By Liz Pinfield
‘If a woman’s choice has anything of an individual character about it, she won’t be forgiven by bourgeois society. This attitude is a kind of throwback to the traditions of tribal times. Society still wants a woman to take into account, when she is making her choice, rank and status, and the instructions and interests of her family. Bourgeois society cannot see a woman as an independent person separate from her family unit and outside the isolated circle of domestic obligations and virtues… Contemporary society goes even further than ancient tribal society in acting as women’s trustees.’
Kollontai, “Sexual relations and the class struggle”
AS INTERNATIONAL Women’s Year draws to a close, abortion remains the only issue affecting women that has received any major publicity. Equal pay, equal opportunity, the provision of nurseries, unionisation—all the main demands of the women’s movement and socialist groups agitating for women’s equality—have been relatively ignored in the face of the increasingly urgent issue of abortion.
Although the quotation introducing this article was part of Kollontai’s polemic against the bourgeois family and traditional shackles of marriage, her analysis, if applied to the present abortion debate, illuminates points essential to that debate, polarised as it now is between the positions of SPUC and NAC.
SPUC considers that its members, as a largely religious group, are ‘free’ to characterise abortion as a ‘sin’ against ‘life’, while the rest of society must be un-free to control their reproduction. They represent the extreme bourgeois concept of ‘contemporary society acting as trustees’. Within a class society, this means that a small group of people assume that they know what is best for society as a whole. This assumption also implies that the majority of society could not possibly know what its real necessities are. SPUC’s demand for restrictive legislation on abortion would lead to a return to backstreet abortions and racketeering.
NAC and the pro-botanists emphasise the slogan ‘a woman’s right to choose’—the ability of women to control their own reproduction. This slogan embodies the notion that the masses are not a bunch of ignoramuses and that each one of us has the ability and should have the right to control our own lives. Under capitalism, such control eludes us. No woman, and especially no working woman, is free to control her own life even when she has control of her reproduction. But once women do have control of their reproduction, they are also free to choose participation in a movement to control not only their own lives but also to change the whole conditions of our present society—the conditions of exploitation at work, inadequate housing, bad schooling and a rotten health service—the conditions of capitalist society.
By freeing the individual to choose that control we are not acclaiming ‘bourgeois individualism’, but providing the potential right for women, and men in some instances, to be free to participate in society and change it. In supporting a ‘woman’s right to choose’ we must not use it as just a rallying cry against SPUC; we must extend its potential to embrace our long term aims. Neither must we support it merely as a necessity for the woman worker, as the housing problem becomes more acute and prices continue to rise. All women, including white collar workers, secretaries and housewives, should have the right to choose whether to have children or not, and the right to be independent of the ‘family’ if they so want.
The aims of the 1967 Act were to allow abortion for the ‘casualties’ of the system, but to uphold restrictions for the mass of women. Abortion on demand was to be resisted. This was social engineering on the part of the Labour Party. It is in tune with ‘limiting problem sections’ of the working class. It is in line with Sir Keith Joseph’s rantings about ‘classes 4 and 5’. Abortion on demand is a class issue as it challenges the bourgeois concepts of marriage, the family and women as reproducers of labour power, and it contains the notion that women as well as men should be free to participate in changing the class nature of our society. It prepares the ground for women’s equal participation in changing the class nature of our society.
After the 1967 Act
Abortion remained a controversial issue after the 1967 Act, and after four years the government set up the Lane Committee to review its working. That body found the Act had provided improved conditions for women seeking abortions. Its recommendations that the NHS provide better abortion and contraceptive facilities and reduce private sector abortions were ignored by the government. Although the Lane Committee’s recommendations were taken up by the longstanding Abortion Law Reform Association (ALRA), it has no clear perspective for political intervention and failed to demand abolition of the private sector.
The initiative was seized by the right with the introduction of the anti-abortion James White Amendment Bill. ALRA, under pressure from the women’s movement, in 1975 launched ‘A Women’s Right to Choose’ campaign against the Bill.
In February 1975, NAC was formed with the main aim of fighting restrictive legislation on abortion through grassroots action. Here was the chance at last for the women’s movement and its potential periphery to agitate on a broader scale and develop its own politics and to move on from the development of the theory of woman’s position under capitalism.
After the successful activities of the spring and summer and the spread of NAC groups all over the country, most people involved saw it still as a campaign to fight against the return to backstreet abortions and for a ‘woman’s right to choose’. At present the main aim of NAC is to fight the reappointment of the Select Committee which followed the fall of James White’s Bill.
In the last months, NAC’s political orientation has not changed radically. It essentially remains a campaign to fight restrictive legislation. But this orientation was verbally contradicted by the reiterations at the recent conference of the need for the campaign to move on to the offensive. The adoption of the slogan ‘Free abortion on demand—a woman’s right to choose’ rather than just ‘a woman’s right to choose’ was indicative of this healthy, if confused, feeling in the campaign. How this in practice changes the orientation of NAC is unclear. Unless ‘free abortion on demand’ is seen as a political demand on the Labour government for improved NHS facilities and adequate financial resources, then it is a meaningless slogan. It is clear that the government is not interested in an efficiently run NHS for people’s needs. While they complain there is no money available to improve the NHS, the fact is that it could be run more economically. (If the 56,000 terminations currently performed on the NHS were performed in outpatient clinics there could be a saving of £1 million pounds a year according to the medial journal Pulse.)
But we are not interested in merely propping up a failing capitalist-organised health service. We must demand that the private sector performing abortion is stopped and all abortions are freely available on the NHS.
At a time when the NHS is visibly crumbing, when doctors have for the first time begun to act militantly, when hospitals are being closed up and down the country, NAC must make it clear what ‘free abortion on demand’ really means, and against whom it is directed. NAC must take up in all its agitation the following immediate demands as a challenge to the Parliamentary Labour Party:
With the expansion of provisions for early terminations, late terminations would be more scarce.
With the establishment of the above provision;
These immediate demands around which NAC should concentrate its activities, cannot be isolated from the broader political context. NAC should be locally and nationally involved in the broader movement that is emerging to fight cuts in education and housing. Where cuts campaigns exist, NAC groups should be actively participating in them and making the links necessary for both campaigns to be forceful enough to challenge local councils and the government. It is not adequate to merely broaden the campaign by leafleting factories where women work or pass motions through the trade union branches, although the TUC must forced to fight for its commitment to ‘abortion on demand’.
As many women do not work, local orientation should be towards women on estates and to activity on the cuts immediately affecting those women. Involving health workers in such campaigns is central to such an orientation.
We must work in NAC to improve it, not take it over. IS has the latter aim, and that of trying to convince people they should join IS. This tactic is merely disruptive as demonstrated at the October Conference, where they lost all their arguments through takeover attempts and the alienation of most women present. Work in NAC is an essential part of United Front activity where opportunism has no place and where we must work with the genuine desire to build the movement and extend its aims.
