ON FOR OVER 50 years have been fighting for abortion rights. The legal and the medical situation has progressed since the early campaigners took up the slogan: 'Our bodies are our own'.
The 1967 Abortion Act represented a qualitative step forward for women, now we face a Bill which is likely to reverse these gains. As we enter a new stage in the struggle for women's right to control their fertility it is useful to look at the history of that campaign and see what lessons it has for us today.
It was the laws passed by the Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution In changed the character of the fight for fertility control in Britain.
The first decrees of Soviet power stripped away centuries of prejudice. abolition of illegitimacy divorce on demand, 'Abortion may unimpededly in the soviet hospitals where the maximum of safety is secured'.
Victory Before the victory question of birth control in Britain was firmlý associated with working class. against the ideas of Thomas Malthus, an 18th century clergyman and amateur economist, who sald. that overpopulation swamp the world's argument sull sterilisation in many Third World countries.
Malthusian ideas were used to justify rigid sexual segregation in the workhouses, and were.
'IF one understand by the family a compulsory union based on the marriage contract, the blessing of the church, property rights, and the single passport, then Bolshevism has destroyed this policed family from the roots up.' Trotsky, Liberty Magazine 1933.
behind most early efforts to take birth control advice to the working class.
Other ideas — of genetic inequality of races and classes overpopulation to produce some of the horrific arguments in favour of birth control, similar to those Keith Joseph and Enoch Powell advance today.
When Malthusian advocated birth control in the streets of South London they early socialists and communists were exceedingly doubtful both contraception.
The Russian revolution dramatically: It allowed group of people, main!!
members CaL: Pary and so s0 476 5 Browne Remand. most succinctly: smash d isory sterilisation just Socialisi Challenge women in this. but 1917 that really Along WILL and the provision of legislation guaranteed that pertormed free and of the Bolsheviks the views about the polemicised vigorously would eventually food resources an justify forced - combined with theories about League speakers were heckled by socialists. vost abortion. and changed things the emereence Or a women, who were both the Party. ment the Communist Party in the was an acte birth controi Obably over its refusal to fight She put the other seei • We are our 16 as much as 31 January 1980 compulsory maternity. It is for women to choose Stella Browne, together SUCH as Dora Chance, set up a campaign group to get ine Labour Party io change its policy the latter year they won a slim tavour or Dinn control actice di oka dumor.
The the = == Lots. 4: 41...
did not start to give wing this success, Stella Browne, oi, Frida Laski and Janet Chance set up f despite mass other early Russell and Janet on abortion majority in forwarded campaigning from Co. every way, Eier Many com advice already Abortion Law Reform Association in 1936. The founding conference was well attended by vocal working class women.
One of them, Nurse Daniels — who had been dismissed as a health visitor in Edmonton;
opposition from local class women for giving birth control advice intervened indignantiy:
*Poor women live under the spell of fear and thev are always trying to get temselves might Working women want abortion. not the poor have it? Let the poor have what the rich have already got.
The association received thousands of letters from working class women, many of which they 1o Birkett Committee Abortion in 1937. It campaigned vigorously in in the streets, through petitioning and conferences and by attemping to organise working class women until the Second World War interrupred its work.
during war Stella bombarded the association mass action for abortion righte turning Stalin reversed the Sovi policy in 1936, releasing at the of unfavourable statistics to suy working. class working Why should Brown febt tide was International Ne Conference, 1922, handed a great many ai policy. This sapped the self-confidence of th pro-abortion movement, and 'IN my opinion, as a Feminist and a Communist, the fundamental importance and value of birth control lies in its widening of the scope of human freedom and choice, its self-determining significance for women. Birth control means freedom for women, social and sexual freedom, and that is why it is so feared and disliked in many infliertial corners today... (it) is the beginning of the end of a socia system and a moral code.' Stella Browne.
EVERY often the to abortion in the past, but this death for a man's violation of
----- pull-quotes -----
whether they will have children or not; and if so, how many, at what intervals, and with whom. Russell
and birth control. They took the issue to Labour Party conferences in 1924, 1925 and 1926, and in
"The Russian revolution allowed the emergence of a group of people, mainly women, who were both socialists and also pro-birth control and pro-legal abortion.'