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.

Shandanette Molnar, George Washington University Law School

As a labor and birth doula and pro-choice advocate, there are many times where the rhetoric used to advocate for the right to terminate a pregnancy safely can also be used to advocate for the right to choose healthy and safe birthing options. Both birth options and pro-choice movements center on the idea that it is important to trust individuals to make decisions for themselves and their reproductive health. Particularly, when a pregnant person decides to choose a more natural approach to childbirth or wishes to avoid a Cesarean birth, there may be obstacles to achieving those goals. Unfortunately, many times these obstacles are institutional or placed by care providers. As an advocate, my goal is to assist clients to empower themselves and make informed choices, whether it be an choice related to birthing or terminating a pregnancy.

Of particular interest to me is the high rate of Cesarean births in the United States – 33%. This figure, double-to-triple the rate recommended by the World Health Organization, is complex and likely attributable to many causes. However, in many cases, a pregnant person’s wishes are not honored due to policies that are in place, such as bans on vaginal births after Cesareans (VBACs) and/or mandatory Cesarean births. When a pregnant person is unable to make decisions related to their reproductive health – or is unable to have their decisions honored – this issue oftentimes fits into a larger RJ framework.

Birth is a tremendous power that female-bodied persons possess. Unfortunately, much of this power remains unrealized due to the culture of fear around birth. Media depictions of birth often portray an angry woman, begging for drugs, and at the mercy of her care providers. For many, these images serve as the only reference to labor and childbirth, and therefore, many individuals remain unaware of how normal pregnancy and childbirth can be. With increased access to information and body-positive education and more “woman-centered care” allowing individuals to make informed choices, birth stories could be transformed into empowering experiences.

As I mentioned in my first blog post, I chose to go to law school in order to become a legal advocate for midwifery care, better birth and breastfeeding practices, and the rights of individuals to make decisions related to their reproductive health. For the 2011-2012 school year, I am working on a note for a government contracts publication, in which I will argue that if the government were to set aside certain contracts for midwives opening birth centers, healthcare costs and the national rate of Cesarean births would lower. In undertaking this project, I have been presented with fantastic opportunities to discuss the issue with professors and classmates. Additionally, if the note is deemed worthy of publication, it will be a great opportunity to draw attention from government procurement professionals to reproductive health issues and the right to exercise birth options.

Burke Bindbeutel, University of Missouri School of Law

Although Mizzou Law is located in what some call “red state America,” our LSRJ chapter has seldom encountered any hostility or opposition from anti-choice groups. Even the picketers outside Columbia’s Planned Parenthood have a dogged, resigned vibe. The hardest thing for our reproductive justice activism to overcome is the visceral reaction that our issues can induce in students.

I was making my schpiel for LSRJ at 1L orientation, taking care to maintain a friendly and upbeat tone. When I mentioned awareness of sexual assault, I heard sharp intakes of breath from several different points in the room, and a softly muttered “Jesus!” Perhaps I was too imagistic in describing a problem that is a serious issue on ours and every campus. But I was disappointed in the hypersensitivity of the student body. Don’t lawyers have to deal with uncomfortable subject matter all the time?

Martha Nussbaum takes on just this kind of kneejerk dismissal in her book “From Disgust to Humanity.” Nussbaum takes a cue from the New Hampshire legislator who denounced at a state Judiciary Committee hearing the act of “taking the penis of one man and putting it in the anus of another man and wriggling it around in excrement.” It’s only natural that someone who can barely countenance the idea of homosexual contact is light years away from asserting the reproductive rights of her constituents. Nussbaum describes a serious need to break through the reflex of revulsion in order to ensure the reproductive rights.

I have detected the same reflex in the law school building where I lately spend all my waking life. It’s not that my peers are stridently or unanimously anti-choice, or believers in the personhood of fetuses. It’s that they would prefer to think about anything other than forced Caesarean sections or syphilitic penises. (Prison rape jokes bafflingly remain in bounds).

At our screening of the Wednesday webinar “If You Care About Criminal Justice, You Should Care About Reproductive Justice,” we had a first-time attendee who took notes and appeared to have a thoughtful and critical attitude. He seemed like just the sort of curious and open-minded student that we seek to reach.

We were sharing reactions after the program’s conclusion, and our visitor confessed to shock over the suggestion that a mother could ever opt for a vaginal birth after having had a past Caesarean. I responded that the speaker phrased the issue not as a recommendation of vaginal birth, but as a defense of the mother’s bodily integrity. Reproductive justice would prevail, I offered, once the decision belonged to the mother, rather than to the health care provider, law enforcement officer or judge. But it was all our visitor could do not to shake his head in disgust.

I believe that the issues LSRJ has identified and pursued have workable solutions that are politically feasible. But meaningful engagement of future lawyers is so difficult because of a firewall of disgust that prevents them from taking positions. Nonetheless, university campuses are places to wrestle with ideas, and Mizzou LSRJ has a great opportunity to engage students and change minds.

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.

Joanne Caceres, Harvard Law School

Amidst the utter chaos that is the first week back at Harvard Law School, I feel a certain calm returning to the classroom where HLSRJ has taken to holding its board meetings. By calm, I partially mean the happiness of seeing familiar faces, but it goes beyond that. It’s the feeling I get being in a room of capable, passionate, and brilliant women and men who are committed to engaging in the same issues as I am. It is moments like these that I reflect on my personal mantra: dripping water carves a stone.

High on our list this year is increasing our visibility on campus in order to create a campus wide conversation on Reproductive Justice. Our first focus is recruiting new 1Ls and building relationships with other progressive campus groups. We are hitting it off next week with the ever-important Reproductive Justice 101 event. I fondly remember the first time I learned about Ms. T, a case study that illustrated the intersectional nature of reproductive justice. It was during that presentation that I knew that RJ would become a major part of my law school career. If we are lucky, we will meet some of our new rising stars at this year’s event!

As we seek to build our core, however, we also are considering opportunities for engaging the entire campus. Through our relationships with other organization leaders, we became aware of a point/counterpoint event that will be looking at the recent anti-abortion bills that have been spreading out throughout many state legislatures, including South Dakota. Many of these bills are slated as being pro-women, because they require providing women with “more information” and more time to make a decision through mandatory wait periods. In reality, these laws are little more than attempts to further limit and prevent abortions, often making what is already a difficult process more difficult. Although we are not officially involved as an organization at this event, our members will be attending and we hope to use this as an opportunity to bring people together to reflect on the conversation. We want to do more this year than talk at people, we want to engage people and allow them to process what is an all too often not openly and intellectually discussed on our law school campus. And hopefully, if we can’t change some minds, at least have our views listened to and understood. It’s shaping up to be quite an active year, drip drip drip.

Shandanette Molnar, George Washington University Law School

Before considering law school, I contemplated becoming a traditional midwife. After learning of the legal challenges that families and midwives face when attempting a more empowered birth experience, I decided that there was important legal work to be done and part of that work was my responsibility. In the meantime, I resolved to become a birth & postpartum doula and lactation educator and counselor so as to maintain my sense of self during law school.

As a maternal care, birth, and breastfeeding advocate, there are certainly times when I feel a disconnect between law school and the birth and reproductive justice movements. This is where LSRJ comes into the picture and precisely why campus-based reproductive justice work is so important. LSRJ bridges the gap between my outside and law school lives and repairs that schism I feel. With an LSRJ framework, I oftentimes engage with fellow classmates and raise awareness of reproductive justice issues. Through these conversations, our chapter highlights that reproductive justice is about much more than abortion. It is about the shackling of incarcerated pregnant women, mandatory Cesarean births, bans on vaginal births after Cesareans (VBACs), domestic violence, and access to information and quality healthcare across the full spectrum of a person’s reproductive life. When possible, I highlight the metarights because they are just so powerful – the right to have children, the right not to have children, and the right to parent the children we have with dignity.

Next week, our chapter will be co-hosting a feminist networking event for students. In an effort to give back to the law school community, I am hoping that I will be able to connect with a new chapter member or schoolmate – perhaps a 1L – and assure them that if they are interested in the work, reproductive justice and LSRJ provide many intersections to pursue meaningful work, both on and off campus.

Though I have often doubted my decision to attend law school, I feel confident in the decision I made now that I have 1L year behind me. Additionally, I think it will be easier to be a lawyer in midwifery school than it would have been to be a midwife in law school. Sure, I still desire to become midwife, but that’s how I’ll spend my fifties+ life. In the meantime, I am going to dedicate myself to combining my legal advocacy skills with a commitment to better birth, breastfeeding, and maternal care practices, as well as birth and reproductive justice. I hope a few of my amazingly talented law school comrades will join me as well.

Burke Bindbeutel, University of Missouri School of Law

“The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy” is a disappointing recent New York Times article. Ruth Padawer describes a discomfited backlash to the medical procedure that allows a pregnant woman to opt for a single childbirth when she is carrying twins. Beneath a patina of thoughtful consideration, the author reverts to some tried and true anti-choice tropes: that the choice to abort will make a woman a social pariah, that she will never overcome her regret. The article casts a woman’s personal choice in a thoroughly negative light.

I am a fraternal twin, as well as an older brother, and a younger brother. I have never thought of myself as fifty percent of a natural, God-given package deal. Once born, a person is an independent entity and not a spectral reminder of a difficult choice, despite what the pundits believe.

Padawer’s waiting room is a coven of hysterical second-guessing and guilt. When parents exercise discretion in building their families, Padawer reasons, they are opening themselves to the frustration of too much choice. In a consumerist society, endless choice leads to bafflement, so judicious would-be mothers must naturally end up with the nagging dissatisfaction of discount shoppers.

The article points to a rift amongst abortion rights advocates by quoting from the comment board of urbanbaby.com. Reduction, this contingent insists, is less defensible than abortion because a woman ought not resist the number of fetuses that nature, or fertility drugs, has provided her. When a Philadelphia doctor in the early 1990’s agrees to reduce a pregnancy, “a stream of patients” quickly mobilizes to selfishly request reductions. This narrative stigmatizes not just the right to choose, but female empowerment in general.

I was haughtily summarizing the article to a fellow LSRJ member over lunch. She pointed out that the case for pregnancy termination is very strong when complications, or too many fetuses, jeopardize a mother’s health. But the decision to go from two to one probably turns on a parent’s preference rather than impending danger. The issue reminded my friend of sex selection, which does not appear to deserve the same legal protection as other controversial procedures.

Dismounting from my high horse, I started to see where my friend was coming from. The issue was not an easy one. Our campus events aim at coalition-building, and elective pregnancy termination wrinkles a lot of noses at Mizzou.

But reduction helps our LSRJ chapter to focus on just what sort of reproductive justice we advocate. If you support the right to choose, you should be prepared to disagree with someone’s choice. Access to family-planning resources is a human right, and how those resources are used is a personal decision.

And that’s what seems to disturb Padawer’s medical establishment most: the freedom of a woman deciding if and when to have children. The doctors in the article are more preoccupied with advancing their own ethical credentials than with serving their patients. “We were in the business to improve pregnancy outcomes, and those reductions didn’t fit the criteria,” says Dr. Ronald Wapner. A woman’s evaluation of economic and social limitations to child-rearing does not fit into Dr. Wapner’s career ambitions.

Reproductive justice allows people to determine how they establish their families. Medical technology facilitates that goal. Having a choice allows parents to allocate their priorities as compassionately as possible.

Sara Taylor, former LSRJ national office intern, LSRJ resident blogger, ’11 graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, and new mother, wanted to share some of her hopes for her daughter.

Dearest Overlords,

Within days of bringing a little girl into “our” world, there are a few things I wish to discuss with you—some critiques and possibly some ground rules for going forward.  You seem to have convinced quite a few of us that we’ve come a long way, maybe far enough that we can stop “nagging” or else prove, as you said all along, that we’ll simply “never be happy.”  Knowing how sincere you are about this, I wish to point out (for my daughter’s sake, at least) some places where it’s possible you may have misunderstood what I want. (more…)

I have this image in my head of myself, what I look like, which doesn’t seem to change very quickly. At least, it hasn’t managed to keep up well with the advanced stages of pregnancy. I’ll walk past a mirror or reflective window and be stunned at what is looking back, all four chins and forty inches of midsection which haven’t yet been incorporated into my mental image. This lag in my brain feels understandable to me considering so little about my life (if not my body) has really changed. Last night, I came home after class, talked to friends, had dinner, checked my bank balance, watched some TV, and went to bed. This week, I met two huge deadlines, fought with my husband, filed papers for a client, gave relationship advice, turned in an assignment, felt betrayed by a friend, and had a heart-to-heart with my mother.

The majority of my obligations and my stressors have absolutely nothing to do with my being pregnant. However, I have been noticing lately that my interaction with others (and mirrors) has a lot to do with it. This may be because I’ve been winding down my responsibilities to prepare for the very large responsibility headed my way in early May – having less “roles” to play may mean that people see me primarily in the most obvious role. But I can’t help wondering if it’s more than that. For instance, someone told me the other day that she didn’t want to ask me for help because I was pregnant. I hesitate to think what level of my brain people believe has been shut down pending delivery. Further, she cut me slack because I was pregnant, not because I was busy or stressed or otherwise engaged. My assistance to her would have had zero connection to my pregnancy other than the dispensation I was unknowingly granted. And sometimes it feels like every dispensation these days, requested or otherwise, necessarily requires some nexus to my pregnancy.

I can’t stop thinking about Mrs T.* In 2009, she went before a judge as an undocumented immigrant HIV+ black woman convicted of falsifying documents and all he saw was “pregnant.” Ignoring sentencing guidelines, her date of release was scheduled to coincide with her due date to ensure compliance with anti-retroviral medication to prevent HIV transmission to the fetus. She was given an unnecessarily longer, more restrictive (and insulting) sentence by virtue of her gestational state. I don’t mean to imply any direct correlation to my situation is appropriate, especially when our only noticeably common traits are pregnancy and womanhood, but I do feel a lot more empathy considering our shared experience as the in(di)visible.

The next time you see a pregnant woman or girl, I strongly encourage you to embrace her wholeness. By this I mean realize she is everything at once – female, student, spouse, creditor, friend, attorney, taxpayer, editor, partner, swimmer, driver, homeowner, daughter, consumer, and everything else, as applicable. She is realistically subject to everything she normally has to deal with in addition to aches, fatigue, swelling, anxiety, shoe-tying, etc. Particularly in the later stages, when her womb has been effectively annexed by the fetus, the state, and by horribly unforgiving gravity, I implore you to remember that she is so much more than pregnant.

*Chapter Note: For more on Ms. T, and to share her story with your chapter, check out the RJ 101 Easy-Event-in-an-Envelope.

Sara Taylor