TRANSCRIPT:

This morning, I had the opportunity to participate in an activity which made a deep impression on me. Last night I received a call from a friend letting me know that there was a chance that Operation Rescue might again be mobilizing to attack abortion clinics in Pittsburgh today.

I was one of several members of the Socialist Workers Party who joined a couple dozen other supporters of women’s right to choose at the clinics this morning to help assure access to them by women seeking abortion rights. The so-called right to lifers did not mobilize, but about a dozen of them surrounded the doorway and spread out to the parking lot and sidewalks around the clinics housed in the Highland Building in East Liberty.

There are two fundamentally opposing points of view clashed, two fundamentally opposing perspectives on women. Our roles and our life came to a head to head. Not as dramatically as they had the week before, where crazed anti-abortionists physically attacked people attempting to get into or help escort people into the clinic at the Fulton Building downtown. Nevertheless, the opposition was deep and had much to teach us.

On the one hand, there were the women entering the clinics for abortion and those there to help them. Most of these women were young. One sported a jacket with the proud insignia, Slippery Rock High School, Class of 1990. This was 1988. A few came alone. But most were accompanied by male and female friends and several by mothers.

Most were white. Several were black. One was Asian. Several came in cars with West Virginia plates. Some were obviously nervous. Some cringed at the anti-abortion attackers and some were strong and even defiant of those who would challenge their right to do what they chose with their bodies. When we warned one mother/daughter from team from West Virginia that they would be met by anti-abortion, the mother responded indignantly, “fuck them” and said the same thing to the Right to Lifer who accosted her daughter, warning them to leave her daughter alone.

When I approached two young black women walking down Highland Avenue to ask if they wanted help getting into the Highland Building, they smiled and said, “we’re not going there, but thank you.” As one just demonstrably, loudly said to her companion, “it’s a woman’s right to choose.” These women and the women and men there to help them that morning came from many different walks of life, perspectives, homes, and ideologies.

But they had in common something very important. And that is the assumption that women do and should have the right to control our own bodies, to make our own decisions about whether and when to bear children. Now, this sounds like a basic human right. And it is. Where without this right to choose when to have children, women would be chained to a life of animal-like subservience to a biological function, chained to the need to drop all other aspirations, all quest for social equality, for jobs, for the right to be part of something bigger than ourselves and our homes, bound to our role to bear and raise children whenever, for whatever reason, an ovum is fertilized in our uterus and pregnancy begins. The fact is that women have not accepted that fate for a long time. Finding ways to rise above biology and to choose to avoid or end unwanted pregnancy. For hundreds of years, women have done that. But in the last few decades, women have taken great strides forward. And through the efforts of massive women’s rights battles, joined in and supported by civil rights and working-class organizations, we have won recognition of many of our rights, including through the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v Wade, our right to safe and legal abortion. This decision was one of the most important victories women have won in decades. Fundamentally strengthening our ability to pursue fights for social equality, jobs, equal pay, childcare, and other challenges to the discrimination against women that have kept us down in our sources of divisions and disunity between us and our brothers. We work beside on the job. Here at the clinic this morning. This one side took this right as ours and used it, and in the case of the abortion rights supporters showed determination to keep it. But the other side was ominous, not to be taken lightly, something to take a strong look at. Halfway through the morning, a woman showed up with the only placard of the day. It read “American Babies and Endangered Species Stop Abortion.”

It seemed to them that, quote, “American babies,” unquote, must have meant white American babies, as they pretty much ignored the black women who went into the building. But the young white women were hit, were hotly pursued by a gang of loudly praying women and women and men, ultimately saying “that’s a baby inside you, don’t kill it” or “Jesus loves you and your baby. Come with me. I’ll take care of you and your baby.”  Or, “that’s not a public building there. That’s a murder place.” They handed out material telling the women that they were about to murder human beings, but giving them a chance to repent. One piece of literature they attempted to give each of the women offered them a choice between maternal admittance into hell, where no human tongue or pen can adequately describe the horror that awaits those who reject the Lord Jesus Christ as their own personal Savior to spend eternity in the lake of fire with the devil and his angels. Or another, quote, “eternal admittance, really to heaven forever at the very moment you accepted and trusted the Lord Jesus Christ as your own personal Savior and Lord, and had confessed this to others.” So that the ranks would not tire of their mission or get discouraged by the rain, they came complete with a preacher and his hymnal who wandered among them, alternately singing from his hymnal, and wagging his finger in their faces as he shared with them some word of God.

These were about a handful of the foot soldiers of the group that calls itself Operation Rescue, which last week carried out an organized attack on abortion clinics around the United States. 1000 of them were arrested, obstructing entrance to clinics and attacking people, trying to get in. Here in Pittsburgh, where 367 were taken to jail, the largest number anywhere, they were the largest number anywhere.

They are part of the movement that carried out invasions of abortion clinics, that has bombed abortion clinics across the United States. They proclaim themselves, quote, “the new civil rights movement,” end quote. Some of their leaders and spokespersons are hierarchy in the Catholic Church who claim to be progressive fighters against social evils. This includes New York’s Cardinal John O’Connor, who in a 1984 speech entitled “Human Lives Human Rights” listed the social evils of today homelessness, mistreatment of the elderly, drug abuse, pornography, sexual exploitation, child abuse, racism, war and abortion.

He said “no one in public life would admit to being a racist or a warmonger. How then, can anyone justify putting babies to death?” The organizers of this movement hold massive prayer meetings in churches where they work their troops up into frenzies, having them step forward to volunteer to be arrested in the cause. The cause, they say, is saving lives.

I believe that among the demonstrators are some who believe this and that this is what they are all about when they come to these actions. And that’s what’s dangerous about them. But nothing could be further from the truth that this movement, is a civil rights movement, a movement in support of life. This is a movement of contempt for women, a movement of hostility and determination to drive back the gains women have made in our quest for dignity, for access to what life has to offer, and for our own lives, for a future for, with control over our bodies and our lives.

A frenzied, fanatical, and violent movement. A friend who was attacked by them last week told me “they’re fascists.” Evelyn Reed, a Marxist feminist whose writings, I hope, I urge you to take a look at in our bookstore, put it this way. In an article she wrote shortly after the Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion, this is what she says, “the hostility to women is concealed behind the slogan of the right to life of the unborn.”

Such sanctimonious concern covers every germination in a woman’s mood, no matter how it was implanted, whether through ignorance or by accident or even by violence on the part of a rapist. Each germination is called the fetus and every fetus is called a person and every person’s life is sacred except the person of the mother. If a mere germination is elevated into a person, the woman herself must be downgraded into a non-person, a mere receptacle or womb for producing persons.

By this criterion, the solicitude for the sacredness of unborn life turns out to be only a cover for reducing a female person, a woman to the animal level of uncontrolled procreation.” Dr. Henry Morgenthau is a veteran abortion rights fighter in Canada who was victimized for helping extend access to abortion to women there.  In 1984, in an interview with the Militant, he was asked, “there are those who argue that the right to life forces are just fringe elements, and the best tactic in dealing with them is to ignore them.

Can you comment on that?” He responded, “They can’t be ignored because if you leave them alone, they will take away your rights. You can’t let them take away such a fundamental right as a woman’s right to abortion. If they take away this right, they might take away other rights as well. You have to stand up to them and you have to counter their lying propaganda. Otherwise people will accept it. And it’s very dangerous. It turns against women and against people who help them. Basically what underlies all these anti-abortion people is contempt for women, a desire to turn the clock back to the time when women were seen in their stereotyped roles as breeders, where women have to procreate year after year, do kitchen work and take care of the children and nothing else.”

“I think if we have accomplished anything in our society,” he continues, “it’s the legitimacy of the women’s right to movement and the acceptance of the fact that women should be able to be equal partners in society. The movement, there is a movement against that, and that movement is reactionary, and we have to fight that. It’s not just a question of fighting for the right to abortion.

If women do not have control over their own reproductive functions, they can never develop their other potential. The thing that holds together these anti-abortion people, usually they are anti-woman. They are anti Jew, 90% of the calls we get that are hostile at the Winnipeg clinic are anti-Semitic. They are anti-Black. They are anti minority. They are anti-union. They are against any progressive forces in society.

And they give themselves this kind of high moral stance of being pro-life. But it doesn’t mean anything. Pro-Life. What does that mean? Pro ovaries, Pro Zygote, Pro Blasticites? Pro embryos? They say that every abortion kills a child. This is not true. A blueprint is not a house. This is lying propaganda. So you have to bring the facts of biology to the people so they understand what’s going on.

They have to understand that a woman who wants an abortion isn’t killing a child. She doesn’t want a few cells to become a child. So either we give in and run or we stand and fight.” Just adding from two 2022: prescient, isn’t it? Going back, 

Operation Rescue and its ilk have thrown a gantlet in the faces of women and of all supporters of human dignity and justice. Dr. Morgenthau is right. We must fight back. And we will. And we do. We fight back because women will not relinquish this right as we fight so hard to attain it. And we now hold it to be ours. All who respect human dignity must take part in the growth in women’s, self-respect, self-confidence and dignity which we win with our right to control our own bodies, to decide when and whether to have children.

Women and men in poll after poll in their overwhelming majority continue to support women’s right to choose abortion. We will not be driven back into the back alleys where millions of us crawled in secrecy and fear for abortion, or to the subservience that accompanies lack of control over when we bear children. Women deserve the support of all who oppose oppression and injustice as we stand up to those who would deny us our right to our lives.

Our choice in the name of justice. This is the side of freedom of justice. This is the tradition of the civil rights movement. Civil rights organizations and unions should be among those fighting beside us. Those behind Operation Rescue and the rest of these attackers hate what happens when women have control over our reproductive lives and the ability to move out of our so-called roles in society. as a whole and challenge the lower pay we get lousy jobs where we were pushed on the excuse that we are primarily job bearers, that we don’t have the right to expect the higher pay men deserve since they are primarily supposed to be something more. As our dignity and self-confidence as women grows so, too, does our ability to stand tall and strong beside the men with whom we work, to look them in the eye as equals, to join with them in fighting for all of our rights.

Also important today, as unions, workers, farmers face the need to organize and to defend ourselves against bosses. We need to be fair to the Operation Rescue types seek to reinforce sexual divisions, which, like racism, are a big part of keeping workers working, people divided against one another. If women are primarily supposed to be child bearers, then we were all, we are only secondarily members of the workforce.

This is a basic excuse that has been used for many years to pay women less and to keep us in the lowest paying jobs. Last Saturday I was talking to an unemployed Black man, and I mentioned I had to leave because I had to go work a six day at my job in a coal mine. He exploded. “What are you doing taking the man’s job?” Why was it wrong for me to have this job? Because it pays well. And I as a woman don’t deserve it. I was his enemy. His tone changed, though, when I reminded him that people said the same thing about black workers in these jobs. Black workers taking them away from white workers.

But he was even more effective when I suggested to him that we need to fight together against the forced overtime I was working, for jobs for him as well. He began to look at me a little differently. I think he might have begun to see something I think is fundamental:  unless we can support all steps forward, all oppressed people take, we will be divided against the very people we must be struggling alongside.

How much stronger we will be when working people defend enthusiastically with our unions. All fights for dignity and justice for all of us. I believe that the fight for reproductive freedom for women is among the most important ones we must join in today. The world has much to gain as women step forward out of biologically determined closets into society as a whole, including into the world of leaders of social struggles.

The way our Nicaraguan and Salvadoran and South African sisters do today, Operation Rescue people hate this image. We love it. It is the future.