California Feminist Blogs

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.

Candace Gibson, University of Utah College of Law

I was very hesitant to start a Law Students for Reproductive Justice chapter at the University of Utah for three reasons:  1) I’m starting my last year-I’m already exhausted and I don’t want to do any more work, 2) it’s Utah, enough said, and 3) the most terrifying reason-how about if no one wants to join the group and it’s just me and my two friends who do claim a feminist identity (I will just be preaching to the choir).  Luckily, my experiences have brought me back to the lessons I learned as a community organizer which have significantly reduced my stress and my hesitancy.

The first couple of weeks of September I was scrambling to get an executive board together (though I am proud to say that the U of U LSRJ has an awesome one that is composed of all three class years!) and at first no one was really chomping at the bit.  Can I blame my 3L friends for saying that they already have too much on their plates? No, I can’t.  Although at desperate moments I thought I was going to be doing all the work and had the recurring thought late at night, “what did I get myself into?” LSRJ made me tap into the lessons that I learned during my community organizing days in college.  These two basic lessons were:  One, there can be no movement without starting a conversation.  Two, people aren’t going to jump on board unless you meet them where they are.  Of course, my peers weren’t going to volunteer for every task and position because all of us were getting barely comfortable with the concept that we were starting an organization at a school that never had an organization like LSRJ, one that was so revolutionary in nature about a subject that is taboo in Utah.  Hell, I was still getting comfortable with the idea.  How can I ask someone to give their precious time when I’m not completely sold on it? As I become more enamored of U of U LSRJ and its potential, I’m not afraid to ask individuals for their time, money, and support.  As these conversations occur, my friends and my peers are willing to volunteer their time or serve on the executive board, and I appreciate every contribution.  Without them, there would be no way that U of U LSRJ can grow.  I also fully know as a community organizer that there may be days where everyone’s personal lives need to be attended to and I will just have to step up to the plate.  As organizers, we often forget that our personal lives will not stop for our professional and public lives.

My experiences have also reminded me of the sheer joy that is part of community organizing.  During the introductory meeting, a future member of the executive board understood the principles of Reproductive Justice so much that she had this enormous smile on her face.  We had made a connection.  These connections and small moments of spontaneity and laughter are going to sustain the group whenever we have our frustrations with each other, with the campus, or with people who just don’t want to understand Reproductive Justice.

The (free) 2011 Women Peacemakers Forum, "Women, Media, Revolution" is coming up! Acting Together on the World Stage, a premiere and panel discussion of a documentary film on artists, peacebuilders, and community leaders "who use theatre to speak truth to power" will kick off the forum at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Oct. 5th and the closing reception will be at 3 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 7th at USD's Joan B. Kroc Institution for Peace and Justice. Taken from the USD website, "Women, Media, Revolution"

is a free public forum to encounter frontline journalists, filmmakers and social media citizen activists engaged in the critical examination of women in conflict and how they are using their voices in a revolution against ongoing political and cultural violence.Coverage of women during conflict often focuses solely on violations of women’s rights to physical security and psychological well-being. It must also unmask the cultural traditions that deny women’s human rights and involvement in decision-making that could change the course of violence in their communities.

This looks SO cool! It features a conversation with Zainab Salbi, founder and CEO of Women for Women International, film screenings, panel discussions on writing, reporting, films/documentaries, TV, & social media.

Did I mention it's free? :D Hope to see you there!

Susy Prochazka, Thomas Jefferson School of Law

San Diego has a reputation as a socially and political conservative city, especially with the large military presence of the Navy and a large population of veterans. Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego is no exception to this conservative atmosphere (on the part of both the students and administration). The school’s chapters of the Federalist Society, the Republican Students Association, and the Christian Legal Society have a large and vocal membership base. Throughout our LSRJ chapter’s relatively short span on campus, we have faced both explicit and subtle opposition from students and administration.

This opposition has ranged from certain members of the Student Bar Association stating that they do not wish to work with the “abortion club” to blatant theft of our chapter’s documents and materials.  Recently, we have faced the issue of censorship of an event flyer by the school’s administration and faculty. At our new fancy campus, student orgs have a lot of problems advertising events because no one is allowed to post flyers anywhere in the building. To advertize, a student organization must send a PDF file to the administration to get our flyers put on the 6 electronic touch-screens throughout the building.

For our first event, we had planned our Sex-Ed Trivia Night at a local happy hour. It is one of our most popular events, and we timed it to take place right after the student org fair to rake in 1Ls and other prospective members. To advertise the event, our co-chair, Thomas, produced an absolutely amazing poster, guaranteed to catch attention and bring in attendees. Our flyer had a black and purple background, with a pair of woman’s legs in heels, and with the event details underneath the simple high heels. Nothing lewd, nothing sexually-explicit, nothing to suggest that this was a portrayal of a stripper. It was simply a poster to generate interest and gain attention through a little flair of suggestiveness.

But after submitting our flyer, we immediately received a response from our administration letting us know that the school has been working over the years to improve its reputation in the community, and that our flyer posed a threat to the school’s image of professionalism. This would be understandable, if there was perhaps a stripper pole or nudity in the background of the flyer. But there was not. What is most aggravating is the fact that our Entertainment and Fashion Law Society hosted a fashion show last semester and advertized through flyers depicting women’s legs in high heels. Thus, while such imagery is acceptable for a student org working in the realm of fashion law, when LSRJ attempts to use an almost identical image, but with the key difference of it containing the word “sex,” LSRJ is “unprofessional” and tarnishing the school’s image. Unfair, but not surprising.

In response, we toyed with the idea of making a poster advertizing our Sex-Ed Trivia Night emblazoned with the word “censored” in giant, red letters. We settled on a light-hearted (perhaps somewhat passive-aggressive) flyer that shows only a grey tabby kitten clambering around in tea cup. Ironically, this generated even more interest in the event and allowed us to hold actual conversations about reproductive justice with students. Many people asked what a kitten in a tea cup has to do with reproductive justice, and we were able to explain the censorship we had encountered with the original flyer – while some people shrugged and were very underwhelmed, some people were outraged.  In the end, this had the effect of creating more support and solidarity for our LSRJ chapter at our school. 

To even further complicate this event, San Diego experienced a massive blackout that lasted for over 12 hours on the day we had scheduled Trivia Night. The event was postponed for several weeks, and will happen this Friday. Hopefully there will be an amazing turnout!

Unfortunately, this troublesome instance of censorship is not the only one we have faced. To encourage donations for the San Diego AIDS Walk, LSRJ had a “Money for Condoms” campaign, where people that donated money to the Walk received condoms in exchange. Some students and administration disapproved and asked that we not solicit in the main lobby of the building or be so blatant with the condoms. Oh no, people have sex! And they have it safely!

Our chapter of LSRJ plans to address and overcome the censorship we have faced in our school throughout this year. So far, we have managed to turn this opposition in our favor, generating more support and interest from like-minded students and faculty. We will continue to do so and look forward to the challenge!

Below is a clip featuring Marlene Dietrich (real name Marie Magdalene Dietrich), bisexual film star active from the 1920s-80s, in drag for the film Morocco (1930). Dressing in men's clothing was very scandalous for the time but Dietrich takes it a step further when she kisses another actress (at around the 2:17 mark in the clip).

Other classic actresses that had relationships with women were Greta Garbo and Tallulah Bankhead. Bankhead, who coined the phrase "Hello Dahling," has also been quoted saying "My daddy warned me about men and booze but he didn’t say a word about women and cocaine!”

Hay everybody, I'm sorry for being such a terrible blogger lately. I'm buried under a mound of books/articles at all times (currently reading Alice Echols' Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture, Susan McClary's "Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshy," Nancy Chodorow's "The Psychodynamics of Family," Cynthia Levine-Rasky's Working Through Whiteness, et al).

In other news, St. Vincent's Strange Mercy is off the chain!

Oh and here are some cool tumblrs:

fuck yeah fashion dykes: "Any and all queer and queer-friendly style inspirations."

FuckYeahPoliticalCartoons Self-explanatory, right?

sexgenderbody: "A direct, honest and respectful conversation about sex, gender & body."

Queer Secrets: Like an LGBTQIAP Post Secret.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.