Wanderlust

Sitting pretty in Albany, thinking about the world

May 4, 2007 at 8:27 pm gvblog Leave a comment

Albany is everything that I hoped that this trip would be, which is a rare and powerful thing to say. At this moment I am sitting in the backyard of the flat shared by Corinne, a slightly maniacal creative genius, and Billy, a teacher at the Free School and the author of A Problem of Memory – Stories to End the Racial Nightmare, which is an amazing, thought provoking book. I highly recommend it – get in touch if you’re interested in a copy. I’m also eating deeeelicious organic stinky cheese from the local food coop, Honest Weight, and drinking a glass of wine.  Really, life doesn’t get much better than this. I don’t know if I’m just absurdly lucky or what, but I have had a really really fantastic time in this town.  Meeting with sex educators, policy advocates, and people working to change the dominant paradigm. More on all that after the jump, and don’t forget to check out the photo gallery for pictures of all these wonderful people!

On Thursday I woke up early and headed over to the Albany Free School to meet with Betsy Mercogliano, who is an incredible woman who works to help women advocate for themselves before pregnancy and during childbirth. The Albany Free School is a pretty incredible community.  I encourage you to read about its history and think about who our current educational system serves, and how.

Betsy coordinates the Family Life Center, which is a beautiful space where they host parenting classes, doula trainings, and more. She is also involved in Birth Net, which works to educate the public about alternatives to the current approach to childbirth in this country. We had a long conversation about the history of the Family Life Center and the ways in which the rights of women TO have children, and how and where, are as restricted in this country as the right NOT to have children. New York and many other states require midwives to have a collaboration with a doctor in order to practice in which the doctor is the final word on what kind of care women should receive, EVEN if the midwife is the one who knows the woman’s history, medical issues, etc.  It made me think about the great lie of the religious right – that their crusade against abortion is "because of the children being murdered", yet you never hear them taking stands against family caps that penalize poor women for having children or against the targeting of poor women of color with long-term contraceptives as population control measures.

I know I probably use the word inspiring too much (and amazing, come to think of it), but Betsy was truly inspirational. One of my theories about all this to-do over having babies or not having babies is that most people are downright terrified of really thinking about the power involved in what women can do. We can make PEOPLE. We can create life, the most essential thing on the planet, inside our bodies.  I have always been awed by that power, by the sheer audacity of what our bodies can do when we let them. I think that’s one of the reasons why there are so many political battles over women’s ability to control their bodies – because the people in power are terrified of what we might do if left unfettered.  

I wish that there was more networking and community among women who are working to help women bear children in the time and manner of their choosing, but in my experience the Planned Parenthoods are rarely working hand in hand with the midwives and doulas as advocates. Betsy related that it was only recently that the local National Organization for Women adopted a resolution supporting the rights of pregnant women.

I left the Family Life Center feeling invigorated from the idea that there are so many people in the world – men and women – who have dedicated themselves to helping people live life to the fullest extent possible, to challenging assumptions about who gets to tell you what to do.   A theme that keeps cropping up in my conversations is the utter failure of the American medical system to actually help people be healthy.  I’ve talked with many many people about the ways in which the medical system, as Elizabeth from Hitops put it "defines sexual health as the absence of disease".  I know that there are certainly medical professionals out there who are committed to a broader definition of sexual health and who work to address sexuality in a way that’s positive and inclusive. But it appears, from my experience and the conversations I’ve had, that health care providers get literally almost no training on how to talk about sexuality outside of the context of contraceptives and STD’s.  I think this deficit leads to a health care system that doesn’t do a very good job addressing issues around sexuality that don’t have to do with pregnancy and disease prevention.  

There are, however, people who DO do an amazing job at addressing other issues around sexuality, and I had the privilege of meeting some of the peer health educators and the coordinator of the STARS program at Upper Hudson Planned Parenthood.

I was struck by how similar the things that these teens learned about in their trainings were to the subjects that we covered in the Female Sexuality class I facilitated at UC Berkeley. I can’t imagine how amazing it would have been to get that kind of opportunity to talk openly with my peers about sexuality in high school. I was always the girl who didn’t mind talking about sex and masturbation with the boys – I never really understood why I was supposed to feel embarrassed about it, although I stopped talking pretty quickly if another girl joined the conversation.  I know that when I was a teenager I was SO hungry for information about what was happening to my body and the things I was thinking about and desiring.  I don’t think that we give young people enough credit for being able to communicate openly and have real conversations about sexuality. There’s this sense that young people need to be "protected" from themselves, from knowledge that will spur them towards being empowered to make their own decisions about their sexualities and their lives.

Family Planning Advocates of New York State, which is the statewide policy organization of Planned Parenthood in New York, is trying to change the way that young people are educated about sexuality in the state by passing the Healthy Teens Act, which would provide funding for comprehensive sex education throughout the state. The staff at Family Planning Advocates is truly amazing , and as Rosie, an FPA intern commented, "it’s great to work at an organization that is truly making a difference in women’s lives." The staff there works with Planned Parenthood’s around the state to pass legislation and work electorally to defend and advance access to reproductive health care.  Since the Supreme Court upheld the Federal Abortion ban (which is truly atrocious, for more on why click here) they are working on passing legislation in New York that would protect women’s ability to access abortion if Roe v. Wade gets any more overturned than it is already.

I also had the privilege of having lunch with Blue Carreker, the Vice President for Public Affairs and Marketing at UHPP. She has been working for reproductive justice for a very long time, and she has a really interesting and thoughtful perspective on a lot of the current challenges within the movement and within Planned Parenthood. We talked some about the difficulties inherent in integrating education and advocacy efforts, and the ways in which it can be difficult to integrate the two. This is one of my primary interests – the ways in which sex educators are involved in advocacy and advocates are involved with sex education, because it seems to me that the two areas should be much more integrated than they are.  When I worked at Planned Parenthood, the advocates knew very little about sex ed and vice versa. One of Blue’s observations was that advocates and educators tend to approach relationships differently in their work – that educators are concerned with people advocating for themselves personally, and advocates and organizers and interested in people working for themselves politically.  Think about how powerful we could be if we integrated the two approaches!

I feel like there is more to write, but I know I don’t need to write everything right now – that I will have time to let things unfold.  There is so much I always think of that I want to share that I have a hard time remembering when it comes to the writing down.

Tomorrow I am off along the Erie Canal, I don’t know how far or for how long but I’m planning to let the river take me where it takes me and go from there.  

I’m interested in hearing from you, dear readers, about what you think of all this – how do you think our education system impacted how you interact with the world? How have you experienced access to reproductive health care in this country? Do you feel like health care providers are able to act as resources and support for you to be sexually healthy? What does sexual health mean to you?

Talk to me – I can’t wait to hear it! 

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