Emergency in Texas!
Join with the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride: Ground Zero Texas
June 16, 2014 | Revolution Newspaper | revcom.us
Texas is the second most populous state in the country with more than 26 million people. In 2011, Texas had 46 freestanding abortion clinics. By September, it could have as few as six left!
This is an emergency. When women cannot access safe and affordable abortion, their lives are foreclosed by forced motherhood. Or they are driven to risk their lives by seeking illegal abortions. Before Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973, it is estimated that thousands of women died each year from botched illegal abortions. Already, especially in the Rio Grande Valley near the U.S.-Mexico border, where there is a high concentration of poor and immigrant women, women are resorting to desperate and dangerous measures to self-induce abortions.
The coat hanger is a symbol of terror and enslavement of women. Before abortion was made legal, many women sought illegal abortions or tried aborting the fetus themselves, often using coat hangers to induce bleeding, and often these women died. The coat hanger became a symbol in the battle to win the right to abortion, and is still iconic of what the lack of this right means for women. Before Roe v. Wade, as many as 5,000 or more women died each year from botched illegal abortions. Countless thousands more were injured or traumatized by the humiliating and dangerous experience of back-alley abortions. Even greater numbers of women had their lives foreclosed by being forced to have a child they did not want or could not care for. All women lived with the constant knowledge that this could be their fate.
Today, a powerful reactionary movement is hammering away at women's right to abortion. They are forcing clinic closures, they are shaming and harassing women, and they are determined not to stop until all abortions are illegal for all women in all circumstances.
Denying women the right to abortion is like rape, it is the forcible violation of a woman's body by a male-supremacist society. It must not be allowed.
This fight has NEVER been about babies. It has ALWAYS been about control over women. This is why these reactionaries also oppose birth control. And when lunatics in power talk about pregnancy from rape being a "gift from god," this is not a slip-up—this is them telling you their true view. They see women as nothing more than incubators.
If you do not want to see women returned to the status of breeders and property of men, if you do not want to see the emergency rooms flooded once again by women hemorrhaging and possibly dying from illegal abortions, if you do not want to see millions of women's lives foreclosed, NOW IS THE TIME TO STEP FORWARD TO FIGHT.
On August 4, in Austin, Texas, a trial begins in a lawsuit that challenges one part of the law House Bill 2 (HB2) that has driven these clinic closures. The law's requirement that abortion clinics meet the same standards as Ambulatory Surgery Centers is medically completely unnecessary and—like the other parts of HB2—was designed to shut down clinics. If this lawsuit is unsuccessful, this law could close all but six remaining abortion clinics in Texas on September 1.
This must not be allowed!
NOW is the time for mass public outpourings of resistance. Through massive resistance, we must create a political situation where the courts and politicians fear that any negative ruling will not only inflame resistance, defiance, and protest, but will also call into question the very legitimacy of a system that would force women to have children against their will. Look at how the right to abortion was won in the first place.
At stake is not just the future for Texas women, but for women across this country.
What is happening in Texas is just the front end of a battering ram against women's right to abortion nationwide. Hundreds of anti-abortion restrictions have been passed at the state level in the last three years. Dozens and dozens of clinics have been forced to close—in Alabama, Arizona, Michigan, Virginia, Ohio and beyond. The last abortion clinic in Mississippi remains open only because of a temporary ruling from a judge. The political and legal precedent in Texas will influence the course of similar laws in other states.
Join with Stop Patriarchy (End Pornography and Patriarchy: The Enslavement and Degradation of Women) this summer for the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride: Ground Zero Texas!
August 1 into September, volunteers from around the country will travel to Texas to stand up against these attacks: building mass protest and resistance, staging determined acts of resistance, confronting the anti-abortion forces and institutions, and caravanning down to the Rio Grande Valley. More plans to be announced soon. Volunteers needed now.
Contact: StopPatriarchy(at)gmail.com
Go to: StopPatriarchy.org
ABORTION ON DEMAND AND WITHOUT APOLOGY!
FORCED MOTHERHOOD IS FEMALE ENSLAVEMENT!
DEFEAT THE WAR ON WOMEN!
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