Candace Gibson, University of Utah College of Law

It has been a whirlwind ride for me as a 3L.  Last summer, when I was planning my 3L year, I wasn’t thinking of starting a LSRJ chapter.  However, I became convinced by one of my mentors to start one. Now, I am sad to leave the U of U Law Students for Reproductive Justice Chapter.

We’ve had a great year. Unlike some of our sister chapters in the Mountain West, we did not have any bureaucratic obstacles to fight and so far, we have gained the respect of our student body and of the other student organizations.  Maybe, we’ll know we have arrived when there is a pro-life law students group on our campus.  We planned and co-hosted five panels, the topics ranged from academic scholarship in reproductive rights to domestic violence in immigrant communities to the valuable contributions of medical practitioners.  We made condom kits twice to help the HIV Prevention Program at the Utah Pride Center and we created a presentation around the legal issues that some Latina adolescents face in Salt Lake City.  We also tabled the months of October and November on various RJ topics.  It was a fun but exhausting year!

All of this could not have been done without the energy and work of our 2011-2012 board who stepped up when they needed to and told me that they were too exhausted to do another thing.   These moments remind me that when you are doing social justice work you have to set some boundaries or else you will be exhausted and no longer useful to your community or your movement.

The other important lesson I am learning is that we always need to mentor.  Often, as adults either pursuing education or because we are still getting our act together, we never think of ourselves as mentors but as mentees.  We need to keep thinking as chapter leaders and as members that we not only mentor during a transition meeting and after we have left, but that we are mentoring while we are leading our chapters and are mentored by our other chapter members.   As a movement, we need to keep mentoring so that we never become irrelevant or worse, we end up erasing the efforts of younger members by saying they aren’t doing anything. (I’m sure you have all heard about the comments made by older feminists who think that we younger feminists are only sitting on their laurels and twiddling our thumbs.)

Aside from these serious thoughts, I want you all to wish next year’s U of U Law Students for Reproductive Justice Chapter board the best of luck.  I’m thinking they will certainly put us one step closer to having our archrival, Law Students for the Right to Life, on campus.

RH Reality Check produces a new short of women sharing their stories entitled, “Our Reality: Women and HIV.”

On April 2, 2012 Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) performed the largest immigration sweep to date arresting three thousand people in six days. What does this mean for families?

Sady Doyle highlights the intersection between Feminism and Immigration and the ways some women are left out.

Round of virtual applause to the UVA LSRJ chapter for hosting a session called Challenges to Choice in Virginia.

Check out this real world example of how the 20 week abortion ban hurts families. Although this instance is one of the “perfect victim”—heterosexual married couple that wanted a pregnancy—it does serve to illustrate how this law impacts real lives and how more people should share their stories.

Esmé Deprez shows us how Curbing Female Reproductive Rights Raises Taxpayers Costs.

Burke Bindbeutel, University of Missouri School of Law

Last week, at a trial in a federal courthouse, I got to observe the effects of immigration policy on the human body’s dignity. If it does nothing else, reproductive justice limits what our government can force upon our bodies–the sources of our most fundamental autonomy. The people I saw in court came north to live by their sweat, and their bodily presence on this side of the Rio Grande was enough to have them rounded up and caged. Although it was chilling to witness the deprivation, I was heartened by the response of the court to the human need.

A fellow Mizzou law student and I dispatched to the borderlands during our spring break. In Del Rio, Texas we caught an episode of the fast-paced human drama known as Operation Streamline. Nine out of eleven Border Patrol sectors along the U.S.-Mexico border have opted to criminally prosecute unlawful migrants. Instead of the consequence-free administrative process favored by California, where Mexican migrants are released at the border, Streamline ensures a criminal record for the migrants. If they attempt to return to the United States, their offense could land them two years in jail.

Sixty-two defendants pled guilty and were sentenced in less than an hour. Just as the blisteringly fast proceeding ended, the prisoners complained that they had not received clean clothes or showers during their five-day incarceration. Inadequate hygienic services probably did not outrage the prisoners. They had already endured a difficult journey, some of them from as far as El Salvador. If clandestine train-hopping across a war zone didn’t deter them, then they probably don’t mind going without soap. But it’s incumbent on the judicial system that removes people en masse to provide basic dignities, which are just as necessary due process of law.

I thought of our work with LSRJ when one of the two women being sentenced told the judge that she needed to tomar pastillas para mi embarazo. The girl couldn’t have weighed ninety pounds. She was sitting out in the public benches due to space constraints, and from where I was sitting I couldn’t see her shackles, so I thought she was there to watch, like I was. But she was a pregnant border-crosser who had politely asked for pills to relieve morning sickness. Pregnancy has always seemed an unimaginable servitude to me, and here was this woman, barely more than a girl, wading across the Rio Grande by moonlight and imagining a better home for her kid than war-torn Mexico.

Our constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship has been rebranded as a loophole for the offensively-coined “anchor babies.” Because people born on American soil are citizens regardless of their parents’ status, the anti-immigration lobby has detected an incentive for poor and pregnant people to decamp for their child’s birth.

It’s true that free trade policies combined with porous borders have encouraged mass migration. Perhaps if the United States were to curtail the opportunity for fresh arrivals to plant roots in our country, we could avoid having to deal with pregnant prisoners. Senator John Kyl advocates repeal of birthright citizenship. But I don’t think that would strike at the root of the problem of massive inequality in the border region. The border divides north from south, but it also divides rich and poor. Even if the U.S. won’t provide this woman a hospital bed, it ought to at least see that the basic needs of her body are attended to.

Concerns that so-called “aliens” have compromised hospital services are misplaced. In rural Texas, hospital care’s availability suffers from poor regulation and exploitative insurance companies. Blaming opportunists distracts from the systemic problems in our health system. It’s similar to those who blame the struggles of an unequal and financially strapped education system on a few freeloaders.

Reproductive justice will exist when people can “decide whether, when and how to have and parent children, with dignity, free from discrimination, coercion or violence.” It’s a sign of an unresponsive immigration policy when prospective mothers risk life and limb for a chance the chance to safely deliver. In Del Rio, the judge assured the prisoner that she would receive medical attention, but for the dozens more defendants on the next day’s Streamline docket, there are no guarantees.

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.

Between the slippery slope of imperial protectionism and cultural relativism, progress appears to be made as Female Genital Cutting  is declining in various countries on the African continent.

As you may have heard Karen Handel of the Susan G. Komen Foundation resigned. Check out the link to the official resignation letter.

One immigration hurdle removed for API women and their families.

Central Pennsylvania’s Shippensburg University puts Plan B in campus vending machines. Go SU!!!

Young Women United a part ACRJ’S Strong Families program, just got a resolution passed to celebrate young parents in their state of New Mexico! Looking forward to August 25^th!

A Colorado Planned Parenthood program–Sext Ed. Love it!

Candace Gibson, University of Utah College of Law

*The views expressed in this blog post are those of the blogger herself; she is not speaking on behalf of Law Students for Reproductive Justice.*

Many of my law school colleagues and I have dipped our toes in the immigration law pond.  In my experience, when people ask me what type of law I am most interested in, and I say, “immigration law,” it invites a conversation that I don’t want to have.  I’m hesitant to speak about immigration because I never know if the person on the other side will be an individual who has no idea that our immigration system is broken and will use language that is derogatory to me and the clients I’ve worked with.

With the start of Utah’s legislative session this week, I am not only feeling this hesitancy but anger.   Representative Herrod, who has announced that he will join the U.S. Senate race to upseat Senator Hatch, has decided to sponsor legislation that would gut the Utah Immigration Accountability and Enforcement Act passed last year.  The Utah Immigration Accountability and Enforcement Act would create a guest worker program for those who are undocumented in Utah but would like to legally work and live in the state.  In order to get a permit, individuals would have to get a background check, take English and civic classes, and their tax contributions would be tracked.   Aside from the constitutional issues at hand and the likely possibility that the federal government will not give a waiver so that the state can implement this legislation, many immigration advocates were excited because the bill was solution-oriented.  Herrod’s legislation would convert the Accountability and Enforcement Act to the Utah Illegal Alien Family Transition Pilot Program.  Don’t you love the name?  His legislation would only allow individuals who have either (1) overstayed their visas or (2) let their visas expire and have children of a certain age and that were born in specific countries apply. Individuals who came into the country without inspection or through non-legal means could not apply.  The bill would allow local enforcement agencies to detain individuals who they suspect of being in the country without any legal status and punish law enforcement agencies that do not comply with enforcement laws by withholding state funds from them.   Before any of this happens, the bill states that our congressional delegates must lobby for amending federal immigration statutes so that Utah may implement this program.  Herrod said this about his bill, “The forgotten person in all of this has been the legal immigrant. We’ve passed laws that are aiding those who come here illegally. That is wrong; we need to work on laws that aid the legal immigrant.”

What Herrod has forgotten or does not want to acknowledge is that in some places in the world there is no functioning way to legally migrate to the U.S.  If I have to wait at least ten years to migrate from Mexico through a family based visa or if my only other option is to be sponsored through an employer, that is not a functioning immigration system.   I am all for state legislation that pushes the federal government to reform our broken immigration system, but legislation that guts another bill that may be unconstitutional is a waste of time and only foments a heated debate.

Reproductive justice isn’t just about abortion and contraceptives, but about improving the lived realities that impact people’s ability to decide when, how, and if they want to parent.  Because many immigrant women have no legal status, they are more subject to intimate partner violence, lack insurance coverage, and are vilified through the media as mindless, breeding machines whose sole purposes are to birth “anchor babies” and “terrorists.” Immigrant women are clearly part of this struggle. In Utah alone, immigrant women already have been targets of gender-specific threats.  In 2010, Concerned Citizens of the United States compiled a list of 1300 individuals who they thought were in Utah without legal status, asking them to be deported, and sent the list to media outlets.  The list included names, social security numbers, and even pregnant women and their expected due dates.    Herrod’s bill isn’t going to help most immigrant women and it definitely isn’t adding anything new to our country’s immigration debate. 

Last week, the Speaker of the House announced plans to introduce legislation that further restricts abortion access in the new health care plan. Last week, the Philadelphia District Attorney, Seth Williams, indicted Dr. Kermit Gosnell on eight counts of murder in the deaths of seven infants and a Bhutanese refugee. These deaths occurred in a clinic that provided abortions to mostly impoverished women, women of color, and immigrant women. The incredibly unsanitary conditions of the clinic, and the horrendous way the women seeking abortions were treated (or more accurately, not treated at all) are described here.

I believe (as do many others) these two events are connected. The events demonstrate that when abortion is used as a pawn in a political (democratic v. republican) chess game, the health and lives of impoverished women, women of color, and immigrant women are put at risk. Even if the “No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act” goes no further, abortion has been more deeply entrenched in the political discourse as a “sacrificial lamb” that can be used to appease a specific group of people.

Reproductive justice activists and lawyers must not only fight against the many barriers women in marginalized communities face in accessing reproductive health care, but also must focus on ensuring that the reproductive health care women receive when (if) these barriers are overcame is safe, effective, and comprehensive. I kept this post short in the hopes of fostering a discussion about what lawyers, law students, community folk, and other RJ activists can do/are doing in response to the existence of clinics like Dr. Gosnell’s.

LS

As most of you heard the Nelson-Hatch amendment failed in the Senate this week. Many reproductive organizations, among others, launched a visible grass-roots campaign to make sure that this Stupak-like amendment was not included in the Senate’s version of a health reform bill. Some were critical that pro-choice groups did not work proactively enough to defeat these measures before the debate entered the public arena.  I had informal discussions with friends regarding the matter. On one hand, I am frustrated that advocates for reproductive justice are once again in a reactionary position (defeat Stupak-Pitts! defeat Nelson-Hatch!) rather than proactively advocating for expansive and inclusive reproductive justice measures. I am also concerned that other important reproductive justice issues are being ignored in the public debate. What about affordability, prevention, and immigrant rights?   

On the other hand, I do not think it is fair to place all responsibility and blame for the passage of the Stupak amendment on just two organizations. I have heard some say that advocates hoped to work quietly behind the scenes to avoid turning the federal health reform debate into an abortion debate. What is the appropriate role for reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations? What can we learn from the Stupak-Pitts and Nelson-Hatch advocacy efforts? How can we work better moving forward?

Jennifer Smith

In her feature on the supposed generational divide in the pro-choice movement, which ran in Sunday’s New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg correctly observes that abortion has hit the headlines recently in the context of health care reform and the horrendously restrictive Stupak amendment—and it’s not something reproductive rights advocates are happy about.  But there isn’t much else I can relate to in her assessment of the current landscape in reproductive rights advocacy and activism.  In fact, I think the story—which argues that there is a chasm between the “menopausal militia,” meaning the generation of feminists who came of age before Roe v. Wade and view abortion in “stark political terms,” and the “millennials,” the younger set for whom Stolberg suggests abortion is a personal issue—misses the mark in a sad but revealing way.

Relying on quotes from Naral Pro-Choice America president Nancy Keenan, Stolberg promotes this political/personal dichotomy without actually explaining how this supposed shift to the personal manifests itself—other than the fact that the post-Roe generations seem less responsive to single-issue pro-choice calls to action.  Provocative accompanying artwork, which consists of a black rectangle with brightly colored letters spelling “WE” floating above “ME,” implies that younger women are selfish in neglecting abortion politics.  Yet Stolberg acknowledges that “a clear majority of Americans support the right to abortion, and there’s little evidence of a difference between those over 30 and under 30.”  In fact, she herself points to several examples of young people organizing right now to stop the Stupak amendment (including LSRJ’s recent webinar on abortion and health care reform legislation).  So what’s the issue?

Democratic pollster Anna Greenberg concludes that young people don’t respond to email alerts about contacting their legislators because they know abortion is legal and believe “if you really need one you can probably figure out how to get one.”  Which means not only are we selfish, but we’re also foolishly complacent.  But what about the millions of poor women, immigrant women, and young women who can’t ever “figure out how to get one” because the barriers we’ve erected to accessing legal abortion are simply too high?  Such women may be forced to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term or to induce an abortion through other means, with serious consequences for the health and security of themselves and their families.  And what about those of us who aren’t poor, immigrant, or under 18 but believe deeply that how our society treats those women reflects on all of us, individually and collectively? (more…)

Last week, the ACLU sought a court order to force the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) to release documents outlining U.S. policy limiting refugee and undocumented teenagers’ access to important reproductive health services. According to the complaint, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request to uncover the details of these policies in August, but has received no response. The FOIA request was triggered by news that in June 2008 the Commonwealth Catholic Charities of Virginia—an ACF grantee—fired four social workers who helped an unaccompanied, undocumented 16-year-old in its custody obtain an abortion and contraception. The complaint also references a Catholic Charities nurse who was fired after she refused to deny her patients information about condoms.

According to the complaint, the ACF’s policies apply to both unaccompanied, undocumented minors and unaccompanied refugee children—many of whom speak little to no English and are detained in jail-like facilities until they are deported, reunited with family in the U.S., or obtain asylum in the U.S., as circumstances warrant.

Reproductive justice demands that minors are given medically accurate information about sex and sexuality and have access to reproductive services. These policies are especially unconscionable considering the vulnerability of the populations affected. As the ACLU put it, “[these minors] are in need of our compassion and care,” not the imposition of religious beliefs that may not match their own. It is maddening that grantees of federal funds who are supposed to provide at-risk minors with necessary services and care are allowed to operate under “the basic teachings of the Catholic Church” rather than to provide medically necessary and legally required reproductive care.

The ACLU’s complaint reminded me of the news in September that women immigrants are now required to receive the HPV vaccine, Gardasil in order to become citizens—a requirement not imposed on male immigrants or current U.S. citizens.

Critics have commented that this is another example of the government using vulnerable populations as human lab rats to test new reproductive technologies. And, I can’t help but notice the double-standard imposed on immigrant women when it comes to the supposed “encouragement” of sexual promiscuity that mandating this vaccine would entail. (You’ll recall, many social conservatives were concerned that vaccinating girls against HPV would conflict with their abstinence-only-until-marriage-or-else message.) I think that this double standard sends a message that only certain groups are worth government “protection”—as a post at Feministing put it, “I guess they don’t care about these things when it comes to immigrant women.”

Personally, I don’t feel that Gardasil has been on the market long enough to be mandated to any group. In fact, the lead researcher in the development of the HPV virus vaccine, Dr. Diane Harper, said that Gardasil “has not been out long enough for us to have post-marketing surveillance to really understand what all of the potential side effects are going to be.” (And while we’re at it, let’s keep studying the effects of the vaccine on boys and men. If we’re going to make the vaccine mandatory, it should be for both sexes.) The Gardasil mandate for immigrant women, coupled with the recent news of alarming domestic policies regarding undocumented and refugee minors’ access to reproductive services, signals the importance of continuing to build and sustain a movement that addresses the intersections between immigration status, class, and access to health care.

-Amanda Allen