A 'HOME birth unit' possible, don.
Day care abortion tacilities is another. As is for womesive treatment Sace women. All these will go it Wancoworth District Health Authority votes to close the hospital DHA planning group - with a majority of Labour members on it - decided unanimously to recommend full closure of the hospital from 1 April next year.
Previously there had 1988 when new facilities WCIC supposed be available in St Georges.
- where you can have your baby in an atmosphere as like home as with all your family present. This is one of the things under threat in South LonBut 850 beds have already been cut over the last eight years in Wandsworth finance the St George's development Representatives of the local women's movement, Labour parties, trade unions and the trades council have been out collecting signatures opposing the closure and have received tremendous response.
As soon as passers by heard 'South London hospital for women' they stopped in their tracks came back and asked what we were petitioning for. had my baby there, I'ma nurse hospital closure'. Support particularly came from old people.
Anger locally has been such that tne Labour rart member on the planning committee who proposed the closure is beginning to wriggle cunbarass ment claiming that he has been misinterpreted and may WCl vote for closure when it comes up on 27 January.
The morale of the campaign is already high. public meeting attracted well over 100 people. One third were the hospital itself A midwife and a doctor from the hospital told the meeting of the plans to expand the hospital by amongst other things, setwell-woman clinic, a breast screening clinic, and providing a day nursery for hospital workers' children and children of women attending as out-patients. The hospital has just set up clinic to help smokers give up Almost half the maternity beds in the area are provided by South London Its much easier to get to on public transport than St Georges. An important factor, since three quarters women who have their babies there are working class unlikely to have cars and most hit by other Tory attacks.
Very many women from the Asian community choose to have their Socialist Challenge babies there, because it is staffed by all-women The special care baby unit is right next to the ward and whenever possi ble premature babies raised in incubators by tre mother's bedside.
Besides such facilities the closure of the hospital will worsen unemployHe me area particularly for women.
The workers the hospital are fighting back 250 angry employees have already met and formed ar the closure with representatives all the different sections. in the hospital If you wish to help cor tact the campaign commit118 pen to everyone, on 28 January 1983
GREENHAM changed the political balance of forces on the disarmament question in Britain. It will take all the jingoism the Tories can muster and indeed Maggie is trying very hard to muster it - to turn the tide against this truly massive feeling amongst women and men that Cruise must be stopped and stopped now. Why has this happened? Why has the Women's Peace Camp at Greenham Common become what the Daily Mirror calls the 'world's most powerful protest against war'.
Firstly because women acted when others in the disarmament movement sat and talked. In acting in such a decisive way, and being prepared to get arrested for their aroused the suffragette spirit that has always been part of the backbone of the modern women's liberation movement, the strength of women's feelings on the disarmament question giving a moral authority to that kind of action.
Focusing on a key target, the base where Cruise was to arrive, women turned Sunday 12 December into a truly mass event, an original event because women, young old, from all backgrounds, came through an informal network to protest as women against the mad Tory government.
This action had the support of fai HOIC WUHICH than turned non-violent direct action the day after also had a lot of sympathy behind it which is why the popular press that day had to rave about nalists' and Soviet television or, trying the other old trick, card of 'butch lesbians' action.
The action was also based on a real feature of this wave of CND in Britain and the disarmament movement throughout Europe. Women are playing a leading role ment as they did in the solidarity campaigns with Vietnam in the late 60's Women have marched to Union demanding peace. Every Tuesday in Tel Aviv during the invasion of the Lebanon against Begin's war and 200 womer dressed In black marched Jerusalem. In Britain women have not only participated in CND, setting up Women Against the Nuclear Threat campaigns, but also they were part of those forces opposing the Malvinas War.
The women's movement has consistently taken up the cause of Irish self-determination, in the mobilisations outside Armagh gaol on International Women's Day. Also, as in Vietnam, women are playing a vanguard role in the against imperialism in colonial countries.
Thirty per cent of the FSLN guerias wno overinrew me samoze dictatorship were FMLN/FDR in El Salvador has not only a women's organisation, AMES, but its own women's brigade. what has to be understood about this feature of the disarmament movement and the direct involvement of women in the armed struggle is that when women join a movement in large numbers, they bring their own demands and their own forms of organisation to that struggle.
Socialists reject the Tories' tempt to drive women back into the home in this country. We oppose the hypocrisy of Tory Margaret Thatcher or Patrick Jenkin who use the breakdown of family life imposed by unemployment poverty not only to attack the welfare state but to make women feel guilty that they work outside the home.
has Eus movemens independently, did Socialist them, unheard Party sellers nuclear case anyone position.
rally pains, they necessary.
perialist threat. strikes Women's waging nuclear war.
Margaret militarism of this stronger up. The country and *Pravda jour- genocide in the Lebanon.
playing the leading the from bases in Britain.
that women in this movewar, the Soviet still true, protested through we see the women, symbolised bes perialism.
compass the struggle the semiwomen. The And have to be pacifists?
leaders like and production.
butter This understanding• informs our approach. Our sympathy is with the anti-capitalist, militant objectives of Our approach goes 100 per cent in the opposite direction to that of the Socialist Workers Party who can only criticise, and at worst do their best to alienate women, by their hostility to women taking action as women. Not only Workers Party coaches have a fifty per cent quota of men on of in the socialist movement in this country to date, but many of their male Socialist Workers arrogantly chanted Women and men unite to fight the bomb', to drive home the point just in misunderstood their Socialist Challenge fully supported this event. All of our supporters. will the defence of women arrested taking action on 13 December and demand support in the labour movement for their defence. On this basis of active support a condebate possible and We don't agree the nuclear threat is a male threat as Women Oppose the Nuclear Threat do, we see it as an imWe don't think sex suggested by Brighton Peace Magazine, will stop the imperialists Thatcher, our woman Prime Minister, is one of the world's leading war mongerers. She calls for a against the Soviet Union, a more interventionist role in the semi-colonial world for NATO she opposes the PLO coming to this the Zionists She's quite happy to let Ronnie put his finger on the button to launch cruise missiles We're not too happy with the idea are 'naturally' more peace loving than men. More women in Britain today, are opposed to nuclear weapons.
In the past women have played a prominent role in movements against often because they have traditionally been left at home to bear the social cost of war. But although this is it is changing Women's changing social role has led them to play a more direct role in wars on both sides of the political spectrum. Thus Israeli army recruiting and the National. Organisation of Women in America heavily polarised on the draft issue.
In Vietnam, Angola, Ireland, Nicaragua, Palestine we see women taking up arms for national Does the demand for Peace enaspirations of these women? No it does not. The first group of women participate in im perialist warmongering even if it's out of no real choice in the case of conscription. In the latter case women can't afford the luxury of pacifism American wal hurls napalm bombs on their homes or as in El Salvador today when the womos of pregnant women are riDDed open and the heads of their companions are placed inside by the death squads. What choice do these women Other issues are also at stake in the.
Greenham debate. Helen Johns, one of the founders of the Peace Camp, has argued for all workers in the armaments industry to give up their jobs even if it means going on the dole because she believes it is morally wrong to produce arms.
Yet workers do not control the labour market nor do they control to nve incy must work wherever they can. Again they cannot have morals that deny them bread and