feminist blogs

On Sunday, Americans will unite in front of television screens across the county, but two things will divide them: team affiliation and abortion. Yes, abortion will be part of this year’s Super Bowl festivities because Focus on the Family, the uber-conservative “family values” group, has purchased an advertising slot allegedly featuring quarterback Tim Tebow’s mom discussing her decision not to terminate her pregnancy despite her doctor’s recommendation. The message being: “If I’d had an abortion, my son never would have won the Heisman.”

Although Americans are used to taking sides on Super Bowl Sunday, how will they react when they’re asked to take sides on one of our nation’s deepest cultural divides during the Big Game? Some national women’s and reproductive rights organizations, including LSRJ, have already reacted–they’re petitioning CBS to pull the ad. This seems like a reflexive, even if justified, reaction. Though I haven’t seen the ad, I’m relatively certain that if it crossed my screen on Sunday, my TV and I would have it out–as we often do when I’m blindsided by bigotry and intolerance wrapped up in American flags, bald eagles, and yes, football uniforms. However, reproductive justice organizations aren’t being blindsided by the ad, so we have the time to formulate a well-reasoned, articulate response. (more…)

The beginning of the new year is a time for reflection, optimism, and goal-setting. In this spirit, Harvard Law Students for Reproductive Justice presents its New Year’s resolutions, and we encourage your chapter to create its own.

For this semester:

1. Meet with administrators from Harvard’s health service to see if we can find out the motivations behind the opt-out policy.

 — Harvard allows anti-choice students to receive a refund of the portion of their health insurance fee which funds abortion.  This “refund” has amounted to roughly $1 per student, and there are student organizations which hold drives to encourage people to opt-out.  In the past, HLSRJ has held response drives, collecting $1 from pro-choice students and donating the proceeds to worthy organizations.  This year, we split our donation between Planned Parenthood and a local abortion fund.  However, several of our board members this year would like to find out why Harvard allows students to opt-out, and how exactly the process works, in hopes of creating awareness and possibly getting this policy changed.

2. Host a State of the Uterus event.

 — This is one of many genius ideas from Cari Simon, our vice president. It is an event to mirror the State of the Union address, and will feature high-profile speakers to update students on current legal developments relating to RJ issues.

3. Work toward coordinating a co-sponsored event with Med Students for Choice.

 — The graduate and professional schools at Harvard are somewhat isolated from one another, and we are planning to work with the med students to host a panel on health policy with both medical and legal professionals.

4. Make t-shirts and sell them to our broader membership so that we can get some publicity on campus.

 — HLSRJ has been a relatively small but very active group.  We would like to increase our visibility and gain more high-commitment members!

5. Mentor 1Ls and encourage them to be as active as possible.

 — This year we have three fabulous 1L board members. They’ve arrived with tons of motivation and fresh ideas, and have been really involved despite dealing with 1L year! We’d like to help them continue their great work.

6. Work with Dean of Students to make sure “wellness vending machine” idea happens, and includes condoms.

 — One of our new 2L board members, Jenny Lee, worked with our student government officers and the Dean of Students to improve access to condoms on the law school campus.  Since it’s not economically feasible to give them out for free, the Dean of Students suggested a “wellness vending machine” in a central location which would supply common healthcare items such as condoms.

For the long term:

1. Work on improving institutional memory. (more…)

In her feature on the supposed generational divide in the pro-choice movement, which ran in Sunday’s New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg correctly observes that abortion has hit the headlines recently in the context of health care reform and the horrendously restrictive Stupak amendment—and it’s not something reproductive rights advocates are happy about.  But there isn’t much else I can relate to in her assessment of the current landscape in reproductive rights advocacy and activism.  In fact, I think the story—which argues that there is a chasm between the “menopausal militia,” meaning the generation of feminists who came of age before Roe v. Wade and view abortion in “stark political terms,” and the “millennials,” the younger set for whom Stolberg suggests abortion is a personal issue—misses the mark in a sad but revealing way.

Relying on quotes from Naral Pro-Choice America president Nancy Keenan, Stolberg promotes this political/personal dichotomy without actually explaining how this supposed shift to the personal manifests itself—other than the fact that the post-Roe generations seem less responsive to single-issue pro-choice calls to action.  Provocative accompanying artwork, which consists of a black rectangle with brightly colored letters spelling “WE” floating above “ME,” implies that younger women are selfish in neglecting abortion politics.  Yet Stolberg acknowledges that “a clear majority of Americans support the right to abortion, and there’s little evidence of a difference between those over 30 and under 30.”  In fact, she herself points to several examples of young people organizing right now to stop the Stupak amendment (including LSRJ’s recent webinar on abortion and health care reform legislation).  So what’s the issue?

Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg concludes that young people don’t respond to email alerts about contacting their legislators because they know abortion is legal and believe “if you really need one you can probably figure out how to get one.”  Which means not only are we selfish, but we’re also foolishly complacent.  But what about the millions of poor women, immigrant women, and young women who can’t ever “figure out how to get one” because the barriers we’ve erected to accessing legal abortion are simply too high?  Such women may be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term or to induce an abortion through other means, with serious consequences for the health and security of themselves and their families.  And what about those of us who aren’t poor, immigrant, or under 18 but believe deeply that how our society treats those women reflects on all of us, individually and collectively? 

It’s true that I probably don’t respond to the action alerts that fill my inbox as often as I should.  But I resent the suggestion that my entire generation and I are indifferent.  I think the most telling part of the story is when Stolberg characterizes coalition-building with immigrant rights and LGBT rights group as a “tactic” to draw young people into reproductive rights activism, as if the movement’s leaders are waging war against younger activists.  (To be fair, it’s unclear whether Choice USA executive director Kierra Johnson used the word “tactic” or if that’s Stolberg’s spin.)  Either way, this doesn’t leave much room to consider whether the 37 additional years of politics played out on women’s bodies since Roe might have led us to a more nuanced understanding of how the struggle for reproductive freedom fits within a larger social justice frame.  Perhaps the moms and dads concerned with comprehensive sex education for their kids or the under-25 crowd organizing around environmental justice and LGBT rights—all of whom are implicitly faulted for not caring enough about abortion—simply get that single-issue activism isn’t enough.  That’s the conclusion countless reproductive justice activists have reached, understanding that reproductive justice will be achieved when all people have the political, economic, and social power to make decisions about our health, bodies, and sexuality for ourselves, our families, and our communities. 

Choice USA’s Johnson says young people are “coming at these issues in a much more complex way.”  If so, the pro-choice movement doesn’t need to dedicate its precious resources to running focus groups to discern how the “millennials” think.  We should instead use those resources to support creative and wide-reaching organizing efforts, informed by reproductive justice values that recognize coalition-building as an inherent part of the work, not merely a new tactic to be employed instrumentally.  And as for the New York Times, I think the idea of a generational divide along a personal/political axis unravels by the end of the piece.  The real story is why when a majority of Americans has consistently favored abortion rights for the last couple of decades our Congress and President are (again) willing to sacrifice women’s health in the face of some tough politics.

Liz Kukura