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.

 — HLSRJ has done fabulous work in the past, but much of this is handed down informally from year to year. We hope to build on the templates and lessons we learned at the Leadership Institute to help next year’s board hit the ground running.

 

2. Try to encourage some annual events that the entire campus can anticipate.

 

3. Work on better collaboration, networking, and publicity between law student organizations and between Harvard schools.

 — These two items go towards increasing our visibility on campus and asserting our place as a strong student organization!

 

4. Keep the Parenting Initiative going!

 — Our president emeritus Ashley Gorski started a partnership with our organizational counterpart Students for Law, Life, and Religion.  She and Laura Openshaw, the president of that group, found common ground in trying to improve the situation for pregnant and parenting law students.  We hope to continue this collaboration for many years to come.

 

Stephanie Young

This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 8:32 pm and is filed under coalitions, pregnancy, leadership, lsrj events, law school, abortion, education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.