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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Jan.25, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Twenty-three years ago on Jan. 22, the Supreme Court's historic Roe vs. Wade decision legalized abortion throughout the United States. That victory was as crucial to the contemporary struggle for women's liberation as was winning the vote over 75 years ago. It marked a new phase in the struggle, as women demanded the right to full, active, free participation in every part of social, economic and political life.
Legal abortion is an essential stepping stone to this right. It grants women the ultimate power to control their reproductive capacity, a necessity if they are to work outside the home and strive for economic and social independence.
The struggle over abortion rights is part of the class struggle. Reactionary forces that for ideological, social or economic reasons oppose women's liberation are strongly against legal abortion--whether expressed from Catholic or fundamentalist Christian pulpits, the halls of Congress, or the doorways of women's health clinics. They have placed many obstacles preventing access to abortion in the way of young, rural and poor women--especially women of color.
Though it is a vital right, legal, safe, affordable, accessible abortion is only one component of women's reproductive rights. For complete reproductive freedom, all women, including lesbians, must have the right to have children or not. Along with ending racism, stopping violence against women and defeating lesbian oppression, women need jobs at a union wage, child care, health care--including sex education, birth control and no forced sterilization-- education, jobs, and housing. In other words, women need all the essentials of life that both the Republicans and Democrats are conspiring to deny the working class and oppressed.
President Bill Clinton may have a better record on choice than the Republicans, in the sense that he's not campaigning against abortion rights. But since he's going along with the Republicans to gut welfare and cut Medicaid, he's making life much harder for working-class women and their families.
We commemorate the struggle for abortion rights and the decision that made this choice legal in the United States. But we know that only a struggle that is independent of the two capitalist parties can keep that right and extend it to full reproductive rights for all women.
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