Interview with Sunsara Taylor
"Abortion on Demand and
Without Apology" Freedom Ride
From two coasts and through the heart of the country
June 9, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Revolution recently talked to Sunsara Taylor about plans announced by StopPatriarchy.org for a summer of actions around the demand Abortion on Demand and Without Apology. The entire interview follows.
Countering Christian fascist anti-abortion marchers in San Francisco, January 2013.
Photo: Special to Revolution
Revolution: StopPatriarchy.org has called for a summer of actions to fight for abortion on demand and without apology. Would you sketch out for us the developing plans around this call?
Sunsara Taylor: First of all, to understand why we're doing this, we have to confront the fact that abortion rights in this country right now are in an absolute state of emergency. There is an all-sided, many-fronted assault on women's right to abortion and even birth control. There is the violence, terror, and threats against abortion providers. There is the avalanche of legal restrictions. The last two years have seen record restrictions on abortion access, and this year has already seen 278 new restrictions introduced around the country. Abortion has been marginalized and stigmatized within medicine, taken out of most primary care; it's not taught in medical schools unless students fight for it. Ninety-seven percent of rural counties don't have any abortion provider. Eight people have been murdered! Roe v. Wade is being aggressively undermined in the courts and in the court of public opinion. And abortion has become more stigmatized than ever before. One in three women has had an abortion, and you can hardly find a single woman in public life or, for most people, in their actual day-to-day life of people that they know that has admitted to them that they had an abortion. We are on track to a situation where women will lose this right. And let's be very clear up front: taking away this right, forcing women to have children they don't want, is a form of enslavement.
So, in this context, we are launching this Abortion Rights Freedom Ride with kick-off rallies in San Francisco and New York on July 23, bringing together hundreds and thousands of people to stand up and send off these Freedom Riders, who will caravan from both sides of the country, making stops and rallying support along the way, to converge at our first big stop in North Dakota in late July.
On August 1, several laws are set to go into effect in North Dakota. One is a fetal heartbeat law that will ban abortion once a heartbeat is detected in a fetus through a vaginal ultrasound—at about six weeks when most women don't even know they're pregnant. So it's a really extreme and outrageous law. There's a lot of expectation that the law will not stand—it's utterly unconstitutional. But it indicates the ferocity and the intentionality of the anti-abortion movement, the fact that it passed at all should be a wake-up call.
The more immediately dangerous law set to go into effect will require abortion providers in the state to have hospital admitting privileges. Now, North Dakota has only one clinic in the entire state, in Fargo, and the doctors there have to fly in from out of state, because abortion providers have to put their lives on the line and there's not that many who are willing to go through all that. So they will not be able to get those admitting privileges and this, if not overturned, would make North Dakota the first abortion-free state. So we will be standing with the clinic and others who have been fighting this—but also protesting the women-haters and legislature and churches behind it. We will hold a big ceremony and award some of these fascists the "Forced Motherhood Is Female Enslavement" Award, which will take the form of a big bloody coat-hanger. (Wire coat-hangers are what many women used to try to induce their own abortions when it was illegal, and a great many women died from doing that.)
Demonstrators defend the Nebraska abortion clinic of Dr. LeRoy Carhart viciously targeted by Operation Rescue, 2009.
Photo: Special to Revolution
Through August, we'll then go down to South Dakota, which also has only one abortion clinic. We'll go through Nebraska where Dr. LeRoy Carhart has been viciously targeted; Wichita, Kansas, where Dr. George Tiller was assassinated, and where for several years Julie Burkhart has fought very hard to reopen the clinic and recently has; and she's under death threats; she's under legal threat; she's under incredible pressure; and so we want to go there and support her and the clinic and also confront these fascists who are doing the kind of things that get people murdered. Then we'll cut through Arkansas, another state that recently passed a fetal heartbeat abortion ban and has only one abortion clinic. And we will end in Jackson, Mississippi, which was at the heart of the civil rights movement, and has the only abortion clinic left in Mississippi, a state that has incredible rates of impoverishment, especially among Black women, who have almost no access to abortion in large parts of that state and the region.
It's a month-long tour with two major elements: we're both confronting the Christian fascists and exposing them for the woman-haters they are. And we're rallying support and drawing forward our side—the people who want to preserve this right but who have been atomized and on the moral and political defensive, who have not seen either the need or the possibility to stand up as a collective force, in mass resistance to defeat this war on women. So we're going to come from both coasts and travel down the heart of the country. And then call on people to converge with us along the way, especially in Mississippi.
Revolution: So the caravans from the two coasts would be starting...
Taylor: July 24. The send-off rallies will be on the 23rd and then the next day they hit the road.
Revolution: What kind of responses have you gotten so far?
Taylor: We've just begun. And we've gotten a very positive response from a number of people who have spent decades on the front lines of this fight around abortion rights and providing services. We've been in touch with a number of very courageous abortion providers who have been giving us quite a bit of insight and helping make connections in the areas we'll be traveling through. Then, this week, Sikivu Hutchinson who does two Black free-thinking, feminist blogs, signed and posted the statement we put out ("Abortion on Demand & Without Apology for Every Woman in Every State: The Reversal of Abortion and Birth Control Rights Must Stop Now!"), as did PZ Myers who has the most popular science blog in the world.
Within 24 hours, over 350 more people signed. And a very significant thing is that many left comments that picked up on the most uncompromising parts of the statement like, "Women are not incubators," and "Forced motherhood is female enslavement," or "abortion on demand and without apology." Some said straight up, "Thank you for finally putting this out so clearly and sharply!" This is a very powerful, if still beginning, indication that there are people out there who want to see this fascist shit called out, and who have been waiting for something like this. We want to publish this statement in North Dakota when we're there.
The statement calls out the state of emergency. It also clarifies the moral high ground on this question. It says very bluntly that yes, the country is divided over the question of abortion. And that makes sense, because abortion really concentrates how you view women. Are women fundamentally incubators and breeders of children, or are women full human beings? If they're full human beings, they have the right to decide for themselves when and whether they have children. Forcing women to have children against their will is a form of enslavement. So the statement cuts through that.
The fight around women has never been about babies. The whole anti-abortion movement is driven at its core by the desire to see women subordinated by men, and to reduce women back to breeders—which is how women have been treated for millennia, until only very recently. The leaders of this movement are rooted in the Bible where woman (Eve) is blamed for the so-called "original sin" of tempting Adam out of the Garden of Eden. According to this myth of the Bible, everything bad that has ever happened to human beings since then is because of this—it is all Eve's (woman's) fault. And the only way women can redeem themselves for this supposedly "great crime" is to obey their husbands and to bear children. It says it right in the Bible, in Timothy 2:13-15. So this is why they are so opposed to women having access to abortion, and it's also why they all oppose birth control. Their real goal is to slam women back into a Dark Ages role.
Revolution: You've sketched a picture of this very dangerous emergency situation threatening the right to abortion. Yet there's not a commensurate movement of tens and hundreds of thousands and millions of people taking to the streets to stop this. Can you speak to this?
Taylor: Well, I think there's three major things involved. First, there's just tremendous ignorance. Even most people who sense that things are getting bad, who maybe are sending extra donations to Planned Parenthood or whatever because they see it is losing its funding (which must be opposed!), don't really understand how bad it is.
San Francisco, 2010. Photo: Special to Revolution
Second, there have been major setbacks in terms of the political and ideological and moral and scientific understanding of people around abortion. It is positive and liberating for women to be able to choose abortion. It is utterly immoral, illegitimate, and vicious and cruel and women-hating to force women to have children that they don't want. But, there's a lot of defensiveness around this and a big tendency for pro-choice people to focus on things like "Oh, what about a woman who's raped?" or "What about a woman whose life is in danger? Shouldn't we have an exception for her?" Of course women like that should be able to get abortions, and the fact that a lot of the restrictions don't make exceptions for rape or for incest or for the life of the woman—this just exposes how vicious and hate-filled the anti-abortion movement is. But at the core, the truth has to be told: this fight is about women's liberation or women's enslavement. It's NOT about babies. Fetuses have the potential to become people, but they are a subordinate part of a woman's body and they don't have a separate biological existence or a separate social existence. But that woman is a human being. Fetuses don't have rights. Fetuses are not people. Women are human beings.
That's why our lead slogan on our statement and this Freedom Ride is: Abortion on Demand and Without Apology. A number of people have told us, "You can't say that in North Dakota. I personally agree with you. But it won't get over in North Dakota. (Or in South Dakota, or Midwest, Mississippi, whatever.)" But we've seen that there's a section of people, and I believe that there's thousands and probably tens of thousands of people, for whom right now, when they hear this, they're like, "Yes, that's right."
The idea is not that you're going to move millions of people overnight on this. You're going to speak to millions of people. But we're going to mobilize those people who have the most anger and the most clarity, and we're going to give them the ideological and moral certitude, and the scientific grounding. And also we're going to fight in such a way that models refusing to accept any of this degradation, shame, enslavement or oppression of women in any form. And we are going to lead those thousands of people to step forward and fight around this with us. And that's going to have a huge effect on them, as well as a huge effect on changing how millions more are seeing this.
The third thing is that for several decades, since the end of the high tide of revolutionary upsurge in the 1960s in this country, since the reversal and defeat of the revolution in China and the whole first wave of communist revolution, and since the backlash that's been unleashed against the women's movement here, a situation has developed where people have largely come to identify the interests of women with the Democratic Party. And to see the organizations that are tied to the Democratic Party—groups like NARAL or Planned Parenthood—as the only defense of these rights. This is a deadly illusion and a deadly trap.
Look, the Christian fascist assault that's been unleashed really got going under Reagan, and it really was a revenge against the women's movement here and the whole revolutionary upsurge and the hopes and aspirations of humanity that we can get free and get beyond the oppression of women and all forms of exploitation and oppression. But this, fundamentally, has never been simply a "Republican war on women." It is the system's war on women—and the Democrats, while having real differences with it, and real opposition to some elements of it—have continuously conceded more and more ground to this assault. I mean, who would have thought even 10 years ago we would be fighting over birth control! And the Democratic Party leadership has really led in demobilizing the people who support abortion, putting them on the political and moral defensive. Hillary Clinton called abortion "tragic"; Bill Clinton said it should be "safe, legal and rare" implying that there's something wrong with it. And then you have Obama who has over and over sought "common ground" with fascists and religious fanatics. Plus, he seems to have a real personal jones against Plan B contraception. The FDA approved it for over-the-counter distribution, but then Obama's head of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius overruled that. That overruling was challenged in court, but then the Obama administration challenged it back. So, people have lost the sense of the need—and the possibility—of relying on ourselves and waging fierce mass political struggle to defeat this war on women—which is the ONLY way it can be defeated. So I think these three things have come together.
But what's not so visible to people is that if there is political leadership and clarity and a force that is daring to fight against it and put something on the line to stop this, there's millions and millions of people who can, and who really must, be brought forward to defeat this war on women. Those of us doing this Freedom Ride are prepared and determined to be that force and bring forward and lead those millions.
Revolution: What would it mean if this assault on abortion is allowed to win—so that abortion is not just increasingly difficult or even impossible for growing numbers of women, but actually outlawed altogether?
Taylor: It has to be understood deeply that forcing women to have children they don't want—it means you have to give up everything you're planning. You have to foreclose your dreams and ambitions. That's your life. If you choose to have a child and are in a position to raise it in a way that you feel is right, that can be a beautiful thing. But to be forced to have a child you don't want is to essentially be told that all you are is a breeder. And to live in a society that denies that right, means that mostly young girls will be coming up not even having those larger dreams and ambitions. Because in the eyes of society it will be very clear that they are not regarded as full human beings. Bob Avakian [BA], in his talk Revolution: Why It's Necessary, Why It's Possible, What It's All About, put this into words that powerfully expresses this. He said, and I'm paraphrasing: Denying women the right to abortion is like rape. It is the forcible control of women, of their bodies, of their lives, of everything about them, by a male supremacist, male-dominated society.
It's worth it to look at El Salvador, which is a vision of where we are headed if we don't stop this. Abortion there is illegal in all circumstances and women are jailed for having abortions or even miscarriages deemed "suspicious" by the state, and doctors and nurses, under threat of imprisonment, are required to turn in women who are suspected of aborting fetuses.
Young people don't remember when abortion was illegal. And it's very important that people who do remember help young people understand what it was like, but also to understand that if this right is taken away again, it's going to be even worse than that, because of the ideological assault, because of the level of surveillance and criminalization...it's going to be worse than before Roe v. Wade.
The other thing that's very important is, people who've had abortions more recently also need to tell those stories. On the tour we'll be collecting and amplifying these stories as part of destigmatizing abortion.
Revolution: There was an inspiring letter from a prisoner recently in Revolution and on revcom.us ("Defending the Right to Abortion, and Transforming the People for Revolution") in which the brother recounted struggling hard with a fellow prisoner who opposed abortion. What's the importance of everyone—in particular men, but all kinds of people—taking up the fight for the right to abortion?
Taylor: To put it very simply, if women, half of humanity, are not free, then no one is free. That's just a reality. But to get into it a little more deeply, this attack on abortion is not incidental. It's very bound up with the way women have been treated for millennia—ever since the very first emergence of class divisions and of exploitation and oppression, of private property and the state, ever since human beings thousands of years ago went from living in more or less egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies. It's very important to note that the oppression of women by men is NOT owing to "human nature." In fact, for tens of thousands of years, human beings lived without organized forms of oppression and divisions, including without the oppression of women by men. But when private property and the state and class divisions emerged, women's role got fundamentally transformed. Women became the property of men and breeders of children, breeders of new lines of inheritance of either the haves or the have-nots, the ruling class or the exploited. Controlling women's virginity before marriage and their sexuality from then on, making sure they only had sex with their husbands, was essential not only to the particular men who wanted to hand their property down to their children and not someone else's—but actually this control over women became very essential to maintaining and organizing class societies as a whole. This is as true, even if different in its forms and appearance, today in this capitalist-imperialist-dominated world as it was in feudal or slave societies.
If you drill down to the root of what gives rise to any form of oppression—whether it be the whole gruesome history of national oppression and today's current regime of mass incarceration and slow genocide bound up with that; whether it be the wars of domination and plunder that are driven by the engine of imperialist conquest; whether it be the destruction of the environment on a massive scale—you'll see that it comes from a common root and a common system. And that this system also requires and gives rise to, the oppression of women. You cannot shatter that system, you cannot overthrow that system, you can't make revolution to get rid of that system, without taking up the fight for the liberation of women. A big part of what Bob Avakian has fought for in one of the dimensions of the new synthesis of communism that he has forged over decades is that if you understand this deeply and scientifically, you actually grasp that unleashing the fury of women, unleashing the pent-up fury at thousands of years of being treated as chattel, abused, degraded, violated, raped, ridiculed, demeaned and diminished in a million ways—unleashing the fury against that is not only a powerful, and potent and necessary force for the liberation of women, but it is a driving force in making revolution as a whole.
This is why something BA has emphasized—both now in the struggle to prepare for and, with the emergence of a revolutionary crisis, to seize state power, and in the context of the new revolutionary society that is working to dig up the remnants of oppression and exploitation and advance towards genuine communism, that is, human emancipation—is extremely important. And in some inspiring ways, this was given expression in that letter from a prisoner you referenced. BA says:
"In many ways, and particularly for men, the woman question, and whether you seek to completely abolish or to preserve the existing property and social relations and corresponding ideology that enslave women (or maybe 'just a little bit' of them) is a touchstone question among the oppressed themselves. It is a dividing line between 'wanting in' and really 'wanting out': between fighting to end all oppression and exploitation—and the very divisions of society into classes—and seeking in the final analysis to get your part in this."
That's the heart of the matter, and it's a challenge to men—and it's a challenge to all people who dream of and yearn for and want to fight for an end to exploitation and oppression in any form, that you have to make this your fight. It's also spoken to very powerfully in BA's new talk, BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! where he makes very clear the only people who should fear the unleashed fury of women and who should not be out there fighting to help foster this and joining in with it are people who want to preserve this oppressive and destructive order.
Revolution: The war on women involves other aspects, in particular the whole culture of pornography, which keeps on getting more cruel, violent, and degrading toward women. So how do these different elements relate?
Taylor: We have identified a real state of emergency around abortion rights, and that is the leading edge of what StopPatriarchy is initiating, and uniting people very broadly to fight against that. At the same time, it's important to pull back the lens and look at what this is part of. Anywhere you look on the globe, the question of the role and status of women is assuming ever more acute expression. Women are straining to enter into realms that have been for centuries and millennia closed off to women, in the workforce, education, public life and politics, the media. At the same time, everywhere on the globe there's an intensifying of violence and degradation against women that's being unleashed. Look at the epidemic of gang rape in India and Brazil and really all over the world; or the Islamic fundamentalism that is growing in huge parts of the world, with the shrouding of women, the imprisoning of women in the homes, the raping, the honor killings of women; or look at the way that women's advance fought for in the '60s and '70s has been turned back. The sexual revolution for instance in this country had a very positive overall thrust to it—women casting off the shame around their sexuality, asserting for the first time in thousands of years that their sexuality was not something that was to be owned by men but to be experienced by them on their terms and in ways that were mutually pleasurable and mutually respectful, whether with men or women or whatever. But then it and the whole movement of the times didn't go as far as it needed to go. We didn't have a revolution and this system remained intact. And so those movements ebbed, and the system really did set to work, consciously as well as spontaneously through its workings, to turn that sexual freedom into the commodification of women's bodies and the more open and vicious and mainstreaming of sexualized degradation and patriarchal male-dominated terms. So you have the mainstreaming of very cruel and violent and humiliating and degrading pornography. And this goes along with the trade in women as chattel, as sex slaves in the sex industry all over the world in the millions and millions.
And these are not just surface phenomena, these things are driven by very profound shifts taking place in the world: mass migrations caused by imperialist penetration ever more deeply into the Third World, the growth of huge slums, the ravages of war, technological developments, as well as the struggles of people in many different ways. All this has both undermined many traditional forms of life and many traditional forms of patriarchy, while at the same time produced immense suffering and insecurity which, in turn, has contributed significantly towards what really can only be called a revenge—a hate-filled, violent, and dehumanizing revenge—against women.
So StopPatriarchy is addressing the way this is sharpening up in this country and makes the sharp point: there really is no fundamental difference between reducing women to breeders, to objects just for turning out babies, and reducing women to sex objects to be plundered and humiliated and used and abused for the sexual titillation of men. That's all part of a package of a real revenge against women. We're fighting all of that. And precisely because of how profound these shifts are and how many people are being profoundly affected by them, we see the basis for millions and millions of people to be led to stand up and fight against all this. So, that is where StopPatriarchy is coming from, even as right now we are taking responsibility for bringing together broad forces, including some who maybe don't fully agree with us on pornography, for example, to stand up right now against these growing assaults on abortion rights.
Revolution: This is also going to be a summer of struggle in relation to the fight to stop the mass incarceration and criminalization of a whole generation of Black and Latino youth. Cornel West and Carl Dix just had a dialogue titled "Mass Incarceration + Silence = Genocide. Act to STOP IT Now!" How do you see the connections between the struggles around these two big fault lines in society?
Taylor: Cornel West and Carl Dix went very deeply into the slow genocide against Black people and other oppressed people through this mass incarceration, through the police terror, through the vigilante murder and the green-lighting of that by the system. But I found it very inspiring that in the course of that, both of them spoke very movingly about the oppression of women. And from the biggest lens, these struggles—against mass incarceration, and against the enslavement and degradation of women—are both fault lines of a system that is built on oppression, degradation, exploitation, and long years of suffering of both these sections of people, of women and Black people and other oppressed nationalities. And the fight against both of them is very critical to transforming the people, to enable the people to lift their heads and fight against what's being done to them and to open up and start thinking about different big questions: Where does all this come from? How can we get rid of it? Both of them are very necessary for making revolution—for transforming the people, in line with making revolution. And waking millions more to be questioning and fighting back.
Around both these questions, many of the obvious forms of official discrimination—whether Jim Crow or the way women were kept out of most of public life—has been dismantled. And there have been significant changes—you know, there's women professionals of all kinds, women politicians... there's a Black president. But, not only do Black people as a whole and women as a whole remain viciously oppressed, in many ways that oppression is intensifying, but it is not so obvious that this is coming from the system.
Also, around each of these fault lines there is a significant degree—and this is largely because of the way the system's hand in all this is hidden—of self-degradation. It takes different forms on each of these fault lines, but for both of them, there is an appearance that all the bad stuff happening to people is just owing to bad individual choices. That is why BA's quote "On Choices... And Radical Changes" is so important:
"First, people don't make choices in a vacuum. They do it in the context of the social relations they're enmeshed in and the options they have within those relations—which are not of their own choosing. They confront those relations, they don't choose them.
"Two, if people feel for whatever reasons that they want to choose to harm themselves and others, we're going to struggle with them—but we're not going to blame them. We're going to show them the source of all this in the system, and call on them to struggle against that system, and transform themselves in the process. Just because a youth 'chooses' to sell drugs, or a woman 'chooses' to commodify herself sexually, doesn't mean that they chose to have those choices. And there is no other way besides fighting the power, and transforming the people, for revolution that all this will change for the better. Blaming the masses for bad choices just reinforces the conditions that they are oppressed by.
"In sum, people do make choices—but they make them enmeshed and confined within social relations that are not of their choosing. We have to bring into being different social relations and conditions so that masses of people can act differently and relate differently to each other. Fundamentally, that takes a revolution which is aiming for communism."
How to Get Involved
Photo: Steenaire/Flickr
To learn more about and connect up with the Summer 2013 Abortion on Demand and Without Apology Freedom Ride, go online to StopPatriarchy.org.
Keep up with the news and analysis around this struggle at revcom.us.
So around both of these, there's the real essential role of people actually lifting their heads and fighting, with cores of people at the beginning and in growing numbers, hundreds and then thousands and tens of thousands, fighting and shining a light on where this comes from and confronting it. That's what we are doing with this Abortion Rights Freedom Ride. We're raising awareness, but we're also confronting these women-haters. We want to go to the fake clinics that lie to women and coerce women into having children they don't want. We want to go to the legislators who are passing these vicious laws, to confront them and call them out and show where this is all coming from. And through that process, people fighting and standing and shaking off that degradation and actually transforming themselves. And have all of that moving in a way that's more favorable for revolution.
The other thing that we want to put a very particular focus on in this Abortion Rights Freedom Ride, and it gets to one of the synergies between these two initiatives, is that there has been, in the anti-abortion movement, a campaign over several decades but really intensifying over the last couple of years to equate abortion among Black people and Latinos as a form of self-genocide. There have been billboards put up all over the country that say, "The most dangerous place for a Black youth is in its mother's womb." They are seizing on the fact that Black and Latino women have much higher rates of abortion than white women to accuse Black women of carrying out genocide against their babies. This is one of the most vicious and hateful campaigns. First of all it's a lie. A Black woman, a Latino woman, any woman who chooses to terminate a pregnancy is not killing a baby. She is taking control of her own reproductive life. That's a right, and one that must be defended. That's very different than the very infrequently mentioned history of this country carrying out massive numbers of coerced sterilizations against Blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans. That was part of a genocidal program, an act of incredible oppression because it was forced on women by a racist system. But women being able to decide for themselves to terminate a pregnancy, that is very different and very positive and very necessary!
But, then there is another level. As has been pointed out by Carl Dix repeatedly, there is a genocide being carried out against Black and other oppressed people today. It is the mass incarceration, it is the fact that a Black person is killed by law enforcement every 40 hours, it is the caste-like segregation of former prisoners—a huge percentage of oppressed communities. And it's actually those genocidal conditions which are resulting in the fact that Black women and Latino women have a higher rate of abortion. Black women and Latino women are concentrated in the areas with the worst housing, the worst economic conditions, the most poverty, the worst education, the worst sex education, the worst contraception access, and the most tenuous and precarious economic situation, the least ability to be able to care for a child that they are not prepared to care for. So of course Black women and Latino women have much higher rates of abortion. That is not the cause of the genocide—it is a direct result of this genocide!
But the anti-abortion campaign has gotten quite a distance among oppressed people, especially with the role of the Black church—it's actually got a lot of people who feel that there's a genocide going on, who are right to feel that, to direct their anger away from the system that is causing all this, but instead at Black women who are disproportionately the targets of this! And then, to use this condemnation of Black women and Latino women as a bludgeon against all women's right to abortion. It's a double poison, a thoroughly huge outrage. So we want to tear this open, and shine a light on, again, what is the real genocide and what is required to liberate oppressed people and to liberate women—and that actually requires defending the rights for abortion, for birth control, for all of this. And to do what Carl Dix and Cornel West are calling on people to do—to stand up around the murder of Trayvon Martin, the mass incarceration and other forms that this real genocide is taking today.
Revolution: Anything you want to let people know about how to get involved in this, how they can support it?
Taylor: Anybody and everybody who really does not want to see women reduced to the status of slaves needs to stand up and fight right now. And you need to join with this Freedom Ride. Donate towards it. Send a message of support with us to the clinics that we'll be traveling to. Join us for a leg of the tour—in North Dakota, or Wichita, or Mississippi. Sign the statement I mentioned at StopPatriarchy.org/abortionondemandstatement and send it to everyone you know, asking them to do the same. Get that to authors, musicians, and other prominent people for their signatures. Raise money for this effort. Reach out to people you know in the places we are traveling through—Fargo, Minneapolis, Jackson, Little Rock, Nebraska, Cleveland... check StopPatriarchy.org for the full list—to help with housing and reaching out locally. There are many different ways to help and there's no excuse for not standing up and fighting with this. It does not have to be that these Christian fascists and patriarchs and these women-haters slam women backwards. But it will happen if we don't fight. So everybody has to join this fight. We all must take responsibility for STOPPING THIS—that is the measure we are all responsible to.
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