I want to say from the outset that this is a struggle over who controls reproduction—and along with it, production, because you can’t have production without reproduction. Will it be capitalist elites who control production and reproduction, or will it be working people and oppressed people?
To explain a little bit more: Reproduction of human life extends to the reproduction of human labor power; reproduction is essential to the capitalist system, and it makes sense for capitalists to invest in controlling it. The topic of today’s panel is abortion, but we must remember that reproduction extends to more than just gestation. The reproduction that is necessary to maintain the capitalist system is not just pregnancy and birth but also domestic labor, cooking, cleaning, laundry, education, and caretaking of children, elderly people, and disabled people with support needs. This labor is not biologically prescribed, and no class of person has a monopoly on this labor, even though we might think of it as woman’s work.
All of this is necessary for capitalist production—just as much, if not more so, than birth and gestation. The capitalist elites know that; they don’t want to pay for it. They are invested, one way or another, in the devaluing of this vital reproductive labor—and one of the mechanisms they use to uphold that is gender oppression.
This is the origin of the oppression of women, marginalized genders, and children—and the upholding of this oppression in maintaining the status quo. Gender oppression is but one of the mechanisms by which the ruling class attempts to hide the contradictions of capitalism. This is the reason they are so invested in a male-dominated social order wherein the father is the king of a heterosexual nuclear family unit, retaining quasi-property rights over women and children, wherein birthing people and oppressed groups are the last reserve in the surplus of workers—expected to shoulder the cost of childcare and eldercare out of their own meager wages.
There is a dispute within the capitalist class over the best way to manage the reproductive power of working and oppressed people. The right-wing onslaught on reproductive rights takes the form of Christian nationalist, white supremacist mobilization, and we have to be accurate in how we characterize these movements in order to better fight them. It is an escalation in gender oppression, obvious from the language that they use: Phrases like “your body, my choice,” now a rallying cry for the anti-abortion movement, chill my spine. Denying access to abortion is one of the most reactionary aspects of family life under capitalism. It is having devastating consequences on real people.
Even in states like Pennsylvania, with relatively liberalized abortion laws, the right-wing movement against reproductive rights feels empowered to intimidate people out of abortion care. This is why we do clinic defense; as Hannah noted, they tend to back down in the face of our power in numbers.
But reactionary right-wing reproductive politics are not limited to abortion bans; there is a concerning, overtly white supremacist trend towards pro-natalism—which folds neatly into the anti-immigration onslaught. Why does this country have room for U.S.-born, white, Christian babies but not Central American immigrants? The answer is not a matter of resources. It is the white supremacist right-wing movement’s preference for white babies. This is expressed explicitly through the popularization of the “great replacement” theory, once a fringe neo-Nazi, Stormfront theory, now mainstream, that people of European descent, and “American culture” (white hegemony) are existentially threatened by an influx of nonwhite immigrants. Their solution to this is white babies; hence their obsession with low white birth rates, and hence Trump’s proposal to pay people five grand to give birth. This baby bounty would only be for straight married couples and not for Queer couples or single moms. They are also considering a “National Medal of Motherhood,” which is a straight up steal from the Nazis.
But the right wing does not have a monopoly on reproductive oppression. Liberal, pro-choice capitalists and the politicians that represent them are agents of reproductive oppression through a more banal free-market ideology: They control working and oppressed peoples’ reproduction by defending and maintaining a status quo that does not allow free, accessible, on-demand abortion, that does not compensate domestic labor and care work, that divides different sectors of labor by gender and devalues the labor that they choose to feminize, and that kills Black birthing people at three times the rate of white birthing people.
They are not interested in lifting a finger against this period of Christian nationalist reproductive politics—they’ve had three years since Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, were overturned. The impact of abortion bans on reproductive health in the U.S. has been dire, particularly for Black pregnant people. For many people, it’s been too late.
Most states that have implemented abortion bans or severe restrictions have not also tracked the correlated factor of maternal mortality. Independent reporting reveals the violent, terrible impact of abortion bans. In Texas, which punishes abortion providers with up to 99 years in prison, the rate of sepsis spiked more than 50% for women hospitalized with pregnancy loss in their second trimester.
Sepsis is a life-threatening condition, and indeed, Texas women like Josseli Barnica and Nevaeh Crain died of sepsis that could have been prevented had doctors not delayed performing an abortion until their fetuses ceased their heartbeats. Candi Miller and Amber Thurman of Georgia, and an unknown amount more in other states with abortion bans or restrictions, died in the same way. Porsha Nguzemi of Texas similarly died of hemorrhaging when doctors delayed lifesaving abortion care. Four of those women were women of color, three of them Black. One of them was only 18 years old.
I invoke these tragedies only to show that is a real fight, with real stakes. The global movement for abortion access has historically publicly mourned the preventable deaths of people who died because of abortion bans—people like Savita Halappanavar of Ireland, an anonymous woman named Izabela in Poland, an anonymous woman named Manuela of El Salvador, and Gerri Santoro here in the U.S. It’s part of how we take responsibility, how we recognize that it will fall on us to prevent preventable death, disability, and torture.
We do not believe that the fight for reproductive justice belongs only to women and birthing people; we believe that the struggle belongs to all working and oppressed people. It is about individual autonomy, of course, a basic human dignity, but it is about more than just a choice. It is an expression of class struggle over the reproduction of the labor force. A blow struck against gender oppression is a blow struck against capitalism.
Clinic defense is a vital front-line measure to ensure the safety of people seeking reproductive care. It is necessary to prevent people from the indignity and violence of forced birth. It is the self-defense that we owe to ourselves and our class. But the fight requires more than just these necessary emergency measures.
We support and encourage fighting back through the labor movement. Union struggles are a mechanism by which working women can win vital freedoms. Unions can fight for health benefits and can even wage struggles for reproductive justice by winning protections for workers seeking abortions or other reproductive care. And the unions can link up with and help to organize demonstrations in the streets for reproductive rights and in defense of health clinics.
As Hannah noted, we’re in a period when there is an upsurge in mass mobilizations like the 50501 protests and the Hands Off protests. The politics here are messy. They always will be messy when we’re in the streets instead of neatly discussing things in a reading group. That’s why we call it the laboratory of struggle; it’s many experiments happening at once, and it’s the only way to test what works and in what conditions.
We make no compromises about demanding that abortion be free, legal, safe, and accessible, and no compromises about our broader perspective with feminist demands and demands for reproductive justice and all that entails. We wear our convictions against white supremacy, ableism, misogyny, and Queerphobia on our sleeves. Not every person we encounter will be on board with our advanced perspectives. Nobody is born a revolutionary. But, as we build power, and as the movement that opposes us grows too, they will be forced to choose between encroaching fascism, the NGOs that have been flailing and failing for 60 years, or a fighting socialist movement of working and oppressed people for reproductive justice.
We call on working-class and youth organizations to mount their own fights for reproductive oppression. This is also why we recognize that, in order to become a fighting force, working and oppressed people need their political party, independent from the class-collaborationist Democrats—even the “progressive” ones like Bernie Sanders and AOC, who “oppose oligarchy” from a private jet gifted by wealthy donors with strings attached. We need a real political vehicle that can ensure that working and oppressed people control all aspects of production and reproduction by building towards a revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. This is the way that a movement can become a revolution.
>> The article above is reprinted from Workers' Voice. It was originally given by Ava Fahy as part of a panel discussion sponsored by Workers' Voice and the National Mobilization for Reproductive Justice.
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