New threat to abortion rights
GERMANY provisions of this parafederal parliament and the regional parliaments, political bodies essentially composed of men who are being permitted once again to decide on the fate of women's bodies.
The regional government of Bavaria, by exercising this new political pressure on the federal government, hopes to get its legislation passed before the end of the year, lest the results of the next legislative
WHILST recent months have seen setbacks for hard line ant!-abortionists in
Great Britain (see IV 185) and Belgium
(see IV 188), the right in West Germany is intent on rolling back the already limited access to abortion which women in the
Federal Republic have. The right wing offensive has an added significance because of the impending unification of the West with East Germany, where women have already begun to mobilize in defence of the more progressive abortion legislation introduced by the old neo-Stalinist regime.
ANGELA KLEIN
S
TREIBL, the successor to
Franz Josef Strauss as head of the Bavarian government, has made the cessation of funding for abortions and the suppression of the legal possibility of abortion in cases of social distress a personal goal. So much so that he accuses the government of a lack of political will in pursuing one of the projects most dear to the right before their return to power.
The legislative measures proposed by
CDU deputies to increase the administrative difficulties involved in having an abortion (for example through the separation of the place and time of interview and prescription) have met with the resistance of the FDP (Free Democrats, a liberal party in coalition with the CDU). At the end of 1989, the coalition government ruled out their consideration before the end of the current legislature.
Yet the content of these measures was still too soft in the eyes of the self-styled
"protectors of life" of the CDU/CSU.
Regions governed by these parties have prosecuted abortion-related trials at Memmingen in Bavaria, and now Koblenz in
Rhineland Palatinate.
Roundabout attack on legal provisions
In retrospect, it is obvious that the essential objective of these trials was not to establish whether the law had been broken (for example the carrying out of an abortion outside the framework envisaged by paragraph 218 of the current leg-
14 islation), but rather to empty certain
International Viewpoint #189 • July 16, 1990 graph of their content — some tribunals have had the effrontery to seek to establish after the event if a situation of distress really existed. In reality it is a policy of massive intimidation of women and doctors to dissuade them from making use of their rights. During these two trials, the authorities have seized files containing the names of 10,000 patients; they gathered together hundreds of testimonies of women who have had abortions. They seek to use statistics to prove what in Bavaria; "abortion is no longer limited to certain categories. When 87% are for reasons of distress it is clear that very few abortions take place because of material difficulties". These are the words of Udo Steiner, a professor of public and administrative law at the university of Regensburg, charged by the Bavarian government with lodging a complaint to the supreme constitutional tribunal that the legal framework is not being respected.
When it is known that 200-300,000 women have abortions in West Germany each year, that the number of unemployed has for some years exceeded two million, that the number of women who live alone with their children has grown constantly and that the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany] has, with 13.8% of abortions effected legally, one of the lowest rates in western Europe (Ireland and southern Europe aside, only Holland has a lower rate with 9.7%), the statement that there will no longer be situations of distress in the FRG appears incredible.
Long-term anti-abortion strategy
The Bavarian government's complaint is only a new logical stage of a systematic long term policy which seeks the rolling back of even the timid reform of 1974, and the complete suppression of abortion for social reasons. Beyond even this, it is abortion for medical reasons which is at stake.
The constitutional tribunal reflects the positions of the federal government, the elections should prove unfavourable to it. The detour via the constitutional tribunal, while delaying the process, will ultimately make it easier to deal with those political bodies which might prove obstructive to new attacks on abortion rights (a regional SPD government for example) as in 1975, when the constitutional tribunal declared unconstitutional the introduction of a time limit during which it would have been possible to have a legal abortion, which had been decided by the government with the approval of a majority of political opinion.
Chameleons of East German politics
The recourse to the constitutional tribunal could have another justification for the anti-abortion lobby. A time limit for legally authorized abortion has existed in the GDR [German Democratic Republic] since 1972. Although chameleons like the DSU president, the pastor Ebeling, and the East German CDU wish to roll the tide of history backwards on this point, the women of the East are more and more resolved to defend their social conquests.
In the context of annexation, involving the imposition on the GDR of the whole of the legal apparatus of the FRG, a decision of the tribunal on this question would deprive women of the possibility of establishing by their mobilizations a relationship of forces which could lead to the opposite result - the adoption by the FRG of the more progressive social and legislative measures prevailing in the GDR.
In the FRG a large unitary front has been formed which, on June 16, organized a demonstration for the suppression of clause 218 of the penal code. It is both possible and desirable to organize common actions of women from the FRG and the GDR.
This demonstration found a large echo in the ranks of the trade unions and of the social democracy. The demand for the suppression of paragraphs 218 and 219 has been made central through the united action of the social democratic women (ASF, the organization of women in the SPD) and IG Metall. It won support at the last congress of the SPD in Berlin, in which it was said that "penal proceedings are not an appropriate measure to resolve conflicts linked to pregnancy. That is why we demand that the indispensable lega measures are not linked to repressive measures".
This formulation avoids calling for the pure and simple suppression of 218, which is an old demand of the autonomous women's movement. Its justification is a little tenuous — it is argued that the suppression of the clause would not eliminate the risk of judicial proceedings, for it would still be possible to invoke the clause concerning bodily mutilations. But the women of the ASF do not demand the suppression of this clause. On the other hand the formulation "suppression of the penal code" leaves open the possibility of introducing new legislation on abortion in the civil code. This is precisely what the ASF wants. Abortion must be made legally possible up to the 22nd week and the state must provide the necessary equipment in sufficient quantities. The 22nd week is, for the ASF, the limit when "the foetus can live independently outside the body of the mother. It is the limit of the right of women to decide". The old debate of the 1970s is then manifestly not yet over. But we cannot permit ourselves the sectarianism of those years. It is indisputable that the proposals of the ASF would constitute a great step forward for women. This does not render superfluous the struggle for the total suppression of 218, but makes a common campaign a burning issue of the day.*
GERMANY vote in general elections in the whole of Germany needed to obtain representation in parliament.
That would mean that for the first time for decades a significant compact political force to the left of social democracy and the greens would be present in the German parliament, with the possibility of exercising pressure on both these parties.
This is considered as a source of nuisance if not a risk of political destabilization by the bourgeois parties and the West German SPD. They have started frantic manoeuvres in order to make that possibility more unlikely. They want do whatever possible to order to weaken and even destroy the PDS.
The new McCarthyism THE absorption of the GDR by the FRG, whatever its rhythms and the moment of its finalization, poses several delicate problems for German big business and the bourgeois establishment. One of these, which has until now, received less attention than the monetary, economic and social contradictions which will be accentuated, is the future line-up of political parties in a united Germany. ERNEST MANDEL
T HE FORMER ruling party in the
GDR, the SED (Socialist Unity Party of Germany - the Communist Party), has transformed itself into a new party, the Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS). It is no longer a government party and is the main opposition party in the GDR. In the first free parliamentary elections, it received 16% of the popular vote. In the subsequent municipal elections, it received about 30% of the vote in such working class strongholds as East Berlin, Eisenhüttenstadt (the steel industry town), Schwebin, Neubrandenburg, Rostock and so on.
Public opinion polls also credit it with 2% of the vote in West Germany. If these projections are correct, and if the PDS maintains its mass base in the present territory of the GDR, it would just go beyond the threshold of 5% of the total
One of the manoeuvres they are employing to this end is an attempt to expropriate the PDS. The new, pro- capitalist majority of the GDR parliament through,
(Volkskammer) has pushed without any debate, a law which seizes all the financial holdings of the PDS and puts them under state control, pending an enquiry on their origins.
Funds and politcal opportunities
The argument used for justifying this law is that these funds are ill-gotten, the result of the exploitation of the East German people and a source of basic inequality of opportunity for the various political parties operating inside the GDR and tomorrow in a united Germany.
In the new German context this law is, in fact, a McCarthy-type attack on an organization of the labour movement, and an inadmissible limitation of democratic freedoms.
We have especially to denounce the cynical hypocrisy which lies behind that movement.
Why is money originating from the bureaucracy's power and privileges more tainted and illegitimate than money originating from capitalist wealth, accumulated through the exploitation of the working class, that is, the extraction of surplus value?
In the GDR, there is a massive influx of CDU,
CSU and FDP money, all coming from capitalist subsidies for these parties. Doesn't this upset the "equality of opportunities" between political parties
- especially when the holdings of the main opposition party are being seized?
And what about the cy, originating dom out 15 cy, originating from out-
GERMANY right corruption, not to speak of those originating from the CIA at the beginning of the Cold War with the purpose of splitting the international trade union movement? Walter Reuther, who co-headed the operation, has now publicly admitted this.
So, if we are to apply even a minimum of distributive justice, one would have to seize and investigate the financial holdings of all the German parties. This would make the functioning of all parties practically impossible and would be a big blow against political freedom and democracy as such. Of course, one should be in favour of all concrete measures which would establish and guarantee financial equality of opportunity between all parties but to seize the holdings of the PDS alone is a clear attempt to deliver a blow against that party's chances in a united Germany, if not to try to destroy it.
The fact that, for purely electoral reasons, the SPD is in the forefront of this attack shows how unprincipled that party has become, not only on the basic problems of workers' interests but also on elementary principles of democratic rights and freedoms. Bureaucratic privileges hated by the masses
Undoubtedly, the SPD's demand has a popular echo among the masses of the GDR. The privileges of the SED bureaucracy, seen as a product of exploitation of the toilers, are legitimately hated by these masses. Inasmuch as big cases of individual corruption, theft and so on are they should indeed be the objects of inquiry and, if necessary, prosecution by the courts.
In that respect three remarks should be made which again underline the cynical hypocrisy of the anti-PDS offensive. In the first place, a major part of the financial holdings of the old SED have either been siphoned off by turncoats who are now members of the pro-capitalist parties or are integrating themselves into private firms, or have been privatized or confiscated. Many of the nomenklatura politicians have joined the bourgeois CDU and social democrats. Why are their financial holdings not also put under financial cessor organization of the SED. Not only is it no longer a state/government party, but it is also a party which contains many members who were not members of the SED. It is a party which has ideologically broken with the SED legacy to a large extent. No coherent balance-sheet of
Stalinism
It is true that a minority of the old SED bureaucrats — those who cannot find a place in the power structure of a capitalist Germany — are trying to cling to the PDS as a last resort in order to survive politically and materially
Without a complete and coherent balance-sheet of the roots and nature of Stalinism and of bureaucracy and the way to light them efficiently inside the labor movement, the credibility of the PDS as a new organization cannot be assured.
In the third place, it is not true that the bulk of the holdings of the old SED is still in the hands of the PDS. A considerable part of these holdings have been abandoned, being either in the hands of the state, now run by the CDU/SPD, or in the hands of the CDU/LDP, or already in the hands of the private sector.
But this whole conflict poses a more fundamental question. The SPD's attempt to cash in on the popular hostility to the bureaucracy's privileges by the expropriation of the PDS, is literally suicidal from the point of view of the whole international social democratic current of the labor movement.Historical proven again and again that to encourage McCarthyite reflexes is to unleash a whirlwind which will not stop at the doorstep of your own little comfortable villa.
In Romania some thousands of anticommunist demonstrators have asked that nobody who has ever been an official under the Stalinist regime allowed to stand for elections for ten years. That would force the SPD to dismiss quite a lot of its present representatives in the GDR, to start with the former mayor of Dresden. attacks on the National Union of Mineworkers for having received "tainted money" to finance the minemburg's formula: "Freedom is always the freedom of those who think otherwise." The SPD leadership will only ignore this formula in the GDR today and in the united Germany of tomorrow, at a high price for itself and for the future of democratic freedom in general.
When the McCarthy offensive was unleashed in the USA, first against genuine Stalinists whom we had consistently fought against politically, we pointed out that they were unable to defend themselves in a credible way because they had themselves condoned the political repres sion of our comrades of the SWP [US Socialist Workers Party] during the Second World War.
But in spite of that fact, we defended the Stalinists against the McCarthyite cops, and rightly so, because very soon McCarthyism proved itself to be a machine for the repression of elementary freedom of thought and action of practically everybody outside the extreme rightwing forces.
Solidarity takes precedence over differences
We applied the golden rule of solidarity with all tendencies of the labor movement, regardless of political differences. In the name of that same proud and princi pled tradition, we now call upon all tendencies in the German labor movement and left to unite their forces:
• Against all discrimination with regard to the PDS or any other tendency in the labor movement;
• For the abolition of all discriminatory anti-communist legislation like the law forbidding dissidents to exercise certain professions (Berufsverbote);
• For the abolition of all legislation restricting the right to free unarmed demonstration;
• For unrestricted democratic rights for the entire labor movement. * receivership?
The East German CDU has 4,000 full- timers. Who is paying for them? Aren't
REMIND ME, they also financed by ill-gotten gains?
WHATS ON THE
The present liberal minister of justice
AGENDA?
held the same post under the Honecker dictatorship. As such he was responsible for the persecution and slanderous condemnation of many political dissidents.
The chairman of the PDS, Gregor Gysi, on the other hand, was counsel for the defence of dissidents like Rudolf Bahro.
So to say that the PDS is the only successor organization of the bureaucracy and the CDU/SPD are not is therefore just fac-
16
In fact, the PDS is only partially a suc-
International Viewpoint #189 • July 16, 1990 ers* strike. Already the seizure of union funds has become a widespread practice in that country. But international funding of anti-union and anti-socialist propaganda and activity is entirely legitimate for these hypocrites. Bankers money
"pure"; union money
Don't the SPD leaders see that it is only a question of time before such attempts are made against
In the era of Stalinist repression, together with the SPD, Rosa Lux-
PLANTE