 Thousands have been mobilizing in the United States against the Supreme Court decision to overturn the historic Roe v. Wade ruling, robbing women of the nationwide right to abortion on Friday, June 24th. The decision was part of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization case, which was a challenge to a Mississippi law that banned abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with no exception for rape and incest. Roe v. Wade was a historic 1973 ruling that placed federal protections on a woman's right to abortion for the first time. The overturning of it immediately strips women in over a dozen states of the right to an abortion. Roe was the result of decades of feminists organizing by groups such as the Red Stockings Group in New York City or JANE, an underground abortion service that provided safe abortions to thousands of women. We spoke to Joyce Chedek of the Red Stockings about this issue. I was in Red Stockings in the 1960s and 70s, which is the feminist group that first publicly raised the issue of abortion and abortion rights and the woman's right to abortion in 1969. And I've been in the struggle since then, since a little before, but since then. It happened at a church in Greenwich Village where 12 members and friends gave testimony to their abortions or their attempts to have them at a time when nobody talked about abortions. So coming forward was very bold. And people talked about one woman said that she had to get certified as being mentally unstable in order to get an abortion. And it was the sanest thing she ever did. Others talked about not being able to get abortions or getting unsafe abortions and being frightened. One woman said that she went to 11 medical institutions and tried to get an abortion. And the tenth one offered to give her one if Julie consented to sterilization. She was 20 years old. She got one at the 11th institution. So this was electrifying at the time. There were 300 people in the audience and it gave some of the women there the courage to talk about their own abortions or attempts to get abortions. And it spread around the country like wildfire. The woman was already in swing. But so people gave testimonies. They disrupted events. They grabbed microphones. They went into meetings. They had demonstrations and they demanded abortion rights. And that's how abortion rights were won. No Supreme Court handed it down out of goodwill. Abortion rights were taken along with many other rights in the struggle. So that's how it happened. The Democrats have claimed responsibility for it and the courts have claimed responsibility for it. That is not what happened at all. What does this decision mean to you as someone who has fought in the movement for so long? It's turning the clock back 50 decades, five decades, 50 years, over 50 years. Body autonomy. How can women be equal in society if they don't control their own bodies? I remember what it was like. I was not one of the women in red stockings at that time who had had an abortion. But we did a disruption a little bit later of an event where all these men were going to speak as experts on abortion. And I asked to speak from the pressure of what it was like to live in the fear of having to have an abortion when they weren't available. I was in school. I would have had to drop out. It would have changed my economic life completely and every aspect of my life. So I gave testimony. We went and took the mic and I was on the stage giving testimony to what it was like if you hadn't had an abortion but might have to. And they turned off the lights on me. But it was an encouraging audience. And they said, continue. It continues by first speaking at the time I spoke publicly. So even then, it was in the wind, it was in the air that women need abortion rights. And I want to raise that now because this law will mean that every woman who dares to be sexually active and what's wrong with that is going to live in fear of what's going to happen if she has to get an abortion. Now 58 million women are not going to have access to abortion in their home states in a few days or a little bit later, the trigger states and the ones that are close to being trigger states. And even women in states where it's going to be legal is going to be an influx of people from other areas. And it's going to be very difficult and create huge anxiety and difficult economic, social, political and emotional situations for people, women and others who can get pregnant who don't need this and are being discriminated against because it's being dumped on them. There's been a whole right wing swing. I think abortion has probably been an easiest target where the political right wing has aligned itself with the religious fundamentalists who are very gung-ho on this and have done their footwork. But there were various papers written in the late 60s and early 70s by some of these think tanks when we were making social gains, both for women, LGBTQ people, anti-war struggles and for civil rights. They talked about how to regain ground, how to undo all this. And there's been a concerted attempt to do this against trade unions, public housing. So it's been systematic. And I think that probably the easiest thing to start with or from their point of view has been abortion rights because they were able to rely with the religious ultra-right. And the issue is it goes against freedom of religion because so many people of all religious beliefs are for abortion. But someone's beliefs, anti-abortion, anti-catering beliefs are being imposed on the entire population right now. So that's how it started. But there's also talk almost immediately of targeting birth control, gay marriage, and even bringing back sodomy laws. So this is a major social attack by a minority with a lot of money that controls a good section of the media on the majority who are for the things that they're attacking. So it's very undemocratic. What are some of the differences that you see in the movement for abortion rights now and before Roe? This is not a legitimate ruling by a legitimate body. It goes against the people's will. It doesn't represent any kind of an elected decision. And I think that people will not respect it. A great many people will not respect it. And we already see the websites up. We see the websites up for abortion access, particularly medical abortion access, what it is, how to find it, how to get the pills, where to get legal counseling, and where to get medical counseling if there is any kind of a complication or what to do. The sites are all up. So there's plenty of people who think this is not legitimate, myself included, who feel that abortion will be a struggle. It will be fought for in the streets. And just like those of us who were involved in seeing that people got abortions when they were not legal, that will continue. Both the Jane Collective, where women in Chicago learn to give abortions themselves. And there were so many underground networks. I was in one here where people phoned you and you directed them to a safe provider. This is already happening. So there's also international solidarity that's happening, where women in Mexico have said that they will help women in Texas and other women in the U.S. get the abortion pill. A doctor in Mexico City said, come to Mexico City. You will get either a free or a very cheap abortion. We will help you. So that is a similarity, I think. 50 years later, it's not... The thing when you fight for abortion, when you fight for something you don't have, you're fighting for it. You're there, you're doing it. When it's taken away from you, a lot of people are shocked by it because you had it. So it may take a little while for some people to get the idea of what's happening. But there are demonstrations right now in front of the Supreme Court. I think that if you don't mind me digressing a little bit, I think we have to be quite concerned about helping our sisters get information they need at this point, get them to the people that they need to find out about getting abortions, getting safe abortions, getting legal abortions, being taken care of in the right way. Particularly, there are things that the federal government could do that it's not doing. I mean, Biden made a statement, but it was of the mildest nature. He didn't say he was going to do anything. And he actually cautioned. He didn't want to see any violence. He said, stay calm. But this is such a violent thing that's being done to all people who can become pregnant. People will die from this. And the fact that you can't control your own body, what kind of a violence is that being perpetrated on you? But he put the onus of violence on those asserting their right and protesting it. The High Amendment, which was passed three years after old versus Wade in 1976 denies women on Medicare abortion, unless a state overrides it. This is only an amendment to the budget. It's not a war. Biden could suspend it. The lawyers are saying now that Biden could suspend that, but he hasn't done it. Also, I mean, the area of the country that's most affected is the traditional black belt states in the south. There's so many military bases there. Biden could say, this is federal property and we will perform abortions on military bases. The Democrats are not doing anything. What lessons can the current movements learn from the movements of the past? The main thing is that abortion was won by the struggle on the streets. That the Democrats didn't do it. That we have the power when we get together to do it. The main thing is that it's an issue that affects everyone. It's a working class issue. It affects our families, our class, our ability to make a living, our ability to raise healthy children, our ability to house and feed them because the cuts are not just to abortion. The anti-abortion states are not accepting federal Medicare funding. They're cutting back on social programs and not accepting a lot of federal programs for poor families. They're taking federal funds and using them for crisis pregnancy centers which persuade people, try to persuade people not to have abortions, pretend to be abortion clinics, but are anti-abortion and are now conducting surveillance. Of people who come to them to find out whether they pursued an abortion or not, and this surveillance can potentially be used to prosecute. This is just some of the ways that our class as a whole is being affected by it. We need to take it on as a working class issue because it is a working class issue. We saw that not having abortion affected the entire class and the entire population, especially the working class because women who had the means could always get abortions. So if we want to keep on raising our own standards, we need the right to abortion. How do we fight back against the verdict? I think we need to talk about abortion as not a single issue. I think this is something that it took us a while to learn back in the 60s and the 70s, that it's an issue of all reproductive rights. So I think we have to fight on every level together for abortion, for housing, for nutrition, for the right to all kinds of medical treatment. One thing that the lack of abortion will do is that it's going to increase maternal mortality, the number of women who die within the eight-month-a-year period after giving birth, and most particularly black maternal mortality. Right now, black women die at the rate of three times that of white women. Making women come to term, carry a pregnancy to term, giving birth is 14 times more dangerous than having an early term abortion. And for black women who don't have decent medical care, who are subjected to racism in the medical arena, and who are subjected to the wear and tear of racism everywhere, which creates an unhealthy situation, more are going to die at greater rates. So I think we need to tie these together and not stop. Bring it all together and bring it up. There were a lot of struggles in the 60s and the 70s, and a lot was won, abortion rights, and there were whole decisions for gender equality. We did away with Jim Crow, the Civil Rights Movement, the Black Power Movement. We ended the Vietnam War. We thought that we won. We thought things were going to get better and better. We knew we were up against the patriarchy, but we didn't understand the kind of patriarchy we were up against. We didn't know we were up against capitalism, which is a system, a predatory system that puts profits first and will just wait in the wings until it can take everything back again. So here we are fighting for abortion rights. We're fighting mass incarceration. We're fighting for the right to tell the history of slavery in the schools. We're fighting for LGBTQ rights again, and we're fighting endless war. And how do we secure, we're going to fight all these things, definitely, but how do we secure them for our children and our children's children? We need to know that we need to fight the battles, but we also have to win the war, and we have to fight capitalism and sweep it in the dustbin of history and replace it with socialism, a system for the people. So I think that's an important lesson that this period has and that we need to take going forward.