Forced Child Bearing Has a Material Cause

 “Without Apology – The Abortion Struggle Now,” by Jenny Brown, 2019

Not quite ‘now.’  This book was written before the repeal of Roe v Wade, but it anticipates that eventuality.  It is a leftist take on fighting for abortion against the failed methods of Planned Parenthood, NARAL, MS Magazine and the Democratic Party’s bourgeois feminists, who have coddled partial anti-abortion types like Cuellar, Carter, Biden and Kaine.  It puts it in the economic and political context of women’s liberation – something that Brown says “the lean-in feminists of the 1%” don’t do. 

Abortion is not just a ‘cultural issue,’ it is a material, economic and class issue.  So-called leftists who consider it a diversion or ‘identity’ politics are fools.  Brown considers abortion, which is a form of contraception, part of the fight for contraception and sex education.  But it also is an aspect of the need for universal health care, subsidized or free day care, paid parental leave, higher women’s wages and shorter hours at work – all working-class matters and something the U.S. has no laws on.  Or as a Marxist might say, key to 'social reproduction.'

SLOGANS

To Brown, the key to fight for abortion is not the ‘choice’ attitude but the ‘emancipation of women’ attitude. Brown calls for ‘reproductive justice’ as an appropriate slogan.  She castigates the weak legality of hanging abortion on ‘privacy’ or the dodge of ‘choice.’  The Republican Party has decided on forced child bearing.  The Democrats allowed abortion to be whittled away for 49 years, and still consider means-testing by a hundred restrictions reasonable.  The Dems thought lawyers, experts, consultants and centrism would win against the whittling away of abortion rights. Brown knows only the revival of a strong women’s movement will do the trick.  And at this point it will have to be one that understands capitalism.

Brown lists some of the anti-abortion restrictions prior to the repeal of Roe v Wade – lack of Medicaid coverage due to Carter’s Hyde Amendment; waiting periods and required ultrasounds; parental consent; few clinics; anti-abortion tracts read by doctors; fake pregnancy centers; abortion pills limited by the FDA and price; gag rules; tightening time limits; attacks on morning-after pills and IUDs; requirements that a doctor perform the abortion; that a hospital must be on call; harassment and physical threats against patients, doctors and clinics.  4 doctors have been killed by anti-abortion fascists, more injured and several clinics bombed or burnt.

BIRTH RATE

The key, according to Brown, is that a declining birth rate is not desired by the capitalist class.  This was evident after birth rates started to drop in the 1970s. The capitalist economy needs more workers, soldiers and consumers to consistently grow GDP.  So-called leftists who ignore the multiple evidence for this have left materialism behind.  The nationalist dodge about abortion ‘genocide’ or ‘limiting the black population’ is also part of this.  Black women have been in the forefront of pro-abortion struggle, as the working class, including its poorest strata, is most impacted by forced child bearing. 

The U.S. has decided on a punitive and CHEAP method to get more children, forcing childbirth while providing little help to families.  Free reproductive and child care labor by women and families is their goal.  As Marx pointed out long ago, child bearing and nurturing are part of the essential social reproduction of the working class, and this burden falls mostly on women although men are acutely aware of this issue too.  On the other hand, most social-democratic capitalist states try to encourage population growth by treating women, children and families with a carrot instead of a stick. Across the border in Canada, abortion is free at any stage, then families are supported in various ways. Canada attempts to replace any population deficit by immigration.  However in the U.S. anti-immigrant hysteria is normal. We have the stick instead.  

Brown recounts how a left-wing mass movement and a women’s underground brought Roe v Wade into being, not politicians or the Supreme Court.  She shows how Ireland voted out the Catholic laws against abortion in 2018 by a 2-1 margin due to a mass movement – similar to what just happened in Kansas. She highlights the various tactics of civil disobedience, lawsuits, electoral campaigns, personal contact and practical mutual aid that work.  She has detailed descriptions on what an abortion is and how to perform an abortion, like vacuum aspiration and pill distribution.  She highlights the fight against shaming, promotes telling personal abortion stories and focuses on the hidden but widespread reality of abortion across the world, with 30% in the U.S. having an abortion, the majority working-class.  As part of her history, she points out that abortion was even legal in the U.S. until 1873.  There's some 'originalism'!

WOMEN’S EQUALITY AND EMANCIPATION

Brown is weak on understanding that men also don’t want to be saddled with unwanted children as husbands, boyfriends or one-night stands.  This was key in the Irish vote.  Brown also does not mention white nationalist or evangelical Christian ‘replacement theory’ that wants more ‘white’ babies.  Both of these versions of the American Taliban oppose abortion due to their idea that women are just baby-machines to bolster the lighter skinned among us.  The ‘coat-hanger’ on the cover even she criticizes, as it makes out that coat-hangers are a way to perform an abortion.  It is not.  She does not discuss deeply how limiting or ending abortion also has a damaging effect on women for miscarriages and women’s health.  That is now becoming quite evident.

At first Brown soft-peddles the ‘material’ side of this question, reprising the 1970s ‘sisterhood’ angle and the 1969 Redstockings radical feminist group.  At the end she also cites the USSR, the former workers’ states, Vietnam and China in their attempt to make women equal to men across the board, including child issues.  She notes that as the Chinese economy gets more capitalist, the 1-child policy became a 2-child policy and it’s now up to 3 as their birth rate drops.  The same thing happened in Poland after 1989, which presently outlaws abortion except for rape and incest due to the influence of the Catholic Church.  This demographic pattern happened in some other former workers’ states like Hungary. The workers’ states were not based on endless and sometimes pointless economic growth at all costs, so their attitude towards abortion – except Romania – was not so driven by material factors.’

On the other hand, dropping birth rates in somewhat homogenous countries like Japan, south Korea, Russia, Netherlands and Denmark are worrying capitalists.  This demographic decline is worldwide, except for countries like Nigeria and Pakistan, due to what she calls ‘urbanization.’ 

This is an excellent abortion primer, or perhaps all you need. 

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “State Department Feminism,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism,” “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Really, Rape, Still?” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Ireland – What’s Up?”  “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Freedom Socialist,” “The Queen’s Gambit,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women,” “Stitched Up,” “Shopping World,” “Mistaken Identity,” “The Unwomanly Face of War,” “Reflections on the Olympics 2012,” “Women in Soviet Art,” 'Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai."  

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

August 9, 2022