Within a few months, women could be stripped of their right to abortion by the U.S. Supreme Court. Millions who care about the rights of women are being led to quietly accept this, by a “pro-choice movement” that has largely given up in advance. While working on the ways to really raise hell at the colleges, high schools and in other ways, members of the National Get Organized for an ACTUAL Revolution Tour were at a university last week challenging students with a sharp provocation and ways for them to self-organize on the real terms of this fight, which is the enslavement or the emancipation of women.

We posted up at a busy walkway where students go through usually not paying attention to anything more than what’s in their own heads. We had a sign and flyers and literally stopped people to ask them to answer this question:

Now, as the Supreme Court moves quickly to rip away abortion rights…
If you will NOT fight against forced motherhood,
Then you ARE choosing the enslavement of women.
Which do you choose?
Into the streets March 8.

When we insisted they choose, a significant number of people stopped and said they are pro-choice or they are against the enslavement of women. We returned to the challenge: the Supreme Court is about to rip away abortion rights, what are you going to do? Some said they would come on March 8^th, but we put back to them that yes, they need to... but this isn't a one day thing.  There's a need to shake up the society and their campus now and get people into the streets March 8 and beyond.  The actual stakes of this fight and the insistence people make a choice and act on it was a break with what people are used to: “everyone has a right to their own opinion,” and that’s it, which definitely unsettled some people.

A number of people were challenged and moved, though. Eight students felt compelled to buy T-shirts to wear as a simple way to start impacting the campus and organizing others. The T-shirts say, “Forced Motherhood is Female Enslavement” on the front and on the back “No going back, no surrender! Abortion on Demand and Without Apology.” Several other students took flyers and/or stickers, responding in substantive ways to the challenge.

* One person who bought a T-shirt was from Texas. He and a woman from the Midwest both had a more living and visceral sense of the danger. Another woman who bought a T-shirt said she did so because she doesn’t want to be complacent.

* One guy had a basic stand that women who get raped should be able to get abortions, but wasn’t sure about other circumstances. When challenged on whether women will be forced to be mothers against their will, he was moved to get involved. He gave his info and took some stickers and said he had never done anything like this before.

* One woman said she just wants to be in a society where this isn’t even a question, where there is just freedom.

* A lawyer jogging through campus was livid about what’s happening and said all her friends are too. We talked about why there is so much silence in the face of this and she was provoked by the reality that the Democrats are leading people not to fight. She said she would talk to her friends about March 8^th and gave a way to stay in contact.

* A professor who teaches about gender inequality was appreciative we were there with the challenge, and seemed to be moved through the back-and-forth. He sees fascists are preparing for civil war, but when we said there isn’t a safe space that’s going to protect people from this, he said he thought there was a role for safe spaces for people to develop their voices to speak out. When further challenged about the need for people to actually fight to defeat the fascist onslaught and that this is a time revolution could be made, he seemed to agree and be considering rousing his students to actually ACT.

* A Chinese student responded when he heard forced motherhood/enslavement of women by connecting this to the recent outrage in China about a video of a mentally  ill woman who had been chained up by her husband, and gave birth to eight children (it's unclear whether that was forced but the video was brutal). When we told him losing the right to abortion means forced motherhood imposed on all women, he said he would have to be at the march and took a few flyers to put up in his classrooms.

Using the provocation this way and really reaching inside people showed that, when shaken awake, when forced to really get outside themselves and think about the stakes, people wanted to act... and wanted to express their voices on this in protest... but we're still wrestling with how to crack this open campus-wide where too many are going along allowing themselves to ignore the steamroller that's barreling down. We're also working on different ways in that context (of stirring overall controversy and debate), for people to get organized, coming together to grapple with the questions of what kind of world we will fight for and why we need revolution, and working together to carry out a real fight for the future right now.

We’ll be going back to this campus again, with creative ways to break open this kind of debate and discussion through creative provocations on the whole campus. 

We've been wrestling with all this and will report in to revcom.us soon.