Bay Area march for abortion, October 2, 2021. Photo: revcom.us
In the most devastating attack on abortion rights since the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022, on May 1 the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals mandated a nationwide restriction on the use of mifepristone. Mifepristone is a safe, effective medication with few side effects, used in over 60 percent of U.S. abortions. This ruling reinstates a requirement that all patients must receive the medication in person at a medical facility, and cannot receive it through the mail or through a pharmacy. It cannot be prescribed through care given by telemedicine. In the recent period, telemedicine accounted for 30 percent of all abortions, and for almost all of the abortions in states where abortion has been banned.
The impact will be extraordinary. Reinstating the in-person dispensing requirement would force patients across the country to travel to a health center to be handed the medication—and in the states with near-total bans, they have to travel to another state. It would end mail distribution of mifepristone, and it would stop pharmacies from filling mifepristone prescriptions for all patients, including those who need it for miscarriage management. Teenagers without resources will be forced to carry the fetus to term. Women of color and immigrants have relied on mail prescriptions in order to bypass institutional barriers. Women in rural areas will be severely restricted from access. Many women will end up not being able to end an unwanted pregnancy.
The case was brought to the Appeals Court by Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, who argued that the access to mifepristone violated Louisiana’s ban on abortion and therefore caused harm to the state. Louisiana’s official policy is to “protect the ‘right to life’ of every ‘unborn child’ from conception by prohibiting abortion...” The ruling is a major step towards the fascists' goal of completely banning abortion. These religious dictators have made a leap in their enforcement of a lunatic vision of a Christian-fascist America. Forced motherhood is female enslavement!
San Francisco: Bloody pants die-in disrupts business as usual for abortion rights June 2022. Photo: RiseUp4AbortionSF
In 1973, a Supreme Court ruling gave women the right to abortion. But on June 24, 2022, the Supreme Court came down with a ruling that overturned Roe—ending the federal constitutional right to abortion in the United States. According to Planned Parenthood, "one in three women [of reproductive age] now live in states where abortion is not accessible. In the first few months after Roe was overturned, 18 states banned or severely restricted abortion."
Mifepristone is a drug that blocks a hormone called progesterone. The recommended regimen is for mifepristone to be used together with another medicine called misoprostol to end a pregnancy. Misoprostol is not currently affected by this ruling. Miso-only abortions are safe but are often longer and less comfortable. And some providers are worried that there will be more ER visits because of miso-only abortions—not because the drug isn’t safe, but because patients will be in more pain. This ruling adds extra cruelty for women seeking medical abortions.
Why is this happening?
In his 2021 New Year’s Statement revolutionary communist leader Bob Avakian sheds some real light on why these attacks on women’s right to abortion are happening.
[T]he elimination of male supremacy is impossible within the confines of this system. This is true because male supremacy has been deeply woven into the fabric of this society, and because this system is based on capitalist commodity relations and exploitation—things are produced to be exchanged (sold), through a process in which masses of people work, for a wage or salary, to create profit that is accumulated by capitalists who employ them and control their work—a system in which the patriarchal family unit remains an essential economic and social component and requirement, even as it is being put under increasing strains. And the fascist section of the ruling class has, over a number of decades now, waged a relentless attack on Constitutional rights, and mobilized their social base of religious fundamentalist fanatics, to forcefully and often violently assert “traditional” patriarchal oppression—with the assault on the right to abortion, and even birth control, a major focus of this attempt to essentially enslave women. What I wrote, 35 years ago, is today more true than ever:
Over the past several decades in the U.S. there have been profound changes in the situation of women and the relations within the family. In only one of ten families is there the “model” situation where the husband is the “sole breadwinner” and the wife a totally dependent “homemaker.” With these economic changes have come significant changes in attitudes and expectations—and very significant strains not only on the fabric of the family but of social relations more broadly....
Bob Avakian also underscores this very important point about the battle for women’s right to abortion as part of the fight against women’s oppression as a whole, and the struggle for revolution:
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.
FETUSES ARE NOT BABIES!
ABORTION IS NOT MURDER!
WOMEN ARE NOT INCUBATORS!
