A response to Rory Dobson's "pro-life" letter (GLW #519) and Brent Howard's "Church and State" letter (GLW #516).
The misnamed "pro-life" movement is regularly assisted by the capitalist press because it reinforces a view that women's primary and essential role in life is to be mothers, and that they should therefore be happy to be mothers at any time in their lives — or else not have sex, presumably.
According to this ideology, women should perform all tasks related to motherhood without pay. As well, women should accept lower paid, casual and lower-status positions in the workplace, since this is their secondary sphere in life.
These ideas are enormously helpful in keeping capitalism working. They justify the excessive amounts of unpaid work performed by women, which replace social services, such as care of children, the sick and elderly, which would otherwise have to be paid for and provided by the state or employers (thus eating into bosses' profit margins, either directly or through increased taxes).
And as for the movement, which is "regularly assisted" by Green Left Weekly, many of its readers and many other feminists, it is certainly not "pro-abortion". Abortion is a medical procedure, not simply a form of contraception, and it cannot be advocated across the board as morally superior.
What countless feminists, socialists, humanists and ordinary women do advocate, on the other hand, is that women should always have the right to choose whether or not to have a child at any given time. If they are to have that choice, they must have the right to freely access abortion. The movement is not pro-abortion, it is pro-choice, and many mothers have been involved in it throughout its history.
As a socialist and a feminist, this is what I see in the debate around abortion and women's reproductive freedom. As a woman, I want to have children sometime, and I want to choose when and under what circumstances. I do not want to be celibate until I wish to be a mother, and I do not want to be terrified of contraceptive failure and accidental pregnancy uprooting my whole life at any time.
Therefore, I want access to abortion. I would like it to be free, and I think it should be. Myself or my sisters, who may be less sure of themselves, do not want to be moralised at by so-called "pro-lifers". The "pro-life" movement is anti-women, anti-women's lives and anti-choice.
Global capitalism, by placing profits before people and the environment, is the main threat to our well-being. Capitalism is propped up by religious ideology that preaches obedience, order and "family values". Access to abortion is just one way that ordinary people, in this case women, can take control of their own lives. And women who really do not like the idea of abortion should exercise their choice not to have one.
BY JOSEPHINE HUNT
[The author is a Socialist Alliance member in the ACT.]
From Green Left Weekly, December 11, 2002.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.