Wanderlust

In Amherst the sun is always shining

April 30, 2007 at 9:19 pm gvblog 1 comment

All I can say is Amherst is idyllic.  I’m settling in to life on a bicycle, and the miles seem to slip under my tires almost unaccounted for. I look down at my odometer and suddenly it’s at 30, without me feeling like I’ve broken a sweat.  I left Boston Saturday morning and meandered my way to Groton, a small town west of Boston, and the home of Hugh and Marion Stoddard, my hosts for the evening who were transcendent.  Which seems like an odd word to describe people, but it seems appropriate for them, somehow.  Marion was instrumental in cleaning up the Nashua river, a vital watershed for a huge swath of Massachusetts, and Hugh is busy unlocking the secrets of the brain at his company that makes brain imaging software.  They are people who are truly, deeply, engaged in the world, and their love of life radiated from them as we spoke.  After dinner, Hugh and I retired to the living room and talked about everything under the sun, from his time in Korea during World War 2 and the pictures he took there to bicycle riding to birth control to watching television and taking naps.  I never anticipated that one of the greatest joys of this trip would be these brief engagements in totally disparate lives, in getting small slices of history from people who’ve lived along entirely different parallels than me. 

I left Sunday morning and had a mostly uneventful ride along Highway 2A through Massachusetts. It was drizzly for most of the day, which I didn’t mind all that much.  The only biking related irritation I’ve been having is a really tight muscle in my lower back on the right side that gets painful when I’m riding up hill. Uncles/doctors – any ideas about how to cure it?  Seat position?

Amherst is home to FIVE colleges, which leads to pretty funny police blotters in the local paper (John Smith, 19, arrested for underage drinking and possession of an open container of alcohol. Sarah Wright, 20, arrested for underage drinking and possession of an open container. etc.)

Mostly I came here because of the Civil Liberties and Public Policy Program at Hampshire College, which has been on the forefront of making connections and advancing the conversation around reproductive justice. Today I had the opportunity to talk with three amazing women – Ellen Gattozzi, a student at Hampshire, Azi Golshan, who coordinates the CLPP student group and the Reproductive Rights Reproductive Rights Activist Service Corps internship program, and Amy Oliver, who works with the Population Development Program, which looks at Population issues in a reproductive justice framework. 

What’s amazing and inspiring about CLPP is their focus on the way we think and talk about issues surrounding reproductive health.  They have an annual conference called "From Abortion Rights to Social Justice". which looks at the links between reproductive health and social justice issues. Incidentally, the idea of reproductive justice, which was developed by a bunch of advocates including Eveline Shen from Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice and Toni Bond from African American Women Evolving, stipulates that:

reproductive justice will be achieved when women and girls have the economic, social, and political power and resources to make healthy decisions about our bodies, sexuality, and reproduction for ourselves, our families, and our communities in all areas of our lives.

from a Mother Jones article by Eveline Shen. 

At Hampshire, they’re working to expand the reproductive justice movement and challenge a lot of the mainstream ideas about reproduction. Amy, for instance, is working on education and research programs that aim to raise awareness about the right to have children and the ways in which class, race, location, income, etc impact women’s ability to have children.  Many people don’t know that most welfare programs have family caps, which cap the amount of money that women receive per child, so women on welfare are essentially being penalized for having children.  Project Prevention is an organization that pays women who are addicted to drugs or alcohol to use long-term or permanent birth control. All of these are reproductive justice issues, but conversations about the right to have children, the right to prenatal care, and the right to raise children in a healthy environment haven’t traditionally been part of the reproductive health dialogue. 

Azi, in addition to working at CLPP, is also a board member at Choice USA, which is an amazing organization working to train the next generation of leaders in the movement (and a sponsor of wanderlust!) Azi is an incredible advocate for leadership development among young people, and we talked about the ways in which the professionalization of the movement (activists as staff people as opposed to volunteers) creates challenges for young people who want to work for reproductive justice.  In my experience, it’s pretty incredible how difficult it can be to "break in" to the field.  I know lots and lots of people who wanted to work in reproductive health and were talented, committed activists, but who drifted into different fields because it was incredibly hard to find a job.  Through CLPP and Choice USA, Azi is working to train young activists from across the country.  She also talked about the need to get more people who are reproductive justice advocates into positions of power – one of the main barriers to achieving reproductive justice is both overt attacks and passive resistance to increasing access to reproductive health.  I think that organizations like Emily’s List and EMERGE are doing great work to train more women to get involved in politics, but I wish that more of the people who are directly impacted by restrictive laws and policies would get involved in political advocacy.  One of the things I plan to study at NYU is organizing models, because I know there are groups and individuals who have been incredibly successful at community driven organizing. It’s one place I think the reproductive justice movement has a lot of room for improvement.

 

Tomorrow I’m heading out to Albany, where I have a bunch of really exciting meetings set up.  It seems like Albany is big enough that there are lots of great resources and communities, but small enough that everyone seems to know each other.  I don’t know whether or not I’m going to try to do the whole 80 miles in one day – there’s an 80% chance of rain tomorrow night, so I don’t know how excited I am about camping.  Camping in the rain will be an adventure, right? Anyone know anyone in Pittsfield, MA, call me!

 

 

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