Mallory Carlberg, University of Oklahoma College of Law

*This post is part of a series written in support of Trust Women Week Silver Ribbon Campaign and the online virtual march from January 20-27. LSRJ is proud to partner with numerous orgs across the country – join the march by sending a message to your lawmakers today! And check back here throughout the week for more posts.

With the anniversary of Roe and the start of a new year, January is a time of reflection for the reproductive justice movement. Reproductive rights organizations publish summaries of the previous year’s anti-abortion legislation and predict what’s to come as state legislatures reconvene. OU LSRJ students have been discussing new bills Oklahoma legislators will introduce this session. In addition to the widely publicized bill outlawing the use of fetuses in the food industry. Legislators will also introduce a personhood bill and a bill requiring the use of an electric fetal heart monitor during abortion procedures. It’s easy to focus solely on the abortion debate since abortion opponents are often loudest about this issue. But there is another issue that deserves our attention: the idea of contraception as prevention.

I want to be clear that what I mean by contraception as prevention is not that we should be preventing abortions. Once we start saying there are good and bad reasons to have abortions, we are no longer trusting women. Our focus instead should be on preventing unplanned pregnancy. Of course this would also prevent abortions, but we should be supporting contraception because it helps people control when or if they have a child and not solely because it prevents abortions.

This year extremist anti-birth control views reached the mainstream. Four GOP presidential candidates participated in a debate sponsored by Personhood USA and signed a “personhood pledge”. Rick Santorum, a GOP frontrunner, has gone so far as to call birth control dangerous because it enables people to have non-procreative sex. And here in Oklahoma a well-known Representative went on record saying that some forms of birth control kill a person. The previous examples show that although Griswold v. Connecticut established a right to privacy and a right to contraception way back in 1965, these rights are still not secure. Affordable, accessible birth control is still not a reality for all.

This year there were both victories and setbacks in the fight to expand birth control access. Under the Affordable Care Act most women employed in the US will have their birth control fully covered by their insurance and religiously affiliated employers will not be exempt from this. However, this year HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius vetoed the FDA’s recommendation that Plan B be available to teens under 17 without a prescription. Pharmacists also continue to deny adult men and women access to emergency contraception based on misunderstandings about the law or moral objections to the method.

As we celebrate Roe this week, we should remember that making affordable and accessible birth control is just as important as making abortion affordable and accessible. People need both birth control and access to safe abortions to achieve reproductive autonomy.

Susy Prochazka, Thomas Jefferson School of Law

*This post is part of a series written in support of Trust Women Week Silver Ribbon Campaign and the online virtual march from January 20-27. LSRJ is proud to partner with numerous orgs across the country – join the march by sending a message to your lawmakers today! And check back here throughout the week for more posts.

As the 39th anniversary of the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision came and went this weekend, the TJSL chapter was excited to celebrate the decision in a variety of ways. We have a great relationship with The Lawyers Club of San Diego, a local group that focuses on empowering women lawyers, and on Saturday they hosted  an educational luncheon titled “That Was Then, This is Now: Reproductive Rights Update,” highlighting recent changes in reproductive rights and justice legislation. After the panel, we attended a Roe v. Wade Anniversary Dinner, an annual event thrown by the Coalition for Reproductive Choice. This year, the dinner focused on the global reach of RJ issues, featuring speakers discussing local, national, and international fights for reproductive rights. Mary Fjerstad, Director of Medical Affairs & Pharmacovigilance at WomanCare, spoke on the global movement in the fields of reproductive health care.  Kimala Price, Professor, San Diego State University &  Board Member of SisterSong, provided the national perspective by presenting on the anti-choice and racist billboards that have cropped up in Atlanta and New York earlier in 2011. Lastly,  Shukri Adam, Public Health Nurse Consultant Somali & Arabic at the Central Region Public Health Center, spoke of the cultural gaps that female Somali immigrants face in California in regards to their pregnancies.

And the celebrating is far from done! In February, our school is hosting the National Women and the Law Conference, an annual conference that explores the different issues that women face in the legal realm.  Our chapter has established such a presence on campus in the past that this year our faculty advisor was chosen to direct this year’s conference, and she swiftly designated the theme of Reproductive Justice.  Some of our board worked extensively on the Conference committee, performing community outreach and assisting with the hunt for speakers. All this hard work on the part of our members paid off when Sarah Weddington agreed to be the Keynote speaker.

At each initial meeting of the semester, each of our LSRJ board members shares what RJ means to us. We then carry this theme of personalizing the movement throughout the year, with each board member striving to educate and encourage interest in his or her particular niche view of RJ. Roe is incredibly important to all of us, albeit in different ways.  Roe is important to Sarah, our VP of Events, because it expanded access to abortions, making it safer to obtain one. Roe is important to Margaret because it provided an avenue to lessen patriarchal dominance in the family, potentially aiding women in abusive relationships. Roe is important to Thomas as a matter of health law, increasing the autonomy of private medical decisions. To all of us, Roe represents a pivotal decision, advancing each of our respective areas of interest in the RJ movement. 

In the space of one month, our chapter will be celebrating the continuing importance of Roe v. Wade at three amazing events, all of which present different avenues of reproductive justice. While Roe is only one facet of the RJ movement, it illustrates that the law, while never a perfect answer to society’s problems, may nonetheless be used as a tool to shape social justice movements.

Burke Bindbeutel, University of Missouri School of Law

*This post is part of a series written in support of Trust Women Week Silver Ribbon Campaign and the online virtual march from January 20-27. LSRJ is proud to partner with numerous orgs across the country – join the march by sending a message to your lawmakers today! And check back here throughout the week for more posts.

The anniversary of Roe v. Wade reminds our Mizzou LSRJ chapter of what an important milestone the 1973 Supreme Court decision was. In the face of years of entrenched opposition, the Court affirmed a woman’s right to terminate a pregnancy. While reproductive justice advocates should cherish the power that the decision granted them, the anniversary also should remind us that Norma McCorvey’s lawsuit was in fact a partial victory. Supreme Court decisions can flip controversial laws, but the most important decisions also inspire backlashes. When reproductive justice is “constitutionalized,” it becomes denatured and defensive. Mizzou LSRJ has been at pains to not be stigmatized as “The Abortion Club,” a state of affairs at least partially due to Roe v. Wade.

The decision interrupted an evolving political discourse, and rested upon an unwieldy compromise. Roe extended Griswold v. Connecticut’s right to privacy to a woman’s decision to abort, but it also stressed that the government had a stake in that decision. Justice Harry Blackmun addressed public safety concerns by discussing fetus “viability,” a slippery term, then and now. The Court did not inform America about when a state’s interest in the potential life of a fetus eclipses a woman’s self-sovereignty.

Here in Missouri, we pioneered the sideways attack on a woman’s right to choose, which the Supreme Court deemed constitutional in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services. Rather than a frontal assault on abortion rights, the Missouri legislature in 1988 barred public funds from sponsoring abortion services or even counseling that related to abortion. Before this surprising decision, states had presumed that interfering with abortion rights would have been precluded by Roe. But in Webster, Justice Rehnquist had his revenge. The subsequent Planned Parenthood v. Casey elaborated on just how states can curtail rights not directly but through obstructive measures like parental consent and waiting periods. These later cases exposed the main flaw of Roe: it may have gone some ways towards shoring up individual rights, but mainly it served as a temporary stay on the anti-abortion brigades.

Neal Devins has argued that the compromises of Webster and Casey have struck a workable balance on the abortion issue. But it is not the role of the Supreme Court to author political consensus. And there is little evidence that partial victories have placated the religion-informed anti-Roe factions. Limited abortion rights are still intolerable to that contingent, and reproductive justice advocates cannot be satisfied with the lack of abortion services in 97 percent of Missouri counties, or the arbitrary requirement that doors in abortion clinics must be at least 44 inches wide.

Judicial fiats covering negative rights are not necessarily the best process by which to protect the dignity of a citizenry, argues Robin West. Roe’s deterioration has put RJ advocates on the defensive. The 1973 decision narrowly framed the broad reproductive justice debate. What could have been, and could still be, a conversation about self-sovereignty and the minimal state has become a fight about the appropriate circumstances for pregnancy termination.

We should not have to continually reexamine the penumbras of 1789 in order to obtain the autonomy that underlies the right to an abortion. Instead, we should expect it from our lawmakers, and throw them out on their ear if they don’t acknowledge us. Roe was a precious victory, but the Supreme Court can’t help us help ourselves.

Candace Gibson, University of Utah College of Law

*This post is part of a series written in support of Trust Women Week Silver Ribbon Campaign and the online virtual march from January 20-27. LSRJ is proud to partner with numerous orgs across the country – join the march by sending a message to your lawmakers today! And check back here throughout the week for more posts.

In May 2009, a 17-year-old girl in Naples, Utah, was pregnant.  She was charged with second-degree felony criminal solicitation to commit murder.  Why was she charged? She solicited a man to punch her in the stomach so that she would miscarry.  He accepted $150 from her, took her to the basement of his parent’s house, and kicked her in the stomach five times.  According to the young girl, who is now a young adult, she solicited the assault because her boyfriend threatened to break up with her if she did not terminate her pregnancy.  A juvenile court dismissed her case in 2009, but the Utah Supreme Court this past December reversed their decision.  They reasoned that an assault does not meet the statutory definition of abortion and now this young woman may face criminal penalties for this tragic incident in her life.

I don’t disagree with the Utah Supreme Court in saying that abortion as imagined by our state’s legislators is a medical procedure, although the term “medical” will most likely be co-opted by the Anti-Choice movement to exclude abortions achieved through pharmaceuticals (see the case of an Idaho woman who terminated her own pregnancy by ordering RU486 online and was charged  with a felony).  What I do disagree with is the numerous laws passed by state legislatures to restrict abortion services to the point that Roe v. Wade doesn’t make any impact in the lives of women who need it the most.  Remember what Justice Ginsburg said at the Aspen Institute in 2010, “If the court were to change its mind . . . the only women who would be truly affected are poor women. Because even at the time before Roe, women who wanted abortions could have a safe, legal abortion.”  The problem is, this great Justice has forgotten that most poor women still can’t have abortions because of the Hyde Amendment.

This young woman in Utah should have had the right to decide to be a parent, to give her born child up for adoption, or to have an abortion without emotional abuse from her boyfriend or having to deal with the heinous consequences and obstacles of laws that ultimately regulate abortions out of existence.  As the Guttmacher Institute said in their awesome video, “There will always be women who need abortions.”

Mallory Carlberg, University of Oklahoma

For the most part, our Law Students for Reproductive Justice (LSRJ) chapter at University of Oklahoma received positive feedback this semester. One person even said they liked being part of a group with “balls.” I, of course, corrected him and said we were a group with balls and ovaries. However, not everyone has enthusiastically supported us. Some groups fear working with us will alienate their pro-life members. A leader of one of these groups recently approached me about co-hosting an abortion debate. From previous experience as a student organizer, I know that debates about abortion are usually not a good idea. The debate tends to focus on religion and when life begins. In the process of debating, I have seen “pro-choice” groups lose sight of their original goal of supporting people with unplanned pregnancies.

Engaging in a pro-life/pro-choice style debate strays too far from the reproductive justice movement’s focus on ending reproductive oppression for my comfort. Instead of agreeing to an abortion debate with this group, I offered to discuss goals we can both work toward, such as comprehensive sex education, improved access to birth control, and improved maternal and infant health outcomes. This person was a proponent of abstinence until marriage and even suggested that some common forms of birth control were abortifactants. It was hard to find common ground, but I know there are other students who can look past LSRJ’s stance on abortion rights.

Since we are a new group, we’ve mostly focused on finding students who we consider our natural allies in the reproductive justice movement: feminists, progressives, people of color and LGBTQ-identified students. Next semester we want to co-sponsor events with groups who we might not initially consider as our natural allies: religious groups and conservative groups. We have to be strategic about what events we bring to campus. Organizing for reproductive justice in a conservative state means we must be careful to stay true to our beliefs, while, at the same time, not reinforcing the beliefs of students who have preconceived ideas of us as man-hating, baby-killing feminists. Sometimes we do the stereotypical thing (we’re excited to be the group handing out condoms on campus!), but sometimes we must decline invitations to cosponsor events because it will hurt our objectives rather than promote them.

Have you successfully organized with conservative groups on your campus? Please send your advice my way!

Joanne Caceres, Harvard Law School

Things are busy as ever as the members of HLSRJ finally dive into our long planned Speak Out Week, which aims to engage the HLS student body in honest exchanges about reproductive health, listen to and share personal stories about reproductive choices, and explore the ways in which access to abortion and other reproductive services intersect with larger social movements. Kicking off our week, our first event was “Bro-Choice,” an event geared towards men and their role in the movement. I am happy to report that we had exceptional attendance and that several men signed up for our weekly email list. We are excited for further exploration into engaging men on campus!

Other events this week include two intersectional panels, one featuring women of color and the pro-choice movement, with Gretchen Sisson, Reverend Penny Willis, Jasmine Burnett and Kaitlyn Soligan; and one featuring different religious perspectives on reproductive justice, with Reverend Marvin Ellison, Rabbi Peter Stein, Reverend Matthew Westfox, and Prof. Daniel Dombrowski. As with all of our events, cross promotion and co-sponsorships greatly contribute to our success. Thanks to our partnership with students from the Harvard Kennedy School, we will be screening of 12th and Delaware followed by a conversation with NARAL Pro-Choice MA.

We are also speaking out using Facebook, our LSRJ website, posters, and word of mouth. We have asked HLS and other greater Boston students share their own reproductive health stories, in the hope that doing so will open up a more honest and nuanced conversation regarding the choices women make throughout their lives. To contextualize these stories more effectively, Julia Reticker-Flynn from Advocates for Youth will join us for a strategy discussion regarding how and why to share abortion stories. We encourage all students reading this to also contribute to our survey or tell us what pro-choice means to them in our new tumblr! We hope our events will inspire other groups on other campuses to Speak Out as well!

Candace Gibson, University of Utah College of Law

As many of you know, October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month.  For the past couple of years, the Women Lawyers of Utah and other Utah bar organizations have planned the Walk Against Violence as a way to fundraise for our local YWCA.  Because of this, the University of Utah Law Students for Reproductive Justice Chapter (UULSRJ) began its public relations efforts at our law school by tabling on various reproductive justice issues.  In this manner, we hope to educate people about reproductive justice in all its intersectional, multi issue glory.  So last week we tabled on domestic violence and in the coming weeks, we will table on infant and maternal mortality, global reproductive rights, and health disparities.

As we talked to students about our chapter, I noticed that we had some problems communicating what reproductive justice is as a concept and as a way of organizing.  I think there are two reasons for this.  First, we need to get better at our basic thirty second elevator spiel.  Second, I think when some people of my generation hear “reproductive” they automatically think of abortion and contraceptives.  In fact, as I was discussing the national LSRJ office and our multi-issue work to a classmate, she told me that she thought that the term “reproductive justice” wasn’t useful for our mission.  She thought we should use another phrase because to her, “reproductive justice” automatically links to “reproductive rights” and makes her think of only abortion and contraceptives.  As I talked to another peer, he said the same thing, and then I talked to a first year, and he had no clue what I was discussing.

So this begs three questions.  Can reproductive justice ever be explained in a sound bite like the “Pro-Choice” or “Pro-Life” communities describe themselves (and thus be easily digested) and, more importantly, do we even want that?  As a movement, do we need to better articulate what reproductive justice is and better publicize the work that we do on multiple issues?  This is tougher than it appears to be, as I think that because we constantly have to defeat onslaughts of anti-women and anti-family legislation, individuals outside our movement think that we only work on abortion and contraceptive issues.

While some of you ponder these questions, send your 30 second RJ soundbites my way!

Mallory Carlberg, University of Oklahoma College of Law

After some trouble getting official recognition and a faculty sponsor, our first event is FINALLY happening next week. In the mean time, my co-chair and I have been assembling the executive board and promoting the event. This gave us many opportunities to have conversations about reproductive justice. The stories students told when we broached the subject impacted us both. Almost every student we spoke to had personally dealt with an RJ issue.

One of our members was overjoyed when she found out she was pregnant last year. Then her baby was diagnosed with anencephaly, the absence of a large part of a brain and skull. This condition is usually not detected until late in the pregnancy. She was devastated and eventually decided to have a D & C. After learning that Oklahoma legislators were considering banning abortions after twenty weeks last session, she wanted to tell her story. A journalist interviewed her, but never published her story, saying that if she came out publicly about her late abortion, she would receive death threats. She wanted people to know how the ban will harm women who are in a similar position as she was. The law is set to go into effect on November first of this year.

Others students shared sex education experiences. Many received abstinence-only education, which often teaches students to be ashamed of their sexuality, and reinforces harmful stereotypes about men as unable to control their passions and women as the gatekeepers of morality. I often shared my sex education story about a goldfish. One day my instructor brought a goldfish in a cup to class, and likened us to the goldfish and god’s protection to the water. She then threw the contents of the cup, goldfish and all, across the room, and explained that, that is what we are like when we are outside god’s protection. She further explained that when we have premarital sex, we are outside god’s protection because we are sinning. This lesson taught us that we could either be clean, healthy virgins or dirty, unhealthy non-virgins – gasping for air on the floor, dying. There was no discussion of how we could place ourselves somewhere in the middle of those two extremes with safer sex practices.

Statistics, theories and hypotheticals are important, but personal stories affect people on a different level. Speaking with fellow students has only reinforced for me the importance of achieving reproductive justice for all. These are not peripheral problems. Reproductive oppression affects everyone at some point in their lives. We hope others come to see this through hearing stories from their fellow students at meetings.

Susy Prochazka, Thomas Jefferson School of Law

Thomas Jefferson LSRJ regularly hosts a “Dinner and a Movie” night once a month, where we indulge in pizza, nachos, and popcorn, watch RJ-related films, and have a faculty-led discussion where we delve into the issues raised in the film.  In the past, we have watched such heavy films as “If These Walls Could Talk,” “Losing Isaiah,” and “Vera Drake.”  In the spirit of Halloween, we are planning to show a “scary” RJ movie, showing the dire social consequences of the lack of access to education about contraceptives and STIs.

Last week, ten of us watched “Citizen Ruth,” a 1996 film that satirizes the conflict between the Pro-Choice and the Pro-Life camps. The film opens with Ruth getting arrested for huffing spray-paint in an alley.  Ruth is an addict, makes regular appearances in jail, and has been declared an unfit mother by the state four times over. Upon her arrest, Ruth learns that she is pregnant again; the judge threatens to charge Ruth with “felony fetal endangerment” unless Ruth obtains an abortion.  Ruth is unsure of what decision to make when faced with this puzzling offer – she is portrayed as a hapless drug addict, uneducated about the politics of the abortion debate, yet very quickly she gets thrust right in the middle. Ruth encounters Pro-Choice and Pro-Life individuals, inadvertently becoming the symbolic center of the struggle between the two groups, as they both vie for Ruth to act according to their particular beliefs.  Both sides attempt to sway Ruth with monetary incentives, both offering $15,000 to secure Ruth’s promise to either continue or terminate the pregnancy.

Ruth is learning about her right to freely govern her body, but she is simultaneously tempted by the money, which is more than she has ever seen. However, before a decision can be made, Ruth suffers a miscarriage. The movie ends shortly after, with Ruth securing $15,000 and sneaking away from oblivious protestors of both camps, who do not even notice that the subject of their vehement shouting has absconded the scene.

Following the movie, our faculty advisor started off a great discussion, asking us to think about what it means to truly believe in an individual’s right to parent, a central tenet to the RJ movement. In the film, the State has declared Ruth to be an unfit mother, thereby intervening in a woman’s right to raise her children. This presents a “slippery-slope” dilemma: at what point may the State intervene and tell a woman she may not have any more children? May the State order a woman to terminate her pregnancy when she has proven to be incapable of raising the children she already has? When has a woman reached such a point – what standards must be met?

We also discussed the paradox presented by the judge’s threat to charge Ruth with felony fetal endangerment, which he later offered to retract if Ruth obtained an abortion: why is endangering a fetus illegal when the potential harm is caused by illegal acts such as drug use, but is legal when the woman is exercising her right to have an abortion? Should there even be a legal or noticeable difference?

And what about the politics of it all? What are the moral implications of Pro-Choice and Anti-Choice members actively attempting to buy Ruth’s choice? Does Ruth lose her freedom to choose when money enters the picture? What does Ruth’s lack of education about the politics of the abortion debate and her right to choose say about the struggle between the two camps? What are the ramifications of this depiction of lack of education say about the movement? Is the debate limited only to the socially elite who can afford to participate? Do the uneducated and the poor have any say in the debate – or is it restricted to the stereotypical rich, white woman?

While we were not able to reach any clear, defining answers to these questions raised by the film, it was a great discussion that allowed everyone to express their opinions on relevant RJ issues. I highly recommend other chapters do such an event, as new and old members can comfortably debate and express themselves in a casual environment. It’s a fun and low-key event that is great for education, building cohesion and friendships between chapter members, and of course, there are nachos!

Susy Prochazka, Thomas Jefferson School of Law

San Diego has a reputation as a socially and political conservative city, especially with the large military presence of the Navy and a large population of veterans. Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego is no exception to this conservative atmosphere (on the part of both the students and administration). The school’s chapters of the Federalist Society, the Republican Students Association, and the Christian Legal Society have a large and vocal membership base. Throughout our LSRJ chapter’s relatively short span on campus, we have faced both explicit and subtle opposition from students and administration.

This opposition has ranged from certain members of the Student Bar Association stating that they do not wish to work with the “abortion club” to blatant theft of our chapter’s documents and materials.  Recently, we have faced the issue of censorship of an event flyer by the school’s administration and faculty. At our new fancy campus, student orgs have a lot of problems advertising events because no one is allowed to post flyers anywhere in the building. To advertize, a student organization must send a PDF file to the administration to get our flyers put on the 6 electronic touch-screens throughout the building.

For our first event, we had planned our Sex-Ed Trivia Night at a local happy hour. It is one of our most popular events, and we timed it to take place right after the student org fair to rake in 1Ls and other prospective members. To advertise the event, our co-chair, Thomas, produced an absolutely amazing poster, guaranteed to catch attention and bring in attendees. Our flyer had a black and purple background, with a pair of woman’s legs in heels, and with the event details underneath the simple high heels. Nothing lewd, nothing sexually-explicit, nothing to suggest that this was a portrayal of a stripper. It was simply a poster to generate interest and gain attention through a little flair of suggestiveness.

But after submitting our flyer, we immediately received a response from our administration letting us know that the school has been working over the years to improve its reputation in the community, and that our flyer posed a threat to the school’s image of professionalism. (more…)