Since the moment that US Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor announced her retirement on July 1, pro-choice activists, feminists and Democratic Party officials have sounded the alarm.
Their concern is understandable. Long considered the court's "swing vote" on a number of issues, O'Connor is credited with having kept Roe v Wade — the 1973 case legalising abortion — the law of the land.
Now President George Bush has nominated a hard-line conservative, John Roberts, to take O'Connor's place, and commentators are speculating that Roe hangs in the balance.
While right-wingers clearly got a nominee who could eventually help overturn Roe v. Wade, the job was made easier by Democrats and liberal organisations. They held O'Connor up as their "model moderate".
This shows just how far the political goal-posts have shifted to the right in Washington. Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, smirked to the New York Times that he found the Democrats' newfound admiration for O'Connor "rather humorous, isn't it? 'Right-wing zealot' is what I always heard."
Indeed, while O'Connor voted to uphold legal abortion, she was also often the driving force behind decisions that chipped away at access to abortion in practice.
O'Connor's "moderation and consensus-building" helped open the door to the bleak picture of abortion rights in the US today — where an estimated 87% of counties have no abortion provider, 22 states have mandatory waiting periods, and 21 states require parental consent for teenagers.
Recently, leading figures in the party — including senators Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, as well as Democratic National Committee chairperson Howard Dean — have all signaled their willingness to move to the right on the issue of choice, saying that the Democrats need to welcome anti-choice people into their ranks and focus on reducing the number of abortions, rather than making sure every woman who needs access can get it.
With their attempt to prove their "moral values" in the wake of last year's disastrous election loss, the Democrats sounded like Republican strategists when they begged Bush for a "fair-minded, common-sense conservative in the mold of Justice O'Connor".
Last year, more than a million people turned out in Washington, DC, to call for abortion rights at the March for Women's Lives. On that day, Democrat after Democrat told us that we had to vote for John Kerry to save the right to choose. That strategy has only hurt us — hampering what could have been the beginnings of a new grassroots fight to protect and expand abortion rights.
We can't rely on a party that's already retreated on choice. And we certainly shouldn't hope that Roberts turns out to be more "moderate" than he appears. It's time to rebuild a real fight for abortion rights where it counts — in the streets.
There's no doubt that some nominees would be more progressive than others — and that Roberts is on the conservative end of the political spectrum when it comes to issues like abortion rights and gay marriage. But to see the fight for abortion rights as primarily a question of which nine people sit on the Supreme Court is a disaster for our movement — and flies in the face of history.
In 1973, abortion rights were won not because moderate members of the court suddenly "decided" that women should be able to control their own bodies. At the time, Richard Nixon sat in the White House, and the Supreme Court was dominated by six Republican-appointed justices.
The key to winning the Roe v Wade decision that legalised abortion was a growing movement that brought thousands of people into the streets across the US — and, more broadly, changing opinions about women's roles at home and in the workplace.
Hundreds of local protests for women's rights took place around the country between 1969 and 1973, raising demands not only for legal abortion, but for paid child care and equal pay for equal work. One of the largest, the Women's Strike for Equality in 1970, drew more than 50,000 across the US.
The fight for women's liberation was connected to other left-wing struggles as well — like the fight for gay liberation, the movement to end the Vietnam War and the Black Power struggle.
Conservatives have fought against the right to choose ever since, chipping away at abortion rights with a host of restrictions. But every time that Roe has been threatened with being overturned, it has been not the political character of the nine justices, but mass protests — including two huge mobilisations in 1989 and 1992 when the court heard anti-abortion cases — that kept abortion rights alive.
The way to keep abortion legal is the same as always — building a grassroots movement that tells the politicians of both parties that we won't go back to the days of back-alley abortions.
Nicole Colson
[Abridged from Socialist Worker, weekly paper of the US International Socialist Organization. Visit <http://www.socialistworker.org>.]
From Green Left Weekly, August 3, 2005.
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