end pornography and patriarchy: the enslavement & degradation of women
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Articles from the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride: GROUND ZERO TEXAS

Leading Up to the Freedom Ride

During the Freedom Ride

Come One, Come All, to the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride: Ground Zero Texas!
July 14, 2014
by Sunsara Taylor
Coming from different perspectives, people from around the country are mobilizing to join with people in Texas to stand up against this assault from July 30 through early September as a critical part of fighting to turn the tide nationwide. The goals of this effort are simple: to get beyond fighting each new assault one by one on ever-shrinking ground and forge a national strategic counter-offensive; to change the way that millions think so that they understand the fight over abortion is a fight over women's enslavement or women's liberation; and to call forth mass, independent political resistance instead of relying on courts and politicians.
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Why we honor and invoke the example & legacy of the original Freedom Rides in our name
July 5, 2014
by StopPatriarchy.org
This spirit of defiance and bravery is badly needed today in the struggle to defend and advance abortion rights and the overall emancipation of women. In honoring the Freedom Rides by adapting their name, we hope to spread that spirit.
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Supreme Court Brings Back the 1950s, Allows Corporations to Deny Birth Control Coverage
July 1, 2014
by Sunsara Taylor
Starting today women across this country can be denied the ability to safely and affordably prevent unplanned pregnancies because of the Dark Ages religious beliefs of their employers. This will make birth control prohibitively expensive for huge numbers of women at a time when access to abortion is undergoing record and ominous restrictions.
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Why Texas is Ground Zero of the Abortion Rights Emergency
June 30, 2014
by writers at revcom.us
House Bill 2 is the most comprehensive anti-abortion law to date.
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Supreme Court Greenlights Cruel, Hateful Intimidation of Women
June 30, 2014
by Mary Lou Greenberg
There’s much more to say about this decision, but for now, let me describe some of the “caring, consensual conversations” outside the abortion clinic where I escort clients down the sidewalk to the entrance every Saturday:
  • “Caring person” in loud-conversation voice: “Don’t murder your baby!”
  • Client heading toward the clinic door shielded by escorts: “I don’t want to talk to you.”
  • Another “caring person” in louder voice: “You’re already a mother! You’ll be the mother of a dead baby if you go in there!”
  • Client walking faster, guided by escorts: “Go Away!”
  • “Caring” preacher person at the top of his lungs a few feet from the entrance: “You’ll burn in hell if you go in there!”
...Let’s be clear: this decision is not about “free speech.”
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NOW IS THE TIME: a statement of support for the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride: Ground Zero Texas
June 25, 2014
by Carol Downer
I was there in the mid-1960’s, when abortion was still illegal in much of the United States and women were forced to travel to states and cities where abortion, legal or illegal, was available, or to subject themselves to procedures done by unknown abortionists. I was one of them. I had taken no action to stand up for my reproductive rights, and I didn’t know anyone else who had.  We’re in that same position today. 
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Three Lessons on the Anniversary of Wendy Davis's Filibuster of Anti-Abortion Restrictions
June 25, 2014
by Sunsara Taylor
As the entire spectrum of official politics moves further and further to the right, this direction cannot be reversed simply by strengthening the “left end” of that spectrum. It is necessary to step outside of these official channels and fight against this whole direction.
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Don't Give Up the Fight for Abortion Rights
September 9, 2014
by Adrienne Luendo

Everyone needs to know about this and needs to be part of the fight to change the way people think, talk, and act about abortion. “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology” is what Stop Patriarchy says. Abortion is the first word in the slogan. It’s not an afterthought, not a statement that abortion should be “rare.”  It creates the possibility of conversations about why abortion should be unrestricted and spoken about without taboo, shame or stigma.  Students are leaders, the future of this world and need to be speaking about abortion on those terms!     
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Judge Rules Against Further Abortion Clinic Closures in Texas
August 29, 2014
by StopPatriarchy.org

It is very important that Judge Yeakel has blocked – at least for now – the closure of abortion clinics that was scheduled to take place on September 1st, 2014 and laid the basis for the possible reopening of clinics in El Paso and the Rio Grande Valley.**

**This means that abortion will not become any more inaccessible to women throughout the state of Texas in the very short term. It may even mean that abortion becomes more available in the Rio Grande Valley and in Western Texas than it has been in a year, depending on whether those clinics have the ability to reopen.

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That Look: The Final Day of a Week of Defiance
August 29, 2014
by an Abortion Rights Freedom Rider

I got the call outside of Governor Rick Perry's mansion on Friday, August 29. It was nearly 5pm. The clock had ticked incredibly slowly that day, and there we were, for the seventh time, at the culmination of weeks of struggle, protest, and exposure. The person on the other end of the phone said, "The judge ruled. He blocked the law. The clinics won't close on Monday, but the Attorney General is going to appeal it." 
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Sunsara Taylor and 4 other Abortion Rights Freedom Riders Arrested
August 27, 2014
by StopPatriarchy.org

As Sunsara Taylor, the other Freedom Riders, and the UT students who stood with them, disrupted business as usual and held up traffic, they exposed the situation in Texas and across the country, challenging everyone there: what is your life going to be about?  Many students came up to express gratitude, and shock - they had no idea that abortion rights are under unprecedented attack...
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Urgently Needed: A Week of Defiance to Stop the Attacks on Abortion Rights
August 15, 2014
by 11 Freedom Riders arrested on 8/13/14

Women are not incubators.  This was our message to the world as we marched out across 11th Street on August 13, holding the pictures of women who have died from illegal abortions, and pointing coat hangers at Perry's mansion.  These are the new terms that everyone who cares about the future of women should be fighting for, society-wide.  We are sick to death of seeing women mutilated, forced to bear children that are the product of rape, left to die on Catholic hospital beds, and shamed and terrorized outside of clinics. 
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Courage and Strength Shatter the Silence: We Must Act on What We Know
August 8, 2014
by Sunsara Taylor

She gave birth to an unwanted son whose very existence haunted her with the memory of her gang-rape. She carried the shame of being a single mother. Soon, she was forced to prostitute herself just to “drag herself and her son through life.” For thirty-five years, she could not look her son in the face when he asked, over and over again, “Mom, who is my dad?”  This is a story told at the Austin People's Hearing of the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride last night. 
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During the Freedom Ride, cont'd

A Morality Based on Reality: I’m Counting on YOU to End the Attacks on Abortion Rights
August 7, 2014
by Alexandria Petersburg
Read at the People's Hearing in Brownsville
I am sick of these stories.  They make me sick.  I have heard a hundred of them in the last year. They are unnecessary.  I have heard the stories of women who take misoprostol but then don’t know that the fetus dies inside you and then infects your bloodstream and kills you from the inside.  I have heard the stories of women who threw themselves down the stairs.  Teenagers making pacts: “If I ever get pregnant, punch me in the stomach as hard as you can.”  Overdosing on handfuls of pills.  I am pissed off at this disaster zone for women and I am looking everywhere for people who feel the same way, or who are open to learning why they should.
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Statement from Tom Morello released in conjunction with The Abortion Rights Freedom Ride 2014: Ground Zero Texas
August 1, 2014
by Tom Morello, lead guitar player for 
Rage Against the Machine & Audioslave
Read at the People's Hearing in Houston
My great grandmother died as a result of an unsafe, illegal abortion. She was a dress maker, wife of a poor farmer, and had no access to women’s health information or safe medical care. Her tragic, unnecessary death shattered the family and orphaned her three children as her husband could no longer care for them. If anti-choice advocates have their way many women will share my great grandmother’s fate. 
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An Interview with a Doctor in Texas
August 4, 2014
conducted by Sunsara Taylor
Excerpts read at the People's Hearing in Houston
[Before abortion was legalized] women would try to abort themselves. Everybody thinks the cliché of coat hangers is just some made-up term. It’s not, it’s reality. Women would do anything possible to themselves if they thought it would cause them to abort. Women would beat themselves in the stomach. I had a patient who attempted to inject turpentine into her abdomen, thinking it would reach her uterus. The end result: sepsis and a sloughing of her abdomen wall. These patients experienced either uterine perforation, hemorrhage, acute infection or a combination of these complications. There are many people today that are not aware of what women endured during this time, nor the morbid consequences... 
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Daring to Be a Woman
July 30, 2014
by an Abortion Rights Freedom Rider
Read at the People's Hearing in Houston
On May 15th, I was walking home from work when I was stalked and raped by a man who I had dared to ask for directions.  This is not the first time I was violently reminded my body is not my own. In fact, I almost expected it to happen again, although I couldn’t imagine how painful it would be to simply survive after collecting the misogynist collateral damage my body had again been reduced to. I’m not going to assume that you don’t know what that’s like because the statistics scream my story is not unique. The piece of me that survived shares a common ground with people in this very room.
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The Controversy

Every movement for liberation has had to go up against not only the forces of oppression, but also the ways in which even many people who hate that oppression have become convinced that the most they can do is fight for some gradual or incremental change. This historic effort was no different.

Two Responses to Unprincipled Attacks Against the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride
August 2014
by the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride Advisory Board

For Women's Lives and Against McCarthyism:
With so much on the line and the responsibility of ensuring reproductive justice for women in this country, we believe diverse ways of fighting back are necessary. Many people and groups are doing important work to address the current emergency and we applaud them.
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A Response to Recent Attacks and Invitation to All:
For too long our side has been forced into defensive battles, responding to attacks in the courts and the electoral arena and public education and struggling to keep services open to women on ever shrinking ground.  Courageous abortion providers and escorts are working tirelessly to keep abortion available to women. We salute these efforts. At the same time, we must all soberly confront the truth: much more is needed.
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A Statement from the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA
August 13, 2014
by revcom.us
A simple but bedrock point of morality: anyone who sees an injustice needs to fight against it.  Contrary to that basic point, some people in the movement act as if they were "franchise managers" of oppression, lashing out with full-blown campaigns of slander and vitriol both against those who are fighting to end ALL oppression as well as many who are fighting very hard on particular fronts against the serious attacks of this system, but doing so without the "permission" of these gatekeepers.
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With New Round of Clinic Closures Looming - Abortion Rights Freedom Ride Steps up Resistance and Responds to Attacks
August 25, 2014
by StopPatriarchy.org
Precisely because their approach of linking this fight directly to the struggle for women's liberation challenges and breaks out of a whole conciliatory approach of seeking “common ground” or seeking to “reframe” abortion not as an issue of women's liberation but instead as simply a general matter of “personal privacy,” “choice,” or “healthcare,” it is not surprising that [Stop Patriarchy has] stoked controversy.
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No One Has to Ask Permission to Fight for Women's Equality
September 5, 2014
by Carol Downer
...I see more and more attacks coming around the country, and I see very little visible protest occurring. Mostly everything is left up to Planned Parenthood and the Democrats, and I am sick of it. I think it’s time for outspoken protests saying “Abortion on Demand and Without Apology.” I respect that Texans have been working hard on this issue, but it has not been enough. We need to do more. In L.A., in NYC, everywhere. I invite Texans who are working for Reproductive Freedom and Justice to come to California. We need some help too.     
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Interview with Sunsara Taylor by Dennis Trainor on Acronym TV
Part 3: (10:03) Texans For Reproductive Justice v. Stop Patriarchy
Critics within the Texas pro-choice community have very publicly stood in opposition to Stop Patriarchy. A coalition calling itself Texans for Reproductive Justice have published a United Statement in Opposition to Stop Patriarchy and a detailed Letter of Concern  “opposing Stop Patriarchy’s messaging, tactics, dishonesty, and racism.”
See this interview

Project Censored
July 23, 2014
Sunsara Taylor of StopPatriarchy.org speaks from Texas about the continuing closures there of clinics offering abortions; Dennis Trainor of Acronym TV asks why even left-leaning media outlets dropped his report about Taylor and the Abortion Rights Freedom Ride. 

I Was Warned About Stop Patriarchy
August 4, 2014
by Mary Lou Singleton
The presence of Stop Patriarchy in Albuquerque did not lead to success for the Operation Rescue sponsored abortion ban. The anti-abortion ballot initiative was defeated by a wide margin. Stop Patriarchy did, however, radicalize many women’s rights supporters in Albuquerque and helped us understand the need for an uncompromising resistance to the current abortion rights emergency in the United States. Now I’m watching the same organized forces who told us to stay away from Stop Patriarchy in Albuquerque using the same strong-arm bullying tactics to defame Stop Patriarchy in Texas.
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On Bob Avakian: Far-Sighted Revolutionary Leadership vs. Gutter-Level Wrecking and Disregard for the Truth
August 18, 2014
by Sunsara Taylor
It is... simply a fact that one of the great hallmarks of [Bob Avakian] over many decades has been his insistence that, “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.” (BAsics 3:22)
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Who is stop patriarchy?

Stop Patriarchy is a group for everyone who wants to FIGHT to STOP the enslavement of women. Not politely lobby against it. Not grumble at the TV. Not simply post things on Twitter. And definitely not sit around waiting for those in power to “come to their senses.” It is also a movement for everyone who can be won to see the need for this – we are fighting aggressively to change minds and to grow and deepen and escalate until we succeed in changing everything. JOIN US!

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