You cannot break all the chains, except one. You cannot say you want to be free of exploitation and oppression, except you want to keep the oppression of women by men. You can't say you want to liberate humanity yet keep one half of the people enslaved to the other half.

—Bob Avakian, BAsics 3:22

There is a reason the fascist forces in this country have made the subjugation of women one of the sharpest and most defining points of their program. To them, the right of women to control their own bodies, lives, futures—especially the right to abortion—threatens the entire patriarchal, Christian fascist order that they are fighting so tirelessly to impose. The gains women fought for so hard over the last few decades have become an existential threat to their vision of a “Great America.”

And they are right. Women’s liberation is incompatible with the oppressive, white-Christian-male-dominated society.

In Basics 3:22, Bob Avakian continues:

The oppression of women is completely bound up with the division of society into masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, and the ending of all such conditions is impossible without the complete liberation of women.

This is why the stakes of the battle over abortion, contraception, and the freedom of women are nothing less than the future of human emancipation itself. And it is why the fascists have gone all-in, advancing towards The Handmaid’s Tale nightmare for millions of women and girls.

Implementing Project 2025: The Architecture of Female Enslavement in Motion

Project 2025 is the fascists' all-encompassing vision and plan for Trump 2.0 and how they see locking into place a fully fascist America. A major part of Project 2025 contains a comprehensive program to re-engineer the federal government so that forced motherhood becomes the law, the culture, and the enforced moral order—administratively and legally.

• Remaking key parts of government, including the Department of Health and Human Services, installing fascists and purging language. Project 2025 explicitly calls for transforming HHS (and other agencies) so they prioritize “protecting unborn life,” purge terms such as “gender,” “sexual and reproductive health,” and “health equity” from guidance, and fast-track personnel who share an anti-abortion ideology. This is already under way: Multiple federal agencies—including HHS, the Centers for Disease Control and Office of Personnel Management—have begun removing or altering language in their public materials and internal documents following executive orders and internal directives. The strategy is to lock ideological aims into the very functioning of government agencies so rules, enforcement priorities, and regulatory practices shift without needing new legislation.

• Attack the abortion pill (mifepristone) via reviews and litigation. Project 2025 identifies revoking or neutering FDA approval of mifepristone as central. Mifepristone is one of the two medications used for medication abortions and has been repeatedly proven safe. Despite the facts, the Trump regime has launched fresh “reviews” of mifepristone labeling and approval—administrative moves that can be used to impose new restrictions (or justify them later)—even as fascist-led states keep suing to roll back FDA’s 2023 expansion of access. These reviews are clearly politically motivated and threaten the most accessible form of abortion for millions.

• Choke off the healthcare infrastructure—Title X,¹ Medicaid, Planned Parenthood funding. Part of Project 2025 aims at cutting federal support to family planning and clinic networks and for allowing states and federal rules to exclude providers such as Planned Parenthood from public programs. That blueprint has been converted into legislative and administrative action in 2025: Title X grants and other family planning funds have been frozen or targeted, and Congress passed budget language that would strip Medicaid reimbursements from some abortion-connected providers (though courts have blocked portions of that law so far). States and the federal executive are actively pursuing rules and enforcement to reduce funding to clinics that deliver contraception, cancer screenings and care for sexually transmitted infections. This is an intentional strategy to degrade the broader, mostly female health workforce, and gut and criminalize women's healthcare that is necessary for sexual independence.

• End telemedicine and criminalize remote access. Project 2025 explicitly recommends re-banning telemedicine abortion and mail distribution of pills. Fourteen states have already moved to prohibit telehealth prescribing or restrict mailing of medication abortion—producing a geographically uneven, high cost access regime that replicates Project 2025’s aim to make abortion practically impossible for low-income women and those who reside in rural areas. The net effect is to turn a safe, decentralized mode of care into a felony-risk activity in large parts of the country. 

• Legal and enforcement strategies for “fetal personhood.” Project 2025 and aligned state initiatives push the logic of so-called “fetal personhood”—that a fetus has legal rights independent of the woman whose body the fetus is part of—which opens a pathway for criminal prosecutions of pregnant women under statutes like child endangerment, manslaughter, or even homicide.

• Using the federal budget as a weapon. During the 43-day shutdown and the budget negotiations that followed, Republican leaders demanded elimination of abortion coverage in all ACA plans² nationwide—even in states where abortion is legal and even where states use their own funds to cover it. It was the first major federal attempt to abolish abortion coverage for the entire country, regardless of state law. It perfectly mirrors Project 2025’s mandate to weaponize federal funding streams to end abortion nationally.

• Undermine women’s professional and economic standing. The fascist blueprint seeks to diminish the social and economic position of women by attacking the institutions that sustain women’s paid work and professional status. A few days ago, the Department of Education moved to narrow the federal “professional degree” definition used for loan and program access—a change that effectively excludes many female-dominated fields (notably graduate nursing, public health and allied health programs) from higher loan caps and protections. This move will reduce access to advanced training, worsen shortages, and significantly impact women’s earnings and independence. This administrative reclassification is consistent with Project 2025’s broader intent to shrink women’s economic mobility and the professional base that supports reproductive and maternal health.

• Normalizing the dehumanization of women. The program also depends on reshaping how society talks about pregnancy: reducing pregnant women to “vessels,” “hosts,” or “incubators” (language long used in anti-abortion rhetoric) makes coercive legal and medical actions seem ordinary, and to turn women into incubators which legitimizes the fascist remaking of laws.

Project 2025’s ambitions are being realized already at state level, and the federal executive branch is moving on the toolkit it recommends (reviews, personnel changes, regulatory signals) to try to lock forced motherhood into the machinery of the state. The goal is not to “reduce abortion” or “protect babies”—it is to change the very definition of women’s humanity in the eyes of the law. For them, women’s freedom and independence must not merely be restricted—it must be annihilated.

All of this follows directly from what Bob Avakian wrote about back in 2020 (“Fascists Today and the Confederacy: A Direct Line, a Direct Connection Between All the Oppression”):

What is really involved is that abortion, and birth control, help to provide women with a certain independence, a freedom to decide whether and when to have children—and, yes, a certain freedom to engage in sexual relations of their own choosing, on the basis of their own desire and volition, without having to be worried about whether they are going to become pregnant when they have neither wanted nor decided to do so. It is this relative independence and freedom that causes a frenzy among Christian fascists, because it runs counter to reducing the role of women to “helpmates” to husbands and breeders of children for those husbands in patriarchal, male-dominated families, and to the subordinate and oppressed position of women in society as a whole.

No Compromise, No “Common Ground,” No Illusions: Women’s Freedom as the Flashpoint of the Fight Against Fascism

The Christian fascists’ aim is not to tweak law—it is to transform society according to their literal interpretation of the Bible, wrapped in white supremacy and American chauvinism. Their vision of society depends on the subjugation of women, the re-institution of forced motherhood, the restoration of patriarchal family relations, and the crushing of any challenge to traditional gender roles. This is not a “culture war.” It is a clash between two fundamentally opposed futures.

The revolutionary leader Bob Avakian foresaw this coming showdown 40 full years ago. In 1985, he wrote:

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.

With the Trump fascist regime’s intensifying rampage, it is becoming more and more clear: The Democratic Party cannot and will not stop this. They are turning people’s outrage into election campaigns and false hopes while women bleed. They are negotiating on the terms of Trump fascists while clinics close. They are trying to “stay civil” and “play by the rules” with the people who believe women are second-class citizens. 

In his sharp 2022 statement, The Fight For Abortion Rights And The Emancipation Of Women,” BA writes:

The attack on the right to abortion is a move to further intensify the already horrific oppression of women, denying them control of their lives and their very bodies, reducing them to breeders of children, cruelly subordinated to men and a patriarchal male-supremacist society. Forced motherhood is in fact female enslavement. Anything which waters down or distracts from this essential truth is objectively aiding this fundamental attack on the half of humanity that is female—is undermining the fight for their emancipation, and the emancipation of humanity as a whole from any form of oppression and exploitation.

Against a force willing to tear apart civil society, defy courts, rig elections, and use the power of the state to impose their fascist rule, there can be no “middle ground.”

There is only one way to stop the Trump fascist regime that is carrying out these horrors and has even more on their list.

Millions must rise—in sustained, nonviolent, determined mass protest—and refuse to leave the streets until the Trump fascist regime is defeated. This is how fascism has been stopped in other parts of the world. This is how it must be stopped here.

The Call from RefuseFascism.org for "The Fall of the Trump Fascist Regime" ends with these powerful words: “The future is unwritten. WHICH ONE WE GET IS UP TO US.”

If we fail to act, it will be written on the bodies of women—in pain, degradation, and suffering. Any future worth living has to go through the fight against fascism that is rapidly tightening its grip on society. So let’s not let the future be written for us. Answer the Call from Refuse Fascism: Come to DC and join the fight for this urgent and unifying demand:

THE TRUMP FASCIST REGIME MUST GO NOW!