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. 

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 College of Law

This month an attorney from the National Advocates for Pregnant Women (NAPW) visited Oklahoma to talk about her work with grassroots activists in Mississippi. Mississippi voters recently rejected Initiative 26, a personhood amendment, which would have defined legal personhood at the moment of fertilization. Shortly after the victory in Mississippi, an Oklahoma group announced they would seek approval to collect the needed signatures to put a personhood amendment on our next ballot. Mississippi activists did a wonderful job with their various campaigns against personhood, but activists here are glad to get earlier notice of a similar campaign and to learn from their experiences.

The NAPW attorney discussed campaign logistics with us. Mostly she stressed that we need to be flexible in our messaging. For example, health care professionals are going to have different concerns than lawyers who are going to have different concerns than people of faith. Throughout her talk, I thought about last summer’s LSRJ Leadership Institute where I heard a presentation on the role of lawyers in the reproductive justice movement. The speaker said that lawyers should be the experts on reproductive rights law and provide activists with information and resources. NAPW is a great example of a national reproductive rights legal organization working with local reproductive justice activists in this way.

If the media dedicated airtime to Initiative 26 at all, most reporters focused on the amendment’s possible effects on birth control and assisted reproductive technology. However, NAPW has been highlighting the equally, if not more, troublesome effect an amendment might have on pregnant women who choose to carry their pregnancies to term. Explaining to the general public that, under a personhood amendment, a woman could lose her status as a constitutional person is a more difficult task, which requires legal experts at least initially. NAPW has framed the message in an accessible way, using legal research and past cases on which they have worked to show how a personhood amendment could create unprecedented state power to control pregnant women. Here is an example of a resource they provided for grassroots groups in Mississippi (http://youtu.be/iU2BZN_GrhI).

Hopefully, Personhood Oklahoma will not collect the signatures they need, but with the support of reproductive rights lawyers, Oklahoma activists are preparing for if they do, and OU LSRJ will be there to foster an in-depth discussion among our classmates on the legal issues surrounding fetal personhood.

Candace Gibson, University of Utah College of Law

Last week, the University of Utah Law Students for Reproductive Justice chapter held its first panel with the support of the awesome Women’s Law Caucus.  Why am I excited about the panel you ask? First, the panel was a discussion of what plans the Utah state legislature has in store for us in 2012.  We had an illustrious set of panelists that included: Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon, State Representative Rebecca Chavez-Houck, Kimberly Myers from the Utah Health Policy Project, and Heather Stringfellow from Planned Parenthood Action Council of Utah.  All of the panelists provided insight into the political realities of working with the legislature and many issues that our student body did not know about, i.e., how do health care exchanges work.

Second, the panel added diversity to the routine doldrums of law school panels.  In my two years at the University of Utah, my peers and I have been inundated with panels that focus on job prospects in various legal fields and how to prepare oneself for these fields. With that being said, these panels are important, but at a certain point as a 3L, you already know what the panelists are going to say and you’re there because you didn’t bring any lunch.  I am glad to say that the UULSRJ panel turned out to be a panel that 30 other students wanted to attend.  It could be possible that they came for the food, but given the questions and comments that were said, it seemed like everyone really cared about women and families.

Third, the panel provided a forum to discuss women’s and family health issues that are rarely discussed at the law school.  This was the first time that the words, “abortion” and “family planning,” were publicly spoken outside of Constitutional Law I in a respectful and engaging manner.  There were many laughs but there were also many furrowed brows.  In essence, the panel established that UULSRJ will be an active, permanent addition to the student organizations at the University.  More importantly, the panel claimed public space for these important policy discussions that impact not just the general population, but that also impact women lawyers as individuals.  I think we have the tendency in law school to distance ourselves from the law to the point that we forget that we will also be personally affected by the law.

As for the UULSRJ board, we are all excited to plan another panel.  In the meantime, have a Happy Holidays!

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!

Mallory Carlberg, University of Oklahoma Law School

Anyone who follows reproductive justice news knows that Oklahoma is often the testing ground for new anti-abortion legislation. State legislators pass bills through the House and Senate with ease. Even when a Governor vetoes a bill, both bodies often have the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto. Since the 2010 midterm election, the situation has only worsened. Our new Governor will not veto any anti-abortion measures, and our new Attorney General endorses redefining “persons” under the Fourteenth Amendment to include fetuses. Oklahoma politicians also routinely undermine other reproductive justice concerns, such as access to comprehensive sex education, family planning services, and social programs assisting struggling families.

The University of Oklahoma (OU) law school produces an excellent class of lawyers every year, most of whom will work in Oklahoma and Texas. A sizable amount will be the next generation of legislatures and judges. In classes, constitutionally protected rights are often discussed in a vacuum as if race, class, gender, sexuality and ability do not affect a person’s experience of their rights. One major goal in starting OU Law Students for Reproductive Justice (LSRJ) is to engage future Oklahoma lawmakers with reproductive rights in a deeper way. The RJ movement’s refusal to be a single-issue movement makes it ideal for building coalitions in a red state. Even if a student’s personal views are against abortion, we can often find common ground on other RJ issues like domestic violence, maternal health, and sex education.

At meetings we want to educate law students on issues they may not have considered and re-complicate the already complicated issue of abortion. This process will start with our upcoming event RJ 101. OU LSRJ members are also helping with “Take Root: Red State Perspectives on Reproductive Justice.” OU, RJ non-profits and RJ community groups have come together to bring a conference to OU next semester, which will focus on red-state specific issues. The conference will showcase national and local leaders and provide young, RJ activists with a space to meet and exchange ideas.

Though our state may have further to go than others to achieve RJ for all, the willingness of OU law students to discuss these issues and the support OU LSRJ has received from faculty inspires me. There is a small, but growing group of Oklahomans who are dedicated to bringing these issues to light. I am excited for OU LSRJ members to bring that conversation to the law school.

Thanks to my amazing host organization, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, my fellowship year has been amazing and I am sad it is ending so soon. On any given morning, I am throwing on a pair of heels and walking over to my first meeting. In that meeting, I sit around a conference table with ten other attorneys who know the games in DC; they know everyone in the administration and everyone in Congress. In this meeting, we create a plan for drafting official comments to Health and Human Services encouraging them to consider certain facts about women in the new health care reform. I add information about the health disparities that Latinas face.

Afterward, I grab the metro and pop up to Capitol Hill where I meet another group of activists in front of a Senators office. We gather the briefs we have been writing, confirm our agenda and then go in and introduce ourselves. We sit down with the Senator’s lead attorney to explain our issue. In this particular meeting, the Senator comes in after her vote on the Senate floor and sits down with us. She confirms that she does support this issue, appreciates the information we gathered, and explains that she is interested in speaking on the floor on behalf of women of color on this issue. Great! We let her know that we are prepared to help. Now, we have to go, we have two more meetings. Number two goes well, but the last is horrible and the legislative assistant is less than kind and barely lets us speak at all. There isn’t too much time to dwell on it. I’ve got to get back to the office to work on a memo that is due to my supervisor on yet another issue. It’s now 5:30pm and we have an invitation to see President Obama speak at a galla for immigrant rights, its time to thrown on a dress and make my way to the event. After waiting until the very end of the event to be sure to shake hands with the President, it is time to get home before it all starts again tomorrow.

This has been my life for the last year as an LSRJ Legal Fellow. It has been a non-stop whirl wind of advocacy work. I have had so many once-in-a-lifetime experiences in this one year that they are impossible to count. I have learned from the best about how to advocate for the most disadvantaged people in our communities, especially women and people of color. These skills, and the confidence that came with their practice, have shaped me into the advocate I have dreamed of being.

I am endlessly grateful to my supervisors who integrated me into even the most important pieces of the work the organization does, to the LSRJ staff who were always available for mentoring, and the funders who made this year possible.

Dani Hawkes (’10, University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law)

2010-2011 RJ Fellow at the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health

*LSRJ brought a delegation of eleven members, alums, and staff to the annual Reproductive Freedom Day (RFD) in Sacramento. Catherine Groat, a 2L at Santa Clara Law School, decided to share her experience here.

Whenever I hear about lobbying, it’s always in this vague smoke and mirrors type of fashion. In my cartoon fantasy, picketers are swarming women and men dressed in red and blue suits as they make their way to their offices on top of a very high hill. I’ve learned, however, that lobbying in its basic form is actually just the purest form of democracy: a group of concerned citizens voicing their opinions to their government in hopes of making a difference.

As a law student, this form of advocacy is new and empowering. The ability to change laws by lobbying legislators instead of judges seems a foreign but fresh idea, and I felt at Reproductive Freedom Day that I had contributed a small piece to a larger scheme and mission that I cared about. (more…)

OK, we can all admit that things in the world are pretty intense currently, correct? Countries are rising up against their governments, earthquakes are enormous, nuclear plants are threatening to melt down, the world’s economy is in turmoil, and state and federal legislatures in the United States are advancing bills that hurt women. With all that is going on, it seems like a government like ours in the U.S. would prioritize disseminating accurate information, based on sound logic and the best available science. Accurate reporting would mitigate the mania, after all. Right? (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…)