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For Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution

Free Abortion on Demand!
Ecuador: Populist President Correa Attacks Women’s Right to Abortion
 For Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
There is an onslaught against women’s right to abortion underway, extending from the U.S. to Central and South America. This is notably the case in Nicaragua, El Salvador and now Ecuador, all three countries under supposedly leftist governments. Ecuador’s president Rafael Correa, a bourgeois populist who came to office in 2007, recently let loose a tirade to squelch any talk of reform on abortion. He thundered, accusing women legislators of his own party of “disloyalty” and “treason” for daring to the minimal reform of permitting abortion in cases of rape. Correa’s tirade was immediately saluted by some of the most reactionary anti-women forces. This onslaught against women’s rights reflected the increasingly authoritarian character of Correa’s presidency, in which all manner of left-wing dissent is subjected to state repression. Against the unholy alliance of right and populist “left” against women’s rights, the League for the Fourth International call for the repeal of all laws penalizing or restricting abortion, and fight for free abortion on demand, in safe, high-quality medical facilities. Ecuador: Populist President Correa Attacks Women’s Right to Abortion (December 2013)

The Fight to Save Beatriz’s Life
Down with El Salvador’s Abortion Ban!
For the last month and a half there has been a mounting cry to allow a young woman from El Salvador, Beatriz, to receive an abortion that would save her life. But although she suffers from lupus and kidney disease, and the fetus lacked a brain and could not survive outside the womb, the Salvadoran Supreme Court refused a petition to allow doctors to perform a therapeutic abortion. On the contrary it ruled that under no circumstances could the woman’s life take precedence over the fetus. Due to the outcry over the case, she was finally able to terminate the life-threatening pregnancy with a Caesarean section. But the struggle against the murderous abortion ban continues, as women in El Salvador are jailed for up to 30-40 years for abortions, or simply miscarriages, which are labeled aggravated murder. The right to abortion is a democratic right, but also a class demand since the bans affect poor and working women in particular. The Internationalist Group calls for free abortion on demand, and puts forward a working-class program for women's liberation through socialist revolution. Down with El Salvador’s Abortion Ban! (6 June 2013) 
Protest in NYC Against Abortion Ban in El Salvador (6 June 2013)
Obama/Democrats’ Conciliation Emboldens Reactionaries
Assassination of Courageous Doctor in Wichita:
War on Abortion Rights Escalates
Mobilize to Defend the Clinics!
Abolish All Restrictions – For Free Abortion on Demand!
The vile murder of the courageous abortion doctor George Tiller marks an escalation of the war on women’s right to abortion. The constitutional protection hangs by a thread – a single vote in the Supreme Court. The “god squads” are in a frenzy, harassing women patients and abortion providers at the clinics. The reaction of the bourgeois feminists has been to look to the Democratic Party and the government of Barack Obama in the White House. Yet the Democrats are not allies but enemies of women’s rights. Obama opposes the late-term abortions that Dr. Tiller provided while seeking “common ground” with the Bible-thumping bigots who harbor the abortion doctor killers. And the police, from local cops to the FBI, give a free pass to the assassins, whom they know well. Assassination in Wichita  – War on Abortion Rights Escalates  (11 June 2009)


Outrage! Teenager Prosecuted for “Procuring a Miscarriage”
Defend Amber Abreu – Drop All the Charges!
State Wants to Charge Her with Murder for Attempted Abortion
 Last month, Amber Abreu went to the hospital in Lawrence, Massachusetts after trying to terminate a pregnancy by taking a drug, misoprostol, that is a key component of the abortion pill RU-486. Now the state has charged her, using an archaic law dating back to the 1840s, with “procuring a miscarriage.” Amber, a recent immigrant from the Dominican Republic, faces seven years in jail on this outrageous charge. But the state wants to go even further and charge her with homicide, for which she could face a sentence of life behind bars. The whole prosecution is an obscene miscarriage of justice. But where is the national outcry over the hideous persecution of this 18-year-old immigrant who symbolizes the plight of young women, often terribly alone, who face desperate decisions that can ruin their lives. The “mainstream” (bourgeois) feminists haven’t exactly rushed to highlight her case. They are following the example of Democrat Hillary Clinton, who wants to find “common ground” with anti-abortion forces. The persecution of Amber Abreu underscores how the oppression of women is deeply embedded in the structure of capitalist society. Trotskyists call for free abortion on demand, and for women’s liberation through socialist revolution.   Defend Amber Abreu – Drop All the Charges!  (22 February 2007)

Women’s Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!
On International Women’s Day 2002, in the midst of the terrorist “war against terrorism” launched by U.S. imperialism and its NATO allies, women around the world are under attack. U.S. war propagandists use the hideous oppression of women under the Islamic-fundamentalist Taliban regime to justify the Pentagon’s indiscriminate bombing which has killed more than 4,000 civilians in Afghanistan. Yet the Islamic-fundamentalist regime installed by Washington and led by the same bloody warlords who were the CIA’s terrorist “holy warriors” against the Soviet-backed Kabul government in the 1980s continues to violently enforce the oppression of women. Women's Liberation Through Socialist Revolution!   (8 March 2002) 

Nigerian Woman Sentenced to Death for “Adultery” 
Stop the Execution of Safiya Hussain,  Free Her Now!
Over the last several years, the discontent of the impoverished masses of Nigeria, Africa’s largest country is being diverted into religious and ethnic strife, provoking riots that have left hundreds dead since last September. In the midst of the communal bloodletting, last October a 35-year-old nursing mother, Safiya Hussain, was sentenced by an Islamic court in the state of Sokoto to death by stoning for the supposed “crime” of adultery. The only proof against Safiya is that she is unmarried and pregnant. In Nigeria the court which decreed the death of Safiya Hussain did so on the basis of the Sharia, the medieval Islamic legal code. In the U.S., the racist death penalty in the U.S. is legal lynching, and is in fact a product of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Reactionary Islamic family codes in Africa and murderous attacks on abortion providers by Christian fundamentalists in the U.S. will only be abolished through international socialist revolution. Stop the Execution of Safiya Hussain!   (8 March 2002) 

From the Anti-Soviet War Drive to Today
U.S. Sponsors Enslavers of Afghan Women
No to the Veil – Women’s Liberation Through International Socialist Revolution!
For the last quarter century, the status of women has been at the forefront of war in Afghanistan. Today, liberals and bourgeois feminists use the vicious oppression of Afghan woman by the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban as a justification for Bush’s terror-bombing of Kabul. Yet the Taliban took power in 1996 with the approval of the U.S. Washington's current allies of the “Northern Alliance” are the same Afghan warlords who during the second anti-Soviet Cold War II were financed, armed, trained and paid by the CIA to wage counterrevolutionary terror in the cause of anti-Communism, Islamic fundamentalism and maintaining the enslavement of women. Not only the feudalist patriarchs on both sides in Afghanistan but their imperialist sponsors who claim to be defending “civilization” are enemies of women. The Internationalist Group and League for the Fourth International defend Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in the 1980s, stand today for defense of Afghanistan and defeat of the imperialist attack, and fight for the liberation of Afghan women through socialist revolution throughout Central and South Asia. U.S. sponsors the enslavers of Afghan women  (25 October 2001) 

For a Class-Struggle Fight to Unionize the Maquiladoras!
Mexico: Women Workers Battle Gun Thugs
The demise of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime, formally certified in the elections of 2 July 2000, raised hopes in various sectors, including layers of the working class. For more than half a century, the PRI’s domination was based on iron-fisted control of the proletariat by its corporatist “union” apparatus. Many workers in the maquiladoras thought that the defeat of the PRI meant that – finally! – they could throw off the dead hand of the corporatist apparatus which condemned them to poverty wages. Yet this has not changed up to this point. Thus the stage has been set for an upsurge of fierce, and possibly bloody, struggles. Of all the current conflicts, the most dramatic is the struggle of the workers at the Duro Bag Manufacturing Company in Río Bravo, in the border state of Tamaulipas. Mexico: Women Workers Battle Gun Thugs (May 2001) 


To contact the League for the Fourth International or its sections, send an e-mail to: internationalistgroup@msn.com 

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