by Ruby K.

This paper was originally meant for publication in the summer of 2019, at a time when attacks on abortion access across several states were making national headlines across the U.S. As 2020 begins, the legal struggle around restrictive legislation drags on, and working-class women continue to be abandoned by bourgeois feminism, the brutality of our “choices” changing little from the decades before Roe vs. Wade to now. Even the bourgeois press acknowledges that in the last six months, tensions in the “pro-choice” movement have grown, with various lobbyists and NGOs futiley struggling over their funding and messaging, and acting surprised that poor women aren’t rallying behind them. The New York Times article linked above sounds affronted by organizers like Amanda Reyes of the Yellowhammer Fund: “In describing her vision, Ms. Reyes used language some say is similar to the rhetoric frequently deployed by abortion rights’ fiercest opponents. ‘If all we do as an organization is pay for abortions for low-income people, we are eugenicists,’ Ms. Reyes said.” Reyes was merely repeating to a larger audience what working class women, especially nationally oppressed women, have been saying for centuries. It is a lesson from the masses that white communists in the U.S. have willfully dismissed.

I wrote about my grandmother, a healthcare provider, to illustrate the conflicts of the pro-choice movement with the working-class movement for reproductive justice. But I didn’t write this paper because of her work as a nurse or as an advocate. Although the work of skilled professionals and advocates to provide reproductive healthcare- usually at huge personal risk- is heroic, truly, this paper is for every working-class woman who has been told to “choose” under capitalism whether or not to get pregnant or have a baby, when in fact she had no choice. Including my grandmother, including myself, my friends, teachers, and neighbors. To everyone in the post-Roe era who was still never able to even think about her “options” because, still, there were none. And most of all, to my family and neighbors who talked this paper through with me, whose living understanding of reproductive justice is far beyond the debates of bourgeois feminism or the conclusions of this paper.

As working-class women prepare to strengthen our demands for access to the reproductive healthcare we need to survive, including abortion, we tend to fall back on the slogans of bourgeois feminism, which says access to abortion is about personal liberty, about “choice.” But under capitalism, “choice” in any aspect of life, including matters of sex, pregnancy, and childbirth, is a luxury that only exists for those who can afford it. As Katya Derevo wrote about earlier this year, recent legislative attacks in states like Alabama and Ohio target, by default, the women who can’t afford to bypass these laws.

In these moments of crisis, our (justified) panic causes us to hitch ourselves to liberal ideology which professes to have the interests of all women at heart, but in reality advocates the interests of women in the ruling class, who, within capitalism, will always be able to obtain whatever kind of medical care they need. Reproductive justice is a working-class issue, primarily impacting working-class women and many trans and gender-non-conforming people. We can’t allow bourgeois feminism to control this struggle, pointing toward the restriction of abortion access as the only culprit, and away from the greater enemy: capitalism. Only in a communist society can women achieve liberation, so all our efforts toward reproductive justice must be inseparable from the struggle for socialism.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t know what abortion was. My mother and grandmother always talked about all aspects of reproductive health frankly, on the strength of their faith that knowledge would protect my little sisters and I better than ignorance would. My grandmother had a cardboard fan — the kind you use in church — with the famous blue “Keep Abortion Legal” logo on it, and she’d fan us with it when we were sick. She’d been a white labor and delivery nurse in the poorest parts of a large, predominately Black, Midwestern city, before the landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion. She witnessed countless unspeakable tragedies brought about by violent, racist policies toward pregnant women, from botched home abortions to the birth of children being greeted with despair because their parents didn’t know how they could possibly afford to feed them. This, combined with her experiences growing up in a deeply racist and patriarchal family, made her a passionate advocate against racism and for women’s liberation, including the right to a safe, legal, easily accessible abortion.

My grandmother felt conflicted about the role she briefly took up as an abortion provider; it was a service urgently required for the survival of so many proletarian women, but she realized that pregnancy itself wasn’t keeping working-class families in poverty. Capitalism (and with it, white supremacy) was. Who knows what decision many of her patients might have made, given the resources to bring up their families in safety?

In 1994, a progressive, though non-Marxist, collective of Black women called Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice (now the reproductive justice collective Sister Song) met in Chicago to call for a departure from the “pro-choice” politics of the women’s movements of prior decades, “recogniz[ing] that the women’s rights movement, led by and representing middle class and wealthy white women, could not defend the needs of women of color and other marginalized women… We needed to lead our own national movement to uplift the needs of the most marginalized women, families, and communities.”

In 2001, Toni Bond, the first Black director of the Chicago Abortion Fund, wrote about how she observed Black women being alienated from the reproductive justice movement even as they remain one of the most affected groups, saying, “When Black women do come to the meeting, it is always a constant challenge to keep other reproductive health concerns on the table with the issue of abortion. The majority of Black women support the right to choose but have difficulty with abortion always front and center. Immediate and extended family is highly valued in the Black community. Oftentimes, family is the only place one can turn. Low wages, unemployment, childcare, etc., make abortion for many women, particularly women of color, the decision they are forced to make, not necessarily the choice they always want to make…The charge of the reproductive rights community must be to stop merely giving lip-service to the notion of organizing around a broader spectrum of reproductive health.” (Emphasis mine.) These are hesitations and concerns that working-class women continue to voice eighteen years later. It’s time that Marxists align with, and contribute to, this type of analysis. It’s in that spirit that I offer the following history.

Limitations of liberal ideas around “choice” and “personal liberty”

Most feminists today think of the term “pro-choice” as chosen for its implication that any decision a pregnant woman makes is to be supported. However, the real choices available to the working class are limited at best. J.V. Stalin explained this concept well in a 1936 interview with a liberal American journalist (emphasis mine):

[W]e did not build [the Soviet Union] in order to restrict personal liberty but in order that the human individual may feel really free. We built it for the sake of real personal liberty, liberty without quotation marks. It is difficult for me to imagine what “personal liberty” is enjoyed by an unemployed person, who goes about hungry, and cannot find employment. Real liberty can exist only where exploitation has been abolished, where there is no oppression of some by others, where there is no unemployment and poverty, where a man is not haunted by the fear of being tomorrow deprived of work, of home and of bread. Only in such a society is real, and not paper, personal and every other liberty possible.

Likewise, it’s difficult for me to imagine what “choice” is enjoyed by a pregnant woman who can’t afford to have a child, who’s in an abusive relationship, or who would have to forgo education or employment to have a child. Real choice is only possible without the systemic coercion of patriarchy and capitalism.

Furthermore, we have to dismiss the idea of individual choice as the be-all and end-all of women’s liberation. That’s the argument of every advertising campaign telling women in capitalist societies that our “empowerment” stems from our “freedom to choose” between a wide variety of commodities provided by the free market. It’s an idea of liberation that belongs to capitalism, and it has no place in the fight for working-class womens’ liberation. Reproductive justice is a collective, rather than an individual, issue. The concept of an individual woman weighing her choices based on her individual needs and desires, separated from her class, nationality, community, family, etc.,is an abstraction totally outside reality.

Rise of the “pro-choice” line in abortion advocacy

Abortion is an ancient practice, and the exploitation of pregnancy has been a key aspect of the oppression of women since the beginning of class society. Thus, working-class women, in our fight for liberation, have historically addressed the need for access to abortion as a consequence of oppressive circumstances. Before abortion was made illegal in the U.S. in the late 19th century, women fought for the issue of abortion — then, an inevitably dangerous procedure, in contrast to today — to be brought out of the shadows, much like sexual and interpersonal violence. Most importantly, the revolutionary proletarian approach to abortion has always prioritized the circumstances that drive women to seek an abortion, rather than simply access to the procedure itself. Advocates against criminalization, like the German revolutionary Dr. Friedrich Wolf, did not frame abortion as something liberatory or a matter of personal autonomy.

The contemporary “pro-choice movement,” on the other hand, has its roots in bourgeois feminist ideas about personal liberty for bourgeois women seeking parity with bourgeois men and the eugenics movement. As Bolshevik revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai wrote in her 1909 essay on bourgeois vs. proletarian lines in the women’s movement: “The fact is that however ‘radical’ the equal righters may be, they are still loyal to their own bourgeois class… each such success, each new prerogative attained by the bourgeois woman, only puts into her hands yet another instrument with which to oppress her younger sister, and would merely deepen the gulf dividing the women from these two opposing social camps. Their interests would clash more sharply, their aspirations become mutually exclusive.” At this point in the abortion debate, liberalism has such a stranglehold on the political consciousness of the working class that many working-class women, fighting for our desperately needed access to abortion, describe ourselves as pro-choice, even if we have a revolutionary understanding of reproductive justice.

Historical consequences of liberalism in the struggle for reproductive justice

Conflicting bourgeois elements have sought either a foothold in pro-choice politics or in anti-abortion politics. Through a result of intra-bourgeois conflict, the combination has constituted an effective political tool for curtailing or expanding the working population according to the capitalists’ needs (this is particularly clear when we regard capitalist investment in eugenics), for keeping working-class women battered and punished with forced pregnancies and unavoidable criminalization, and for creating ideological misdirection, i.e. insisting that poverty is the consequence of having too many kids, not of austerity and imperialism. Major organizations like Planned Parenthood provide desperately needed reproductive healthcare to poor women, using our poverty as a talking point, but never question the society that keeps us in poverty.

When we look at similar settler colonial states, like Israel and apartheid-era South Africa, the pattern is clear: access to abortion is restricted for settler women by legislators panicking to maintain settler birth rates for their ethnostate (Comrade Derevo outlines this history as it pertains to the U.S. in her article). Meanwhile, such states maintain forced sterilization on the one hand and turn a blind eye toward high rates of dangerous illegal abortions for the colonized population — the poor women — on the other hand, as the status quo.

In an example of the kind of interest many capitalists had in promoting birth control, Margaret Sanger, birth control crusader and founder of Planned Parenthood, famously remarked with disgust on donors to her organization who insisted their contributions be used to curtail the Black birth rate (she refused them). Then, in an example of the inevitable consequences of bourgeois politics, the same woman partnered with notorious white supremacists like Lothrop Stoddard and even spoke at a meeting of women members of the Ku Klux Klan. Sanger would eventually work with the “philanthropist” and eugenicist, Clarence Gamble (the pharmaceutical heir to Proctor & Gamble), an advocate, like Sanger, for the sterilization of the extremely poor or disabled, to instigate the first trials of the birth control pill on uninformed and unconsenting Puerto Rican women. In 1969, Black revolutionary Fannie Lou Hamer had to block a resolution by Planned Parenthood president Dr. Alan Guttmacher at the White House Conference on Hunger, which proposed mandatory abortion for any unmarried woman, and mandatory sterilization for any “second [offense]” of childbirth out of wedlock. These are just a few examples of the ideology underpinning the pro-choice movement.

We can’t dismiss this ideology as ancient history, not when it includes the continued forced sterilization of nationally oppressed women, not when the Black maternal and infant mortality rates continue to climb, not when hand-wringing over “overpopulation” in colonized countries provides liberals with an excuse to disguise their racism with concern for the planet. We can easily recognize, and rally against, instances when the capitalist state uses brute violence to force nationally oppressed women into pregnancies, abortions or sterilizations that they haven’t consented to. When capitalism sets things up economically to have the same result, we have to reject it just as strongly.

South Africa gives an instructive example of the consequences of issuing a demand for abortion access as an end in itself. During apartheid, the white settlers’ National Party advocated separate reproductive policies for white women vs. African women, using tax incentives and highly specific regulatory health laws to discourage white women from having abortions or using contraception, while promoting the use of contraception and encouraging sterilization for African women (and turning a blind eye to African women who sought illegal abortions and died from them). During the first post-apartheid parliamentary session in 1996, the African National Congress instituted the Choice on Termination of Pregnancy Act, which legalizes and subsidizes abortion for any woman, of any age, for any reason. However, as the legacy of apartheid lingers and South Africa struggles to develop against imperialist opposition, nearly half of all abortions in South Africa remain illegal and unsafe. Few doctors practicing in poor areas will agree to provide abortions, and no NGO that accepts U.S. funding is allowed to offer abortion care. Meanwhile, extreme poverty drives proletarian women to seek abortions by any means necessary. In the end, despite some of the most permissive abortion laws in the world, reproductive justice remains out of reach for South Africa’s Black proletariat.

Reproductive justice will remain out of reach for all working-class women if we continue to invest in bourgeois feminism, if the economic basis of women’s oppression is ignored. Capitalism and white supremacy are not separate problems to be relegated to the back burner until this urgent issue of abortion is dealt with; we have to fight capitalism as part and parcel of this repression.

Consequences of idealism in the struggle for reproductive justice

By abandoning materialism, communists have failed in our duty to correctly analyse and explain abortion bans in the United States. In an attempt to remain appealing to the white petite bourgeoise, we’re ignoring questions of class and nation and tailing pro-choice politics with critiques like “the Republican right wing party, lacking any class interests, simply wants to rally their (usually undefined) base for support in being right wing.” This failure leads the masses to believe the Democratic Party has our interests at heart. The split between Democrats and Republicans is thus portrayed as a split between progress and reaction, not between historically industrial capitalists and agricultural capitalists, whose interests do often conflict. This has always been an important but difficult concept for Marxists to grasp; in 1953, Maurice Cornforth wrote, “[D]ifficulties are felt in understanding the relations between American and British imperialism today. For it is argued: Either they are working together, or else they are not. If they are working together, then there is no rift between them; if there is a rift between them, then they are not working together. But on the contrary, they are working together and yet there are rifts between them; and we cannot understand the way they work together nor fight them effectively unless we understand the rifts which divide them.” (Emphasis mine.)

Abortion legislation can serve more than one purpose — we have to look at the entire context of this issue. Republicans and Democrats alike aren’t just playing political games; they’re promoting their respective capitalist interests. As Lenin reminded us, “People always have been the foolish victims of deception and self-deception in politics, and they always will be until they have learnt to seek out the interests of some class or other behind all moral, religious, political and social phrases, declarations and promises.” (Emphasis mine.) In other words, fantasies of a monolithic bourgeoisie or capitalist parties separated strictly by ideology give us no solutions and no way to progress.

Our task is to interrogate this crisis unflinchingly. Anything less is to leave nuanced criticism to the “pro-life” reactionaries and conspiracy theorists. To embrace a materialist analysis is to insist on looking beyond the Democratic Party line for answers. Concretely, this means investigating the current conditions of states like Alabama: the legacy of segregation and an incomplete Reconstruction, the concerns of the Southern aristocracy (fears over losing the white majority due to immigration); which section of the bourgeoisie stands to benefit from population growth of white Americans and/or oppressed nations — the driving economic interests. If we ignore these conditions and refuse to investigate them, we dismiss and lag behind the masses, particularly the Black masses, who for decades have expressed fears of a Black genocide through population control.

Idealism prevents us from ever arriving at a revolutionary proletarian position, which we can only achieve through materialist analysis.

Comparing bourgeois and revolutionary positions

For an instructive example of the differences between the bourgeois line on reproductive justice versus the revolutionary line, consider that in 1921, Margaret Sanger wrote (emphasis mine):

As an advocate of Birth Control, I wish to take advantage of the present opportunity to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the “unfit” and the “fit,” admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit though less fertile parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.

This was the view Sanger and her colleagues expressed over the course of her career.

Activists and commentators such as Planned Parenthood, the Guttmacher Institute, and their supporters, argue that the extent of Sanger’s backwardness is worth debating, or insist that she was progressive for her time. The virtues or vices of Sanger as an individual aren’t important; nevertheless, her writings point to the underpinning bourgeois ideology of the pro-choice movement and how this ideology continues to impact women today.

Meanwhile, only one year before, the newly born Soviet Union had decriminalized abortion, and on the subject, Bolshevik revolutionary Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote (emphasis mine):

How is one to help the mother, breaking under the burden of childbirth and the rearing and upbringing of children? …The answer is clear — the state must not only undertake the protection of the mother and child, must not only care for women during pregnancy, and during and after confinement, but must set up tens of thousands of nurseries, kindergartens, children’s colonies, and dormitories where children receive care and food, where they would live, develop and study under conditions ten times better then even the most loving mother could provide for them by her own unaided efforts… The fight against abortions must be carried on not by persecuting the mothers, who resort to abortions often at great risk to their own lives, but must be directed towards eliminating the social causes that have made it necessary for women to resort to abortions.

Echoing Krupskaya, her husband, V.I. Lenin likewise wrote, in a refutation of the panic over the so-called “population bomb” and the bourgeois insistence on promoting birth control to achieve “zero population growth” (emphasis mine):

Yes, we workers and the mass of small proprietors lead a life that is filled with unbearable oppression and suffering. Things are harder for our generation than they were for our fathers. But in one respect we are luckier than our fathers. We have begun to learn and are rapidly learning to fight — and to fight not as individuals, as the best of our fathers fought, not for the slogans of bourgeois speechifiers that are alien to us in spirit, but for our slogans, the slogans of our class. We are fighting better than our fathers did. Our children will fight better than we do, and they will be victorious. . . It goes without saying that this does not by any means prevent us from demanding the unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions or against the distribution of medical literature on contraceptive measures, etc. Such laws are nothing but the hypocrisy of the ruling classes.These laws do not heal the ulcers of capitalism, they merely turn them into malignant ulcers that are especially painful for the oppressed masses.

To be clear, in 1936, the Soviet Union did re-criminalize abortion, with Krupskaya citing the success of the Bolsheviks’ support programs for women and children, mass demand for the new legislation, and the medical risks posed by abortion, which, before the widespread introduction of antibiotics in the 1940s, carried an extremely high mortality rate. Support for women and children in the Soviet Union was unprecedentedly comprehensive and guaranteed employment protections for pregnant women, childcare, education, family allowances, protections against paternal abandonment and protections for unmarried pregnant women. I bring up the 1936 abortion ban because although I ultimately disagree with the decision, I think the justifications for the law, in the context of the period, show a true commitment to reproductive justice in the most revolutionary sense of that phrase. Reproductive justice in the Soviet Union was part of the creation of a completely new socialist society.

Recognizing that today we must fight uncompromisingly for unrestricted access to all forms of reproductive healthcare, including and especially abortion, the working-class women’s movement should model our line after the legacy of Bolshevik women, who showed us what reproductive justice looks like through their rigorous social investigation and commitment to uplifting the voices of proletarian and peasant women. Working-class women deserve more than the right to an abortion. We deserve liberation.

In 1990, acclaimed author Toni Morrison shocked her TIME Magazine interviewer by saying that young, Black, single mothers were not, in fact, a social problem; rather, that class society’s demonization of them is the problem. I want to end this article with her words: