Late to this thread, but it doesn’t take a huge amount of class analysis or understanding of class politics to draw a straight line between the elimination of a symbol for women on a product created to assidt women deal with the biological reality of a female reproductive system, on the one hand, and a rise in childbirth mortality on the other.
Women ARE an economic class — the means of reproduction. Every facet of that is under attack now from the left AND the right.
Now, for what reason could males, as the class that exploits the female means of reproduction have, for in various ways reasserting control over those means, ie women, in the West?
Could it have anything to do with the crisis in late-stage capitalism and the common prediction amongst economists that within 1-2 generations unemployment rates on the West will reach 50%?
Hmmm..... now WHY, in the face of that, would men want to insist 1) women aren’t an ontological category of their own, for instance with their own symbol, 2) women aren’t a political category that ought to be allowed to advocate for their rights, 3) women aren’t actually oppressed due to sex, since biological sex doesn’t exist, 4) sex work IS work, 5) surrogacy work IS work?
They have a plan for us, even if not all of them are consciously aware of that plan. The wealthy have gobbled most of the pie and hidden the rest in underground bunkers. Men KNOW this.
Women shall have no pie what, depending upon how well we perform for them, employed men taking those now scarce jobs, choose to feed us.
Which is why female solidarity is critical, as is the insistence that we EXIST, ontologically, politically, and as an economic class.
Hence the furious reaction to symbolic erasure.