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.

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I was tuning out by tuning in to Ani DiFranco’s “God’s Country,” when it happened. I was traipsing along Chestnut Street en route to the Leadership Institute this morning, when I came face to face with an oversized banner, tacked to the side of a church, which quoted from Pearl S. Buck. “Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.”

Ah, my own little burning bush! “Dudette,” said the oversized banner, tacked to the side of a church. “Expand your horizons. Grow yourself!”

Indeed this weekend has been all about expanding horizons, affecting the way we think about campus organizing.

Through countless discussions with similarly-situated LSRJers and a series of fabulous presentations about successful LSRJ events, I’ve decided it’s important to meet in the middle sometimes. And I’ve decided it’s also really important to rock the metaphorical boat. I’m pumped about planning fall activities and feeling all kinds of support from this amazing network of people who are seriously a wealth of good ideas. We can’t stop at talking. Repro justice demands more and better. It doesn’t just happen.

- Jonelle Kusminsky

Being surrounded by a group of smart, driven, and passionate law students brought together by their common desire to advance the values of reproductive justice is like waking up on a winter morning wrapped in your down comforter—you never want to leave.  This is how I felt Saturday when I joined more than 80 law students from 50 law schools around the country to kick off the second annual Law Students for Reproductive Justice Leadership Institute. Our day was filled with activities and learning opportunities that ranged from brainstorming strategies for building sustainable campus chapters to learning the basics of a successful amicus brief to strengthening our abilities to identify strategic partnerships and work in coalition. These sessions and activities were led by new and seasoned reproductive justice activists including Tina Sinha, an intern at the LSRJ national office and rising 2L at UC Berkley School of Law, Jill Morrison, Senior Counsel at the National Women’s Law Center, and Cynthia Soohoo Director of the U.S. Legal Program at the Center for Reproductive Rights.

I felt a buoyant giddiness as I caucused with my peers about the challenges and success stories of new campus chapters—finally a group of people who understand me, who share my values and who want to support my efforts to advance reproductive justice on my campus and in my community. But as much as I would like to stay enveloped in this moment of warmth and comfort, I can’t ignore the fact that reproductive justice is anything but comfortable.

Being imprisoned and shackled during labor is not comfortable; finding a sanitary place to express breast milk between your Property and Torts classes is not comfortable; and viewing the fetus you’re about to abort on an ultrasound machine is anything but comfortable. But these are the realities we must confront, engage, and challenge as law students—and soon to be lawyers—committed to ensuring that all people and communities have access to the information, resources, and support they need to exercise their sexual and reproductive choices and rights.  

More than once I felt tears welling in my eyes as speakers relayed the intersecting oppressions that prevent women and their families from making meaningful choices about whether and when to have a child and from achieving happy and healthy birth outcomes. But the tears were tempered by the knowledge that I was in a room full of people dedicated to eradicating barriers to reproductive justice. And despite the discomforts that we may encounter on our respective campuses discussing sex, sexuality, reproduction, and their attendant taboos, a successful reproductive justice movement demands that we leave the warmth and comfort of the Leadership Institute—energized and renewed from the infusion of support we have received—and return to our campuses determined to forge unlikely, and even uncomfortable, partnerships that will enable us to reach more people , engage in more effective activism, and foster stronger legal scholarship and leadership around reproductive justice.

- Lauren R.S. Mendonsa

It’s 10 o’clock on Saturday morning, and we’ve just heard that reproductive justice is about “applying an intersectional analysis to the issues.” In other words, repro justice infractions don’t occur in a bubble! Often, women (and men) confronting reproductive injustices are the same ones confronting sexism, racism, classism, homophobia.

And at the intersection of sex and gender and race and class is LSRJ: these men and women convening in this great hall whose backgrounds are as varied as the privileges they’ve enjoyed and the rights for which they’ve had to fight. Hard.  This is probably why I love it.

This is definitely why I’m super-enjoying an opportunity to brainstorm with folks about shared concerns, nurturing one another’s aspirations to move and shake and make change. PS) Hugest thanks to tablemates Caleb, Kelly, Shannon, Tori, Megan, Kate, and Lauren for their willingness to share from their own experiences in campus organizing and for inspiring this blogger to take some of these same ideas home with me!

- Jonelle Kusminsky