Communist Social Relations, Childbirth and Women’s Health
January 23— Trump led off his executive orders with an attack on women around the world. He brought back the Reagan-era “global gag rule” on abortion. This will directly cause the deaths of thousands of women from unsafe back-street abortions.
Capitalism has never valued the lives of the babies—or the adults—of our class. It places the responsibility of childrearing on individual women, their partners and immediate family. It replaces the “village” that we need to raise a child with what Marx called the “cash nexus.”
Masses of women around the world are unable to provide for the basic needs of their children. They are forced to make hard choices when they get pregnant. Women without access to affordable and safe contraception and legal abortion often take the desperate alternative of an unsafe, illegal abortion. Thousands more women will die each year due to these attacks on family-planning services.
US foreign policy since World War II has combined massive spending on the military with a tiny fraction for social services. This is supposed to calm the masses while it makes US imperialism look like the good guys. An even smaller fraction of this goes to health clinics in countries impoverished by imperialism.
It’s already illegal to use US funds to provide abortions. The “global gag rule” goes way beyond that. It means that clinics that get US funding can’t spend any other funds to provide abortions, or even to refer women to abortion providers. It will force health clinics around the world to choose between US funding or providing a full range of health services to women.
The same thing is happening in the US. Planned Parenthood is the largest US provider of health care services for women. Taxpayer dollars in the US are already prohibited from paying for abortions. Planned Parenthood provides those services from other funding. But Congress seeks to shut down Planned Parenthood altogether.
Both of these development reflects the dominance of the Republican Party pandering to religious fanatics who call themselves pro-life but are anything but.
In the US and other countries, women’s health clinics struggle to provide services to poor and working-class women that ruling-class and even middle-class women take for granted. These include treating sexually transmitted diseases, breast and cervical cancer screening, and birth control. The attack on abortion is the leading edge of an attack on the health of working-class and other poor women around the world.
Communism and Abortion
What will we do about abortion, and birth control in general, in a communist society? We know that women’s health, will be just as important as men’s health. Health will be more important, period. We’ll do away with money, wages, rent, and bills to pay. Men and women will choose freely whether or not to commit to loving partnerships. No one will face the responsibility of feeding, clothing, educating and loving a child on their own. This will let women make decisions about having children more freely.
We will live and work collectively—from each according to commitment; to each according to need. Everyone is—and always has been—both an individual and part of a collective. Communism will let us put that understanding into practice in a dialectical way. We envision political struggle, collective living and planning as the way we make decisions and get things done. If someone doesn’t want to work, we won’t starve them or lock them up—we’ll struggle with them
That’s our basic view of communist social relationships. We reject coercive social relations. We rely on political struggle for everything, from who washes the dishes and takes out the trash, to who changes the baby’s diaper.
That’s how we’ll deal with the question of birthing and raising babies as well. Children will be the joy and the responsibility of the collective. But everyone is both an individual and a member of a collective. Having another kid is a decision that will involve collective political struggle in the same way as every other decision: should Suzanna learn how to work the lathe? Should Javier learn how to work the milking machine?
But collective struggle has limits. At the end of the day, if Javier really doesn’t want to go anywhere near a herd of cows, we’ll find other useful work for him to do. And no woman will be forced to have a baby or to have an abortion. The collective will respect those decisions.
Laws making abortion illegal can never stop it. When the economic realities of survival in class society push women to choose abortion, laws can only criminalize it and drive it underground. Like the laws criminalizing the migration of workers across the bosses’ borders, these laws can make abortion dangerous and expensive. But if people are desperate enough, they will break the law.
When abortions are illegal, rich women pay doctors who will perform abortions illegally at high prices. Poor women seek out non-traditional and often non-sterile abortionists or take matters into their own hands, often with fatal consequences.
The law legalizing abortion in the Soviet Union allowed women to get safe, sterile, abortions. It was one of several women-led reforms after the Russian revolution that included communal child-care.
Women still got a lot of abortions in the Soviet Union, especially during the 1920s’ New Economic Policy.
Childrearing was supported by a network of social services. Nevertheless, the wage system and the maintenance of the family economy inevitably made childrearing an individual responsibility. That, combined with a housing shortage and an insecure economy, convinced many women that abortion was their only option.