Keeping the Conversation Going
Lawyers love to talk, so when you bring a group of lawyers-in-training together, there’s little need for conversation starters. Not surprisingly, I found this to be the case at this weekend’s Law Students for Reproductive Justice second annual Leadership Institute. What I did find surprising, but maybe shouldn’t have, was the energy, passion and insight of the conversations. While we had opportunities to engage in formal caucuses around issues facing new chapters, Law Students of Color, and ideologically conservative campuses, I witnessed some of the most inspiring conversations taking place in between the structured events and in whispers, mummers, and note passing during them. For many of us, the conversations spilled over into dinner and followed us into our hotel rooms. At the end of the weekend, I found myself giving a hurried hug to a woman I had met less than 48 hours prior as the subway doors closed mid-sentence on our conversation—which had started on a bus four hours earlier—about fostering and sustaining campus diversity. With the collective experiences of 80 law students advocating for reproductive justice across the country at our finger tips, I would have liked to see someone try to shut us up.
But as we return to our respective campuses, people will try to shut us up, or at least temper our enthusiasm either because they disagree with the goals and values of the reproductive justice movement, or because they simply don’t see a place for reproductive justice in legal institutions or professions. While we received bags, literally, of activism tools this weekend, the greatest take-home of the weekend is the network of law students and professionals upon whom we can now call for strength and support whenever we confront the jungle gym of obstacles that can stand in the way of successful campus activism and reproductive justice advocacy.
Not only did we have opportunities to identify other law students with whom we can partner on local and regional activities, we got to listen to our peers present a range of Easy Events in an Envelope (issue-based event ideas that the national organization provides) that they successfully utilized to engage their campuses in conversations and activism around reproductive justice. In addition to the list of Institute attendees included in our conference packets, I saw numerous ad hoc contact lists circulating, and the tech-savvy among us issued repeated reminders to join LSRJ on facebook, twitter, and lsrj.org’s electronic forum.
The point is, we must keep the conversations we started this weekend going and invite our campuses, and the communities in which they’re situated, to join in. Whether a chapter decides to host a faculty debate on the consequences of Gonzales v. Carhart or raise money for safe birthing kits for refugees, it has friendly chapters to whom it can turn to ensure the event’s success. And if the conversations we begin on our campuses start to lag, or there’s an awkward silence, we know how to find someone that can liven things up and get us back on track. It’s easy to get bogged down in the seemingly endless demands on a law student’s time, but the more we utilize each other as both a support system and mechanism of accountability by continuing the conversations we started this weekend, the better prepared we’ll be to conquer obstacles that stand in the way of successful campus activism and individuals’ abilities to make healthy, meaningful choices about their sexual and reproductive lives.
- Lauren R.S. Mendonsa