Abortion Rights Freedom Ride 2014: 
GROUND ZERO TEXAS

Strategic Thinking:

Three Major Components:
  1. Forge a national strategic counter-offensive to what is a national war on women.
  2. Radically reset the political, moral, and ideological terms of this fight so that millions understand that this fight is about women’s liberation or women’s enslavement.
  3. Mobilize all people of conscience to wage massive, independent, political resistance. Relying on politicians, and the courts, has not halted the barrage of attacks.

PictureAbortion Rights Freedom Ride 2013 Report
For more on strategy, see:
Abortion Rights are at a Crossroads: This is NOT a Time to Lay Low - It is Time for Massive, Uncompromising Struggle!  by David Gunn, Jr. and Sunsara Taylor, and read the report to find out what we learned in 2013 from waging resistance throughout the (then) five states with only a single abortion clinic.
  • A Statement signed by people from many walks of life, including major luminaries, artists, public figures, and religious leaders, which recasts the moral and political terms and the thinking of millions. 

  • Nationally Web-Cast "People's Hearings" - public speak outs in Houston, Austin, San Antonio, and the Rio Grande Valley which drew out the true dimensions of the emergency. People did not know of clinic closures, scope, or stakes. These speak out combined mass testimony from before Roe and from today, the breadth of a wide-range of community leaders and health care providers, and the prominence of well-known individuals.

  • Confrontational, dramatic, non-violent political protest that delivered "the verdict" of these hearings to appropriate individuals and institutions. Protesters brandished bloody coat-hangers, images of women who died from illegal abortions, and shackles representing female enslavement.
On the ground day to day the Freedom Riders did mass outreach with tens of thousands of stickers, palm cards, coat hangers, collected stories, staged flash protests, conducted media work, blogged, released videos and involved growing numbers of people on the ground and throughout the country in waging this fight in ways big and small. All this culminated in a...