A few years ago, some people might have thought that the bourgeoisie was ready to retreat on the question of abortion and to grant women a right that, when all was said and done, would not cost it very much.
Under pressure from the feminist move ment and mass mobilizations demanding freedom of abortion and contraception at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, a number of governments in Europe and North America were actually compelled to make some legal concessions.
But to believe that this would lead the most reactionary governments to follow suit and that the restrictivelaws in question would open the royal road to women's right to freely decide whether or not they wanted children meant discounting the extreme right-wing currents-the great defenders of the rights of the fetus-which have since become stronger. And in particular, it meant underestimating the social and economic implications of such a re form.
Conceding to women the right to control their own bodies opens the way to many other demands. Why would a woman de mand the right to do as she pleases, if not in order to overcome her condition of dependency—she whose "fate" is supposed to center around the kitchen and nursery?
And how can women become economically independent without waging a battle for the right to work and everything it implies-job training, equal pay, social services to relieve women from household chores and child-raising, the fight against sexism and all the forms of discrimination women face on the job? There has been no lack of struggles around these issues in the past ten years.
Consequences of 'Austerity'
The international bourgeoisie is faced above all with economic problems that undermine the possibility of making the laws on contraception and abortion effective in places where they have been changed. The capitalists generally fall back on ideologically reactionary arguments to justify their backward policy. This comes through clearly from state ments made by certain representatives of the right-wing parties-especially [French Gaullist leader Jacques] Chirac-during the European parliamentary election campaign.
In the context of the economic and social crisis, far from unfreezing the necessary funds, legislatures and governments continually nibble away at the budgets allocated to social services, particularly the hospital sector (with the closing of some departments, especially gynecological services; staff cutbacks; raising the cost of medical insurance premiums; and so on).
In France, for example, this austerity policy is being carried out with great fanfare by the current minister of healththe same Madame Veil who sponsored a bill to liberalize the abortion laws four years ago.
In Italy, the abortion law passed last year cannot be implemented for lack of funds, bed space, and medical personnel. In 70 percent of cases, doctors hide behind the "conscience clause" to justify their refusal to do abortions, and most hospital staff do the same-either for ideological reasons or to avoid an extra burden of duties that is not compensated either by improvements in existing facilities or by the hiring of new workers.
In Britain, women have been realizing the hard way for years that in order to get an abortion in a public hospital it is necessary to sign up months in advance. This creates good business for private clinics that charge exorbitant fees.
Attacks By the Church and the Right Wing
Added to all this is the increasingly aggressive campaign being mounted by the "right-to-lifers." Patterning themselves after what is happening in the United States, they have recently stepped up their propaganda, even finding ways to systematically coordinate their activities. International conferences of physicians have been held in Switzerland, France, and Britain, where the problem of the "fetus's soul" has been gravely discussed. Identical leaflets have been handed out in London and Brussels. A book called Babies to Burnwhich accuses certain doctors of doing abortions in order to conduct "experiments" on the fetuses or even to make soap out of them (sic!)-has been distributed in several languages. All this indicates that reactionary forces are at work to try to still women's demands as well as to roll back legislation in places where the laws have already been liberalized.
Sermons by the pope and all the bishops of the "holy church" since it launched its campaign around the "right to be born" have only strengthened the determination of these forces. Such statements have given unexpected support to all the antiabortion currents that are developing around the world, particularly in Europe.
These include the far right in Spain, which proclaimed loud and clear during the recent election campaign its total oppo sition to abortion rights; the Christian Democratic Party in Switzerland, which is now sponsoring a ballot initiative on the "right to life"; the current in France that finds the "Veil law" too liberal and would like to see it abolished; and those who back the repressive policy of the Belgian author ities not only toward doctors but also toward women who break the law.
This entire situation explains both the failure to implement the laws passed in various countries and the attempts to roll back legislation that is on the books. It makes clear why the laws have still not been changed in a number of European countries (Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands) or have been modified in such a restrictive way that women continue to be denied the right to abortion (West Germany, France, Luxembourg). This is the case despite parliamentary debates that in most cases have been going on for years. For the sake of appearing liberal, the "progressive"
wing of the bourgeoisie makes a few stabs from time to time at liberalizing the abortion laws, only to retreat immediately in the face of attacks by right-to-lifers as soon as they threaten to upset the delicate equilibrium of parlia mentary dealings.
But women have shown that they are not about to wait patiently and indefinitely to be granted what many consider an elementary democratic right. The wide spread mobilizations at both the local and national levels in recent years bears witness to this.
In many cases, however, such actions have not succeeded either in forcing the bourgeoisie to retreat or in putting a stop to attacks by the far right. This is because the passivity of the working-class organizations and the refusal of their leaderships to get involved in the fight have contributed to isolating women's struggles and discouraging many feminists. The reluctance of the workers movement to take up the specific demands of women, including the right to abortion, is no small factor in the problems that many European women's movements face in coordinating their activities to wage a counteroffensive against the attacks of the bourgeoisie.
Experiences in several countries have proven, however, that it is possible to involve the workers organizations. Their support, and sometimes their active participation, in the battle for the "right to choose" has had a tenfold impact on the rise in consciousness and active commitment among the most exploited women and among workers in general.
The patient work carried out in Britain by both the National Abortion Campaign and the LARC (an abortion-rights grouping within the Labour Party) bore fruit last November in a conference that drew some 400 delegates from the principal British trade unions. These delegates voted to support the NA's campaign to increase the number of walk-in abortion clinics, as well as the March 31, 1979 International Day of Action.
Most importantly, the conference mandated the delegates to organize a demonstration by the workers movement in the event the British Parliament made the slightest move to restrict the abortion laws.
Of course, it remains to translate this attitude on the part of the trade unions into action. However, the actions led by the feminists in the NAC after 1975, when the legislators began to reconsider the law, did force the Labour Party after a long battle to support a resolution in favor of abortion rights at its 1977 conference. Naturally, the party leadership has never done anything to back this up. Labour ministers even waged an ideological offensive last year focusing on the crisis of the family, thus reinforcing the idea of women's status as an auxiliary supply of labor. But the stand taken by the party conference must have helped to provoke discussion within the union locals on what steps to take.
The outcome of the battle to extend the 1967 law-which is restrictive in many ways and does not give women themselves the right to decide-will now depend on the capacity of the NAC, the LARC, and the most militant trade union activists to launch initiatives that can compel the trade unions and the Labour Party to implement their position and actively participate in the actions carried out by local committees.
In a similar fashion, the breadth of the mobilizations carried out for more than three years by the Committees to Decriminalize Abortion in Belgium and the national demonstrations they organized on two occasions (March 8, 1977, and March 8, 1978) have had obvious repercussions on the attitude taken by the reformist parties. To begin with, this has been shown in the Pies have anyadeed a bith that depe parliamentary arena, where three SP depuabortion simply a medical procedure. Corresponding to this is a bill put forward by the CP-for its own narrow interestswhich says more or less the same thing. But it is especially in the area of mobilizations that there has been a significant change for slightly over a year now.
Thanks to the massive and ongoing character of the initiatives taken by the movement to decriminalize abortion, as well as to the feminists and members of the trade-union left wing who have insisted on raising this question within their organizations, the SP has included for the first time the demand for decriminalization and for women's right to decide in its own election platform. Followed by the FGTB (the biggest trade union federation in the country, controlled by the SP) and
Socialiste the Femmes
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(Women's Socialist Forethought, an orga-
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BUNTEN VERLEN UNRI
nization with close ties to the SP), the SP resolved to support the Day of Action called for March 31 in Brussels. The presence of party leaders at this demonstration-while no guarantee of the actual policy to be followed thereafter by the SP-nevertheless showed that the behind-the-scenes work of the committees has paid off. This cannot fail to lead to all kinds of contradictions within the reformists' ranks, given the policy of class collabo ration pursued by the leadership.
There can be no doubt that the question of abortion will help win the most militant SP activists away from their party if the movement for women's right to decide continues to grow and gains a following within the workers' ranks.
A Radicalization That Sharpens the Contradictions
The positions adopted by many reformist parties under the pressure of mass mobilizations and the radicalization that found expression within their own ranks are pro foundly contradictory to their overall orientation and their integration, to a greater or lesser degree, into the state apparatus.
To take but one example, the Italian CP was compelled to make a 180-degree turn after demonstrations by tens of thousands of women in the streets at the end of 1975 and beginning of 1976. Its avowed hostility to abortion suddenly became transformed into a more or less liberal position, which it used as a bargaining chip with the Christian Democracy as the parlia mentary debates went on.
Hence the contradictory nature of the law that the CP helped to promulgate, and the very limited liberalization it involves. If the Italian CP changed its position, it is because it could hardly do otherwise given the breadth of the demonstrations and the "wildcat" participation-in defiance of the CP leadership's orders—of many of its own women members in the first demonstrations called by the Women's Liberation Movement. Apart from the desire to keep control over its ranks, the CP hoped to prove the validity of its strategy of "historic compromise" in the eyes of the masses by showing them that it was possible to reform the bourgeois state through the introduction of a law that could only better the lives of millions of women.