I recently came across two news items about childbirth. One reported a 43-year-old high-risk pregnant woman who experienced an amniotic fluid embolism during delivery and remained unconscious in the ICU for thirty days. The other told of husband Li abandoning his wife due to her infertility, cohabiting with another woman and fathering a son; after the wife finally conceived a daughter through a fifth IVF attempt, the husband abandoned mother and child.
At the time, I saw these two stories almost simultaneously, and the content was astonishing—an outright bare reflection of the cruel fact that in a patriarchal society, women are treated as tools for reproduction. In such a society, women’s status is very low. Many households with feudal thinking abort upon learning the baby is a girl after prenatal examinations; many baby girls face killing or being given away at birth. Even if they survive, the patriarchal head of the family treats daughters as “money-pits,” saying, “If you weren’t choking yourself to death the moment you were born, it would be a blessing.” There are countless such phenomena.
The woman in the news at forty-three still had to risk pregnancy to bear a child, and during delivery she encountered an amniotic fluid embolism.
In the Weibo comment section someone said, “Her family loves her very much and hasn’t given up after so long,” as if the conduct in this news deserved praise. Major media in the same society also paired this photo with captions like “recovered after more than thirty days in a coma,” as if a huge blessing had fallen upon this woman and her family. It’s classic funeral-turned-wedding-news tactics. The reason this case could be published and widely praised is that its content is somewhat deceptive, as if this woman, even when asked to take enormous risks at forty-three, would be fine as long as she doesn’t die and the family is happy; even if women are generally treated as domestic slaves and tools for reproduction in today’s society, as long as the husband’s family is willing to treat the illness, not let her die, gender equality persists, and society remains just; even though amniotic fluid embolism is the most dangerous obstetric emergency, historically there has been no method to detect its precursor during prenatal checkups, and there are no effective preventive measures, with case fatality rates still over sixty to eighty percent—but once such news is reported, capitalist medical technology is “progress,” and bourgeois doctors are “wholeheartedly serving the people.”
After the amniotic embolism, the mother’s heart stopped, followed by massive postpartum hemorrhage, DIC, multi-organ failure, severe anemia, and life-threatening conditions. She later suffered an acute brain infarction due to severe ischemia and hypoxia. After more than twenty days, the mother remained in a coma, with limited movement, tubes everywhere, tracheostomy, gastric tube, urinary catheter… At this point, the Chinese media still pretended to praise the mother’s relatives as having “furrowed brows and a worried expression.” It is well known that pregnancies in women over thirty-five are considered high-risk; if danger arises, the uterus may be removed, or life lost. At forty-three, pregnancy is extremely dangerous. Do her relatives not understand what forty-three means for pregnancy? If they truly cared about her health and safety, why risk her life to bear a child?
After reading these, one cannot help but feel terrified. After such a “calamity,” can the mother’s body recover to its original state? The news called this a “medical miracle” and included a photo of the mother smiling in a wheelchair, which is truly shocking. Should we not consider how the mother will live her life afterwards? It shows she was treated as a reproductive tool; as long as she accomplished her mission and kept alive, that was the best outcome.
The other woman who was similarly treated as a reproductive tool also faced misfortune. Ms. Yan and her husband Li were married for nine years and faced discrimination from the husband and the patriarchal society due to their inability to have a child. Under great pressure, she endured substantial pain to undergo IVF, with four failed attempts before succeeding on the fifth.
But when she was about to give birth, her husband cheated and cohabited with another woman and fathered a boy. This not only dealt a huge emotional blow to Yan but also brought about a major upheaval in her life. It’s hard to imagine how a pregnant woman at eight months would continue to live, let alone raise a child alone. Li abandoned Yan and her newborn daughter, not only out of lust but also to obtain a more favorable reproductive tool to produce a son to ensure a heir and “continue the family line.” This case exposes the reactionary nature of marriage in capitalist society. This kind of marriage and family treats men and women by two different standards and two different moral codes: men can cheat and have sexual freedom, while women must maintain chastity toward their husbands; men can decide with whom to raise offspring, but women have no choice not to have children and, if they cannot bear, are abandoned. This phenomenon is widespread in capitalist societies, especially in the reactionary Confucian society. With the rise of private property, women first became men’s private property; with further development of private property and social class divisions, women became wives and slaves, losing independence and freedom.
Social existence determines social consciousness; the reactionary male-chauvinist ideology and the ideology of treating women as domestic slaves and sexual tools are determined by capitalist social systems. Under Lenin’s leadership of the great Bolsheviks, women in factories, workshops, commercial offices, banks, and plants occupied an important place. Under the slogan “All power to the Soviets,” women fought resolutely, opposing landlords and capitalists, striving for peace, bread, freedom, and equality. After the Soviet regime was established, the complete equality of women was enshrined in the constitution, and every effort was made to ensure this law did not become a mere paper tiger. Through such efforts, phenomena of oppression, discrimination, and injustice against women were eradicated on the territory of the great socialist Soviet Union.
This contrasts so starkly with the misery of women in all capitalist countries and with the above two cases of women in the former reactionary Chinese society. In socialist China, there was once a happy and wonderful world where oppression and discrimination against women did not exist, and gender equality was advocated. In socialist China, many female pilots, electricians, workers, and tractor drivers emerged, fighting on the frontline of production and building the socialist motherland. They benefited from the socialist system, moved beyond the narrow confines of the family, and became half the sky’s pillars with independent economic status and genuine personal dignity, able to labor happily for socialism rather than being confined to the family, doing housework, and becoming increasingly selfish, narrow, and ignorant. The documentary “Shoveling the Earth” about Socialist China records this: children and women in the socialist era received good care in nursery schools, played with peers, showed mutual understanding and courtesy, and formed early collective-spirited mutual aid. Children were taught labor skills from a young age, wore product tags, and received labor education at school, learning to consider others’ happiness and developing a spirit of selflessness. Not only did children grow strong under socialist education, but women could also largely relieve themselves from domestic labor and participate in social labor, becoming an important force to sustain socialism. Such scenes are so beautiful; people in socialist society can live so happily! In capitalist countries, countless women toil at home and struggle over trivial matters, working like beasts and dogs, exhausting their energy and living in pain. As a recent report starkly shows: in September 2025, a 38-year-old mom in Hangzhou died of cardiogenic sudden death due to chronic sleep deprivation and overwork; she had two children, and her husband and in-laws lived with her, with family responsibilities almost entirely on her. She woke at 4:30 a.m. every day for seven years to make breakfast, sent the children to school at 6:00, went to work, returned at 18:00 to cook and help with homework, and stayed up late to tidy the house until 1 a.m., averaging only 4-5 hours of sleep per night. Seven years of such grinding, like a wind-up machine, until cardiogenic sudden death, which became her final stop. Her last WeChat moment, “Seems like I can finally sleep in,” became her last words.
After comparing the status of women in socialist and capitalist societies, we should recognize that the root of all oppression lies in private property. A society without private ownership of the means of production and a system that guarantees women the right to freely engage in creative productive labor are necessary and solid foundations for liberating women from male guardianship and domination. Ensuring women’s right to govern their own bodies and lives is more effective than any legal provisions. The complete liberation and equality of women can only be achieved by women themselves, and oppressed working women must ally with their proletarian brothers to fight against capitalist private ownership in order to gain their liberation. This is the only path for millions of women to escape oppression and exploitation and to gain freedom.
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