Young Women Continue the Fight!

                        Young Women Continue the Fight!

As a member of the Bad Old Days Posse, I am proud of the work we do to bring the stories of illegal abortion in the 1960s to young women in schools and universities.  We’ve been doing this for four years and many of the groups we visit want to know what they can do to help women get safe reproductive health care including abortion in the face of the continuing efforts by Republicans and the Christian right to eliminate body autonomy for women.

This past fall we spoke to a few groups who have inspired us with their courage, energy, and dedication to women’s rights. So I’m devoting this post to their activities in support of reproductive justice.  Their activities are mainly local which is where everyone should start but some have national significance and influence.

At Boston University we met with Students for Reproductive Freedom.  This is a very active group.  In 2019 BU students started working on installing a Plan B machine in the student union.  After five years of work (delayed by the pandemic) the machine was installed in the student union in March of 2022.  The vending machine offers a generic version of Plan B (emergency contraception not medication abortion) for only $7.50, well below the cost at a pharmacy and much more private.  The two students who spearheaded this effort, Molly Baker and Charlotte Beatty put it this way in article in the Boston Globe.

“Unfortunately, Molly and I and the rest of our club aren’t going to have a lot of sway

with the Supreme Court,” said Beatty, then a senior at BU. “But what we can do is

make sure people [on campus] have access to emergency contraceptive.”  Boston Globe, 3/27/22.

This group continues to fight for reproductive rights.  On the evening the Posse spoke to them the room was packed. Students listened attentively, told their own stories, and asked thoughtful questions.  They also talked about their continued efforts to educate on campus, and to assist states with abortion questions on the ballot.  On campus they were planning a Halloween event that included passing out baggies filled with candies and condoms.  The group also hosted an event for vote forward (votefwd.org).  They wrote letters to voters in Ohio and Virginia who had important elections in the 2023 election cycle. In the letters they explain why they vote and encourage the recipients to vote as well. (We know they helped out there!) Thank you to Ohio, Kentucky, and Virginia and Pennsylvania for letting politicians know where the people stand on abortion!

The following week we met with a combined group of UMass Chan Medical Students for Choice and the UMass Women’s Health Optional Enrichment Elective. The Women’s Health Elective is a semester long class organized by students that covers abortion, substance use in pregnancy, the misrepresentation of female anatomy in medical education, adolescent medicine for young women, and menopause.  Again, they were an active engaged group who told their own stories as well. One student told us that she came to UMass because she knew that in her home state, she would not get courses on abortion and reproductive care.

Like many similar medical students around the country, this group had become increasingly concerned about the lack of courses on reproductive health and abortion.  On October 6, 2022, students at UMass Chan Medical School demonstrated along with medical students nationwide to advocate for reproductive justice issues including safe, legal, accessible abortion; gender-affirming care; comprehensive access to sex education and contraception and affordable health insurance.

Thanks to this effort and their continued work UMass Chan instituted a new curriculum called VISTA which is meant to be more inclusive and updated.  Students are hoping that the new curriculum is inclusive of important topics for women and marginalized sex and gender minorities.

Finally at a recent meeting of a local pro-choice group, a high school student described her experience at a town wide event.  She was managing a booth for the group and as part of the design had blown up a map of the fifty states based on research from the Guttmacher Institute.  The map shows the full range of abortion access in each state from those that have completely banned abortion to those where abortion is legal and fully accessible.  She said that many more students came to the booth than she had expected.  Since many of them will be applying to schools and colleges within the next two to four years, her hope is that they will consider states where abortion is legal and accessible.

These young women found ways to support abortion and contraception in their own communities and to assist women in other states.  They are making a difference and we in the Posse are proud to know them.