Ash Moore, Resident Blogger (’14, University of Oklahoma College of Law)

It is the 40^th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I’m in law school so you may think you’re about to be bombarded with legalese and a disconnected opinion. But I have a different and important perspective – a personal one.

When I was a teenager, I was raped. Gang raped. And as cliche and trite as it has become, I was ashamed and felt like it was my fault. So, despite my better judgment, the first thing I did was take a hot shower. I washed away all evidence of the crime even though I knew exactly what I was doing. After the shower, I went in to denial. I tried to pretend like it didn’t happen. I didn’t get tested for STDs and I didn’t do anything about a potential pregnancy.

Then, in a couple of months when I started throwing up and feeling like I was getting fatter, reality set in with a vengeance and brought sheer terror with it. I didn’t know anything about pregnancy except how it came about and I knew it was a possibility.

At that point, I was more determined not to tell anyone than I was before. What if they didn’t believe me? Or what if they did and they were furious I did everything I wasn’t supposed to do? Either way, what was I going to do if I was really pregnant? I knew abortion was an option, but I didn’t want to kill something growing inside me.

I could give a baby up for adoption, but my life would be permanently changed and maybe ruined in the meantime. I didn’t know if that option was selfish, but I didn’t make a mistake, this was forced on me. Couldn’t I put myself first for a second?

I could keep the baby. But I truly believed that wouldn’t be the best thing for the baby. I wouldn’t be able to give it the kind of life it deserved. I would struggle, not have money, and be a young parent (with or without help) which is hard on the people I knew who had young parents.

Whether you think it was right or wrong, abortion was a huge part of the decision process. And the longer I thought about it, the more it seemed like the most rational and right choice. I’m deeply religious and that caused a huge problem and huge internal struggle. Would God understand? Would He approve? Would I be condemned? I knew no matter what decision I made, I would never be the same again.

Most people agree that abortion should be available for rape victims. So I wasn’t in the same position as the women struggling with restricted rights today. But what was the same was the excruciating decision process and fear. What the pregnancy test result was and what I ultimately decided are irrelevant.

What is relevant was that I had a tough decision to make and no matter what I decided, more options made the tortuous experience a little easier. It made me feel like others had struggled and came to the same decision I did; no matter what I chose, I knew I would never blame or fault anyone for making a different one in that impossible situation.

No matter how someone gets to the point where they need to make a decision regarding a pregnancy (through rape, mistake, health or money problems, or other things I may not be able to think about right now), I believe all the choices I had should be available to every other woman (and more if we can find them).

I think access to all the choices should be easy because the decision making process is hard enough. I think most women probably walk in to a doctor’s office or adoption agency after as much thought, pain, and tears as I went through. Any obstacles to make these personal decisions harder are cruel and unusual punishment.

If abortion is the ultimate decision, I believe no doctor or spectator has a better idea of the heartbeat about to stop than the woman who has to live with the decision. As you can see, abortion isn’t my story. But it’s an important part of it. And it’s an important part of society. No matter what you would choose, imagine, as I did, the process without one or more of the choices.  Then look me in the eye and tell me you want to do that to another living, breathing, caring, concerned person who is only trying to think about the best decision she can make for herself and her family. It should never be harder than it was for me. Or you. If you know the feeling.

Rosie Wang, Columbia

Culture is to softness as is policy to hardness. Cultural change is to a wave as legal change is to a solid object. No, this is not the return of the ye olde standardized testing analogies but some of the concepts used today at a storytelling workshop that explained the role of stories in the RJ movement. Basically, stories are engines of change for public sentiment, and subsequently political reality. Awesome, but admittedly, also a bit abstract to me. What made it click on a new level for me was Sujatha Jesudason of CoreAlign’s truly powerful closing talk to the LI. She said that to survive, the reproductive justice movement had to break its bad habits. This included no longer telling stories of victimhood, and instead writing a heroic narrative, in which the heroes include all people as people who have agency in their reproductive lives. She said that the RJ movement must craft something akin to Rosa Parks’ story, something both familiar in its everyday aspect, and yet with lasting potential for symbolism and parable. Looking back on the stories that I have helped tell this summer via this blog, I see myself falling into this very trap of bad habits. Writing about Bei Bei Shuai, a woman being charged with murder and feticide for attempting suicide while pregnant and mentally ill, I wrote that “her story demonstrates how even women who have conformed to the mainstream can become victimized.” And yet Ms. Shuai is a hero to me for facing with optimism and strength a legal system designed treat her body as first and foremost life support vessel for her fetus. But this is story that is yet unresolved, where victory is uncertain –how can it be a success story and not something reactionary? I concluded that the narrative of someone acted upon and then acting in response is not victimizing or teleological. Instead, it is empowering and can do important work in touching upon people’s common sense of humanity. I think it also serves as a rallying cry to people devoted to RJ to support Ms. Shaui in determining the course of her own heroic narrative. Because while anti-choice has it easy in that they can frame decades of reproductive oppression and the status quo as “tradition” for the dominant story they tell, we get to write our own rallying cry from scratch, with the very work we do every day.

Rosie Wang, LSRJ Summer Legal Intern

In many ways Bei Bei Shuai’s story sounds like my mom’s. Both women were raised in large Chinese cities, in households where both parents worked. Both came to the United States, following partners with promising job prospects. Both worked in Chinese restaurants while harboring plans to improve their English and get graduate degrees. It’s the story of many Chinese immigrant women, but Ms. Shuai’s narrative diverged when, at eight months pregnant, she was abandoned by her boyfriend who, it turns out, had another family.

Suffering from major depression, Ms. Shuai ingested rat poison as a suicide attempt and was rushed to the hospital by friends. She consented to all treatment to save her life and her pregnancy, but while she survived, but the baby she gave birth to died after a few days. She was charged with murder and attempted feticide while still hospitalized for an emotional breakdown and then spent 435 days in prison. She is now out on bail, but paying for a GPS-enabled ankle bracelet that will cost her $2500 until her trial.

What is wrong with this picture?

Well, what part of what Bei Bei Shuai did was criminal? Suicide is not a crime in Indiana and the law used to charge Ms. Shuai with feticide was targeted at third party attacks on pregnant women, not abortion. This particular interpretation of the law is the result of a swelling segment of anti-choice advocates who want to give fetuses separate legal personhood. This in turn criminalizes the behavior of pregnant women and subjects them to investigation for miscarriages or poor birth outcomes. Pregnant women would become a separate class with fewer rights.
Second, criminal penalties hardly seem like an effective deterrent to actions made under extreme emotional disturbance. That just isn’t how mental health works! Instead there needs to be careful screening and medical treatment for the 13-20% of women who experience depression while pregnant, and the 30% of depressed pregnant women have suicidal ideation.
Finally, let’s go back to the familiar story of Ms. Shuai’s immigrant experience. Many media outlets have portrayed Ms. Shuai sympathetically, but this sympathy can misguidedly stem from referencing the model minority myth rather what is owed to all women. The one interview with Bei Bei Shuai currently online shows her answering the questions about her family, her hopes upon arriving in America, and how she spent her time in prison. She answers that she came to the US wanting independence and an MBA, has been taking classes in prison, and is still strongly determined to live in America.

Together, Ms. Shuai’s optimistic answers and lack of hard feeling toward the American justice system form a perfect narrative of the grateful, educated, and ambitious immigrant. It seems to announce to white viewers, “Hey! She might be a foreigner and a woman of color, but she’s middle class, loves this country, and believes in its bootstrapping principles! We can sympathize with her and thus she deserves better!” But the insidious implication in the media constructing this type of narrative is that only people who have lived “perfect” lives up until that point — those who can answer those questions as Ms. Shuai or my mother would — are entitled to bodily autonomy and freedom from state intrusion into their private grief. And even if Bei Bei Shuai’s Chinese upbringing might look like a non-threatening analogue of the stereotypical American family, 34% of American children actually do not live in a home with two married parents. Many women from these families are especially vulnerable in terms of the ability to access health services and will see their rights stripped away by fetal personhood statutes. Bei Bei Shuai is admirably resilient and positive and her story demonstrates how even women who have conformed to the mainstream can become victimized. But women who do not fit that profile, who might be undocumented immigrants, on public assistance, raised in nontraditional families, angry about the way American society has written them off, all deserve justice and dignity just as much. It’s a basic human right.

Elisabeth Smith, LSRJ Summer Legal Intern

This is the third week of my summer internship at LSRJ and I love everyone and almost everything.

All the interns are busy updating LSRJ factsheets so that law students around the country have accurate information on a wide range of reproductive justice topics.  While updating my factsheets, I have come across the worst of the internet.  When researching CEDAW (the United Nations Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women), I found a webpage that warned people to call their representatives and demand that CEDAW never be ratified and the Violence Against Women Act be repealed because both are bad for families.

Confused? I was.  The website explained that actually women are just as likely to be abusers, lie about domestic violence, and many innocent men are behind bars. Okay, then.

Next I researched the Convention for the Rights of the Child and encountered a site that proclaimed “No CRC in the USA!” Why? According to this group, if the US ratified the CRC then children would have the right to reproductive health information and services (among other things). Heavens.

Finally, I researched China’s population policy and found a site suggesting that “ObamaCare” (for the record, the Affordable Care Act) includes provisions that would forbid Americans from having more than one child.

Okay, people, seriously. Let’s debate, let’s discuss policy differences, differing world views, different potential solutions, and let’s do so respectfully. But when the premise of your argument depends solely on misinformation and outright lies, I don’t want to give you a seat at the table.

I haven’t cited the blogs in question for one reason: I don’t want anyone else to visit them. In their honor, though, I would like to set the record straight.

1)       Women are more likely to be victims of both fatal and nonviolence at the hands of intimate partners.

2)     Children have a right to information about their bodies and reproductive health because abstinence-only education does not work: youth in the program group were no more likely than control group youth to have abstained from sex and, among those who reported having had sex, they had similar numbers of sexual partners and had initiated sex at the same mean age.

3)     The Affordable Care Act does not limit the number of child a person or family can have. It does mandate that insurance companies pay for well-baby and well-child visits, immunizations, and screening and counseling.

Reproductive justice imagines a world where people have the rights, the support, the information, and the resources to make decisions for themselves and their families, free from violence and oppression. I would like to surf the internet in that world.

After 2 years of the Affordable Care Act, LSRJ boardmember and RJ fellow, Erin Armstrong shares 5 ways in which Health Reform Supports Women.

A bill for an online database listing names of abortion providers? More anti-choice legislation is put forward in Tennessee.

Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum Miriam Yeung highlights the struggle of Mothers and children targeted and separated in ICE raids, and the underlying human rights offenses against undocumented families.

Indigenous Lakota women push for access to Plan B contraception in South Dakota and explain why the Tribal Law and Order Act is so important to their communities.

Following the murder of  17 year old Trayvon Martin February 26th, the  implications of Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground Laws’ are explored.

This is the third in a series of posts by LSRJ alum Heather Sager (’10, Indiana University Maurer School of Law) who recently took a position at the Human Rights Law Network in India. Heather will be bringing us along on her journey through the field of international reproductive rights work.

I’ve mentioned before that part of my work with HRLN focuses on holding public tribunals. At these tribunals, we host people who have approached the State Human Rights Commissions and were ignored. Since we can only host a limited number of complainants, we choose based on a variety of factors, one of which is the inclusion of a variety of human rights violations. We try to focus on some of the most pervasive issues within whatever state we’re working. One of the most common, disturbing problems we see across the board is rape.

Part of my research into any human rights issue includes looking into the relevant legal and procedural background. In the process of researching rape, which I believe to be worsened by largely systemic issues within the country, I began to write about some of the more all-encompassing legal and social problems. This introduced me to rape investigation procedure in India.

Last September, Human Rights Watch issued a report calling attention to the use of the per vaginum examination (or, ‘finger test’ as it has been affectionately dubbed) in examining rape survivors in India. The report called for Indian legislation to introduce a standardized method of examining women and for the government to ban the use of a cruel, archaic process.

The per vaginum examination has been a controversial method of post-rape examination for some time. The method requires that a doctor insert his fingers into the vagina. Through this, he determines whether the hymen is present or absent, the ‘laxity’ of the vaginal tissue, the general shape and consistency of the vagina.

Until recently, this method was used across the board, in every case of reported rape where a medical examination was performed. In many instances, the per vaginum examination was performed without the woman’s prior knowledge or consent.

The per vaginum examination has long been discredited as a reliable test for medical purposes. Not just highly subjective, with unpredictable results, because of the test’s methodology (if we’re being generous with the word), it’s particularly cruel when administered immediately following a traumatic sexual assault.

But despite the widely agreed-upon fact that a finger does very little to serve as a consistent standard, the state has done very little to see that this practice is stopped. In March of this year, the Union Health Ministry of India issued new standards of post-sexual assault examination that, while improved, are greatly lacking.

The good news is that the new standards have barred using such helpful medical determinants as how well the woman is dressed and how well she keeps up her oral hygiene. The bad news is that the guidelines only limit the use of the finger test, allowing medical personnel significant leniency in deciding whether a situation warrants the use of the test.

Arguments that the test could still be of some use have been put forth, and the Ministry seems to have been listening. I wonder if they were also listening when the courts have used ‘finger test’ results in rape proceedings, calling attention to whether the woman is ‘habituated to sexual intercourse.’ Although the Supreme Court of India ruled in 2003 that a woman could not be cross-examined on her moral character in a rape case, courts across the country have continued to issue opinions on the general believability of her testimony, based in part on whether she may or may not have been sexually active.

Although my work in Delhi doesn’t focus solely on women’s rights issues, we deal very heavily in the area. As part of the Tribunals we hold, I’ve met with rape survivors here who were beaten by their attackers, refused help by the police, and ignored by the Commissions whose responsibility it is to protect them. Let’s add to this the doctors who may or may not decide this “test” is necessary in order to examine them and a court that may or may not use her ‘vaginal laxity’ to determine her reliability as a witness.

And the standard that decides whether one is ‘habituated to sexual intercourse’? Two fingers.

This is the second in a series of posts by LSRJ alum Heather Sager (’10, Indiana University Maurer School of Law), who recently took a position at the Human Rights Law Network in India. Heather will be bringing us along on her journey through the field of international reproductive rights work. Click here to read her first entry.

In my post two weeks ago, I introduced the work I’ve been doing in India, with the Human Rights Law Network. Specifically, I wrote:

For the last month and a half I’ve been part of a small team that plans and executes public hearings on the National and State Human Rights Commissions throughout India. We bring in victims, activists, lawyers and experts, hold a hearing in every state with a Human Rights Commission, publish analysis of our findings, and perform various legal and individual case follow-up within the Commissions and court system. While every case is heart-wrenching, my personal focus remains on those involving women’s and reproductive rights.

Let me explore that a bit. (more…)

Psychologist Joseph Nicolosi is the author behind the book, Parents Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, as well as an “expert” in what is called reparative therapy, which seeks to “repair” one’s homosexuality. The CNN featured series, “The Sissy Boy Experiment” includes personal stories and reflections by Nicolosi’s former patients who, as young boys, were sent to Nicolosi to “bring out the heterosexuality in them,” leading to emotionally detrimental effects. (more…)

This is the first in a series of posts by LSRJ alum Heather Sager (’10, Indiana University Maurer School of Law), who recently took a position at the Human Rights Law Network in India. Heather will be bringing us along on her journey through the field of international reproductive rights work.

The spring of my 2L year, I was thrilled to receive the news that I had been selected as one of LSRJ’s International Interns. At the time, the program placed summer interns with an organization abroad. What an incredible service! I remember very clearly speaking on the phone with Cari Sietstra, “How do you feel about India?” I was, to say the least, ecstatic.

I knew that summer would be a big turning point for me, but I’m certain I couldn’t have been aware of just how big of a turn things would take. I spent my entire 2L summer working for an India-wide NGO based in New Delhi. Beginning my internship at the Human Rights Law Network was, from the moment I walked in, like jumping into a giant pool of hectic, all-encompassing work, with culture-shock to boot. The unit I worked in, Reproductive Rights, was headed at the time by a fabulous woman named Jameen Kaur. She allowed her interns a huge amount of autonomy, and I was able to spend my summer fact-finding, traveling, researching, and eventually drafting a sizeable writ petition on access to blood services and maternal mortality. The entire experience was exhilarating, exhausting, frustrating, and extremely fulfilling. (more…)

Last month, the world was captivated by Egypt, and rightly so (and to an extant it still is). In less then two weeks a leaderless youth-driven revolution brought the 30-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak to its knees. I will not recount all the facts as they are widely known (hopefully), but will direct you to this fantastic article for a recap.

The situation in Egypt is changing everyday. Right now, there seems to be a focus on how the country should transition from an oppressive dictatorship to a democratic and/or constitutional state. For this reason, many people seem to be asking where the lawyers are and how they can assist in Egypt’s transition.

Whatever involvement lawyers will have in this process, I think it is important that RJ lawyers are a part of it. (more…)