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Photo: Chris Davies (Report)
takes place.
In the last few years the anti-abortion organisations have shown that massive demonstrations can be organised against abortion, and they have mounted highly emotive educational' campaigns on the evils of abortion and the moral dangers of "abortionism'.
More recently SPUC, Life and similar organisations have been preparing for the question of abortion to to be re-introduced into Parliament. At the same time, they try desperately to preserve their non-political' stance.
In the last two general elections SPUC and Life have had poster and Teaflet campaigns calling on the electorate to vote for your anti-abortion candidate*. This campaign has inspired National Front, as well as Tory. Liberal and Labour candidates to declare their anti-abortion committments in many constituencies.
Now the campaign to repeal the 1967 Abortion Act has become focused on a Private Members" Bill to make abortion for social reasons illegal and to restrict abortions to within 20 weeks of pregnancy (it now stands at 28 weeks)
This bill has its second reading in the House of Commons on Friday, February 7. That the bill is sponsored by a Labour MP must give satisfaction to anti-abortonists who have carefully cultivated a non-sectarian, non-party class image (while remaining well within the control of a thoroughly reactionary leadership). Part of an anti-abortion rally in Hyde Park, with the Catholic Church well to the fore. Shortly after we go to press, on February 7, the House of Commons has scheduled the second reading of a bill introduced by James COULSON looks at the political context in which this debate problems are above class and politics, the effect of this has been to mobilise considerable numbers of working class people, especially women, against their ists have had in attracting such support is not difficult to explain. There has been virtually no tradition of understanding or support within the labour movement on the question of abortion and contraception and of its significance for the rights of women.
In part this is indicative of the residual hold of Catholic and other churches over sections of the working class. In addition, there has been the determined evasion of the Labour Party, to take any position on tion of the trades unions has ensured that such "private matters' were excluded from their agendas.
### SUBORDINAFION
The subordination of women's rights to population policy as regulator of the availability of abortion and contraception in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe has meant that no clearly motivated political commitment to women's rights to control their fertility has been established in those societies, to which reference might be made.
Thus the mystery, guilt and ig norance which have for so long surrounded questions of sex and reproduction are rarely clearly challenged within the labour movement.
Like other attempts to proclaim that practice.)2 own interests and in support of reaction.
The success which the anti-abortion , and the cconomist tradiation.
The situation is even more contused. by the re-emergence of reactionary support for contraception and abortion The idea that contraception and abortion -as the means of controlling population size-will solve the problems of poverty and underdevelopment in the third world have been peddled for sometime (both as theory and unsuccessful CRISIS The social, economic and political crisis now disturbing the countries of the advanced capitalist world have brought variants of these same argu-. ments back onto our own doorsteps.
Keith Joseph has most clearly articulated the political relevance and practical implications of the 'scientific" work of the new eugenicists-Shockley, Eysenck, etc.-in arguing that the cycle of deprivation' (which he believes drains away the resources of the welfare state) could be broken if social classes 4 and 5 could be "persuaded' not to reproduce.
Given this state of apparent confusion in which reactionaries are lined up both for and against contraception and abortion on demand, it is important the political basis of these demards is clarified. Within the labour movement it is essential that the right of women to control their own bodiestheir fertility and their sexuality -is the underlying understanding on which these demands are fought for. The winhing of this control is one necessary component in the struggle for women's liberUNDERSTANDING This political understanding, which has for long been taken for granted within the women's movement, is beginning to gain wider acceptance as the inclusion of the demand for contraception and abortion in the Working ing Women's Charter illustrates.
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The possibility of generating wider positive political committment to this question has been opened up further by the campaign which the Abortion Law Reform Association launched in early January for abortion on request' up to twelve weeks of pregnancy with risk to the women's health as the only basis for refusing a later abortion.
The statement of aims of the campaign sets it clearly in the context of women's right to control their fertility, and recognises (if only sketchily), through demands for improved state assistance to mothers through betterfamily allowances and more adequate housing provision, that the availabilman, Gwyneth Dunwood, Renee ment. The coming period is likely forces for and against abortion ties to press forward for the right ity of contraception and abortion alone will not provide most women with a real possibility of choosing to have a child or not to have one.
The campaign is sponsored by six women Labour MPs (Helene HayShort, Joan Maynard, Jo Richardson, and Joyce Butler), This sponsorship enables us to take up the campaign in local Labour Parties, and in conjunction with the Working Women's Charter Campaign to press for active support from the labour moveto see a sharper polarisation of the which provides important opportunito ahortion on demand and to clarify and popularise the political basıs of this demand.
Footnotes:
Contraception, but not abortion is discussed in the 1972 Labour Party Green Paper Discrimination Against Women; these topics are ignored in the Labour Government's White Paper Equality for Women. 2. This is fully analysed by Bonnie Mass in the pamphler The Political Economy of Population Control in Latin America. 3.See for example the material produced by Population Countdown. 4. Speech by Keith Joseph in Birmingham 19.10.74.
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White, Labour MP from Glasgow. This bill will restrict the avail- ability of abortion facilities for women. Below, MARGARET