to such
counter-productive victories. Moreover, legal efforts have failed.
Note that Brookline had “model” anti-blockade laws. Doctors wearing
bullet-proof vests with armed bodyguards are still murdered. Faced with
their own political failure, the liberals can only re-double their
lobbying efforts, hoping that a split will develop within the right. As
Susan Yanow of the Massachusetts Abortion Access Project was quoted as
saying, “the shootings have divided the abortion movement. They are
fighting with each other over tactics.” Caught in this quicksand of
lesser-evilism, liberal feminists hope the checks-and-balances charade
of American democracy will rein in the extremists. This strategy
represents a death of vision that cannot adequately ensure women’s
reproductive freedom. The anti-choice movement has moved its agenda
beyond a legislative strategy to destroying the women’s movement with
violence. We need to take direct action against this movement to stop
them. Roe was a tremendous victory, we now have to expand on it. We need
to defend Roe and the clinics using whatever means necessary. We have to
move women’s reproductive freedom outside the parameters of the state’s
authority, linking abortion rights to Major Ana MarĂa of the Zapatista
National Liberation Army’s vision of a free society, a world without
borders and directly democratic, moving us toward directly challenging
the existing order’s monopoly on power.
Jan. 22, 1995 marked the 22^(nd) anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Instead of
being a celebration, it was a day of mourning. Instead of being an
affirmation to women everywhere, it was mostly filled with muted anger
and suppressed rage. In demonstrations across the US the urgency to
break through the liberal facade was palpable on the faces of fierce
women taking the streets in the bitter cold. What we need to do now is
repeat again and again, “we won’t go back,” taking our demands beyond
this rotting American dream. We need a movement willing not only to
defend the clinics but to build an insurgent base for a revolutionary
counter-society. Only then will we be able to defend our bodies and
bring their hate machine to the ground. The women who have given up
their lives demand that we push beyond Roe. As women took the streets in
NY on the 22^(nd), police politely asked us to stay on the sidewalk; we
refused. Our freedom is not up for negotiation, our bodies are not up
for a vote. Our lives depend on our refusal and our willingness to put
our bodies beyond their death culture and grasp the free society.