ONE OF the best things to emerge from the recent for (WIS) AGM, was the organisation's committment to ensuring that women's demands are raised in the election campaign.
An Election Manifesto for Women is now being produced that will enable activists to raise these demands wherever they are campaigning.
Broad demands
Within the manifesto broad demands made, for example, around everything from Faual Pav to domestic and racist violence, reproduc tive rights to public transport.
The initiative will give WiS a much-needed boost to its national profile, and could will LEGAL By Sam Inman ONE MILLION people are being called to march on Washington D.C. for the 5 April "March for Women's Lives, expected to be the largest demonstration ever in defence of women's reproductive freedom.
The initiators of the march, the National Organisation for Women (NOW), say 'our massive numbers and our mobilised majority are our est hope to protect and restore the right of all women to birth control and logal abortion'.
Fow socialists and feminists can be unaware of the raging battles around abortion rights that have taken place recently in the US.
Never before have there been stronger attacks on a woman's right to choose in the years since the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. legalising abortion in 1973.
This is the country that spawned the most milkant of anti-abortion initia. tres - Operation Rescue - which, quite literally, terrorises abortion cl.
But now, the Supreme Court tsel has joined in the fray. Earlier this year LEGAL, * announced that it wil consider the case of Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the restrktive Pennsylvania law - requiring parental consent, a 24-hour waiting period, spousal notification and 'counselling" on the abortion procedure and alternatives.
This opens the prospect for a com plete reversal of Roe v. Wade, which Is why on the annhorsary of the 1973 decision pro-choice rallies and picket lines were organised throughout the country, and the call for the 5 Apri march launched from these.
Mootings, rallies and spoaking tours are now being organised to try LEGAL and reach the one milion goal.
Socialst feminets in the US are worried though, that the NOW leadership is heading in the same direction as it did at the beginning of the US women's movement - that of concentrating on electoral strategies.
Mobilisations that are used as campaign rallies for ororenome Democrats or Republicans would blunt the campaign, and make it less Ikely that working class women, the brought into the movement.
irish Prime Minister Reynoias limited. Women will have to threaten that they would commit suicide if not allowed an Independence Only women's possibility to decide for themseives on when and whether to have a child can ensure that such barbarities do not recut. That possibility cation, and socialand economic independence.
Any attempt to impose that choice - whether it be by a so-called 'Communist state as in Ceausescu's Komania, an Is lamic fundamentalist move ment, or the combined weight of the Catholic church and state as in Ireland and Poland - has consequences that are disastrous for individuals and re since the nants or society do d Whole March 21, 1992