by Terry Moon

When the Supreme Court, with its male chauvinist members hand-picked by sexist-supreme Donald Trump, overturned women’s right to an abortion on June 24, 2022, they did much more than ignore decades of court precedent that established abortion as a right. First, they trashed the fact that the Court rarely takes away a human right, making it obvious that now all rights are up for grabs. Second, they made clear their view of women as less-than: less than men, less than what is considered a full human being. Third, they demonstrated that the rights women struggled for 50 years to establish, including our definition of who we actually are, was open to attack. They purposely showed just how easy it is to destroy something so precious and fought for.

ATTACKING OUR BODILY AUTONOMY

It’s no accident that the opening shot was to destroy women’s physical autonomy, our right to control our bodies. After all, it’s our bodies that have always been in contention. Men like Trump, like Brett Kavanaugh, assume women are theirs to rape, belittle, scare. Those like Vice President J.D. Vance consider women as breeding machines. If they don’t have children, they are, by (his) definition, “miserable.”

Republicans, authoritarians, oligarchs, white nationalists and a growing body of natalists are determined to force women to have babies by outlawing abortion, attacking birth control, criminalizing spontaneous miscarriages, defunding or underfunding organizations like Planned Parenthood whose very name they abhor. They don’t care that in the process they are destroying women’s healthcare, including the possibility of having children safely and being able to raise them in a society that actually nurtures children rather than killing them via pollution, wars, poverty and illnesses that were once under control—like measles and other childhood diseases held in check by vaccinations.

Instead of funding organizations that actually help women, an unconscionable amount of federal and tax money is being funneled to so-called “crisis pregnancy centers,” religiously run entities, most without any trained or actual medical personnel, who lie to women about abortions and about what services they will give women if they have the baby they may not want or cannot afford. These fake “clinics,” do not even follow HIPAA guidelines, so women’s names, addresses, etc., are not secured. These phony clinics are what Republicans are overfunding with absolutely NO oversight in order to replace women’s actual healthcare, which the Trump administration is methodically destroying.

Trump’s “big beautiful bill” was set to eliminate all funding for Head Start, which has helped educate children from poor and working-class families for decades, until an outraged outcry stopped it, but they still laid off many who oversaw it. According to Moira Donegan, the terrific feminist writer for The Guardian, Republicans promise more cuts to childcare funding, and a repeal of the 50-year-old tax credit for daycare. The average cost of daycare is $11,000 a year! Statistics like that tell you just how far the Republican plan to give “families” who have a child $5,000 would actually help.

While, on one hand, they are forcing women into childbirth, on the other they are making it extremely difficult to actually raise children. Donegan gives us the reason why: “the Republicans’ childcare policy, like their pro-natalist policy, is based on one goal: undoing the historic gains in women’s rights and status, and pushing American women out of the workforce, out of public life, out of full participation in society—and into a narrow domestic role of confinement, dependence and isolation.”

CHILDREN PAY THE PRICE FOR TRUMP’S BILL

Two million or more children will no longer have food stamps because new work-hour reporting requirements are purposefully created to be so difficult to meet that deserving families will be dropped from the program. Medicaid, which Trump promised multiple times to “not touch,” is facing “the largest cut in its history,” which would affect “roughly half of children in the U.S.” The cruelty of Trump et al is seen in how Republicans are planning to punish states that use their own state money to pay for the children of immigrants to be on Medicaid by taking “a huge chunk of federal funding unless” these states “strip immigrant children of their health insurance.” And that child tax credit you’ve heard so much about? If either parent doesn’t have a Social Security number, even if the child is a U.S. citizen, that tax credit would be taken away, which would “eliminate credits for 4.5 million children.”

To help them along, they have enlisted an army of so-called “influencers” like tradwives who sell the beauty of staying home, being taken care of by a “good man,” and returning the favor by doing absolutely everything to keep the home going and, of course, loving every minute of it. To make that more appealing, there are the opposite “influencers” like Andrew Tate, and various other misogynists promoting and teaching rape and murder if women don’t toe the line. That murder is not a hyperbole is seen in the death of 23-year-old Valeria Márquez, murdered by a hit man who shot and killed her while she was livestreaming her TikTok makeup video in Jalisco, Mexico.

So where is the good news here? It’s that no one loses their right without a fight; it’s that women have decades of experience in how to fight and a history that shows how willing we are to do so, and we’re not just talking about women in the U.S. What’s being called “the resistance” is just getting started and millions of women have already taken to the streets.

What fascist leaders forget at their peril is what the philosopher Hegel articulated so concretely: “When individuals and nations have once got in their heads the concept of full-blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength, just because it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very actuality…If to be aware of the idea—to be aware, i.e., that individuals are aware of freedom as their essence, aim, and object—is a matter of speculation, still this very idea itself is the actuality of humanity—not something which they have, as humans, but which they are.”[*]

If that’s our reason for being in the streets, we can’t lose.

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[*] From the introduction to Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, quoted in Philosophy and Revolution by Raya Dunayevskaya (Lexington Books, 2003), p. 34. Hegel, being a man of his time, used the word “men” rather than humanity, etc., which I changed. But this is only in the last sentence. The first sentence is as Hegel wrote it.