Spanish trial shows face of oppression

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The trial of eleven women in Bilbao for 'abortion practices' is one of the most gruesome examples of the legal and domestic oppression of Spanish women.

A campaign in support of the accused has been mounted by left parties and women's organisations.

1,300 women, including theatre and cinema personalities, political figures and many ordinary working class women signed •a declaration which admitted that they too had had abortions-illegal under any circumstances in Spain.

A series of public demonstrations, marches, meetings and sit-ins have taken place in all the major cities, and these have been attracting increasingly violent attention from the armed forces.

The governing Centre Democratic Union (UCD) of Adolfo Suarez is in the forefront of these attacks on women's rights.

But the trial has also opened the way for the openly fascist right wing to give full reign to its hysteria.

El Alcazar dedicated its front page to denouncing abortion as 'barbarism' and 'murder' and actually attacks the government for being too soft and 'afloat on a sea of subversion' Madrid's Monday Bulletin declares that these women represent a 'despotism which will finish democracy', and that 'not even the penal system can deal with these women' These statements are a culmination of a series of remarks from conservative and right wing sectors which attribute the supposed sexual immorality to the transition to democr acy' after Franco's death.

General Jaime Milans del Bosc publicly declared that this process was responsible for 'disorder and pornography' Socialist Press has never accepted that the democratic facade set up after Franco's death-which has left: Franco's repressive apparatus intact-is equivalent to a bourgeois democratic state.

Sections of the 'progressive' bourgeoisie are of course anxious to ameliorate an extremely unsteady political situation and pave the way towards entry to the EEC by attempting to broaden the democratic base of their antiworker government.

However, traditional business interests and sections of the armed forces and the police favour a less subtle form of control over the working class, a position which is amply illus. trated in the open threats they have issued over the question of abortion and continual discussion of the prospects of a military coup by top generals.

The democratic rights of Spanish women can only be secured through mass working class action to bring down the reactionary Suarez regime and bring to power a workers government.

The fight for such action must include struggling for strike action in support of the Bilbao 11 and the placing of demands that the class collaborationist leaders of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party break from their search for a coalition deal with Suarez.