Women’s right to choose
Defend legal abortion on the 38th anniversary
By
Sue Davis
Published Jan 15, 2011 9:53 AM
Jan. 22 marks the 38th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court
decision legalizing abortion. Tens of thousands of women have been saved from
death and serious injury since abortion became legal in 1973. Women who chose
to have safe, legal abortions ever since have felt enormous security and relief
as they went about their lives.
However, the new Congress is ready to mount a frontal attack on legal abortion
— the most serious in its history since the 1976 Hyde Amendment.
Joined by more than 50 new anti-choice representatives, Rep. John Boehner
boasts of being the most anti-abortion House Speaker in history. The No
Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act seeks to codify the Hyde Amendment, which
prohibits Medicaid-funded abortions for poor women.
It would also impose such stiff conditions on private health insurance
companies that none would offer abortion coverage. Being forced to pay for
abortions would be like a tax on the 62 million U.S. women of childbearing
age.
Given that women earn only 77 cents for every dollar men earn and that women
have been hit hard by the jobless recovery, many more women would share the
financial desperation and emotional misery women on Medicaid have experienced
for 34 years.
That anguish was portrayed in the 58-page study entitled “Whose Choice:
How the Hyde Amendment Harms Poor Women,” published last September by the
Center for Reproductive Rights and the National Network of Abortion Funds.
Fifty-eight percent of women on Medicaid reported “serious
hardships” due to Hyde, including having had to deprive children of food,
pawn wedding rings and take out high-interest loans to pay for needed health
care. As of 2001, 18 percent to 35 percent of Medicaid-eligible women reported
having to carry unintended pregnancies to term because of Hyde.
However, the Hyde Amendment wasn’t implemented without a struggle in the
streets and in the courts. The fight to stop Hyde in the 1970s is instructive
with regard to defending legal abortion now.
Eighty groups of progressive pro-choice women, many who called themselves
socialist-feminists, organized nationally as the Hyde Amendment was set to take
effect. As they spoke out, wrote, marched and rallied to stop Hyde, they also
theorized about women’s rights.
In order for women to be able to control whether, when and with whom to have
children, the activists compiled a list of rights that included — in
addition to legal abortion — access to birth control, sex education,
daycare, health care, jobs and housing; and freedom from sexist, racist and
anti-lesbian oppression; sterilization abuse; sexual harassment; incest; and
domestic violence.
To describe these prerequisites for women’s liberation, they coined the
term “reproductive rights” and discussed “reproductive
freedom.” This now includes the call for “reproductive
justice.”
Meanwhile, women lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights, led by the
world-renowned legal activist for women’s rights, Rhonda Copelon
(1944-2010), filed a nationwide class action lawsuit that stopped Hyde from
taking effect in 1976.
Defeat Hyde in the streets
After the Supreme Court overturned the injunction in 1977, Federal District
Court Judge John F. Dooling Jr. heard testimony from doctors, theologians and
poor women, and received more than 500 exhibits on the medical and religious
aspects of the case.
After 13 months of deliberation, Judge Dooling invalidated the Hyde Amendment
in 1980 as violating the First and Fifth Amendments. CCR stated: “His
decision documented the health impact of denying poor women abortions; the
major religious traditions which support the conscientious choice of abortion;
and the pervasively religious character of the anti-abortion position that the
fertilized egg is equivalent to a person.” (Past Cases at
ccrjustice.org)
Later that year the Supreme Court, in a highly contested 5-4 vote on Harris v.
McRae, reversed that decision, “ignoring [Dooling’s] comprehensive
findings of fact as well as the principle that the state must respect the
constitutional rights of the poor in distributing or limiting welfare
benefits.”
The majority opinion stated that a woman’s freedom of choice does not
include “a constitutional entitlement to the financial resources to avail
herself of the full range of protected choices” and “poverty does
not qualify as a ‘suspect classification’” protected by the
Fifth Amendment.
Justice Thurgood Marshall defended poor women’s rights in his eloquent
dissent: “The denial of Medicaid benefits to individuals who meet all the
statutory criteria for eligibility, solely because the treatment that is
medically necessary involves the exercise of the fundamental right to choose
abortion, is a form of discrimination repugnant to the protection of the laws
guaranteed by the Constitution. The Court’s decision today marks a
retreat from Roe v. Wade and represents a cruel blow to the most powerless
members of our society.”
The Hyde-30 Years Is Enough! Campaign, an NNAF project, says, “For more
than 30 years, the Hyde Amendment and other funding restrictions have affected
the poorest and most vulnerable of low-income Americans, with a
disproportionate impact on women of color and immigrant women. The Hyde
Amendment denies abortion access to the 7 million women of reproductive age who
are currently enrolled in Medicaid. These funding restrictions are the most
detrimental of all attacks on safe, legal abortion care, and represent a clear
violation of low-income women’s human rights.”
It is crucial that the federal government guarantee equal, comprehensive health
care to all women, and provide funding for those who need it.
Pro-choice activists and their supporters must rally to stop the “cruel
blows” that today threaten all but rich women. Only a widespread, united
fightback, in the streets and the courts, can defend women’s right to
legal abortion and advance the struggle for reproductive justice.
Articles copyright 1995-2012 Workers World.
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