reproductive freedom

Making Sure Smoking Cessation Works for Everybody

/ Mira / Leave a comment

Thank you to Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan for giving me the opportunity to share the story of what we’re doing at the Grand Rapids Pride Center and other LGBT organizations in conjunction with the State of Michigan.

Screen Shot 2016-05-23 at 10.23.00 AM

Smoking rates in the LGBT community, and many other minority communities, are higher in Michigan than in the general population. This mirrors a national phenomenon. And it’s not okay.

…Although I’ve been an advocate for public health for some time, smoking cessation hadn’t been one of my core issues, until the last couple of years, when MDHHS and this project helped me realize how important it is. I’ve also been thinking about how all the work I do on public health topics – on helping Michiganders be healthier and helping Michigan communities be more inclusive — intersect with my own desire to start a family. Mother’s Day came and went recently, and alongside thankfulness for my own mother, it is a time for me to renew my commitment to seeing a world where all people can choose to have or not have healthy, loving families, on their own terms, just as I wish to be able to do.

And smoking and family planning are related.

Read the rest over at Planned Parenthood Advocates of Michigan. And please support Planned Parenthood! They’re a resource our communities depend upon, and we must stand in solidarity with them and shut down the baseless attacks made against them.

A Brief Note on Self-Policing

/ Mira / Leave a comment

This brief piece is a response to recent comments by Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, as can be seen here or here, for example. It builds on my call to build an inclusive feminism, as well as to create a culture of calling in, wherever possible (sometimes, it is admittedly not possible). 

DWSPortrait

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL) was the source of recent controversy for blaming the loss of reproductive freedom on women born since Roe v. Wade.

In the spirit of calling Ms. Wasserman-Schultz in, rather than out, her statements really help reiterate the importance of teaching the powerful role of self-policing in patriarchy / kyriararchy processes. The system knows that no one will ever guard the cages in which women are held better than the women themselves. The “system” benefits by pitting women against women, because it frees up its resources to focus on robbing our rights from us.

When a woman lashes out at other women – young women in this case (even as young as me, since Roe v. Wade has been in place all my life) – it is not a random act of relational aggression. It is a design of the system. I should like to see Ms. Wasserman-Schultz learn this. I should like to see every woman learn this.

Self-policing is part of what makes these processes like patriarchy so insidious and so difficult to eradicate. A crucial thing for us all to understand is that, because we were born in cages, we do not know fully what the freedom we are creating looks like. None of us has ever seen a world in which women matter – a world truly free of misogyny. We have never seen a world without the cages we are trying to destroy, even when we have broken free temporarily from them. And far more powerful than the bars of the cage is the belief by many caged people – women in our case – that there is no cage, or worse, that the cage is where we belong.

When Ms. Wasserman-Shultz understands this, she will understand that, even when it is true that women are enforcing the patriarchy (which is not at all true of the entire class of women who are under 43 years of age, but in this case, is true of her, herself), we need to educate them, precisely because we believe that women (and every other marginalized group) deserve to be free. And irrespective of everything else (e.g., if she is asked or choses to step down), it is my hope that we all do exactly this for her, and for anyone else who makes these kinds of missteps.