This book by Sarah Ruden traces propaganda against reproductive rights through Western history. It shows that we can resist by exposing the history of these false claims and the damage they have caused.
abortion
Review: ‘Relinquished: The Politics of Adoption, and the Privilege of American Motherhood’ by Gretchen Sisson, PhD
May 30, 2026This book cuts through myths about adoption as an alternative to abortion, revealing that while women are pressured to choose adoption, that choice often had a negative impact on their lives.
Women World Wide: May 2026
May 16, 2026Takes up: The tenth anniversary of the French law abolishing prostitution; La Cité Audacieuse, a feminist space in Paris, France; and England and Wales decriminalizing abortion.
Women WorldWide: April 2026
April 15, 2026Takes up: a yearly 2.5% increase in self-harm cases among people aged 24 and under; proposed UK ban of pornography depicting incest where one person is pretending to be under 18; and the situation of pregnant women and girls in ICE custody.
Review: ‘Beyond Limits: Stories of Third-Trimester Abortion Care’
April 8, 2026‘Beyond Limits’ by M.D. Shelley Sella is a book informed by her experience as the first woman doctor in the U.S. openly providing third-trimester abortions. It includes testimonies of her patients and addresses frequently asked questions revealing the necessity of legalizing abortion at all stages of pregnancy.
Women WorldWide: March 2026
March 26, 2026Takes up: Paula Doress-Worters, a founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, writing Our Bodies, Ourselves; far Right president José Antonio Kast taking office in Chile; and International Women’s Day demonstrations in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay.
Review: ‘Abortion in the Age of Unreason’
January 10, 2026A physician who performed abortions for over 50 years describes his patients’ experiences and the evolving political situation. It reminds activists to be unapologetic about fighting for abortion rights: “Opposition to and psychological warfare against abortion is the principal organizing tool in America for imposing a totalitarian state.”
Review: ‘We Choose To: A Memoir of Providing Abortion Care Before, During, and After Roe’
November 22, 2025Authors Dr. Curtis Boyd and Dr. Glenna Halvorson-Boyd describe experiences in providing abortion care. The book provides hope that we can defeat authoritarianism and create a compassionate, connected society.
Women WorldWide: August 2025
August 31, 2025Takes up: a demonstration in Lippstadt, Germany, against Evangelical Lippstadt Hospital’s decision to stop providing abortions; a Superior Court Justice in Ontario, Canada, finding five men not guilty of sexual assault; and police removing migrants, mostly women and children, from a makeshift encampment outside the City Hall in Paris, France.
Woman as Reason: What overturning abortion unleashed
May 21, 2025Revoking the right to abortion relegated women as less than full human beings. All human rights are up for grabs, and women’s hard-won rights were deemed easy to destroy. Trump has acted accordingly but is running into “the resistance,” with women leading the way.
Women World Wide: May 2025
May 7, 2025Takes up: the opening of Poland’s first abortion clinic; International Women’s Day in Argentina; and a march in South Africa demanding the government declare escalating levels of femicide and violence against women and children a national emergency.
Lead article: Women fighting fascist rulers–from Iran to the USA
March 27, 2025In many countries misogyny is state policy, be that in the U.S. where abortion bans are killing women or Iran where the new hijab law has draconian punishments. It’s doubtful if Trump et al comprehend the rage and power that opposes their deadly drive for power and riches.
Women WorldWide: February 2025
March 2, 2025Takes up: Three Thai women rescued from a human egg farm in the country of Georgia; the third African Women in Dialogue conference; and the UN Human Rights Committee ruling Ecuador and Nicaragua responsible for violating the human rights of three girls denied abortions.
Trump grabs power, spreads hate, stirs resistance
February 3, 2025President Donald Trump is encouraging deadly hate toward women, Blacks, people of color, LGBTQ people, people with disabilities, and immigrants. It is grassroots responses and mutual aid that can block Trump’s power grab. More forms of revolt will erupt in the face of the downward spiral of this capitalist world in crisis.
انتخابات ایالات متحده بهمثابه جلوهای از ضدانقلاب
January 13, 2025Farsi translation of the lead article “The U.S. election as manifestation of counterrevolution.”
Lead-editorial article: The U.S. election as manifestation of counterrevolution
December 6, 2024Counterrevolution is the guiding principle of the Trump campaign and the dominant characteristic of politics worldwide. Although revolution does not appear to be on the horizon in the U.S. or in most other countries, capitalism is stumbling through a global crisis, both economic and ecological, psychological and communal.
A poem by Sunshine Lombré
November 22, 2024Poem read by the author, Sunshine Lombré, at an abortion rights demonstration in Evanston, Illinois.
Woman as Reason: A battle we must win
October 31, 2024The fundamentalist, sexist, anti-gay convictions of J.D. Vance, Josh Hawley and Harrison Butker reveal that their movement not only wants to end abortion but control what women think, what we feel, in fact who we are.
Review: ‘The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America’
August 28, 2024After Roe v Wade was overturned after nearly fifty years, what will it mean to be a woman in America and what kind of country is it becoming? This is what the book ‘The Fall of Roe: The Rise of a New America’ explores, reviewed by Adele.
Women World Wide: July 2024
July 8, 2024Takes up: Protest in Brazil against a bill that equates abortion after 22 weeks with homicide; the 4th World Congress for the Abolition of Prostitution in Montreal; women outdo fundamentalists in Turkey’s local elections; and the cancellation of a state-sponsored mass wedding of 100 orphaned girls and young women in Nigeria.
Woman As Reason: Anti-abortion fanatics yearn to repeat ‘Communist’ Romania’s horrors
June 19, 2024If Republicans are able to institute their white Christian Nationalist dream of forced pregnancy and no birth control, the kinds of fascist practices women in Romania suffered under Nicolae Ceausescu will be imposed on women in the U.S. Not only women, but children too will suffer and die.
Mujeres en lucha contra el feminicidio
May 19, 2024El feminicidio (el asesinato de una mujer por ser mujer) está aumentando en todo el mundo, al igual que las manifestaciones en su contra. En esta lucha se puede ver algo de la visión de futuro implícita en este movimiento: una sociedad en la que las mujeres sean comprendidas como seres humanos libres. La clave está en la “totalidad y profundidad del necesario arrancar de raíz”.
Woman as Reason: “Trust women” is not the needed rallying cry
May 9, 2024Vice President Harris and President Biden should stop talking about their “great trust” in women because anti-abortionists too know that women will fight to do what’s right for themselves. This is a fight against forced pregnancy, to keep birth control legal and accessible, for our health and lives to be valued, to be seen as whole human beings.
Draft Perspectives, 2024-2025: Part Two, Trump 2.0: A global threat
May 4, 2024Part II of the 2024-2025 Draft Perspectives. Takes up: the global retrogression that a second Trump period would mean.
Women worldwide fight femicide
March 16, 2024Femicide—the murder of a woman because she is a woman—is on the rise across the world, as are demonstrations against it. In this struggle can be seen some of the vision of the future implicit in this movement: a society in which women are comprehended as free human beings. Key is “the totality and depth of the necessary uprooting.”
Women World Wide: March 2024
March 9, 2024Takes up: Amazonian Initiative Movement, a Sierra Leone group fighting genital mutilation (FGM); a two-year, 7,400-mile caravan journey through 20 African countries by #FrontlineEndingFGM; Asian Women for Equality struggling to stop massage parlors and other venues of prostitution in Canada; and France becoming the first country to explicitly guarantee women’s legal right to abortion in its constitution.
Review: Deep Care: The Radical Activists Who Provided Abortions…
February 28, 2024Adele reviews a fascinating history of three interconnected projects of the radical feminist community in the Oakland, Calif., area over the past 40 years: an underground self-help abortion network, clinics run on feminist principles, and clinic defense organizations.
World in View: Thousands protest Argentina’s Milei
February 6, 2024Argentine President Javier Milei aims to privatize state institutions; eliminate regulations on businesses; prevent strikes; and seek full executive powers. Less than two months after taking office, he was confronted by a one-day mass general strike. What kind of society do Argentinians want to create?
Editorial: Democracy under dire threat
January 25, 2024Trump and his allies are aiming at a second term. The means: taking power at all costs, even with a minority of votes. The ends: complete evisceration of human rights, democracy, and human solidarity.
Woman as Reason: Why we call them fanatics
January 24, 2024Columnist Terry Moon explains why Marxist-Humanists refer to anti-abortion activists and organizations as fanatics and zealots.
World in View: Can Poland overcome its reactionary history?
January 7, 2024After eight years of ultra-nationalist, reactionary rule, Poland’s Law and Justice Party was defeated in parliamentary elections. However, the country’s future direction is by no means assured. Two areas are key: women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.
World in View: Argentina’s president imposes austerity
December 21, 2023Argentina’s new President Javier Milei quickly imposed social welfare cuts, while threatening protests. Still, mass resistance from below is developing. Is that enough to break out of the political-economic-social straitjacket that Argentine masses have been living through for decades?
Readers’ Views: November 2023
November 24, 2023Readers’ Views on: Israel/Palestine; Revolt in Iran; in Canada for 2SLGBTQIA+; Trump, Biden too old to run; Racism in Tennessee; Prisoners miss ‘N&L’; Memorial for Paul Geist and Dan Bremer; Texas targets pregnant women & refugees; Ohio targets women and democracy; Revolutionary history; and Raining on those with disabilities.
Woman as Reason: Authoritarians try to nullify Ohio vote for abortion
November 22, 2023Ohio citizens voted in a landslide to enshrine the right to abortion in the state constitution. Fanatics in power tried and failed to derail the vote and are now maneuvering to nullify it, destroying democracy in the process.
Women World Wide: November 2023
November 18, 2023Takes up: International Safe Abortion Day; elections in Poland; ‘Women in Revolt! Art and Activism in the UK, 1970–1990’, the first major art museum show covering the feminist art movement; and El Salvador’s anti-abortion laws.
Handicap This!: November 2023
November 14, 2023Takes up: The right of disabled people to be part of the reproductive justice discussion; Indigenous Disability Awareness Month in Canada; and European Union countries requiring people to prove their percentage of disability in order to have free access to culture.
Evanston rallies for abortion rights
October 18, 2023In person report of the Oct. 15 Pro-Choice Rally and March in Evanston, Illinois.
Women WorldWide: October 2023
October 3, 2023Takes up: Mexico’s Supreme Court ruling state laws against abortion are unconstitutional; Britain’s first cohousing community exclusively for women over 50; and #SeAcabo, (It’s Over), the Spanish women athletes’ #MeToo movement.
Right threatens AIDS funding
September 9, 2023Reauthorization of funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) has been abruptly bogged down by Republican legislators under the false claim that it supports abortion providers.
Editorial, August 2023: Abortion bans—cruelty is the point
August 19, 2023The stories told by 12 women who bravely sued Texas over its draconian so-called “exception” in its abortion ban, show that the point of the ban is to cruelly strip women of the right to control our own bodies and lives. Freedom is the enemy of the anti-abortion fanatics.
Draft for Marxist-Humanist Perspectives, 2023-2024: Polycrisis and the need to transform reality. Part I
June 15, 2023Society’s crying need for radical transformation makes itself felt day after day. In response, ruling classes across the globe have split into two main factions with differing strategies for heading off the threatened transformation from below: counter-revolution spawning new flavors of fascism with rough new figureheads, or non-transformational transformation to patch up the status quo while saving the powers that be. This thesis is about what is happening in the world and what to do about it.
Woman as Reason: Save democracy, save abortion
June 3, 2023Republicans have to destroy democracy if they want to rule because a robust majority of the U.S. population supports legal, safe, accessible abortion; are for gay rights and don’t despise Trans people. So how do you trash their rights? You do it by destroying a government by the people and for the people. Let us count the ways.
May-June: Women WorldWide
May 11, 2023Takes up: Canadian Dawn Dumont Walker’s struggle to keep her son and escape her abusive ex-partner; the Spanish parliament passing legislation for paid leave for debilitating menstrual pain and decriminalizing abortion, including for minors; and the life-altering and horrendous suffering of women in Bangladesh due to climate chaos.
Review: ‘Policing the Womb: Invisible Women’
March 18, 2023Adele reviews “Policing the Womb: Invisible Women and the Criminalization of Motherhood,” by Michele Goodwin, Goodwin describes the increasing wave of legislation regulating pregnancy and criminalizing miscarriages, stillbirths and supposed “endangerment” of the fetus.
Woman as Reason: Valenti’s ‘Abortion Every Day’
March 17, 2023So much is happening regarding abortion—since the reactionary U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, trashing women’s right to abortion, a human right we’ve had for 50 years—that it is almost impossible to keep track of. For help, you can turn to the splendid blog of Jessica Valenti, “Abortion Every Day.”
Woman as Reason: Church survives on sexism & hypocrisy
January 25, 2023Misogyny is ingrained in society, as are disdain, discrimination and abuse. Sexism works for the Catholic Church and they are determined to keep it.
Readers’ Views: January-February 2023, Part One
January 24, 2023Readers’ Views on: Women’s Struggles for Freedom; Open Season on Lgbtq+ ; Healthcare Workers on Strike; Lois Curtis; Immigrant Solidarity Needed; Putin vs. Ukraine; U.S. Right vs. Ukraine; Water and Humanity’s Future
Readers’ Views: November-December 2022, Part One
November 11, 2022Readers’ Views on: Iran: Woman, Life, Freedom; Election Threats and Battles; Women’s Marches and Enemies; Sexist Supreme Court; Ukrainians Fight for Freedom; Para-Transit Disservice; Mike Davis; Labor Struggles, from Amazon…to the Bank.
Handicap This!: November-December 2022
Disabled women have joined anti-U.S. Supreme Court demonstrations as they are eleven times more likely to die during pregnancy or childbirth; Disabled South Koreans protested in subways over lack of access to essential services, abuse in institutions, and elevated death rates; a disabled woman in Pakistan founded two organizations which manufacture and donate wheelchairs, employing mostly the disabled.
Election shows women feel the hate
It wasn’t alone the question of abortion rights that helped Democrats do so well in the midterm elections, but also what made women and so many others furious was the extreme cruelty and sickening glee with which Republicans imposed their draconian abortion laws and bans. Women could feel the hate.