Clinic Defense and Abolition

The racial disparity evident at Saturday’s demonstration is not something that can be ignored or dismissed, but neither can we accept a superficial identitarian critique that ignores the actual material conditions behind the racial dynamics of the current anti-choice movement. As Marxist feminists, we recognize that both eugenicists and forced birthers are working towards the same goal, control by state and capital over gestational labor for its own ends, to both reduce “undesirables” and quash insurrections, as well as to swell the workforce and the military.

Instead of addressing the structural poverty which compels many Black women who might otherwise choose to have a child to obtain abortions, the anti-abortion movement is instead concerned with stripping bodily autonomy under the facade of “protecting lives in the womb,” condemning Black women to continue to perform reproductive labor in dangerous conditions with little to no material support. It is no accident that evangelical ministries have poured money and resources into organizing in Black and immigrant communities, cynically appropriating the rhetoric of Black liberation and racial justice for its own ends, and erasing the Black radical feminists who have continually fought for the rights of Black women to control their bodies, against the efforts of those who seek to both force and deny parenthood to them. For instance, in 1994, a group of Black women in Chicago, recognizing that there was no space in the current women’s rights movement for women of color, marginalized women, and trans people, formed Women of African Descent for Reproductive Justice, and pioneered the Reproductive Justice movement and published a full-page statement in the Washington Post and Roll Call. Three years later, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective was established to fight for reproductive justice, defined as “ the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” 

It is also glaringly obvious, especially during the recent movement to defund and abolish the police, to abolish the carceral state altogether, that we cannot turn to laws or the police to protect ourselves or grant us liberation. Roe V. Wade was not a benevolent recognition of “a woman’s right to choose,” but an attempt to suppress militant left-wing feminist organizing and re-route this power into a liberal framework of “privacy” and “rights of the individual.” The Democratic establishment, positioning abortion as an individual right to privacy while continuing to actively quash any working-class organizing to materially improve the lives of all people who can become pregnant, and demanding that we work within the confines of regressive laws and the carceral system to defend our rights, are not our allies. On Saturday, we saw tangible evidence of this. The NYPD must be stripped of funding, and those funds be redirected not only to providing free abortions, but also to other essential aspects of reproductive justice:free healthcare, free housing, free childcare, free education. Free abortion on demand, as well as the right to give birth and raise a child in safe, healthy, supportive, and dignified conditions. 

We cannot turn to the law, the police, the ostensibly “pro-choice” Democrats, or the non-profit complex to ensure these rights, but must militantly seize them for ourselves, on the streets, and in front of the clinic. The antis have made it very clear that they have no regard for “civility,” “legality,” or “safe, legal, and rare.” Neither should we.