Here’s our latest installment from Lisi Owen, an LSRJ international intern working at Engender Rights in the Philippines. The text of this post is an excerpt from a letter Lisi recently published in the Manila Times.

I arrived in Manila to intern with EnGendeRights, a women’s legal NGO, almost ten weeks ago. As I’m preparing to return to the U.S. next week, I’d like to offer my thoughts on reproductive health policy in the Philippines. My departure conveniently coincides with the CBCP’s recent vow to vehemently oppose the reproductive health bill pending in the House of Representatives as part of its “pro-life” stance on family planning, so this letter is all the more appropriate.

I have a staunchly Catholic friend in the U.S. with whom I shared all the recent news articles articulating the CBCP’s position and vow to oppose the RH bill, and his response was that Filipino Catholics need to “wake up.” Spain, Belgium and other Catholic countries have woken up and changed their laws on contraception, and even abortion, so why is the Philippines still sleeping?
In response to the Church’s so-called “pro-life” position, I have this to say: Life is more than the possibility of a fertilized egg. Life is children living in pushcarts on the sidewalk, wearing no pants. Life is women who risk death every time they get pregnant, but continue to do so because their husbands beat them when they refuse sex in the name of “natural family planning.” Life is sitting on your front step waiting to die, because you’re that miserable, and have nothing else to do.

If the Church is pro-life, then I ask this of the bishops: How do you justify the suffering you cause? This is not a matter of the Church or the government sitting idly by and allowing people to suffer, but an active promotion of misery, and it is wrong.
I recognize the American imperialism that has preceded me in the Philippines, and how that might influence your opinion of my views. But before you dismiss me as another American trying to impose my heathenous, western views on a country that’s seen enough outsiders meddling in its business, let me clarify my position: It is one of choice. If you want to practice natural family planning with your partner, that is your prerogative. If you want to capitalize on the benefits of scientific progress to control your own reproductive health, that is your prerogative as well.

It is not, however, the prerogative of the government to impose its own archaic, paternalistic religious views on the suffering people of a nation, (in violation of both the Philippine Constitution and international law, I might add) such that they are stripped of their power of autonomous decision-making.

It’s hard to believe it’s the last day of my internship with LSRJ. This summer has been fabulous. I’ve learned so much and gotten to participate in some fun events, like testifying before the California Commission on the Status of Women at their public hearings. We’ve had great guests for our Networking Lunches and heard about a wide range of issues–from transgender rights to the latest anti-choice proposition in California to young women’s activism and perspective on RJ issues.

My internship project paired me with Generations Ahead, a brand new organization that focuses on assisted reproductive technology and its implications for reproductive justice. I learned a lot about policy work and about some cutting-edge issues and got to know the GA staff. Today when I stopped by to say goodbye I learned that GA is guest blogging at RaceWire right now, so I’m going to use this space to do a little cross-pollination: Truc Thanh Nguyen, Project Director of Racial Justice and Human Rights, writes about the relevance of reproductive technologies to social justice movements.

And while you’re exploring the web beyond Repo Repro, check out the Generations Ahead website to find out more on what they’re about. This org is gearing up to do some great and necessary work in a relatively unexplored area of reproductive justice. I certainly hadn’t fully considered the impact of reproductive technologies before I started my work with them. My perceptions have definitely been widened on these issues.

I should also note that it’s International Blog Against Racism Week. As it happens, I did that here. But don’t let the fact that IBARW only officially lasts until tomorrow stop you if you haven’t had time to post on your own blog this week. Every week should be a week to speak out against racism and injustice.

It’s been fun! Thanks to everyone who read and everyone who commented on my posts. Blogging here has been an unexpected bonus in a summer of exciting RJ work.

–Erin Simonitch

Our next intern dispatch comes from Lisi Owen, who is an LSRJ intern in Manila, Philippines. Here’s more about Lisi, and then her first fabulous post.

Lisi Owen is a rising 2L at the University of Denver (DU). She wants to pursue a career in public international law and hopes to some day be able to work for the U.N. At DU she is involved with Amnesty International, LSRJ, the Denver Journal for International Law and Policy, and the DU Law Civil Rights Clinic. Outside DU she volunteers with the Colorado Lawyers Committee, the African Community Center, and Dress for Success Denver.

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Hello from the Philippines! As Emily told everyone last week, this summer LSRJ has placed interns in Thailand, the Philippines and Nepal. I am the intern in Manila, Philippines, and am working with EnGendeRights, Inc., a women’s rights legal NGO.

Our biggest project for the summer is working to repeal an executive order of former Manila Mayor Jose “Lito” Atienza that effectively bans modern family planning services (pills, IUDs, ligation, injectables, vasectomies, etc.) in Manila City. Executive Order No. 003 was instituted in 2000 shortly after Atienza took office, and although a new administration has now taken over, the EO has yet to be repealed.

The effect of the contraception ban has been felt most heavily by poor women who are unable to afford contraceptives and other family planning services from private hospitals or who are unable to spend the time and money to travel to other cities where such services are available. For detailed accounts of the burden the ban has placed on these women, you can check out a report compiled by local Philippine NGOs and the Center for Reproductive Rights, in New York, entitled Imposing Misery: The Impact of Manila’s Contraception Ban on Women and Families, available on CRR’s website under publications.

While we are working hard to pressure the current Mayor, Alfredo Lim, to repeal the executive order, and to pressure the national government to maintain a more pro-family planning stance, we have already made some progress in terms of actually addressing the family planning needs of women in Manila. Through a partnership with Marie Stopes we were able to provide free ligation services for women in Tondo, Manila, which is one of the poorest areas in the entire Metro Manila area. Additionally, last Friday in honor of World Population Day the Reproductive Health Advocacy Network held a reproductive health fair, also in Tondo, at which hundreds of women availed of family planning services. Such an event is unprecedented in Manila, and was a huge achievement given the difficulty NGOs and other healthcare providers have faced in the past in providing family planning services in Manila.

I must reiterate Emily’s point about how amazing it is to actually see the accumulation of my academic knowledge “filled in by the color of experience.” Reading about international law and its implementation and actually seeing it on the ground, so to speak, are two entirely different things. It certainly is inspirational and exhilarating to be a part of the latter!

As some of you may know, this summer LSRJ has set up a series of fantastic international opportunities to send law students into the field, and fight for reproductive justice abroad. LSRJ has put dedicated activists in Thailand, the Philippines, and Nepal. Our crew will be blogging about these experiences throughout the month of July. This first post is by Emily Kane. Emily is a rising 3L at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law in Tucson, AZ. A native of California, Emily spent her two years in between undergraduate and law school in Washington, DC at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism (RAC) doing advocacy work predominantly in the areas of reproductive justice and judicial nominations. She is currently spending her summer as an LSRJ International Intern in and around Mae Sot, Thailand working on international reproductive justice advocacy.

In Thailand, where I am one of two LSRJers placed, we are working on a project through the New York based Global Justice Center. Specifically, we are asking two major questions of international human rights law: 1) are women (and their partners) protected from government pressure and interference in making their family planning choices?; and 2) if maternal birth rates are abnormally high, at what point can a government be blamed? These questions, perhaps seemingly uncomplicated, have not been asked in quite this way and represent uncharted territory in the reproductive justice world. In seeking these answer, we are scouring the net (thank you Westlaw and Lexis Nexis!) and the countryside (interviewing Burmese refugees in western Thailand).

As with all summer law jobs, it is amazing to see the outlines of classroom conversations and mountains of text filled in by the color of experience. Last fall, I took a course about the UN and human rights, related treaties, and the processes by which these treaties are actualized. Reading CEDAW for class last November, while fantastic, cannot compare to reading it now as we try to apply it to the project before us.

Struggling with language barriers, gauging foreign cultural norms, and mining through the vast universe that is international human rights law has been humbling. At the same time, studying the law and (perhaps) finding new avenues to help women attain the international human rights to which they are entitled is emboldening.

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.