Wanderlust

Sex Ed year round and the problem of religion

May 20, 2007 at 6:32 pm gvblog 6 comments

At long last, I bring you the full and unexpurgated recounting of my time in Philadelphia.  Whee! Wednesday and Thursday were chock full of meetings with all sorts of people working to facilitate women’s control over their bodies and their lives. (Ergh. I’m trying to figure out a better way to say that. ideas? I was using "help women control their bodies and their lives’ or "help women have autonomy.." but I don’t like the word help in this context.)

I started the day of at Choice, an organization dedicated to increasing awareness of and access to reproductive health care, especially among underserved populations who traditionally experience barriers to care. At Choice, I met Jackie, who coordinates their 4(!) hotlines, and walked through the bustling hotline reception room on our way to her office.  I’m always interested in the posters and paraphanalia that people chose for their offices. There are a few things that are nearly ubiquitous-  the "Just do it" condom stickers, various incarnations of the Rosie the Riveter poster, a rainbow of buttons. 

I was particularly interested to visit Choice because in San Francisco I was a Board Member at ACCESS, an organization that does similiar work in California. Pennsylvania, it turns out, has some of the most restrictive laws in the area – there is a parental consent law for abortion that is enforced, and state Medicaid funding for abortions is restricted to women who are pregnant as a result of rape of incest or for whom carrying the pregnancy to term would pose a "life risk", defined as threatening her mental or physical health.  (In California, for instance, women who are faced with an unplanned pregnancy who aren’t able to afford an abortion can get emergency Medicaid to cover the cost of the procedure, although the number of providers who accept Medicaid is decreasing). 

Incidentally, Pennsylvania follows federal guidelines which were enacted by the Hyde Amendment in 1977. The Hyde amendment bans state use of federal Medicaid dollars to pay for abortions unless the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest, or the abortion is "necessary to save the life of the woman." States can use their own funds to cover other medically necessary abortions – usually defined by states as those to protect the physical or mental health of the woman – for Medicaid recipients. These restrictions leave thousands of low-income women vulnerable to delayed care, financial burden, and unsafe, illegal abortion by requiring them to come up with the money for their procedures. 

Choice advocates for women seeking reproductive health care on a number of levels, including with health care providers. It turns out that the biggest barrier women face to getting Medicaid funding for procedures is the providers themselves.  In order to qualify for the funding, doctors have to sign a form stating that a woman meets one of the three requirements set forth by the Hyde Amendment, and many doctors, even at reproductive health clinics, are reluctant to sign the forms.  Many women get their initial pregnancy test from their general practice doctor, who would be the logical person to sign form enabling them to get Medicaid funding.  Those doctors give a variety of reasons for their reluctance to sign the waiver, from religious objections to abortion to fears of scrutiny from medical boards. Jackie related that one doctor told a woman "We don’t deal with women’s issues." Can you imagine being faced with an unplanned pregnancy and having a doctor tell you that?

I asked Jackie how they incorporated advocacy into the work they did – certainly a huge part of their mission is dedicated to helping women advocate for themselves personally, but I was curious if they positioned that work in a political context, if they talked to the women they were helping about the need for political advocacy to remove barriers to accessing care. She raised what has been a particularly thorny problem – that many women who are having trouble accessing health care are also dealing with numerous other issues in their lives, and writing a letter to their member of Congress isn’t a high priority given everything else they’ve got going on. Choice does make a concerted effort to educate women about their role within the medical system and what rights they have within that system. 

During this conversation Jackie said "you know, some people don’t believe in access to some kinds of medical care", which really struck me, not because it’s not obvious from all the laws and restrictions they’ve passed, but because I’d never heard it put in quite that way before.  I mean, I get not agreeing with some of the choices people make, but to not BELIEVE in their right to access care is a pretty horrific idea, if you ask me. 

My next stop was Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania, a formidable affiliate best known for their role as the plaintiff in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, in which the Supreme Court ruled that states could impose restrictions on access to abortion like parental consent laws and mandatory waiting periods as long as they don’t pose an "undue burden" on a women’s ability to access abortion.  I met with Karen Fitchette-Gordon, the Vice President for Education and Professional Development. 

Karen runs a truly extraordinary Education department – they have nearly a dozen different programs that include Youth First, a year round program in Philadelphia schools that serves over 1700 students each year in sixth and eighth grade.  Yup, you heard that right. Year round. Most sex education happens, at best, for a day or two once or twice during middle and hight school. These students get one period of sex education a week for their entire sixth and eighth grade years. Oh-la-la.  I have long despaired at the brevity of sex education classes, knowing how long it takes to really have conversations about safer sex and positive sexuality, so I was delighted to learn that there were places where the importance of maintaining a conversation about sexuality with youth was acknowledged and encouraged.

And guess what? The students who participate in Youth First in sixth grade are less likely to be sexually active in eighth grade and more likely to have safe sex if they are sexually active. Well, doesn’t that just beat all.  I’m reminded of the Waxman report, a Congressional inquiry led by Congressman Henry Waxman which found that students who take virginity pledges are less likely to use contraception when they have sex (which 88% of them do, before marriage, according to Columbia University researchers), and are less likely to seek STD testing despite comparable infection rates.

I am continually impressed by the dedication and effectiveness of Planned Parenthood staff people around the country.  If any of you are reading this, y’all rock. I mean that.

My next stop was at the home of Irit Reinheimer, the co-author, with Jacinta Bunnell, of "Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls Will Be…" a much beloved coloring book about gender. It’s full of drawings and ideas that challenge the gender binary and is intended to give people more ways to talk about gender. According to Irit, the idea for the coloring book came from a desire to talk about gender without getting into heavy theoretical discussions about "gender paradigms and the new socio political ramifications of non-normative gender identification etc etc." They had an idea that there were ways to talk about big ideas without getting all theoretical and wonkish about it. 

If you don’t have a copy of the coloring book, I highly recommend getting one. They make fabulous baby shower presents, or anytime presents. The most powerful thing about the coloring book is the way it uses a really simple medium to communicate messages that resonate with people – that make sense on an intuitive level, even though those message are often a radical revisioning of cultural norms. For instance, this page - which, for those of you who don’t like clicking on links, features boys holding signs that say ‘I want a doll’ and ‘I’ll cry if I want to’ with the caption "Unless things change around here, we don’t want to be boys anymore."

What’s interesting to me is that I feel like most people I talk to regardless of age, background, etc, would agree that boys should be able to cry, and that gendered toys are going the way of the dodo.  Yet there’s still this idea that there’s a cultural norm that we’re all somehow subject to – this idea that, well, I certainly don’t agree with it, but it’s still there. But who gets to decide what normal is? Why does there have to be a normal that we’re all measured against? 

While Irit and I were making tea in her kitchen, her downstairs neighbor Tara came in and mentioned to Irit that her class on Goddess Archetypes was starting that weekend. Intrigued, I asked her to tell me more about the class and what it was all about. We ended up talking for nearly an hour about her background and her spiritual practice, which is rooted in the spiritual connections between women and the earth. It got me thinking about the way that spirituality and religion are pretty much utterly divorced from reproductive health in our culture. For many women who grew up in restrictive religions full of negative, disapproving messages about sex, I think there is an understandable resistance to allowing religion space in the bedroom, as it were.  In my experience, the only time that religion ever gets discussed in a positive way in the reproductive health community is when religious leaders and folks like Clergy for Choice groups and the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice are called upon to talk about how not all religious people oppose abortion. This is certainly commendable, and clergy have long been some of the staunchest advocates for women’s autonomy (forming the backbone of an underground network that helped women obtain abortions before Roe.)

But what about reproductive health and sexuality beyond the choice to bear a child?  For centuries, women’s sexuality has been linked with spirituality, but these days it seems like our definition of sexual health is based purely on performance (or dysfunction).  The idea seems to be that if your parts are working right, that’s the end of the story. It seems to me that sex and sexuality are much deeper and broader than that, and that the things we value in sex – feelings of intimacy, pleasure, and connection – have very little to do with the mechanics of sex and much more to do with spirituality. 

So where did spirituality go? Tara is involved with a network of women who are educating women about spirituality and sexuality, and there is a feminist spirituality movement strongly connected to Neo-Paganism and Wicca.  But not only was I not familiar with the work that Tara did, I had literally never heard anyone talk about spirituality in the context of sexuality. Sure, I’d seen some Wiccan rituals at various events I’d been at, but that was pretty much the end of it.  Is it too crunchy and hippy for mainstream feminists?  Too reminiscent of the praying they were forced into growing up? Too out there?  

I’ve heard repeated over and over in conversations with different sex educators that "sexual health is more than the absence of disease", that sexual health involves the body, head, and heart.  But what does that really mean, and how do we address sexual health beyond the body?  In my brief investigation, it seems like Dr. Gina Ogden is doing some really interesting work on the integration of sexuality and spirituality, and I’m sure there are others.

This is an area that I’ve never given a whole lot of thought to, so I’d love to hear your perspectives on the integration (or lack thereof) of sexuality and spirituality in your experience, professional or otherwise.  

This is also why I’m really excited about going to graduate school in the fall (for those of you just joining us, I’m headed to NYU to study the Politics of Reproductive Health Care and Sexuality Education at the Gallatin School for Individualized Study).  I’ve done a whole lot of practical work in reproductive health, but almost no theoretical work.  There are a whole lot of people who have thought longer and written far more eloquently than I about this stuff, and I can’t wait to read them!

Congratulations for making it to the end of this post – I have bolted myself to the computer instead of playing in the sunshine, so your readership makes it all worthwhile. Unless, of course, no one is actually reading this, in which case never mind.

I’m off now to roller derby (and more on Baltimore soon, because Charm City has charmed the pants off me…) and tomorrow I head to DC and the last stop on the first leg of my trip! 

 

 

Entry filed under: On the Road. Tags: .