EDITORIAL: A PLOY AGAINST WOMEN

It's almost unimaginable that anyone would manipulate the tragic death of
Laci Peterson to promote a reactionary agenda. But the White House and
members of Congress are trying to do just that.

Peterson, nee Rocha, was eight months pregnant when she disappeared last
December. Police found her body in early April in the San Francisco Bay.
Her fetus was located a mile away--still attached to the umbilical cord.
The discovery evoked horror and rage in the hearts of women and all who
stand up strong against misogynist violence in any form. Police arrested
her husband as a suspect in her apparent murder.

Now the Bush administration and foes of abortion on Capitol Hill are
trying to redirect the anger and revulsion at Laci Peterson's tragic
death into support for a bill that would make a fetus a separate person
from the woman carrying it to term. California state prosecutors have
announced their intention to charge Scott Peterson with double homicide
of two people and seek the death penalty.

In an April 25 White House media conference, spokesperson Ari Fleischer
pressed Congress to pass the "Unborn Victims of Violence Act," which
establishes penalties for harming a fetus in the course of a federal
crime.

The bill, already introduced in the Senate, is soon to come before the
House.

This bill, and the charge of double homicide, are attempts to define a
fetus as a person protected under the 14th Amendment, which bans any
state from depriving "any person of life, liberty or property without
due process of law."

This lays the basis for outlawing abortions and criminalizing as
murderers those who perform them or receive them.

Women's groups are outraged. Even Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., warns
that this congressional move "has nothing to do with domestic violence
or the severity of the crime. What they want to do under the guise of
domestic violence is lay the groundwork for abolishing abortion rights.
That is violence against women."

From their own bourgeois vantage point, if the White House or Capitol
Hill had real compassion about Laci Peterson's life, they would beef up
laws against harming pregnant women.

But real support for women's lives, and remedies for violence against
women, take a grass-roots struggle. Violence against women is endemic in
a capitalist society that promotes ideological justification for the
inequality of women. Real support for women would begin with funding for
battered women's shelters and couples counseling, access to decent jobs
and education, affordable daycare, and drug and alcohol programs.

And first and foremost, each woman needs control of her own body--to
have the most profound and basic right to decide when and if to have
children.

Using the terrible death of Laci Peterson to lay the basis for the
abolition and criminalizing of abortion is an additional act of violence-
-an egregious crime against women. 

http://www.workers.org/