Step forward in fight for abortion rights
SWEDEN / BELGIUM ly less than 13,000 members. Over a longer period the party's social composition has changed — it is now dominated by high salary white collar groups in the public sector, and has virtually no base in the factories. The party's paper is suffering a grave financial and political crisis.
Against this background the VPK held its congress from May 23 to 26. As the result of a meeting held earlier this spring
THE framing of the new abortion law in Belgium caught the with representatives of the VPK, the SP attention of the world's media when the king refused to sign it.
the Workers' List and independent trade unionists, the party leadership proposed
After getting a majority in the Senate, the law was passed with that the congress support an electoral alli-
61% support in the Chamber of Deputies. After a short delay ance. The proposal also had the purpose the law came into force on April 3, 1990. This is the first time of achieving a compromise within the
VPK between the "renewers" who want that the 1876 abortion law, which is based on the French penal to change the party's name, omitting the code of 1810 and which absolutely forbids abortion, has been
"K" for communist, and who in general amended - and in a fundamental fashion.
want to accelerate the rightward turn of who want to keep the "K" either because they do not want to cut links with
Stalinism or because they oppose social democratization.
This proposal was, however, sacrificed at the congress in order to preserve party unity. The VPK chairperson, Lars Werner, in his opening speech decided to back down on the leadership compromise and opt for a more rapid "renewal" changing the party's name. With the support of a minority of the congress (136 for, 133 against with 4 abstentions) the party decided to follow his line and took the name "The Left Party".
And, in the process, the idea of seeking broader alliances and electoral unions was dropped and forgotten. After the congress leading VPK members — who however did nothing during the congress — are trying to minimize the importance of that decision and are not ruling out an electoral alliance.
Common left front difficult to achieve
This decision, as well as the decision of the Workers' List, will make it more difficult for all those who would like to see common action on the left in the coming period. It is a fact that broad mass activity has been held back during the last years not out of satisfaction with the policies being pursued, but because there has been a total lack of positive examples of class struggle and because of the lack of real, credible alternatives to social democracy.
Today we can see a small upsurge in the struggles, but there is still an imperative need to strengthen all forms and forums of unity - a task that is going to be central to the Socialist Party in the coming period.
It is a task that must be undertaken, whether within the framework of the Dala rebellion, in united action against racist attacks on refugee homes, in coordinated campaigns against entering the Common
• Market or in continuing the fight for a
16 united left slate in the elections. *
International Viewpoint #188 • July 2, 1990
IDA DEQUEEKER
W OMEN decide: Accord-
Wing to the new law, women can legally obtain an abortion up to 12 weeks after conception if they find themselves in a situation of distress. All they have to do is inform a doctor of their situation, which they define for themselves. The abortion must be carried out by a doctor in a medical institution. This means that in practise it is the woman who decides whether or not to have an abortion. This is all the more true in that a network of abortion clinics already exists where abortion is carried out according to these principles. Abortions that are carried out without reference to these regulations remain an offence, except in cases where the health of the woman is seriously endangered or the foetus has an incurable disease.
This partial, but important decriminalization of abortion is without doubt a belated - and therefore unacknowledged - recognition of 20 years of actions by the women's movement and the left. At the same time it is the result of the development of the political relation of forces, and the decline in the power of the Christian party, the CVP, which has historically tried to reconcile the different social classes in Belgium and has been the main political instrument of the Belgian bourgeoisie. A parliamentary breakthrough: The text of the new law is dated 1985, when a proposed liberal/socialist law was presented to the Senate. Despite the fact that at the time the government was a liberal/ democrat/Christian coalition, the proposal got onto the parliamentary agenda. Previously, even much less radical proposals had not got this far. The CVP always managed to block any debate, forbidding any questioning of the ideological basis of the Christian workers' allegiance to the CVP
Why was there this breakthrough in 1985? This is a long story. While in 1973 a doctor from Liege, Dr. Peers, spent 33 days in preventative detention for openly stating that he carried out abortions at the request of the women concerned, by the end of the 1970s such a thing could no longer happen. Several university clinics were openly carrying out abortions, and there are abortion centres in Wallonia [French speaking Belgium] and Brussels. Another centre was opened in Gand in Flanders in 1980.
In other words for some years the law has been openly flouted. Starting in 1974, against a background of big mobilizations on the abortion issue, a series of Belgian governments, always including the Christian Democrats, tried to avoid confronting this explosive question. In 1974, abortion was referred to an "Ethical Commission" which came up with a split verdict - 13 for a change in the law, 12 against. Several attempts by the Liberals to introduce into parliament slight changes in the law ran up against the opposition of the CVP.
For a whole period the courts, while waiting for the law to change, had adopt-
ed a tolerant attitude to the developing pro-abortion network. However, in 19823 judicial attacks recommenced. These attacks were arbitrary, introducing a situation where rights were not secure. In 1985 there was a monster trial of 52 helpers and patients in the abortion centre in Gand. Marijke Colle, a member of the Belgian Socialist Workers Party (POS/ SAP - Belgian section of the Fourth International) was among the accused, as president of the centre. Nonetheless, a survey found that in 1985, Belgian citizens underwent 15,940 abortions, of which some 5,000 were carried out in the Netherlands and the rest in Belgium
Thus, even from the point of view of a bourgeois democratic state, an intolerable situation was developing. Nonetheless, the CVP maintained its totally uncompromising attitude, while from the other side the notion of a minimal compromise became increasingly less acceptable under the pressure of the way that the real situation was developing.
This polarization was the background to the liberal/socialist alternative that was to form the basis of the new law with the support of the Greens. This alternative had the merit of corresponding to the practise of abortion as it really existed, which was felt by much of the population to be a gain, as well as matching the conceptions of an important part of the population. Furthermore the bill had a good chance of getting passed given the electoral decline of the CVP. At the same time the CVP, the eternal party of government and the incarnation of the austerity policy, was facing a growing degree of autonomy on the part of the Christian workers' movement. On top of this, since the 1987 reform of the state, the CVP, the majority party overall, has had to confront the Socialist Party (PS) which is the majority party in Wallonia.
With its traditional "nyet" against any movement on the abortion question, the CVP ended up clearly in a minority, supported only by the extreme efforts to use the advice of the State Council to block the liberal/socialist proposal, or to arrive at a more moderate consensus, ended in failure. This left the CVP in a cleft stick, expressed in contradictions within its own ranks. One position, put across by the prime minister Martens, concerned with the stability of the government, supported a "realistic" approach, another, represented by the party president Van Rompuy, upheld ideological purity.
The fundamentalists, who had threatened to bring down the government if the law was adopted, had in the end to bend to the realists, after a further effort to find a compromise - permitting abortion in cases where the health of the woman was in danger and in cases of rape or incest -came to nothing. Even the declaration with which the CVP tried to console itself
- pointing to its majority position in
Flanders — vanished into thin air after the vote, when it turned out that a majority of the Flemish deputies had voted for
The king: With hindsight we can perhaps identify another reason why the CVP maintained its rigid attitude for so long. The court made it known in a discreet fashion that the very Catholic king was opposed to the proposal. But in vain. When the law was passed, the king renounced his constitutional duties. He refused to sign the law, referring to insurmountable problems of conscience.
Was this just a caprice of the "melancholic" king? No. In the Belgian political growing centrifuexpressed by the State reform, the on, we have to king - the symbol of, and a factor in, the unity of the country -as a conscious attempt to intervene in an authoritarian fashion, using problems of conscience as a pretext. The parliament unanimously let the king off, recognizing his temporary inability to govern. Thus as the ministers signed the law in his place, the king could address the nation as its just and principled father. Some 55% of the citizens were found to "understand" this attitude. Could this be a precedent allowing in other circumstances a royal intervention from above the parliamentary melée? All the parties, including the socialists and the Greens, covered up this intervention by the king — who according to the constitution, as king, does not have the right to freely express his political opinions — with moralizing about the king, as a human being, having the right to a personal conscience. Socialists: Throughout the whole history of abortion legislation in Belgium, the Socialists have not shown much initia-
BELGIUM tive, either inside or outside parliament. A Socialist bill introduced in 1974 to change the abortion law while taking into account the sensibilities of the CVP, had the merit, together with the first public statements by doctors, of launching the public debate on abortion.
But even in those days the new women's movement, as well as a part of the traditional women's movement, found the proposals unsatisfactory. They wanted the recognition of a woman's right to choose. It was only in 1978, after the big mobilizations by women in the 1970s around the slogan "abortion out of the penal code, let the woman decide" that the Socialists put forward a bill to decriminalize abortion. The women's movement and the revolutionary left supported this proposal. But the SP itself did not mobilize: there was no attempt to arouse a broad social movement to support the bill and no policy was developed towards the Christian workers' movement - for example demanding that it would, for democratic reasons, not place obstacles in the way of a parliamentary vote. The party hid behind the fact that there was not at the time a majority in parliament for the proposal. Having more or less regilded its banner, the SP put the abortion question off indefinitely.
When now at last a satisfactory change in the law no longer appears ruled out in the parliamentary arena, the Socialist parties, who have just re-entered the government are doing everything to limit extra-parliamentary actions of support, which they cannot control. The argument is that we must not upset the delicate balance in the parliament and government. The Greens think in the same way, from fear of negative electoral repercussions. The women's movement and the left: But nothing can change the fact that the parliamentary victory was preceded by 20 years of extra-parliamentary action in which the women's movement and the revolutionary left were the irreplaceable driving force. They played this role in the big united mobilizations of the 70s (abortion out of the penal code); the abortion committees and their constant struggle for a broad united front; the actions to raise awareness such as the national women's day in 1976 around the theme "abortion, let the woman decide"; the foundation of the illegal abortion centres, which work according to the principle of a woman's choice; and the mobilizations against the trials of patients and helpers at abortion
All this activity produced the profound change in people's thinking which created the conditions under which women can with dignity demand a fundamental democratic right that has been so long denied them by the patriarchal ideology of the family — the right to control their own his activity allowed abortion to be 12 ooked al ratonally. Thus, the existenc July 2, 1990 • #188 International Viewpoint
Peace is still a long way off
BELGIUM / EL SALVADOR of means of having an abortion has not increased the number of abortions. On the contrary. The number of abortions in Belgium varied between 18,000 and 34,000 between 1968-1972 but was 13,000 to 15,000 per year in 1978 to 1982. The ending on the ban on distribution of contraceptives in 1973 seems to have led rapidly
INTRODUCTION to their generalized use. In Flanders at the start of the 80s, three out of ten pregnan-
THE FIRST YEAR of the government of the extreme right National cies were unwanted. Some half of these
Republican Alliance (ARENA) of President Cristiani reveals a bloody pregnancies were voluntarily terminated.
balance sheet - 3,285 deaths, 2,074 detainees and 249
The evolution in social attitudes has surely also had its impact in the Christian disappearances. According to the Salvadoran Human Rights milieu.
Commission, the armed forces were responsible for 2,868 murders.
Only this can explain the silence of a
The electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua has impelled whole series of Christian base organizathe Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FLN) to give tions when the CVP stated its positions on the recent legal changes. The Bishops' serious consideration to the question of negotiations. It has rejection of the new law has also had no succeeded in imposing the mediation of the United Nations on the impact on the population, who have for a
Salvadoran government, which implies an international recognition long time been putting the new law into of the Salvadoran conflict and above all of the belligerent role of the practice.
FMLN. In these negotiations, the FMLN is demanding early elections
Ideology: The separation of the parliaand, drawing on the experience of Nicaragua, that certain conditions mentary and extra-parliamentary fields of are met for its participation in the political life of the country - action, the fruit of the Socialists' efforts, above all, it is demanding the purging of the army.
has had a negative effect on the terms of
But the FMLN, as always, is maintaining its military pressure; thus the debate. The keystone of the new law is the right of the woman to decide — her
It attacked the residence of President Cristiani on the same day as right to self-determination. The supportthe discussions opened in Geneva, and it subsequently launched a ers of the new law restricted this idea in broad offensive in the mountainous region of Morazan. It has shown liberal terms of "personal liberty", that is the Salvadoran government and masses that it has maintained its as a conflict of interests between woman military capacity and that it has not abandoned its revolutionary and embryo, a conflict of values between the right of the woman to dispose of her objectives, belying those who sought evidence of capitulation in its own body and the "right to life". This participation in the negotiations.
leaves open a space for the right to step
The imposing demonstration in San Salvador on the anniversary of forward as the defenders of the rights of the death of Monsignor Romero - murdered by death squads linked the unborn child, weak and defenceless.
to ARENA in 1980 — proved that, despite repression and a decade of
This approach also skirts round the issue of the problems of maternity under capiwar, the capacity for mobilization of the revolutionary forces talism, tied to the specific oppression of remains solid. These factors are decisive in the negotiations women within the family. The right to presently underway. We reproduce below extracts from an interview abortion implies both the right to refuse conducted by Radio Venceremos with commandante Ana maternity in general and to reject specific oppressive form of maternity. This latter