When I tell people that I am interested in both criminal justice and reproductive justice, they often look at me askance, or raise their eyebrows.  Don’t these two fields clash a lot, they ask? Well, yes, in some ways. But women’s health advocates and prison reform activists have more in common than many might think. Beyond the fact that there are more women in prison than ever before because women’s incarceration rates have skyrocketed since the beginning of the so-called “war on drugs,” women’s lives are effected by high prison rates in multiple other ways. Feministing’s Samhita draws the connections in her most recent (and last) post on the Nation’s Passing Through.  One reason, she says, that the women’s health and anti-incarceration movements need to start talking to each other is that women’s STD rates are exponentially higher in communities that have the highest incarceration rates, even in women who are not engaging in so-called risky behavior. A recent Washington Post Op-Ed has more:

One obvious reason is that conversations about sexual behavior, race and sexually transmitted infections remain taboo. Another is that the incidence of many STDs, particularly HIV, is concentrated in poor, segregated neighborhoods that are characterized by high rates of incarceration. Inner-city populations of African Americans and Latinos account for almost two-thirds of the 2.2 million Americans in prison nationwide, and two disturbing trends are increasingly present in these communities.  

One is the shift in the patterns of marriage and courtship that result when so many men are removed from a community. The other is an increase in the number of “multiple concurrent sexual partnerships,” in which individuals are engaged in sexual relationships with more than one person at a time. In many communities, when one sexual partner is imprisoned, the person left behind chooses another partner. When widespread, this behavior creates an efficient, effective pattern for introducing and maintaining an STD through a network of sexual relationships. 

As the Op-Ed, written by two public health academics, later notes, we as a society ignore the fallout of our addiction to incarceration at the peril of our health — and particularly of women’s health.  But the op-ed gets something seriously wrong:  it suggests that we can place blame for the high rates of HIV and other STDs at the feet of the women left behind when their men are dragged off to jail. We shouldn’t be placing blame on the community at all. And as Samhita rightly notes, it’s not quite so simple:

High rates of incarceration has such deleterious side effects that we have only begun to understand. Beyond dismantling and shaming entire communities, the onslaught of emasculating practices via police has created greater threats to masculinity, which backfire in the form of unsafe sexual practices, multiple partners and in its extreme form, rape.  

It may be true that, as some claim, the feminist/women’s health movement fanned the flames of the incarceration fury — particularly in the 1990s with the push toward victim’s rights. But it’s time to move beyond the divisive past and start to work from our commonality — that women and men, both inside and outside the prison walls, deserve better. 

I (your regular blogger) am traveling this week, so in my stead we’ve got a great guest post from another law student leader in LSRJ….

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This is a slight departure from the current events/political slant usually taken by this blog.  It’s more personal in nature- I’ve been thinking about what the connection is between being a law student and being a reproductive justice advocate, and this is one of those connections for me.  The thought stemmed from a discussion I had with my law professor who led the legal clinic I worked in last semester, which provided services for low-income families:

Law professor: you have a really great, distinctive counseling style.  Where did that come from?
Lowly law student:  hmmm…actually, it came from working in an abortion clinic.

I started working in the clinic right after college, while trying to figure out the next steps in my life.  I was a counselor.  Every day the waiting room would fill with women and girls, mostly pregnant and not wanting to be.  I would meet with them after their lab work and sonogram confirmed the pregnancy and how far along they were.  It was my job to learn about their situations, discuss their options, and support their decision- in short, to be an advocate.  Here’s what it taught me that will make me a better lawyer:

•    Start with an open ended-question.  Both at the abortion clinic and the legal clinic, that was usually, “Could you tell me about what brought you here today?”  Allowing people to tell their story is incredibly important.
•    People in crisis need someone to be calm.  Having an abortion can be an incredibly stressful experience, and so can walking into a lawyer’s office for the first time.  Many women seeking an abortion, and many people seeking the help of a lawyer, have been living in perpetual crisis for some time.  Providing a measured, sympathetic presence is one of the most important things an advocate can do.
•    The best way to figure out what’s really going on is just to let someone talk, with an occasional question or reflection.  Immediately launching into a speech, a list of options, or interrupting someone is a sure way to mask the true situation and shut someone down.
•    A problem does not stand on its own.  A woman may come into the clinic because she is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy, but may also be dealing with other issues, such as lack of child care, an ill parent, or an abusive relationship.  These problems may be keeping her from being able to deal with the immediate problem.  The same thing happens in legal situations- a client may come into a lawyer’s office for a divorce, a will, or to sell a piece of property, but is simultaneously dealing with multiple other issues.  It is the responsibility of the advocate to find out what else is going on, and address the problems together, because that’s how they got to be problems in the first place.
•    Time constraints are real.  Sometimes you might have only 15 minutes with a client.  However, when working at the abortion clinic I learned to never be afraid to ask the client to come back before taking action.  If your instinct says, “something isn’t right here,” you’re probably correct.  At the abortion clinic it often meant that someone (a boyfriend, a husband, a mother) was pressuring the woman into having an abortion, and she wasn’t ready yet.  In a legal context, it could mean that you haven’t had time to fully explore what is going on with the client, and if someone needs to end the meeting, you should make a follow-up appointment rather than rushing into something without all the information.
•    Sometimes you have to ask for help.  If there’s a situation you don’t know how to handle, there’s almost always someone to talk to about it.
•    This isn’t about the advocate, it’s about the client.  Trust their judgment.  They’re the one who has to live with the decision.

So there you go.  Want to be a better lawyer?  Work in an abortion clinic.

The first-ever national study of four common sexually transmitted diseases (or STDs) (HPV, Chlamydia, Genital Herpes, and Trichomoniasis) among girls and women was released yesterday. And the results were eye-opening: at least one-in-four girls are infected with one of the four diseases surveyed. Among Black girls between the ages of 14-19, the percentage shoots up to about half.

According to the NY Times, the Centers for Disease Control reacted by calling “for strengthen[ed] screening, vaccination and other prevention measures for the diseases, which are among the highest public health priorities.”

Yes, that’s right. But let’s not beat around the bush here. We don’t just need “prevention measures,” if prevention measures means more abstinence-only “education”. We need comprehensive sex education so that teens–who, let’s face it, are likely to be sexually active at some point before marriage–know how to prevent the transmission of STDs and learn how to protect themselves. C

ecile Richards, Planned Parenthood’s current leader, put it well: “The national policy of promoting abstinence-only programs is a $1.5 billion failure,” Ms. Richards said, “and teenage girls are paying the real price.”

Yes, it is girls and women who are paying the price. And it’s not the price for having sex or for attending comprehensive sex ed, if they were lucky enough to have it, as some on the anti-sex, anti-woman, anti-abortion bandwagon would have us believe. It’s the price for living in a country (or rather, under a regime) that does not respect women’s sexuality.

The Wall Street Journal can argue all it wants that these numbers are not alarming once we dig a little deeper, and that the prevalence of HPV in young women shouldn’t get us too worked up. But it does. And it should. It should get us worked up enough to push our states to reject abstinence only funding (if they haven’t already) and to institute real, comprehensive sex education.

The other day, Iowa became the 17th state to reject federal abstinence-only dollars. The state will continue to refuse funding until and unless the federal government makes significant changes to the program. The other 16 states include New York, Ohio, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Montana and Connecticut, among others. New York had previously received the second largest amount of any state of federal abstinence only dollars.

As it currently stands, recipients of federal Title V abstinence-only funding are required to adhere to strict guidelines. The program requires states receiving the funding to adhere to the following requirements:

In case it’s not apparent, there are significant problems with this definition. As SIECUS explains, “This definition ensures that young people who have already engaged in sexual activity, those have been sexually abused, or those living in nontraditional households are not only denied critical health information but are presented with shame- and fear-based messages. Other groups of young people, such as gay and lesbian youth, are ignored completely.”

Yup. And the rejection of these ideas was really needed in Iowa, where some of the federal (and state matching) funding had been used to pay for a huge roadside billboard featuring a picture of a pregnant woman who was not wearing a wedding ring. The billboard read: “Wait for the bling.”

Certainly there’s nothing wrong with encouraging teens to wait to have sex until they are ready. But using federal dollars to pay for misogynist, patriarchal, patronizing ads like this one goes way beyond simply encouraging kids to wait until they are ready. Especially ironic is that, while abstinence only programs encourage waiting until marriage (for just about everything), they don’t provide people with the education necessary to prevent pregnancy should they decide to become sexually active. Abstinence-only programs are not just anti-woman, anti-gay, and anti-abortion. They’re also anti-sexuality, full stop. They suggest that sexuality is a failing. But what’s failing are these programs, which have not been proven to reduce rates of teenage sex. And they’re far out of step with public opinion, which heavily supports comprehensive sex ed (which includes abstinence).

Given the weight of public opinion, and the fact that more than 1/3 of states have now rejected the federal funding, I’ve got to wonder at what point the scales will tip. The Democratic congress has not yet had the political will to reduce or end Title V and the other abstinence-only funding streams. But the point at which Congress will have no choice but to do so — the tipping point to borrow from Gladwell – now seems closer than ever.

Editors’ Note: Today we’ve got a very special guest post from Kara Loewentheil, the president of the LSRJ board and a 3L at Harvard Law School. Kara brought this story to my attention and I suggested she write about it, since I couldn’t think out of fear that my head might explode. Luckily, Kara was able to keep it together. Here she is:
Although the conversation in question took place over the summer, it is only now making its way through the blogosphere: a taped recording of a phone call in which an anti-choice organization, posing as a racist prospective donor, offers a donation to Planned Parenthood of Idaho if they will use the money specifically to perform abortions on African-American women because, the fake “donor” said, “the less black kids out there the better.” It’s hard to even know where to start with how disturbing this story is, on multiple levels. First, of course, there is the fact that anti-choice organizations are using their time and money to try and trick reproductive health care providers into saying or doing something that can be used to stir up negative publicity. It’s this kind of duplicitous behavior aimed at not only tarnishing the reproductive justice movement but diverting its resources away from patient care and into defensive action and media response that many reproductive justice activists find incredibly frustrating.

But more important, of course, is Planned Parenthood of Idaho’s reaction to the fake donation offer. The charge of racism is particularly weighted in the reproductive health care and reproductive justice movements. While reproductive justice itself is a movement that was born out of the experiences of women of color in particular, the mainstream reproductive health and rights communities have often unfortunately been out of touch with the needs of marginalized populations, particularly poor women of color. The history of experimentation on the bodies of poor women of color in this country has given rise to a healthy skepticism about the ways that the mainstream medical community behaves in treating the reproductive health needs of women from these communities. It’s thus clear that even assuming the best of intentions, reproductive health care providers must go above and beyond in distancing themselves from this legacy.

Planned Parenthood of Idaho apologized for the caller’s responses and called her approach “a serious mistake.” Bloggers and activists have disagreed on how to interpret the tape - whether the Planned Parenthood employee was happy and eager to accept the donation, whether she was confused and flustered, etc. It’s impossible for us to know. You can hear the tape recording of the phone call here and read the transcript here, and see what you think for yourself.

Hopefully we can all at least agree not only that reproductive health care providers should be very clear about their rejection of such offers, and that we would all be better off if the anti-choice organizations making these calls would put their time, money, and volunteer energy into doing something that actually improved reproductive health care for women and their families.