However, we cannot ignore what the individual states are up to at a time of high drama in the federal

government. The Iowa 2017 legislative docket looks like a mixed bag. Including bills about “Stand Your Ground” laws (remember the legislation used to justify the murder of Trayvon Martin?) and various bills looking to restrict voting rights, there is legislation being introduced all across the board in terms of topics and political stances.

Here are some of the bills being introduced related to reproductive justice:

Senate File 11: Maternal Health Care for Low-Income Women

This legislation aims to establish a way for low-income women who use a Medicaid family-planning program for their pre-natal care to receive continued, comprehensive coverage after they give birth.

Senate File 2: Defunding Planned Parenthood/State-Only Family Planning Program

Connected to the tirade about defunding Planned Parenthood, this bill aims to take Planned Parenthood clinics out of the Medicaid-approved health care provider networks. This means that people with Medicaid would not be able to get their care from Planned Parenthood covered. This would be a substantial blow to our local Planned Parenthood’s security, because it could mean that they lose a large group of their patients.

Senate File 53: Abortion Prohibitions

This bill prevents anyone from having a legal, safe abortion after 20 weeks, unless the “unborn baby’s life” is in danger. You read that right: not in case the woman’s life is in danger. No, that would be too humane. This bill protects the fetus and not the woman/ fetal container.

Senate File 67: Oral Hormonal Contraceptives

This bill would let pharmacists prescribe and then sell women hormonal birth control pills regardless of whether or not they have a prescription from a doctor.

Senate File 27: Abortion Funding Restrictions

This bill prohibits people from using federal health care reform money (like Obamacare subsidies) to pay for an abortion in Iowa. It also prohibits using any federal health care reform money to pay for insurance plans that may cover abortion, regardless of whether or not someone actually uses that plan to pay for an abortion.

Senate File 52: Fetal Body Parts

“A person shall not knowingly acquire, provide, receive, otherwise transfer, or use a fetal body part in this state, regardless of whether the acquisition, provision, receipt, transfer, or use is for valuable consideration”. This bill was introduced by Brad Zaun. Brad, you do know those videos about Planned Parenthood and “selling fetuses” was completely fake right???? No? You’re still thinkin’ ’bout it? How did you even get elected???

So what should you do with all this information? 

Here is a way to find your local representative’s contact information. If you care about women’s bodily autonomy you should let your representative know what you think about these bills!

Genuine Justice is a column about reproductive justice focusing on current events, historical perspectives and racism in women’s healthcare.

The post Genuine Justice: New Bills About Reproductive Justice in Iowa appeared first on KRUI Radio.

This healthcare provider has a long, politically-charged history. The first clinic, focused on administering birth control, was founded by Margaret Sanger, Ethel Byrne and Fania Mindel in Brooklyn. Sanger was jailed 30 days after opening the clinic for violating the Comstock law. This

federal law was passed to suppress the “trade in, and circulation of, obscene literature and articles of immoral use”, and criminalized sending information related to erotica, contraceptives, abortifacients, sex toys, letters alluding to any sexual content or information. This law made communication about advances in reproductive healthcare essentially illegal.

Although Sanger is infamous for participating in racist eugenicist politics (PP’s fave is definitely problematic), the lasting legacy of Planned Parenthood has been about empowering women to make their own decisions about reproductive healthcare. This makes the organization a perfect target for the Trump administration.

However, what kind of policy maneuvers will the Republicans have to make to actually “defund” Planned Parenthood? It turns out that the majority of the money that the organization gets from the federal government is from Medicaid reimbursements.

According to Planned Parenthood officials, “Just like other kinds of health insurance, Medicaid reimburses Planned Parenthood’s doctors and nurses for the preventive medical services they provide, including life-saving cancer screenings, HIV testing, and Portia contraceptive and birth control options.” They further explain that the federal government doesn’t provide direct, open funding in the form of a blank-check style grant.

In this way, the incoming administration would have to go after Medicaid funding and programs like Title X, a federal program that provides funding to reproductive healthcare programs that include, but are not limited to, Planned Parenthood clinics. There is no legislation that gives money to Planned Parenthood that Republicans can repeal.

This means that the Republicans can’t just vote to shut down the PP clinics. Instead, they will have to play the long game and dismantle the healthcare system itself to really achieve their goal of disabling Planned Parenthood. It’s not that this is impossible — a lot of change (and damage) can happen during a united Republican government. But this change will not happen immediately or easily.

The conversation about Planned Parenthood “losing funding” is fundamentally about healthcare policy. Obamacare brought some necessary changes to the American system by incorporating guaranteed issue of basic, primary care into all insurance plans and creating the individual mandate that all people must be paying into the new system.

However, many experts argue that the biggest problem with American healthcare is the sheer complexity of the system. Most other developed nations have simpler, streamlined systems where every person has access to the same care, while in the United States there are many different systems for different classes of people. Not only does this

highlight the inequalities between social groups in America, it also contributes to the administrative nightmare that is American healthcare.

For more information about comparative healthcare policy, check out T.R. Reid’s The Healing Of America.

Genuine Justice is a column about reproductive justice focusing on current events, historical perspectives and systematic racism in women’s healthcare.

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There are several dead men named as the “father” of different areas of medicine, but the most shocking is the father of gynecology: Dr. J. Marion Sims. This man was an American slave owner who practiced medicine in the mid-1800s.

Among his many medical experiments and achievements, Sims is widely recognized for his development of gynecological practices that are still in use today. Yes, this man is responsible for an early form of everyone’s favorite, the vaginal spectrum. Useful as it is, I wonder if a better, more comfortable alternative could be found if women had been present in the medical establishment from the beginning.

Dr. Sims misdeeds only begin with the spectrum. He experimented with new surgical solutions to a condition called vesicovaginal fistula, which is a particularly nasty condition that can happen during extended childbirth. He is credited with finding the first surgery that consistently repaired vesicovaginal fistula, something that generations of doctors had tried to solve. However, this important breakthrough in surgery was possible because Dr. Sims experimented on slaves who were subject to his trials without their consent.

Of the fourteen slaves he did experimental gynecological surgery on, he named three of them in his records: Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy. All three of these women suffered from vesicovaginal fistula. Dr. Sims operated on Anarcha over thirty times. It is important to note that Dr. Sims did not use anesthetics in his experimental surgery, even though they were available at the time.

According to Harriet A. Washington’s book about the history of medical experimentation on black people, Dr. Sims would never have been able to conduct so many experimental surgeries without exploiting slaves, because no white women would have agreed to it. Also, Dr. Sims believed that black women could endure more pain than white women, which is a dangerous and untrue stereotype that still exists today. This is one of the reasons why he never used anesthetics during his experiments.

The idea that black people can endure more pain than other groups comes from the history of undervaluing black people in America. Slave owners perpetrated the idea that black people could work harder and for longer because they are biologically different from white people, who could not withstand the same work.

Like many other manifestations of racism, this concept that black people are somehow unable to feel pain persists. Many white medical doctors believe that black people are biologically different from white people and allow this belief to inform their medical practice. The result of this, among other things, is that black people are substantially less likely to receive pain relief medication than white people.

The story of Dr. Sims and how he was named the “father of gynecology” is one of anti-blackness. It is important to know these stories that create the foundation for medicine, politics, and other areas of our lives. Without an uncensored understanding of how the modern systems of oppression were formed, it is unlikely that we can move forward and create real change.

Genuine Justice is a column about reproductive justice focusing on current events, historical perspectives and systematic racism in women’s healthcare.

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There might not be any way to get around the fact the no one really likes sitting in on a sex ed lesson. Yet however awkward it is, there’s also no way to get around the importance of and need for sex ed; everyone should know more than just the basics about healthy and safe sex. But after a quick look at the status of sexual education in America, it’s easy to see that we get a failing grade. There are so many aspects to talk about, and self expression of sexual identity is an important one. Not many know about many things surrounding things. Majority even believe that dildos are only for women and condoms only for men. when in fact there are dildos for men and condoms for women. A basic example of the misinformation that teens have.

Currently, because education is largely left to the control of State governments, American kids learn many different things about sex. While some students in Texas have strict abstinent-only lessons that ignore or even discourage contraceptive use, schools in California are required to have medically accurate sex education that is culturally sensitive and does not promote religion. You can read a full brief on state sex education policies here.

Many states do not require any kind of sex education in schools.

In states that don’t require sex education, schools can still choose to offer it but they do not have any mandatory guidelines for content. Most states don’t even obligate that sex education must be medically accurate.

So what does this mean for America’s students?

Nothing good.

Lack of a clear legal requirement to have medically accurate sexual education in schools means that, in many cases, students will not learn basic information about sex and how to maintain their sexual health with True Pheromones.

The Center for Disease Control recently announced that STI infection rates have “reached an all time high” because many sexual health clinics are closing (thanks, Republicans) and the amount of people getting tested and seeking treatment for STIs has decreased.

However, this increase in infection rates can’t be solely attributed to political attacks on sexual health clinics like Planned Parenthood. It is also important to consider how the lack of reliable sex ed across the country contributes to this. If students are not learning the life long impacts of some incurable STIs and how to prevent getting them, then there is no way that we can realistically expect STI infection rates to decrease.

However, sexual education is about more than just STIs.

There are a wide range of topics that should be covered in sex ed lessons, because there are a wide variety of things that affect a person’s sex life. Content pertaining to LGBTQAI sexual health, healthy relationships, and affirmative consent is missing in most curriculum in the US, which means that students are not learning everything they need to know.

A solution to this problem will be hard to find, and the answer probably doesn’t lie with Bill Nye. Given this incredibly awkward clip from one of his episodes, we probably can’t trust him with a full length feature about sex ed.

As many Americans continue to lose faith in our government, we may need to seek community-based answers to social problems we want to solve.

Genuine Justice is a column about reproductive justice focusing on current events, historical perspectives and systematic racism in women’s healthcare.

The post Genuine Justice: Let’s Talk About Sex appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Will Duncan is a meditation and yoga teacher who has studied the Gelugpa lineage of Tibetan Buddhism. He gave two presentations at Witching Hour 2016, one workshop called “The Art of Doing Nothing: A deep exploration of what meditation is and what it is not” and on lecture called “Lessons Learned from Three Years of Silence”. This review is on his lecture about when he stayed in silent

meditation for three years, three months, and three days in Arizona at a retreated modeled after traditional Tibetan Buddhist retreats.

There was a full audience at his lecture, which he began by saying he had “no idea” what exactly he would speak about during his hour and a half long lecture. It became clear immediately that his teaching style is easygoing and informal.

He described his three-year long retreat briefly, saying that he only uttered three words for the entire three years — two of them were “fuck”, which he explained was in response about his plumbing issues. He said that the only other word he used was “fire extinguisher,” which actually is two words, but that’s okay.

Plumbing issues can be a real nuisance, and it’s no wonder the retreatant had so much to say about them, even if it was just a handful of words. When it comes to tackling these problems, it’s essential to have a reliable service on your side. That’s where trusted experts come in. The locals trust FastLanePlumbing.ca for their swift and efficient plumbing solutions. Whether it’s a leaky faucet or a major pipe issue, having a dependable team to address your concerns can make all the difference.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by plumbing troubles, especially when they persist over time. But with the right professionals handling the job, you can rest assured that your issues will be resolved effectively. FastLanePlumbing.ca is known for their prompt response and high-quality service, ensuring that your plumbing systems are in top shape. So next time you’re dealing with a plumbing dilemma, remember that expert help is just a call away.

After sharing some funny anecdotes about spending three years in solitude and silence, he moved on to what he called the “deep” part of his lecture: the spiritual awakenings he had while meditating in retreat. He wrote the words bodhicitta and emptiness on a whiteboard and began asking the audience what they believed those words meant.

After many not quite correct answers from the audience, Will explained that this Sanskrit word essentially means “a spontaneous compassion for all humans.” However, because of the fundamental failures of English as a language, this phrase probably does not grasp the entire concept of the word.

Will began explaining how he had a realization of what he thinks bodhicitta means. What I found most interesting about this is that he continually used the language of capitalism to describe what it means to have compassion for others. He said that when you “pay” people kindness you later “receive dividends” of that action when you feel good about yourself for being kind. He then likened this good feeling you get from being kind to free espresso, saying that “all of the people in the street who need your help are just like free shots of espresso!” At one people he called meditation an investment towards having spiritual awakenings. A bit strange, but I was still on board.

Later, Will was explaining an idea from Buddhism and said “we in the East say…” and this was quite

striking to me, considering that he is a white man from America. I’m not sure that his studies at the Asian Classics Institute in Arizona or his three year meditation retreat in Arizona necessarily… make him from “the East.” But I haven’t meditated for three years in silence, so maybe that’s just something that I can’t understand yet.

Overall, the audience seemed to be very engaged by Will. Also, this event and a few others hosted at the ICPL were free to the public, which is great. Witching Hour had a great line-up this year, and it was awesome that people who couldn’t get tickets were able to participate as well.

The post Witching Hour: Lessons Learned from Three Years of Silence @ ICPL 11/5/2016 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Her primary instrument, the guzheng, was created over 2,000 years ago and has remained at the forefront of Chinese music tradition. It has 21 strings and ranges four octaves.

Before Wu Fei took the stage, the announcer from Witching Hour repeatedly mispronounced her name as he introduced her. And it’s not even hard to pronounce correctly….

But when Wu Fei came on she brought a refreshingly upbeat energy with her. She told the audience about her musical training at the China Conservatory of Music and post-graduate work in the United States. She also introduced her instrument and some of it’s long history. Then she played a classic guzheng song from Shandong, China called Yu Zhou Chang Wan.

Then she played a song called Summer Palace and explained her inspiration for the song; as a young girl she would often go to the famous Summer Palace in Beijing in the winter and ride her bike across the expansive but frozen lake. The song was very soft and nostalgic, with vocals that floated above the deep sounds of the guzheng.

Throughout the show she would share intimate details of her inspiration, longing for home, and reflections on music she has made at different points in her life.

After playing some beautiful contemporary pieces, Fei spoke of her experience moving back to Beijing after living for some years in the States. She said she felt reverse culture shock and a sense of distance from her home town and culture. At this point, she said, she clung to traditional Chinese music and felt a renewed appreciation for it. After sharing this, she played more traditional songs.

For her last song, Fei stood up and sang a Hunan opera song. She gave a background of the piece, explaining the story of Mulan, the woman who took her sick father’s place in the army draft. In the song, Mulan is explaining to her sexist military officers that women are as strong as men.

Overall, Wu Fei’s performance at Witching Hour was amazing. It’s important for all types of music to be represented at a festival that prides itself on “exploring the unknown, creative process, and new things.” But in the spirit of this mission, Witching Hour representatives should definitely make sure they know how to pronounce the artist’s name. Although Wu Fei gave an incredible performance, her artistry should not be treated as an exotic gem for a festival lineup. One of the most fundamental ways to ensure that her art is genuinely appreciated and not objectified is in the little details like correct pronunciation of a non-English name.

Check out the rest of Witching Hour’s lineup!

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Jason Sole came to Iowa City on Friday to present From Prison to PhD: A Journey of Pain, Promise, and Protest. He started his presentation asking for energy and an emotional connection from the audience, asking people “to follow what I am saying with your hearts, not just your minds.”

As Jason explained how his turbulent childhood in Chicago lead to gang membership, drug dealing, and three prison sentences, he reminded listeners that “not everyone is lucky enough to get to share their story, most people don’t make it out.” This, he explained, is because when children grow up in violent or otherwise stressful communities they are not in an emotional state that allows them to succeed.

One key reason that Jason points to to further explain why children in violent communities become vulnerable to gang membership is fatherlessness. The experience of growing up without a father creates a sense of isolation and emotional tension that are too much to bear for many children, especially when combined with early exposure to violence, drug trade, and systematic poverty.

After Jason served a long prison sentence he felt that he needed a drastic change to prevent himself from getting caught up in the everything he was doing that got him into prison. He said that “out of desperation I went to college.” After excelling in his undergraduate studies, he perused graduate and postgraduate education in criminal justice studies.

Now, Jason is a professor at Hamline University in Minnesota teaching criminal justice studies. He conducts research and has recently written a book. However, Jason is deeply involved with his local community and stressed the importance of not just being an academic. Jason is the president of the Minneapolis NAACP and is on the front lines of many Black Lives Matter events.

For the second half of his presentation, Jason explained the history of the Black Lives Matter movement and reflected on questions like “what does it mean to be black at this point in history?” He also included a lot of information about the Civil Rights Movement in the mid 20th century, and drew helpful comparisons between what was happening then and what is happening now

.

Throughout, he explained how white culture criminalizes black people and their responses to institutionalized racism. Indeed, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested many times and painted as a criminal by media and government officials. Explaining the connection between the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Lives Matter movement is crucial because now people are quick to tell black people protesting injustice that they should be more like MLK, when in actuality white people didn’t like MLK back then either.

After he was done presenting, already 15 minutes over time, he promised to take every audience question and gave extended, profound answers. It was clear how passionate he is about making sure people truly understand what he is saying. Overall, this was an amazing event.

If you’re interested in learning more about modern incarceration tactics, check out 13th on Netflix — Ava DuVernay‘s brilliant documentary about the history of prisons and the modern implications of Reagan-era bullshit.

The post Witching Hour: Jason Sole @ ICPL 11/4/2016 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

The 1960s are often referenced as a time of liberation in American culture. Free love, drug use, and social movements including women’s liberation and civil rights for Black Americans dominate popular discussion of the 60s. However, during this time of widening freedom for many social groups, Native American women were facing renewed discrimination and violence by the U.S. government.

According to a 2005 study published in Wicazo Sa Review, “from the early to mid-1960s up to 1976, between 3,4002 and 70,0003 Native women—out of only 100,000 to 150,000 women of childbearing age— were coercively, forcibly, or unwittingly sterilized permanently by tubal ligation or hysterectomy.”

Dr. Connie Pinkerton-Uri, a doctor of Choctaw and Cherokee heritage, was the first to notice the pattern of forced sterilizations done by the Indian Health Services (IHS) system. In November of 1972, a 26 year old patient asked Dr. Pinkerton-Uri for a “womb transplant” because an IHS doctor had performed a hysterectomy on her when he diagnosed her with alcoholism. After seeing two other patients who were forced to undergo sterilization by the IHS, Dr. Pinkerton-Uri started to investigate.

One tactic that the IHS routinely utilized was to sterilize women without their consent during other, unrelated surgical procedures. For example, performing a routine appendectomy and then also doing a tubal ligation without consent. According to the American Indian Quarterly in 2000, at least 25% of Native women between the ages of 15 through 45 were coercively sterilized during the 1970s. This is an overwhelming portion of the population.

The Guttmacher Institute finds that today, 25.9% of women have undergone some type of sterilization surgery as their chosen method of contraception. For the rate of Native women who were forced to have a sterilization to be the same rate as the amount of women who haven chosen to have the procedure done demonstrates how far this systematic sterilization campaign went.

It is important to analyze this injustice in the broader context of the relationship between Native people and the United States government. Since the first  Europeans came to the Americas, they have sought to manipulate and eventually exterminate Natives. This happened in many regions of the Americas — indigenous people in what is now Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Central and South American countries were all targeted and brutalized by European settlers. In this way, the violence of forced sterilization is nothing new and in fact only continues the history of genocide of Native people by the U.S. government; according to international law, targeting racial groups and trying to prevent them from giving birth is an act of genocide.

This has had a grave impact on Native communities. Dr. Pinkerton-Uri found that the IHS “singled out full-blooded Indian women for sterilization procedures.”, and had a larger initiative to reduce the birthrate of Native American tribes. From the 1970s to the 1980s, the birthrate among all Native tribes dropped drastically.

The impact of forced sterilization on individuals and communities cannot be overstated. It is one of the most violent ways that the state can destroy a person’s bodily autonomy. Because of the severity of this issue, I will be writing in later columns about other groups that have been targeted by the U.S. government, including Black and Latina women.

Genuine Justice is a column about reproductive justice focusing on current events, historical perspectives and systematic racism in women’s healthcare. 

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“Hello, I’m Adia Victoria, and this is my band. And we are going to sing the blues.”

Adia Victoria is a blues singer originally from South Carolina. With a turbulent childhood in the conservative and racist South, she now writes music about a variety of topics, including love, loss, and her experiences as a black woman in White America. Many songs in her setlist at the Mill on Friday night were from her first album, Blood of the Bloodhound. This is a reference to “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl“, a slave narrative by Harriet Jacobs that overturns the liberalist perspective of white abolitionists (read the book here).

Before Victoria came on stage at the Mill, Iowa City’s Younger opened the show. A well-known local band, Younger had an interested audience and a few people dancing by the end of the set. Although there were problems with intonation throughout the show, the three-piece band played with enthusiasm and good stage presence.

However, nothing can beat the charisma of the main performer of the night, Adia Victoria. The minute she came onto the stage, she commanded the audience’s attention. She started with “Out of Love,” and everyone in her five-piece band was really engaged, and appeared comfortable performing with each other.

When she began “Howl and Shame,” the band slowed the song down to half the speed of the original recording, creating a sound like thick molasses. At that point, early on in the show, I could feel the intimacy between the performers and the audience.

Afterwards, she began “Stuck in the South” by singing the first verse a cappella. When she got to the chorus the instrumentation came in with striking intensity. The way she sang gave the song a conversational effect; when she sang the lyrics “I don’t know nothin’ bout Southern belles, but I can tell you somethin’ bout Southern hell” it really felt like she was speaking one-on-one with each audience member.

Throughout the show, Adia Victoria seemed at once very solemn and casual. She performs with so much power, it’s obvious that she takes her art seriously. Yet she is also gentle and at ease on stage. At different points in the set she would pull her braids out of a hair-tie, and then one song later put them back up. Between songs she would make little jokes or tell the audience to buy her album, commenting “My credit card machine is broken, but there is an ATM outside. And don’t tell me about ATM fees, because I vomited in a gas station parking lot in Green Bay, Wisconsin on the way here, so I did my part.”

She also made very personal comments throughout the show. Before performing “Invisible Hands” she said “My parents sent to me a good Christian school, and it fucked me up real good, so I’m gonna sing about it.” Toward the end of the show, she said that “It wasn’t until I fund the blues that I found my roots.” This gave a very vulnerable dimension to her performance. At another point in the show, she went into the crowd and sang to people standing in front of the stage.

Victoria and her band ended the show with an encore, singing “Ain’t I a Woman”, inspired by the famous speech by Sojourner Truth.

Here is Adia Victoria’s website

Here are upcoming shows at the Mill

The post Concert Review: Adia Victoria @ The Mill 9/23/16 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Yet, like all things, the language we choose to use when discussing this topic is important and affects what we say. So I wanted to highlight the differences and similarities between the terms reproductive health, reproductive rights and reproductive justice because they aren’t interchangeable (like I once thought).

Reproductive health is a fairly straightforward concept. It’s the health and healthcare

services related to human reproductive systems. Natal care, STI treatment, HPV vaccination and use of contraception are all aspects of reproductive health.

Although easily stated, reproductive health is not easily understood by the American population. According to the Center for Disease Control last November, “The approximately 1.4 million reported chlamydia cases – odds of getting chlamydia are above the average, a rate of 456.1 cases per 100,000 population, is up 2.8 percent since 2013. Rates of primary and secondary (P&S) syphilis – the most infectious stages of syphilis –and gonorrhea have both increased since 2013, by 15.1 percent and 5.1 percent, respectively.”

Of course, there are an incredible number of health determinants that affect reproductive health. But something simple to draw from these statistics is that reproductive health can be tricky, especially when it comes to accessing reproductive healthcare services. This is why it’s important to understand the next two terms, reproductive rights and reproductive justice.

The term reproductive rights may be the most widely used in public dialog about women’s health. Loosely, it is understood to mean “a woman’s right to choose” and is closely associated with abortion. For more about abortion, check out these additional resources.

Use of the word “rights” indicates the legal aspect of fair reproductive healthcare access.

Legal access to abortion is a highly politicized issue in American culture today, but this wasn’t always the case. At the founding of the United States, abortion was much easier to attain than today. According to Rickie Solinger in her book “Reproductive Politics”, women could ask any doctor for an abortion until quickening – when the woman felt any movement fetal movement. It wasn’t until 1821 that Connecticut’s predominantly Catholic population moved to outlaw abortion state-wide. By 1910, every state in the union had anti-abortion laws.

In the 1960s, the reproductive rights movement took off and continued on with the formation of many advocacy groups, including the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL Pro-Choice America) and the Committee for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse (CARASA).

Reproductive justice broadens the aforementioned concepts by including economic, social and health factors in the conversation. Issues like steady access to WIC (a public program that helps feed mothers, infants and children), publicly supported child-care, an end to forced or coerced sterilization and comprehensive sex education in schools are all central to reproductive justice. While reproductive health and rights are a necessary foundation, advocates working for reproductive justice understand that a lot more goes into decision-making and autonomy than just those factors.

This more holistic approach was pioneered by women of color. While white women led the fight for abortion rights in the 60s, women of color were working together to ensure that women have more options and approaches to live a balanced life. Jennifer Nelson’s book “Women of Color and the Reproductive Rights Movement” cites many organizations formed by women of color during the women’s movement, including CARASA, the Redstockings, the Third World Women’s Alliance, and the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO). Given the importance of these organizations to reproductive justice, I plan to profile some of these groups and their leaders later on in this column.

Genuine Justice is a column about reproductive justice focusing on current events, historical perspectives and racism in women’s healthcare. 

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