Okay, right, it's 2023 and it's still the case that politicians, judges and whoever still think they've got the right to control our bodies and tell us what to do and to deny us bodily autonomy. And really that means we're almost treated like incubators. And I think that sense of looking at large swathes of America, chunks of Europe, where women and pregnant people are forced to carry an unwanted or perhaps unviable pregnancy to term by law. the dystopian world that we live in today. That's not this might happen, that is what's happening today.
And I think that when we look at it even globally beyond Europe and the US, more than 25 million unsafe abortions occur every year and at least 40,000 people die of those. It's the most preventable way that women die through maternity of some sort. Because we know that bans don't stop abortions, they just make them more dangerous, you know, that's the reality. Abortion is part of everyday life and And it has been part of every human society in history, controlling fertility. Whether it was women in ancient Egypt, they mixed a paste of fermented crocodile shit or honey.
Or women who saw that in antiquity that goats miscarried when they were eating certain grasses. So they would then eat those grasses in order to stimulate an abortion. This is something that's been going on forever.
And the only difference is whether it's legal and whether it's safe. So today I'm going to look at why... is abortion and reproductive rights more widely such a central part of a right-wing agenda and I'm also going to talk specifically about the far right as well because the far right is growing and is having an impact and I think there's another side of that agenda that I want to explore as well because I want to look at how the ideas around reproductive rights fit into a socially conservative worldview about women's role and sexuality but it also fuels a eugenicist racist agenda about building a master race and about encouraging the reproduction by some women while cracking down on the ability of others to give birth. So I think we have to see those two things in tandem really to understand reproductive rights as a whole issue.
Because when you think about where those ideas about building a master race and encouraging some women to reproduce and sterilising others, this was brought to its most murderous and terrible logic in the Holocaust, wasn't it? Six million Jewish people died, murdered in the Holocaust. hundreds of thousands of people sterilized because they weren't seen by the Nazis as being fit to have children that's where the logic takes you but I want to talk about how these ideas are gaining not only a following but our positions of people in in parliaments and in governments are actually putting these forward and I think we start with maybe so why is it I'm asking the question well let's say what it isn't about being against abortion rights is not about religion primarily it's not about caring about babies at all all.
And it's not even about morality. I mean Donald Trump succeeded in the biggest rollback in rights that affects millions of women and pregnant people in America today. He's not a religious man, I'm sure I don't need to share that with you.
He has no morality. This was driven by a purely transactional thing to get votes. But of course the people that oppose our rights use the language of morality and religion in order to try and get across their... of view and I think we have to expose that and challenge it.
So for instance, these people who say they're pro-life, what a lie that is. I mean, number one, the so-called pro-life lobby in America has been responsible for the murder of at least 11 staff in doctors and other staff within clinics, abortion clinics, and the attempted murder of 26 others. In Texas, they even proposed a bill that would have execution for women who had abortions.
abortions. They wanted the death penalty. So, you know, pro-life, I don't believe it.
And in Ireland and in Poland and in other places, women have died because of a ban on abortion. And actually, not because they had to go to the back street, but because they were in a dangerous miscarriage or pregnancy in a hospital and doctors, because of the law, felt they couldn't intervene. That's what happened to Savita Halabanafer and others. So this is, again, abortion bans mean women die.
There's nothing pro-life about it. And also, this... Some people say these reproductive rights, attacking reproductive rights, is about imposing white male supremacy, particularly when they talk about the far right.
This is not a simple gender war. As it happens, many of the leaders of far right organizations across Europe are women. The most famous are Marine Le Pen and Giorgio Meloni in Italy. But the person who led the way and wants to go further in the Supreme Court in America, There is a black man, Clarice Thomas.
So that sense of it being simply a gender war isn't quite enough. And I mean, look at it in Britain. You know, the two, you know, the most leading people that are against reproductive rights and against abortion rights in Britain, well, obviously there is Rhys Mogg, but there is the...
are women Nadine Doris and Maria Caulfield both Tories who are utterly against abortion rights. So we want to say it's more complicated than simply a gender war. It's about politics. It's about policing our class. It's about control.
That's what this is about. And central to all of this, and we've talked about this in previous sessions, is the institution, the family. And this idealized nuclear family is at the center of where the socially conservative ideas come from. And again, we've talked about it today, the role of the family, its ideological economic role it plays.
There are common threads throughout right-wing ideology from mainstream conservatives right through to fascists. This is something that is a common thread. The economic role... role, you know, Isabel and others talked about, this sense of actually, it's meant to be families who look after, you know, all the dependent people, and with as little intervention and support from the state as the state can get away with.
That's what the economic role is. And of course, when we look at the ideological role, it plays with creating those traditional gender roles. I thought it was really interesting the last session, you know, where we talked about the binary gendering that we're brought up to be.
in terms of girls and boys. And I think for women, we are encouraged to see from the youngest age that we are the people who care about everybody else. I always joke about we're the ones who have to notice if everybody's got a cup of tea.
That's our responsibility. That's how you're brought up. And that sense of being a child-bearing carer. And it's revered, isn't it, that this is whatever we do, we could be a leading scientist for NASA. I heard one of them on the radio this morning.
morning but we'd still be asked what about your children who's looking after your children yet they never ask that of you know successful men you know because that's assumed they'll have a wife or a nanny isn't it so that sense of it's still seen as being our key role and you know regardless of the many changes in our lives over many decades and abortion is seen as really the ultimate challenge to this idea of accepting this role in fact it's seen as the ultimate betrayal for a woman that if she has an abortion you are absolutely rejecting what your biological destiny which is to give birth. And you know, funny enough, when I wrote the book Abortion Wars and went round the country doing talks at trade union meetings and socialist meetings and all sorts, you know, what came through was how many people talked about they had an abortion, their child, their sister, their friend had had an abortion, never talked about it. Certainly they'd never talked about it at work, certainly they hadn't talked about it sometimes even with their best friends and family. And that is because even in Britain, where over 200,000 abortions happen every year, it's legal in most cases, that sense of shame and stigma still associated with it is because it's seen as such an utter betrayal of what we are as women. And I think we need to keep that in mind.
It shows the power, really, of this oppressive ideology. And I think, you know, when we talked about the family, and quite rightly, somebody said in the other meeting, but families don't look the same. And of course, it's absolutely right. We don't live in the 1950s, you know. My mum had to leave her job in the Northern Ireland Bank when she got married because married women weren't allowed to work in the bank as a clerk.
You know, you were expected to be looked after. forever onwards by your husband. And that's no longer the case. You do have a sense where women, the majority of adult women work for all of their adult lives and half the workforce are female.
But this dominant idea about the family taking care of themselves, that you're meant to be independent, resilient and everybody in their own nuclear box worrying about their money and their bills and whether they can pay for the electricity or food on the table, that is as important as ever. to force us to take responsibility for every crisis in capitalism you should be looking after your own you can't rely on the state you're scroungers you're feckless you know all the words that are used to denounce people now of course the far-right take those sort of binary ideas about gender and the family to its extremes so men are seen to be the warriors they're meant here they go out there they earn money they hunt you know whatever while women are at home having babies and you know you only have to see the extreme of this in the far right when you go to trad wives on tick tock you know women who wear long flurry dresses and boast about how many white babies that they're bringing into the um into the world you know this is their main aim and i think what this goes to and when i say it's taken to his extreme of the far right but actually feeds right through is an essentialism about um the binary roles and i think this is an important thing to understand is that you know if we're seen as childbearing and caring is our you know main role we're told it is biological we're told it's natural for us that is essentialism, that's essential to being born as a sex as a woman and then for a man you're born as essential something else. I think it's actually something we should challenge this biologically determined binary but for right-wing politicians this is seen as you know anybody who challenges this dominant binary are seen as a threat. So you get the idea that you get far right and right wing politicians across Europe talking about they're against gender ideology.
This is what they've sort of come their overall thing, hasn't it? So therefore LGBT plus people, trans people, people, women who choose not to have many children or no children at all are seen as a threat and are portrayed as such in a way that means that they don't fit in with their family and the essentialism and I do need to say as an aside that actually the dead end of an essentialist view of biological sex is something that's also taken up by some, not all by any means, but some radical feminists who want to deny trans rights. They say not only that if you're born a man you're always a man one thing and they also say being born a man means you are automatically a predator, violent, aggressive, a danger because they see masculinity and being born a man as something that is by definition a threat.
Things that we in the SWP utterly reject that sort of essentialism and certainly stand up for trans rights but I think it shows that we've I've seen that I'm shocked to see it that that some radical feminists who believe you know her anti trans rights who say they're gender critical but actually they find themselves on the same side as the far right. And actually if you find yourselves on the same side as the far right, you're in the wrong place. So that's sort of an aside, but it is part of this idea of us rejecting that biologically determined, the idea of our biology determines what we are. But the other side that I want to examine in this is both ideas about reproduction and racial purity coalesce within right wing ideology and practice. And you see it, I don't know how many people are familiar with the great replacement.
theory. Great, I put it in inverted commas because there's nothing great about it. This is the idea that immigrants are a threat to white populations in every way, not only because they have large families, but they are the aliens and really we need to have native white women having lots of children, so we'll ban abortion and we'll encourage them to have children while actually saying that immigrants are a threat.
But this isn't something new, this is something that goes right back. And I quote a guy called Horatio Storer, the name tells you this is a long time ago, the 1870s in America, when America was being colonized and he was the first person, one of the first people to say we should criminalize abortion because for most of human history abortion wasn't criminalized but he said we should criminalize it because he said that the west, the country's west, North America's west had to be populated by white Americans rather than aliens and he said the responsibility for this lay on women upon whose loins depends the future of our nation so it was up to white women to breed in order for them to be able to dominate North America. Then more recently in 20th century America, 20th century, the ruling class worried that too many middle-class white women were using birth control in Britain but the poor were having lots of children so birth control they said had to be used against poor people and to encourage middle-class white women to have more babies and in Britain they were talked about it was going to weaken the stock that was going to hold up the British Empire if too many poor women had children. In the US there was a ratio, a mathematical calculation that if you wanted to have a sterilization before birth control was really effective at all you couldn't have it unless you'd already had a certain number of babies compared to your age and they had a little calculation for this if you'd produced enough children then you were allowed to have a sterilization if you hadn't, you weren't whereas at the same time, significantly, in the American South black women and African American women find themselves being sterilized often without their knowledge and definitely without their consent, when they went into hospital for other procedures. I mean, absolutely file history.
One of the most famous of these was a civil rights activist you may have heard of, Fanny Lou Hamer. And she spoke of her experience of being a victim of what became called a Mississippi appendectomy. Because it was so common, if somebody went in to have their appendix removed, they would be sterilized if they were a black woman. She said in her local hospital, 60% of the black women who went through there had been sterilized.
Some of them didn't know for years afterwards when they discovered, They couldn't have children. And some doctors'notes were discovered. So therefore, I mean, one author has called this reproductive racism, and I think that's quite a good phrase.
But it's played out today in Hungary, in Poland, in Italy and Greece, where having children is posed as a sort of national obligation, as something that is a public national duty for you to have children, to counter the threat of what's been described by many politicians as a demographic war between... between native Europeans and so-called... immigrants, mainly the immigrants they're worried about are Muslims. And you see this in America, one Republican, and he was a Republican congressman for 20 years, so he's not just somebody on the margins, he said this, he said the US subtracts from its population a million of our babies in the form of abortion. We add to our population approximately 1.8 million of somebody else's babies who are raised in another culture before they get to us.
So that gives you the view, doesn't it? These women are having too many abortions, but these... other people are invading us with their different cultures.
In Hungary, where you see this sort of attacks on gender ideology the most extreme often, Viktor Orbán has said, the leader has said that he wants Hungarian children, not migrants, and he references the great replacement theory, which is basically a far-right fascist theory. He says, if Europe is not going to be populated by Europeans in the future, then we are speaking of an exchange of populations to replace the population of Europeans with others. In Hungary, Hungarian women are offered huge incentives, heterosexual married couples, to have more children. They can get a massive loan, they can buy a big car. Every child they get, money comes off their loan.
If they have four, they never have to pay it back and don't have to pay tax for the rest of their lives. So they're encouraging them, while at the same time Roma families, who are treated the most folly in Hungary, are absolutely given no support and they don't want them to have children at all. But this is reflected in other societies too. In Poland, in Duda's 2020 press conference, presidential election campaign he called lgbtq movement a foreign ideology you know this idea that has been brought into the country by others and now the far right government offers financial incentives to polish heterosexual couples who have children in what the prime minister admits is a revolutionary socio-demographic project so this is birth control from the top not birth control for people trying to control their bodies but actually saying that we're trying to control the population so on the one hand poland has got an absolute ban on abortions in almost every case but at the same time they're trying to give money to encourage people to have babies and this is what he says in Germany billions of euros are spent on support for immigrants but here billions of zlotys are spent on Polish families so you know they're making it clear they're not hiding from us what their you know agenda is our bodies are in the middle of this in terms of being tools for them to control the population again in France just two more examples a national rally member spoke to the impending death of the identity entity of French people due to migrationary submersion and the replacement of people in the city of Marseille because of so much immigration and large immigrant families. And in Italy, whole regions, whole cities, you cannot get an abortion.
They call them pro-life cities, even though it's legal and has been since 1978. But that sense of, and then also, you know, Salvini, the previous prime minister, he talked about a demographic winter and referred to Europe's crisis of empty cribs. While at the same time, of course, we know that the racism that comes from, and now we've got Giorgio Maloney who is from a fascist organisation who's against abortion and against giving support to immigrant families. So those are the extremes of it.
And of course in this country, let's just, as an aside again, let's remember, this isn't unique just to far-right governments in parts of Europe or into Trump's America or what's left of Trump's America. Here in Britain, we have politicians who do talk about the invasion, don't they? Sveta Braviman talks about the invasion of others, of aliens. And also, I don't know know how many people are aware that in terms of benefits here, if you rely on welfare benefits, if you have more than two children, you do not get child tax credits for children above that. There's a two-child rule.
That in itself is population control. It's saying we don't care about the kids if they haven't got enough money, but if you're poor, you're not allowed to have more than two kids because we're not going to support you. But if you are re-smogged, you can have six and who cares because you're rich and we're not going to dictate what you should do.
So conclusion. What do we do about this? How do we resist this?
And I think, you know, when we look at what's going on in Britain today and what's going on in other countries when we see strikes in France and elsewhere, the organised working class in Britain has been the backbone of fighting and defending abortion rights. It was already being mentioned about the fantastic demonstration in 1979 organised by the TUC to defend the 1967 abortion act. I was on the demo.
It was fantastic to see male trade unions, sometimes from unions that had no women in them, but out there fighting and marching. Why? Because it was working class women who died in the back street before the Act came in in 67. The wards, emergency wards in London and other big cities failed on a Friday night when women got paid.
They went to a back street abortionist, ended up in difficulty and women died in those wards. And that was what they didn't want to go back. There was no going back. That's why for us in the SWP we talk about abortion being a trade union issue.
Not just in the SWP, in abortion rights we say it's a trade union issue. It's a class issue because the rich have always been... been able to get the best available. ...abortion, but for everybody else it's very, very different. And I think when we talk about the collective strength that we need to mobilise to fight for these rights, well, we've seen that it's there, haven't we?
If I was doing this meeting a year ago, it would have been slightly more abstract. I'd say workers can make a difference. have got the power to do this. But actually today, we've seen it in real life, haven't we? We've seen how the trains don't go, what happens in the hospitals, what happens in schools.
You know, all the kids are running around in the street the other day when the London teachers were on strike. You know, workers have to be able to do it. have immense power, immense power. And that's why, you know, in Britain today, there's still a criminal law that underpins abortion law, which we in abortion rights and we in the SNP and socialists have said we should get rid of that.
And that's something that I'm very, very proud of our tradition in that struggle, because I think that sense of understanding how the right to control our bodies is a fundamental part of being, to be honest, to being part of the struggle for a better society, let alone what a better society should look like. And I think one thing that just, my final point is this, one thing that the last year has shown us is change is not linear, that ever onwards and upwards and excellently we're going to get a better society. Because they had abortion rights for 50 years in America, lots of limitations, lots of issues, but they had abortion rights, and then it was snatched away.
And in a moment, women and pregnant people were being turned away from abortion clinics. You know, so reforms, we want to fight for them because they make a difference in our day-to-day lives. Absolutely they do.
Absolutely. But at the end of the day, do we want to keep coming back year after year for every new expression or incarnation of the far right or the right? Every new attack on why we should be having more babies or why we're not allowed to have babies? You know, that sense of we want to do more than just fight in the here and now. We do that, but also we do it with a vision of something very, very different.
And what we say is that actually women's oppression is not some inevitable product of our biology. It is a product of the way society is organized, but in particular around who lives. looks after the next generation and other dependents.
And therefore we want to build struggles and an organisation that can transform the world to bring permanent change, that can change the world that actually from which women's oppression and these divisions has flowed. And that's what our vision is in the SWP of a social society. And so for us, fighting for abortion rights, fighting for our reproductive rights is an absolutely central and essential part of that struggle for a better society.