The Los Angeles chapter of Rise Up 4 Abortion Rights responded to the national call to act on the weekend of February 24th/25th from Rise Up: Fascist Judges: Keep Your Hands Off Abortion Medication! The point of this demonstration was to sound the alarm on the possible national ban of mifepristone, the most common form of abortion medication. (For more on the state of things now, see this article.)

It was important that we gathered some people from the LA chapter via Zoom before the weekend of the 24th/25th to talk about what’s actually happening with this case, and make plans to wake people up in a busy area of town with a protest. We decided on Santa Monica because so many people are out shopping on the pier, etc., on the weekends, and we wanted to have an impact on the terrain because so many people don’t even know about this danger.

On the day itself, about 11-12 people showed up, from young college students who we just met to a young woman who got involved by reaching out over Instagram and a few people who have been around since the huge battle against the Supreme Court decision to overturn abortion rights last spring and are now taking more responsibility for the chapter overall. The day itself featured a lot of new, energized young women who were taking an active role in signing people up on the spot, chanting and wanting to get the demand: legal abortion nationwide in front of everyone. People felt good afterwards even as we were a small crew. We were able to get this in front of a lot of people, with people signing up on the spot, taking bandanas and stickers and donating. We met people on the Santa Monica pier from across the country and from around the world, including a woman from Australia who bought us all drinks after the protest because she was so inspired by what we did.

What was also an important feature was that after the protest we got dinner and were able to informally bat around March 8th International Women’s Day and get into the attacks on Rise Up last summer in an initial way. (Go here, here, and here to learn about these attacks, to get RiseUp’s response, and to get the response of the revcoms.) One of the national organizers with Rise Up attended the march, and she was able to give a breakdown of why Rise Up started in the first place and why manifesting on March 8th is important in this time where the fascist attack on abortion is getting more sharp, yet women all over the world have risen up in the past few years.

The newer young women had a lot of questions about the mifepristone case itself, like why is it even happening in the first place and what’s going on with it. One young woman had a lot of questions on the attacks. She read one of the articles that the Intercept had run and the response from the co-initiators of Rise Up, and she could easily identify the McCarthyist nature of the Intercept attack and understood the similarities of this attack to the history of COINTELPRO and what they did to movements in the past.

Along with another comrade, I emphasized why we got attacked, what the attacks were, including the ugliness of the accusation of “cult” and “pyramid scheme” specifically towards the revcoms and the revolutionary leader Bob Avakian. And how we have to be ready for more attacks and to do better at countering them. I was thinking and summing up from last year how important it is to be proactive and preemptive on the attacks, how they are a part of the overall fight for abortion rights, and to not just  respond to the attacks when they happen, but to prepare and steel people to not be deterred by them but to also go on the offensive against such attacks from their own perspectives.

We didn’t get into everything since some people had to leave beforehand, but they were very inspired by what Rise Up did last summer with the bold actions and unleashing the fury of women and had a lot of ideas of how to spread this on their campuses.

Going into the protest as well, there was debate that opened up on our Discord chat on using the word “enslavement” from the slogan “Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement,” with one person arguing that it’s insensitive to Black people and the history of the enslavement of Black people in this country. This person decided to leave the chapter by the end of it, but most people were making the argument that we should not change this slogan because this is the reality that is confronting women, and we should not be concerned with changing labels when the fascists are very united and are winning right now.