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This was published 7 years ago
Why industrial action was the perfect response to lost reproductive rights in Poland
By Naomi Chainey
Black umbrellas flooded the streets of Warsaw on Monday as Polish women took to the streets. Displaying collective grief over lost reproductive rights – their leaders are contemplating a total ban on abortion with potential prison sentences up to five years – women across the nation wore black and went on strike in protest.
There is something poetic about women striking in protest of anti-abortion legislation; an eloquent statement beyond the apparent. You want to control our bodies? Perhaps our bodies will not be available when you want free domestic labour. Perhaps our bodies will not comprise the underpaid of your workforce. Perhaps – just perhaps – our bodies are ours, to make use of as we see fit.
In 1975, 90 per cent of Icelandic women brought the economy to a halt by taking a "day off". A day off work, school, homemaking and parenting to highlight the value of their labour. Icelandic men came to refer to it as "The Long Friday" (apparently "having it all" was not as enjoyable as advertised). Many believe the day of inaction, and the solidarity it generated, paved the way for Vigdis Finnbogadottir, the world's first democratically elected female president, to be sworn into office just five years later.
This week's Black Monday demonstrations did not slow the Polish economy, but by evoking the Icelandic protest Polish women made a clear statement. In the face of ever-tightening anti-abortion legislation, they will no longer be dismissed or undervalued. "Not one step further" their signs read. They've had enough.
Thousands of women demonstrate in front of the Polish parliament against a legislative project that will effectively outlaw all abortions under every circumstance, including rape and incest. Credit: Pacific Press
And it worked. On Wednesday the Polish government announced plans to drop the proposed legislation. A Cabinet minister said the protests "caused us to think and taught us humility".
Anti-abortion legislation never does much to prevent abortion anywhere it's introduced. As long as women are shamed for sexuality outside marriage; as long as women are expected to sacrifice financial empowerment on the altar of motherhood; as long as there is rape and violent men using children to control their female partners, women will seek abortions. Hell, the terrifying prospect of childbirth alone might be enough to send some women to a dangerous back-alley surgeon.
No matter the punitive measure, or the health risk, the subjugative codifying of women's bodies as vessels of reproduction, and sources of free childrearing, will drive women to risk abortions. Criminalisation only sends women to untrained surgeons in unclean settings, making what should be safe and simple operations potentially deadly. Anyone who fails to understand why women are willing to do this vastly underestimates the social and economic impact of women's oppression.
Only through the alleviation of that oppression are abortion rates ever successfully reduced. Sexual education and availability of contraception are consistently the mitigating factors. In combination with legal access to safe abortion, these measures empower women to engage with motherhood on their own terms, the societal benefits of which include slowed population growth, reductions in crime and poverty and even environmental welfare.
This information is readily available to any politician or religious leader with an internet connection, so one must ask: if we know that criminalising abortion doesn't prevent it, what does a "pro-life" advocate have to gain from anti-abortion legislation?
The answer is simple: Control. A demonstration of power. We will punish you, this legislation says to women, for daring to take charge of your own bodies and the means of reproduction. Your uterus does not belong to you. It belongs to the state.
Patriarchal societies are built on a foundation of free female labour. In Australia, for example, the vast majority of unpaid domestic work, childcare, caring for adults and formal volunteering is performed by women, and estimated to be worth 48 per cent of our gross domestic product. This figure does not recognise the additional labour of pregnancy, an enormous economic contribution which, as Erin Riley points out, is commonly misconstrued as a passive experience.
The practical value of women's work is enormous, and maintaining control of how that work is valued (or devalued) is vital to maintaining the status quo of inequality. Women are culturally policed into financially unrewarded roles via gendered concepts of responsibility and fulfillment. Limiting access to abortion, and by extension disrupting women's education and career paths, is just one more way to ensure women adhere to their societal role.
Industrial action is, therefore, an entirely fitting way to protest any law restricting women's reproductive freedom. Because if society is built on our free (or cheap) labour, surely that gives us the power to shake the very foundations of the system that seeks to exploit us. By collectively refusing to engage with the status quo, and taking control of the kinds of work we will or will not partake in, we can wield more power than most of us believe we have.
Our bodies are our own, and we can use them however we see fit.