The Left's maniacal reaction to the possibility of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade reveals more than violent fanaticism or terminal narcissism. It unmasks a visceral fear of failing to transform American society along Marxist lines.
For the Left, abortion goes beyond allowing women to take ultimate control over their sexual behavior. It goes beyond enabling them to achieve professional and personal fulfillment. It represents a fundamental plank in the Marxist platform of destroying the nuclear family and replacing it with collective child rearing.
Few, if any, "woke" activists, politicians or influencers mention that goal. But the goal began with Marx himself, became only partially realized during the Soviet Union's earliest days and remains fundamental to modern Marxist feminists.
Most Americans who support legalized abortion view it through the lens of personal freedom. They generally have no idea about abortion's Marxist roots. But in the United States, those roots extend at least to the birth of the previous century.
Dr. Antoinette Konikow, a Marxist since her 20s, emigrated from Switzerland in 1893 to practice medicine in Boston, where she performed illegal abortions and engaged in political activism. In 1923, Konikow wrote Voluntary Motherhood, which expressed one of today's fundamental rationales for abortion.
"Women can never obtain real independence unless her functions of procreation are under her own control,” she wrote. “The woman married to a worker finds in Voluntary Parenthood the same source of leisure and economic relief that her husband received through his labor union. To her Voluntary Parenthood means the eight- or six-hour day, instead of the 12 or 16-hour day, which the mother of many children is bound to endure." (Emphasis in original)
Konikow cited Ellen Key, a 19th century Swedish feminist, to reinforce her point.
"The professional woman through Voluntary Parenthood is enabled to combine her professional work with marriage,” Konikow wrote.” Ellen Key points out that every professional woman has the serious question before her: marriage or independence. Voluntary Parenthood permits her to combine both."
Compare Konikow's views with Chelsea Clinton's in 2018, when she appeared at a rally to support Roe:
"It is not a disconnected fact … that American women entering the labor force from 1973 to 2009 added three and a half trillion dollars to our economy. Right? The net, new entrance of women -- that is not disconnected from the fact that Roe became the law of the land in January of 1973."
Though a century separates Konikow and Clinton, their views reflect the Marxist belief that the nuclear family, by its very nature, restricts a woman's independence. For Marxists, the nuclear family plays a pivotal role in capitalism by turning women into incubators and domestic servants. Lenin even went so far as to call housewives "domestic slaves."
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels boldly proclaimed their intent in The Communist Manifesto.
"Abolition of the family!” they wrote. “On what foundation is the present family, the bourgeois family, based? On capital, on private gain. In its completely developed form, this family exists only among the bourgeoisie. The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital."
Richard Weikart, a conservative history professor at California State University, Stanislaus, analyzes that position.
"It was within the family that private property and the division of labor first developed," he wrote. "The original division of labor was the sex act but other labor was differentiated later on the basis of sex and age, which Marx and Engels called a natural or physiological division of labor within the family. Private property also arose first within the family, since women and children became slaves of men.”
Abortion, therefore, would free women from domestic and economic pressure by limiting the number of children who could become burdens to the state. In 1920, three years after the Bolsheviks took power, the Soviet Union legalized abortion on demand.
"The birth of a child is for many women a serious menace to their position," the Communist newspaper Pravda stated. Leon Trotsky cited that quote to justify Soviet policy in his book, The Revolution Betrayed, a comprehensive critique of Stalin's rule.
"It is just for this reason," Trotsky wrote, "that the revolutionary power gave women the right to abortion, which in conditions of want and family distress, whatever may be said upon this subject by the eunuchs and old maids of both sexes, is one of her most important civil, political and cultural rights."
The Bolsheviks intended abortion to play a vital role in their goal of making child rearing a communal activity governed by the state.
"The place of the family as a shut-in petty enterprise," Trotsky wrote, "was to be occupied, according to the plans, by a finished system of social care and accommodation: maternity houses, crèches, kindergartens, schools, social dining rooms, social laundries, first-aid stations, hospitals, sanatoria, athletic organizations, moving-picture theaters, etc. The complete absorption of the housekeeping functions of the family by institutions of the socialist society was to bring to woman, and thereby to the loving couple, a real liberation from the thousand-year-old fetters."
Konikow witnessed such activity when she visited the Soviet Union in 1926. Notice the similarity with the positions that the "woke," traditional European socialists and today's Democratic Party advocate.
"To lessen mother's work in Soviet Russia, nurseries were created for babies and smaller children," she wrote in 1940. "Almost every large family had such nurseries under the management of reliable nurses. The husband in the factory could buy a good dinner for a small sum in the dining rooms connected with the factories or with his trade. His wife and children were allowed to have their dinners in the same dining room.
"Women workers expecting motherhood received two months’ vacation before and after delivery with full pay; also a layette for the baby and free mild for the baby or nursing mother. Working women nursing the baby could stop work every four hours to nurse the baby in the nursery. The workers had free medical care, free hospitals and a month's vacation with pay. In case of illness, the worker received his full wages for a certain time and then half of the wages indefinitely."
Such a program implied and demanded monumental social upheaval.
"The relationships they envisaged for Communist society would have little or no resemblance to the family as it existed in nineteenth-century Europe or indeed anywhere else," Weikart wrote about Marx and Engels. "Thus it is certainly appropriate to define their position as the abolition of the family. Only by making the term 'family' almost infinitely elastic can they be said to have embraced merely a reformulation of the family.
The ideas Trotsky and Konikow endorsed now inspire modern Marxist feminists. One is Johanna Brenner, a professor emeritus at Portland State University who supports the Democratic Socialists of America. During the 1970s, Brenner became involved with the Coalition for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse.
"So what would we put in place of the family as we know it? I argue for the importance of building democratic caring communities," Brenner said in 2017. "These, I think, are a more progressive grounding of relational life than family households -- although I’m not opposed to family households being one part of such communities. Enlarging our affective bonds beyond a small circle, whether defined by blood and kinship or otherwise, is an essential part of any laboratory project.”
Black Lives Matter bluntly summarized those ideas in a manifesto the organization later deleted from its website:
"We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and 'villages' that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable."
Patrisse Cullors, one of BLM's co-founders, took pride in her devotion to Marxism. She called herself and fellow co-founder Alicia Garza "trained Marxists" who "are super-versed in ideological theories."
Evelyn Reed, active during the mid-to-late 20th century, exemplified the connection between Marxism, feminism and abortion. One of Trotsky's supporters during his exile in Mexico, Reed reflected Engels' views of the family in her 1970 article, "Women: Caste, Class or Oppressed Sex?"
"Women were then given two dismal alternatives," Reed wrote. "They could either seek a husband as provider and be penned up thereafter as housewives in city tenements or apartments to raise the next generation of wage slaves. Or the poorest and most unfortunate could go as marginal workers into the mills and factories (along with the children) and be sweated as the most downtrodden and underpaid section of the labor force."
Reed founded the Women's National Abortion Action Coalition in 1971. During a rally commemorating Roe's fifth anniversary in 1978, Reed foreshadowed today's incendiary "woke" rhetoric by condemning what she termed "the unholy alliance of the Catholic Church's male hierarchy, the Ku Klux Klan, the Mormon Church and the John Birch Society" against abortion. Then in 1985, Reed co-wrote a paperback, Abortion is a Woman's Right!
Reed's French contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir, personified Marxist fanaticism concerning abortion.
“I am for the abolition of the family. It is through the intermediary of the family that the patriarchal world exploits women,” wrote de Beauvoir, who in 1971 joined other French women demanding legalized abortion on demand in the "Manifesto of the 343 Sluts."
De Beauvoir displayed her fanaticism in an interview with fellow feminist Betty Friedan in 1975. Friedan suggested that full-time mothers could receive help from the government through vouchers.
"No, we don't believe that any woman should have this choice," de Beauvoir replied. "No woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children. Society should be totally different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one. It is a way of forcing women in a certain direction." (Emphases added).
Christina Hoff Summers recognized the latent totalitarianism while criticizing de Beauvoir in her book, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women.
"Though she does not spell it out," Summers wrote, "she must have been aware that her 'totally different' society would require a legion of Big Sisters endowed by the state with the power to prohibit any woman who wants to marry and stay home with children from carrying out her plans."
De Beauvoir's intolerance exposes the Left's ultimate goal in advocating abortion: not personal emancipation but ideological slavery.
Joseph D'Hippolito is a freelance writer who has covered politics, current events, religion and sports. His commentaries on politics and religion have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Jerusalem Post, National Post (Canada), American Spectator and American Greatness, among others. His sports coverage has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today and Guardian, among other outlets.
