To arms, citizens,
Form your battalions
Let’s march, let’s march
Let an impure blood
Soak our fields

This is the refrain of the Marseillaise, forever the battle-song of oppressed humanities. It was composed by Claude Rouget de Lisle in 1792 shortly before the French Revolution and popularized by a battalion of Marseille soldiers as they marched to Paris to help in overthrowing the aristocracy. It became France’s national anthem.

The song could very well have been sung by us, millions of women in our pussy hats, as we marched on January 21^st in Washington, DC and in all of the major American cities.

We marched because the Trump administration is likely to interfere with the progress we have made: wages, medical care, domestic violence legislation, school lunches, and so much more.

We also marched because of the threat to that which has protected women’s health for a century:

Planned Parenthood.

It has helped us to plan our children so that as responsible mothers we could give birth to them whenever we could best care for them.

It is not that women ignored spacing and planning the children they bore before the birth control movement existed. To do so a hundred years ago many women, especially the poor, had to rely on shoddy and self-inflicted abortions. Many died in the process.

In 1916, Margaret Sanger, a nurse who had witnessed many such needless deaths, established a birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. There she taught walk-ins who wanted to learn “how to stop the babies from coming” everything she had learned about reliable birth control methods in Holland. That country had such counseling centers before World War I.

The police closed Sanger’s clinic after a few days and she ended up in jail, where she rapidly befriended her fellow inmates. On March 6, 1917, Margaret Sanger’s prison sentence was up. As she recalled later in her autobiography:

Through the metal doors I stepped and the tingling air beat against my face. No other experience in my life has been like that. Gathered in front of me were my old friends who had frozen through the two hours waiting to celebrate ‘Margaret’s coming out party.’ They lifted their voices in the Marseillaise. Behind them at the upper windows were my new friends…and they too were singing. Something choked me. Something still chokes me whenever I hear that triumphant music and ringing words: ‘Ye sons of freedom wake to glory.’

After prison Margaret Sanger abandoned guerrilla tactics and fought for the right of women to access comprehensive birth control throughout the court. She succeeded, but access has always been a somewhat thorny issue. Only recently has it become part of most healthcare plans.

During his first week in office President Trump is targeting the free birth control provision of the Affordable Care Act. Just as shocking is the fact that he revived the ban on providing foreign aid to groups that provide abortion counseling. Are we going back to unwanted children and self-induced abortions?

We might very well. Anti-abortion, right-to-lifers marched in Washington less than a week after the Women’s March. Their placards defamed Planned Parenthood. They were addressed by Vice President Mike Pence. They are targeting Roe v. Wade, which is the ruling that for decades has given every woman the right to a legal, safe abortion. Women, hurry to the barricades!