2,000 Picket in New York

Protest Medicaid Cutoff

of Abortion Funding

!

SAFE LEGAL ABORTIONS

MEN

HYDE AMENDMENT

MEANS MURDER FOR WORKING-CLASS UPEN

SAKER

(LNS)--"Califano, you can't hide.

Too many sisters have already died." The loud chants of over 2,000 determined picketers wafted from the street into the auditorium at New York University's law school, where Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano appeared November 12 to receive an award.

Demonstrators were targeting Califano for his key role in the federal government's cutoff of Medicaid funding for elective abortions, which has already left many poor and third world women with no access to safe abortions.

Just a week before the November 12 demonstration, it was revealed that a 27-year old Mexican-American woman died in a Texas hospital after undergoing a $40 abortion in a nearby Mexican border town. A legal abortion in Texas would have cost much more than she could have paid. But her Medlcald coverage did her no good. As of August 4-when the 1977 Hyde Amendment went into effect-the federal government stopped all federal funding for abortions. And Texas is one of 40 states that have followed suit, terminating all state funding for abortions as well.

"This administration is eagerly enforcing the Hyde Amendment's cutoff of federal funds for abortions in a way which will lead to the death and maiming of countless women," said Rhonda Copelan, attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, one of the many groups which endorsed the demonstration. "Poor women are the first and most vulnerable victims of a campaign to take away woman's hard-won right to abortion."

Bustling picketlines of women, men, and children called out, "Not the church, not the state, women must decide our fate." The lively protest culminated in a rally featuring speakers and songs from members of women's and community organizations, who joined as sponsors in the November 12th Abortion Rights Coalition. Sponsoring groups ranged from CARASA (Coalition for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse) and NOW (National Organization for Women), to the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee, and a variety of lesbian, gay, labor and cummunity organizations.

Demonstrators pinpointed the direct connection between the issue of abortion and the practice of page 4/December, 1977/What She Wants

WOMAN'S BODY

forced sterilization--a policy aimed, again, at poor and third world women who are aften threatened with the loss of social services unless they "consent" to the operation.

As Dr. Helen Rodriguez of the Committee to End Sterilization Abuse pointed out, "Many women are sterilized because abortion is unavailable, or as a condition for obtaining an abortion. If abortions are no longer an option for poor women, sterilization abuse will continue to increase.'

Other demands by picketers included an end to HEW cutbacks in health care and child care. Others raised issues ranging from the need to pass the gay rights bill, to protesting the racist implications of the recent Bakke decision.

Meanwhile, inside the law school, protesters appeared more low key but were just as indignant. The most dramatic moment came after Califano answered panel member Sylvia Law's question: "What public or social purpose is served by singling out abortion from health coverage under Medicaid, and excluding poor people from it?"

Califano's reply: "The right to be preserved is the right to life.'

At that moment, about 50 people stood up and silently raised wire coat hangers high over their heads to symbolize the dangers of illegal and selfinduced abortions.

The current trend of government policy is to erode the hard-won right to legal abortion, which was established in a Supreme Court ruling in 1973. Last June, the Supreme Court ruled that states could no longer require public hospitals to provide abortion services and that states had the right to refuse to provide their portion of Medicaid funding for elective abortions. The final blow came on August 4 when the 1977 Hyde Amendment went into effect, cutting off all federal funds for elective Medicaid abortions. States do have the option of continuing Medicaid abortions but they must provide all the funds.

So far, approximately 40 states have cutoff state funding for abortion, with the blessing of Congress and the Carter administration, and swayed by the well-financed, conservative "right to life" lobby, which includes powerful elements of the Catholic Church bureaucracy. It is unclear how long the 10

remaining states will continue to allot Medicaid funds for abortion.

In addition, pro-abortion for all women is under attack, Illinois Republican representative Henry Hyde--sponsor of the Hyde Amendment--openly acknowledges: "We don't want to stop abortion just for the poor, but for all women.

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While government officials are currently hashing out the details of the new 1978 Hyde Amendment-whether it will permit Medicaid in cases of rape, incest and danger to the health of the woman--hundreds of thousands of women are threatened with illegal, botched abortions.

Last year, 300,000 women depended on state and federal funds for abortion. Unless these funds are restored, it is estimated that 85 women will be hospitalized and five women will be killed every week as a result of illegal or self-induced abortions.

Most of the women facing life-endangering abortions will be poor, third world and teenage women, since a good 60% of the 1.1 million abortions in the U.S. last year were done in clinics attended by the poor. Only 29% of the abortions, according to Tom Wicker of the New York Times, were performed "in those private hospitals in which the Supreme Court absolutely guarantees the right of a woman who can afford it to an abortion on demand."

At the same time that it is refusing public funding" for abortion, HEW is more than willing to pay for sterilizations, currently covering 90% of the cost of Medicaid sterilizations. According to the government's own figures in a 1976 General Accounting Office report, 34,000 Native American women of childbearing age have been sterilized since 1973, as well as 32% of all black women under 30.

Though family planning services will continue to be funded, the available methods of birth control fail to meet the health and personal needs of many women. Forced sterilization, where women have no other option, is hardly a choice, pro-abortion advocates point out.

"You may win this round," warns a letter addressed to Califano from CARASA (Coalition for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse). "But there are many rounds to go. When we win back the right to safe abortion regardless of income, then we're going to tell you we need more clinics. And when we get more clinics, we're going to hit you for more jobs, more daycare, decent schools, and all the other things that add up to real reproductive freedom--the freedom to have babies if we want to, as well as not to have them."

Anniversary of

New York (LNS)--November 13 marked the third year since the death of Karen Silkwood, a worker at an Oklahoma plutonium factory who was killed in a suspicious car accident after she had investigated the plant's safety conditions. At a "Karen Silkwood Day" rally in New York City, forty activists gathered to protest what they considered to be inconclusive findings of a Congressional investigation of Silkwood's death. Speakers discussed the dangers posed by safety violations in the plant's production of radioactive materials.

Before her death, Silkwood, a union organizer, had charged that the Kerr-McGee plutonium processing plant she worked at in Crescent, Oklahoma had strayed so far from federal regulations on plant safety that it posed a danger to its workers and the public. Plutonium, a deadly radioactive material, is known to cause cancer, even in minute amounts. On the evening of the fatal car accident, Silkwood was driving to meet New York Times reporter David Burnham and a representative of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International (OCAW), bringing with her documents on the lax safety precautions for handling plutonium at Kerr-McGee. The documents, which a co-worker saw Silkwood take with her, disappeared in the crash and have never been recovered. Kerr-McGee officials were the first to arrive on the scene after the accident.