We are here today to celebrate the life of Carol Downer, a life full of compassion for humanity and a determination to make the world a better place for all. Carol was a lifelong freedom fighter—she was as broad-minded as she was determined, and as generous as she was courageous. She deeply wanted a liberated world, for women and for all people. And we are so proud to have known her for decades—working side by side, discussing, debating and learning from each other in the fight for a better world.

Carol made many significant contributions in her life. She was world renowned for her fierce defense of women’s right to abortion through establishing and directing a network of clinics for decades. She refused to shut down her Los Angeles clinic after it was firebombed by fascist “right to life” women haters in 1985.

Carol was always a radical. She bravely fought to make abortions available to women when they were illegal, in the decades since Roe v. Wade when abortion was under an all-sided attack, and in the face of the right to abortion being viciously slashed, forcing women back to the status of second class citizens.

But Carol was not just a feminist. As she said herself, “We were always anti-capitalist and looked at the bigger world/picture.” 

She saw the links and connections between the different ways that people are oppressed in this world, and spoke and acted boldly on that understanding whenever she felt it would make a difference. 

In the midst of the Iranian uprising in 1979 which overthrew the hated U.S.-backed Shah, Carol joined a delegation to Iran after Iranian students had taken over the U.S. Embassy, holding the occupants hostage. The atmosphere in the U.S. was full of outraged American jingoism and vicious anti-Iranian sentiment. But Carol went against that tide and joined others who went to stand with the revolutionaries in Iran before the Islamic fundamentalist regime consolidated power. 

With internationalist enthusiasm and great heart, Carol described the scene:

It was a wonderful revolutionary atmosphere. An absolutely revolutionary atmosphere where people talked to each other and to us everywhere we went. Cab drivers would talk politics... In restaurants, walking down the street, revolutionary literature were everywhere out on sidewalks – hundreds of different pamphlets were spread out with people reading and talking. There was a freedom of talking and people told us about how it was before – how lives had been changed.

Decades later, she helped co-found the International Emergency Committee to Free Iranian Political Prisoners with Dolly Veale, harkening back to what she’d seen of the torture in Evin prison and determined to stop this from happening again.

For decades, we fought together for abortion on demand and without apology! From clinic defense in the ’70s and ’80s to analyzing and fighting against the rising fascist attacks on women. And when she could, she wanted to be on the frontlines!

In 2014, when she was 80 years old, Carol joined the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride in Texas—which was ground zero at that time in the fight for abortion. In the hot Texas summer, she spent a week out on the streets—with as much energy as the teenagers—in protests, discussions, reaching out to people in Texas about what the anti-abortion laws being passed would mean for women’s lives. She wrote about this later, that they were “talking to real people—not just people in the existing ‘movement’—the majority of whom know nothing about the clinic closures and have never heard anyone speak positively about abortion. I saw this have a real positive impact on people’s thinking.”

In speaking to why she wanted to be there, she wrote: 

First, I have watched our defeat in Texas with dismay, and I wanted to come join in with the protests of Texans and to voice my own outrage. Second, I see more and more attacks coming around the country, and I see very little visible protest occurring. Mostly everything is left up to Planned Parenthood and the Democrats, and I am sick of it. I think it’s time for outspoken protests saying “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology.”

She felt great anger seeing Roe v. Wade overturned, but also anger that too many thought this reform would never be taken away. She didn’t want any other woman ever to go through what she did with her illegal abortion in 1963. This fear marked a generation of women, which too many had forgotten. She didn’t want anyone else to go through what she experienced with the LAPD raid on her health clinic in 1972, and her bogus arrest and trial for allegedly performing an abortion on another woman. She was determined that “We will control our own bodies!”

Besides Carol Downer’s lifelong role in the political struggle for freedom from oppression, we also want to celebrate and cherish that she was a person of great principle and intellectual integrity. In 2022, in an interview on The RNL—Revolution, Nothing Less!—Show, Carol said: “I’m a very contentious person myself and I love to get into discussions. I like to be challenged. I don't mind having to prove where I’m drawing my thinking from.”

This spirit of following the truth where it leads and relishing principled debate is sorely missing today. Many of us among the revcoms can recall long afternoons of heated and passionate debate that bounced between sharp critique of each other’s position, agitation and anger about the oppressive conditions that women (and many others) are forced to endure and laughter and appreciation. We disagreed about how the oppression of women is woven into capitalism... about what drove the fascist assault on the right to abortion... and at times, on questions of tactics and focus. But she was hungry for these debates because she was driven by a bone-deep curiosity, and desire to end oppression.

It was this that led her to appreciate the new communism and the work of Bob Avakian. She heard Avakian speak whenever she had the chance. She seriously engaged his theoretical work, and defended him repeatedly against vicious anti-communist attack.¹ After hearing him speak in 2003, Carol said: “Bob Avakian hurls an impassioned, articulate challenge to capitalism and U.S. imperialism. Women’s liberation cannot be achieved without defeating these forces, therefore Avakian’s presentation is an important contribution.”

Especially in this time of rapidly escalating fascism, we greatly miss Carol’s presence, her fierce intellect and fiery spirit, her joy at watching people stand up against oppression, and we call on all to honor and learn from her. Her further contributions to freeing humanity from all traditions’ chains will be sorely missed.

I want to close this out with a quote from Carol herself, at a protest on International Women's Day called for by Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights, just months before Roe v. Wade was overturned. Carol closed out her speech with this, with her speculum proudly in hand: “We will get those abortions that are necessary for our lives and the lives of our family and our community, by any means necessary! In closing, I’m going to address myself to the patriarchal capitalists: you be aware that we may have to overthrow you in order to get this done. Because when we get moving and when females get moving, we're going to bring everybody along and we just might end up liberating everyone.”

It is in carrying forward that spirit of defiance, that drive for liberation that we can honor Carol Downer!