In 1857 the Supreme Court decided the infamous case of Dred Scott v. Sandford, ruling that Dred Scott, an enslaved man who had lived in free states and territories for years, was condemned to live out his life as a slave because his freedom had no federal or constitutional protection. The Court thus denied the very humanity and personhood of African Americans at the moment that the nation was poised to enter the civil war to abolish slavery.
In December 2021, the Supreme Court appeared to be on the verge of another historic denial of constitutional protection for human rights. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in cases from Texas and Mississippi, testing the legality of state-imposed bans on abortions early in pregnancy. In their arguments, Texas and Mississippi attacked the fundamental constitutional protection afforded to women by Roe v. Wade, the 1973 case that guaranteed a woman’s right to abortion under the constitution’s protection of privacy and personal freedom. Roe projected a vision of reproductive freedom, woven into the legal and cultural fabric of the country.
As in the Dred Scott case, overturning Roe returns the question of women’s reproductive freedom and gender equality to the states, particularly the former slave states of the South, where labor rights, civil rights, reproductive rights, women’s rights, and LBGTIA rights lack protection, and where Jim Crow voter suppression laws are back in force. All indications are that the Court will at least uphold the Mississippi ban on abortions after fifteen weeks, with a strong possibility that Roe will be overturned.
Why is this happening now? What is the difference between today and 1973 when Roe was decided? To answer these questions, we must peel back the layers of social and political change, in all their complexity, to see the most fundamental level of change. We must look at the underlying transformation of the economy and its impact on the political life of the country.
The reality is that robots and artificial intelligence are taking over the workplace, eliminating jobs and keeping wages low for millions of workers. A growing number of people – a new dispossessed class within the working class – do not really participate in the economy, do not have a real job. As this is happening, all social support is being withdrawn by the billionaire-dominated ruling classthat dominates every level of our political life. Mass homelessness is just one example of the ruin of the working class.
In this environment, individual human lives have little importance or value. The laws protecting those lives are being weakened, overturned, and repealed. Just months ago, the supplemental Earned Income Tax Credits payments sent to families during the height of the pandemic were terminated. Child poverty rates instantly rose 41%.
Of course, at the center of the fight to restrict reproductive freedom is the attack on the vote. As key anti-abortion strategist Paul Weyrich stated, “I don’t want everyone to vote. Elections are not won by a majority of people. Our leverage goes up as the voting populace goes down.” Texas and Mississippi are taking the lead in trying to overturn Roe v. Wade. These are former slave states where voter suppression has long been effective in maintaining the dominance of giant corporations and white supremacy,
Abortion bans, despite strong public support for women’s access to abortion, are politically useful as well because of their appeal to the evangelical right wing. They are being used to build a popular fascist base, both within and outside the electoral arena, focused on advancing corporate priorities and dividing working people. Ex-president Trump has been the most prominent proponent of this fascist advance, fomenting “white grievance” and suppressing resistance.
How the Ruling Class Has Blocked the Fight for Reproductive Justice
Given the wide support and life-and-death importance of access to abortion, why have we reached the point in history where nationwide constitutional protection for abortion hangs on such a weak and slender thread – the vote of a few justices on the Supreme Court?
The history of the fight for legal abortion and contraception – one front in the fight for women’s reproductive freedom – shows how the modern movement has been crucially isolated from other struggles for economic and social justice. It has been distorted and used to carry out the goals and ambitions of the ruling class to reduce the birth rate of “welfare dependent and criminal populations,” in the words of J.D. Rockefeller.
Under the leadership and funding of leading capitalists, the issue of reproductive freedom has been narrowed, framed as a privilege – a “choice” – and primarily made accessible to a select group of women, those who are mainly white, educated, and relatively well-off. It is significant that Planned Parenthood, with major funding from the Ford Foundation, provides private-pay abortions in specialized clinics. The whole premise of “choice” is a lie. For many women who want a baby, abortion is not a “choice” – it is a necessity because they cannot afford a child and have been cut off from childcare, education, healthcare, and economic security.
These corporations and philanthropists have been successful in separating abortion care from women’s health, and, indeed, from public health as a whole. Under their influence, the issue has been isolated from allied movements for single payer health care and Medicare for All.
A Hundred Years of Ruling Class Domination
Margaret Sanger’s advocacy of legal birth control and abortion, which launched the modern movement, has been dominated and shaped by the ruling class agenda of race/class-based population control. It embraced the quest for racial purity, approved of forced sterilization, and lobbied for eugenics, advocating pseudo-scientific “selective breeding” – a fascist program later adopted by Nazi Germany. Vicious race-based immigration restrictions were part of population control policy.
This campaign continues today, targeting migrants, the “unfit,” or families that seem to either too big (in poor communities and poor countries) or too small (among the wealthy). As a staple of imperialist political control worldwide, it is seen as an alternative solution to the social pressure for emancipation and revolution. In May 2009, a group of billionaires, including Microsoft founder Bill Gates, media mogul Ted Turner, George Soros and Warren Buffet – as well as David Rockefeller Jr. – met (again) to plan initiatives for population control across the post-colonial world.
The more-or-less hidden agenda of race/class-based population control, by isolating the issue of abortion, has marginalized its importance even though it is an essential part of women’s health and gender equality.
The movement for reproductive freedom cannot tap into the public support that exists for legalizing abortion because it has been separated from the broader fight for health care as well as social and economic justice. This separation has thrust the movement toward the courts for protection.
The Rise of the Movement for Reproductive Justice
In the 1990’s a pioneering collective of women of color, SisterSong Reproductive Justice Collective, based in Atlanta – along with other feminist organizations, including Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice and California’s Women’s Health Services – broke through the ruling class formulation of abortion access as a matter of “choice” and advanced the demand for “reproductive justice.” Reproductive Justice is embedded in the struggle for basic needs and confronts white supremacy as a tool of control and exploitation. It makes this demand not only for women of color but for all working class women.
The struggle of women and the LBGTQIA community is a revolutionary fight for a new kind of society where wealth is shared on the basis of need and the goal of governance is equality, security, peace, and planetary health rather than private profit. This is a big agenda, of course, but the movements now building are heading in that direction. Whether or not it is openly articulated, many fighters in these movements understand that the people are being impoverished, and, for the society as a whole to move forward, private corporate power and private corporate property must be abolished and the vast wealth of society must be shared.
The Path Ahead
As Dr. William Barber of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival said recently on Democracy Now, the movement should never have allowed the separation of voting rights from economic justice: “That was a fundamental mistake, I believe, on many activists’ part and on many Democrats’ part, to separate these out. We should have started saying we demand infrastructure of our democracy, which is voting, and infrastructure of investment in the lives of poor and low-wealth people.”
New candidates are now entering the electoral arena and supporters are turning to the power of the vote as a crucial tool for accomplishing movement objectives and challenging the corporate wing of the Democratic party. In the event Roe v. Wade is further undercut, the struggle will only intensify. Women can be fierce in their resistance to gender oppression. The demand for reproductive justice is on the political agenda of the rising movement for revolutionary renewal.
Published: April 21, 2022
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