49 years. That’s how long abortion has been a constitutionally protected right in the United States. It’s been 49 years since the Supreme Court put forward their decision on Roe v. Wade. Yesterday, it became public knowledge that a handful of justices with lifetime appointments have voted to overturn the legal precedent affecting over 100 million Americans.

In those 49 years, Congress has failed to enshrine the right to abortion by codifying it into law, allowing the Supreme Court decision to stand as the only bulwark — until now. But it’s not too late for Congress to follow the mandate they have with control over the House of Representatives, Senate, and Presidency. More than half of Americans have supported Roe v. Wade for decades, including half of Republicans, and they continue to support the right to abortion even as it is anti-democratically stripped from them. 

Never has the time to act on reproductive rights been more urgent, particularly when the worst harms of this decision will quickly affect working class people the most. In a country with the highest healthcare costs and maternal mortality rate of its peers, it is unsurprising that Black women suffer a maternal mortality rate 3x higher than white women. We must not allow the racial and economic disparities in reproductive care continue to worsen. Furthermore, we acknowledge that access to safe abortion care is and has always been unequal across racial and economic lines, and that there is much work to be done to ensure universal access to abortion care.

New York has long taken a leading role in the fight for the right to an abortion. When the first four states legalized abortion, it was New York that passed the most liberal legalization of abortion in the country — three years before the Roe v. Wade decision. But its most liberal legalization was far from comprehensive, and it wasn’t until 2019 that New York passed the Reproductive Health Act, which expanded the state’s abortion rights back to the forefront in the nation. 

But there is more work to be done, and we cannot continue to wait on Congress to protect abortion on the federal level, just as we didn’t half a century ago. There are several bills that the NYS Legislature must pass swiftly to ensure that we continue to protect the right of abortion as we increase its access to the most vulnerable among us. These include: 

  • S8778, which protects legal abortion providers by prohibiting law enforcement from cooperating with out-of-state investigations related to abortion,
  • S757, which establishes a state fund for abortion access and allows New Yorkers to contribute to the fund through their income tax returns,
  • S7002, which requires all private insurance plans in the state with maternity care coverage to also cover abortion care,
  • and the NYHA (S5474/A6058), which would provide free at point of use universal healthcare coverage to all New Yorkers and those working full-time in the state, including for all reproductive health.

When NY legalized abortion, it quickly became an oasis state, with hundreds of thousands coming from around the country seeking the procedure, amounting to 60% of abortions performed in the state in the two years after legalization. If the Supreme Court decision holds, we should expect states like NY to again become that oasis. We must ensure that our abortion care is fully funded and accessible to all, regardless of residency, economic status, citizenship, age, race, and level of disability.

Until the Court’s decision is made final, abortion access should remain unaffected across the country. In NY, abortion access will continue as it has, so residents should continue to seek out safe and legal reproductive care.

The Supreme Court’s decision has been decades in the making, and it will continue to make political moves to police people’s bodies through homophobic and transphobic erosions of our rights. The leaked majority opinion penned by Justice Alito makes clear that this decision will serve as precedent to undo other landmark cases, like Obergefell v. Hodges and Loving v. Virginia, which established the constitutional right to gay and interracial marriage respectively.

This is disheartening beyond words, but it is not the end of the fight. The state can make abortion illegal, but it cannot prevent abortions. We stand in solidarity with all those who seek abortion and all who will provide it, by any means necessary. 

Please consider donating to the following funds in states where support for abortion care is desperately needed:

And sign this petition to send a message to the Supreme Court that we won’t back down. 

We’ll be rallying for reproductive rights at 396 Broadway in Kingston at 5 PM tonight. See you there!

By Evan Moravansky, MHVDSA Political Education Co-Chair

Speech delivered at MHVDSA’s May Day 2022 Cookout in Kingston, NY

First celebrated as an annual event in 1890 by trade unionists, communists, socialists, and anarchists alike, May Day is part of a long-held tradition honoring the collective power of the proletariat and a recurring opportunity to demand better conditions for the working class.

It emerged out of the mid-nineteenth century movement for the 8 hour workday — the workday we know well today. But not so long ago, with the rise of industry and with it, capitalism, an acute form of economic exploitation developed. Those who worked just long enough for sustenance and taxes now had to work enough for sustenance, taxes, and their boss’s sustenance and taxes too! And so came along the 10, 12, and yes, 18 hour work day.

Such a life is unimaginable if not appalling to us today. But it was, and in many ways remains, the daily reality for the working class here and across the world. And it was not by technological progress or the will of those who run the economy that we may work less hours than we once did. No, it was the will of the people and by their determination to decide their own collective fate that we work as we do today. And yet, as we know, the struggle continues.

You may wonder why we celebrate today, and not the Labor Day we know of in September. While that holiday has its own history in the labor movement, its 1894 establishment was a conservative reaction against the radical politics associated with May Day. In truth, the origins of May Day lie in the juncture of tragedy and hope on the picket line.

May 1st was chosen to commemorate the Haymarket Affair, an event on the heels of the Great Upheaval of 1877, where rail workers went on strike to protest the third wage cut in a year. This led to 100,000 workers striking across the US, threatening to paralyze the economy until it was violently put down by state forces for fears that the workers would gain control over industry as had happened in Paris just six years prior.

In similar fashion, the Haymarket Affair began as an American Federation of Labor-sponsored strike for the 8 hour workday on May 1st, 1886. As the strike continued, on May 4th, during a peaceful labor demonstration in Chicago’s Haymarket Square, police started to disperse the crowd, and an explosion rocked the area. Not knowing who threw the bomb, police fired on the workers, killing four and injuring dozens more.

Eight anarchists were convicted of conspiracy thereafter, in what can only be described as a sham trial, with scant evidence connecting them to the bomb. Seven were sentenced to death. In the end, four met their fate at the hands of the state, despite only two of the men actually being at Haymarket Square. This would reverberate through history yet unwritten, becoming a focal point of labor and Left activism that influenced major figures for decades after.

One such figure, the undeterred Samuel Gompers, founding member and head of the AFL, penned a letter to the Second International Workingmen’s Association, a global organization of laborers and socialists. In this letter, he informed them that they would again rally for the eight hour work day on May 1st, 1890, and suggested the movement go international. And so the Second International adopted May 1st as International Workers’ Day.

Today, the memory of labor struggle and labor lost continues to fuel the fight for equality and peace. On May Day, we commemorate the contributions of our fellow members of the working class, but we also keep the fight alive. Not just DSA, but us, as workers, who fight not just for individual self, but us, together.

We fight for economic security for all, where no person should struggle to have their basic needs met, and that ‘all men created equal’ loses its mere rhetorical significance and becomes material — something we know to be true because we don’t just say it, we live it.

We fight for democracy for all, ensuring that the vote is afforded to everyone in society, and that the economy which controls nearly every aspect of our lives is democratically run by the many, not the few.

We fight for a sustainable planet for all, where we fulfill our role as stewards of this green Earth, and protect the natural world not so our descendants can admire it in a museum display, but in the clean air they breathe and clear water they drink.

We fight for these things and more, as socialists, as organizers, as workers, as family, as friends, as humans, united against every injustice among us. To quote Eugene V Debs, the socialist organizer and rail worker who ran for President in the early 1900s and later inspired Bernie Sanders, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”

The good fight is not just about when and where we clock into work. It is not calling a rose by any other name. Workers rights are not just about work, but rights for every soul on this Earth affected by labor — gay rights, democratic rights, Black rights, transgender rights, reproductive rights, immigrant rights. Labor encompasses all. This shared struggle, at its heart, is the recognition of our own humanity, extended to others, and complete only when we are all free.

I don’t have to explain to you the ways in which we remain unfree. Though we won the eight hour workday, economic uncertainty threatens it, with many of us overworked or with multiple jobs that hardly pay us enough to survive, let alone thrive. The cost of living skyrockets while our paychecks stagnate or dwindle, and all the while we are hapless to fix it, beholden to the whim of those who make decisions about the state of the world without us.

This is not the way it has to be. Much like the Great Upheaval of 1877, we see workers becoming increasingly aware of their power to affect change not by waiting, or hoping, or asking — but demanding it. The unionizations we see from Amazon, Starbucks, and even the NewsGuild here in the Hudson Valley; these are not symptoms of the social illnesses of poverty and powerlessness, but its very cure.

Although most of us are not in the union fight, we today know well the unfreedom of work that we all experience daily. The unfreedom we experience when we walk into our workplace, where for most people, they are stripped of their ability to decide how their labor and time is spent. This is not the unfreedom of work itself, but that work which determines how well we eat, where we live, how much time we spend with our children, what memories we make with loved ones, and when we’ve had enough. Enough of the things that make us human. Should not we be the ones who decide these things for ourselves, together?

This is a question asked every May Day for more than a century. Some may hear this number and think there is no path ahead, that we have exhausted our fight. And in truth, the fight has gone long, it has made progress and experienced setbacks. But that we stand where we do today, enjoying the company of each other becomes a radical act in itself, being human as we are — this here is why we continue.

And so, today, we celebrate May Day because we celebrate our shared humanity and vision for a future not utopian, but equal. Today, we stand against all forms of oppression and unfreedom, in pursuit of labor’s triumph over capital — people over profits — against that and those who hold power over us. It is here, today, that we carry the torch of workers’ rights with us! And tomorrow, we all do! Solidarity, and all power to the people!