by Terry Moon

This year, those who celebrated International Women’s Day and Women’s History Month in the U.S. are completely aware that the “President,” elected by one of the smallest plurality votes in American history, wants to destroy the very concept of women’s history and deny the oppression of women, which Trump has exacerbated. As in so many other countries—from Iran and Afghanistan to Russia, India, Sudan and more—in the U.S., misogyny has rapidly become state policy.

Ah yes, Trump promised to “protect women,” which evidently meant jailing licensed Latina midwives who aid women having babies and miscarriages. His pledge (read lie) to “leave the question of abortion to the states,” has become a death sentence. States argue in court that it is their right to let pregnant women die in emergency rooms rather than treating them. States with abortion bans penalize doctors who dare to help women whose pregnancies will kill them, are killing them, in so draconian a way that doctors sit on their hands while women bleed to death or die of sepsis. Women are dying horrible, painful, terrifying deaths when all they need to continue their lives, take care of their children, make love to their husbands, is a simple, safe, 30-minute medical procedure that also happens to be an abortion.[1]

These states are run by misogynists who pretend to care about life while enacting laws that cause women to die, that are purposefully cruel, and all the while Governors and Attorneys General prattle on and on about their commitment to “saving lives.” Many of those lives they supposedly “save” are by forcing women to carry a doomed pregnancy to term. Those lives end in hours or days with a baby in agony, a mother-by-force traumatized, and an overwhelming crippling hospital debt for intensive care.

In Texas, ground zero for anti-abortion fanaticism, from 2019 to 2022 the rate of maternal mortality rose by 56%, compared with 11% nationwide. Also in Texas, as activist Jessica Valenti reports in her blog, “Abortion Every Day,” an independent study of infant deaths revealed a 23% spike due to congenital anomalies. The author of that study, Dr. Alison Gemmill, told the Los Angeles Times: “Prior to these abortion bans, people had the option to terminate if the fetus was found to have a severe congenital anomaly—we’re talking about organs being outside of the body and other things that are very severe and not compatible with life.”

As for Trump’s lie about leaving the question of abortion to the states, the Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Trump nominated is leaning towards reinstating a rule forcing women to do an in-person visit to a health-care provider to get abortion pills. Abortion pills are extremely safe—safer than Viagra. If they weren’t, the bodies would have been piling up since the COVID-19 epidemic and also now, when the pills can be obtained without a doctor’s visit.

THE MEANING OF HISTORY MONTHS

Let’s tarry for a moment on Women’s and Black History Months. Both came about from intensive and sustained struggles, organically connected because the Women’s Liberation Movement was begun by women Civil Rights activists who saw that women, too, were not free.[2] These were struggles, not just for recognition that Blacks and Women actually have a history, but struggles for freedom, for new human relationships sans racism and sexism and for an economic system that didn’t just benefit the already wealthy.

Reading that history—which was being unearthed for the first time—gave more context to what it meant to be a woman, to be Black. For both—for anyone or group who reclaimed their history—it became possible to see one’s self as a continuation of that history of struggles for freedom; as someone making history in their own lifetime and contributing to the fullness of what freedom can come to mean.

That is what the Republicans and King Trump want to destroy as they let loose Elon Musk to rampage through webpages, trashing anything with the words Black, women, Hispanic, first, female—the list of almost 200 words can be found here. It is an unprecedented attempt to destroy a history of struggle in the hopes it will destroy actual struggle.

IRAN FAILS TO KILL A REVOLUTION

Women the world over know very well what their governments think of them because their “leaders”—often unelected or installed in fraud/sham elections—frequently show them in violent ways.

Iran’s government made their policy to harass, control, and harm women crystal clear before, during and after the revolutionary “Woman Life Freedom” uprising. So anxious and brutal is the Iranian government in enforcing hijab that they beat women to death. Their new laws on veiling[3] are so draconian that a woman who dares show a few strands of hair or too much ankle or wrist will have her car impounded, her job taken away as well as her husband’s, her bank savings held. She will be fined into poverty and banned from higher education. It’s highly likely that she would be arrested—especially if she is a member of one of the many minorities in Iran. Once arrested, she could be beaten, jailed for up to 10 years, raped, lashed. Shops that serve her will be shuttered; cabbies who drive her will lose their cars. It is now compulsory to snitch on women with “improper hijab.” In short, her life will be ruined, if not forever, for decades.

During the Woman Life Freedom revolt, many activists were beaten, some to death, children were killed outright, demonstrators were purposely blinded with rubber bullets, women and men activists were swept into prisons and brutalized. Now it seems that the Iranian government cannot stop killing its youth, including women and girls.

According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI): “Since the start of 2024, Iran has executed at least 29 women.” They are a part of the of 862 people—most of them youth—that Iran put to death in 2024. In Iran, 13 years old is the age girls can be legally married, even younger if her father or a judge approves. As CHRI puts it: “These women are often young and, like many of those executed in Iran, often members of minority communities. What stands them apart from other executed prisoners is that many were victims of child marriage (and thus child rape), domestic violence, and gender-related crimes and injustices, who committed murder as the only way to escape intolerable abuse.” There is no protection for married girls, and it is extremely difficult for a full-grown woman, much less a child, to escape from an abusive marriage. Without question the death penalty is also imposed on activists, including women.

None of this can be separated from the dire state of the Iranian economy. According to the government’s own statistics, industrial facilities operated at only 41% of their capacity in the first month of 2025. The entire economy is in trouble: power and national gas shortages, a severe decline in the production of meat and poultry, energy shortages causing business to close, price hikes for food, medicine and other basic commodities.

Iran has also suffered a decades long drought. Wikipedia reports that “Iran ranks among the most water-stressed countries in the world.” Eighty to 100% of its renewable water is used each year.

The inability of Iran’s leaders, its army, its supposedly “Revolutionary” (read Reactionary) Guards to solve any of Iran’s existential problems prompts it to turn on its own population. This reveals the complete bankruptcy of thought that only sees a solution in turning Iran into a nation of snitches, where neighbors would suspect, fear and turn on each other rather than the government.

It’s not working.

In a remarkable article in The Fire Next Time, Siyavash Shahabi unknowingly reveals the striking similarities between the despotic leaders of Iran and those like Governor Abbot of Texas, whose draconian abortion ban authorized anyone to sue anyone who aided or abetted an abortion, be it a cabbie or a husband driving a woman to a clinic, or a grandmother giving her granddaughter a loan or information on terminating a pregnancy. Shahabi wrote:

“One of the most insidious aspects of the Hijab Law is its potential to fracture society. It deputizes ordinary citizens to police one another, creating an atmosphere of suspicion and fear. Community groups, businesses, and even families are drawn into the machinery of control, eroding trust and solidarity. The law encourages denunciation, rewarding compliance and punishing defiance, ensuring that everyone becomes complicit in the regime’s vision of a controlled society.”

Strikingly, from Iran to Texas, the target is women. These laws also harken back to the U.S.’s infamous fugitive slave law which required states that had banned slavery to send escaped slaves back and penalized anyone who helped them to stay free.

But despite all of this, slaves still fled north for freedom, women are still having abortions, and women in Iran still dance, sing, and show their hair in public. What Shahabi concluded certainly speaks to women in Iran but also to women in the U.S. who are fighting their own version of Iranian fascism, i.e., Trumpism, and it is a warning to both dictators:

“Despite these oppressive measures, the resistance against forced hijab has only grown stronger. Since the ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ movement erupted in 2022, acts of defiance have multiplied across the country. Women walk unveiled through public spaces, challenging the regime’s authority with every step. Videos of these acts spread like wildfire on social media, inspiring others to stand firm in the face of repression.

“This defiance carries immense risks. Women who resist face imprisonment, fines, and public harassment. Yet the courage of these individuals is a testament to the resilience of the Iranian people. They are not just rejecting a law—they are rejecting a system that seeks to erase their humanity.”

FASCIST HEADS OF STATES WILL NOT STOP US

Attempting to “erase their humanity” is a great description of Trump, Musk and his base. It is what is so awful about them and it is not only that they try to belittle those living with disabilities, immigrants fleeing horrible persecution or living in failed states where they and their children have no future; women who want to control their own lives and destinies, people of color who have lived experience of discrimination and racism; LGBTQ+ people who simply try to live as who they actually are—basically anyone who is not white, male, able-bodied and, oh yes, wealthy. What is horrifying is that not only do they attempt to erase the humanity of others, but in their hatred and contempt for the Other and their willingness to do horrible things to innocent human beings including causing their deaths, they reveal themselves as monsters, devoid of humanity themselves because they are incapable of seeing it in others.

People take to the streets for many reasons, but one that unites them is the recognition that those who rule their countries do not comprehend them as human. That was clear in International Women’s Day (M8) demonstrations worldwide. Importantly, dictatorships could not stop these demonstrations, only enlivene them.

• Women in Turkey held two mass demonstrations. In Kadikoy, Turkey’s biggest city, hundreds rallied. While President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan touted 2025 as “the Year of the Family,” protesters’ banners read: “Family will not bind our life!” and “We will not be sacrificed to the family!” In Istanbul M8 marches have been attacked regularly as women have defied outright march bans. This year in Istanbul over 3,000 marched in a demonstration with banners reading: “We won’t be silenced,” “We’re not afraid and we won’t obey,” and “Long live our feminist struggle!” It was only after the peaceful march was over that Erdoğan’s thuggish police started grabbing women, roughing them up and arresting at least 200.
  

  “In Nicaragua there is a dictatorship. We demand an end to the repression.” Nicaraguan women marching in Costa Rica on M8 for freedom for women and others in Nicaragua. Photo: Peace Brigades International

• Nicaragua has outlawed any M8 demonstrations for years. That did not stop Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica from taking up their sisters’ struggle and marching in M8 demonstrations. Slogans included: “Exiled women, never silenced,” “You will flourish Nicaragua, free and feminist” and “Against macho tyranny, here we are feminists!”
• In Pakistan, where honor killings run rampant, women in this year’s Aurat March—Pakistanis’ International Women’s Day demonstration—presented a mock funeral carrying a shroud-draped stretcher titled “Women’s Rights.” Other signs read: “My Body, My Choice,” and “No to Patriarchy!” Crowds shouted out “ZADI!”—FREEDOM! They had to yell because the police had confiscated their speakers, blocked streets, and denied them a permit for the march. A 71-year-old feminist spoke for many: “We will not back down! There are 400 of us here today and we will keep fighting to our last breath.”

In the U.S., over 300 demonstrations took place across the country on March 8, including in all major cities. Thousands came out to protest Trump/Musk. What many protests had in common were that women of all ages attended. Many were veterans of second wave feminism, now in their 70s and 80s, and they marched and rallied next to teenagers, mothers and their daughters, working women and college students.

A director of Women’s March, Rachel O’Leary Carmona, caught something when she said: “What people are concerned about is everything, because there’s no aspect of these attacks [coming from the Trump administration] that doesn’t touch everybody.”

That was evident at the demonstration in Chicago. Over 2,000 rallied in Federal Plaza and then marched and demonstrated in front of Trump Tower and stopped traffic there for over 30 minutes. People came from all over. I talked to a woman who came from Champaign/Urbana—a two-and-a-half-hour drive to Chicago.

In a conversation with three young women holding handmade signs about abortion rights one said: “I think we feel pretty powerless…”  She stopped talking and tears started streaming down her face. She continued: “It’s just so sad to think about the reason we have to be here. We have to show up for each other and we have to be there for each other and it feels like there’s nothing we can do. But it is comforting to see that there are people who care and people who are willing to stand up for what’s right and for people who are being harmed by this. Of course I, as a woman, have been impacted, but there are so many different identities of people who are being hurt more and in different ways. I just want to show them solidarity.”

She expressed the widespread feeling at the Chicago Women’s March—and no doubt many more across the country—a passion for transforming what women and others rightfully saw as their country now being led by monsters; by people so misshapen that they were causing the death and misery of thousands for no other reason than to take power and enrich themselves.

What she expressed about the “many different identities of people who are being hurt” was also made obvious by the signs that took up multiple issues, including solidarity with Ukraine, funding for science, racism, transphobia and trans rights, genocide in Gaza, immigration and immigrants, saving democracy, and of course, the right to abortion and women’s control of our bodies.

But signs, as creative and angry as they were, don’t fully express the rage, passion and determination to stop the fascist direction of the Trump administration. In the past that anger has been directed towards building up the Democratic Party as the way to counter Trumpism. But now the Democrats have proven themselves so pusillanimous as to be useless. Women and others determined to stop the Trump/Musk carnage are realizing that for that to happen, it is they, we, who will have to do it.

It’s doubtful if Trump et al comprehend the deep anger and power that they have unleashed that opposes their deadly drive for power and riches. Now let us move forward with our passion, demanding to be recognized and treated as human beings, united with the idea of sweeping away the depths of inhumanity we face in order to lay the basis for a society of totally new human relations. That is how we can deepen the ongoing history of Women’s Liberation and begin a new chapter of freedom struggles.

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[1] To read about these deaths, go to ProPublica here, and here to see their series. These deaths were only found by creative investigative reporting. Texas has refused to keep maternal or infant mortality figures since legal abortion was overturned. These “pro-lifers” don’t want us to know how many their inhuman laws have killed.

[2] See: Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left by Sara Evans.

[3] You can find an English translation of the new law on hijab here.