After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June of 2022, a decision made by just six unelected justices with consequences for the bodily autonomy of millions of people across the United States, the socialist movement leapt into action to defend abortion rights. DSA led the charge, with over one hundred chapters across the country mobilizing for pro-choice campaigns throughout the summer and fall. On October 6th, YDSA organized demonstrations on more than fifty campuses in twenty-nine different states as part of a nationwide student strike for abortion. Since then, FU-YDSA has joined the fight by mobilizing Furman students to defend patients at the Greenville Women’s Clinic from aggressive anti-choice harassment. In coordination with Upstate Clinic Defenders, a pro-choice volunteer organization, we have so far assembled successful clinic defense operations on February 11th and February 18th, with more planned for the 23rd, 24th, 25th, and more dates in March. We are now in the process of organizing protests against South Carolina House Bill 3774, effectively a near-total abortion ban, with the help of other (Y)DSA chapters and local volunteer groups.  

What significance does the right to an abortion hold for the socialist movement? Angela Davis, Black Marxist scholar and two-time Communist Party candidate for Vice President, proclaimed in Women, Race, and Class that “birth control—individual choice, safe contraceptive methods, as well as abortions when necessary—is a fundamental prerequisite for the emancipation of women.” It is noteworthy, then, that the same political forces responsible for the historic defeat of abortion rights last June, the same ones now pushing for a national abortion ban via an act of Congress, are also behind assaults on the legality of Plan B, the birth control pill, and even condoms. If we view the struggle over abortion not as a philosophical disagreement about the nature of human life, as conservatives would have us see it, but rather as a conflict over the concrete emancipation or subjugation of women and others with uteruses, then it would be dangerously shortsighted of us to brush aside omens of a mounting challenge to basic contraceptive rights. What is at stake here is not whether a fetus constitutes a human life, but whether the category of people capable of bearing a fetus to term are to have the freedom to decide, if, when, and under what circumstances they do so. We socialists have a duty to answer with an uncompromising “YES!” and plant ourselves firmly on the front lines of the fight to fully realize that freedom. That is the spirit of FU-YDSA’s clinic defense campaign. 

Reproductive freedom is fundamentally a class issue. A very particular set of class interests is arrayed on either side. On an abstract level, the tension between bodily autonomy and external domination of the body is one expression of the tension between the ideology of the emancipation of the working class, which demands for every human being the full freedom to develop their own physical and mental capacities to whatever ends they desire, and the ideology of capital, which insists that one’s body and mind belong to the market as mere inputs in the process of production. On a more material level, the capitalist class benefits directly from the existence of a subclass of workers whose lives revolve around child-rearing and unpaid domestic labor. The former maintains a large working class, and the latter lowers the cost of social reproduction, that is, the minimum cost of the goods and services needed to keep the average worker alive and healthy enough to continue working. A larger working class means a larger market for the products the capitalists sell and a larger unemployed population to keep wages low. A lower cost of social reproduction means a lower limit for what the capitalist class can pay the proletariat before facing total system collapse. In short, patriarchy is a core pillar of the capitalist system of exploitation. Strengthening and deepening it by undermining the hard-fought historic advances of the feminist and queer liberation movements (abortion rights chief among them) benefits the capitalist class in a directly quantifiable way. As always, when the capitalist class stands to gain, the working class stands to lose. Workers of all genders will find themselves squeezed tighter from every angle as the right of their child-bearing comrades to regulate their own bodily functions is methodically stripped away. 

All this may seem very theoretical to an outside observer, but the real, on-the-ground experience of clinic defense vindicates it. According to our Upstate Clinic Defenders comrades, many of the key individuals behind the efforts of our anti-choice opponents are property-owners or indirectly on the payroll of people who are. Several of them own construction companies. Additionally, the anti-choicers operate out of properties they own both adjacent to and across the street from the Greenville Women’s Clinic, including a newly constructed fake abortion clinic (yes, you read that right) which attempts to lure patients in for the medical malpractice they call “abortion pill reversal (a biological impossibility). The existence of such a facility suggests serious involvement from larger business interests.  

The class dynamics are just as apparent on our side. None of our UCD comrades are businessowners, to say the least, and there are no propertied interests subsidizing their efforts (or ours, for that matter). A substantial number of the honks we solicit with our roadside “honk for choice” signs come from workers on the job: truckers for retail giants like Wal-Mart and Food Lion, postal workers, et cetera. 

The battlelines in this fight could not be more clear. On one side stands a coalition of capitalists and petty proprietors who, for the sake of their own class interests, seek to keep millions of people stuck in a state of subhuman domination so that more profit may be wrung from the lives of the working class. On the other side stands a coalition of workers across all trades, industries, races, and genders who seek to defend their own from the desperate conditions anti-choice legislation is producing, conditions where the vulnerable and impoverished are forced to drive across state lines to seek healthcare under threat of harassment or worse. There can be no doubt for the socialist movement: we stand for the proletariat irrespective of gender, and therefore we must defend birth control in all its forms from the reactionary forces attempting to steal it away from those who depend on it most.