Members of the Communist Party USA and Young Communist League protest in New York City on Friday, June 24, 2022, immediately following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. | Courtesy of CPUSA
The following statement was released by the Communist Party USA on June 24, 2022.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization is a horrific setback for women their partners, their families, and society overall. As expected, the Court overturned Roe v. Wade, making abortion rights susceptible to the whims of extreme-right state legislators.
A woman may not get an abortion in Texas, but a resident of New York can. Just as where you live determines whether you can vote with ease, breathe fresh air, access Medicaid, or have your children attend a well-funded school, the same is now true regarding abortion rights.
Human rights in this country have never been universal, and the Dobbs decision highlights this fact even further.
The Supreme Court decision surely ranks high among the worst, anti-human decisions in its history, such as the Dred Scott decision of 1857 or Plessy v. Ferguson of 1896. The first decision, made by a Supreme Court dominated by slaveholders, eliminated all restrictions on slavery in the Republic. Adding insult to injury, the Court stated that the Constitution’s authors never intended any Black person to have citizenship rights. Plessy held that racial segregation was constitutional, enshrined in the “separate but equal” doctrine. We all know how the “equal” part went.
Like the 19th-century justices, today’s right-wing Supreme Court has determined that certain people, in this case women and trans men, are even less equal than they were before the Court ruled on June 24.
What will be the impact of the ruling? The Southern Poverty Law Center writes that it will:
“have serious, long-term consequences for women and others. This terrible ruling also endangers other fundamental rights, putting many other communities at risk. The constitutional rights in jeopardy include the right to contraception and equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community. . . . The decision is particularly harmful for those people living in poverty because they lack the resources to travel to a state where abortion is legal or pay for necessary medical procedures.”
Members of the Communist Party USA and Young Communist League protest in New York City on Friday, June 24, 2022, immediately following the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade. | Courtesy of CPUSA
We must fight back to prevent this from becoming reality.
Today, we mourn this horrific setback. Tomorrow and beyond, we organize. Everywhere—in our communities, unions, schools, places of worship, and workplaces. We must help build a backlash against the right, one in the same spirit as the women who rebelled after Trump’s election and helped take the House of Representatives away from the GOP in 2018; the millions who marched for Black Lives after the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others; and the teachers, auto workers, and nurses who went on strike these past four years.
As big as these movements were, the current situation demands a much larger movement, one that’s more inclusive, broader, more militant. Civil disobedience is in order. By inclusive we mean the involvement of a wide range of society, genders, classes, and ethnic backgrounds.
We also mean inclusiveness in terms of tactics. Some may only be willing to make phone calls to their elected officials. Some may want to work in the electoral arena to vote out anti-abortion politicians. Others may demonstrate and engage in civil disobedience and risk arrest. All tactics are on the table. We must engage with people who have never carried a picket sign or called their members of Congress.
This is the kind of unity needed to turn the Court’s decision into a temporary setback. The Communist Party USA is committed to helping build unity to restore women’s right to an abortion.
People’s World is a voice for progressive change and socialism in the United States. It provides news and analysis of, by, and for the labor and democratic movements to our readers across the country and around the world. People’s World traces its lineage to the Daily Worker newspaper, founded by communists, socialists, union members, and other activists in Chicago in 1924.
A tear rolls down an abortion rights activist’s cheek as they speak outside the Supreme Court in Washington, Friday, June 24, 2022.
As expected, the Supreme Court of the United States has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that legalized abortion across the nation nearly 50 years ago. The decision was already revealed in an unprecedented leak reported by Politico in early May, but now the nation has the final version of the majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and circulated among the other justices in February.
The ruling marks the first time in U.S. history that a constitutionally-guaranteed right has ever been removed by the Court. But the extremists on the Court do not appear content with just killing abortion rights. Justice Clarence Thomas, a signatory to the decision, called for the Supreme Court to overturn other past rulings protecting same-sex marriage, gay sex, and the use of contraceptives.
The destruction of Roe is having immediate impact. In the state of West Virginia Friday morning, the last clinic in the state providing abortion services closed its doors. The sole clinic in Mississippi continued to provide services but was expected to stop at any time as right-wing protesters gathered outside. In Wisconsin, Planned Parenthood issued an order to stop abortion services at both of its clinics. Similar scenes are playing out across the country.
The scene outside the Supreme Court, Friday, June 24, 2022. | Jacquelyn Martin / AP
The decision strikes down both Roe v. Wade, the Court’s 1973 ruling that enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion, and a decision in 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that essentially upheld that right.
Alito wrote: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have inflamed divisions in the country.”
Joining him in tossing Roe were Thomas and Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. The latter three justices were appointed by former President Donald Trump. Thomas first voted to overrule Roe 30 years ago.
Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—the last remaining Democratic appointees on the Court—dissented.
“With sorrow—for this Court, but more, for the many millions of American women who have today lost a fundamental constitutional protection—we dissent,” they wrote, warning that right-wing abortion opponents would now try to impose a nationwide ban “from the moment of conception and without exceptions for rape or incest.”
Though he did not sign their dissent, Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the liberal wing.
Protected by Roe no more
At least half the states in the country are expected to quickly make abortion completely illegal, with poor and working-class women and women of color in Republican-governed states having their rights stripped away first.
Abortion rights advocates say this will result in desperate people traveling to get abortions in states where the procedure remains legal, such as Illinois or New York. Some 13 states have “trigger laws” on the books which outlawed abortion the minute Roe was officially overturned.
In those places, the ruling marks a return to the time before Roe v. Wade, when abortion was a crime everywhere.
As late as the early 1970s, for example, police departments and governments around the U.S. were conducting crackdowns on what they called the illegal “abortion industry.” Almost totally forgotten these days are the vicious attacks against women in government-led terroristic campaigns.
The story of one such campaign, in Chicago, gained wide circulation again following the Politico leak. In the early ’70s, police came crashing down on “Call Jane,” a feminist collective of young women who, since 1965, had provided safe but then illegal abortions to roughly 3,000 Chicagoans per year. The collective, led by the famed civil rights and human rights activist Heather Booth, was raided after two Catholic women told police their sister-in-law planned to have an abortion provided by the group.
A homicide detective assigned to the case traced “Jane” to the South Shore neighborhood. There, police raided an apartment, arrested nearly 50 people for questioning, and tore three women who were actively undergoing abortion treatment away from their procedure and hauled them off to the hospital.
Members of the Jane Collective, arrested by Chicago Police. | Chicago Police Department
Seven women were charged with 11 counts of performing an abortion and conspiracy to commit abortion. They would soon be known in Chicago’s newspapers as the “Abortion Seven.” Members of Call Jane protected the women they served and prevented many of them from being arrested by eating the index cards that bore the details of the patients’ information.
There were similar cases across the country where working-class women went to incredible and dangerous lengths to access abortion or to protect those who needed them.
A woman working for the Parks Department in Brooklyn found a woman who performed her own abortion bleeding and dying in a ravine in Prospect Park. She was able to get the woman to the emergency room at a nearby hospital where her life was saved.
In 1973, the Abortion Seven had to be released by prosecutors when the Supreme Court issued Roe v. Wade. With the decision, the Court affirmed that access to safe and legal abortion was a constitutional right. It said that states could not ban abortion before 24 weeks into the pregnancy.
The nightmare of state harassment suffered by women in Chicago in the early 1970s may pale in comparison, however, to the level of surveillance and repression that will be deployed against women, non-binary people, and trans men seeking reproductive services in those parts of America where abortion is again illegal.
The data produced by cell phones, internet browsers, search engines, and social media could be used to prosecute those who seek abortions, and the heaviest crackdowns would undoubtedly descend on poor women and women of color.
Many people in the states where abortion is now illegal are unlikely to make, nor can they afford, the long, expensive, and health-endangering journeys that will be required. The poor, the young, and people of color will more likely be forced to turn to illegal methods, creating another racist feature in the already racist criminal justice system.
Now, stunned women’s rights activists fear prosecutions like that of the “Call Jane” collective will become business as usual.
Women as criminals
A national organization for defense attorneys has published a report that lays out a future in which the U.S. could undertake “rampant criminalization” and “mass incarceration on an unprecedented scale” in the name of “defense of the unborn.”
“States are laying the groundwork now, and have been laying the groundwork for criminal penalties that are completely different,” than the pre-Roe era, says Lindsay A. Lewis, a New York criminal defense attorney who co-authored a report on abortion for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys (NACDL).
Abortion rights advocates marched in the 1970s. | AbortionFilms.org
“They are so much more advanced and so much harsher than what existed before Roe was enacted.” State legislatures have spent recent decades “modifying their criminal codes” in ways that “completely change the calculus when it comes to what it would mean to go back to pre-Roe times,” according to Lewis.
Lawyers warn that the states where the procedure is illegal are laying the groundwork to go after even those women who travel to other states where it is legal in order to get abortions denied in their home states.
Criminal charges could come from specific abortion laws, but also from criminal codes that penalize “attempted crimes, conspiracies, and accomplices to crime, all relics of laws developed during the U.S.’ so-called ‘war on drugs.’ Those laws could subject a wide range of individuals to criminal penalties if Roe is overturned”, the NACDL report says.
They would include prosecuting people from states where the procedure is illegal who attempt to seek abortions in states where it remains legal.
For example, Louisiana law defines an “accomplice” to a crime as “anyone involved in its commission, even tangentially, whether present or absent if they aid, abet, or even counsel someone.” Lawyers say this could be used against a wide range of spouses, partners, friends, loved ones, or counselors, such as clergy or abortion fund networks, which help direct people or help transport them to clinics in places where abortion is still legal.
Turning dissent into action
The Court’s decision opens the way for a future Republican Congress and president to ban abortion entirely across the whole country. In the immediate weeks and months ahead, the decision is expected to set off an avalanche of legal challenges as the fight over abortion moves to state capitals and as Roe becomes a central issue in the November midterm elections.
President Joe Biden addressed the nation after the ruling was made official, calling Friday “a sad day for the Court and the country.” With Roe gone, he said, “the health and life of women across this nation are now at risk.”
The reaction from abortion rights, women’s equality, and other movement leaders was more stinging.
“The hands of time have once again been turned back,” said Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Joyce Beatty. “In the midst of a Black maternal mortality crisis, restricting access to abortion will disproportionately endanger the lives of Black Americans,” Beatty declared. “Let me be very clear: Government-mandated pregnancy is not pro-life, it is pro-policing of women’s bodies.”
In a statement sent to People’s World, Working Families Party spokesperson Nelini Stamp said: “Make no mistake, white Christian nationalists have been working towards this moment for 50 years. They have exploited the most anti-democratic features of our political system, from the courts to the Electoral College to the United States Senate. They have engaged in outrageous power grabs, bulldozed basic norms, and can’t be bothered to justify their hypocrisy. They know their views are unpopular, so they rig our democracy to enshrine minority rule, trampling our rights.”
Members of the Communist Party USA march for reproductive rights. | via CPUSA
Opinion surveys show a majority of Americans oppose overturning Roe and handing the question of whether to permit abortion entirely to the states. Polls conducted by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and others also have consistently shown that only about 1 in 10 Americans want abortion to be illegal in all cases. A majority are in favor of abortion being legal in all or most circumstances.
Laura Dewey, a leader of the Communist Party USA’s Michigan district, pointed to the 2022 elections as a frontline in the battle to stop the anti-abortion assault. She said, “We must help build the biggest backlash against the far right, one far larger than the right-wing backlash against Obama’s election, one comparable to the women’s uprising after Trump’s election. We need to be in the streets in the coming months and at the polling booths in November.”
She said that “a strike by women and trans men should be considered.”
Dewey called the decision “fascistic” in nature and connected it to other aspects of extremist Republican policy. “Along with the police violence against and the mass incarceration of Black and brown people and the wave of anti-voting laws, the reversal of Roe v. Wade signals the right’s determination to control and suppress human beings. It may very well be a sign of fascism to come unless we the people halt this frightening trend.”
John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People’s World. John Wojcik es editor en jefe de People’s World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper’s predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.
C.J. Atkins is the managing editor at People’s World. C.J. Atkins es el editor gerente de People’s World. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from York University in Toronto and has a research and teaching background in political economy and the politics and ideas of the American left. In addition to his work at People’s World, C.J. currently serves as the Deputy Executive Director of ProudPolitics.
A crowd gathers outside the Supreme Court to protest against the overturning of Roe v. Wade. (Kent Nishimura / Getty Images)
Despite majority support for abortion rights, we failed to build a majority coalition to defend reproductive freedom. We should honestly assess our failures — and then build a movement that ties together labor, feminists, and health care organizing.
There is not much new to say about the leaked Supreme Court decision that is poised to overturn the legal precedent set in Roe v. Wade (1973). That precedent stated that women have a right to privacy and therefore the right to an abortion. The shortcomings of the privacy precedent are clear. It’s only indirectly a right to have an abortion, as it’s really a right to not have the state directly involve itself in one’s medical decisions.
The US right has challenged this ruling for years in the streets and in the courts, state by state. The story of the end of Roe is the story of the most organized, militant, and successful conservative social movement of the past fifty years. In the end, the Democratic Party didn’t stop them. Neither did the reproductive rights and the social justice nonprofits that so many depend on for health care and legal support.
Am I angry with the Right? Oh, yes. Beyond the court cases, I have watched them harass, intimidate, and lie to women in front of clinics over and over again. I have never lived in a country where they did not dominate the political argument. I have watched them invade and bomb clinics, murder doctors, stalk clinic workers, and follow women around their neighborhoods and to their homes, all in the name of protecting “life.” From Texas to New York City, the antiabortion right is unscrupulous and unforgivable.
But this outcome was entirely expected. As a result, I am now angrier with the abortion rights movement — from leftists to liberal Democrats.
Now that Roe is almost dead, I’d like to be clear about why. Seventy percent of the US population supports abortion rights. The fact that we have lost these rights to a minority coalition should prompt self-criticism. It is our responsibility to put together a majority coalition that can safeguard basic reproductive rights. It is our responsibility to frame the issue in a way that challenges culture war narratives with a universalist program that advocates for those rights. We didn’t. So let’s take stock.
First, we accepted the Right’s terms of debate.
At every turn, from Hillary Clinton’s abortion should be “safe, legal, and rare” speech to the Right’s “abortion is racist” charge, we implicitly accepted that abortions are malign or allowed ourselves to be put on the defensive. We decided that it was better to downplay abortion services at women’s clinics and instead argue for the funding of Planned Parenthood because it provides routine pap smears. Well, the Right wasn’t coming after Planned Parenthood because of the pap smears, were they? It is contradictory to demand that the abortion rights movement de-emphasize abortion when abortion is the issue that animates the Right’s challenge.
By tailing the Right, we have blurred what should be a principled line between respecting women’s autonomy and taking it away. The Right says that abortion is racist because its provision is a concerted attempt by white people (feminists) to kill black babies in the womb — and we seem to agree at times by describing the history of abortion rights in the United States as a white women’s issue, always and everywhere marred by the country’s horrific episodes of forced sterilization. (This kind of rhetoric, though common in movement circles, tends not to make it into print — thus the Twitter link.)
But it is not racist to provide abortion services. Rather, it is racist to force people to have abortions because of their race (which is still not the same thing as forced sterilization). Abortion is not the only reproductive health care issue that matters — far from it — but the contradiction between the demand to de-emphasize abortion in the movement and abortion being the spearhead of the Right’s offensive holds here as well. How, exactly, do we plan to defend the right to abortion by incorporating it into a broader health care agenda if we can’t even defend the right to abortion in the first place?
Finally, the abortion rights movement has allowed the Right to present itself as not only anti-racist, but feminist as well. The “pro-life feminist” script taps into the intuition that the Democratic Party does not really care about most women, despite their “girl boss” rhetoric. The Right then turns around and says that they care about women. Although the Right doesn’t have any social policies that would support women and their dependents, they sell the lie that they might do so with vague promises of church, family, and community support. Seems like a nice tradeoff for reproductive rights, doesn’t it?
Second, the abortion rights movement has become captive to the liberal nonprofit world, with all of its terms and conditions.
This captivity is both strategic and moral. The nonprofits are “doing the work.” They are “community organizing” and “in the struggle.” They are providing vital services that people need. They surely know what’s best, especially when it comes to securing public and private funds for their operations. Only they know how to navigate the legal and electoral systems with their lawyers, lobbyists, and grant writers.
This world contains an intricate web of professional activism that you almost need a degree to understand, which puts us on amateur footing when we notice their strategy is failing. Upon receiving criticism, the nonprofits pull out their moral guns by insisting that they are the ones on the front lines protecting the most vulnerable women — and that their “privileged” critics have nothing worthwhile to say.
Third, the movement did not unambiguously get behind a federal universal health care plan.
Here it is worth distinguishing between socialists and liberal Democrats since the former have strongly supported Medicare for All. The latter, however, have not, which can be seen in Planned Parenthood’s inconsistent state-by-state position on the matter. In some cases, they support it. In other cases, they don’t. I suspect that either position is largely dictated by their relationship to their state Democratic Party.
But we ought to ask why feminist actors have been unable to push nonprofits like Planned Parenthood to the left on health care. The only way out of the state-by-state strategic morass is to win a federal health program that includes abortion coverage — so it is important to assess our seeming incapacity to knit together a reproductive rights coalition that sees universal health care as a medium-term goal.
The issue, it seems, is intimately related to the nonprofit capture problem. And it also speaks to why calls to deemphasize abortion lack a concrete policy strategy. How can we guarantee abortion access without integrating it into a compelling universal program that protects other reproductive rights as well?
Fourth, the movement criticized its own ideology, and then made no strategic improvements.
For thirty years now, left feminists have been criticizing liberals’ “pro-choice” ideology for failing to address a wide array of reproductive health concerns and inequality of access to it. The “pro-choice” framework is indeed insufficient, but the alternative “reproductive justice” framework is still a largely academic and nonprofit-driven idea that falls prey to the same strategic problems.
In other words, these internal disagreements have done a respectable job of challenging some mainstream liberal feminist narratives but have done little to change the course of the movement. It is politically impotent to have two competing ideologies with no discernible strategic differences. What does it matter if you have a more robust ideological framework if it doesn’t generate a distinct politics? How, we should always ask, does it change the strategy to win abortion rights specifically?
Fifth, the abortion rights movement accepts outdated narratives about what this is all about.
The Left has held onto the notion that the antiabortion movement is a backlash against the feminist and civil rights movements. The Right, the narrative goes, wants white women back in the home and pumping out babies so as to control them and prevent Anglo-Saxon demographic decline. Women of color are simply collateral damage in this effort. It is, therefore, some amount of feminist success that propels these reactionary politics.
This idea, I think, is upside down. It is feminism’s failure to attack the deep ills of the United States’ political economy that make antiabortion politics a force for reaction. Just look at countries without a militant antiabortion movement: they have public programs to support women, their dependents, and working-class families through crises and tough times. Even if such programs have been hit by austerity, they are there, and they matter. They have insulated abortion rights from conservative challenges by giving everyone a stake in defending those social benefits.
Instead, in the United States, we have white supremacists, black Baptists, Latino Catholics, and “pro-life” Evangelical feminists joining together at demonstrations to accuse clinic escorts of being the Ku Klux Klan incarnate. It’s wild stuff, and it’s partly thanks to our historic inability to win broader social protections.
People are anxious about the social status of the family and women’s fertility for extremely assorted reasons, some of which are completely contradictory. Abortion gives them a focus. What the Left should emphasize, though, is the need to create ties between feminists, the labor movement, and health care campaigning. There is currently a middle- and upper-class bias to most feminist politics in the United States that needs to be thoroughly dissected, understood, and repudiated.
I don’t have an uplifting message to close on. I only have my two cents: the Left should take a deep breath, then regroup to fight on a stronger footing than before. It’s taken the Right fifty years to get where they are, so it is hysterical to insist the “fascists” are now, finally, charging at the gates — or that another harried vote for Democrats will suddenly change things.
If the antiabortion right are fascists (and some surely are), then consider that they’ve been there, chipping away, for decades, often through the regular organs of the US political system. If that’s the case, then we have long since been living in their world in practice if not in law. Panic is of little political value. So we may as well stop and reflect on our strategic failures, lest we wind up doing the exact same thing over and over again.
And maybe — just maybe — our side will have a “come to Jesus” moment of its own.
Lillian Cicerchia is a postdoctoral researcher in philosophy at the Free University of Berlin, with a focus on political economy, feminism, and critical theory.
Alison Whitney, 84, of South Paris holds a protest sign while sitting in a lawn chair at Canal Plaza in Portland on Saturday | Ben McCanna/ Staff Photographer, PPH
About 200 demonstrate outside U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ office downtown, and many want Roe v. Wade to be codified under federal law.
A crowd of about 200 people rallied for abortion rights Saturday afternoon outside U.S. Se Susan Collins’ downtown Portland office, joining a national backlash against Maine’s senior senator for her votes to confirm U.S. Supreme Court justices who appear poised to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling.
Rose Dubois of York led the crowd with chants.
“When abortion rights are under attack, what do we do?” she said.
“Stand up! Fight back!” the crowd answered.
Many of those at the demonstration held homemade signs, including one that read “Being forced to wear masks goes against your rights? Imagined being forced to carry a pregnancy.”
Another read: “Susan, we’re looking at you!”
Collins, a self-styled abortion-rights moderate, was the deciding vote in 2018 to place Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court bench. She also supported conservative Neil Gorsuch for the high court. Both made private pledges to her to respect the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, Collins said. But this past week a leaked draft opinion indicated that both justices would vote to overturn the precedent.
Collins on Tuesday issued a statement saying their assurances were “completely inconsistent” with the draft opinion. Emails to her office were not returned Saturday. Collins says she supports federal legislation to protect abortion rights, but not a measure that the Democrats are pushing.
At the rally on Saturday, Devyn Shaughnessy of Portland said Collins “has betrayed us in the past, but this is a pivotal moment where she has the opportunity to codify Roe v. Wade.” Votes are needed to protect abortion rights under federal law, and if Collins and a fellow Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, do not vote to do so, “they’ll have blood on their hands,” Shaughnessy.
Jo Ophardt, a member of the Maine Democratic Socialists of America, leads a group of about 200 people in a chant during protest in favor of reproductive rights on Saturday in Portland. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer
Under the draft opinion, abortion policy would be left up to the states, so which ever political party is in power could decide if it’s legal. “People are saying, ‘Maine’s ok. We’re okay for now,” Shaughnessy said. But in upcoming elections if Republicans take control and Maine “turns red, we’ll be in trouble,” she said.
One of the speakers at the rally was Dave Aceto of Portland who urged men to join the abortion conversation. They should not just show up with flowers on Mother’s Day, he said. Sons, brothers, and husbands should stick up for abortion rights of women.”
“Men where are you?” he said.
Abortion is a human right. Abortion is a health issue,” Aceto added. “To men I say it is time for you get involved. It is all of our voices that will keep abortions legal, safe and readily available.”
And to cheers he said: “The days of white men having control over people’s bodies must end.”
Another speaker was Jeanne Lafferty of Portland, who remembers when abortion was illegal in the early 1970s. “We made it legal,” Lafferty said. “I have another question for you. Can we do it again?”
The crowd yelled “yes.”
The fight for abortion rights will have to be an ongoing, inclusive, national movement, she said.
What won’t work, Lafferty and others warned, is a few protests, a few demonstrations and marches, but then the anger fades and people “go home.”
What’s needed, said Portland City Councilor Victoria Pelletier, is consistency and bravery. She said the establishment will be ready for protests, chants and anger, but it’s not prepared for consistent, weekly messages.
She gave the crowd a list of steps to take, including a May 14 Day of Action by a Planned Parenthood committee that is looking for people to knock on doors during the day.
Pelletier also told rally participants to “give our girl Sue a call” at her Washington office and urge her to protect abortion rights. Ans she encouraged them to write letters to Maine’s congressional delegation every week. Calling and writing again and again may not seem like it will make a difference, but it will, she said.
Abigail Forcier of Lyman said she attended the rally because “it’s most important to me that women retain the right to control their own bodies.” She also wants Roe v. Wade codified in federal law.
“Collins needs to really rally for that, to be a big a part of making that happen, and to speak for women everywhere,” Forcier said.
Garcia speaking at a demonstration for abortion rights in New York City, shortly after the draft decision was leaked – Photo: PSL
On the night of May 3, a US Supreme Court draft decision regarding the landmark Roe v. Wade decision was leaked to the press. As per the draft, penned by conservative Justice Samuel Alito, the Supreme Court is set to overturn the historic decision, eliminating the right to abortion for millions of women. In response, thousands have taken to the streets of US cities, demanding that the right to abortion be protected. Activists and the millions of women in the streets hope that this outpour can sway the final Supreme Court decision.
Karina Garcia is an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation and a writer for socialist feminist magazine Breaking the Chains. She has been organizing since she was 17 years old, when she founded a women’s rights organization at her high school. For the past ten years, she worked with a national reproductive justice organization focused on the Latina community. Peoples Dispatch interviewed Garcia to discuss her perspective on the current moment in the struggle for abortion access in the US.
Peoples Dispatch: Why is it that the ruling class in the United States is fighting so hard against abortion rights, specifically now? What has changed about the current moment?
Karina Garcia: This is really an attempt to distract, divide and confuse the people.
People are facing so many problems, whether it’s poverty wages, a lack of health care, lack of sick days, lack of all sorts of protections, clean water, food, all these very obvious social problems that actually have solutions. If the government put the massive amounts of resources that exist in this country into these issues, we would actually be able to provide people with all of the basic necessities, not just in this country, but in the world, overnight. We have those resources now. 40% of the food in this country is wasted. We spend trillions of dollars on the military industrial complex, starting new wars.
The resources all exist for people to live dignified lives and to have food, health care, housing, education, all the things that they need, but we have a ruling class that doesn’t want that. They want to keep starting new wars and they want to keep accumulating endless amounts of profits.
The fact of the matter is, people’s living conditions in this country have not improved, they’ve gotten worse. Inequality has only been sharpened during this pandemic. The complete failure and inability of the government to meet the people’s basic needs has been exposed for all to see. They couldn’t even pass Build Back Better, which would barely get us to a level of social welfare that’s comparable to other countries in the global north. They didn’t do anything, not that they couldn’t, but they just wouldn’t. They can make all the excuses they want: the filibuster, this or that politician, we’ve heard it all and it’s worthless. When they want something to pass, they get their people in line and they pass it. When it comes to tax cuts for the rich and bailouts for the banks, they act immediately and with complete urgency. So we’re not having it.
Right now there are all of these looming social problems that exist in society, and abortion access is just that thing that they are able to use, that they’re trying to use to scapegoat and to divide people. It presents an opportunity for them to distract. Our class is mostly unorganized, so they can use these wedge issues because they have control over the media.
They use these wedge issues to divide people based on what they call moral issues. But the fact of the matter is, we know that it has nothing to do with morality at all, because the states where they are enacting the most vicious and cruel restrictions on abortion access are the places where women and families have it the worst. Texas, for example, is one of the worst places to be if you’re a woman or a child, because there’s so little support, from child poverty to lack of access to child care, to poor, underfunded schools.
The restrictions on abortion have nothing to do with actually improving people’s lives, or protecting people’s lives or protecting families. It has everything to do with providing no solutions and no major changes in society, not actually providing anything material for people other than scapegoating, propaganda, division, humiliation, shame. That’s the only thing that they can offer, to put down and shame people.
It’s disgusting. But it has nothing to do with the population. It has nothing to do with wanting more workers or wanting a more moral society. It’s a way to score political points with religious voting blocks without actually making any material changes to people’s lives.
PD: What do you think it will take to sway the court’s decision on Roe v. Wade?
KG: What has happened has provided us with a really big opportunity. The myth is that the Supreme Court is this higher, almost holy body, that is only moved by arguments and whatever is written on paper. That’s just ahistorical. The Supreme Court is highly political. They’re highly affected by social movements, the things that are happening in society, over and above everything else: their function is to provide stability for the capitalist system.
And whenever there are movements that are challenging the status quo, that can be explosive, it creates a level of instability that they don’t want to deal with. That’s the kind of instability that we have to show them. If they think that they’re going to roll back the rights of half the population, that they’re going to put us in this endless position of humiliation and domination and control and that we’re not going to do anything about it, they’re mistaken.
This has provided us an opportunity. Whoever leaked that draft decision is a hero. Because they’re giving us a chance to fight now. Influence them now. Make them feel it now.
Kavanaugh is a DC frat boy, he’s not a religious zealot. He can totally be moved. And, you know what? At the end of the day, any one of them can be.
PD: Is Roe v. Wade enough? And if not, what more do we need?
KG: Roe v. Wade is not enough. We’ve known for years that Roe v. Wade is not enough, because you can have any right on paper. The fact of the matter is that 90% of counties in the United States don’t have abortion clinics. Not only that, but people don’t have health care, people don’t have child care. This is about our lives and our families living dignified lives.
Abortion is just one part of health care. It’s a part of the fight for reproductive justice. The fight for socialism is a fight for all of our needs to be met, for us to have the resources and the wealth that we create put towards the things that matter to us, the things that that we really need. Clean water, clean energy, housing, health care, education, all those things are part of reproductive justice. They’re a way for families to live with dignity.
We’re not really for imposing one or another view of what families should or shouldn’t be. We’re for providing people with what they need to be able to create the families that they want with the resources that they deserve. Whether that’s more support for fertility treatments for people who are having difficulty conceiving, or better or more accessible forms of contraception, to be able to have an abortion if they need it, if they want it, if it makes sense for them.
All of those things are what’s needed, what’s really required. Roe is an important baseline, but we have to go beyond it too.
PD: What are some major obstacles for building a movement that can win abortion rights for everyone?
KG: One of the obstacles that we face is that a lot of people don’t have basic sex education. They really don’t understand the process of pregnancy and so that makes them vulnerable to the cynical and despicable vitriol that is put out by the right wing antis. Another challenge, and I think the challenge that the whole movement faces, is the nonprofit industrial complex. Just the fact that so many issues are separated and that and there’s real divisions, of course, in our class, but we don’t have a very highly developed national movement for something more comprehensive.
We are trying to transform society. We think that our resources should be used to fight racism, to fight sexism, to overcome the historic exploitation and super-exploitation and oppression of certain communities and actually build up a society that meets all of our needs, the needs of the many, not the few, a society that aligns with our values for dignity and justice.
Having that collective vision, a program that ties together all of the different social movements, that’s historically one of the challenges that we face in this country.
PD: How do activists overcome the divisions within society that already exist in order to build this movement?
KG: Political education is really important. In addition to bringing people out in the street, we have to bring people together to deepen their understanding of what’s behind these attacks so that we can see that this is part of a bigger attack on our communities as a whole. When they’re coming after one segment of our community, [help them see] it actually hurts all of us. An injury to one is an injury to all. That can’t just be some slogan. It has to become a fact.
And we’ve seen a lot of solidarity over the years out on the streets and I think that we’re going to see that again. But solidarity is really earned and trust and respect for each other is really earned. We get that and we give that by coming out for each other, struggling side by side.
PD: You’ve been in the streets these past few days. What is the mood of the people? What have you been noticing?
KG: People were so happy when we were marching down the street. People joined us from the sidewalks, they were cheering and chanting alongside us. That kind of feeling is electrifying, it’s magnetic, and it spreads. That’s why it’s important to get out into the streets.
And it’s a complete distraction to just say, oh, we have to focus on getting the Democrats elected, let’s all vote. Please. We’re past that. That’s our enemies talking, confusing us, and lulling us back to sleep. We have to stay out in the streets so that we continue to bring our people out and break through this facade of apathy.
People know what’s going on and they have seen and experienced that their vote hasn’t fundamentally changed the things around them. It’s bigger than choosing between these two ruling parties: we need a new system. It’s a really patronizing way of thinking and is just downright disrespectful to say that all the people that don’t vote just don’t care or are apathetic or are somehow to blame for this rotten system of these capitalist politicians who use all of our resources and then have the nerve to blame the people themselves for the problems that they’ve created.
PD: What can the movement in the US learn from the struggles in Latin America for abortion rights?
KG: Stay in the streets. Our sisters in Latin America, they won their rights the way that we won our rights to begin with. They fought for them. They took them. They built strong independent organizations, people’s organizations. They’re connected to a broader socialist vision of all of the different rights that they deserve. It wasn’t about just waiting for these politicians to change their mind.
They were able to win their rights by exercising and showing their strength, the strength of their organizations, building them tirelessly day by day through actions, great and small, supporting each other, helping each other. All of these ways that you show you care about each other. You build up your organization that makes you so much more powerful, so much more difficult to ignore, coopt, and divide, when you are building strong political organizations in your community with a shared vision of what you want.
A crowd of people gather outside the Supreme Court, early Tuesday, May 3, 2022, in Washington. A draft opinion circulated among Supreme Court justices suggests that earlier this year a majority of them had thrown support behind overturning the 1973 case Roe v. Wade that legalized abortion nationwide. | Alex Brandon / AP
The Supreme Court of the United States has voted to overturn Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that legalized abortion across the nation. In a shocking and unprecedented leak reported by Politico Monday night, the nation heard the news of the initial majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito and circulated among the other justices back on Feb. 10.
This will be the first time in U.S. history that a constitutionally-guaranteed right, in this case the right of women to an abortion, has ever been removed by the Court.
The decision secretly approved by the justices strikes down both Roe v. Wade, the Court’s 1973 ruling that enshrined the constitutional right to an abortion, and a decision in 1992, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that essentially upheld that right.
Alito writes in the leaked ruling: “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed divisions in the country.”
Some progressive leaders in Congress are urging preemptive legislation to block the Court’s opinion before it can take effect. Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., said that Senate must toss aside the undemocratic filibuster to immediately pass a law making abortion rights permanent. She also urged an expansion of the number of justices on the Court.
In a statement Tuesday morning, Bush issued a direct challenge to Democrats and the White House:
“Abolish the filibuster. Codify Roe. Expand the Supreme Court. Protect abortion rights by any means necessary.”
She declared, “We need all of the above. This is an emergency.”
Saved by Roe
Once the ruling takes effect, at least half the states in the country are expected to quickly make abortion completely illegal, with poor and working class women and women of color in Republican-governed states having their rights stripped away first.
It would mark a return to the time before Roe v. Wade, when abortion was a crime everywhere.
As late as the early 1970s, for example, police departments and governments around the U.S. were conducting crackdowns on what they called the illegal “abortion industry.” Almost totally forgotten these days are the vicious attacks against women in government-led terroristic campaigns.
Members of the Jane Collective, arrested by Chicago Police. | Chicago Police Department
The story of one such campaign, in Chicago, was being heavily circulated following the Monday night leak after a report in The Guardian. In the early ’70s, police came crashing down on “Call Jane,” a feminist collective of young women who, since 1965, had provided safe but then illegal abortions to roughly 3,000 Chicagoans per year. The collective, led by the famed civil rights and human rights activist Heather Booth, was raided after two Catholic women told police their sister-in-law planned to have an abortion provided by the group.
A homicide detective assigned to the case traced “Jane” to the South Shore neighborhood. There, police raided an apartment, arrested nearly 50 people for questioning, and tore three women who were actively undergoing abortion treatment away from their procedure and hauled them off to the hospital.
Seven women were charged with 11 counts of performing an abortion and conspiracy to commit abortion. They would soon be known in Chicago’s newspapers as the “Abortion Seven.”
Members of Call Jane protected the women they served and prevented many of them from being arrested by eating the index cards that bore the details of the patients’ information.
There were similar cases across the country where working class women went to incredible and dangerous lengths to access abortion or to protect those who needed them.
A woman working for the Parks Department in Brooklyn found a woman who performed her own abortion bleeding and dying in a ravine in Prospect Park. She was able to get the woman to the emergency room at a nearby hospital where her life was saved.
In 1973, the Abortion Seven, had to be released by prosecutors when the Supreme Court issued Roe v. Wade. With the decision, the Court affirmed that access to safe and legal abortion was a constitutional right. It said that states could not ban abortion before 24 weeks into the pregnancy.
Declaring women’s health illegal, again
The nightmare of state harassment suffered by women in Chicago in the early 1970s may pale in comparison to the level of surveillance and repression that could be deployed against women today in an America where abortion is illegal. The data produced by cell phones, internet browsers, search engines, and social media could be used to prosecute women who seek abortions, and the heaviest crackdowns would undoubtedly descend on poor women and women of color.
“It’s like a thought experiment—to think about what ‘Call Jane’ would look like,” in the modern era, said Cynthia Conti-Cook, a technology fellow with the Ford Foundation told the press Monday. Her work in gender, racial, and ethnic justice looks at how law enforcement could use the data produced by digital infrastructure—smartphones, computers, and social media—to prosecute people who have or even assist others in accessing abortions, should Roe v. Wade be overturned.
“A single mobile phone could reveal the entire collective,” Conti-Cook said. “Just one encounter with law enforcement—a traffic stop, a search, an arrest—could expose the entire network through digital connections.”
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, at least 26 states would outlaw abortion either immediately or as quickly as possible, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research organization. Abortion rights advocates say this will result in desperate people travelling to get abortions in more states where the procedure remains legal, such as Illinois or New York. Some 13 states already have so-called “trigger laws” on the books which will outlaw abortion the minute Roe is officially overturned.
Many people in such places are unlikely to make, nor can they afford, the long, expensive, and health-endangering journeys that would be required. The poor, the young, and people of color will more likely be forced to turn to illegal methods, creating another racist feature in the already racist criminal justice system. This disaster would happen in addition to the possible return of the widespread death and health problems that often came with having an illegal abortion before Roe.
Now, stunned women’s rights activists fear a soon-to-come future where abortion may no longer be legal in most of the U.S. and where prosecutions like that of the “Call Jane” collective will become business as usual.
Women as criminals
A return to illegal abortion will be a horror show in the U.S., the country already with the world’s largest law enforcement apparatus and largest incarcerated population. The new reality will cement the U.S.’ status as the country with the largest number of imprisoned women.
Abortion rights advocates march in the 1970s. | AbortionFilms.org
A national organization for defense attorneys has published a report that lays out a future in which the U.S. could undertake “rampant criminalization” and “mass incarceration on an unprecedented scale” in the name of “defense of the unborn.”
“States are laying the groundwork now, and have been laying the groundwork for criminal penalties that are completely different,” than the pre-Roe era, says Lindsay A. Lewis, a New York criminal defense attorney who co-authored a report on abortion for the National Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys (NACDL).
“They are so much more advanced, and so much harsher than what existed before Roe was enacted.”
State legislatures have spent recent decades “modifying their criminal codes” in ways that “completely change the calculus when it comes to what it would mean to go back to pre-Roe times,” according to Lewis.
The lawyers warn that the states where the procedure is illegal are laying the groundwork to go after even those women who travel to other states where it is legal in order to get abortions denied in their home states.
Criminal charges, the lawyers explain, could come from specific abortion laws, but also from criminal codes that penalize “attempted crimes, conspiracies, and accomplices to crime, all relics of laws developed during the U.S.’ so-called ‘war on drugs.’ Those laws could subject a wide range of individuals to criminal penalties if Roe is overturned”, the NACDL report says.
They would include prosecuting people from states where the procedure is illegal who attempt to seek abortions in states where it remains legal.
For example, Louisiana law defines an “accomplice” to a crime as “anyone involved in its commission, even tangentially, whether present or absent if they aid, abet, or even counsel someone.” Lawyers say this could be used against a wide range of spouses, partners, friends, loved ones, or counselors, such as clergy or abortion fund networks, which help direct people or help transport them to clinics in places where abortion is still legal.
International human rights organizations are condemning the attack on Roe v. Wade. In a brief to the Supreme Court, the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to health warned that overturning the ruling and banning or criminalizing abortion is “irreconcilable” with international human rights laws.
Justice Alito says in his ruling very clearly: “We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
Four of the other Republican-appointed justices—Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—voted with Alito in the conference held among the justices. The three Democratic-appointed justices were opposed, and the allegiance of Chief Justice John Roberts is not yet known.
If, as expected, the draft ruling is adopted by the Court, it would be a ruling in favor of Mississippi in the controversial case allowing the state to ban abortions after 15 weeks. That would allow each state to decide on its own whether to either restrict or ban abortion entirely. It would also enable a future Republican Congress and president to ban abortion entirely across the whole country.
Several Republican-led states have already passed highly restrictive abortion laws in anticipation of the ruling that has now been leaked. Trump supporters are claiming the leaked ruling as a victory for him. Thanks to his appointments, the Court now has a 6–3 right-wing majority.
Alex Brandon / AP
Politico said it received a copy of the draft opinion from a person familiar with the court’s proceedings in the Mississippi case. The Court declined to confirm what would be the worst security breach in its history, regarding one of its most consequential rulings in history.
Neal Katyal, a former U.S. acting solicitor general who has argued many cases before the Supreme court, said on MSNBC Monday night: “I’ve quickly scanned the draft opinion, and it appears legitimate. This means there was a preliminary vote to fully overrule Roe v. Wade and that a majority of the court agreed. It’s possible the Court could pull back from this position, but this looks like they voted that way after the oral argument.”
Democrats were quick to condemn the ruling. The Democratic National Committee and the party’s senatorial committee chair, Christie Roberts, issued stinging condemnations.
“This Republican attack on abortion access, birth control, and women’s health care has dramatically escalated the stakes of the 2022 election,” Roberts said. At this critical moment, we must protect and expand Democrats’ Senate majority with the power to confirm or reject Supreme Court justices.”
No word has yet emerged on whether the party leadership intends to take up the calls of Rep. Cori Bush to ditch the filibuster, make abortion rights permanent through legislation, or expand the Supreme Court.
John Wojcik is Editor-in-Chief of People’s World. He joined the staff as Labor Editor in May 2007 after working as a union meat cutter in northern New Jersey. There, he served as a shop steward and a member of a UFCW contract negotiating committee. In the 1970s and ’80s, he was a political action reporter for the Daily World, this newspaper’s predecessor, and was active in electoral politics in Brooklyn, New York.
Reproductive rights advocates protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C. on May 2, 2022 following the publication of a draft opinion suggesting Roe v. Wade will soon be overturned. (Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
“While abortion is still legal, tonight’s report makes clear that our deepest fears are coming true. We have reached a crisis moment for abortion access. We don’t have a moment to spare—we must act now.”
A leaked draft opinionpublished Monday by Politico strongly suggests that the U.S. Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority will soon strike down Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling enshrining the constitutional right to abortion.
“This is the most alarming sign yet that our nation’s highest court is poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, ending the constitutional right to abortion as we know it and ripping away our freedom to decide if, when, and how to raise our families,” NARAL Pro-Choice America president Mini Timmaraju said in a statement.
In a joint statement, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said that “if the report is accurate, the Supreme Court is poised to inflict the greatest restriction of rights in the past 50 years—not just on women but on all Americans.”
“The Republican-appointed justices’ reported votes to overturn Roe v. Wade would go down as an abomination, one of the worst and most damaging decisions in modern history,” they added.
Asserting that “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Alito wrote in the draft opinion—in which he is reportedly joined by Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—that “we hold that Roe and Casey must be overturned,” a reference to the 1992 case Planned Parenthood v. Casey that affirmed the constitutional right to abortion while allowing states to regulate the procedure.
“We can only do our job, which is to interpret the law, apply longstanding principles of stare decisis, and decide this case accordingly,” Alito contended, referring to the legal principle of deference to precedent. Abortion has been a constitutionally enshrined right since 1973—or for a fifth of the nation’s history.
“We therefore hold that the Constitution does not confer a right to abortion,” Alito added, “…and the authority to regulate abortion must be returned to the people and their elected representatives.”
Reproductive rights advocates say that if Roe is struck down, more than 20 states are certain or likely to outlaw abortion, many via so-called “trigger laws.”
“While this is a draft opinion and abortion is still legal, we need to brace for a future where more and more people are punished and criminalized for seeking and providing abortion care,” said Timmaraju. “Now more than ever, we must support those working to provide abortion care and elect champions who will relentlessly fight for reproductive freedom and take bold action to safeguard abortion rights.”
Following the draft opinion’s publication, hundreds of reproductive rights advocates staged a demonstration outside the Supreme Court, where barriers had already been erected in anticipation of protests.
The Politico article’s authors, Josh Gerstein and Alexander Ward, noted that “no draft decision in the modern history of the court has been disclosed publicly while a case was still pending.”
Gerstein and Ward said Politico received a copy of the draft from “a person familiar with the court’s proceedings” in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a case challenging Mississippi’s 15-week abortion ban that reproductive rights advocates have warned could prove Roe‘s “death knell.”
In addition to Roe, Alito also takes aim at Lawrence v. Texas, the 2003 ruling overturning the state’s sodomy ban, and Obergefell v. Hodges, which legalized same-sex marriage in 2015, sparking fears that this could be but the beginning of a wider rollback of civil rights won in recent decades.
Advocates stressed the imperative for Congress to act immediately to shield reproductive freedom at the federal level—and for people to stand up and fight for their rights.
“If SCOTUS is going to legislate from the bench and turn back the clock 50 years on Roe v. Wade, then the Senate needs to pass my Women’s Health Protection Act,” tweeted Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wisc.), referring to legislation that would codify the right to abortion nationwide.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) tweeted: “Congress must pass legislation that codifies Roe v. Wade as the law of the land in this country now. And if there aren’t 60 votes in the Senate to do it, and there are not, we must end the filibuster to pass it with 50 votes.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) asserted that “it’s time for the millions who support the Constitution and abortion rights to stand up and make their voices heard. We’re not going back—not ever.”
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