Next month we will have the first chance in 18 years to extend abortion rights when the House of Commons debates pro-choice amendments to the Human Embryology Bill.
Every day recently I have removed anti-choice leaflets from the entrance sign to the hospital where I work at and numerous friends have told me about receiving pro-life propaganda through their door, urging them to contact their MP and ask them to vote against all of the pro-choice amendments.
The anti-choicers are getting their arguments out and once again the focus of the main pro-choice group Abortion Rights will be a public meeting in the House of Commons. Yet it is vital that a wave of public opinion is built up supporting reproductive freedom so that we have some chance of liberalising the law and finally extending abortion rights to Northern Ireland.
This October may be the last chance to extend rights to women in the north of Ireland, as abortion will become a fully devolved issue in the next few months.
We also need to start building a mass campaign capable of fighting the attacks that will undoubtedly come if the Tories win the next general election.
Feminist Fightback are prioritising this issue in the next month. We have three main critiques of the national Abortion Rights campaign to defend and extend abortion rights:
• the fight for reproductive freedom is not put at the centre of the argument so debates are about viability and scientific development dominate;
• secondly, a right to choose is only possible for all women if we change the material conditions of women’s lives — this means fighting for demands that would alienate the cross-party MPs that Abortion Rights works so closely with;
• thirdly, we need to move away from lobbying MPs and organising meetings in the House of Commons to organising a campaign of mass action. While we support the campaign and will continue to encourage trade union affiliation to it, we think that the campaign needs to change, and change quickly.
Feminist Fightback’s initiative is Trade Unionists for Choice — a network for organising the fight for reproductive freedom within the labour movement. The anti-choicers may have the church, we should have the unions!
We want to speak in as many unions as possible before the vote (before 5 November), and after the vote. In November Feminist Fightback and the RMT women’s advisory committee are organising a joint speaker training event with the aim of getting more women confident about speaking at branches. We are also organising some direct action.
If you can help with Trade Unionists for Choice, either as a speaker or by getting a speaker to your branch meeting please get in touch as soon as possible.
From the Trade Unionists for Choice Statement
As trade union activists and organizations, we want to create a strong labour movement voice in favour of a woman's right to choose — whether to have, or not to have, a child.
We support the Abortion Rights campaign, and will continue to work for trade union affiliations to and funding for it. At the same, we want to establish a network that exists specifically to organise pro-choice activity in the labour movement and from a working-class perspective. We also believe that Abortion Rights as a whole should adopt such a perspective…
The right to choose is an issue for all women, central to the struggle for women's equality and liberation, but it affects working-class women with particular sharpness…
We take inspiration from the British labour movement's history of pro-choice campaigning…
• No reduction in the 24-week time limit for access to abortion;
• The right to abortion on demand, without having to get the consent of a doctor, up to the legal time limit;
• The extension of abortion rights to women in Northern Ireland ;
• Integration of abortion into the NHS as a service that can be performed by trained nurse practitioners;
• An end to privatisation, marketisation and fragmentation in the NHS; increased public funding through taxation of the rich and business to guarantee free and equal access to abortion;
• An end to forced sterilisation
• Publicly-funded access to IVF for all couples, including same sex ones;
• Improved access to and increased choice of publicly-funded contraception;
• Clear, honest, comprehensive and confidential sexuality and relationship education for all children which addresses issues of consent and domestic violence;
• A real right to choose, which also means the right to have a child free from economic and social pressure. This requires a real living wage for all workers, benefits which can be lived on and rise with earnings, universal publicly-funded childcare and an end to the stigmatisation of single mothers.
We will also seek to make solidarity with women, and particularly labour movement women, fighting for abortion rights across the world, from Ireland to Poland, from the US to Iran.
• To get involved, for a full copy of the statement, contact either Rebecca (07971719797) or Laura (07890209479).
