We should understand that abortion is also a class issue. Rich women have always been able to get
their personal physicians to arrange an abortion for them. It's poor women and middle class women
who don't have that kind of money and don't have an expensive private physician in whose
office you can perform an abortion. Those women are the ones denied an abortion. The majority
of American women, who go to a place like Planned Parenthood which is safe and public and low cost.
And so we're talking about real class divisions here.
The original women's movement of which I am a proud founder of- the second wave feminist
movement- had two prongs to our [movement]: abortion rights. Our abortion rights movement
was the ability to have a free abortion, to have that right like every other Western industrialized
wealthy country has except the United States. And the other is to stop forced sterilizations
because control of women's bodies has also been a weapon to stop undesirable people i.e poor people
or minority people from having children. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their work said,
"You can tell the advancement of a civilization and of a nation by the way they treat women."
And as our country goes backward in time, and as our people die younger and younger,
and as fewer and fewer people have any children because they don't believe in the future,
and as we lose our wars and go backwards, the right wing is trying to assert male supremacy
and white male supremacy and to divide the mass of workers from each other, so that
we don't all together demand a more just and economically possible future together. Abortion
is an element of class control through controlling women's bodies,
and it has always been so. There have always been abortions. It's just that poor women have
had to try to abort themselves or go to unsafe conditions because having an unwanted child,
particularly with someone who is intolerable to live with, is a cruel and unusual punishment.
What happens when you ban abortions is women still try to abort unwanted children.
They just are much more likely to bleed to death and die and much less likely to be healthy and be
able to parent if they want to and be available for a wanted child. And so, this assault on women
is part of a right-wing thrust, because abortion has always been here.
It will be here and the way you treat is a real testimony to the question
of whether you want to inflict a cruel and unusual punishment
on the majority of the people. Women are a slight majority in the United States.
Or, whether you're going to give women and men the honor to decide if they want a child.