A battle still to be won

It is estimated that, at the present rate, it will take 40 general elections before women are equally represented in Parliament. Perhaps it was this, along with statistics showing women's pay falling far behind that of men, which prompted Harriet Harman to announce a new equality law to end discrimination in June. The stark inequality between women and men in wages, work and conditions has been highlighted, not eradicated, by the "quiet revolution" which now sees more than 12 million women in the workforce. Meanwhile, sexual freedom is all too often misrepresented by lap-dancing clubs or scenes of binge drinking women than it is by confident, strong and independent women. It wasn't meant to be like this. The women's movement, which took off 40 years ago, promised a new world for women. Women's biology would no longer be their destiny and women fought for the right to be equal at work, at home and in society. Women's liberation began in the US against a background of mass movements for black civil rights and later black power, against the Vietnam war and the student movement. The term "women's liberation" was consciously adopted in identification with the national liberation movements against colonialism taking place around the world.

So, from the start, the women's movement identified with radical change. Many of the students who came from the northern states to campaign for black equality in Mississippi and elsewhere in the south were women. They endured often very dangerous conditions and were part of a brave and idealistic generation. The feminist academic Lise Vogel was probably typical. She came from a middle-class Jewish communist family. Her parents' worries when she was growing up were "money and McCarthyism." This is how she describes her experiences in the south in the early 1960s. "I got far more out of being in Mississippi than I ever was able to give back. In the end, I knew that I had participated in history, that what we did made a difference and that I had been tried and not found wanting." Yet Vogel and many women like her had become disillusioned with the movements by the late 1960's because they felt that women were sidelined or ignored and that issues of what came to be called women's oppression were either not recognised or were ridiculed. At one conference in 1967, where women tried to raise issues of women's liberation, the future feminist writer Shulamith Firestone was told by one man: "Move on, little girl, we have more important issues to talk about here than women's liberation." A popular slogan of the US movement against the draft to Vietnam was "girls say Yes to guys who say No."

Little wonder that a movement for women's liberation emerged and, by 1968, was holding meetings, publishing papers, organising activities all aimed at full equality for women and prepared to adopt militant tactics to get it. The movement spread to Britain where the first conference was held in Oxford in 1970. Here, the movement developed in a different way. It was more influenced by the left and the trade unions and took up strikes from its inception. The fight for equal pay by the Ford women machinists in 1969 and the night cleaners campaign led by May Hobbs were the two best known. In Britain, the 1960s and early '70s also saw major legislative changes which liberalised society and benefited women. There were laws on abortion, divorce, gays, equal pay and sex discrimination. More women were going out to work, a layer of young women was going into higher education and women were more in control of their bodies with major changes in contraception. Attitudes also changed. It became more acceptable for married women to work, for children to be born outside marriage and for couples to dispense with marriage altogether. Heterosexuality began to be challenged as the norm. The women's movement highlighted and campaigned around diverse issues including abortion, equal pay, domestic violence, rape and images of women. But the advances made by the left and working people in those years didn't last.

The second half of the 1970s saw a series of defeats and the decade ended with the historic election of a woman prime minister, but one committed to policies which would attack working people in general and working-class women particularly hard. The late '70s also saw the splintering and often disintegration of the women's movement, most spectacularly in Italy but also in Britain where the 1978 conference broke up in disarray. Many of the changes in women's lives which began in the '60s have turned out to be permanent. Women are present in the workforce in unprecedented numbers and there is much greater openness about sexuality and relationships. But women at work are also differentiated by class, with an important and successful layer of women employers, managers and higher professionals who have benefited from a limited opening in a man's world, but who have shown little sisterhood with their working-class counterparts. Working mothers' conditions are under attack as women are expected to compete with men in a workforce characterised by flexibility, long hours and low wages. Alan Sugar once asked a woman on the Apprentice about her plans for having children and the US feminist, now Democratic Party senator, Dianne Feinstein supported the overturning of a law reinstating women after maternity leave on the grounds that "we want to be treated equally … now we have to put our money where our mouth is."

At the same time, a number of gains are under attack, with attempts to reduce the abortion time limit, a shamefully low level of conviction for rape, the acceptance of lap-dancing clubs. Women's liberation has been turned on its head, so that anything goes as long as women are prepared to accept some of the worst conditions. The ideology of women's equality has been traduced by right-wing politicians such as Sarkozy or Berlusconi who accept women cabinet ministers so long as they conform to sexual stereotypes. Benefit cuts are sold by the new Labour government in the name of doing something for women and families. The bombing of Afghanistan is justified in the name of liberating oppressed Muslim women. Women's liberation led to a challenging of ideas and assumptions, which changed much about society. Yet, the limits of liberation are clear today. Women's liberation did not sufficiently confront the structures of oppression and, especially, the roots of women's oppression that lie in class society. So, feminism became an ideology that spoke to and for the women who could make it in a man's world. Meanwhile, millions of working women around the world have seen their lives worsen in the past two decades as they try to juggle increasingly stressful work with the demands of children, home and family.

This basic contradiction has never been resolved and cannot be until the wealth of society is used not for wars, Trident or luxury lifestyles of the super-rich but for creating resources which allow decent child care and an end to the double burden which women face. That means challenging the way that our society is organised and the class basis on which it is organised, not just arguing for more women in certain areas, welcome though that is. Today, women are a key part of the unions and are prominent in movements such as the anti-war movement. They play much greater roles in public life and have achieved many things that previous generations would have thought impossible. But, if we want real equality, then this time around we have to see socialism as central to women's liberation. And the division won't just be about gender but about class.

Spain's crisis of faith

Spain's controversial abortion law has been passed by the lower house of parliament and is now making its way through the Senate. Beyond parliament, however, a bitter conflict on the "ley del aborto" has torn open old wounds between the Catholic church and the ruling socialist party. Under the law's provisions, abortions would be available on demand for women of 16 and over up to the 14th week of pregnancy - and up to 22 weeks if there was a risk to the mother's health or if the foetus was deformed. Women could also undergo the procedure after 22 weeks if the foetus had a serious or incurable illness. However what has most angered the Catholic community - and even some supporters of the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) government - is a provision allowing girls of 16 to have an abortion without their parents' consent or knowledge. Opinion polls have shown that 56 per cent of socialists who support the liberal PSOE government are very unhappy at this clause, against 64 per cent opposition across Spain as a whole. The protests against the new abortion law have been led by Hazte Oir, a coalition of Catholic organisations. In October over a million people gathered in the Plaza de Independencia in Madrid to voice their opposition.

This highly motivated Catholic movement has been joined by the centre-right Partido Popular, which has pledged to ask the Constitutional Court to overturn the abortion legislation. PSOE policies have set Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on a collision course with the Catholic church in Spain on numerous fronts, including divorce, gay rights and education. And the battle over the proposed abortion laws has become increasingly bitter since the church banned a leading PSOE member from taking communion. Staunch Catholic Jose Bono is president of the Spanish Congress and voted for the legislation. He argued in an interview that he supported the law because he understood it would reduce abortions and that, according to former pope John Paul II's guidance on the issue, "politicians can vote for laws governing abortion if they believe that they are reducing the evil it causes." But in a letter to daily newspaper El Mundo the Spanish Episcopal Conference stated that politicians were obliged to vote against any law which did not adequately protect the inviolable right to life of those who are yet to be born. This ongoing struggle has highlighted the suspicion with which many Spaniards view the Catholic church.

It was closely associated with the dictatorship of Franco, leading to deep distrust among generations of Spanish leftwingers. Students of the Spanish civil war well remember the role played by the Catholic caucus in the US to prevent president Franklin D Roosevelt from supporting the democratically elected government in Madrid. Catholic activists and writers also rubbished the press reports by Jay Allen on the nationalists' slaughter in Badajoz and George Steer's accounts of the destruction of Guernica, arguing they were communist inventions. Following the church's decision to bar Bono from receiving communion PSOE vice-secretary general Jose Blanco waded into the argument. Blanco accused the church of "hypocrisy," pointing out that it had taken no action against members of the former Partido Popular government of Jose Maria Aznar which introduced the present abortion law - "members of the government of the right under whom in our country there have been over 500,000 abortions."

And so the fight over the right to life of the unborn child has fired up old animosities, with socialists believing that the church favours its allies on the right above those on the left - even devout Catholics such as Bono. High-profile socialist Luis Solana, who was instrumental in establishing democracy after Franco, noted that socialists who are also practising Catholics have experienced "many bitter times." As far as the church is concerned the classic socialist is an agnostic, he said, hence those who follow both the Catholic and socialist creeds such as Bono are rejected by the hierarchy and should expect no charity. Back in October a local communist leader of the United Left (IU) Pedro Moreno Brenes explained his own relationship with Catholicism. Brenes, a lecturer in law at Malaga University and a Catholic, practises his faith openly alongside the political beliefs that he has held since adolescence. He said that his religion coexists with his political leanings and said that he felt no conflict whether he was invited to a religious or civil event, and was pleased to accept all invitations should they be from Muslim or Jewish communities or atheists. Asked about the antagonism between the IU and organised Catholicism, Brenes touched on another reason for the church's hostility towards the left. "The party, for example, proposes that there shouldn't be any tax privileges for religious entities. It is compatible in the respect of - and the separation of - public and religious life."

Brenes remained in no doubt that the Christian message of "love one another" is much the same as the communist belief in fraternity and equality. But while it may be compatible to be a Christian as well as a socialist or communist in Spain - where Catholicism is the only real Christian option - it seems that the Catholic church hierarchy views things very differently.

Why women need abortion rights

Thirty-seven years years after the U.S. Supreme Court's Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, the myriad attacks on its availability has limited access to such an extent that women across the U.S. are turning to so-called do-it-yourself abortions. No governmental agency or private institution tracks the incidence of self-induced abortions. So it's left to anecdotal reports from health care providers, along with a few recent studies, to hint at what has become a dangerous pattern. "Our local hospital tells me they see 12 to 20 patients per year, who have already self-induced or had illegal abortions," said an administrator of a women's health clinic in the South. "Some make it, some don't. They are underage or poor women mostly, and a few daughters of pro-life families." In a 2006 interview with University of California-Davis professor Carole Joffe, the administrator described women risking cardiac arrest by swallowing whole bottles of quinine pills along with castor oil, and women who douche with a variety of dangerous chemical products in an attempt to terminate pregnancies. The administrator said that other abortion providers around the country also noticed a perceptible rise in the number of patients they were treating for complications from illegal abortions.

Outside the South, in cities like Boston and San Francisco, medical researchers are working to compile studies, conducted mostly among Latina women, to examine the prevalence and methods of self-induced abortions. A study by Planned Parenthood released earlier this year documented the methods used to induce abortion by immigrant women from the Dominican Republic, including "mixing malted beverages with aspirin, salt or nutmeg; throwing themselves down stairs or having people punch them in the stomach." These studies have focused primarily on Latina and immigrant women who, in addition to the obstacles of cost and fear of harassment by anti-abortion protesters, may face additional burdens of anti-abortion conservatism and mistrust of medical treatment in their communities--as well as the fear that going to a clinic or hospital might lead to questions about their immigration status. "In my Washington Heights clinic in northern Manhattan, I see at least one patient every week who has tried to end a pregnancy on her own," writes Anne Davis in a letter to the New York Times. "When lack of information, poverty or stigma overwhelm pregnant women, some take matters into their own hands."

With lawmakers debating provisions in health care legislation that would lead to insurance companies dropping elective abortion procedures from their coverage, it's easy to imagine that more and more women will feel it necessary to attempt to induce abortions on their own. At the same time, polls show that support for reproductive rights is reaching critically low levels. Gallup reported in May 2009 that for the first time, people self-identifying as pro-choice are a minority in the U.S.--its numbers show that only 42 percent of women consider themselves pro-choice, and a majority of respondents, whether they consider themselves pro-life or pro-choice, think that abortion should be legal, but only in certain circumstances. What's more, in the same week that Rep. Bart Stupak proposed his amendment to ban insurance plans that cover abortions from the new insurance exchange in the House health care legislation, poll figures from CNN/Opinion Research Corporation found a slim majority (51 percent) of people agree that women should have to pay the full cost of abortion procedures out of pocket legal attacks and ideological regression on the subject of reproductive freedom, it's worth stepping back to consider the reasons why abortion is a fundamental right for women. Women in the U.S. live in the intersection of a contradiction: a set of rigid, puritanical social and sexual mores functioning alongside a pervasive culture of sexism that objectifies and commodifies women's bodies and sexuality.

The mixed messages arrive early and carry significant consequences. For example, while 12- and 13-year-old girls regularly appear in hyper-sexualized advertising, particularly in fashion industry ads, federal and state governments continue to sponsor abstinence-only programs in schools. The Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SEICUS) reported, "Between 1996 and federal fiscal year 2008, Congress funneled over $1.5 billion (through both federal and state matching funds) to abstinence-only-until-marriage programs." Such programs bar discussion of contraception or safe sex in favor of teaching that the only safe and acceptable sexual pairing is a heterosexual, married couple. SEICUS describes how "many abstinence-only-until-marriage programs rely on fear, shame and guilt to try to control young people's sexual behavior. These programs include negative messages about sexuality, distort information about condoms and STDs, and promote biases based on gender, sexual orientation, marriage, family structure and pregnancy options. "This approach also tends to treat all premarital sex as immoral, chosen behaviors, adding to the stigmatization and alienation of teens who have been victims of sexual assault and molestation. Though federal funds have subsidized abstinence-only-until-marriage programs since 1981, no data proves that such methods deter teens from having sex.

When researchers at the British Medical Journal examined the results of abstinence-only programs from 13 studies covering more than 16,000 people, they found rates of behaviors weren't quantitatively different in terms of "the rate of vaginal sex, number of sexual partners and condom use." And they found that "the rates of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among participants in abstinence-only-until-marriage programs were unaffected." In 2006, the Guttmacher Institute reported that 13 percent of teens aged 15 and under acknowledge having had sexual intercourse, as do seven out of 10 19-year-olds nationwide. To be sure, however, not all teens are in a rush to have to sex. The Kaiser Family Foundation found in 2005 that 24 percent of teens aged 15 to 17 said they had "done something sexual they didn't really want to do." Women and girls confront a mass media that constantly tells them their value is determined by their attractiveness and treats them as sexual objects. Yet horrible double standards that shame women for having sex--even non-consensual sex--still exert significant influence, as evidenced by a Chicago Tribune syndicated column by Amy Dickinson published in November.

Responding to young woman writing from Virginia who described being coerced into sex during a frat party, Dickinson wrote: "I hope your letter will be posted on college bulletin boards everywhere...You were a victim of your own awful judgment...Getting drunk at a frat house is a hazardous choice for anyone to make because of the risk (some might say a likelihood) that you will engage in unwise or unwanted sexual contact. In a similar way, women facing unintended pregnancies are offered little to no support. There are few programs to help women with the medical expenses of pregnancy and childbirth, let alone to subsidize child care, food, housing or any of the other expenses that present daunting challenges for working and poor mothers. The situation isn't helped by the fact that the recent recession led to reduced jobs, hours and benefits for working women as well as budget cuts in state programs for the poor."

Carol Joffe relates a story on her blog, RH Reality Check, that she characterizes as a dismal sign of the situation for women in the current economic crisis - the story of Starla Darling, a pregnant Ohio woman, who was informed she would soon lose her job and her health insurance. She rushed to a hospital, requested a medication to induce labor, and had an emergency Caesarean section, two days before her health insurance expired. Not only was Darling upset about having a C-section birth--"I was forced into something I did not want to do"--her insurance company refused to pay for the birth. Now this unemployed woman, two months behind on her rent, is facing medical bills of more than $17,000.

A century of struggle for women's rights

At its very beginning, in the early 20th century, International Women’s Day – the 8th of March - was a day of struggle for working women. Nowadays it has largely been hijacked by the capitalist establishment as a ceremonial and sometimes highly commercial affair. Much has happened over time, providing welcome proof that women’s oppression can be fought and pushed back, but despite this, the oppression rooted in society continues. Indeed, in the past years many earlier conquests for women have been lost as a result of the crisis of capitalism. “We did it!” exclaimed an editorial in The Economist magazine on 2 January 2010. In some way this business journal wants to celebrate that in 2010 women will account for half the labour force in the U.S. This does mark a step forward, but since when did “we” include The Economist? The rising proportion of women in the workforce is neither the result of increased welfare spending or greater male responsibility for household work. The US has the lowest level of investment in childcare and parental leave in the western world, and the state has not even signed the UN Declaration on Women’s Rights. It is rather that the economic crisis has predominantly knocked out jobs in industries such as motor vehicles, so that male unemployment has risen to 11.2 percent while the female rate is 8.6 percent.

It is true that most of the new jobs in recent years have gone to women. In Europe, these account for six million of a total of eight million new jobs since the year 2000. But this reflects a form of increased exploitation of the working class as a whole. Most of these are insecure, part-time, temporary jobs involving unsocial working hours etc. that typically mean lower hourly rates of pay but more stress and illness. Capitalism has always made use of and had an interest in preserving sex discrimination, with low wages for women meaning more profits. The last thing women’s rights activists around the world can do for the 2010 International Women’s Day is take a rest. The situation is very serious and the events of the last year call for an answer to the question: which way forward for women’s struggle? For the first time ever there are now over 1 billion people suffering malnutrition in the world, one in six of the human race. Women have for a long time accounted for 70 percent of the world’s poor. The Asia-Pacific region has most of the world’s hungry; 642 million people suffer from chronic malnutrition.

Young women - millions of workers in the informal and export-related sectors - are the first to lose jobs. Seven out of ten workers sacked in the in the Philippines are women. The sums sent home by migrant workers – remittances – have fallen sharply and migration has been reduced. Women working in 'domestic service' abroad are returning home. The World Bank estimates that the flow of remittances to developing countries fell by 7.3 percent in 2009. Loan facilities from “micro-financing” and other projects, that were supposed to help women out of poverty by doing home-working, have decreased. When the crisis hits parents’ finances it is first and foremost girls who are taken from school and thrown into housework, domestic work or factories. Over 100 million girls are already working as child labourers worldwide (ILO). Infant mortality rates are increasing, and this affects girls more than boys. An estimated 50,000 more African infants died last year due to the crisis.

More women and girls are trafficked and forced into the sex trade. This was the tragic outcome for many women who lost their jobs during the Asian crisis of 1997. The first “industry” to bounce back was the sex industry. In Jakarta, two to four times more women became sex-workers in the year after the crisis. Capitalism knows no boundaries when it comes to inventing new markets for its business. Everything is turned into “commodities”, including bodies and emotions. A form of sex trafficking is the trade in brides. In some countries the drastic consequences of women’s oppression mean that part of the female population has gone “missing” due to gender selective abortions. This is the case with the so-called one-child policy in China, where 118 boys are born to every 100 girls. 50,000 women from poorer provinces or countries are sold for marriage each year in China; more than 10,000 women are sold by families living in dire poverty in Vietnam for marriage or prostitution in China .

Whatever there is a shortage of, becomes a luxury under capitalism. Paradoxically, the phenomenon of polygamy is recurring among rich men. It happens that businessmen from Hong Kong, with constant trips to Guangdong take a second wife among that province’s poor migrant workers.Women also suffer most from another major crisis which has developed as a direct result of capitalism – the climate crisis. Atmospheric warming as a result of 150 years of industrialisation, carbon emissions and pollution, will be an important theme for this year’s 8 March demonstrations worldwide. According to the Women’s Environment and Development Organisation, women and children run a fourteen times greater risk of dying from natural disasters than men. In the Asian tsunami of 2004, 70 to 80 percent of those who perished were women. After events like earthquakes and hurricanes, with few resources, poor women have less chance of getting aid or compensation and are at greater risk of subsequent infections when caring for the elderly and children.

Already global warming is causing a significant additional burden on women in the neo-colonial countries in particular. It is they who must walk farther and farther in search of drinking water. It is they who do much of the farm work which becomes more and more onerous in the areas affected by drought or floods. On International Women’s Day last year, the militant women of the farm workers’ network 'Via Campesina' expressed their anger against imperialism’s deforestation and the threat to Brazil’s biodiversity. In Brasilia, hundreds of women occupied the Department of Agriculture. In Rio Grande do Sul, 700 women occupied land belonging to the paper company, Votorantim Cellulose, and eucalyptus plantations were sabotaged. In other places, mining companies, sugar cane plantations, the paper multinational, Stora Enso, and large estates were occupied. In Espirito Santo thousands of women took over the harbour in Portocel and sabotaged a large amount of pulp exports. Deforestation is responsible for 20 percent of the increase in greenhouse gas emissions globally. The forests must be given protection immediately. But the failure of world leaders at the UN summit in Copenhagen means there is not even a binding agreement on measures to stop climate change.

For decades, the “solution” to oppression and poverty routinely served up by the world’s politicians and economists has been more development of market-geared economies - more capitalism! If only the poor countries open their economies up to international capital, then in time they will reach the same living standards as in the West – such is the mantra of neo-liberalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. With its crises, capitalism has condemned itself as a system. Global financial agencies such as the IMF and the World Bank, with a decisive role within the international capitalist system, have generally continued to demand deregulation and spending cuts in healthcare and education as conditions for providing loans to countries hit by the crisis. As if it was not deregulation that increased the exposure of these countries to the international financial crisis in the first place.

It is estimated that foreign investment in developing countries fell by a third last year. Similarly, continual reliance on market-based “solutions”, such as the trade in carbon emission rights has only resulted in greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise. New attacks on already down-sized welfare systems mean that the crisis is hitting ordinary people even harder. In Ukraine, the IMF suspended its last loan payment in protest against the country’s parliament deciding to raise the minimum wage by 25 per cent. In most countries of course “the minimum wage” means women’s wages. In Latvia, the government has obeyed the dictates of the IMF and foreign creditors, with the result that the government sector wage bill has fallen by 40 percent, and half of the country’s hospitals have been closed.

The biggest question for women in many parts of the world in the immediate future will be the struggle against truly historic cuts in welfare that governments are planning. Where they exist, publicly funded health care, elderly care, childcare, pensions, parental and sickness insurance, student grants etc., have all been very important reforms that have especially benefited working class women. Unpaid domestic work has partially been taken over by society, enabling women to take employment and become less economically dependent on men. But never before have the world’s politicians been forced to adopt such massive rescue packages as last year, to save the capitalist financial system from collapse. The trillions of dollars in aid to the banks must eventually be paid back and, as long as capitalism remains, we can be sure the directors who caused the crisis will not be the ones to pay. Instead, the burden of payment will be placed on the shoulders of women, workers, the elderly, the young and the sick.

Any idea that capitalism as it develops leads to sexual equality is easily disproved by looking at the countries with 150-200 years of capitalist development. In Sweden, which ranks as one of the most equal countries and is considered to have a relatively well developed welfare sector (although this has been scaled back sharply over a period of more than two decades), women in full-time work do not earn more than 83 percent of men’s wages. The labour market is extremely gender-segregated with women mostly in the public sector, where wage growth has been slowest. Sweden has the highest proportion of notified rapes per 100,000 inhabitants in Europe, and, together with Britain, tops the league for the lowest proportion of reported rapes that are prosecuted (only 13 per cent). These are clear examples of how apparently 'progressive' capitalist state perpetuates women’s subordination.

The oppression of women has its origin in class society which has existed for well over 5,000 years. There was a long drawn-out change from primitive communism under which land, tools, homes, were held in common by everyone to private ownership. The 'monogamous' family developed as a surplus developed in society that could be appropriated. Personal wealth, however meagre at first, needed to be protected from 'outsiders'. The family became an institution for men to control property and exercise power in society. The word “family” comes from the Latin “familia”, and means “the whole number of slaves belonging to one master.” In China, under the emperors, for example, the binding of women’s feet was a common practise among the families of the privileged. As the proverb explained, this was “not to make them as beautiful as a curved bow, but to restrain women when they leave the home.”

Capitalism is also a class society that has developed and continually adapted the oppression of women to suit its needs and the demands of modern production. In today’s family, male dominance is still manifested. Women account for the vast majority of unpaid housework. This covers emotional labour - the care of children, the old, partners – and involves arduous tasks such as cooking, cleaning, laundry. The four walls of the home are often an arena for men’s violence against women. Amnesty International has estimated that still at least one in three women worldwide are beaten, forced into sex, or exposed to abuse during their lifetime.
The dominance of the male in the home has long been used as a mechanism for instilling in women and children the idea of submission to authority. It has been challenged and changes have taken place in many countries but it still runs through much of society. Girls and boys have generally been brought up differently because of social pressure and surroundings. This even became a business idea of modern capitalism when the department store was born in the 19th century, and the bourgeois ideal of womanhood was created, with women made into objects. Fashion, beauty and advertising are mega industries that have a huge economic stake in perpetuating the idea that you are not a “real” woman without spending a considerable amount of time and money on “improving” your looks.

The male sex is still considered by most societies to be superior to the female, regardless of what anti-discrimination laws exist. A boy learns early in life to be proud of his gender, while a girl is supposed to hold herself back. A guy who is interested in typically “girly” things risks being called gay. Homosexuals understand early on that their sexual orientation can give them a lower status in society and make them vulnerable to attack. Around the world, words related to women and sex without love are used as swear words. Sexual oppression haunts women in the world throughout their life and one of the most important requirements for women’s struggle wherever it takes place is “the right of women to their own bodies.” Rapists are driven by the idea that they are entitled to take a woman under their control. Although most men distance themselves from violent abuse, sexual harassment is something most women have experienced. When the proportion of women in the workplace falls , and when the pace of work increases, so trade unions report that sexual harassment also rises.

A woman’s right to her own body also covers the right to abortion. World-wide, 70,000 women die every year as a result of unsafe abortions. 40 percent of the world’s women live in countries where abortion rights are severely restricted. Even where abortion is legal, unsafe “backstreet” abortions continue to be carried out, for example in India, because, for many women, professional healthcare is too expensive. Free access to contraceptives and sanitary supplies are also important demands. In Uganda, many girls are forced to leave school when they reach the age of 13, because they cannot afford to buy menstrual products. Women are often held back psychologically not only by feelings such as fear of being raped, a sense of shame over their body, physical suffering during pregnancy and labour etc.. In rich and poor countries alike, they are often denied real sexual pleasure, which has an adverse effect on their health. (Genital mutilation through female circumcision, carried out in Europe, as well as Africa and elsewhere, is only the most gruesome illustration of this form of discrimination.)

The decision to hold a yearly International Women’s Day in order to strengthen the fight for all women to get the right to vote was taken in 1910. The call came from the Women’s Conference of the Socialist 2nd International in Copenhagen that year, with 170 participants from 17 countries. The initiative came from Clara Zetkin who was active in the German and international labour movement. She had already for many years been the chief editor of the Socialist Women’s Association’s journal, Die Gleichheit (Equality), with a circulation of 112,000. She tirelessly campaigned for women to organise themselves. For male party colleagues she explained, “only in conjunction with the proletarian woman will socialism be victorious”. Zetkin said that while socialists supported the bourgeois women’s demands for justice, working women must organise themselves in their own organisations along class lines. This proved to be completely right. To win women’s suffrage (the right to vote) required working class methods of struggle.

International Women’s Day was originally known as “Working Women’s Day”, and was celebrated on a different date each year in the early spring. It was not until 1921 that the Communist International, once again on Zetkin’s initiative, decided the date should be 8 March each year. This was also to pay due notice to the fact that the 1917 Russian Revolution had broken out on International Women’s Day – 8 March (but 23 February according to the old Russian calendar). On that day, 90,000 women textile workers left the factories in a spontaneous strike for bread and peace, which then grew in scale and did not subside until the Czar was overthrown. The revolution continued and in the workers’ and peasants’ seizure of power in October 1917 gave a fantastic boost to workers and women around the world. Revolutionary Russia was the first country in the world to give men and women equal rights within the family, women’s suffrage, the right to abortion, the right to civil (non-religious) marriage and divorce, the prohibition of sexual harassment, rights for LGBT people, and eight weeks maternity leave. The revolution introduced municipal childcare, laundries and public canteens even if the resources to maintain them were always too small.

The main lesson from the century that has passed since the first International Women’s Day is that the pace of change is far too slow. We cannot afford to wait another 100 years. How many millions of women will be raped, will starve, or die from natural or climate-related disasters and wars in the meantime? The most important lesson from the past year is that we cannot have any confidence in an economic system that goes into crisis at regular intervals, and where many of the gains won through struggle are constantly being wiped out. We are not impressed that more women become directors or 'bigwigs', if this system, based on huge class differences and a majority living in poverty, continues. Hence the need for a socialist programme for women’s struggle, pointing in a revolutionary direction, for the overthrow of capitalism. In a democratic socialist society where ownership and control over the economy and state power is in the hands of the workers, the poor masses and the women, there would be ample resources to invest in effective measures that would transform women's lives. Alternative economic and social relations in a socialist society would lay the basis for eradicating sexism and rendering the idea of separate gender roles out-dated as women's oppression itself was brought to an end.

A revolution can only succeed if women are at the forefront. Last year, 2009, it was the women of Iran who were perhaps the most courageous fighters internationally. They have continued to be a large part of the mass protests against Ahmadinejad’s dictatorial regime, even uncovering their heads and marching loudly in demonstrations of both sexes. Decades of anger against oppression is boiling up in Iran and the movement is far from over, but to overthrow the regime more class-based workers’ struggle is needed. Women make up at least half of the world’s working class, and workers everywhere need new socialist parties, fighting trade unions and combative community movements involving working class women to take the struggle forward. We must never allow sexist attitudes among men to divide and weaken the struggle. Despite the fact that one hundred years has passed and liberation has still not been achieved for women from their double oppression, it is inspiring that the revolutionary and socialist traditions of International Women’s Day survive and continue to exercise an important influence in bringing together and strengthening those who are fighting capitalism and oppression in various parts of the world. This is needed, and is ultimately the road to victory.

BNP sexism is unnatural

'Rape is simply sex'. That is the appalling view of the BNP London election candidate Nick Eriksen. Writing on his own blog, under the name John Bull, Eriksen claims 'men have allowed themselves to be brainwashed by the feminazi myth machine into believing that rape is such a serious crime'. He goes on to say: 'Men who go along with the rape myth are either morons or traitors'. Eriksen is not only number two on the BNP's London-wide list, and so stands a chance of getting elected to the London Assembly, but is also the party's London organiser. This means he is in charge of the whole London BNP campaign. Eriksen is a recent recruit to the BNP but has been a controversial political figure for some time. As a former Conservative councillor in Southwark, his views were so extreme and divisive that his surgeries were regularly picketed. He went on to be a founding activist with Right Now, a magazine aimed at the far right of the Conservative Party. Its first editor was Ralph Harrison, a close collaborator of one of Britain's most important postwar racist and antisemitic activists, the Dowager Lady Jane Birdwood. Harrison was followed in 1995 by Derek Turner, a former activist in the Social Action Initiative, a small fascist group active in the Irish Republic.

In some early issues Eriksen wrote openly under his own name but he later submerged his identity in the deeply odious John Bull column, in which he raged against multiculturalism, women's equality and political correctness. Eriksen also voiced his obnoxious views on his John Bull blog, which he started in April 2005 just before the general election. In August of that year he turned his attention to the date-rape drug Rohypnol. 'It turns out that these stupid tarts are simply getting blind drunk, taking 'recreational' drugs themselves, and then having sex', spouted Eriksen. 'Next day they wake up with an almighty hangover and a deep feeling of shame and regret. So what do they do then? Why, cry rape of course, and try to get a poor innocent man sent to prison in order to save their "reputation"-as if they had one!' Under the heading 'Assault with a friendly weapon', he continued in similar vein.'Rape is simply sex. Women enjoy sex, so rape cannot be such a terrible physical ordeal. To suggest that rape, when conducted without violence, is a serious crime is like suggesting that force feeding a woman chocolate cake is a heinous offence. A woman would be more inconvenienced by having her handbag snatched'.

Eriksen obviously hates women. In another article the following day he wrote: 'Men are more intelligent than women-it's a fact. Let's be proud of it, let's celebrate it, let's take advantage of it, and let's not tolerate women who seek to deny it'. But his violent misogyny does not stop there. Eriksen believes that figures that show women are the victim in nearly four-fifths of domestic violence incidents are a lie and that men are the real victims. In an article in November 2005 entitled 'Give her a slap', Eriksen attacked campaigns that try to heighten awareness of the domestic violence and abuse as an attempt 'to vilify men'. Eriksen believes that 'Very few men have any inkling of the hatred and contempt which most women have for them' and that 'Feminist talk about "equality" is just a pretext-their real agenda is to try to gain superiority over men'. Concluding this particularly odious piece of twaddle, Eriksen endorsed physical violence against women. Commenting upon a very public fracas in which Rebekah Wade, editor of The Sun, was arrested following a fight with her husband, the actor Ross Kemp, in 2005, Eriksen advanced his own solution. 'Come on Ross', urged Eriksen, 'let's see if you're as tough as your on-screen persona-give your wife a good slap!'

With statements such as these it is not surprising that his blog profile states that he takes a '"right-wing", nationalist, patriotic, traditional viewpoint, pro-moting men's rights and the national interest of the British people. Opposed to all forms of political correctness'. In Eriksen's mind, when not being raped or beaten women have one role in life. 'Let's be honest', he wrote on 16 September 2005, 'for a woman to consider a job or career more important than having children is, quite literally, unnatural. Of course having children usually leads to women's careers being disrupted, but so what? … Instead of complaining that nature prevents women from having successful careers women should embrace the career nature has ascribed to them - motherhood'. In this view he fits neatly in the BNP. The far-right party has long argued that women should not work but stay at home and bring up children.

Attitudes to rape are forged by the state

The results of a survey this week about rape led to much media comment - and baffled reactions about the attitudes it recorded among people in Britain. According to the report by the Haven service for rape victims, 50 percent of the female respondents believed that victims should take some responsibility for their attack. Large numbers of men also believed that women who have been raped were to blame in some circumstances. Such attitudes are not a result of individual ignorance; they reflect a much wider view of women’s place in society and of systematic women’s oppression. There is a long history of the legal system, judges, police chiefs and politicians trivialising rape or suggesting that women are to blame for it. Until 1994 judges were obliged by law to tell juries that they should seek corroboration of the alleged crime as “women and small children tend to lie about these matters”. These ideas continue to dominate the courts. In 2007, a judge allowed a paedophile who allegedly molested an 11-year-old girl to escape jail when the judge ruled the victim had “welcomed” his advances. And today, although attitudes are officially more enlightened, it’s estimated that only 5 percent of women who are raped report it - just one in 14 reported cases result in a conviction.

As recently as last September, figures gained after a Freedom of Information request showed that some police forces failed to record over 40 percent of rape complaints. Police in Durham said they only ruled five out of 130 rape allegations were not in fact crimes. Yet a further 83 cases were never officially recorded in the first place. Many of the newspapers that affected surprise at the recent survey consistently portray women as mindless objects who are to be judged solely on their looks and then “won”. For some people that encourages the attitude that women are things to be “bought” - or seized. Others newspapers blamed women in different ways. The Telegraph blamed the “uninhibited ‘ladette’ culture” for “fuelling a disturbing new ambivalence towards the crime of rape, particularly among women”. The Mirror’s columnist Sue Carroll managed to use the report to attack Muslims: “A survey tells us half of women think rape victims are to blame for the crime because they wear short skirts or accept a drink. “Who on earth did they ask, women in burqas?” She went on to say that the issue was “mired in confusion” because of the views of “hardline feminists” and that it is “downright stupidity” to be “someone prevaricating over whether to say ‘no’ in a man’s bed”.

Is it any surprise, when such ideas are put forward as “common sense”, that many people end up blaming people who have been raped? The continuing struggle for women’s emancipation involves an absolute assertion that, in all circumstances, no means no—and that rape victims need support, not scapegoating.

Banning abortion costs lives

On February 10th, a student group at the University of Washington (UW), Students for Human Life, set-up an anti-choice display on campus. The display consisted of makeshift gravestones with the names of women attached, as well as a short paragraph explaining how each of these women died due to complications during abortion procedures. The intended message behind this display was to convince passersby that abortions were harmful to women's health. However, the display really amounted to an attack on women's bodies and their right to control their own reproductive health. First of all, if the argument is that medical procedures that could result in injury or death of the patient should be criminalized, then this logic should be drawn out to its fullest conclusion. If you accept this premise, then you would also agree that not only should abortions be banned, but so should open-heart surgery, brain surgery, kidney transplants, blood transfusions, chemotherapy and a host of other "risky" operations.

However, the instances of death are rare in these cases, and the benefits far outweigh the potential costs. Similarly with abortions. In fact, abortions are one of the safest surgical procedures for women in the U.S. today. According to the Guttmacher Institute, less than 0.5 percent of women obtaining abortions experience any complications, and the risk of death associated with abortion is about one-tenth of that associated with caring the pregnancy to term. The display at the UW campus merely exaggerates a handful of cases that unfortunately ended in death of the patient, while ignoring the millions of cases in which women received safe abortions. Secondly, the display ultimately amounts to an argument for increasing funding for abortions, not decreasing funds or eliminating abortions altogether. If doctors or nurses made errors during procedures or equipment proved faulty, then the solution isn't to ban them from ever performing the procedure again. Instead, the solution is to make sure doctors and nurses have the best possible training and equipment to ensure the procedures go without a hitch. Reducing funding for abortion services will only result in more fatal procedures like those depicted.

Of course, the anti-choice Students for Human Life will argue that if reducing funding will lead to more deaths of women, then abortions should be banned completely. However, this argument overlooks the fact that criminalizing a behavior doesn't prevent that behavior from ever happening again. Banning abortions does not mean women will no longer seek out this important medical service. Instead, they would be forced to either find shady underground abortion clinics or self-induce abortions, both of which are extremely unsafe practices. Banning abortions will not save women's lives. Instead, the death rate for women undergoing the procedure will skyrocket (coat hanger, anyone?). Case in point: the exact death toll during the period when abortion was illegal in the U.S. is unknown, but some conservative estimates are as high as 10,000 per year. Compare this to a study in New York City in which, after abortion was legalized in 1970, maternal mortality dropped by 45 percent.

Reproductive freedom is a foundation of women's liberation. Women can never have full equality if they cannot control their own bodies, and we cannot have a fundamentally democratic society if half the population is denied this essential freedom. If Students for Human Life were truly concerned about the well-being of women, they would be fighting for increasing funding for abortion services and pressuring their congressional representatives to pass and enforce legislation that further protects women's right to abortions. Instead, Students for Human Life is arguing that they are protecting women's lives by taking away control of their own bodies. This is both condescending and paternalistic, and amounts to an attack on a woman's liberty. No one is more qualified to make a choice concerning a woman's reproductive health than the woman herself. As late abortion provider, Dr. George Tiller, commonly said, "trust women."

Abortion is not the only fight

Finally, a feminist health campaign telling it like it is: American women are being thrown under the bus for an insurance industry-friendly motion towards "health reform." Enough with the handwringing, Jane Fonda seems to say in this video for the "Not Under the Bus" campaign. It's time for women to stop that bus and start driving it. The healthcare bill currently headed for conference committee station in Congress is troubling to progressives on several accounts, but for women, it will have the ironic effect of making a medical procedure less accessible. The Senate's abortion "compromise," extorted by Ben Nelson of Nebraska (along with a pile of cash for his state), ostensibly means that women who want full coverage will have to write two checks: one to cover abortion, and one to cover everything else. Analysts worry this will amount to a Stupak-like ban on all insurance coverage for abortions – how many insurers, not to mention employers, are going to put up with separate checks? And that's only a question for "blue" states that won't ban abortion coverage entirely. If the expected happens, it will mean that women will have to pay more out of pocket and travel even longer distances to exercise what Roe versus Wade supposedly codified as a "right."

Last month, feminists were shocked at Stupak-Pitts, then outraged. Now, Jane Fonda is looking outright panicked on Youtube: "Help end discrimination against women," she pleads. It may well turn out that the decade's greatest threat to abortion access wasn't George Bush, but Obamacare. Odd as it is to say, I find Fonda's panic somewhat comforting. In both its boldness and its generality, it signals the women's movement to regroup at square one, to focus on women rather than on a procedure. After all, the right to abortion is based on broader Constitutional rights to autonomy and bodily integrity and the privacy to make decisions about what happens or doesn't happen to one's body. And if we apply these rights broadly, not only to a woman's "right to choose" to terminate a pregnancy but also her right to choose to carry that pregnancy to term, and her right to choose what happens or doesn't happen to her body at the time of childbirth, then we would see that all pregnant women are being denied these rights.

Case in point: Joy Szabo of Page, Arizona, pregnant for the fourth time. In order to exercise her rights, she sought long and hard for a provider and had to travel 300 miles away from her family for care. But Szabo wasn't seeking an abortion; she was seeking a vaginal birth. You see, Szabo gave birth previously by cesarean section. She is among the hundreds of thousands of U.S. women who seek vaginal birth after caesarian (Vbac) each year, though nearly half of hospitals won't allow it. Szabo was denied the right to deliver at her local hospital unless she delivered surgically. She was even threatened with a court order. You thought abortion was controversial? Ask a nurse about Vbac. Szabo also told it like it is: "Page Hospital: Enter my body without permission, sounds like rape to me," she wrote in lipstick on the back of her minivan. Szabo's ordeal ended happily on 5 December, when she gave birth vaginally in Phoenix. But the majority of American women in this situation are scheduling repeat surgery — either on their doctors' recommendation or insistence — though research has shown it is more likely to result in a baby's admission to neonatal intensive care for prematurity and breathing problems, to say nothing of the risks to mothers.

Meanwhile, the majority of labouring women are confined to hospital beds, strapped to mandatory but ineffective fetal monitors, induced or sped up with artificial hormones, and consequently experiencing unnecessary pelvic trauma and the highest cesarean section rate on record, at 32% (10-15% is considered the maximum we would expect for health reasons). If you question whether this has anything to do with women's bodily integrity, talk to a woman who's had an infected caesarian scar or an episiotomy that tore into her perineum. Perhaps the biggest loss for women's health reform is that with all the drama over abortion, maternity care has remained a huge blindspot — and a costly one, at that. The US spent $86bn on maternity care in 2006 and another $26bn caring for babies born preterm, now also at a record high of 12%. Prematurity is a leading cause of infant death, yet the majority of premies are induced or surgically delivered too early. This over-medicalisation means that childbirth costs Americans more than twice per capita what other countries with better outcomes spend.

Medicaid picks up nearly half the bill in the US. If they gave just a little attention to improving care, they could literally save billions. Improve quality and reduce costs" — this has been Obama's mantra for health reform. How is it that instead of addressing real threats to women's and babies' health, "reform" has led us toward rolling back abortion access? Advocacy groups have been defending "abortion rights" and, to a lesser extent, "birthing rights," but it's possible that such a single-issue focus has helped to marginalise. To what other bodily system or medical procedure do we attribute rights? We don't have endocrine rights or MRI rights; men don't have testicular rights or Viagra rights. Rights belong to human beings. Or do we? A society that would force a woman to carry an unwanted pregnancy would also force her to have major abdominal surgery. Women won't get real health reform until we reform this fundamental lack of respect for women. The bus stops here.

Rape: No Should Mean NO

A young woman walks into a bar, drinks too much and carelessly shows the man next to her that she is carrying a wad of notes in her handbag. He mugs her on her way home and the police arrest him. The jurors mutter that she has no one to blame but herself, but they don't mean it. However much of an idiot they think she has been, they still know that a mugging is the responsibility of a mugger and the guilty man must pay. A young woman walks into a bar, drinks too much and carelessly flirts with the man next to her. He follows her and rapes her. The jurors mutter that she has no one to blame but herself, but this time they mean it. She is more than just an idiot. The supposed provocation she offered absolves the alleged rapist of responsibility; now it is the victim who is at fault. Take the case of a young and previously confident woman I recently heard of who walked into a bar. A man she had been chatting to followed her into the lavatories. There was DNA evidence that he had sex with her and she emerged covered in bruises. CCTV cameras were not in the lavatories, but they were outside, and showed the man's friends dragging her out of the pub and dumping her on the street. The jury nevertheless acquitted after it heard the man say that she had consented and his lawyers add that she was drunk and had once committed a minor offence. She attempted suicide. Her parents saved her, but the combination of the confrontation in the bar and public humiliation in the courtroom has left her profoundly depressed.

A generation back, liberal-minded people blamed prejudiced officialdom for the law's double standards and I can see survivals of old misogyny today. You cannot say that the judiciary has learnt the lessons of feminism when it is so determined to pimp the English libel law to the world's rich that it allows Roman Polanski to sue via video link from Paris because the police would arrest him for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old if he set foot in a British court. A lord chief justice who announces that he wants to impose sharia on British women with brown skins, but not British women with white skins, also has much to discover about anti-sexism and, indeed, anti-racism. But it is no use pretending that today's judges are as prejudiced as the jowly monsters of the 1970s. No judge in the 21st century would dare say that a woman who goes out in a short skirt invites men to attack her, even if he thinks it. The police have transformed their behaviour, too. In 1982, the BBC provoked national outrage when it broadcast a gruesome fly-on-the-wall documentary showing detectives mocking and bullying a confused rape victim. Today, lawyers complain that police treat women too gently for their own good and do not prepare then for the tough cross examination defence barristers will inflict on them when they reach the witness box.

As for the government, Labour's women ministers have made it their business to reform the law. From the 2003 Sexual Offences Act that tightened up the definition of consent to Baroness Stern's announcement last week that she wanted to see drunken men who force themselves on their wives and girlfriends treated as rapists, they have tried to turn Britain into a country where "no" means "no" under any circumstances. All for nothing. Journalists usually trot out the statistic that only 6% of women who report a rape see their attacker convicted. Although shocking, the figure is misleading because most reports of crime don't lead to a sentence. Conviction rates are more telling. The Crown Prosecution Service only takes a case to court when it believes it has a fair chance of winning. Usually, its prosecutors call the odds right and last year won 86.6% of the cases they initiated. In rape trials, however, they secured guilty verdicts in just 58% of cases. Usually, I am happy to denounce the authorities for just about anything, but with rape I have to denounce the public. Julie Bindel, who can often seem the last principled feminist in England, has sat through dozens of rape cases and said: "I gaze into juries' eyes and see middle-aged women in particular wanting to blame the victim. They look at the man in the dock and think he's like their sons."

Women barristers, both prosecutors and defenders, told the same story. "If the defendant's of previously good character and there has been any kind of drunken flirtation before, they want to find reasons to acquit," said one. "Juries don't like branding a man a rapist," said a second. "If she knows him and led him on, juries appear to say, 'Yes, he had sex with you without your consent, but you should have known better.'" On the one hand, juries are doing the job they have been doing for centuries. Drink, drugs and flirtations produce enough mixed signals to cause reasonable doubt in a defendant's favour when he says that he thought she consented and she says he raped her. On the other, they are sending an unforgiving message. You shouldn't generalise about generations. There are as many shy, sensible or cautious young women now as there have always been. But today's dominant style is for women to be bawdy and empowered: to try to drink as much as the men around them, talk as dirty and boast about their control of their lives. They are not enjoying the liberation that the feminists of the 1970s imagined, but a kind of social equality. If men can behave badly, women can too. Then they provide a convincing account of rape backed up in a case with DNA evidence and bruises, and too often they find that, far from being empowered, they are publicly dishonoured. The jury, a representative sample of the people who pass them in the street, takes their account of themselves literally and says that, if the defendant is really so brassy and sassy and in control of her life, then rape isn't the responsibility of the rapist and the victim must pay.

Abortion is a political issue

Thanks to Gordon Brown’s pandering to the bigots inside his own cabinet, Labour MPs had a free vote on anti-abortion amendments put to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill in parliament this week. The Labour Party has policy supporting abortion. But some Labour MPs will still vote to cut women’s access to abortion, declaring that this is an “issue of conscience”. Yet the idea that abortion is an “issue of conscience” makes no sense. Why single out abortion? Why isn’t voting to go to war and kill millions of people an “issue of conscience”? Or cutting disability benefits? Or selling off schools to used-car salesmen?

But more fundamentally, the idea that abortion is above politics is plain wrong. Abortion is not a “moral” issue – it is a political one about whether women have the right to control their bodies. Attacks on abortion rights don’t impact on all women in the same way – they specifically hit working class women. Rich women have always been able to get access to abortion, whether at private clinics or by travelling abroad. That is why any attack on abortion rights is a political attack on the working class – and that is why we have to fight them.

Forty-two years ago the 1967 Abortion Act was passed in Britain. Prior to the Act, thousands of women desperate to end their pregnancies resorted to dangerous and illegal backstreet abortions, with many dying or being seriously injured as a result. The Act has drawbacks – it doesn’t allow abortion on request, some women still face obstacles in accessing abortion services and it was never extended to Northern Ireland. But the passing of the Act transformed the lives of thousands of women, and was a huge step forwards for women’s rights. The right to abortion is something the majority of people in this country support.

However, abortion rights have come under attack from the right ever since they were introduced. In the 1970s Tory MPs tried to change the law to restrict women’s access to abortion; this led to mass campaigns to defend a woman’s right to choose. The anti-abortion lobby has seized on the issue of late abortions and time limits, because it thinks it has identified a “soft” spot in public opinion. But their underlying aim is to remove all abortion rights. An attack on late abortion is an attack on abortion rights as a whole. Late abortions are very rare and this has been true regardless of time limits or fetal viability.

In 1983 a sociologist researched into all women who had presented for an abortion after 20 weeks in Tower Hamlets in east London. There were just 12 requests made after 20 weeks – or 1.5 percent. This matched the picture in the country as a whole. The main reasons for late presentation were denial of pregnancy, youth and mental disorder. One 14 year old recently arrived from Bangladesh where she had been raped on the way to collect water from a well. She was 30 weeks pregnant and the only case that had presented over 28 weeks in the entire decade.

One 14 year old recently arrived from Bangladesh where she had been raped on the way to collect water from a well. She was 30 weeks pregnant and the only case that had presented over 28 weeks in the entire decade. To have such a focus on what amounts to a tiny minority of abortions is ridiculous, and betrays the political and ideological reasons that underlie this focus. Some women still meet obstruction from their GPs, and the General Medical Council guidance on this remains weak. Abortions at over 20 weeks are often associated with delays in the system, and could be reduced in number by the provision of NHS daycare facilities.

The effect of lowering time limits on abortion is that women who are the most vulnerable – young, poor, ethnic minorities and those with fetal abnormalities – would be prevented from having an abortion. It would mean more injuries and deaths of women desperate to end unwanted pregnancies and resorting to unhygienic and dangerous methods. There is a question about fetal viability – which means the point at which the fetus can survive outside the womb. Some argue that scientific advances mean that this occurs earlier. But medical opinion, based on good research, does not support this idea. There were great advances in neonatal intensive care in the 1970s and 1980s, which led to calls for the limit to be reduced from 28 weeks to 24, but this hasn’t been the case since 1990. I think the issue has been muddled by pictures showing a fetus to be “walking” in the womb and such like, which have been seized upon by the emotive, unscientific and mainly religious groups who are part of the anti-abortion movement. From this, people wrongly extrapolate that the fetus can feel pain – there is a lot of wooly thinking about fetal pain. More pseudo-science, which comes from “research” funded by the anti-abortion lobby, talks about a link between abortion and breast cancer. But they rely on speculation – there’s no evidence. In fact the evidence is that there is no link, as the Royal College of Gynaecologists confirms.

In 1966, the year before abortion was legalised, around 4,000 women in Britain died trying to end a pregnancy that they did not want, could not afford, or could not cope with. They died in agony from infections or perforated wombs – often bleeding to death afraid to go to hospital in case of arrest. It is estimated that every year between 60,000 and 100,000 women went to backstreet abortionists while up to 40 percent of “miscarriages” were self-abortions. In total, despite the risk of death or prison, somewhere between 16 to 20 percent of all pregnancies ended in abortion – around the same level as today. The right to abortion, like the right to divorce and the availability of safe contraception, was an important victory in the fight for women’s rights.

It reflected the wider social changes brought about by women gaining a degree of economic independence as well as the struggles for liberation and equality of the 1960s. A woman’s right to choose whether to have children or not is fundamental to her, and her child’s, prospects of having a decent and happy life. The alternatives to abortion have always been long term misery of one kind or another – shotgun weddings, poverty and overcrowding, the mental strain of caring for a child when you cannot, and a constant fear of pregnancy that makes it impossible to freely enjoy sexual relationships. When women cannot control their fertility they cannot plan their lives or be free to take part in work and society on an equal basis with men.

This is why, 40 years on, just 3 percent of people oppose all abortion while three quarters support the idea that it should be entirely a woman’s right to choose in the first three months of pregnancy – when 90 percent of all abortions are performed. Until the Industrial Revolution, abortion was not considered a crime under the Common Law untill “quickening” – the point at which the baby begins to move in the womb at 16-18 weeks. It did not become illegal until 1861 – at the same time as the state began to regulate marriages, register all births and develop a range of measures to codify family life and discipline the personal lives of the new industrial working class.

When women have no safe legal abortion, it does not stop them. The World Health Organisation estimates that 20 million unsafe illegal abortions a year are performed worldwide and that 68,000 – overwhelmingly poor women – die as a result. When legal abortion came under attack – just years after the 1967 Act had been passed, a mass movement to defend it came rapidly into being. The National Abortion Campaign mobilised tens of thousands of working class people in defence of abortion rights. Socialist women, who were part of the wider working class movement, as well as activists from the women’s movement, launched petitions, lobbies of MPs, meetings and film shows.

Arguing that abortion was a class issue, they found a bedrock of support beyond the ranks of those who thought of themselves as feminists or who rejected religious teachings about the “unborn”. The TUC responded to the grassroots organisation, passing resolutions in favour of a woman’s right to choose and mobilising 80,000 to march on parliament in 1979 against the bill put by John Corrie, a bigoted Tory MP. The demonstration marked the high point of the abortion rights movement. Thanks to the huge resistance against Corrie, attempts to restrict abortions no longer talk of a “woman’s place” or “god’s will”. They now put their energies into the thin end of the wedge – the “softer” issues of viability and disability – lying about their real intent to deny women the right to decide for themselves whether or not to have children.

The degree of freedom to control our own lives has always been an indicator of the general level of liberation in society. That is why the first society to allow women to have safe medical abortions in hospital, without restriction, was revolutionary Russia after 1917. It also granted women support in childcare and complete freedom to divorce – rights taken back under Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship. Ninety years on, while we still have to get two doctors to give us permission and half of all NHS hospitals refuse abortion after 12 weeks, the right to free and safe abortion is one we must fight to defend and extend as part of our fight for freedom and equality. Famous women's rights campaigner Margaret Renn used as the slogan “Not the church. Not the state. Women must decide their fate.” Maybe it's time for that message to be resonated, and for women once again to take action.