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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

Carolyn

Pro-Choice Revolution or Reform?

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.

Abortion Reform and Women’s Liberation

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.

The Right Counter-Attacks

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 Pro-Choice Response

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.

Toward the Free Society

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.