'We Won't Go Back'
A million march for women's lives
By Tracy Sorensen
In possibly the biggest march on Washington ever, on Sunday, April 3, nearly a million people turned out to defend a woman's right to choose abortion. Individuals and delegations from organisations across the United States marched from the White House to a rally on the Mall near Capitol Hill to protest against the most serious challenge to the right to choose in 20 years.
On April 22, the Supreme Court will begin hearings to assess the legality under the constitution of legislation from Pennsylvania which restricts access to abortion.
If the court, now stacked with known anti-choice conservatives, gives this state legislation the thumbs up, it will either overturn or further dilute the court's landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling which guaranteed women's right to choose.
Initiated by the National Organisation of Women and endorsed by hundreds of organisations, the march was called under the slogan, "We Won't Go Back! March for Women's Lives!"
"The police reports said there were 500,000, but from our own counts we estimated that we went over a million", NOW international department director Marie-Jose Ragab told Green Left by telephone from Washington. "The mood was very good; it was very political."
The march was an expression of anger over the erosion of reproductive rights during the Reagan and Bush administrations, Ragab said. Over the past 10 years, Medicaid funding for abortions has been withdrawn, the states have been given more latitude for legislating over abortion, and the right of workers in federally funded clinics to provide clients with information on abortion has been restricted.
All of this has paved the way for the current attack. The pro-choice movement in the US is now looking to strategies for defending women's rights in the post-Roe era. Strategies being discussed include direct action, an underground network to provide access to abortion, support for the Freedom of Choice bill now before Congress, and support for an electoral alternative to the mainstream parties.
Speakers at the rally included feminist authors Gloria Steinem and Susan Faludi, actors Cybil Shepard and Jane Fonda, National Rainbow president Jesse Jackson, abortion providers and representatives of black, farm worker, religious, labour and welfare organisations.
Repeatedly, the call was to make abortion a major issue in the 1992 presidential election campaign. NOW president Patricia Ireland called for "the end of politics as we know it" and a campaign to "change the balance of power in Congress and in state legislatures across this country".
Ireland told the rally that even while Roe v. Wade was formally intact, there were 44 million women in the US whose right to d already been severely curtailed: "young women, poor women, women in the military, anyone who depends on the federal government for health insurance, women who live in rural areas, where 83% of counties don't have abortion clinics".
Jesse Jackson continued this theme in his speech to the rally. According to US Guardian correspondent Chris Seymour, he drew links between women's lack of control over their bodies and salaries only three quarters of men's.
Jackson said that Anita Hill (who had challenged the latest Supreme Court nominee with charges of sexual harassment) was right, and "spoke movingly about the indignities many working women face, from inadequate pay to sexual harassment to lack of day care and health care to inhuman working conditions", reported Seymour.
The Pennsylvania legislation, the first of the restrictive state laws to make their way to the Supreme Court for hearing, prohibits women minors having access to abortion without the consent of one parent or without special dispensation from a judge. No public funds may be used for abortions, and no abortion can be carried out in a public facility, except in the case of rape or incest or to preserve a woman's life.
Other state laws, introduced since the Supreme Court's 1989 Webster ruling, which gave the states more freedom to legislate in this area, are even worse. The cruelest is legislation passed in Louisiana in June 1991, which prohibits abortion except to preserve a woman's life, or in extremely limited cases of rape or incest.
Victims of rape or incest must report the incident within seven days, and seek medical attention within five days from a doctor other than the one performing the abortion. No abortions are to be performed after 13 weeks, and no exemptions are allowed for the health of the mother or severely deformed foetuses.
The pro-choice legislative response includes a Freedom of Choice Act now in Congress, which seeks to codify the federal guarantee for the right to choose embodied in the Roe v. Wade ruling. Unfortunately, even if the enormous lobbying effort by some women's groups pays off and the legislation is passed, it is expected to be vetoed by President George Bush, if he is reelected.
Another tack is to support pro-choice legislation passed in more progressive states. Post-Roe, it is likely that some states will become "abortion states".
According to Judy Norsidgan of the Boston Women's Health Collective, some women's groups are learning menstrual extraction, "so that if abortion should become illegal there'll be a cadre of people underground who'll know how to provide safe early abortion", she told Green Left in a telephone interview.
NOW's electoralism and pitch to "middle America" has long been criticised by more radical sections of the US progressive movement, and the US reproductive rights movement has been criticised by feminists such as former Ms editor Anne Summers for failing to mobilise earlier, when the first attacks on abortion rights for poor women and women of colour occurred.
Interestingly, NOW appears to be moving to break its long association with the Democrats, and is helping to initiate a "third political force".
"We realise that we are very limited with the two-party system, which in the last 10 years or so has become the one party system", Ragab said. "So efforts are being made to create another political force, a third political force. We really have very few options; we cannot make our voice heard."
NOW members will vote on proposals to involve the organisation in a project for a new political party at a national conference in Chicago in June.