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PETER RAMSEY

PHOTO

ANGELA DAVIS ... at Vancouver public meting Dec. 1.

Access for all crucial
to choice, says Davis

Pro-choice supporters in the United
States face a tough battle to reverse a
U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing
individual states to set their own, often
reactionary, abortion laws. But for
women of colour and those living in pov-
erty, lack of access to abortion has long
been a reality, Angela Davis told a Van-
couver audience Dec. 1.

“And of course here in Canada a sim-
ilar situation prevails: poor women,
women of colour, immigrant women are
much more likely to meet with a tragic
ending as a result of the inaccessibility to
legal abortion,” the renowned civil rights
activist and Communist declared at the
University of B.C.

What both the women’s and pro-
choice movements need are a truly multi-
racial character if the fight against
racism, and class and sex exploitation,
are to end, Davis said in a talk sponsored
by the Congress of Black Women of B.C.

Abortion in the U.S. was effectively
decriminalized in the historic Roe versus
Wade case in 1973, when the USS.
Supreme Court ruled that access to abor-
tion was a constitutional right. But a
reactionary Congressional amendment
two years later effectively banned abor-
tion for poor women and women of
colour, Davis told the sold-out crowd of
more than 400.

The amendment cut off federal funds
for reproductive health clinics, and in
1975 women of colour accounted for 80
per cent of deaths resulting from back-
alley abortions, she noted.

“When ... the Supreme Court ruled
that abortion was an issue ... only
between a woman and her doctor, the
point, the outlying implication, was that
only women who have doctors willing to
do (abortions) have financial right to
abortion.

“If there had been clarity from the
beginning, perhaps the movement itself
would have not only called for the right
to privacy, but would have called for the
right to federally subsidized abortions,”
Davis said.

Davis, author of the definitive book,
Women, Race and Class, and twice vice-
presidential: candidate for the Commu-
nist Party USA, acknowledged that she
was “turned off” by the feminist move-
ment at first.

She recalled that when women in the
U.S. took on the abortion issue in the
mid-Sixties, the leadership was predomi-
nantly white and middle-class, and abor-
tion rights questions were sometimes
framed in an unintentionally racist way.
Among these was the notion that “poor
women have a duty to restrict the size of
their family.”

“The assumption was, having children
causes havoc. Well, having children does
not cause havoc if you have the money,”
Davis said to applause and appreciative
laughter.

Asa professor during the late Sixties at
the Berkeley campus of UCLA, Davis
came under fire from then California
governor Ronald Reagan for her Com-
munist Party membership, and becamea
cause celebre when she was arrested on
trumped-up charges following a fatal
courtroom shoot-out between police and
Black Panther members. A successful
worldwide “Free Angela” campaign was
launched.

Noting the federal abortion bill that
threatens pro-choice rights in Canada,
Davis declared that: ““We have reached a
critical juncture in the fight for women’s
control over their bodies.”

In the U:S., “‘the Bush administration
has clearly made, as its mandate, the aim
of criminalizing abortion, outlawing it
even in cases of rape and incest.”

While making reference to several
U.S. cases of racial and gender discrimi-
nation to back her points, Davis also
pointed to the recent shooting of a black
woman by Toronto police and the police
killing of a Native leader in Winnipeg.

She urged the women’s movement to
examine “the violence that is inflicted on
women who attempt to exercise their
reproductive rights ... and the violence
that erupts from ... racism.”

“The challenge facing the abortion
rights movement in the United States
today, as well as here in Canada, is to
become a truly multi-racial movement,”
Davis asserted.

She called for an international, multi-
racial conference to tackle the problems
of sexist and racist violence.

With files from Roxanne Lee and Peter
Ramsey of The Gleaner, Langara Cam-
pus, Vancouver Community College.

eason's Greetings

from
Marine Workers
and Boilermakers
Industrial Union,

SEASON'S
GREETINGS
and solidarity
to all workers

in B.C.

Season’s Greetings
and peace to all
in the labour movement

International Longshoremen’s
and Warehousemen's Union
Ship and Dock Foremen, Local 514

Secretary-Treasurer
Howie Smith

1st Vice-President
Bob Pickering

President
Doug Sigurdson

Our hope is a
New Year
filled with
peace for all
humankind.

Retail Wholesale Union
Local 580 —

12 « Pacific Tribune, December 18, 1989