From the Buffalo DSA Healthcare Work Group:
Today’s Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturns the right to abortion which is supported by the majority of the people in country.
People have to fight back. But the abortion fight has been taken over by professionals with a clever legal strategy and a polished PR campaign for politicians, nonprofits, and individualistic aid efforts that all distract from the class war destroying working people and American public life.
These “experts” have failed. We cannot trust their institutions or politicians to wage a fight for what little we have left of abortion rights. Their apologetic arguments emphasize individual “choice,” privacy, and worst case scenarios, rather than plainly stating that abortion and birth control have a central role in the freedom of working people.
Let’s learn from socialist countries, the first and best on abortion, who went up against the established church and valued women as workers and comrades, starting with the Soviet Union providing free abortion in public hospitals and clinics in 1920. When Western Europe won legal abortion in the mid- to late 70s, it was simply included in the national health systems that the labor movement and left parties had already instituted. Irish feminists in their 2018 referendum didn’t just talk about the situations in which abortion might be needed to save lives. They said “free, safe, legal” and organized to bring abortion into their healthcare system by publicly and plainly telling the truth about it.
In America’s post-war labor compromise, it was decided that we would get healthcare through our jobs rather than a universal system – so when we won abortion legally, we still had to figure out how to pay for it. Roe v. Wade protected the private right to buy an abortion procedure on the healthcare marketplace.
Never forget that these compromises were made to discipline American workers through horrible working conditions – including reproductive working conditions: we are not guaranteed universal childcare, healthcare, or paid leave. We are tied to our employers in the marketplace, and fear agitating for more.
Today’s decision is possible because of our minoritarian political system and class domination. We can’t let the same undemocratic forces continue to absorb movement politics. We can’t mobilize for one day in the streets, then move on. We can’t let establishment defenders of the Roe-status-quo continue to tell working class people that private healthcare and abortion is the solution to our bad working conditions and insecure, expensive healthcare and childcare!
Abortion is healthcare, and must be: Public. Free. Safe. Legal.
linktr.ee/buffalodsa ~ protectabortion.org
Show up. Meet people mobilizing in outrage about the Supreme Court Decision, wherever they are in your community.
- Become a part of an organization to structure and amplify your decisions and demands.
- Have real conversations with people about their experiences and what they care about. Make sure to get their contact information so you can channel your rage into organizing and durably change our political-economic system.
Follow up. Organize for universal, public healthcare that includes reproductive care as an essential, and normal, service.
- Collectively, we must refuse to vote for or donate to politicians that do not fight for Medicare for All on the federal level, or New York Health Act on the state level: legislation that would institute a public, single-payer healthcare system.
- We must fight and organize together. Strategize, provide political education, knock doors, and make calls with a democratic membership organization like DSA about single payer healthcare.
- Buffalo DSA has a militant, badass Healthcare Committee: Meeting, July 5
Work it out. Radicalize your coworkers and union into the fight for universal, single payer healthcare.
- Your union can extract wins from your boss, but we can all fight back against the boss class making these decisions. Politicize your coworkers. DSA union members can use this guide to organize their co-workers and unions.
- Union members are strongly encouraged to work with our Healthcare Committee to provide political education on how American healthcare disciplines labor and families, as well as how we can fight back together.