From a roundtable discussion of some of the Abortion Rights Freedom Riders
August 18, 2013 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Abortion Rights Freedom Riders at fake clinic in Wichita, Kansas
Rider: We drove, the west caravan, from you know, Wyoming to Montana. Montana is a huge state. So is Wyoming. Wyoming has one abortion clinic left in the whole state. And we’re driving hundreds and hundreds of miles, and spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars on gas. And we could afford it because we were able to raise the money to do this, from people donating who think that abortion is an essential right. And it just smacked us in the face in a very real way, that a woman in this area who needs an abortion has to cover hundreds of miles and spend hundreds of dollars. We went to an abortion clinic in Montana, the Mountain Country Women’s Clinic, and even though there are a couple of abortion clinics in Montana, this is the only one that provides a payment plan. So you’re going to spend all that money, cover all that ground, and then you’re going to get to a clinic, where you have to pay a thousand dollars up front! Unless you go to this one, in the giant state of Montana. This is the part of the whole situation that’s confronting women.
Then, when we drove from Fargo to Wichita. Hundreds of miles, and there were stretches of many, many, many miles where you don’t even see a billboard for a concert, you don’t see a billboard for an event... you don’t even see a billboard for a fucking McDonald’s, you see EVERY billboard, it’s got a BABY on it and it says: “Abortion, the choice that kills,” or “Abortion stops a beating heart,” or “I’m a child, not a choice” with the word “choice” all bold and red and shit.
These are areas in which people are born, grow up, get married, and die in the same community, in the same environment of isolation, where the terms around this debate of what abortion is, what a woman is, and what a woman is even capable of, are completely defined by very real limitations like geography and money, but also these ideological constraints in which you never even hear a voice that says that you can be anything more than a mother, or that abortion can be anything other than murder.
Outside fake clinic in Wichita.
Another Rider: Here in Wichita, and we’ve been here for several days now, we talked to a woman yesterday, in front of a crisis pregnancy center—those are FAKE CLINICS where they tell these outrageous lies to women, about the risks of abortion, they try to convince women who have been raped to have their rapist’s child... really, they cover over all sorts of scientific information about sex and sex education, they’re really, really coming from the dark ages. And so women that are in these crisis pregnancies go to these centers, and then they’re lied to in this way. So we’re standing out in front, with our banner that says “Forced Motherhood is Female Enslavement” and talking to one of the people who has been very helpful to us here, and has gone out with us here in Wichita. And she’s talking about how big of a problem teenage pregnancy is, and that women who get pregnant, who find themselves in these situations, find it more acceptable to go out and get into a fist fight with another woman that they know will hit them, punch them, and try to basically have a miscarriage by getting into a fist fight. Another woman she knows, she doesn’t know if this woman had an abortion, or what happened, but she was pregnant and then she supposedly fell down a flight of stairs, and then was not pregnant. This, this is the framework in which people are living in. Another group of our Freedom Ride went to the mall and they talked to people there, and you know there was sort of this understanding that came about through this particular excursion that it’s not OK for a 14-year old woman, she’s not ready to have a baby and become a mother, but a 16-year old is!
Watch for much longer excerpts from this roundtable discussion, to be posted here soon.
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