[The following article appeared in the June 11-12 issue of the French Trotskyist daily Rouge. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
ROME-Following the vote in the Senate on June 7, the secularist parties decided to present the abortion bill in the Chamber of Deputies. This decision was arrived at during a meeting between the Italian Communist Party, the Italian Socialist Party, Proletarian Democracy, and the Republican Party. So the debate will resume, and will probably continue until early 1978.
The women's movement throughout Italy was quick to respond after the Senate's disgraceful vote (see Intercontinental Press, June 20, 1977, p. 698). Meetings, discussions, leaflet distributions, and spontaneous demonstrations took place. The response was broad and united, bringing together all sections of the movement-from the various feminist groups to the women of the UDI (Unione Donne Italiane-Italian Women's Union), an organization close to the Communist Party.
The breadth of the response shows how crucial an issue the abortion question is for the mass of women. A significant example of this reaction is what happened in Florence and Modena, where women workers from several factories spontaneously walked off the job to participate in protest sit-ins in the centers of these two cities.
On Thursday evening [June 9], several thousand women took part in a unitedfront demonstration in Milan, while in Modena, Livorno, Turin, Trieste, and Reggio di Calabria, leaflet distributions
and sit-ins were held to protest. But this is only the beginning. In the face of such a display of contempt by the legislators, everyone agrees that the masses of women must be mobilized in action.
Apart from these demonstrations of women's outrage, how have the different sections of the movement reacted to a vote that struck a blow against the interests of women? The first meetings that have been held make it possible to assess the responses.
The first reaction was widespread selfcriticism. For nearly a year, the fight for abortion had been left up to the political parties, which were more concerned with their political wheeling and dealing than with what happens to women. During the
meeting on Thursday at the women's center in Rome, an activist explained:
"The truth is that this is a huge defeat for us, and we are right to feel guilty, because we gave up the fight for abortion."
A realization that the vote had wiped out three years of bitter struggles by women was reflected in all the remarks:
"We left the waging of our struggle to the parties and institutions. We were sure of getting a law passed that, even though hedged in with restrictions, would no longer penalize women forced to have an abortion." "We were already thinking in terms of the problem of enforcing the law, of health facilities and the advice centers, as though we had already won the right to abortion.
Other women stressed the need for the movement to assume its responsibilities as a political movement in its own right so that it could not be "used." The vote against the abortion law is the most recent example of the way the women's movement has been exploited and then betrayed. One lesson seems to have been absorbed by everyone-to get what they want, women must make their weight felt by fighting and mobilizing.
All contributions to the discussion stressed the importance of organizing a united counterattack. The women have not forgotten that their massive mobilizations last April helped to bring down the Christian Democratic government of Premier Moro. Today, women are ready to take to the streets again, by tens of thousands, to protest against a vote that is part and parcel of the Christian Democrats' policy of rolling back the gains of the mass movement. The demonstration yesterday evening [June 10] in Rome was just the first step in this direction.