In the United States 25 states do not allow legal access to abortion, or have heavy restrictions according to the Center for Reproductive Rights. Organizations like Planned Parenthood provide reproductive healthcare with one goal: to expand opportunities for women in those states. The reproductive rights panel in the Brookline Booksmith was hosted on Friday, Jan. 16 as a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood.
The panelists consisted of: Mason Dunn, an advocate at Planned Parenthood; Annie Cardi, author of Red; Meghan Elizabeth Kallman, author of The Conceivable Future and a Rhode Island state senator; Loretta Ross, a professor who, along with professor Marlene Gerber Fried, wrote a recent book Abortion and Reproductive Justice; An Essential Guide for Resistance. The panelists chatted about their books and emphasized the small steps that could be taken to get around abortion bans with just one being community.
During the panel, they discussed how to work with people you disagree with. According to Dunn, empathy is Planned Parenthood’s greatest strength. Fried said the communities that come together through oppression are what are helping each other.
“The thing about community is that it does save lives,” Fried said. “I was looking at the history of birthing back in the day when women knew that birth was likely going to kill them more than anything, so they had these communities ready to take care of their kids because they didn’t know if they were going to make it.”
Kallman said that community is essential in this modern age as well.
“If you find yourself in need of contraception and perhaps you are 16 or 17 and your parents are not supportive of that, who are you going to go to? You’re going to go to possibly a friend, a friend’s parents, an auntie [or] a neighbor. That is where the richness of connection comes in,” Kallman said.
The authors discussed the connections to their books. Cardi’s book Red, a graphic novel about a religious teenager who becomes pregnant, discusses how she hopes her book promotes a world where people can live in their bodies without shame, especially when women are taught their bodies are a liability.
Fried said the fight for reproductive rights is so important because the limited rights in the U.S. never do protect everyone.
“Even though [reproductive rights] is a fragile right,” Fried said. “It belongs to everybody.”
Ross, who started her fight for reproductive rights after being unwillingly sterilized by a doctor, and Fried talked about how their book connects to all points of history, such as resistance to laws, colonialism and reproductive rights. Ross emphasized the importance of looking beyond someone’s beliefs and to try and understand them.
“People are actually far more complicated than the labels that we attach to them for our convenience,” Ross said. “If you appreciate the complexity of other people, other people can appreciate your complexity as well.”
