Sunsara Taylor is a writer for Revolution Newspaper and and Advisory Board member of The World Can’t Wait. Taylor has traveled to the heart of the controversy around abortion and Christian fascism—reporting from the funeral Dr. George Tiller, leading protests in support of abortion outside Obama’s commencement speech at Notre Dame, and disrupting Rick Warren’s sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church. In 2008-2009, she conducted a national speaking tour to promote the book Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World, by Bob Avakian. If you search her name on Youtube, you can watch her indict the U.S. for war crimes and torture while holding her own against Bill O’Reilly. These are her words.

In May of this year, Dr. George Tiller, one of the most courageous abortion doctors in the country, was assassinated. In the weeks that followed, violence and threats against women’s clinics and doctors continued at heightened levels.

Two weeks ago, the U.S. Senate approved a version of health care reform that includes an amendment, Stupak-Pitts, that would deprive women of health-care that covers abortion if they receive any form of government stipend or tax break. While the version that is working its way through the House doesn’t include these same restrictions, Senators Orrin Hatch (R-OR) and Ben Nelson (D-NE) are poised to introduce them. If passed, millions of women would lose the abortion coverage they currently have and complicated abortions needed for the health or life of the woman will become cripplingly expensive.

Taken together, these events represent an escalation in the legal and extra-legal assault on women’s right to abortion beyond anything under the Bush Regime. Without the right to decide for themselves, without coercion, shame or danger, when and whether they will have children, women are not free. When half of humanity is oppressed, all of society suffers. [Read more...]