Mindspring censorship (Over-limit, but it's really important)

Apsken at aol.com Apsken at aol.com
Sun Feb 7 08:21:43 PST 1999


Alex LoCascio asked: "What do Marxists say about an issue like abortion, which is soooo beyond the relations of production and the class struggle?"

Marxists oppose all forms of human oppression, and therefore unconditionally support unrestricted access to abortion. How can anyone not be aware of this? What kind of caricature regards Marxism as soooooooo narrowly focused as to avert one's eyes from oppression if its connection to "relations of production and class struggle" isn't immediately evident (to a myopic male observer, who perhaps would prefer to see women's access to the labor market limited by the burden of unwanted offspring)? This is not the stuff of deep philosophical discourse, except for non-Marxists of religious inclination, although it was the subject of considerable Marxist agitational literature in the days when abortions were illegal.

During the pre-Roe days, nearly every Marxist party in the United States provided illegal abortion referrals, and sometimes money to pay for them, to women faced with unwanted pregnancies. I was heavily involved with several of these, because my former father-in-law was an abortionist. After abortion became legal, the Daley administration of Chicago, as closely linked to the Catholic church as any, instructed welfare case workers to counsel pregnant recipients to "consider" having abortions, and even sterilization. When the Chicago Women's Liberation Union, challenged by the Black Panther Party to protest, was slow to respond to this, Marxists and New Leftists took up the battle for the other, equally important aspect of free choice for women, eventually taking the organizational form of CARASA (Committee [?] for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse).

That Alex gleefully reacts to a poster who slips in the Catholic line supported by Hitchens and Hentoff is disgraceful. Until such "comrades" have both the capability and willingness to volunteer their bodies to host the unwanted embryos of others (that is, to submit themselves to the oppression they advocate), they have no legitimate standing to argue against women's right to be equally free.

Ken Lawrence



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