Reproductive Justice Week at UNC Wilmington!

by Becki Fernandez, 2017 Campus Leader at UNC Wilmington

This November, I organized and implemented a week of programming surrounding the theme of reproductive justice as part of my position with the NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina Campus Leader program, aptly called “Reproductive Justice Week.”  I have been organizing for years with the UNCW Feminist Student Alliance around several feminist, social justice issues, but this was the first time that I organized a full week of programs coinciding with a week of awareness.

The climate surrounding talking about reproductive justice in Wilmington, NC, is an interesting one, particularly around the subject of abortion.  I have noticed during my time in Wilmington that abortion rights is one of the few angles of modern, progressive social justice that the community has some trouble rallying around.  Just look at what we saw happening with the Democratic Party this year with the debate surrounding a litmus test on support of abortion rights.  In Wilmington, we have more fake clinic crisis pregnancy centers than actual medical clinics that offer abortion services. In fact, our one clinic that does offer abortion services can only bring in an abortion provider 4 times a month.  I am genuinely fearful of wearing any of my pro-abortion t-shirts in public here because of how antagonistic the community seems to be.  I know that I am far from the only person in Wilmington, NC, that is passionate about abortion rights and reproductive justice.  But, I am still aware that the community has a sizable, adamantly anti-choice community that will protest along the sides of busy roads and intersections to try and deny people access to their constitutional right to an abortion.  So at the very least, I set out to get a conversation started on abortion rights in southeastern North Carolina.

I also wanted to try and focus on a few reproductive justice issues that go beyond abortion rights. While abortion rights are an important battle in the reproductive justice framework, they are not the only pressing issue in today’s world.  The right to have children is also an important reproductive right, and the right to parent and raise these children in safe communities is also an important reproductive right.  Essentially, the right for you and your possible family to exist and live healthy, dignified lives regardless of sex, gender, sexual orientation, race, immigration status, ability, income, or any aspect of your identity is the ultimate reproductive right that should always be fought for.

I started off my week of action with a “How to Get an Abortion in North Carolina” toolkit presentation with Carolina Abortion Fund.  The presentation was very informative and went well.  Representatives from Carolina Abortion Fund came in and talked about the current state of abortion rights and access in North Carolina.  I am sure this is not exactly news for anyone reading anything off of NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina’s website, but the current state of abortion rights and access in North Carolina is pretty grim.  So “Reproductive Justice Week” might not have started off on a happy note, but it definitely started on a call-to-action to help provide abortion funds, at the very least, to people in need in North Carolina.

The next event of Reproductive Justice Week was a discussion on LGBTQIA reproductive health and rights hosted with a fellow student organization on campus, Pride.  I felt it was dire to include a program about queer reproductive health because as many folks doing this work are aware of already, the reproductive rights of the LGBTQIA community is oftentimes left out of the reproductive rights narrative even though these rights are just as important.  Cisgender, heterosexual individuals are not the only individuals in need of abortion access.  Furthermore, LGBTQIA folk face larger disparities than some of their cisgender, heterosexual counterparts in finding access to general and reproductive healthcare, which goes far beyond abortion rights.  Not to mention the struggles LGBTQIA parents face in fighting for their basic right to parent, on top of fighting for basic rights to employment, housing, and freedom from violence and discrimination.  During our discussion, we made sure to touch on many of these issues, as well as take audience feedback on LGBTQIA reproductive justice issues that are important to them.

Next, we hosted a small lunch and chat with representatives from NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina where we also talked about the current state of reproductive rights in NC, with a focus on fake clinic crisis pregnancy centers and all the legislative barriers that have been created for people trying to seek out an abortion in NC.  The discussion was vibrant, lively, and had great involvement from UNCW faculty and staff.

Our next event of Reproductive Justice Week was a screening of the documentary No Más Bebés.  This is a documentary about a group of immigrant women in Los Angeles suing county doctors, the state of California, and the U.S. government for coercing and at times even tricking these young, immigrant mothers into getting their tubes tied and becoming sterilized.  This was one of the most powerful events of the week of action for me, personally, as a Latina and child of immigrants.  I have witnessed firsthand what it is like for non-Latinx people to think your family is dirty because it is large and Latinx.  It was a profound, impactful documentary that was also deeply resonating.  The film also serves as a reminder to the reproductive justice community that this is a movement founded for and by women of color, and the specific needs of people of color that are found in the intersections of the reproductive justice framework need to be prioritized because they are the needs that have been constantly looked over for most of the reproductive rights movement.  The bodies of people of color have been used for centuries for experiments and torture to advance the reproductive rights narrative and that must be recognized in order for us to move forward.

After that, I, along with the Feminist Student Alliance, hosted a discussion on the Hyde Amendment and why it is our duty to support low-income folks’ access to abortion care.  A lot of people in the room for this event were not even aware of the current implications of the Hyde Amendment, which is great in a sense because I feel the entire purpose of holding events like these are to educate people who do not know as much about these issues as I might, as opposed to preaching to a choir of established reproductive rights activists.  The Hyde Amendment infamously prohibits federal funding from covering abortion.  This means that low-income people who may be relying on Medicaid/Medicare for healthcare coverage cannot use this coverage for abortion services unless they live in a state that explicitly allows it.  Making abortion care only readily available to people with middle and upper class incomes goes against the whole point of legal and safe access to abortion.  Access to abortion has to be affordable, too, in order for it to be a genuine right.  Sadly, this does not stop legislators from slashing funding for abortion care left and right, and there are even a few people who say they are “pro-choice” who agree that federal funding should not go towards abortion.  However, abortion is healthcare, plain and simple.  Placing insurance bans against covering the costs of abortion care should not be the one facet of healthcare that we won’t fight to gain coverage for.

Our last event of “Reproductive Justice Week” was “Storytelling as Activism” with Collective Sex and Shout Your Abortion.  Activists Poppy and Amelia shared their own personal abortion stories and emphasized how important storytelling is in activism.  Storytelling is what breaks barriers and stigma because it goes beyond the 24-hour news pundits, beyond the internet thinkpieces, beyond the debates on legislation.  Storytelling shows how even the most stigmatized of social issues affects real people and their real lives.  And that is just what Poppy and Amelia did with their presentation.  The entire room of people was deeply moved by what these two abortion storytelling activists had to say.  Additionally, I think it is safe to say that not just through the entire week of events but with this program in particular, I started an honest conversation about abortion in my community which is exactly what I set out to do.

Overall, I was impressed with the outcome of my “Reproductive Justice Week.”  Despite a few concerns of ours, no one came out to harass me, members of my student organization, or any of the presenters I had visiting during the week of programming.  Furthermore, we had great attendance from Wilmington community members, which is fantastic considering all the events happened on UNCW’s campus.  In this day and age, discussions about reproductive justice can be exhausting and tiring.  It is definitely an uphill battle to fight for these rights and have our voices be heard.  Nevertheless, we cannot stop until all of our rights are guaranteed!

#BlackLivesMatter, and Black Health Matters, too: Reproductive Justice

by Anna Katz, 2017-2018 Campus Leader at Duke University

This November, I had the privilege of attending the first annual Black Health Matters Conference at Harvard University.  Given my work as a NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina Campus Leader and love for all things sexual health, I was particularly looking forward to Saturday’s panel Who and How: Sexual Health Activism for Our Most Underserved Communities.  As I ponder what shape my budding career might take, I am always thrilled to hear the varying ways activists approach this critical work.  With panelists working in academic, government, and the nonprofit sector, the event promised to offer several unique perspectives on sexual and reproductive health.

But perhaps most exciting was the opportunity to attend a reproductive health event that centered and amplified the voices of four Black women leaders in the sexual health field.  Mainstream reproductive rights activism historically sidelined women of color, trans women, poor women—virtually anyone who didn’t reflect middle- and upper-class white leadership.  Frustrated with this marginalization, a group of Black women created their own movement, coining the term “reproductive justice” in 1994.  Now a national leader in reproductive justice, SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective defines reproductive justice as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.”  To ensure that these rights are universally recognized, they believe, we must analyze power systems, address intersecting oppressions, center the most marginalized, and build coalitions across issues and identities.

In doing this work, we must first contextualize sexual and reproductive health activism within a history of reproductive oppression.  Our nation has a broad and shameful history of sexual and reproductive coercion of Black folks and other communities of color, contributing to an abiding distrust of health practitioners and organizations like Planned Parenthood.  From the forced reproduction of enslaved African and African American women to the coercive sterilizations of the American Eugenics Movement, from J. Marion Sim’s surgical experimentation on enslaved women to the non-consensual extraction of Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells, from contraceptive pill trials on Puerto Rican women to the infamous “Tuskegee Syphilis Study,” folks of color have continuously been stripped of bodily autonomy, often for the purpose of “advancing” reproductive science.  The generational trauma of such violating practices cannot be minimized; as activists, we must acknowledge our nation’s ugly histories and recognize where the mainstream reproductive rights movement has failed the most vulnerable.  The panelists echoed SisterSong’s push for centering those who have been marginalized and emphasized that paying lip service to historically subjugated groups is not enough. “Activism is a doing, not a saying,” explained panelist Jill Smith, HIV/STI Project Manager at the Maryland Department of Health.

I am proud to be working with NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina, an organization that is committed to serving all North Carolinians and prioritizing those disproportionately impacted by harmful policies.  In an attempt to echo this commitment on Duke’s campus, I am building partnerships with groups that tend to be excluded from reproductive health conversations.  I am thrilled to be kicking off next semester with a sexual and reproductive health trivia night in collaboration with The Bridge, an online community for Black and Latina women.  Through such coalition-building, perhaps we can build an on-campus reproductive justice movement that is truly inclusive and intersectional.

Environmentalism & Feminism: The Undeniable Link Between Environmental Rights & Women’s Rights

By Leah Block, first-year student at North Carolina State University

People look at me funny when I say I’m trying to find a career that incorporates both environmentalism and women’s rights. To me, the connection has always been so clear; if women are empowered, the environment will thrive. For one, the world-wide annual carbon footprint now averages 4 tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) per person per year, and the average annual carbon footprint in industrialized nations is a whopping 11 tons of CO2 per person per year . Women play a key role in population control, and therefore a key role in the mitigation of these statistics.

There are many ways to go about women’s empowerment, but when it comes to climate change, the most important step is giving women proper access to education. When girls go to school, not only do they learn about family planning skills, they are also far more likely to go into the working world. This puts off child-bearing for a number of years, and lowers the average size of families.

Another important step in the empowerment of women is one that’s a little more complicated due to cultural differences and expenses. Ensuring access to reproductive health – that is, access to birth control, contraceptives, and abortion care – is critical in reducing the average family size. In some developing countries, the average family includes 6 to 8 children. If we look at our average carbon footprint per person, 4 tons of CO2 per year, a family of 8 would produce 32 tons of CO2 per year. This astonishingly high statistic could be prevented simply by assuring that women in developing countries have access to condoms, birth control pills, or IUDs. Certain organizations such as Ipas work to ensure that women in developing countries have these rights, which is a great step towards a more stable environment for us all. 

Image from Repeal Hyde Art Project

A less discussed factor on this topic is the fact that women are responsible for most of the global farm work. In general, food production can be sustainable; unfortunately, food production in both developed and developing countries tends to be on the unsustainable side. A good example of poor agricultural practice is the deforestation of humid and semi-humid tropical rainforests, which are the world’s largest biomass reservoir. In fact, rainforests absorb about 8.8 billion tonnes of CO2 every year, making them a crucial component to Earth’s well-being. Farmers, many of them being women, clear-cut these forests to make room for new crops and pastures after “using up” land; that is, after depleting the soil of its nutrients. Going into countries where unsustainable practices are happening and reaching out to the women who manage food production is vital to the reduction of CO2 emissions, and therefore mitigating the effects of global climate change. Some sustainable tactics to teach these women include crop rotation, cover crops, soil enrichment, and Biointensive Integrated Pest Management.

Undoubtedly, when women receive proper care, the Earth receives proper care. The people who do not see an overlap between women’s rights and the well-being of Earth need to look a little closer. I am confident that I will create a career for myself which involves my two passions and betters the world in the long-run.

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This post is part of NARAL Pro-Choice North Carolina’s Student Perspectives on Reproductive Justice blog series. To write a post for the series, please contact our Advocacy & Organizing Manager at Sarah@ProChoiceNC.org.

Fact-Check: OTC Birth Control

In last night’s debate between Senator Kay Hagan and Speaker Thom Tillis, there was a lot of talk about birth control.  If you were listening closely, you heard something new: Speaker Tillis claimed to support increased access to birth control, and proposed to do this by making some forms of birth control available over-the-counter (OTC).

Don’t be mislead folks.  As our friends at Planned Parenthood Action Fund pointed out, “[o]pponents of women’s health are proposing to move birth control over-the-counter as a part of their larger effort to take away insurance coverage for birth control — forcing women to pay out-of-pocket instead of keeping the coverage they have today.”  The reality is that making some forms of birth control available OTC may increase access for some individuals, but birth control would become more expensive and less affordable for most women and families since most health insurance plans don’t cover OTC products without a prescription.

The lack of affordable contraception is a real problem that we encourage more lawmakers to sincerely address but making some forms of birth control available OTC is not a comprehensive solution.  A national survey from the Center for American Progress showed that in 2012 women with private insurance already paid about 50 percent of the total costs for oral contraceptives, while the typical cost of noncontraceptive drugs is only 33 percent.  The high cost of birth control has real, potentially harmful consequences. The same CAP survey found that the high cost of contraception forced many women to stop or delay using their preferred method of birth control while others were forced to depend on less effective methods because they were most affordable.  With 98% of American women using some form of birth control in their lifetimes, it’s long past due for lawmakers to recognize that birth control is basic and essential health care that should be both affordable and accessible.

 

They’re baaaaack!

The NC General Assembly’s short session started today at noon. Sign up for our email alerts to get the latest information on NC laws and policies affecting reproductive rights and health. http://bit.ly/fightbackNC