One of the most politically explosive elements of the fight going on for the future is over the right to abortion—which really is a concentration of whether women will be enslaved or emancipated. This is an expression of something Bob Avakian captured powerfully and with tremendous far-sightedness when he said, all the way back in the mid-1980s that:

The whole question of the position and role of women in society is more and more acutely posing itself in today’s extreme circumstances—this is a powderkeg in the U.S. today. It is not conceivable that all this will find any resolution other than in the most radical terms and through extremely violent means. The question yet to be determined is: will it be a radical reactionary or a radical revolutionary resolution, will it mean the reinforcing of the chains of enslavement or the shattering of the most decisive links in those chains and the opening up of the possibility of realizing the complete elimination of all forms of such enslavement?¹

This is what motivated me to unite with others—who came at this from very different political perspectives—in Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights to struggle fiercely to stop the Supreme Court from overturning Roe v. Wade and ripping from women the right to abortion.

Yet, through this whole time, there have been others—including many so-called leaders of the so-called pro-choice movement—who have not only failed to sound the alarm and mobilize opposition in the streets, many of them were out there telling people to just calm down, it won't be that bad. Some insisted that people focus on raising funds for women to travel as abortion bans went into effect. Others focused on spreading the abortion pill, insisting that even if a woman had a medical complication inducing her own abortion she could just go to the hospital and the doctor wouldn't be able to tell her apart from a miscarriage.

Well, let's look at how this is playing out now that the nationwide right to abortion has been overturned.

Sometime last year, a 35-year-old woman from Texas named Amanda went into a hospital clinic, bleeding and cramping in excruciating pain from a miscarriage. The hospital promptly scheduled an appointment to scrape out the contents of her uterus to be sure she did not hemorrhage or get infected. She and her husband were grief stricken, but the procedure went smoothly and the hospital staff was wonderfully supportive.

Naturally, when she learned in January of this year that she was having another miscarriage and went to the hospital in excruciating pain and bleeding, she asked the hospital—the same exact hospital—for the same treatment as before. They said no. Instead, they sent her home and told her to come back only if she was bleeding excessively. Although the hospital refused to confirm it, they refused treatment because in between Amanda’s two miscarriages, Texas had passed a draconian law effectively banning almost all abortions.

You see, the abortion “activists” were not wrong in pointing out that the treatment for miscarriage is the same as the treatment for an incomplete self-abortion. But, they were deadly wrong to insist that women would get the treatment they need for either.

What happened next to Amanda is barbaric. She shared her story in detail with the New York Times in order to expose this danger. She spent 48 hours bleeding and cramping in pain so intense she compared it to labor and she left fingernail marks scratched into her wall from the pain. Her husband cried with her in fear over 48 hours. Even after that, she kept bleeding for another week.

And she was “lucky.” All the fetal tissues left her body. She didn't get infected. She didn't die. But she could have.

Similar outrages have been happening to women in other countries where abortion is outlawed. In 2012, 31-year-old Savita Halappanavar died after days of worsening infection while she was held at a hospital in Ireland that refused to intervene in her miscarriage because of that country's strict anti-abortion laws. Since then, after huge protests, Ireland reversed the total ban and legalized first trimester abortions in 2018.

Earlier this year, Izabela Sajbor sent text messages to her husband and mother from a hospital in Poland where they let her die as she miscarried. “My life is in danger,” she wrote. Later, she wrote, “The doctors can't help as long as the fetus is alive thanks to the anti-abortion law.... A woman is like an incubator.”

Stories like Amanda's are playing out across the U.S. Gabriela, from Missouri, was denied the best medication for her miscarriage. Even then, she couldn't get the prescription her doctor did give her until she underwent the public shaming of having to insist, through tears, to her pharmacist that it was for a miscarriage, not an abortion.

Meanwhile, what has become of the abortion funds? Predictably, they are totally outstripped as millions of women are left without access to abortion. But that is not even the worst of it. Continuing the same capitulationist logic that led them to lie down and accept the fall of Roe without a fight, many of these funds are shutting down without a fight out of fear they might be prosecuted for fulfilling their mission and helping women travel to where they need abortions.

I could go on about all the other horrors that are just beginning to unfold—a 10-year-old rape victim forced to cross state lines for an abortion, doctors under increased threat, more severe bans on the way and much, much more.

But what is most important is this. It really is true that when it comes to the lives and the future of women, there is not going to be some muddling along in the middle. Things really are going to extremes. To repeat from that prescient quote from above:

The question yet to be determined is: will it be a radical reactionary or a radical revolutionary resolution, will it mean the reinforcing of the chains of enslavement or the shattering of the most decisive links in those chains and the opening up of the possibility of realizing the complete elimination of all forms of such enslavement?

So it is right and necessary that people from very diverse political perspectives continue to come together in Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights and tell the truth and fight for it: Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement. Women need abortion on demand and without apology!

At the same time, as we live through seismic shocks not only for the future of women but in almost every dimension of society and the future, as you and millions of others are being FORCED to question whether the way things have been is the only way they can be, I want to put a serious challenge to you. Dig into, lift your sights to, and take up the roadmap that Bob Avakian has laid out for a real revolution. Let us get to a world where never again does a woman anywhere on this planet have to bitterly remark that she has been treated as an incubator as she lay dying from the barbaric practices of this system. Let us break the chains and unleash the fury of women as a mighty force for this revolution.