In the early hours of Saturday, August 8, the U.S. Senate voted 50–49 to confirm Todd Blanche—Donald Trump's former personal criminal defense lawyer—as Attorney General of the United States. Every Democrat voted no. Two Republicans voted no. He was confirmed anyway.

Blanche's confirmation is dangerous on more than one front. In his first week in office, he told NBC's Meet the Press that "no attorney general should ever pledge" to run the Justice Department independently of the White House, and said Trump should have a say in individual prosecution decisions. This is coming from the man who is already transforming the DOJ into a weapon against Trump's perceived enemies (twice indicting former FBI Director James Comey, bringing a case against the Southern Poverty Law Center) while working to shield and reward Trump's own loyalists, from erasing January 6 convictions to pushing a $1.8 billion fund that could have compensated the insurrectionists who assaulted police officers—a fund he was forced to formally abandon just to get confirmed. That is its own urgent danger, and deserves its own reckoning.

In this article, we take up a different front. Less than two week before the confirmation vote, on a private call with Christian fundamentalist shock troops, Blanche had already spelled out one of the things he intends to do with the power he was about to receive: work to bury the right to abortion, everywhere, for good. Here we will get into how serious this threat of a new round of attacks on the right to abortion is; why it has to be fought for what it actually is—a brutal, fundamental attack on women; and what kind of radically different society is possible, and worth fighting for.

Four years after the fascist-dominated Supreme Court tore up Roe v. Wade, the trajectory for women in this country remains extremely dire—and has just gotten much worse. ProPublica has been documenting women bleeding out and dying of sepsis (blood poisoning) while doctors waited, terrified of prosecution, for a fetal heartbeat to stop. Meanwhile, state review boards still refuse to even track how many of these deaths the bans are causing. OB-GYNs are fleeing the states that have banned abortion outright, leaving maternity care empty in the places that need it most. 

There's an irony underneath all this suffering. It is the irony that is fueling the Christian fascists’ fury. Even with bans covering most of the South and Midwest, the total number of abortions in the U.S. hasn't collapsed. Guttmacher data shows more than 1.1 million abortions were provided nationally in 2025 – the highest annual total since 2009. Shield laws let doctors who practice in places where abortion remains legal mail safe, abortion-inducing pills directly to patients in states where it's now banned, pushing abortions into the states enforcing the strictest bans from 74,000 in 2024 to 91,000 in 2025. The fascists see it as a defeat they cannot live with—a loophole still standing.

The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian has been warning for over three decades that Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the Supreme Court decision that overturned Roe v. Wade, was never the destination—it was the first step toward a national ban, reaching past state lines into birth control, IVF, and beyond. Since Trump and the MAGA fascists seized full control of the federal government, that machinery has been built out piece by piece—culminating now in an attorney general openly committed to closing the remaining loophole and finishing the job nationwide.

Blanche’s track record on abortion—and the chilling promise to the Christian fascist base

Blanche's record on abortion did not begin the week he was confirmed. At his confirmation hearing on July 15, under friendly questioning from Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, he agreed to order a review of the Biden-era DOJ opinion blocking use of the 1873 Comstock Act as a backdoor national ban on mailing abortion pills. (The Comstock Act was passed in 1873—at a time when women could not even vote—and bans the sending of “obscene materials” through the mails.) He committed to pursuing “faithful enforcement” of that law which would give the federal government a way to restrict abortion access across state lines, including in states where abortion remains legal. 

It's worth being precise about what's actually being threatened here, because it works differently—and reaches further—than a normal state abortion ban. Several attacks are in motion. The Trump FDA is separately reviewing mifepristone's safety—and by extension its legal status—but even a hostile ruling there wouldn't stop the flow of pills, since misoprostol alone can still induce abortion.

The far bigger danger is the Comstock Act, the same 1873 law Blanche has pledged to enforce. The Comstock Act makes it a federal crime to mail anything "for producing abortion." Legal experts point to what makes this law different from a state ban: it doesn't regulate whether abortion is legal in any given state—Dobbs already left that to the states—it regulates the U.S. mail, which is federal and reaches every state in the country. 

A Justice Department willing to enforce Comstock’s plain text wouldn't need to overturn Dobbs, pass a new law, or win a single vote in Congress. It could functionally cut off mail-order abortion pills everywhere—including in states where abortion remains fully legal—simply by criminalizing the mailing of the pills that now make up most abortions in the country. In other words, the FDA can attack the drug; the DOJ can attack the means of getting it to patients. That's the lever Blanche personally controls—and it's the one anti-abortion groups are pushing him hardest to pull.

But the target is not only the pills. The Guardian's reporting points to another potential front for Blanche's DOJ: challenging the abortion shield laws enacted by states such as New York and Washington. Those laws are designed to protect providers and state officials from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions. If the federal government succeeds in undermining those protections, the states with abortion bans could gain new avenues for reaching across state lines to pursue providers serving patients elsewhere.

A Grim Fascist Escalation

What came out just days before the confirmation vote promised a grim fascist escalation. On July 30, the White House Faith Office held a private conference call putting Blanche in front of representatives of thousands of anti-abortion organizations from across the country. A recording of it was later posted online by the Christian nationalist group “Intercessors for America.” On the call, Blanche promised the assembled supporters "permanent solutions" so that Dobbs “becomes permanent in every single state”—including states that protect abortion rights. He told them plainly, "we will have victory, and victory will be soon, and it will be permanent." Blocking mail-order abortion pills into states with existing bans is part of that plan, so no state's protections can survive contact with federal power. And he did not hide what this is really about: he thanked the anti-abortionists for their prayers, for "taking a knee" morning and night, and called stripping abortion rights from the entire country "doing God's work." Senator Patty Murray described correctly what a vote for Blanche means: an attorney general who will attack abortion rights in every state, including where it has remained legal so far.

This is the chief law enforcement officer of the United States describing the criminalization of women's bodies as a religious mission. This is Christian fascism speaking through the mouth of the Attorney General of the United States.

What is fundamentally at stake: women’s emancipation and the future of all humanity

Bob Avakian has insisted for decades on the truth that most of society—including the mainstream "pro-choice" establishment—refuses to face: the right to abortion is not just a “bodily autonomy” or a "culture war" issue. It goes to whether women are treated as full human beings or the property of the state, the church, the husband. Forced Motherhood is Female Enslavement. 

This is why the Christian fascist movement can never be satisfied by a state-by-state patchwork. Bob Avakian has emphasized many times that “this fascist offensive to outlaw abortion is not about 'saving babies'—it is about controlling women, and reducing them to 'handmaid' breeders of children, under the domination of men.” As Sunsara Taylor has noted, JD Vance's "theo-bros" salivate not just for a national abortion ban, but for bans on birth control, on divorce, even on women's right to vote. The deeper danger of this fascism lies in forceful reshaping of society based on "open and aggressive white supremacy and male supremacy," joined together with a "fanatically anti-scientific and Christian fundamentalist lunacy." Abortion is one of the sharp current edges of that program, but not the whole of it. The same forces coming for abortion are coming for immigrants, for trans people, for Black and brown people, for anyone who doesn't fit their vision of a white, patriarchal, Christian nation.

At the same time, women are, as Avakian has highlighted, a mighty potential force for revolution. Half of humanity forced for millennia to bear "tradition's chains." Once women refuse any longer to accept being reduced to servants and incubators, they represent a force this system cannot contain within the "politics of the possible" that Democratic Party politicians keep trying to channel every righteous outrage into. That is why, marching with thousands in the fight against the overturning of abortion rights, we had raised a demand beyond anything the mainstream "pro-choice" movement will say out loud: “Abortion On Demand and Without Apology! Break the chains—unleash the fury of women as a mighty force for revolution!” 

A world worth fighting for

Bob Avakian has put the actual stakes of this moment in the starkest, most scientific terms there are: “the crisis and deep divisions in society can only be resolved through radical means, of one kind or another—either radically reactionary, murderously oppressive and destructive means, or radically emancipating revolutionary means.” Todd Blanche, thanking Christian fundamentalists for their prayers while he engineers a national ban, is the reactionary pole of that choice, now installed at the top of the Justice Department. But there exists another pole, the radically emancipating, revolutionary pole, that is actually possible and well worth fighting for. 

Here is what nowhere nearly enough people in this society know about yet: there is already a serious, concrete answer to the question "what would things actually look like if we didn't live under this system?" It's called the Constitution for the New Socialist Republic in North America, authored by Bob Avakian. And it is exactly what its name says—not a slogan, not a wish list, but an actual detailed draft constitution for a genuinely new, much better society, ready to be studied and taken up.

In this Constitution, the right to abortion and birth control isn't left to the mercy of the next election, the next Supreme Court seat, the next state legislature. It is written directly into the fundamental law of the land and enforced by the socialist state itself. Full legal equality between women and men is a floor, not a ceiling: the New Socialist Republic would commit to actively uprooting "tradition's chains" of gender oppression in every sphere of life—work, family, culture, political and social life. The goal is to enable and encourage women to take part, as fully as men and people of all genders, in transforming society and the world. Collective structures for childcare and the endless unpaid domestic work women have been buried under for centuries would be built out as a shared social responsibility.

Sit with that vision for a second, really picture it. A world where no woman's fate hangs on where she was born or happens to live. Where the choice of whether or when to have children is up to women themselves. A world where women feel safe to walk on the streets alone, or reject a man’s advances without fear of retribution. Where the whole weight that gets dumped onto women's shoulders under this system is something society takes up together to lift and transform. This blueprint is the product of a real scientific method of the new communism developed by BA—applied to the actual, material question of how a radically different society can stop reproducing, generation after generation, the same chains. This Constitution, and the rare, concrete vision of society it lays out, deserves more than a glance. It is worth doing the work to actually study it, argue over it, wrestle with it, and spread it to millions who hunger for a world they don’t even know is possible.

Now hold that vision up against the hard lessons of everything we’ve seen since 2022: rights won through reform, within this system, can be—and are being—taken away. Roe stood for nearly fifty years and was overturned in one afternoon by a fascist-packed Supreme Court. Every state law protecting abortion access today sits under threat from a federal government now headed by an attorney general openly vowing to nullify it. There is no legislative fix. No "electing better Democrats." No favorable court ruling that secures this once and for all under a system whose fundamental dynamics keep regenerating this oppression—because that oppression is woven into the capitalist-imperialist system itself, and the patriarchy bound up with it.

The Trump-led fascist state and the system it came out of—the state that just confirmed Todd Blanche—cannot be reformed into its opposite. The whole system produces figures like him again and again, and it needs to be defeated and replaced with a radically different system. A Constitution that actually enshrines these rights, backed by a state built to enforce them, has to and can only be won, and defended, through revolution. The socialist state as the transition to a communist world in which the oppression that has scarred humanity for thousands of years—including the oppression of the female half of humanity—is finally ended, can be visualized in detail right now, in a document you can go read today. But it has to be built, by masses of people getting organized now, while there is still time to act. The only real answer to what Todd Blanche and the whole Trump/MAGA fascist regime represent is revolution—nothing less.