Abortion banned in the U.S. = In Capital’s Best Interest??

All over the United States, local and state politicians are moving to make abortion less available.

In South Dakota Republicans are trying to expand the definition of homicide to include language that would protect the fetus. This move would make it legal to kill doctors who perform abortion. The bill is called House Bill 1171, and it is soon going to be up for vote in the State’s House of Representatives (which currently has a Republican majority). These measures, considered ‘personhood’ measures, can be used to force pregnant women to have procedures against their will, and they already have been.

This is just one piece of the larger picture in places like South Dakota, as Mother Jones reminds us:

South Dakota already has some of the most restrictive abortion laws in the country, and one of the lowest abortion rates. Since 1994, there have been no providers in the state. Planned Parenthood flies a doctor in from out-of-state once a w…eek to see patients at a Sioux Falls clinic. Women from the more remote parts of the large, rural state drive up to six hours to reach this lone clinic. And under state law women are then required to receive counseling and wait 24 hours before undergoing the procedure. Before performing an abortion, a South Dakota doctor must offer the woman the opportunity to view a sonogram. And under a law passed in 2005, doctors are required to read a script meant to discourage women from proceeding with the abortion: “The abortion will terminate the life of a whole, separate, unique, living human being.” Until recently, doctors also had to tell a woman seeking an abortion that she had “an existing relationship with that unborn human being” that was protected under the Constitution and state law and that abortion poses a “known medical risk” and “increased risk of suicide ideation and suicide.” In August 2009, a US District Court Judge threw out those portions of the script, finding them “untruthful and misleading.” The state has appealed the decision.

Then take the ‘Protect Life Act’ otherwise known as H.R. 358 which would amend the 2010 health care reform law. This bill would actually allow hospitals to stand by and watch a pregnant woman die rather than perform an abortion that would save her life. The idea of this is so utterly barbaric it blows my mind. I am sure that if such a bill was passed the worst victims of it would be poor women of color, because within this country as we know healthcare is still a luxury not a right, and the more money you have the more options you have in terms of healthcare. (Mind you, this bill was proposed by same man who recently tried to amend the lexicon of rape to include “forcible” (H.R.3) Rep. Joe Pitts (R-PA) Just FYI.)

All over the country, the religious right is gearing up and every single day there are new bills being passed, pushed forward or written that seek to limit women’s access to abortion.

As Marxists, we can’t just analyze this situation in moralistic terms. In Marxist-feminist circles I am in there has been a lot of discussion about whether capital has an interest in banning abortion. Its still unclear. This is a very difficult subject because its incredibly easy to draw functionalist conclusions. What are functionalist conclusions? They are basically conclusions that assume that however things are working right now, must be the way they are because capitalism needs them to be this way. They assume that the parts of the whole are necessary to the whole. We have all been guilty of this from one time to another, for example, those who thought that U.S. capitalism could never incorporate or tolerate homosexuality in any way have been radically proven wrong. As a whole, I would argue that capitalism cannot do away with heterosexism, but it has certainly done a good job of erasing its fascade by allowing a few acceptable, respectable gays to the surface as the symbolic figureheads of LGBTQ folks across the country.

But what about abortion? What is capital’s interest in either women having access to abortion or not having access? Does capital have an interest either way?

I want to sketch out some broad positions on this subject and invite people to weigh in.

First position: This is an ideological fight between the right and centrist social forces within the ruling class. I think this is the most common position within the left (at least that I’ve heard). It assumes that this issue is purely ideological. It assumes that the battle over abortion is at its heart dictated by ideological interests being battled out within the ruling class.

In other words, this view holds that there are numerous factions within the ruling class, some representing more antiquated interests that are staunchly religious and conservative (Bush represented this faction). Other factions in the ruling class are more liberal, because they are fundamentally pragmatic. These factions are more logical and in touch with their capitalist interests, they don’t care if you are black, blue, gay or straight. They care if you are going to make the car, as cheaply as possible, so that they can make the best profit. Of course this faction is also ideological as well, because it exists in the real world, but it is not going to let the Bush types steam roll all over the empire because they think that Jesus appeared to them in a dream one night telling them to bomb Iran.

If we agree that the right wing elements within the government represent a right-wing, proto-fascist, racist section of capitalists, we may very well dismiss the idea that capital has any real interest at the moment in limiting, banning, or making abortion available either way. In other words, if we hold this position, we think that in this capacity the right-wing section is just pushing their own agenda as capitalists versus their interests as the embodied interests of CAPITAL.

The logical conclusion of this belief may posit one of two things (though I may be wrong).

A) That the secular wing of the ruling class will not intervene unless there is popular protest and pressure from below. The idea behind this is that the secular wing of the capitalist class is not really terribly interested in this debate either way but will step in to protect women’s rights under pressure.

B) Sooner or later the right-wing section of the State will eventually marginalize its own self by pushing forward too dramatic of a program, which at some point will get checked by the logical, more secular, ‘purist’ capital wing. Perhaps this more pragmatic Capital wing does not want the religious right loonies to muck up the United State’s image by pushing too far a religious right agenda. Perhaps it has other reasons why it does not want the Christians getting too trigger happy. Point is, at some point ‘logical’ capital will reign in the religious right-capital, the way a bunch of giddy corporate hacks spending tens of thousands on sex-workers and strip-clubs get reigned in after the story breaks in the media and stockholders complain that this is not boding well for business (begrudgingly).

I think this position assumes Capital processes (M-C-M) are fundamentally sex/gender/race blind, and thus, Capital acting in its most truest interests is ruthlessly pragmatic and not really hemmed in by ideological interest in any one religion, race, nationality, gender, etc. It wants profit and profit don’t have no gender, race or religion.

I find this argument mostly ideological and lacking a materialist analysis. Why? Because it assumes that both sides lack a material interest in either increasing the number of people in the labor force or constraining it. One way or another, abortion and birth control have an affect on population growth, and on family structure. To assume that capital is not interested in population growth is to assume that capital is not concerned with labor. I am going to dismiss that position because I think it is contradicted by history.

Second possible position: The fight over reproductive rights may be shaped by ideological disagreements within the ruling class. BUT, the different factions of capital have more than just an ideological interest in the outcome of this fight, since the issue on the table critically affects the make-up of the labor force in the U.S. which has an impact on capital here and abroad.

The above position is basically my own. I think that capital has a material interest in the makeup of the labor pool in the United States. I also think that if we look at history we can see that capital has intervened in birth control and abortion legislation at times when it has needed the labor pool to either contract or expand.

Historical Context

Research shows that the integration of middle-class women into the workforce coupled with stagflation of wages starting in the 1970s forced most US families into what Hochschild (2003) has called the “time bind”. The “care gap” facilitated by neoliberal globalization, has largely been filled in by immigrant women of color. At the same time, by most reports, women make up the majority of the paid workforce in the U.S. for the first time now, or soon will be, since most of the jobs lost in the present recession/depression have been lost in ‘productive’ sectors, and women tend to be concentrated in service and retail sectors which are much less amenable to outsourcing (nursing, teaching, food services, clothing stores, nannies, etc.).

The austerity measures being pushed forward in every direction by states strapped for cash is forcing the working class to shoulder increased burdens that are heavily gendered. Women and families (half of which are now headed by women) bear the brunt of these service cuts. Families in general have always contracted and expanded based on the growth of capitalism. Families are the basic social units that facilitate the reproduction of labor, capital’s only source of value.

As Rayna Rapp correctly notes: What the working class sends out in exchange for basic resources is labor power. Labor power is the only commodity for which the working class controls its means of production. Control over the production of labor power undoubtedly affected women’s experiences historically, as it does today. (53) In the early stages of industrialization, it appears that working-class households literally produced a lot of babies (future labor power) as their strategy for dealing with a market economy. Now workers produce fewer children, but the work of caring for them (social reproduction) is still a major process that goes on in the household. Households are the basic units in which labor power is reproduced and maintained. This takes place in a location radically removed from the workplace. (54)

So here we can see that household makeup is heavily related to the regulation of babies. Linda Gordon, a feminist historian, has documented the way that families have always been linked to labor. Nomadic families – valued small families because they moved a lot. These families had rudimentary forms of birth control. Agrarian families – benefitted materially from the labor of large families and thus they rigorously disapproved of women ending their own pregnancies. Within agrarian communities, ideologies that saw birth control as immoral were very prevalent.

As we know in the 1960’s and 1970’s capital relocated to the third world in search of cheaper labor costs. Women were the cheaper laborer of choice because as Teri Caraway (2007) writes, “Employers were keen to hire women because their subordination to men meant they could be paid lower wages” (15).

Its important to note that it is not just women who are the laborer of choice, but YOUNG women. Sharon Stichter notes that in “export oriented areas where female employment is high, the predominant characteristic of the female labor force is that it is young and single”.

Young and single women are the worker of choice because they don’t have children. This makes them cost less event though the cost of educating them may be higher (in countries where public education exists, this is considered part of wages for capital since public education is often paid out of taxes).

In places where the employment of young, single women is prevalent, there are often large families where social reproductive work is a cooperative practice with older generations of family helping out. This has traditionally been the case for families of color. Black and brown families in the U.S. have for the most part not been built as two parent nuclear families, but as extended networks of people who may not even be blood related. This extended family model allows the pooling of resources which is critical to working-class family survival.

Maria Mies has written extensively in her book Primitive Accumulation on a World Wide Scale, that throughout the colonial process, considerations about whether to bring wives to the new colonies were made by cost-benefit analysis. Furthermore, legislation either banning or allowing intermixing between native women and Colonial men was often based on the need to satiate male labor with sex without having to pay for the reproduction of a whole family, or without bearing the cost of having to import women from the colonial power. Allowing colonial men to have sex with and keep native women as mistresses made it so that mixed children were produced but they had basically no rights to inheritance or property because this was not a legally recognized marriage.

Furthermore, Mies notes that shifts in profitability have a profound influence on women’s place in the division of labor. Mies whole argument is that through the globalizing process of capitalism, women in the third world are being brought into relationship with women in the first world. This occurs through the expansion of the gendered division of labor on an international scale, where women in the first world are being pushed to be breeders and consumers and women of color are being prevented from being breeders and mothers.

What am I saying with all of this? I am not making any kind of definitive judgment about what capital’s interest is in barring abortion. I am just bringing to our attention that concerns about the family, and concerns about gender are not just ideological concerns. They are directly and critically related to the labor needs of capital.

I want to caution against the rallying cry of a new reproductive rights movement here also. I think there is definitely a need for a reproductive rights movement but it will have to be within a larger working-class movement lead by women. Gone are the days where single-issue fights for the reproductive right to have non-reproductive sex can take precedence over the myriad of other issues working-class people and women in particular are facing.

However to fight these attacks, I think its important for Marxist-feminism to advance a theory of the material basis of women’s oppression, one that looks at the all the ways in which what we think are merely personal or ideological issues are actually inflected with class relations. For example, Linda Gordon’s tons of interviews and research amongst pro-life women has found that the movement against birth control and abortion is in many ways a defensive movement by women who are fighting against men shirking responsibility for social reproduction and having sex without consequences in ways that are destructive to communities. We have to look all the different ways that capital relations take the form of personal relations, and ask ourselves who benefits from what.