On Sun, 7 Feb 1999 11:21:43 EST Apsken at aol.com writes:
>Marxists oppose all forms of human oppression, and therefore
unconditionally
>support unrestricted access to abortion. How can anyone not be aware
>of this?
Wait a minute. So while Marxists have been able to discuss issues like human rights and free speech in Marxist terms rather than bourgeois libertarian ones, they nonetheless take it for granted that abortion is an issue to be defended on bourgeois "rights" grounds?
>What kind of caricature regards Marxism as soooooooo narrowly focused as
to
>avert one's eyes from oppression if its connection to "relations of
>productionand class struggle" isn't immediately evident
Marxists don't offer uncritical support for organizations like Amnesty International. Instead they question a lot of "human rights" talk, especially when it serves as nothing more than a pretext for post-colonial intervention.
My question is pretty damned simple, and I don't understand all the incredulity. I'll ask it again: Has there been anything published that deals with the issue of abortion and reproductive rights from a Marxist perspective, rather than justifying it on the moralistic bourgeois grounds that we are all human beings with certain inalienable "rights."
>(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)?
Gosh Ken, you sure have got me pegged. That's *exactly* what I was thinking. I was really just looking for a pretext to keep women barefoot and in the kitchen/bedroom. Thanks for clarifying that for me.
>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.
Ah, here we arrive at the trademark Ken Lawrence approach to a discussion. After rudely berating someone for not immediately grasping what you seem to regard as some self-evident truth, you lapse into a misty-eyed remembrance of your activist days...
>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.
Um, Ken, I dunno how capable you are of reading, but if you take another gander at that post, you'll see I disagreed with that fellow who suggested that Marxists should defend the rights of the "unborn."
Look, I'm unequivocally pro-choice. But I'd like to arrive at a sort of theoretical justification/grounding for this position, rather than uncritically regurgitating liberal "rights" talk.
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