Newsletter/July 2016

Victory for Reproductive Rights at the Supreme Court 

We are overjoyed that the Supreme Court has ruled to protect abortion access! Our clinicians in Texas saw the negative impact that HB2’s clinic closings had on  the 5.4 million women of reproductive age in Texas. This landmark 5-3 decision sets a strong precedent for protecting and normalizing access to compassionate, comprehensive reproductive health care and opens the door for similar laws to be challenged across the United States.

We think this victory in the Supreme Court calls for a celebration! We are hosting a SCOTUS Victory Party  on Wednesday, July 6, at 6:00pm in our New York office and we would like to invite you to  join us!  This is an epic win for reproductive health, rights, and justice and we are inspired and ready to get to work increasing our efforts to expand access to abortion care nationwide.

Our summer RRASC Intern, IonaPearl Reid-Eaton, traveled to Washington, DC to hear the decision from the steps of the Supreme Court. She says “It was so amazing to be right there, screaming, dancing, and boasting a pro-choice sign as the decision in Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt was released.”

You can read about IonaPearl’s full experience following HB2’s 3 year journey from Texas to Washington, DC on our blog!

Vote 2016: Get the Facts 

Fatigued by this year’s election season? Take a deep breath and get the facts with RHAP’s pro-choice voting guide! Our Vote 2016: Get the Facts guide provides national and state-by-state resources to help you make informed decisions this election cycle.

Over 300 bills restricting abortion access were proposed in 2015 alone. Anti-choice legislation is making comprehensive reproductive health care a privileged luxury, not a fundamental right.

Find out who is running to represent you in this year’s presidential and legislative elections and where they stand on reproductive health policies important to you. Our voter guide includes information on upcoming primaries, voter registration, Presidential, Senate, and House candidates.

In addition, our voting toolbox includes information on allied actions organized by All Above All, Act for Women, and Coalition for Liberty and Justice. Check back in for updates, as our voting guide will grow when more national and local resources become available.

Have additional resources you want posted? Send us an email to info@reproductiveaccess.org.

 

Our Patient Ed Materials are Now Available in Chinese! 

We are excited to announce that 43 of the Reproductive Health Access Project’s education materials are now available in simplified and traditional Chinese! This will help us reach Chinese-speaking populations in this country and across the world. RHAP’s materials have always been freely available in English and Spanish on our website. Our patient education materials and clinical tools help support communication between health care providers and patients and are used in clinics in the U.S. and internationally. We work hard to ensure that all of our education materials are evidence-based, pharma-free, and easy to read and understand, so that people everywhere are able to make informed decisions about their reproductive health and care.

All of our translated materials comply with the International Patient Decision Aid Standards and cover abortion, contraception, and miscarriage care. Our materials have been extensively field-tested and reviewed by both Chinese-speaking clinicians and patients. Their feedback was critical in helping us make sure that our materials are accessible to people at different levels of medical knowledge and literacy. We are very grateful to our reviewers for the time and effort they put into helping us make sure our materials are as patient-centered as possible! Check out our patient education materials in simplified and traditional Chinese on our website.

Thanks to funding from the Lalor Foundation, we are translating our materials into several more languages, so stay tuned!

 

Focus on a Provider: Maggie Carpenter

Dr. Maggie Carpenter attended medical school at SUNY-Downstate Medical School and it was there that she became aware of family medicine. Dr. Carpenter says “I knew I wanted to do women’s health but I really liked the idea of being able to serve all my patients needs and the needs of their families. Making sure that I was able to offer my patients all the reproductive health care options they might need was important to me so when I was looking at residency programs I chose a program in Seattle that offered a rotation in abortions up to 14 weeks.”

After she completed her residency, Dr. Carpenter, moved to Kansas where she enjoyed the full scope of family medicine including obstetrics. After a year working as a general practitioner in New Zealand she moved to Brooklyn and started at Early Options. Here she was able to focus on providing the full range of contraceptive options for her patients. Eventually, she moved to New Paltz, NY where she joined the Institute for Family Health and eventually became involved as an educator for the Mid-Hudson Family Practice Residency.

“When I first began my work at the clinic in New Paltz, we were not offering IUD insertions or abortions—we were not even offering pap smears in a lot of cases. There were so many people in need and people could see this so we began to work with the staff to get them trained in providing these services. At first there was hesitancy but people began to see these patients in need and how grateful they were to have this kind of access to care and within 6 months everyone was on board. Now it is an integral part of what we do. Our residents are now going on to offer these reproductive health care services in their practices and they are able to have an impact across the US.”

Dr. Carpenter continues to teach young doctors at the Mid-Hudson Family Practice Residency on a part-time basis and in addition, she has founded and runs a nonprofit called, Go Doc Go, which sends volunteer doctors to the developing world.

“We do cervical cancer screening in Ethiopia and Senegal and we are looking at going down to Haiti to offer LARC insertion in the near future. So many women do not have access to the full range of reproductive health care.”

Dr. Carpenter is committed to improving our current health system and she hopes to use her experience and expertise to improve reproductive health care and primary care services for people worldwide. We are so grateful to Dr. Carpenter for all the great work she is doing to make reproductive health more accessible to everyone.

You can learn more about the work she is doing abroad at godocgo.org.

 

RHAP Welcomes 3 New Members to our Team!

RHAP is always excited to have new voices and perspectives join our team. This past month, we were delighted to welcome a new employee and two new interns!

Naomi Legros, Operations Associate – I’m excited to be a part of the RHAP team and explore the world of public health through the reproductive health lens! As a newbie to reproductive rights and health care, I hope to bring the same passion that I have about bringing awareness about intersecting issues (race, class, and gender) in black and brown communities to this platform, as they too overlap in many ways. The exposure that I’ve briefly had here so far has been sharpening my understanding of the many injustices that the government and systems of power have been enforcing on these marginalized groups of people in terms of their bodies and their choice to do what they deem right for themselves. I’ve always been pro-choice, but with this opportunity, I get to represent my beliefs in a productive way. Lastly, I am hoping that this experience affirms my short-term goals of pursuing a Masters in Public Health.

I graduated from Tufts University in 2014 with a dual degree in American Studies and Africana Studies with an English minor. My academic passion has lied within representation of the Black Diaspora in the arts and humanities. When I’m not at work with RHAP, I volunteer at my alumni high school and college program, overseeing a cohort of mentors and mentees as they navigate college as first-year students. I am also doing museum research for a side project within the realm of African-American history, documenting and cataloging assigned artifacts in topics of entertainment and war. You can always find me reading (for fun!), engulfed in a soccer match, or rediscovering this amazing city!

 

Hailey Broughton-Jones, Communications Intern – Originally from Brooklyn, I am a rising junior at Wesleyan University, majoring in African-American Studies. I am excited to be returning to RHAP as a Communications Intern after working with RHAP as a high school intern two years ago. I first became involved in reproductive justice through conducting research on pro-choice non-profits for a high school project. My classmates and I had the great opportunity and privilege to interview Executive Director, Lisa Maldonado, about her line of work and the mission of the organization. Ever since then I haven’t been able to stay away!

Since the 10th grade, my understanding of reproductive justice has grown and continues to evolve as I reflect on how different aspects of our privileged identities shape the spaces we work and organize within—especially when it comes to abortion rights. It is essential in any line of social justice work to reflect on how our privileged identities intersect in organizing spaces, silencing those who have been historically marginalized within “liberation” movements. Specifically within reproductive justice, I am interested in providing comprehensive reproductive health care to low-income black and brown communities, especially communities that have historically experienced abuse by medical institutions.

I look forward to diving into my work during the month of June and enjoying my time learning from the awesome leaders within RHAP’s team. Outside of RHAP I love working with little humans at summer camps, biking, swimming, and organizing on campus within the Black Student Union. As a foodie, I am always down to grab a bite!

 

IonaPearl Reid-Eaton – RRASC Intern – I (her+she) was born in New York, grew up in North Carolina, and attend school in Massachusetts, where I am a rising fourth-year at Hampshire College. I study Reproductive Justice with a focus on abortion (access, politics, and  procedures) and sexuality education, as well as journalism.

I was introduced to the Reproductive Justice movement when I began working for the Civil Liberties and Public Policy (CLPP) program during my first semester of college (fall 2013), and most recently served as one of the organization’s Student Group Co-Coordinators. When I started working for CLPP, I began to understand intersectionality and the interconnectedness of oppressions. I knew I was helping people and I felt great about the work I was doing, but I didn’t want it to be all that I was doing, so I distanced myself.

I began to connect to my work personally in March 2015, after the death of my grandmother, and that, as well as monitoring RHAP’s “Demystifying the Manual Vacuum Aspiration Abortion: The Papaya Workshop” at the 2015 CLPP Conference inspired me to pursue becoming an abortion provider.

In my free time, I enjoy reading (Sister Outsider), eating (Sour Patch Children), and listening to Lemonade on repeat.

 

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