by Jo Campbell
The issue of reproductive choice once thought secured by Roe v. Wade, is beleaguered today with threats and reverses. I should not have been surprised, therefore, to find that an article I wrote for a shore daily in July 1989 is still news. Pulling it out of my files, I re-read it in amazement. It was written shortly after the infamous Supreme Court Webster Decision, which made the unviable the ruler of a woman's life, and, in effect, turned women's bodies into container ships.
On July 3, 1989, the Supreme Court decided Webster v. Reproductive Health Services, The Webster decision was a Missouri-based monstrosity which decided 1. life begins at conception, 2. abortions are prohibited in public facilities - including in a private hospital on rented government land!, and 3. elaborate tests for fetal viability are required regardless of need or logic.
This decision was part of a war against women all colors, of the modest middle class as well as the poor in support of war against -- who knows who's next? War-readiness, after all, is how we keep the populace distracted, fearful and confused.
Here is the old story, with a few updates.
Part of the struggle to enlist support for reproductive freedom in the early 1970s was a widely-published photograph of a woman huddled in her own blood, dead as the result of an illegal abortion -- the only kind there was for centuries.
Many of us knew then that the most vigorous opposition to reproductive choice had nothing to do with that woman or her death. Opponents of choice (as I perceived them then), cared only for the possibility that the egg within her uterus had been fertilized by a male-determining Y chromosome; the cell which meant the egg would have developed into a boy fetus.
The state, said the Supreme Court, has a vested interest in that egg and that chromosome -- an interest in childbirth; no interest -- that is, nothing to gain from -- a terminated pregnancy, no matter what the cause.
The (Reagan-Bush) state has no interest in the concerns of the individual woman, or for the unwanted children in their millions who end up abused, alienated and who cost the state hundreds of millions of dollars in medical care, education, police work and imprisonment.
The state, therefore, will become involved in abortion only to the extent of making it difficult or impossible for the lower-income middle class and the poor (minority or other).
Impregnated women in these groups must be made to deliver.
Why does the state press for compulsive child-bearing? Why care about those almost-little-boy fetuses? Because, despite the dangerous and costly alternatives of criminal behavior and its penalties, they may grow up to be soldiers; especially if their mothers are poor and black.
Doubtful? Examine the American ranks and the casualty lists from Vietnam.
The emotional picketers who assail clinic-bound women may sincerely agonize over their own perceptions of children not born. But the real drive to reduce family choices comes from behind the picket lines -- from a center with an out-of-control fringe which is exploding bombs and setting fires (and shooting people!)
It suits the interests of world conflict and commerce to have low-income, especially minority, schoolgirls kept ignorant of birth control, and then to make sure they are denied the remedy for that ignorance.
Who keeps the young men confident of their right to impregnate with impunity? Certainly they are never made responsible.
There are some nice people -- not the clinic-bombers -- who think anti-choice has something to do with cute little babies. It doesn't. It has to do with controlling women, their lives and their production of a living labor-source.)
President Dwight D. Eisenhower called the war-prone interests "the military-industrial complex." He pronounced them dangerous and urged the rest of us to watch them carefully.
Anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked (by me, of course) at a world-population press conference how the world could cope with leaders who demand that women produce fodder for their wars.
It could be a difficult and never-ending struggle, she said.
She was right.
Maryland's own Wayne Gilchrest, despite his commendable stand, still needs to understand the folly of refusing Federal funding of abortions for poor women. The interests which want their children born, Gilchrest was told by one of a group of women in his Washington office, are the employers who want a pool of desperate, ignorant, unskilled labor -- the nearest possible to slave labor. This group includes the military which wants to keep up the supply of expendable troops.
Women are regarded by these interests, not as human beings, but as worker-producers. How dare women have life-plans of their own?)