Leah627
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It’s my second year back at Hampshire College, for what is, in my mind, one of the most empowering weekends of the year. This conference, entitled “From Abortion Rights to Social Justice: Building the Movement for Reproductive Freedom,” and sponsored by the Civil Liberties & Public Policy Group, brings together student and community activists from around the country to share their stories, build the movement for reproductive justice, and, as Marlene Gerber Fried put it, “to re-charge and inspire each other.” In the following series of posts, I will feature notable words, moments and ideas from the opening plenary session as well as various workshops.
Marlene Gerber Fried, longtime CLPP director and current interim President of Hampshire College, shared three lessons from her years as a reproductive justice activist at the Opening Plenary Session.
Here they are:
Lesson 1: Stay close to the reality that drives your activism."
Gerber Fried told conference attendants one woman’s story to illustrate her point. She had come across this particular woman at an abortion clinic. When the woman got there, she realized that she was short $100 needed for the abortion. The woman had her 11-month old baby along with her, and, panicked and desperate, she began to take items out of the baby’s diaper bag and try to sell them to the other women in the waiting room. Gerber Fried concludes that,"Last night’s [abortion] speak-out grounded all of us in the reality of women’s reproductive and sexual lives," Gerber Fried reminded us. "My work puts me daily in touch with the reality of abortion in this country, not the rhetoric-- the reality.”
Lesson 2: Resist the fragmentation of issues and movements.“Listening to women on the margins tells us what we need to be fighting for.”
As Audre Lorde said,
Gerber Fried built on Lorde’s words, emphasizing that“There is no such thing as a single issue struggle because we do not live single issue lives.”
Lesson 3: Go deep. Understand the fight that we are in, so that we will understand what we are fighting for.CLPP is “a reproductive justice organization…and we are committed to keep pushing the margins and the edges out so that more people will come into that circle.”
Gerber Freid shared a quote from the late Dr. Tiller, emphasizing the urgency of abortion rights:
Finally, she shared some words of encouragement, words that are needed especially in these past few months full of legislative threats to essential women’s health care:“This battle is about the self-determination of women over the direction and course of their lives. Abortion is about women’s hopes and dreams. Abortion is a matter of survival. Abortion is not a choice. It’s a right.”
I’m looking forward to more re-charging and inspiration—stay tuned for more radical roundups from the CLPP 30th Anniversary Conference.“Be bold visionaries. It’s hard these days, but it’s really been hard for many days. It seems really acute right now . . . here we are fighting to save Planned Parenthood. But there’s also much to inspire us that’s going on in the streets in Wisconsin, in Mexico, in Egypt, with freedom fighters throughout the world. We’ll hear a lot of things that make us angry and a lot of things that make us sad, but we’ll also hear about the fight and the resistance so that we can keep our fires lit. We don’t have to come here to learn about everything that’s wrong-- that’s what brings us here. We come here so that we can re-charge our batteries, we can inspire each other.”
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