'One more child won't make any difference.' This was the experienced, professional judgement given to one of the women interviewed in the Newsreel Collective film An Egg is not a Chicken.
Refused an abortion, this woman had already been forced to go through with an unplanned pregnancy at to, ten nad twins and found herself struggling alone to hold down a job, look after three kids, and complete a college course. When fate for impertect contraceptive menoos, struck a uniro ume, sne got heavily into debt to pay for a private abortion - by this time she had discovered that a woman only has control over her own body if she can afford to buy that right on Harley St.
The experience of Winifred and two other women - a young motner Torcea to acree to sterisauon in order to get an ason tion, and a 19-year old student who went through the traumas ot a ser-incucec abortion — are threaded Derween snots OT te fight to ensure women the right to choose. The personal real¡ties which are ine result or restrictive abortion ecisiazion, in adequate facilities, and the refusal to allow women to decide the course of their own lives are constantly brought home.
Although the film is centred around the activities of the National Abortion Campaign, it includes struggles around equal pay, nursery provision, and the Hackney nurses dispute. Unfortunately there is no real attempt to communicate to the audience that the fight for women's rights at home and at work are welded together and cannot be fought out in isolation from one another. Although the film-makers obviously understane is, it is nor expiained - a wore doout me workine vomen's Charter might have got over this problem see abortion as a women's issue - shots or demonstrations etc. concentrate almost exclusively on banners belonging to women's organisations - rather than understanding that abortion, like all questions of women's rights, is the concern of the whole workers' movement. Women have rightly taken the leadership of the abortion campaign, but it is the whole of the labour movement which should be behind them.
Both these problems can be avoided if the filmi is used, as was intended, with speakers who can enlarge on the questions which it raises. And the film itself is able to get across the vitality of the campaign and harsh realities of abortion restric tions in a far more immediate way than any speaker.
JUST OUT:
25 minute black-and-white newsreel film (16mm) on WOMEN'S FIGHT FOR FREE ABORTION ON DEMAND available from the Other Cinema, 12/13 Little Newport Street, London WC2. (Tel: 01-734-8505/9) This film is the first of a series of monthly newsreels to be made by the Newsreel Collective. The next two films will be about the revolutionary situation in Portugal, and on working class struggles around housing, rents and squatting in Britain. L HELP Aborton sPur nides bening siocans like sociai nei not kuling out its leaders onn aim is to deny women the right to-control their own bodies.
_ red weekly 4 september 1975 _ nhs/social services cuts 11