Bodies as a site of class struggle?

You don't even have to look at US for where this is imported from. Precious Life have been doing this in NI at family planning and advice centres for as long as I can remember, and of course NI is the only part of the UK that isn't covered by the 1967 Abortion Act.

My gut reaction is that there are likely to be more attacks on womens' freedom as times get worse. For various reasons, one reason is trying to reimpose traditional roles to use women as free labour to make up for cutting the welfare state. Another is to get people to focus their anger at what is happening away from the ruling class, so encouraging men who lose their jobs to blame women rather than their employers.

I don't know for sure, but i don't think that there has been a major change in public attitudes to abortion in recent years (ie. most people think that something around the current law is about right.)

What i think is happening is that there has been a renewed energy and confidence within the anti-abortion movement linked to the efforts of people like Nadine Dorris, who are connected to the US anti-abortion movement and want to import its approach to the UK.

Thomas Frank's What's the matter with Kansas? suggests that this has been part of a "culture wars" strategy which encourages sections of the working class to focus on cultural issues whilst neo liberal policies are undermining their economic postion. Part of this is a focus on "the tradtional family" which says that men should/will regain their patriarchal authority over women and children.

fatbongo

Thomas Frank's What's the matter with Kansas? suggests that this has been part of a "culture wars" strategy which encourages sections of the working class to focus on cultural issues whilst neo liberal policies are undermining their economic postion. Part of this is a focus on "the tradtional family" which says that men should/will regain their patriarchal authority over women and children.

I see the logic in transferring the debate within an election from what will be done to arguments about 'values' makes things more manageable. It entrenches the public and removes what little element of choice and accountability this system had to begin with.
I don't really know if this is a discourse that has been imposed, for example when Blair started talking about abortion and the Tories were going on about late-term abortions it seemed to me like an attempt to impose a discourse that most people didn't care about. That said evangelical churches in the UK are growing and I don't really know that much about their members or their politics aside from the fact that these churches seem to be economic con jobs for the most part.

Interesting stuff Joseph. It seems to me that our labor power is within our bodies. Sometimes in doing stuff for work we gain new abilities but for the most part work lessens our abilities (tiring us out, breaking us down) and it always places limits on us, because we can't do other things with our time and ability. So I think that yeah the body as a site of class struggle. And this extends beyond waged work in lots of ways, as you get into. That said, I think that the political attacks you're talking about do have stakes for the class struggle but the attacks may be a kind of class struggle/effort at restructuring class relations which is not consciously motivated that way. What I mean is, the functional role of all this in capitalism and the understanding of the people involved may be very different. Know what I mean?

Also, your post reminded me of this quote from Sergio Bologna -
"our analysis of these structural factors will be ineffective unless we can combine it with an analysis of the huge transformation taking place in the sphere of "personal life". This obviously starts from the breakdown of sexual relations brought on by feminism. It then widens to involve all the problems of controlling one's own body and the structures of perceptions, emotions and desires. This is not just a problem of "youth culture". It has working-class antecedents in the cycle of struggles of 1968-69. The defence of one's own physical integrity against being slaughtered by line-speeds and machinery, against being poinsoned by the environment etc, on the one hand is a way of resisting the depreciation of the exchange value of one's labour-power and the deterioration of its use value, but at the same time it is a way of re-appropriating one's own body, for the free enjoyment of bodily needs. Here too there is a homogeneity, not a separation, between the behaviour of the young people, the women and the workers.

The question of drugs now arises. Control of drug usage is being reappropriated by the institutions of the political cycle. No sooner have young people had a taste of soft drugs, giving them a first-hand taste of how much this society has robbed them of their perceptive potential, than the heroin multinational decides to step in and impose hard drugs. A space of political confrontation opens up, between use value (self-managed, within certain limits) and exchange value of drugs, and this involves organisation and instances of armed self-defence."
http://libcom.org/library/tribe-of-moles-sergio-bologna

I’m minded to say that the reimposition of a ‘traditional’ role of women as male-owned baby-making machines is part of the class struggle, and part of the current ruling class offensive against historic working class gains.

I read this shortly before hearing about the Arizona Health Bill, which allows employers who provide health insurance to demand proof that the birth control pill isn't being used for the purpose of birth control (it has other medical uses). This passed Arizona's House of Representatives and will now go to the Senate.

Though there's been lots of opposition to the bill from the Democrats, they aren't exactly fighting for women's right to have control over their own bodies - their line of argument is that women shouldn't have to disclose their medical records.

This certainly seems to be an example of the traditional role of women being imposed upon us - women must either relinquish contraceptive control to their partner, or failing that, abide by the "moral" beliefs of their boss.

And in the US the lack of contraceptive control has further ramifications: only 6 states provide any paid maternity leave (Arizona, unsuprisingly, isn't one of them). And so if you do get pregnant you'll either have unpaid leave or, as is more likely in low paid work, lose your job. It isn't hard to see how women will be forced off the labour market and back into the home.

Control over our bodies, particularly control over women's bodies, is clearly an important part of controlling the working class. I'd agree that bodies are a site of class struggle but not only because we're fighting for dignity and respect but also because of the repercussions that reproduction and the traditional division of labour has in economic terms. Women's work in producing and caring for children is a necessary part of producing value.

Having said that, I haven't really been able to make the most direct connection between that analysis and this current struggle around reproduction. I've viewed this as part of a general attempt to clutch on to conservative values when looking for someone to blame for "broken Britain". Apparently it's tempting to try to recreate nostalgic visions of a whiter, more christian Britain before men were emasculated into unemployment by feminism, before the failing multicultural experiment, before hoodies roamed the streets because their single mothers are at work, etc etc. I would have thought a bit of conservative backlash would be a good direction for the state to push peoples frustration. David Cameron has blamed everything from the riots to the banking crisis on the deterioration of christian values and women's rights are bound to be one of the first casualties in that trend.

hey again Joseph, I read this quote today and immediately thought of your post.

One essential condition of the establishment and maintenance of power is the coercion of bodies and the threat of violence or death. To be sure, the body is not simply a biological entity, but a political institution: the relations of the State to the body are thus considerably more complex and extensive than those of repression. Nevertheless, the State is always rooted in its physical constraint, manipulation and consumption of bodies. In every State, this takes place in two ways: through institutions which actualize bodily constraint and the permanent threat of mutilation (prison, army, police, and so on); and through a bodily order which both institutes and manages bodies by bending and moulding them into shape and inserting them in the various institutions and apparatuses. As a material reality, the STate is synonymous with a kind of stunting regimentation and consumption of persons' bodies - in other words, with its incarnation in the very flesh of the subject-objects of state violence. Since all bodies are political, we cannot speak here of bodily mortification by the State: for that would point to the image of an original body, which, while naturally free, is later politically distorted. But within the bodily order, it is still necessary to have personnel who train and discipline bodies with suitable physical devices."

- Nicos Poulantzas, _State, Power, Socialism_ page 29.

I wanted to point out this recent interview with Ina May Gaskin about maternal mortality rates here in the US. Apparently the Center for Disease Control (CDC) is missing half to two-thirds of the maternal deaths.

She talks about the

personnel who train and discipline bodies with suitable physical devices

mentioned in Nate's quote above:

What we’re finding out we don’t have is choice in—when the pregnancy continues. Now what? Where you have the baby, it’s not just a matter of getting the baby out of the woman, it’s how we do it. And so, as our C-section rate goes up, up, up—when I began as a midwife, it was under 5 percent. Now—and then, in only a decade, it had quadrupled. And now we’re, in many hospitals, over 50 percent. And that’s going to mean that you—you’ve lost the benefits now of the C-section, and you’re starting to have women dying because of C-sections.

...this is—when you do too much surgery, when you enter the abdominal cavity, you know, you’ve introduced whole new kinds of complications that can take place. You can have women dying from pulmonary embolism, and that can happen hours or during a C-section. It can happen after. It can happen after the woman goes home. It can be days or weeks. And there can be just—boom, because she doesn’t know that a pain in her leg is a sign of danger. You can have scar tissue that grows and can cause a bowel obstruction, causing a death that way. You can have a scalpel slip and cut the uteran artery and bleed to death. You can have the bowel knicked and then have an infection set up that might mean an early death from bowel obstruction.

...And the fact that California reported a tripling of the maternal death rate between 1996 and 2006 should—and the fact that here in New York, the New York Academy of Medicine reported that the death rate, which according to the Health and Human Services should be no higher than three to four per 100,000 births, for African-American women has reached an astounding 79 per 100,000. Should be three or four.

She then talks about how the profession of midwifery -women helping women give birth- has been basically obliterated by the medical industry, at least in the US.

There is also this pamphlet from the '70s, which I have yet to read:
Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers

I've seen this kind of shit in Louisville, KY at the abortion clinic there, the bullying/guilt-trip tactic is used constantly by the anti-choice zealots. I'm sorry you all are experiencing it more in Britain, no one deserves this disgusting harassment. Are there clinic escort volunteers that can keep harassers away from women?

at feminist fightback, we were thinking about this question and wrote this discussion paper last year: http://www.feministfightback.org.uk/?p=1503