EMERJ Blog

Wanderlust Story Collective and Bike Caravan Coming to Town!!

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 19:48:19 GMT

This summer, a group of sixteen women are traveling from New Orleans to New York City on a reproductive justice bike tour. In solidarity with local activists and rooted in the belief that sharing stories is a powerful way to elevate awareness and create social change, we'll be pedaling from town to town to listen to your stories and document how you and others are working to expand access to reproductive health care, defend reproductive rights, and promote reproductive justice.

It's a story collective - it's a bicycle caravan - it's building the movement for reproductive justice!

The goals of the trip are to document the inspirational, groundbreaking work happening across the country and build horizontal networks to strengthen our collective movement for reproductive health, rights, and justice.

THE INVITATION: Do you or does someone you know live along the route? We're looking for health care providers, sex educators, reproductive justice advocates, policy changers, radical activists, doulas, midwives, culture jammers, and anyone who is working to empower women to control their bodies and their lives.

Join us to share your story at a Wanderlust discussion gathering. We're interested in knowing what you do and why you do it, what the important issues in your community are, and how we can work together to build a strong and vibrant movement for social change. We would like to share your story in order to support your work and raise awareness around the issues and concerns in your community.

TOUR DATES

Saturday, May 24th New Orleans, LA

Wednesday, May 28th Mobile, AL

Tuesday, June 3rd Birmingham, AL

Saturday, June 7th Atlanta, GA

Tuesday, June 10th Augusta, GA

Saturday, June 14th Charleston, SC

Saturday, June 21st Chapel Hill, NC

Thursday, June 26th Washington, DC

Friday, June 27th Baltimore, MD

Monday, June 30th Philadelphia, PA

Tuesday, July 1st Princeton, NJ

Wednesday, July 2nd New York City

INTERESTED? If you'd like to join the Wanderlust story collective and bicycle caravan for a gathering when we come through your town, please fill out this survey by clicking here,

or email wanderlust@protectchoice.org and let us know where you are and what you do.

We're also looking for people to host the riders as they come through town - if you are willing to let all or some of the riders stay with you, that would be delightful!

If you're able to host please email wanderlust@protectchoice.org and let us know.

For more information about Wanderlust, please visit www.protectchoice.org

Wanderlust is a program of the
Pro-Choice Public Education Project.

some thoughts on RJ

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 18:58:59 GMT

     I first heard the words “reproductive justice” more than two years ago at a job interview with Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice. Fresh out of college, I had majored in politics and Asian American studies, had several years of social justice work under my belt, and thought I’d heard it all. Reproductive justice? What is that, I thought, abortion rights? I felt confused. What did I know about reproductive justice? A great deal, as it turns out.
    My background in feminist, immigrant rights, racial justice, and queer/ trans activism was characterized by work in separate spheres (though it gave me a foundation for understanding reproductive justice later on). In the past, I’d struggled in predominantly white feminist spaces that did not confront race issues. In LGBT spaces, I often encountered racism and xenophobia. I valued the work we did together, but it was painful at times trying to reconcile all the issues important to me as a queer immigrant woman of color. For two years I served as communications coordinator for ACRJ where I was able to finally reconcile what I had learned to believe were conflicting identities.
    What reproductive justice offers is another way of understanding our community and our work. It offers a broader, more comprehensive framework for appreciating our shared experiences and encourages us to embrace the intersectionality of our identities and draw strength from it. The RJ framework helps those doing work in silos to consciously and strategically move together toward a common goal. For ACRJ, that objective is to achieve economic, social and political power and resources for ourselves, our families and our communities so that we can make healthy decisions about our bodies, our sexuality and our reproduction. After all, at end of the day, we all live the very real consequences of injustice.
    When transfolks in our communities are denied housing, employment or health care, that oppression is experienced in tangible ways. When Vietnamese nail salon workers are not given the necessary tools and information to protect themselves in a toxic industry that is the only viable job opportunity for many recent immigrants, that oppression is also experienced in tangible ways. When communities are actively targeted or left to fend for itself with little to no resources, it’s a kind of slow, institutionalized sterilization. This has everything to do with our bodies and our reproduction.
    Through organizing, ACRJ brings individuals together to look at the real effects of oppression in their community and to find ways to change it. By building leadership capacity, we offer people the tools they need to create power for themselves. When we develop strong alliances, we can span across boundaries and achieve more than we can in isolation. By offering educational resources, we increase the knowledge that we have in our communities. These efforts are born from shared values and a common vision. It allows us to achieve systemic change without compromising our diversity.
    Many of our kindred organizations work with individuals and local communities. By building alliances among organizations nationwide and strengthening the leadership and organizing capacities of grassroots efforts, EMERJ helps to pool our shared knowledge and develop resources for a stronger, more vibrant reproductive justice movement. What EMERJ does is national movement building work founded on social justice organizing principles.   Drawing upon the RJ framework, EMERJ recognizes the strength we all have when we work and exist collaboratively, rather than in isolation.

Diana Ming Yin is a graduate student and writing fellow at Boston University. She has previously served as communications coordinator for Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice and worked with several grassroots groups on feminist, racial justice, queer/trans lib, and immigration rights issues.

At Least You Have Your Health: Women’s Health and Reproductive Justice

Wed, 12 Dec 2007 14:19:21 GMT

In order to ensure that our lives are free from control and exploitation, we must ensure the health and well-being of our bodies. The regulation of women’s bodies happens in many public and private institutional and social arenas, and as reproductive justice activists we must actively incorporate a broader vision for women’s health into our organizing.

To really understand what this framework can offer, let’s look carefully at how we might answer some common questions about women’s health through a reproductive justice framework.

What is health? The first and most important element of this approach is to keep in mind the multi-faceted nature of what it means to be healthy. A measure of health is often made by assessing a woman’s physical needs. This is central and inexorable. However, reproductive justice pushes us to think more broadly by thinking about the political, cultural, economic, racial, institutional and environmental factors that pertain to bodily health. A reproductive justice based approach enables us to consider not only what illness a woman might have, but also the social factors (environmental toxins, access to preventative care, community health education, etc.) that make her more or less prone to getting sick and more or less able to afford treatment. This comprehensive approach changes the meaning of “health” rather dramatically. It no longer simply refers to whether or not a person is sick or whether or not a woman can get reproductive health care. Instead, it allows us to diagnose the factors that contribute to, or detract from, overall wellbeing, not merely for a single woman but also for her family and the community in which she lives.

What is reproductive health? A woman’s ability to control her body and its reproductive capacity is central to securing overall health. It is more than access to abortion. Including comprehensive reproductive care like abortion and contraception are the tip of a very deep iceberg. Acknowledging a history of eugenics and population control, the reproductive justice approach aims to ensure that women have all the medical and social resources they need to have children, as well as the right to control when and how they become mothers. This awareness means that we must advocate for abortion and contraception as well as:

Maternity care, including pre- and post-natal care and infertility treatment;
A range of birth options including midwives, doulas and alternative care providers;
Mental health services;
Preventative care, including but not limited to, pap-smears, vaccinations (i.e. HPV), childbirth education, and mammograms;
Services that are ethnically and culturally competent;
Care that is sensitive to people of all different genders and sexual orientations and addresses their unique concerns; and finally
Ensure that any and all health care services are economically and physically accessible to women and their families.

How do we ensure health? A vision of women’s health that utilizes the reproductive justice framework calls on us to strategically consider incorporating the leadership of women of color, poor women and young women in order to determine their needs and decipher a course of action based on their lived experiences. Here are some strategic considerations:

We must advocate for health care that is not exclusionary on the basis of race, gender, age, sexuality or citizenship. Expanding current healthcare systems will not be sufficient -- we must acknowledge and actively address these disparities.
In order to address the depth and breadth of these disparities we must mobilize people from allied social justice and human rights organizations and think of “health” as expansively as possible.
We must integrate this broad-based grassroots organizing into this advocacy and use it to inform our legal strategies in health care advocacy.

It is a broad brush with which reproductive justice paints a picture of women’s health. But in order to effectively ensure that our communities are viable and healthy, we must commit to a comprehensive and inclusive reproductive justice approach. I’ve only outlined a few of the key components, I look forward to a dialogue with the reproductive justice community on how to make sure our communities are safe and healthy.

Eesha Pandit is currently Director of Advocacy at Merger Watch. She is also a weekly staff writer for RH Reality Check. Recently, Eesha served as Associate Director of Programs at the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program, and has also worked with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University and Amnesty International USA's Women's Rights Program. She is a graduate of Mount Holyoke College and the University of Chicago.

Guidelines for posting content on the EMERJ Community Circle

Tue, 04 Dec 2007 19:01:22 GMT

Guidelines for posting content on the EMERJ Community circle

The EMERJ Community circle is a vehicle to lift up the voices of your community and to share your reproductive justice stories. Anyone who is a member of the EMERJ Community circle can post a blog entry, write a news article, upload a document, or upload photos to stay connected with each other's work and to share news, updates, and reflections about how we are advancing reproductive justice in our communities.

We invite to you post content about:

1) The reproductive justice issues you see in your community

2) The reproductive justice work you’re doing in your community

3) The movement building work you’re doing for reproductive justice

4) Your experiences and reflections around your connection to the Reproductive Justice Movement

Please be advised that the EMERJ Community circle is NOT intended for

Communicating with individual members of the EMERJ Community (please link to individual members’ profiles to send them messages)
Providing comments and suggestions regarding EMERJ tools, strategies, and activities (please email emerj [at] reproductivejustice.org)

We reserve the right to remove any content that does not respect these guidelines.

If you have questions, please contact us at emerj [at] reproductivejustice.org BEFORE you post any content.

Thank you!

EMERJ Strategy Team

Are you ready to build a movement?

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 21:14:35 GMT

From young mothers of color demanding quality education and affordable childcare, to incarcerated transgender people challenging the human rights abuses within the prison industrial complex, to immigrant families resisting deportation raids to keep their families together, people all around the country are fighting for reproductive justice in their communities every day.

If you’re reading this, it means that you are part of the EMERJ Community – a national network of reproductive justice activists and advocates – and that you, too are working to advance reproductive justice in your community. And together, we are building a strong and vibrant Reproductive Justice Movement.

What do we mean when we say we’re fighting for reproductive justice?

Reproductive justice exists when all people have the social, political, and economic power and resources to make healthy decisions about our gender, bodies, and sexuality for our selves, our families, and our communities. To achieve this, we must challenge the policies and institutionalized practices that aim to control and regulate individual bodies, which becomes a powerful strategic pathway to controlling entire communities. Because reproductive injustice is a result of multiple oppressions based on race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, age, immigration status, and geographic region, our fight for reproductive justice is inherently connected to the larger struggle for social justice.

When we place reproductive health and rights within a social justice framework, we are striving for long-term change at individual, community, institutional, and societal levels. To do this, we must organize individuals and communities to change structural power inequities. So rather than merely relying on services or policies, reproductive justice is about building power and leadership of grassroots communities so that those who are most impacted by reproductive injustice have the self-determination to be a part creating and implementing solutions.

What is so unique about the Reproductive Justice Movement that makes it so powerful and vibrant? It goes way beyond a single-issue focus, spanning a broad range of issues that impact our lives in so many ways. The reproductive justice framework recognizes that everything in our lives is connected, and we can’t just separate our selves from our families, our body parts from our mind and spirit, parts of our identity from one another – we really have to address the issues impacting out lives comprehensively. Reproductive justice is also rooted in building alliances and working collectively across issues and movements to fight for the needs of all of our communities, which makes us much stronger and more effective than working on our issues in isolation.

There is no better time than now!

Right now is a critical political moment in our country. Over the past few years, reproductive justice has been gaining momentum, with a rapidly growing number of leaders and organizations using the reproductive justice framework. Meanwhile, the Right is losing ground and progressives are gaining power at the state level. And with the rise of activism around immigrant rights, universal healthcare, and climate change, there are increasing opportunities to build alliances and collaborate across issues and movements.

This is a moment in time that calls for bold action and holistic approaches to change that reflect the realities of our communities. We need a coordinated strategy where everyone who is working to achieve reproductive justice can come together and move our selves toward a shared vision. We can do this by building a stronger and more vibrant Reproductive Justice Movement, and that is what EMERJ has set out to do. And because you are part of EMERJ, you are building the movement too!

*****

Want to learn more about EMERJ? Go to www.emerj.org to check our tools and strategies!

Want to read more about the reproductive justice framework? Download A New Vision, available in the “Files to Download” section of the EMERJ Community Circle (scroll all the way to the bottom of the page!).

*****

Maria Nakae is the Alliance Building Coordinator and a New Voices Fellow at Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice (ACRJ). Her work at ACRJ involves building alliances, conducting trainings, and developing tools and resources to advance the Reproductive Justice Movement.

Our first post

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 20:06:06 GMT

Just want to say hello to the EMERJ Community!