Abortion Rights Freedom Ride 2014: GROUND ZERO TEXAS
BAsics 3:22
You cannot break all the chains, except one. You cannot say you want to be free of exploitation and oppression, except you want to keep the oppression of women by men. You can’t say you want to liberate humanity yet keep one half of the people enslaved to the other half. The oppression of women is completely bound up with the division of society into masters and slaves, exploiters and exploited, and the ending of all such conditions is impossible without the complete liberation of women. All this is why women have a tremendous role to play not only in making revolution but in making sure there is all-the-way revolution. The fury of women can and must be fully unleashed as a mighty force for proletarian revolution.
Bob Avakian
Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
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Watch video of Bob Avakian, on "A world of rape and sexual assault"
Call to Action
END PORNOGRAPHY AND PATRIARCHY: THE ENSLAVEMENT AND DEGRADATION OF WOMEN!
We are told that "equality for women has been won" and that "there are no limits to what girls can achieve." BULLSHIT!
Every 15 seconds a woman is beaten. Every day three to four women are killed by their partners. One out of four female college students will be raped or sexually assaulted while in college.
In recent years, pornography has become increasingly violent, cruel, degrading towards women; women are referred to as “cumdumpsters” and “fuckbuckets”; the “money shot” (ejaculation in a woman’s face) is standard; humiliating cruelty—like violent “ass-to-mouth” penetration—is normalized, and racist bigotry is sexualized. Meanwhile, the broader culture has been pornified: pole dancing is taught at gyms, “sexting” is a national phenomenon among teens, and the strip club is the accepted backdrop to “male bonding.” All this is tied in with, and reinforces, the trafficking of millions of women and girls as literal chattel in the international sex industry.
This is NOT society becoming more comfortable with sex....
Forced Motherhood is Female Enslavement!
Abortion on Demand & Without Apology!
There have been decades of assault on women's right to abortion. But in the last few years this has taken a dramatic leap with hundreds of laws passed restricting access to abortion, closing down abortion clinics, and leaving huge parts of the country with no abortion providers at all.
Texas concentrates a lot. In 2011, there were 46 abortion clinics in a state of 26 million people. By September 1 this year, it's very likely that there will only be six abortion clinics left.
As Sunsara Taylor has said: “It is no exaggeration to make the analogy between this Abortion Rights Freedom Ride taking on the fight against female enslavement and the original Freedom Rides which challenged the brutal regime of the Jim Crow South. Forced motherhood IS female enslavement.”
Women and men from many different perspectives have joined this ride directly or in other ways, including financially, come to its support. The Revolutionary Communist Party fully supports and commends these efforts as fulfilling a great need and calls on all those who do not want to see women enslaved to their reproduction to recognize and act on this great need.
Follow the progress of these mobilizations, join these efforts, support them financially.
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To those who call themselves "pro-choice" but say that “Abortion On Demand and Without Apology” is “too extreme”:
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Women will begin dying from dangerous illegal abortions. Others will be imprisoned for self-inducing abortions. Thousands more will have their lives foreclosed by being forced to bear children they do not want – shattering their dreams, trapping them in abusive relationships, and/or driving them into humiliating and dangerous poverty. Rural, poor, immigrant, and women of color will be hardest hit.
Interview with Sunsara Taylor:
A Watershed Moment in the Battle for Abortion Rights and for the Liberation of Women
Posted August 24. Read more
The Abortion Rights Freedom Ride Advisory Board consists of:
Diane Derzis, owner of Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the last abortion clinic in Mississippi
Carol Downer, co-founder of Feminist Women’s Health Center which began doing abortions in 1971
Merle Hoffman, CEO of Choices Women’s Medical Center which began doing abortions in 1971
Wendy Robinson, Director of Voice of Choice
Mary Lou Singleton, licensed midwife and nurse practitioner, founder of Personhood for Women
Sunsara Taylor, Revolution newspaper, Stop Patriarchy, fighter for abortion rights since 1995
Statements of Support
"I stand with the brave 11 Freedom Fighters for women’s reproductive rights who were arrested outside of Governor Rick Perry’s mansion on August 13th for protesting the closure of all but six abortion clinics in the state of Texas. Legislation that limits access to sensitive healthcare, specifically safe and legal abortion, is a form of serious violence against women. We must raise our voices, fill the streets, make art, to defend doctors and assist women, to change hearts, enlighten minds and resist this oppression throughout this Week of Defiance." —Eve Ensler
"Reproductive freedom is a basic human right, like freedom of speech. It affects everything in a woman's life, whether she is healthy or not, in school or not, in the labor force or not, and how long she lives. In opposing reproductive freedom, Rick Perry has become a dictator endangering women's lives. He should be impeached." —Gloria Steinem
Additional voices and statements of support at StopPatriarchy.org
Voices on the Freedom Ride
Updated August 30, 2014
People's Hearings—
Abortion Rights Freedom Ride 2014: GROUND ZERO TEXAS
Brownsville, August 20, 2014
San Antonio, August 13, 2014
Austin, August 6, 2014
Houston, July 30, 2014
From Stop Patriarchy
Daring to be a Woman
Posted August 23, 2014. When I speak about patriarchy I talk a lot about how women dare to do basic things because of how dangerous it is to be female in this society. Read more
Voices of the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride
Updated July 22, 2014. These statements are from Abortion Rights Freedom Riders at Ground Zero: Texas and elsewhere. Read more
Why I Am Taking Part in the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride 2014
by Sunsara Taylor
July 28, 2014. "...as I head to Texas to take part in the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride 2014, I see this as a critical part of fighting to realize a whole better world." Read more
Some Thoughts Preparing to Head out on the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride
August 24, 2014. This Abortion Rights Freedom Ride aims to accomplish a great deal. I'd like to comment on a few aspects, thinking of it from the point of view of accumulating forces for revolution and how it contributes to getting closer to the time when it would be appropriate and possible to go all-out to seize power. In other words, to look at it from the largest strategic objectives of communist revolution. Read more
From Stop Patriarchy
In Honor of Throw-Back Thursday
Posted August 28, 2014. at the second People's Hearing in Austin, Texas, Sunsara Taylor reminded us that we cannot look to politicians or the courts to save us; we might demand to be heard, we must demand the rights we deserve. Read more
“I believe that we are living in a truly pivotal point in time”
July 28, 2014. A “millennial” calls on others of her generation to be part of the Freedom Ride. Read more
Why I’m a Freedom Rider for Women’s Lives...
August 2, 2014—From an Abortion Rights Freedom Rider. Read more
From Stop Patriarchy
Reflections from the Ride
Posted August 28, 2014. We are not forced to wear chains and shackles but yet we are enslaved. We do not need an endorsement to be role models but yet we are. We were not always equal but yet as women we leave a big impact on society. Being a freedom rider is a privilege. Read more
From Stop Patriarchy
An Open Letter to the Parents of the Abortion Rights Freedom Riders
Posted August 28, 2014. This week on this journey I have met women and men with impressively sharp and astute intellects; compassionate, sensitive hearts; and courage of their convictions that facilitates their passion radiating around them to influence the world. I would be immensely proud to have raised any one of them. Read more
No One Has to Ask Permission to Fight For Women’s Liberation
A response from Carol Downer to Katie Klabusich’s attack on Stop Patriarchy in Bitch Magazine
Posted August 30. Read more
From the Advisory Board of the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride
A Response to Recent Attacks and Invitation to All
July 10, 2014
For Women's Lives and Against McCarthyism: A Response to "United Statement Against Stop Patriarchy"
July 29, 2014
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BAsics, from the talks and writings of Bob Avakian is a book of quotations and short essays that speaks powerfully to questions of revolution and human emancipation.
On this planet today, there are no questions that are more important—and no answers that are more thoroughgoing—than what is spoken to in BA Speaks: REVOLUTION—NOTHING LESS! And there is no person more filled with contempt for the powers-that-be and the horrific order they trumpet and enforce—nor more filled with scientific confidence in the potential of masses of people to change all that—than Bob Avakian, the Chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.
"She makes an excellent exposition of the view that sexual differentiation of status, role, and power are built on small asymmetries in biology as, for example, the division of reproductive labor, in societies where the development of a surplus gives rise to a general class structure. No better theory has yet been advanced than this general view that we owe originally to Engels, and I found Ardea Skybreak's book a very thoughtful and persuasive exposition of that view." 
Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing
the World
