Talking About Abortion here ♦ More on the Communist Fight Against Sexism here ♦
Talking About Abortion: “Rights” versus “Needs”
USA, August 1— “Thanks for the Red Flag article about abortion,” wrote Maisie. “However, it should have said at the very beginning: ‘Women do have the right to control their own bodies and lives. Women do have the right to make decisions about their own health care. Women do have the right to plan and control their own future.’
“Women can and do and will decide what to do about an unwanted pregnancy,” she continued, “and if they choose to abort, they’ll try to do it, whatever the law says.
“Because of this repressive, misogynist Supreme Court decision,” Maisie concluded, “many women, especially poor women, will be placed in dangerous positions with limited choices and will have unsafe abortions, risking their lives.”
“I agree that women can and do and will decide what to do about an unwanted pregnancy,” responded Lily. “And many will choose to abort, and when that decision is criminalized, more women, especially poor women, die. That’s the material reality.
“But how do we talk about it? Why didn’t the article talk about ‘rights,’” continued Lily. “People talk about ‘rights’ all the time: the Civil Rights movement…Human Rights…I co-sponsored a Human Rights Club at the high school where I taught.
“But the language of ‘rights’ is intertwined with the history of capitalism. The preamble to the US Constitution begins: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” But fifty-five ruling-class white men wrote it, twenty-five of them enslavers.
“What hypocrisy! This document was written by a ruling elite who had just won its war of national liberation, justifying their rebellion from the British colonialists. It set up a new government to solidify their class rule over the working-class majority, including the continued oppression of women, the enslavement of Africans, and the genocide of the Indigenous inhabitants.
“The ‘American Revolution’ of 1776 and the French Revolution of 1789 used the Enlightenment vocabulary of unalienable rights given to men by a Creator to justify establishing a government ruled by the emerging capitalist class, rather than a hereditary monarch and aristocracy.
“This was part of an argument that replaced the ‘divine right of kings’ and the authority of the Church with a ‘Creator’ who had given rights not only to kings, but to all men. This justified rebellion against the kings, and establishing governments of men who had money, weapons, and power at their disposal. And it covered up the continuing exploitation of the rest of us.
“Talking about rights emphasizes the individual, fighting for and winning a limited freedom within an oppressive society. We don’t fight for rights. We fight for communism,” concluded Lily.
“We fight for power for the working masses and to build a society based on collective work to meet our needs. As we wrote about abortion in our pamphlet The Communist Fight Against Sexism: ‘seeing everyone as both an individual and a member of a collective will enable us to develop communist practice around abortion as well as everything else.’
“In a communist society we won’t need to defend our rights against an oppressive state. We’ll be able to make decisions about health care—and everything else—in a free and responsible manner.”
“Exactly,” responded Maisie. “Even in communism, folks will have to negotiate with each other to decide who changes the next diaper, or which neighborhood has a transit station. We’ll be discussing priorities, dividing resources, and making value judgments about how much time and energy we need to devote to building and sustaining our communal projects.
“And phrases like ‘the right to make autonomous decisions,’ ‘the right to privacy’ and ‘the right to dissent’ are bound to be discussed when the will of the collective group is the rule.
“Is that just semantics? Or is there a real difference between talking about ‘rights’ versus ‘needs’ in a communist society?”
AND that’s what we’ll discuss in the second part of this article.
ICWP Materials on Communism and Fighting Sexism:
- ICWP pamphlet: “The Communist Fight Against Sexism” here
- Communism will allow us to decide more freely about having children here
- More here
Front page of this issue
