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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the May 22, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Editorial: For full freedom of choice

Republicans and Democrats high up on the Hill can filibuster about "partial birth" abortion until the cows come home-but it won't make their arguments viable. They are laying siege to each woman's fundamental right to control her own body.

All the sanctimonious blather about the "rights of the unborn" masks the war waged by Democrats and Republicans alike against women's inalienable right to determine whether and when to bear children.

If these politicians are so concerned about babies, why aren't they delivering impassioned stem-winders about the need for expanded pre-natal care, affordable health care for families, childcare and other vital social services? While they strike a public posture of grieving for fetuses, they are snatching milk bottles from starving infants. Millions of children and women have been plunged into desperate hunger and poverty because of the bipartisan abolition of the meager federal welfare program.

Make no mistake about it. All the proposed legislation limiting abortion rights is part and parcel of the cynical crusade aimed at eroding the 1973 Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court ruling legalizing abortion.

In the May 11 New York Times, Frank Rich quoted right-wing spokespeople boasting about this sensationalized campaign. John Jakubczyk, general counsel of "Arizona Right to Life," said late-term abortion isn't "what we care most about." Wielding inflammatory rhetoric, Jakubczyk stressed the aim is to abolish women's right to abortion at any stage.

"The whole issue [of late-term abortion] is a scam being perpetrated by people on our side," said Mark Crutcher, head of the reactionary firm Life Dynamics, "for fund-raising purposes."

Helen Alvare, attorney for the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, admitted that her organization's assertion-made in a full-page Washington Post ad-that some young women have an abortion because they "won't fit into a prom dress" was a gimmick created by an ad agency.

The overwhelming majority of people in this country support women's reproductive rights. Millions of women and men of all nationalities, ages and walks of life have marched, rallied and linked arms to defend abortion clinics against the bombs and bullets of those who cloak themselves as "pro-life."

But really defending women's right to control their own bodies requires a sustained and militant struggle by the women's movement and all its allies. The hallowed halls of the House and Senate need to ring with the popular slogan of the women's liberation movement that warns "Keep your laws off my body!"

Late-term abortion is not the question. The real question is: Are you for or against Roe vs. Wade? None of the so-called compromise legislation-now being offered up by Democratic senators moving ever further to the right-is acceptable, because it is all an attack on the basic right to choose abortion. That right must be upheld-now, in a period of political reaction when poor and working women are under particular attack, more than ever.

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