N THE days leading up to the march the media had reported that both pro-choice demonstrators and "pro-life" counter-demonstrators would be present in Washington. But any representatives of the rightwing, anti-abortion crowd were few and far between, and they were clearly overwhelmed
The rally featured dozens of speakers, including Patricia Ireland, NOW president. Present at the march, but specifically not invited to speak at the rally were Democratic Party presidential candidates Bill Clinton, Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas.
The immense turnout for this action is an indication of the outrage felt by millions of women. The attempt to roll back gains women won in the 1960s and 70s is not limited to reproductive freedom, but includes such questions as the lack of pay equity for women workers, access to education and jobs, sexual harassment, abuse and discrimination in all walks of life, and access to affordable health and child
IRELAND / USA most basic civil rights to Irish women. If European governments think that this is good enough for Irish women the same view could spread across Europe.
The campaign can be contacted at:
Repeal the 8th Amendment Campaign, P.O. Box 3441, Dublin 8.
Messages of support are welcome also to a public meeting in the Mansion House, Dublin on April 29th. * tend proch care.
Currently the women's movement is facing several specific threats to abortion rights, the greatest one being the possibility that the Supreme Court will overturn the Roe v. Wade decision which legalized abortion. Already, safe and affordable access to abortion has been severely restricted and in many cases it is impossible for women receiving medical care sponsored by the government to find. This includes women in the military, Nati)
ve American women who live on the reservations and poor women who depend on the federal Medicaid program. Restrictions have also been implemented in some states requiring that young women notify their parents before having an abortion, that married women notify their spouses and that clinics provide "counselling" — designed to discourage a choice for abortion - to prospective patients prior to the procedure. Clinics prevented from giving advice
In one of the most outrageous acts, federally funded family-planning clinics have been "gagged", with staff under legal compulsion not to inform women that abortion is available as one of their options. The Supreme Court recently upheld the constitutionality of this federal regulation. Speaking at the rally, Patricia Ireland said that "44 million women in the US have already effectively lost the right to choose"
Belief that reproductive choice is a fundamental right for all women, not just for a privileged few, remains strong in the US women's movement. This theme was reiterated by many speakers at the rally.
Young women who grew up after the
Roe v. Wade decision are especially vulnerable to the government-sponsored campaign of restricting abortion. The president of Planned Parenthood pointed out that before Roe over one million abortions were performed in the US each year, and the result was that women died "Most often the victims were women of color and poor women", he said.
Others also reiterated the pre-Roe horrors of backalley abortions, the tremendous toll on women's lives before abortion was legalized. Still others spoke of what Roe represented in terms of the culmination of years of organizing and mobilizing efforts by women to demand the right to a legal, safe and affordable abortion - and the need to keep the momentum going in order to safeguard those reproductive rights still intact and to win back those that have been taken away.
Many speakers urged rally participants to view this march as a stepping-off point in terms of organizing outreach across the country to protect abortion rights. Some urged support for the the "Freedom of Choice Act" presently before the US Congress. And there was, of course, widespread talk about electing pro-choice candidates to Congress and Senate in the November elections.
Unfortunately there was little clarity about what it means to really be a pro-choice candidate. Patricia Ireland felt constrained to point out that the current Congress is allegedly already pro-choice. But in fact Congress has been complicit in the Reagan-Bush campaign to undermine abortion rights over the last ten years. It helped confirm Bush's last two nominations of anti-women's rights and anti-abortion candidates to the Supreme Court, while failing to pass the Freedom of Choice Act — although it was introduced in 1989 - and making no concerted effort to stand up to Bush's threatened veto of pro-choice legislation.
Clearly, the women's movement does not need any more friends like those it supposedly has in government right now. Rather it needs to push ahead with independent political action. Feminism in the mainstream
This march and rally clearly showed that the government's attempts at restricting abortion and not going to be met quietly or without a challenge. The outpouring of women and men, young and old, of all religious racial and ethnic backgrounds on April 5 directly contradicts the media's portrayal of the marginalization of the women's movement. It shows how false are the assertions that the goals of feminism are out of touch 1 3 with "mainstream" America. *
TURKEY / KURDISTAN The Spring syndrome "FOR Turkey to recognize the Kurdish reality — and this is what it has done - is the most important event of the year", declared Turkey's prime minister Suliman Demirel to the Milliyet newspaper on December 9, 1991. Despite such declarations and the promises made by the Turkish government, which had authorized the celebration of the Kurdish New Year ("Newroz"), on condition "that the law be respected" and despite Demirel's instructions to the forces of law and order to "not intervene unless public order is threatened", the army fired on demonstrators. The Newroz was drowned in a bloodbath, with a hundred killed, hundreds of arrests and a curfew in several Kurdish towns in Turkey. This outcome was predictable. Earlier this year the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) announced an uprising for the Spring (see the interview with its leader Abdullah Ocalan on p. 16), while the state had threatened a "Spring operation" to wipe caused great public indignation, all the more so in that the PKK leader, "Apo" had threatened such actions as reprisals. Certainly the fire and the deaths went beyond what the militants intended, but Kurdish nationalist circles seemed inclined to defend these kinds of action as a reply to state terrorism in Kurdistan.