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The National Abortion Campaign was built because we needed it. We had no other appropriate organisation to take on the job of fighting a hard defensive campaign. In the beginning, when NAC had only to coordinate a massive groundswell of anger, it worked quite well. Now, two years later, hundreds of women have left the campaign leaving the work to a few women who are fighting desperately to breathe life back into it in time to deal with the latest threat from the Benyon Bill.
What has happened? Why has NAC always been only on the fringes of the women's liberation movement, and why has the WLM taken a back seat and allowed the campaign to fall prey to left sectarian infighting? Where is the spontaneity which characterised earlier women's liberation activities like the Miss World protest?
This problem is not unique to NAC; we seem unable to confront women from organised left groups and counter their influence with our own. And NAC, without a clear feminist perspective, seems to be moving steadily in the wrong direction.
Why are we Fighting for the Right to Abortion?
Is it simply for our right to have those children we can afford when we want them? The right to economic independence through work outside the home? The right to training for skilled jobs, the right to structure our childbearing according to our economic and social needs?
This is only part of the story. If we see abortion only in this context, as primarily economic demand, our opponents can point to other answers - better child care and housing. or sexual abstinence. Neither of these are solutions for us because they ignore our right to express our sexuality freely. The fight for abortion is primarily a fight for sexual freedom, The economic implications of unwanted pregnancy flow from OUr sexuality. The sixth demand of the women's liberation movement, for the right to a self-defined sexuality, must be in part a reaffirmation of our right to have heterosexual relationships without suffering from the economic and social consequences of our sexuality.
Clearly our access to money affects our sexual freedom. Women who can afford more children, who can pay others to care for them, and who can afford abortions even if they are illegal, are to a large extent freed from the anxiety which so distorts sex for the majority of us. We cannot enjoy our sexuality if we are afraid of getting pregnant. Freely available contraception has not solved this problem: many women suffer from pill side-effects because they fear pregnancy (a major side-effect is loss of libido), and no other form of contraception is safe enough to eliminate that fear. Only the knowledge of abortion back-up, free and on demand, can eliminate the twin evils of inadequate and dangerous forms of birth-control and constant fear of pregnancy.
Taking Sex onto the Streets On both sides of the abortion fight the issue of sexuality is suppressed, yet on both sides it is primary. We know that the anti-abortionists regard abortion as a threat to their concept of morality and yet we have not really confronted them on this major issue.
Is this because we have not sorted out the theory in our own minds, or is it because we are afraid of campaigning around an issue which arouses such powerful feelings? Do we fear that our campaign would be less respectable if we made the sexual aspects of it more explicit? Is it our own inhibitions which hold us back? Or are we unconsciously avoiding the issue because we too fear pregnancy and try to view sex and pregnancy in two separate boxes?
Our opponents might identify sex only with unmarried blondes in fast cars, but we know that sexuality is a part of all our lives; it is as important for the forty-yearold production line worker as it is for the twenty-year-old student. Sexuality doesn't cease after marriage, and its economic and social implications don't disappear. Though it may appear difficult to organise around this issue, the fight for sexual freedom affects all women; so surely all women can identify with a campaign based around that demand.
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The Limitations of NAC The campaign so far has been doggedly defensive. Concentrating on the economic aspects of fertility control, abortion has been separated from its feminist context and launched into the political arena in haste, without sufficient thought.
1. Our campaigning slogans demonstrate the limitations of our campaign: no return to backstreet abortion/keep it safe and legal .... In both of them we identify women as victims. There is nothing wrong with the demands as such, but they do not evoke the power of women; they appeal for help, they don't demand control. They are not a rallying cry for women because they seem to be about others and not about ourselves. The slogan 'free abortion on demand, a woman's right to choose' is far more constructive, but it has been used in the narrowest possible way — choice about abortion rather than about life.
2. NAC has even shied away from positive legislation. Instead of backing the ALRA model Bill we have again postponed the issue. We have again lost theinitiative. How can we expect women to fight enthusiastically to defend the '67 Act which we know is a bad law?
3. When our opponents say that liberal abortion policies cause promiscuity we deny it. Why? We don't subscribe to their narrow-minded morality; we surely expect women to make use of technological advances which allow us to make the most of our sexuality.
4. Even when we fight for day care clinics, we stress their economic usefulness to the state. We don't argue that women prefer quick simple procedures, that day careclinics are better than the old way.
5. We have never used our ability to perform abortions clandestinely as a threat against the state. We do not suggest that a clandestine network could possibly replace the NHS. While continuing to fight for NHS abortions, our ability to defy the law is a powerful weapon which we haven't The Personal is Political [remember?] Not one of the current NAC slogans includes the words "we' or 'our". Have we forgotten that the strength of the women's liberation movement is that we together against our own oppression? If people are avoiding NAC because they feel we can manage without them then we have failed to put across one of the most basic theories of the women's movement. We cannot fight to liberate others. We must fight to liberate ourselves. The American slogans make this explicit — our bodies, our lives — our right to decide.
Building a Feminist Campaign NAC is not a feminist campaign. It is an uneasy coalition of politically active women and we as feminists have allowed our ideas to be fragmented and pushed aside by the more organised left groups. It is time we organised among ourselves and made our politics explicit within and through the campaign, and worked out more imaginative ways of putting our case across. Demonstrations and public meetings are not the only ways of campaigning, and they are not the ways the women's movement has used in the past. We don't suggest that NAC drop its plans and completely reorganise itself. As socialist feminists we are just one constituent part of NAC. We must sort ourselves out, and provide positive alternatives and feminist practice instead of moaning about left group domination.
We would like to start that organisation now and invite all non-aligned socialist feminists to a lunchtime meeting during this conference where we can decide on a place and time to hold a meeting and start organising for ourselves.
This paper was written by ANGELA PHILLIPS, DOROTHY JONES and PAT KAHN. Our view is an over-view: we haven't been involved in local NAC groups. One of us has been active on the steering committee, and one of us does a lot of design and printing for NAC.
Shortly after this conference some groups of feminists met to discuss 'femininist action' in NAC. The result was a chain reaction. First the idea for the NAC caravan was launched and adopted by NAC but organised and designed by feminists. Then during the committee stage of the Benyon Bill, FAB (Feminists Against Benyon] emerged. The name was used to cover three different events organised by different people on each occasion. The first was the stink bomb incident in the committee room, which attracted wide press coverage. The second was the spray painting exercise against chosen targets. The third waS. the occupation of the Catholic Cathedral in Westminster.
These actions had in common a combination of imagination and self-activity, with the intention of stimulating similar activity elsewhere.