F*#k the Courts and the Legislators - and Walgreens

Women are Not Incubators

Dear Readers: here, below, is a speech I gave (in somewhat shorter form) at a rally held by the Chicago Revolution Club and Rise Up for Abortion Rights (RU4AR) Rights on International Woman’s Day in downtown Chicago last Wednesday:

Women, Life, Freedom!

Fuck the courts and the legislators, women are not incubators! (RU4AR Chant)

Happy International Women’s Day! Power to the women, all the women, may they rise with their male and transgender comrades as a mighty force for revolution in the United States and around the world!

Men like to say that they love women. Great.  Here in the US today, loving women means more than doing an equal amount of housework. It means more than supporting women in their careers and life decisions, including the choice to have or not have children.  It means taking to the streets and the public squares to fight against the Christian fascist war on women.

Many here have heard about Republican states passing laws that make it illegal to tell the truth about white racism in past and present American history.  I’m guessing that few of you know that many of those laws also prohibit teaching about American patriarchy past and present.

Since the Christian fascist Dobbs v. Jackson decision last summer, eleven states now ban abortion in all or nearly all cases and nine more eleven states have passed strict abortion bills. In cold defiance of majority national opinion, as Jessica Valenti notes, “pregnant women are being left bleeding for days. Raped girls are being denied treatment. Doctors [are being] forced to choose between giving patients adequate care or going to jail! Twenty state Attorneys General [have] threatened retail pharmacies to keep [abortion] medication out of their states, even though these medicines are standard treatment for miscarriages.”

The giant Chicago-based pharmacy chain Walgreens, with more than 880 stores nationwide, has recently capitulated to these threats and is taking the leading abortion pill mifepristone off shelves even in states where abortion remains legal like Iowa and Kansas.  Fuck that! We need to go over to the Walgreens around the corner there and tell them a thing or two!

And it’s NOT just about the red states.  Any day now, a handpicked far-right Christian fascist federal judge in Texas is going to prohibit the safe and effective abortion pill mifepristone nationwide.  

Gee its nice your state is blue; the war on women is still coming for you! (RU4AR chant).

Red state, blue state, we can’t hide, the war on women is nationwide! (RU4AR again).

Trust me, the Republic-fascists from Trump and Sam Alito and DeSantis on down to Marjorie Taylor-Greene and your angry FOX News uncle want to ban abortion nationwide.

I’m here as a member of the Editorial Board of Refuse Fascism. What’s the socialist feminist holiday International Women’s Day (IWD) got to do with fascism? Four things. Fascists, and that’s what the Republicans and even a few Democrats are, …fascists all about restoring so-called traditional social hierarchies, hierarchies of race, hierarchies of class, hierarchies of nationality, hierarchies of religion and most definitely hierarchies of gender. 

Fascists like Trump and DeSantis and the Supreme Handmaid Court “justices” who killed abortion rights last summer are all about putting women back in their supposed place, as pregnant and powerless as possible. It’s not about the babies, trust me.  They couldn’t care less about the babies. It’s about neofascist gender oppression.

Second, just as capitalism and patriarchy are all bound up with each other, as my good friends in the Revolution Club will be happy to explain, fascism is a product and even a destination of capitalism. Ask me what I mean by that later if you want. It’s basically capitalism without elections and the rule of law, kinda like what Trump tried on January 6^th.

Third, fascism is militantly nationalistic. True socialists and feminists like the female and working-class comrades who invented IWD 114 years ago (and who revitalized it here in Chicago in 1967) are internationalists.  As internationalists, they fight for and learn from the great feminist struggles of other countries like in Latin America (hold up the green bandana!) and Iran today.

Women, Life, Freedom!

Fourth, the current attack on women is the leading current battering ram in the Republi-fascist’s attack on every decent human and civil right they can get their hands on.  The Republi-fascists see the assault on females as a wedge to expand and escalate a many sided Christian white nationalist assault on gay and transgendered people, on people of color, on liberals and socialists, on intellectuals, on anti-imperialists, on voting rights, on livable ecology, on education, on civility, on the rule of law. 

And that reminds me, tomorrow night at 5 O’clock over at the University of Illinois at Chicago a mile west of here, young people are protesting the revolting appearance of two leading fascists, the despicable women haters and neo-Nazis Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens. These two far-right media personalities and bigots, Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens, are scheduled to speak 7 p.m. Thursday at UIC’s Dorin Forum, 725 W. Roosevelt Road. I say shut them down. The protest starts at 5 p.m. Thursday at UIC’s quad. Attendees will march toward the front of the forum. Be there or be square.

Power to the people, power to the women.

• Please note: Walgreens is a Chicago based firm, founded here in 1901.